Juventus (Soccer Team)

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      Juventus Finds Its Fall Guy in Andrea Pirlo

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      Andrea Pirlo was given a difficult task and failed at it. But if Juventus misses out on next season’s Champions League, it won’t be entirely his fault.The jokes almost wrote themselves. Last summer, Juventus announced that it had installed Andrea Pirlo as coach of its under-23 team. It was a thoroughly sensible idea: the perfect place for a beloved former player to cut his teeth in a new phase of his career, the ideal spot for him to take his first job in management.The same, at the time, could not be said for what came next. Ten days after getting that job, Pirlo was handed another, this time as coach of Juventus’s first team, the one that included not only several of his former teammates, but Cristiano Ronaldo, too. And so the jokes came, cheap and quick and irresistible. Pirlo must have really impressed in those eight days! No wonder he got the job: He’d never lost a game!The official explanation was only a little more convincing. “Today’s choice is based on the belief that Pirlo has what it takes to lead an expert and talented squad to new successes,” a Juventus club statement read. There seemed to be only three feasible, overlapping explanations, and none of them reflected especially well on the team’s hierarchy.One — the most likely — was that it had decided to fire his predecessor, Maurizio Sarri, with little time to find a replacement who was not already in-house. Pirlo just so happened to be in the right place at the right time.The second explanation held that Pirlo was a place-holder, willing to do the job for a year or two, until a more suitable candidate became available.And third was the thought that, after nine Serie A titles in nine years, Juventus had come to the conclusion that it could employ anyone it wanted — the least talented of the Backstreet Boys, a friendly spaniel, or maybe, at a push, Sam Allardyce — and still win the league.Whatever the club’s thinking, its folly was ruthlessly exposed over the subsequent nine months. It is not just that Juventus has ceded its title, or even that it has surrendered its dynasty so meekly. It is that the decline has been far steeper, far quicker and far more consequential than the club could possibly have imagined.On Saturday, Juventus hosts Inter Milan — the team coached by its former manager, Antonio Conte, and overseen by its former technical director, Giuseppe Marotta, and that has swept to the championship this year — knowing that it must win if it is to retain any realistic ambition of playing in the Champions League next season. Otherwise, barring a collapse from one or more of Atalanta, A.C. Milan or Napoli, the ignominy of the Europa League beckons in Turin.Juventus currently lies in fifth place in Italy, just outside the Champions League places for next season.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe likelihood, of course, is that much of the blame for that will be placed squarely on Pirlo’s shoulders. Already, his future is the subject of intense scrutiny in the Italian news media: There have been various reports in the last few weeks of emergency talks inside the club to establish whether he will be allowed to fulfill the second and final year of his contract.Outside, too, he seems to have been identified as the source of the problem. This week, a handful of Juventus fans confronted — though that is not quite the right word for what was, basically, quite a congenial conversation — the veteran goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon outside a training facility the club was using and asked if it was true that the squad had given up on its rookie manager. Buffon assured the supporters it was not true.Regardless, Pirlo is experienced enough to know this is how it works. The manager is always the fall guy, and particularly in these circumstances. Juventus had won nine consecutive titles with experienced managers at its helm. The year it appointed a neophyte, it collapsed. It is hardly outrageous to believe those two things might be connected.For all the significance they are afforded, for all that we hang on their every word and elevate the best of them to guru status, managers do not make quite as much difference as we think. There have been several academic studies on how much of an impact they have on results. The book “Soccernomics” held that managers account for, at most, 8 percent of a team’s performance. “The Numbers Game” had it slightly higher. Neither estimate puts a manager’s significance close to the importance of money, or luck.That is not to say managers do not matter. Elite soccer, in particular, is a sport of the very finest of margins; often, all that separates great triumph from bitter disappointment is a momentary lapse of concentration here or a little extra fitness there. A single, controllable factor that affects 8 percent of the outcome matters a great deal.Inter Milan, led by the former Juventus manager Antonio Conte, won its first Italian title in a decade this season.Matteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockPirlo would, on the surface, seem to be proof of that. Juventus had what appeared to be an unassailable advantage over its domestic competition for almost a decade, and yet when it traded an experienced manager for an inexperienced one, it slumped not by a few points, but from first to, potentially, fifth. Eight percent is the difference, it turns out, between Serie A titles and the Europa League.A little deeper, though, the picture is more complex. The reason that soccer tends to react to disappointment by changing the manager is that it offers the illusion of the simple solution: Fix that 8 percent and everything else will follow. In the case of Juventus — in every case, for that matter — it does not quite work like that.The club that Pirlo inherited was not quite the smooth-running machine it appeared. His appointment itself was proof of that: He was hired on short notice because the incumbent, Sarri, had proved stylistically unsuited to the squad. Pirlo, from the start, appeared equally ill matched: The soccer he wanted to play did not seem to be the sort of soccer that fit the players at his disposal.Pirlo didn’t create the problems at Juventus, but he didn’t fix them, either.Alberto Lingria/ReutersThat sort of disjointed, disconnected thinking has infected almost everything Juventus has done for some time, perhaps since it last reached the Champions League final in 2017. The signing of Ronaldo — a hugely expensive indulgence, even if his performances preclude its being called a mistake — is the most glaring example. But there are many more.Juventus has spent the past few years desperately trying to offload whomever it can in order to reduce its salary commitments and to comply with European soccer’s financial regulations, often relying on curious swaps to do so: João Cancelo for Manchester City’s Danilo, Miralem Pjanic for Barcelona’s Arthur. It has left many on the squad feeling unwanted and uninvested.At one point, Juventus lent Gonzalo Higuaín to A.C. Milan and then Chelsea, only to welcome him back when Sarri was appointed. It then spent a summer trying to offload the playmaker Paulo Dybala, arguably its most gifted attacker other than Ronaldo, in order to pay Higuaín’s wages.Dybala stayed and, eventually, Higuaín left. Last season, Juventus was forced to leave Emre Can off its Champions League squad — without offering him any warning — because its playing resources were so bloated. He departed soon after, along with a clutch of other exiled veterans.Even the signing of Ronaldo — a commercial success and, broadly, a sporting one, too — has hardly been an exercise in joined-up thinking. At this stage in his career, Ronaldo is effectively a pared-down attacking spearhead; he cannot, or at least does not, run and press as he might have done a decade ago. And yet Juventus has presented him with two coaches whose approaches work only if attackers do just that: first Sarri, and now Pirlo.Will Cristiano Ronaldo accompany Juventus into the Europa League next season?Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is easy to see why Juventus would want to assume that Pirlo is the source of all of its troubles, to decide that changing the coach, swapping out the rookie for a more garlanded name, has the air of a panacea. It was a gamble, and it backfired. He wasn’t good enough, not yet. It was too much, too soon.That might all be true, but it is not the root of the problem. Pirlo is not a cause; he is a symptom. The issue, for Juventus, is not with the man who got the job, it is with the people who gave it to him, whose expertise runs so deep that they took a coach with eight days’ experience and threw him into one of the most challenging jobs in Europe, and expected it all to work out fine.A coach, after all, makes only 8 percent of the difference. The other 92 percent comes from the structure and the organization and the thinking behind the manager. Perhaps, as Juventus confronts its demise, the blame should be apportioned on similar lines.The Meaning of the CupBrendan Rodgers and Jamie Vardy haven’t given up on the cup’s magic.Pool photo by Richard HeathcoteIt is the memories passed down between the generations that slowly, steadily accrete into something that becomes a tradition, and so it is with the greatest tradition in English soccer: worrying about the diminishing majesty of the F.A. Cup.Those who were there speak in hushed tones of the year that Manchester United was forced to pull out because the authorities wanted the team to play in a tournament in Brazil instead, or of the time that Liverpool sent out a squad of under-7s because the club had a more important game in Qatar the next day.But every club has its own story: a set of reserves sent out to play so as to save the first team for the league; a manager admitting that the cup is a distraction from the much more important business of securing 14th place, rather than 15th, in the Championship.Nowhere is this played out in more somber tones than on British television, where the only thing that interrupts the self-flagellation about the demise of the magic of the cup is the advertising proclaiming that it is, in fact, alive and well. It is a rich irony, because what has destroyed the cup more than anything else is television, both because of the money it has poured into the Premier League and because of its insatiable demand for content.One of the things that made the cup final special was the fact that it had a whole day reserved for it: We called it “cup final day.” There is no better gauge of its reduction in status than the fact that this year the game — Chelsea vs. Leicester on Saturday — will be squeezed in between Southampton’s meeting with Fulham and Brighton’s match with West Ham.Still, there is hope. The other problem faced by the F.A. Cup these days is that it is almost always won by a team that considers it, at best, a consolation prize and, at worst, an afterthought, as Chelsea will if it emerges victorious at Wembley this weekend. It is nice for Chelsea, winning the F.A. Cup, but its eyes are cast on much brighter horizons.Things are different for its opponent, Leicester City. Leicester has never won the cup. It came close, three times, in the 1960s, but lost in each final it reached. For some time — possibly until it won the Premier League in 2016 — those defeats defined the club, at least in the eyes of a generation of fans. This weekend is a long-awaited chance to address that longing.Winning the cup would mean a lot to Leicester — so much, in fact, that it might even have the power to change the meaning of the cup itself, to prove that the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated, that it does not have a fixed value, but rather that it signifies rather more in some contexts than in others and that, in the right hands, it still matters very much indeed.Glory DaysSporting, which ended a long title drought this week in Lisbon.Pedro Nunes/ReutersFrom a Premier League perspective, this pandemic season has not brought quite so much chaos as anticipated. Manchester City, for the third time in four years, stands as English champion. It is the same in Germany, where Robert Lewandowski’s Bayern Munich picked up a ninth consecutive championship last weekend.Elsewhere, though, the picture is different. Inter Milan had waited 11 years to win Serie A. Lille is two games from winning its first French title in a decade. Atlético Madrid needs two more wins to claim the Spanish championship for the first time since 2014.But no club had waited quite so long as Sporting Lisbon (yes, yes, I know: Sporting Clube de Portugal). Until this week, it had been 19 years since the club last won the league, almost two decades of watching its two great rivals, F.C. Porto and Benfica, trade the title between them.Under Rúben Amorim, its promising coach, Sporting has ended that purgatory in style, going through the season undefeated. That it did so in a season of empty stadiums is a shame, of course, but it did not seem to diminish the celebrations in Lisbon on Tuesday.A word, too, for Ajax, champion yet again in the Netherlands. Rather than mount the trophy it received for winning the Eredivisie in its museum, the club chose to melt it down and create tens of thousands of little stars, one to be sent to each season-ticket holder, a reward for their perseverance in this most difficult of years, something to hold close as a memento of the year they had to stay apart.Not All Ideas Are Bad IdeasNever, it seems, underestimate the vengeance of a governing body scorned. In the month or so since the chaotic life and unmourned death of the European Super League, UEFA has been unsparing in its pursuit of the dozen clubs who concocted the plan, its own little Catilines.Nine of the teams were made to sign a humiliating mea culpa, repudiating their rebellion and promising never to do it again. Particular venom has been reserved, though, for Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, the three holdouts. UEFA has commissioned a disciplinary panel to decide their fate, and the domestic leagues of Spain and Italy may follow suit. The latter is already threatening to deny Juventus a license for next season unless it performs repentance.There is no doubt, of course, that much of the anger over the proposed breakaway was justified. There is little reason to sympathize at all with any of the clubs involved. But that does not mean that UEFA is best advised to use its new power — or, rather, its long-term foes’ sudden impotence — as nothing more than a cat o’ nine tails.Bringing the mutineers to heel provides short-term satisfaction, of course. It flexes the muscles, slakes the thirst for vindication. But it also risks failing to engage with some of the ideas that lay beneath the self-interest and opportunism of the breakaway — some of which, like proper financial controls, are worthy of consideration.Fans in Manchester after City clinched the Premier League title on Tuesday. Soccer’s current economic systems work just fine for the fans and their club.Jon Super/Associated PressMost of all, though, UEFA is in danger of calcifying the status quo, offering it a false status as the final form of the game and demonizing all change at just the point when European soccer needs it most. Not change as devised by the elite, perhaps, but change of some sort.Currently, the economics of the game work for, at most, a couple of dozen clubs: those owned or operated by nation states or individuals of fabulous wealth, and the lesser lights of the Premier League. That is not enough. The central problem with the Super League was that it sought to put a pin in history, to freeze the elite forever as it happens to be now. UEFA’s taste for retribution risks doing precisely the same, but for the game as a whole.CorrespondenceA brilliantly curious question from Bill Eash. “The layout of most Premier League fields includes a small extension outside the playing field,” he points out, correctly. “Most of that surface is sloped to the barriers. I wonder: Are injuries incurred by that design? And what’s its real purpose?”Yes, very occasionally, players hurt themselves by being forced to run at full speed down a hill into a barrier, though thankfully not as often as you would think. And no, I have no real idea why some stadiums — Old Trafford has the starkest off-field slope, I think — are designed like that. I guess it’s to do with drainage, but it has always struck me as a strange idea.Pool photo by Ian WaltonLaurence Guttmacher has a similar “question of culture,” as he put it. “Soccer teams play a man down while someone warms up before entering the pitch. Basketball players enter a game after prolonged periods on the bench. Both sports involve similar physical demands, so why the difference in approach?”I haven’t watched enough basketball benches to confirm this thesis, but if it’s right, my instinct is that it must be rooted in some sort of tradition — soccer players do it because they always have, and basketball players don’t because they never have — and that basketball is probably wrong on this one. It would, I think, be a good idea if the players stretched before coming on. That’s just good sense, isn’t it?Luke Doncic, ready for any type of game to break out.Jerome Miron/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAnd the final one of this orthodoxy-challenging trifecta comes from Carl Lennertz, who asks about the relationship between “the transfer fee versus what the player earns.” This is an especially good one, and it is a subject we should think about more.Essentially, they are totally disconnected. There is no consequential link between a players’ salaries and the fees they can command: A player earning $250,000 a year could cost $50 million to sign; a player on $10 million a year might be given away for some nominal sum. Both are left entirely to the market to decide. I wonder, though, if it might not be a bad idea if that changed, and transfer fees were to become more, well, explicable.By contrast, Rob Haxell is here to pick holes in arguments, particularly my (borrowed) suggestion that there might be ways of reducing the elite teams’ ability to hoard talent. “I wonder how Liverpool would feel about Virgil van Dijk being available on a cut-price deal this summer because they didn’t give him enough playing time?” he wrote, fully aware that an injury exemption would not be an especially difficult thing to draw up. More

