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    Liverpool, V.A.R. and the Problem With Process

    If process and hubris trump getting calls right, the system has broken down.There are very few coherent sentences in what will, in time, doubtless come to be known as the Luis Díaz Tape, a sort of Premier League equivalent to the Zapruder film. The various protagonists communicate in clipped and meaningless phrases, any clarity sacrificed on the altar of self-important brevity.The tape lasts only two minutes, and while it is not a particularly thrilling video — a group of faceless voices discussing procedure while staring at screens, advancing resolutely toward a presaged outcome — it is, by turns, tense and frustrating and never less than compelling.It is best considered, really, as a character drama. The setting is this: Díaz, the Liverpool forward, has just scored to put his team ahead against Tottenham Hotspur. The goal is ruled out, on the field, for offside. A few miles away, in a building at Stockley Park west of London, the Premier League’s Video Assistant Referee studio whirs into action.Darren England, the game’s designated V.A.R., wants to check if the goal should be allowed to stand. He commands that the footage be rewound and paused and decorated with a line. He determines that, no, Díaz had timed his run perfectly. “That’s fine, perfect,” he says to his colleagues in the video room and to Simon Hooper, the on-field official. “Check complete.”It is here that everything unravels. The goal should count, but England seems to have declared that the original call — no goal — is “perfect.” “Well done, boys; good process,” Hooper mutters. Tottenham restarts the game with a free kick. A couple of pregnant seconds pass by. Nobody seems to have noticed the non sequitur. The audience, though, knows.Luis Díaz, hero denied.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersAt this point, the hero enters. Mo Abby is not a qualified referee; he is the technological specialist, present to operate the video equipment while the officials issue their expert judgments. “Are you happy with this?” he asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he knows he is stepping outside his role.Now, it all goes to pieces. The precise nature, the exact scale, of the error is suddenly clear to England and Dan Cook, his assistant. Another outsider, Oli Kohout — the hub operations manager, which is not a title that can be pithily explained — suggests pausing the game and allowing Hooper to correct the mistake.England is the one with the power to make that call. In the inevitable dramatization, it is at this point that the camera will focus intently on his face. His eyes will betray his panic, his fear, his dawning realization of his powerlessness. His voice, though, does not. The game has resumed. “Nothing I can do,” he says, again and again, with surprising conviction, his hubris sealing his fate.It is this that is, in truth, most troubling about the incident at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The last week has been rife with false equivalences. When the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, suggested that the most sporting consequence of the mistake would be for the game itself to be replayed, the response was predictable. Should we replay the 1966 World Cup final? Argentina’s defeat of England in 1986? The 2019 Champions League final? That game last year where my team was on the end of a disputed, subjective call?The difference should not need to be spelled out, but since we are here: Plenty of teams have been the victims of errors no less consequential than the one that cost Liverpool last Saturday. In almost all of those cases, though, those decisions were made in good faith. The officials believed they were right. They did not press ahead in the clear, undisputed knowledge that they were wrong.There are plenty of reasons to be object to the existence, or at least the application, of V.A.R. It interrupts the rhythm of games. It diminishes the experience of watching soccer in a stadium, allowing the nature of the action to be determined remotely, by some apparently unaccountable external force. It creates and enforces an expectation of perfection that is impossible