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      Rage About Europe's Super League Is Muffled by Our Cheers

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      A breakaway league would remake European soccer to benefit a few rich teams, but we will watch it anyway.Real Madrid’s players pumped fists and exchanged hugs. A scoreless tie at Liverpool on Wednesday night had assured that the Spanish club had taken what it saw as its rightful place in the semifinals of the Champions League. All of a sudden, a 14th European Cup title hung tantalizingly close.No club has quite so much of its identity bound up with the Champions League as Real Madrid. It regards the tournament as its personal fief. Its sees its pursuit of continental primacy as its central, animating force. At much the same time as Zinedine Zidane’s team was celebrating victory, though, the club’s president, Florentino Pérez, was putting the finishing touches to a plan designed, in effect, to destroy the competition forever.Pérez spent the tail end of last week making calls and lobbying support and quieting nerves among some of European soccer’s most powerful executives for a plan years in the making.On Sunday, the fruits of that labor were revealed: A dozen leading clubs — Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham from the Premier League; Juventus, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan of Italy; and Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético from Spain — had agreed to become founding members of a breakaway superleague.Pérez and his allies must have known what the reaction would be: a great torrent of caustic condemnations, each one flecked with scarcely concealed rage. UEFA released a statement, also signed by the Premier League, Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Serie A, threatening the conspirators with expulsion if they continued down this dark and murky path. The Bundesliga of Germany lent its support, even though its teams had refused to sign up to the proposals. The French league did the same.Executives from those teams that would be cut adrift spoke gravely of the need to protect soccer’s pyramid. Fan groups rejected any rupture en masse and outright. So, too, did various national associations. Gary Neville, the former Manchester United player who has become a staple of British television broadcasts, had his say.Almost as important, Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, gravely intoned that the clubs involved would have to answer to their fans. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, released a statement decrying the idea. None of his country’s teams had agreed to take part. Only Paris St.-Germain had been asked. It said no. For now.That none of these parties can be considered truly dispassionate goes without saying. Of course UEFA does not want the Champions League to be usurped. Of course the major domestic leagues cannot countenance the idea of seeing their competitions diminished. Of course executives at those clubs who would be excluded do not want to see the gravy train they are currently riding overtaken by an express.They are all compromised in one way or another, but that does not render their outrage unjustified. They might be no less avaricious or cynical in their thinking than the rebel clubs. Their calls to arms over the sanctity of soccer’s pyramid might ring deafeningly hollow. But the problem with the plan is not that it accentuates money; it is that it eliminates risk.Juventus won’t have to worry about an early exit, or any exit, from the Super League.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockFor the dozen founding members, the appeal of a Super League is that it is predictable. There would no longer be any need to worry about qualifying for the Champions League — it is possible that at least four of the signatories will miss out on next season’s edition simply through not being good enough in their domestic leagues — in order to have access to soccer’s most lucrative prize pot. The income would, instead, be guaranteed.The problem with that, of course, is that unpredictability — what is rather grandly known in the sport’s argot as competitive balance — is at least part of the secret of soccer’s appeal. In March, F.C. Porto knocked Juventus out of the Champions League in the round of 16. Its elimination came in the same week that the Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli, had ill advisedly gone public with his latest harebrained schemes for improving the sport he purports to love.From a business perspective, his club’s exit was bad. Juventus is the champion of Italy. It is one of the most popular teams in the world. It has far more box office appeal than Porto; the longer it stays in the Champions League, the better not only for Juventus itself, but to some extent for the competition as a whole. From a sporting perspective, though, its demise was compelling, spellbinding drama, and at the center of the plot was jeopardy: Something was riding on this. Remove the stakes, and it is highly likely that the product will suffer. More

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      The European Super League Explained

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      Whether you’re a lifelong fan or an outsider who doesn’t know your Manchesters from your Madrids, we’ve got answers to your pressing questions.A little more than a year after European soccer found a renewed sense of unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the sport now faces its greatest crisis in a generation.Late on Sunday night, 12 of the world’s biggest soccer clubs unveiled a plan to launch what they called the Super League, a closed competition in which they (and their invited guests) would compete against one another while claiming even more of soccer’s billions of dollars in revenue for themselves.The announcement cast doubt not only on the ongoing viability of the Champions League — the sport’s showpiece club competition — but also called into question the very future of the domestic leagues that have been soccer’s cornerstone for more than a century.All of a sudden, it is not clear where soccer is heading, or what it will look like when it gets there. Here, then, is what we know so far.First things first: What is a Super League?The concept has been around for decades: a Continental competition that incorporates all of the most famous names from the Europe’s domestic leagues every year into an event all their own. For a long time, it has effectively been something between an aspiration and a threat. Sunday night, though, was the first time anyone had given it a physical form.Who gets to play in it?So far, there are 12 founding members. The teams that have been the driving force behind the project — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — have kindly invited eight other clubs to join them: Barcelona and Atlético Madrid from Spain, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan from Italy, and the rest of the Premier League’s self-appointed Big Six: Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal.They expect to be joined soon by three more permanent members, though it is not clear yet why those teams have yet to disclose their involvement. Paris St.-Germain in France and the Portuguese giant F.C. Porto were seen as likely candidates, but both have distanced themselves from the project. The organizers are eager to have a team like Bayern Munich, the reigning European champion and one of the world’s biggest clubs, but on Monday, Borussia Dortmund’s chairman said that not only was his team out but also that Bayern agreed with his position.Whatever the final roster, those 15 founding teams will form the league’s bedrock. The full allotment of 20 clubs each season will be fleshed out by a rotating cast of five more teams, chosen through some sort of formula that the organizers haven’t gotten around to deciding just yet.That sounds a lot like the Champions League.It does, to be fair. But the roster for the Champions League is set each year based on clubs’ performance in their domestic leagues. The Super League will have permanent members who face no risk of missing out on either the matches or the profits.The ‘Super League’ AnnouncementTwelve leading European soccer clubs issued a statement on Sunday confirming their plans to form a breakaway league. Here’s what they said at the time.Read DocumentHow will it work?The 20 teams will be split into two divisions — 10 teams in each — and then play one another home-and-away. At the end of the regular season, the top four clubs in each division will progress to a knockout round that will be familiar to viewers of the Champions League. The difference is that those playoffs will be held over the course of four weeks at the end of the season.Will the Super League teams still play in their current domestic leagues?That is absolutely their plan. It may not be the leagues’ plan.Is this about money?Yes. According to their own estimates, each founding member stands to gain around $400 million merely to establish “a secure financial foundation,” four times more than Bayern Munich earned for winning the Champions League last season.But that is just the start, really: The clubs believe that selling the broadcast rights for the Super League, as well as the commercial income, will be worth billions. And it will all go to them, rather than being redistributed to smaller clubs and lesser leagues through European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. At the same time, the value of domestic leagues and their clubs will diminish drastically as they are effectively rendered also-rans every year.Two architects of the Super League: Liverpool’s John Henry and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockWon’t the Super League teams fight over all that money?The founding members have decreed that spending on transfer fees and wages will be capped at a certain percentage of revenue, which — theoretically at least — gives owners far more chance to restrict their spending at the same time as they are maximizing their income.Sounds good for those clubs. Their fans must be happy?Not so much, no. The reaction has been one of spittle-flecked rage at the betrayal of tradition. It does not help that, though several of the clubs have released statements insisting they will consult with fan groups as the project develops, nobody thought to do that ahead of time.It is hard, though, to be sure how universal the sense of outrage and betrayal is. There is a little evidence — though it is hardly overwhelming — of a demographic split in the reaction to the idea, and it may be that this is what the clubs are banking on: that older fans may be more wedded to tradition, and younger ones may be won over more easily. More

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      European Super League to Include Six Premier League Teams

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      A group that includes Juventus, Manchester United, Liverpool and Real Madrid has agreed in principle on a plan that would upend the sport’s structures and economics.LONDON — A group of the world’s richest and most storied soccer clubs has agreed in principle on a plan to create a breakaway European club competition that would, if it comes to fruition, upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound global soccer for nearly a century.After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which include Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea in England, and Juventus and A.C. Milan in Italy — could make an announcement as early as Sunday, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.At least 12 teams have either signed up as founding members or expressed interest in joining the breakaway group, including six from England’s Premier League, three from La Liga in Spain and three from Italy’s Serie A, according to the people with knowledge of the plans.The timing of the announcement appeared designed to overshadow Monday’s plan by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, to ratify a newly designed Champions League, a competition which would be decimated by the departure of its biggest teams.The New York Times contacted a number of clubs involved in the breakaway plans but all declined to comment or did not respond. A UEFA spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment. But the Premier League has written to its 20 clubs, warning members that its rules bar clubs from joining outside competitions without prior approval. In a statement, it said that it “condemns any proposal that attacks the principles of open competition.”The leaders of the breakaway group have been trying to get other top teams, like Germany’s Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund and the French champion Paris St.-Germain, to commit. But to date those clubs — and others — have declined to walk away from the domestic structures and Continental competitions that have underpinned European soccer for generations.P.S.G., for example, has been invited to join but has so far resisted the overtures. Its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, sits on the UEFA board and also heads beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based television network that has paid millions of dollars to UEFA for the right to broadcast Champions League games.The teams committed to the super league plan are, for the moment, limited to almost a dozen clubs from Spain, Italy and England. A cohort of six teams from the Premier League — United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — represents the biggest grouping from a single country. Atlético Madrid is the other team from Spain that is said to have endorsed the project, while the Milan rivals Internazionale and A.C. Milan would join Juventus as Italy’s representatives.The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli has worked behind the scenes to round up allies for his super league plan.Massimo Pinca/ReutersUEFA and the top European leagues, though, are bracing for the breakaway announcement. Officials spent the weekend in discussions about ways to block the plan, including potentially banning the breakaway teams from domestic leagues and from next season’s Champions League, with the breakaway scheduled to begin in 2022. They also began contacting lawmakers at the European Union, hoping the bloc would be able to strengthen its hand in preserving the status quo.The repercussions of a split between European soccer and its best-known, best-followed and richest clubs would be seismic for all involved; without the top teams, UEFA and the leagues would face demands for millions of dollars in refunds from the broadcasters who pay billions for television rights to tournaments, and the clubs would lose revenue streams that could cripple their budgets as European soccer continues to emerge from the financial wreckage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.Among the most notable teams involved in the breakaway group is Juventus, the serial Italian champion. Its chairman, Andrea Agnelli, also leads the European Club Association, an umbrella body for more than 200 top division clubs, the majority of which will be left out of the proposed Super League. He is also a member of UEFA’s executive board. When asked by The Times this year to discuss his role in the talks of a breakaway league, Agnelli brushed off the idea as a “rumor.”Still, according to documents reviewed by The Times in January, plans for the breakaway league had gathered pace since the summer. Top clubs sought to take advantage of uncertainty in the soccer industry caused by the pandemic to forge a new path that would ensure a degree of financial stability for them but would also almost certainly lead to a significant — and potentially devastating — loss in value and revenue for teams excluded from the project.Each of the would-be permanent members of the proposed super league are being promised 350 million euros, or $425 million, to sign up, the documents said.Manchester United and Manchester City are part of a group of six Premier League giants backing the plan.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUnder the proposals reviewed at the time, the super league, which would play its matches in the middle of the week, sought to secure 16 top soccer franchises as permanent members and to add four qualifiers from domestic competitions. The clubs would be split into two groups of 10, with the top four teams in each group qualifying for the knockout stages, culminating in a final that would take place on a weekend.The event would, according to the documents, generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for the participating teams, which are already the richest clubs in the sport. (An alternative version of the plan proposed 15 permanent members and five qualification spots.) The group had entered into discussions with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to raise financing for the project, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The firm has so far declined to comment.UEFA found a powerful ally in opposition to the plans in FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. FIFA warned that any player who took part in such an unsanctioned league would be banned from appearing in the World Cup. The statement came after UEFAs president, Aleksander Ceferin, demanded support from his FIFA counterpart, Gianni Infantino, amid mounting speculation that the breakaway would have FIFA’s backing.European soccer leaders huddled on the telephone and in video conferences over the weekend to forge a counterattack. However, finding a solution to the potential loss of the biggest brands in soccer is not an easy task. The Premier League, for example, would lose much of its sheen — and almost certainly a lot of the commercial appeal that has turned it into the richest league in soccer — should it move to banish its top six teams.As member-owned clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid would likely require the support of the thousands of their supporters before formally joining, and any German clubs that agree to take part would face similar obstacles. All can expect heavy internal opposition; fan groups from across Europe had already voiced opposition since details of the plans for a super league emerged earlier this year. More

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      Soccer Samples Streetwear and Likes the Fit

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      Juventus reimagined its look, P.S.G. partnered with Jordan Brand, and now Arsenal and Inter Milan are following suit. But soccer’s interest in design has little to do with the sport.The lights at the Allianz Stadium cut out, and the music swelled. In the darkness, a small patch in the middle of the field seemed to glow. The center circle started to pulse and ripple. And then the grass itself appeared to get pulled away, as if it were nothing more than a tablecloth. Three words ran around the electronic advertising boards: “History. Passion. Lols.”The extravagant buildup did not seem to match the occasion. Juventus was at home to Genoa that night, a run-of-the-mill Serie A game. It was late October 2019, much too early in the season for the title to be decided or a trophy to be won. What mattered, though, was not what Juventus was playing for, but what the team was playing in.That night, Cristiano Ronaldo and his teammates would showcase a special edition jersey, designed in collaboration with its apparel partner, Adidas, and Palace, the maverick British skate and streetwear brand.The design toyed with the history and passion of Juventus, incorporating the team’s traditional bianconero stripes and the disruptive touches that had made Palace a streetwear phenomenon. The team’s logos and the player’s numbers were displayed in an acidic green. Toward the bottom, the stripes started to pixelate.The jersey was greeted as a masterpiece, but Juventus would never wear it again. By the time Ronaldo and his teammates took to the field against Torino a few days later, they were back in their regular uniforms. It did not matter. Later that week, the Palace jersey came online — or, as the streetwear world would put it, dropped.It sold out in 12 hours.Soccer goes popP.S.G. and Jordan Brand released their first collaboration in 2018.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA couple of years earlier, Juventus had held a lavish reception at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. The guest list included players past and present, but also pop-culture fixtures like Giorgio Moroder, the pioneering music producer, and the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski.The party was arranged to herald the dawn of a new era for the club. Its team was in the middle of an unmatched period of success on the field, establishing a run of dominance in Serie A, however, it risked being left behind by its Continental rivals. To remain competitive, it needed to close the revenue gap on clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United, its chairman, Andrea Agnelli said. To do that, he was convinced, Juventus had to become “more pop.”He is not the only executive in European soccer to have that thought. In 2018, fans lined up around the block outside the Parc des Princes to get their hands on the first drop of a collaboration between Paris St.-Germain and Jordan Brand, a subsidiary of its primary apparel partner, Nike. Earlier this year, Arsenal unveiled a collaboration with 424, a streetwear brand based in Los Angeles.As with the audience for Juventus’s collection with Palace, the core market for these collaborations is not the club’s fans. It is not even, necessarily, fans of the sport. The collections are not intended to be worn as soccer products or as declarations of loyalty to a team; the tie-ins are not, as they are often presented, attempts by Europe’s insatiable superclubs to sell more tickets or to pick up more fans.The Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli oversaw a complete rebranding of the club.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“A lot of the people buying those P.S.G. Jordan shirts will not care about the team’s league position,” said Jordan Wise, a founder of Gaffer magazine and the creative agency False 9. “Many of them may not even like football.” That is precisely their value to clubs: an entirely untapped market, one not subject to the vicissitudes and tribalism that affect soccer fans.“Working with streetwear brands gives the clubs access to a completely different space,” Wise said. “But to do that, they have to think and look different: less like clubs, and more like sportswear brands.”No team has embraced that shift quite like Juventus. In 2016, at Agnelli’s instigation, the club decided to embark on a comprehensive rebrand. Every aspect of the team’s identity would be in play, including, most controversially, its iconic crest, a symbol that had roots stretching back more than a century.“It was more than just a change in the badge,” said Giorgio Ricci, Juventus’s chief financial officer. “It was a new visual identity, one which would enable us to be seen as innovative, one step ahead.”The club put the rebrand idea out to a number of marketing agencies, and eventually selected a pitch from Interbrand, a longstanding partner. Its approach had been risky: After consulting the company’s global network of creatives, Lidi Grimaldi, the managing director of Interbrand’s Milan bureau, decided against presenting the club with a suite of options, spreading their bets in the hopes that one caught the imagination.Instead, she said, Interbrand decided to go in with one design. Though the company had previously helped tweak the Juventus crest, making it a little less ornate, altering the color scheme a touch, this time Interbrand would suggest something more revolutionary. “Something really bold,” she said. Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey did not have much time. Because Juventus and Adidas needed to start work on the club’s jerseys for the next season, Interbrand had less than a month to get its ideas together. Rather than something that looked like a soccer crest, it designed a logo that had “more in common with Google or Apple or Nike,” Grimaldi said.There would be no depiction of a charging bull, as there had been on every version of the crest for more than a century. There would not even be a crest, as such: just a sleek and stylized J, a design that would form the centerpiece of and inspiration for an updated visual identity. That was no accident. “The whole strategy was to widen the spectrum of activities without abandoning the club’s core, which is football,” she said.To present the idea to the Juventus board, Interbrand made a short film, one that offered a glimpse into what this bold new future might look like: that stylized J emblazoned on cafes and hotels, adorning events, used in collaborations with cutting-edge fashion brands. The Juventus executives, including Agnelli, were thrilled, Grimaldi said. This was precisely the sort of sea change they had been seeking. The main response, she said, was: “Wow.”The club, of course, knew such a drastic change would not be universally welcomed. When the new logo was revealed, the reaction from fans was — at best — mixed. Juventus felt it had no choice but to ride out the storm.“We needed a new identity that could change the perception of Juventus among different stakeholders,” Ricci said. “One that could enlarge the scope and potential targets of our business. We needed a new identity that was suitable not just for core customers, but for new audiences, something that could be a trigger for creators.”Perhaps the best measure of its success came on Tuesday. After a similarly intensive design period, Inter Milan — Juventus’s fierce domestic rival — presented its own new crest, a simplified version of the badge that has graced the club’s jerseys for decades. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.The soccer entertainment complexFew clubs can match Manchester United’s revenue off the field.Oli Scarff/ReutersFor years, Manchester United has been held up as soccer’s gold standard in converting the sport’s unparalleled popularity into cold, hard cash.The partnership model it pioneered, combining 25 official club partners with a jumble of regional partners around the world, might have made it an easy target for satire — all those tractor and noodle endorsements — but it has also turned the club into a financial powerhouse, capable of earning a profit even during the coronavirus pandemic.Increasingly, though, the consumption habits of younger people are making that approach seem outdated. “We’re seeing a move away from the licensing model,” Wise said. “We know that Generation Z and millennials hate being sold to. That means it’s no longer enough to plaster a club’s badge on something and assume fans will buy it out of loyalty.”Instead, he said, partnerships must feel “authentic,” and the content used to promote them must “tell stories.” That authenticity was the logic behind the Juventus rebrand, not only of its crest but of the club’s whole visual persona, from its social media — using a bespoke font — to its branding.“It was about placing soccer in the broader entertainment framework,” Ricci said. “We see our competition not just as clubs, but things like the gaming industry.”For partners, the appeal is obvious. Soccer has a reach that no other aspect of culture can match. Cristiano Ronaldo has more followers on Instagram than anyone else on the planet. Lionel Messi might trail his rival there, but it will be some solace that he is, at least, ahead of Beyoncé.Cristiano Ronaldo is a global brand in his own right, with 273 million followers on Instagram.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLikewise, Juventus has a name recognition that can supercharge a brand like Palace. The difference is that, increasingly, soccer has to give a little, too. It has to accept the principles of what Grimaldi called “strategic design,” the idea that design itself can change consumer behavior and expectations.“The rebrand was not a way of being cooler or more contemporary,” Grimaldi said. “It was a chance to show you understand the verbal and visual codes you have to adopt if you want to be understood in other spaces. To do work with Palace, for example, you have to adopt the design codes of their world.”It is, though, a slow burn. Four years since its rebrand, Juventus is not in a position to pinpoint any immediate financial boost, which has traditionally been the primary motivation and metric for anything any soccer club does. When looking at the club’s books, Ricci said, it is hard to isolate what is a consequence of the rebrand, and what is a result of winning trophies or signing Cristiano Ronaldo.He is, though, “absolutely convinced” that it was worth it. Internally, the new identity gave the club a sense of direction, he said. Externally, the outrage over the new badge subsided fairly quickly: Signing Ronaldo and picking up another handful of Serie A titles meant the club’s traditional fans did not feel alienated.But at the same time, it meant that Juventus had become something more than a team, something more like a sportswear brand, too.It is still occasionally possible to buy one of those original pixelated, acid green, special-edition Palace jerseys in streetwear’s thriving resale market. Prices start at several hundred dollars, far more than even the newest Juventus jersey. And how the team is doing on the field makes not the slightest bit of difference. More

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      Don’t Reject the Champions League’s Changes Out of Hand

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      The latest proposals to reallocate European soccer’s riches show that there may be sense even in dumb ideas.Say what you like about Andrea Agnelli, but at least he is not afraid of a bad idea. Even by the standards of Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, this has been a fairly spectacular week, a seemingly never-ending stream of free-form thoughts about the future of soccer, each one somehow worse than the last.There was, first, a stout defense of the coming reform of the Champions League, the so-called Swiss Model, which would see 36 teams qualify for the tournament and then play 10 group games, rather than six, all of them against different opponents.That was just Agnelli getting started, though. It is perhaps easiest to think of him as soccer’s equivalent to Stewart Pearson, the policy strategist/vapid marketing guru skewered so perfectly in “The Thick of It,” the British political satire. Legacy places in the Champions League? Banning elite clubs from buying each other’s players? Selling a subscription to the last 15 minutes of games? Yes, and ho (Parental Guidance: R).The reaction to all of these suggestions, of course, was what even Agnelli, presumably, has come to expect: a panoply of derision and disdain, the sort that in a strange sort of way unites soccer’s various warring tribes in hostility to the machinations of a smart, urbane businessman who seems determined to play the role of cartoonish supervillain.That so many of his ideas emerged in a week in which Agnelli’s Juventus was unexpectedly and dramatically eliminated from the Champions League by F.C. Porto simply served to underline his hubris. This, after all, was the sort of drama he wants to negate, inflicted by the sort of team he wants to disenfranchise. He got, in short, what he deserved.But while that reaction is both understandable and largely justified, it is not desperately constructive. Just as with Project Big Picture — the set of ideas tossed around by the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool for reform of the Premier League and leaked late last year — the immediate rush to outrage means that the islands of common sense in Agnelli’s thought torrent are swept away before they can be properly explored.Take, for example, the last of his suggestions. Why would it be bad, precisely, to sell the rights to watch the last 15 minutes of games? Of course the clubs would benefit from the tapping of another revenue stream, but who suffers?Those who wanted to watch the full match could still do so, through whatever subscription package they currently enjoy. But maybe others — those not able to afford it, those without the time to benefit from it, those who do not wish to watch an entire game — could use a cheaper, shorter, more ad hoc alternative.There will have been plenty, for example, who might have wanted to watch the denouement to Juventus’s game with Porto, once it became clear that it might prove more compelling than anticipated. So why not let them?Porto isn’t in a Big Five league, but it deserves nights to celebrate, too.Valerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesThat the idea could be dismissed out of hand is, in part, down to the fact that it was Agnelli who proposed it. He is, after all, not only the chairman of Juventus, but the president of the European Club Association, too, a body that is designed to represent the interests of all of its members but — in the popular imagination — is largely deployed to lobby for the game’s established elite.As such, it is assumed that everything that is in Agnelli’s interests is automatically tinged with not just self-interest, but also greed. The expansion of the Champions League, according to that argument, is designed to enable a handful of clubs to make more money, at the expense of everyone else, furthering the financial chasm that yawns between teams in the major leagues, and between the major leagues and the minor ones.The idea of legacy places — allowing teams with more European pedigree to leapfrog those with less, ensuring that the traditional powers always have access to the Champions League, regardless of where they finish in their domestic leagues — is seen as offering them a backstop, inuring them from the consequences of failure, breaking the contract that sport should be in some way meritocratic, ensuring their money keeps flowing.This is, doubtless, true. Agnelli is not advocating anything that would damage his, his club’s or his collaborators’ interests. But it does not follow that those who stand in his way are acting out of some sort of higher purpose. This week, several clubs — most notably Crystal Palace and Aston Villa — led the resistance to the reform of the Champions League, insisting that it would irrevocably damage domestic competitions.That Andrea Agnelli is largely looking out for the interests of Juventus does not mean every one of his ideas must be rejected out of hand.Denis Balibouse/ReutersAnd they are right, but their motivations are no purer than Agnelli’s. Crystal Palace and Aston Villa benefit very nicely, thank you very much, from the status quo. They have been made immeasurably rich by their mere presence in the Premier League; they will reject any move that endangers their place on that particular gravy train.It is here that the problem becomes broader, more pernicious. There is a reason Agnelli — and John W. Henry, the owner of Liverpool, and Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, and the powers-that-be at Bayern Munich and Juventus and all the rest — keeps having bad ideas, and it is one that cannot be put entirely (though that is relevant) to the big clubs’ greed for trophies and for profit.It is that on some fundamental level, the economics of soccer as they stand do not work, and they did not work even before the coronavirus hit, creating a colossal hole in the accounts of (almost) every club across Europe, rich and poor alike.Ideally, at this juncture, it would be possible to pinpoint just one problem — the spending of Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City, the wealth of the Premier League or the growing gap between haves and have-nots — and then to identify a panacea that would make it all better But that is not how it works. Fairness in top-flight European soccer is a vast and unwieldy and complicated issue, and one without an obvious solution.For the grand houses of continental Europe, the issue is the relentless march of the Premier League. For the big clubs of the Premier League, it is being expected to win an arms race against teams backed by nation states. For those teams, it is trying to crack a cartel that is arranged against them.For all its financial might, P.S.G. is still chasing its first Champions League title with Kylian Mbappé. For all its struggles, Barcelona has won four with Lionel Messi.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor the teams that fill out the five major leagues of Western Europe, it is finding a way to overcome the enormous financial advantages of their opponents. For those leagues that are not considered the major powers, it is identifying a way to compete with the Big Five, and to deal with the deleterious effect on competitive balance of the Champions League itself.And that is before we get further down the pyramid, to the teams struggling to breathe away from the continent’s top divisions. It is this that makes it too hard to sympathize with the plight of Crystal Palace, which currently makes more money than A.C. Milan and Feyenoord and Legia Warsaw and Panathinaikos and all but a couple of dozen other teams in the world. It is this that means it is dangerous to assume that what is good for Crystal Palace is good for soccer as a whole.There are, unfortunately, no easy answers. But that should not dictate that all suggestions for change are shot down, or that the underlying assumption should be that they are all rooted in bad faith, or even that self-interest itself precludes an idea’s having merit.The people who own clubs are within their rights to want steadier, more predictable incomes, or more restricted spending. It is not feasible to demand, as we currently do, that they just throw as much money against the wall as possible in pursuit of short-term success. Fans, above all, should know by now that such an approach rarely ends well.Will an expanded Champions League still have room for past winners like Ajax and Feyenoord?Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say that Agnelli has yet hit upon the answer. Legacy places for historic teams defeat the purpose of sport, though they are not exactly unprecedented: In South America, there have been various experiments — rarely for good reasons — to make relegation a punishment for years of underperformance, not just a single bad season.Expanding the Champions League — though not something that is personally appealing — has more positives, should the extra places go to national champions from lesser leagues, expanding the horizons of the competition, though even that might then have a distorting effect on those domestic tournaments. (Banning transfers between elite clubs makes no sense: How else would Agnelli, for one, have unloaded Miralem Pjanic’s contract?)But none of this should disguise the need both to talk about and institute change. The status quo might work for a handful of teams — the ones, largely, that finish in the top 15 of the Premier League pretty regularly, and possibly Bayern Munich — but it locks out the vast majority; according to a report this week from Football Supporters Europe, fans* are finding it increasingly off-putting.[*This is a subject for another column, but the issue with these sorts of surveys is that they represent a specific cohort of fans, not a broad spectrum.]It is incumbent on everyone, then, to have the courage to have ideas: not objections rooted in tradition, not utopian daydreams, but concrete, considered suggestions. Would cross-border leagues help teams from smaller nations compete? Should elite teams be allowed to sign strategic deals with partner clubs? Is there a way to make the Champions League more compelling? How do you address competitive balance within and between domestic tournaments? (Answers below.)All of them will have drawbacks. All of them will elicit criticism. But it is a conversation we must be prepared to have, not one that should be shut down just because someone, somewhere, finds it does not align with his interests. Partly because that is the only way anything will change. And partly because if we do not, one of Agnelli’s ideas might just stick.a) Yes, it’s obvious; b) yes, so is that; c) you’d start by changing the seeding; and d) squad and spending limits, and a combination of a) and b).A Year OnA packed house and one mask at Anfield in March 11, 2020, hours before sports called time.Phil Noble/ReutersThe news seeped through as Jürgen Klopp was licking his wounds and Diego Simeone was basking in glory. It had been one of those electric Champions League nights: Atlético Madrid had eliminated Liverpool, the reigning champion, last March, storming what was supposed to be fortress Anfield with that distinctively Cholísta mix of strategy and steel.And then, as the managers were picking over the bones of what had happened, as 56,000 people were drifting into the night, the news flickered through from Italy. Daniele Rugani, the Juventus defender, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The club was sending its squad into isolation for 14 days. Its opponent the previous weekend, Inter Milan, quickly did the same.That was March 11, 2020, a year and a day ago. Even in the slightly frantic, vaguely frazzled surroundings of a press box, it was apparent that what had played out in front of us was not the story. It seemed obvious, even then, that the night’s theme was not just Liverpool’s facing up to an immediate future with no European competition.The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. Across the Atlantic, Rudy Gobert had tested positive, bringing the virus into the N.B.A. Sports in the United States was shutting down. Over the next 36 hours, Europe reached the same conclusion. The patchwork solutions that had tried to hold back the tide — games in empty stadiums, games being postponed — gave way.In England, at least, the tipping point was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive. The Premier League, until then content to stick its fingers in its ears and blunder through, called an emergency meeting. A few hours after insisting the show, that weekend, would go on, the league confirmed it would be mothballed. Nobody could be quite sure that it would come back.Two things now stand out about those few days. One is specific to Britain. It is important to remember that, at the time of Arteta’s positive test, the British government was dallying. The country was still almost two weeks from being locked down. Officials were encouraging people to go to work. Some 56,000 people had been allowed to go to Anfield, including some who flew in from Madrid for the privilege. A quarter of a million had been admitted to horse racing’s Cheltenham Festival.Looking back, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that it was the abandonment of the Premier League that concentrated a few minds and forced a few hands. Its elite soccer league is, deep down, one of England’s most high-profile institutions. Its sudden absence denoted, in the most incontrovertible tone, that the pandemic had arrived.The other, broader thing is that for all the criticism, for all the missteps and the arguments and the questionable motives, soccer deserves credit for finding its way back: its players for enduring the schedule; its executives for conjuring solutions; the countless, unheralded staff members at clubs and leagues and broadcasters for making it work. Soccer is not perfect. Sometimes, it is not even good. But in what has been an inordinately difficult year for so many, it has, in some small way, helped.CorrespondenceManchester City and ballet, you say? Set this photo to music.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillLast week’s column on Manchester City — a team that inspires an intellectual response, more than an emotional one, at least in my eyes — prompted many of you to get in touch to set me straight. Matt Noel highlighted not only that Pep Guardiola has been able to “make some tweaks and reunite” his squad, but also the “style in which City plays … is nothing short of miraculous, delicate and ephemeral.”I have no arguments there and, of course, it is not for me to dictate your responses to any team. I was, as the vernacular goes, simply offering you my truth. “I love watching City,” Charlotte Mehrtens wrote. “The skill is such a joy. You claim this football lacks soul? That’s like saying a choreographed ballet lacks soul.”This is a great parallel, because there is something inherently balletic about City, and also I find that ballet leaves me a bit cold, too. I appreciate the art and the skill, but I could do with a bit of talking. The issue here, then, may be that I am a philistine.David Ittah took exception with the idea that Guardiola has invented a new position for João Cancelo. “Marcelo has been playing exactly that role for many years at Real Madrid,” he wrote. He has indeed: Nobody loves Marcelo, pound for pound the greatest signing of all time, more than me. But Cancelo’s role is much more structured, much more part of the tactical blueprint, than the freestyle approach that makes Marcelo a joy.And a wonderful idea from Ian Greig. “Why not try to make a virtue out of the loss by holding games on out-of-the-way unknown pitches in remote places. Pitches without stands, or fans in beautiful places, rural Scotland, Georgia. Years ago I watched a game near Syanky in Poland, a lovely site surrounded by pines. I hold the memory dear.”Consider me on board. Let’s play the Champions League final in Lofoten. Or Qeqertarsuaq. More

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      Weston McKennie Is Right Where He Belongs at Juventus

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      Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesWeston McKennie Is Right Where He BelongsWhat is most surprising about the American’s path to Juventus is not how far he has come, but how effortless he has made the journey look.Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 8, 2021, 10:30 a.m. ETAs he sat down for lunch, Weston McKennie slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and onto the chair in front of him, hiding it beneath his legs. He was breaking the rules — he and his Schalke teammates were strictly forbidden from taking their phones into the cafeteria — but he was prepared to take the risk. There are some calls you do not want to miss.McKennie found himself glancing down every few seconds, checking his screen as surreptitiously as he could. Midway through his meal, it arrived. His screen lit up and his chair buzzed. McKennie grabbed his phone, stood and walked out of the room. “I was just like: ‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this,’” he said. You do not, after all, keep Andrea Pirlo waiting.The last few months have been full of moments like that for McKennie, instances in which the surreal somehow feels quotidian. His career, and his prospects, have undergone the sort of whirlwind transformation that can be difficult to process: the rise is so dizzyingly rapid and the curve so precipitously steep that after a while, the scale and speed of the journey as a whole is difficult to gauge.Signed to help Juventus in midfield, McKennie has instead become a ball-winning, goal-scoring fixture alongside stars like Cristiano Ronaldo.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is only in fleeting vignettes — little scenes from his last six months — that McKennie can catch a reflection of his new reality. Last summer, he was a 22-year-old midfielder from Little Elm, Texas, who had been a rare ray of sunlight in the otherwise stormy sky looming over Schalke, the troubled Bundesliga team where he had spent all of his professional career.His most recent season had been conflicted. Personally, McKennie had found it satisfying: He had made 28 Bundesliga appearances in a campaign interrupted by the pandemic, and had established himself as a mainstay of the United States national team. Collectively, it had been difficult. Schalke had collapsed in the second half of the season. It did not win a single league game between January and the summer.Even in that context, his performances had been good enough to catch the attention of the likes of Southampton and Newcastle, steady performers from the middle reaches of the Premier League. He was one of the few assets Schalke possessed that it could sell. He most likely knew the club needed money. He most definitely knew that cash was scarce in a pandemic-afflicted market.But then his agent mentioned that another team had inquired about his services. “It didn’t seem super-realistic,” McKennie said. “So I kind of brushed it off.” A couple of weeks later, though, the same suitor returned, the interest more concrete this time. “We have to make it happen,” McKennie instructed his agent, as he prepared to join Schalke’s preseason training camp. He was told to expect a call from Juventus, the grand old lady of Italian soccer, coached by Pirlo and home of Cristiano Ronaldo. Precisely, in other words, the sort of call you do not want to miss.McKennie made a name for himself in Europe at Schalke in the Bundesliga. But when the club fell on hard times financially, it cashed in on McKennie by loaning him to Juventus.Credit…Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conversation went well. Pirlo outlined why he wanted McKennie: There would be lots of games this season, plenty of chances for an energetic, dynamic, ball-hungry player to shine. McKennie did not need a hard sell. “It was more a case of me selling myself to him,” he said. “If that’s what he wanted, then that’s what I’d do.”And so McKennie finds himself where he is now: still a 22-year-old from Little Elm, Texas, but one that has made such an impression in the midfield of the biggest club in Italy — one not battling relegation but competing to win Serie A and the Champions League — that last week it exercised its option to turn his initial one-season loan into a permanent deal, paying $21.5 million for the privilege.It is the final seal of “approval” of his coach, Pirlo, who just so happens to be one of the finest exponents of the midfield art in recent history. “A legend,” McKennie calls him.Sometimes, he said, he overhears one of his teammates expressing disbelief at finding themselves playing in such rarefied air, competing with the heroes of their childhood. “They can’t believe how far they’ve come, that they’re playing in the Champions League,” he said. “And I think that, when I was a kid, I had never even heard of the Champions League.” McKennie is not fulfilling his dreams: Somehow, it is bigger than that, as if he is stretching the bounds of reality.McKennie has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of seven in the Champions League.Credit…Massimo Pinca/ReutersIt is in those little moments that he can glimpse it. Sometimes, it is something grand that triggers it. When he was younger, he and his family, then living in Germany, where his father’s Air Force career had taken them, went to Camp Nou while on vacation. They explored a lot, he said, during the years they lived near Kaiserslautern, where they moved when McKennie was 6.“The stadium was closed that day,” he remembered. “But we persuaded the security guard to let us in. The team was training: all of those players, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho.” They stood and watched for a while. When a loose ball flew into the stands, McKennie scurried down to retrieve it and throw it back. That was their cue to leave.He had not been back to Barcelona until December. “It was strange that it was empty, just the players on the field, when I first went, and it was empty again now,” he said. This time, McKennie did not have to plead with security to let him in. He belonged not only in the stadium, but on the field. He scored that night.Sometimes, though, the realizations come in more intimate, more private settings. Those are the ones that catch McKennie by surprise. “I was sitting with Alvaro Morata after training the other day,” he said. “We were just watching Cristiano practicing his free kicks. And we turned to each other and said what a privilege it is, just to be able to do that: to watch him take free kick after free kick.”But while McKennie feels fortunate to find himself where he is, that should not be mistaken for luck. He is no mere tourist at Juventus, passing through, savoring these snapshots of life in the elite, an American on some sort of year abroad in Serie A.The perception, when he joined, was that he was destined to be an option of first reserve: that he would spend much of his time riding the bench, and when he was not, he would be a “hard six,” there to win the ball back and give it to someone with, well, more talent.Juventus made its acquisition of McKennie permanent last week. He may be there a while.Credit…Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse, via Associated PressIn reality, even McKennie is a little “surprised” at how important he has become. He has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of its seven — so far — in the Champions League. He has emerged, too, as a creative, offensive force: He has scored at Camp Nou, in that rout of Barcelona, and at San Siro, in a win against A.C. Milan. He is comfortable enough in his surroundings to joke that Ronaldo, Aaron Ramsey and Dejan Kulusevski take turns acting as his translator (though his Italian is now good enough, he said, to understand most of what is going on.)At first, he said, he worried about living up to expectations, wondering “why they chose me.” It has taken only a few months for those anxieties to dissipate entirely, quietly shed as his rise gathered speed and height, as McKennie has proved that he belongs.That is what makes his transformation difficult to parse: that it has felt so smooth, so natural, that the line between remarkable and quotidian has blurred quite so readily, that it seems so obvious now not only why McKennie picked up, but why Pirlo called in the first place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Luis Suárez Rediscovers His Bite

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerLuis Suárez Rediscovers His BiteAfter a summer of indignity and humiliation, the striker has been reborn with Atlético Madrid.Luis Suárez has scored 16 goals this season after swapping his colors in the Liga title race.Credit…Pablo Morano/ReutersFeb. 23, 2021, 12:01 a.m. ETLuis Suárez had already been made a scapegoat, blamed for all that had gone wrong at Barcelona. He had already been rejected, told bluntly by the club’s new coach, Ronald Koeman, that his services were no longer required.He had been forced to sit alongside the president who had precipitated it all and say thank you for having me, even as the thought of being forced to go brought him to tears. Worse, though, was still to come, a final indignity in his summer of humiliation.On Sept. 17, Suárez touched down in the Italian city of Perugia to considerable fanfare. The airport where he landed put out a statement celebrating his arrival. His progress to the city’s University for Foreigners was accompanied by a crowd of fans and photographers. Even the university thanked him for gracing its halls.His stay was to be brief. Suárez was there to sit for an Italian exam. His wife, Sofía Balbi, is of Italian descent, making her husband eligible for citizenship, providing he could demonstrate competency in the language.Suárez brief visit to Italy in September attracted the attention of fans and, later, the authorities.Credit…Crocchioni/EPA via ShutterstockIt was something he had been planning for at least a year, he would say later, but at the time his motivation seemed much more immediate: Juventus was offering Suárez a swift exit from Barcelona, but could not employ any more players from outside the European Union. Suárez’s getting an Italian passport was the key to the transfer. A few minutes after arriving, he left. He had passed the test.That, though, was only the beginning. A few days later, the Perugia prosecutor’s office and the Guardia di Finanza, part of Italy’s mosaic of law enforcement agencies, announced that they were investigating “irregularities” in the exam. Suárez, they suggested, had been informed of the questions beforehand, and been asked only to do the oral portion of the test.The university was accused of agreeing to give him an intermediate grade — enough to pass — before he had taken the test. Juventus, the prosecutors would later claim, had sought to exert pressure “at the highest institutional levels” to accelerate the process. A phone call from his Italian tutor to one of the examiners had been intercepted, revealing that she admitted Suárez could not “utter a word” of Italian.Though both the university and Juventus deny any misconduct, and Suárez himself was never accused of wrongdoing, the reputational damage was nevertheless substantial.He has, of course, long been used to being cast — often rightly — as a villain. As his summer descended through tragedy and all the way on into farce, though, his image shifted again: unwanted by Barcelona; accused of cheating in an exam; and at 34, while still one of the most talented strikers of his generation, condemned to play out the coda to his career as a figure of ridicule.A timeline of Luis Suárez’s actual and suspected crimes, clockwise from top left: a handball against Ghana at the 2010 World Cup; accusations of racial abuse leveled by Patrice Evra in 2011; an accusation of biting (the third of his career) in 2014; and diving, every time he steps on the field.Credit…From top left, clockwise: Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press; Lindsey Parnaby, via European Pressphoto Agency; Ricardo Mazalan, via Associated Press; Manu Fernandez, via Associated PressThat is not quite how things have worked out. Suárez did not end up signing with Juventus. Instead, freed from his Barcelona contract, he joined Atlético Madrid. Barcelona’s hierarchy would have preferred to see him leave for Italy or France — Paris St.-Germain was interested, too — rather than for a direct rival. There was some trepidation that the executives might come to regret the move. Even they, though, could not have predicted quite how much.As he prepares to lead Atlético’s line against Chelsea in the Champions League on Tuesday night, Suárez is in “one of the best moments of his career,” as the Atlético president, Enrique Cerezo, put it.He has scored 16 goals in 20 La Liga games for Diego Simeone’s team. Atlético sits atop the Spanish table, with a three-point lead and a game in hand on the second-place Real Madrid. Thanks in no small part to Suárez, Atlético is dreaming of its first league title since 2014, and only its second this century. He has, in the first six months of his Atlético career, proved one thing beyond doubt. “Luis Suárez is not old,” Cerezo said.Simeone, certainly, never believed that he was. He had admired the Uruguayan for some time — he had hoped to sign Suárez while he was still with Liverpool, calling his performances in England “extraordinary” — and, when it became clear Barcelona was prepared to jettison him, Simeone urged Atlético to make its move. Cerezo and the club’s executives did not take much persuading. “When a player of his quality is available, you have to try,” Cerezo said.In his final days with Barcelona, Suárez, like Lionel Messi, became an easy target for those looking to assign blame for the club’s failings.Credit…Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen coach and player first spoke by phone, Simeone detected “the energy, the hunger, the defiance” that have not only characterized Suárez, but that also were Simeone’s finest attributes as a player. Most of all, though, Simeone felt that Suárez had something to prove. “He had a desire to show that he is still relevant,” the coach said.It is tempting to ascribe Suárez’s form in Madrid to the re-ignition of that inner fire. He has always, after all, given the impression that he is at his best when he has something or someone to rage against, whether it is an opponent, an authority or, in this case, simply the dying of the light. “Some did not believe I was still capable of playing at the top level,” Suárez said this week.And yet it is possible, too, to believe that the opposite is true: that Suárez has found himself again not in war, but in peace.His former international teammate Sebastián Abreu told the Spanish newspaper El País this week that he believed Barcelona had, in Suárez’s final year with the club, “mounted a campaign where they identified Luis as the problem with everything, together with Lionel Messi.” Suárez, judging by his public comments, seems to agree with that assessment.With Atlético, by contrast, he has not only encountered a coach who — as Abreu put it — “knows perfectly how to treat a player,” he has also found a club that is not “blaming Suárez for every situation, and so that has liberated him to enjoy playing soccer completely.” Without battles to fight off the field, he has been able to dedicate himself once again to winning them on it.Just as crucially, he has found himself on a team prepared to offer him the support he needs to do so. Just as Atlético has revived Suárez, so he has revived Atlético. Simeone had always regarded Suárez as the finest pure striker in the world, but he was aware that he was, in his mid-30s, no longer able to play on the counterattack quite so devastatingly as he had, say, with Liverpool in his mid-20s.Atlético Madrid adjusted its style of play to get the most out of Suárez. It’s working: The club leads La Liga by three points.Credit…Jose Breton/Associated PressIn order to restore Suárez to his former grandeur, then, Simeone dispensed with the counterpunching approach that had long characterized his tenure at the club. In its stead came a more possession-oriented, high-pressing style, one designed to get more players closer to Suárez, and the ball to him in the areas where he could do the most damage. “The team is accompanying him, so that he can become the best version of himself,” Simeone said. “And that is scoring goals.”Even for someone, like Simeone, who never doubted Suárez’s ability — who never mistook the ticking of a clock for the tolling of a bell — there is still the occasional surprise.Late in January, the Atlético coach found the striker lingering on the training field, practicing free kicks with a couple of teammates, Thomas Lemar and João Félix. Simeone, sensing an opportunity to set Suárez a challenge, remarked that he had not seen him score from set pieces all that often during his career.A few days later, Suárez lined one up in a game against Cádiz. He was about 30 yards from goal. He whipped the ball into the top corner. Suárez had passed that test, too.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More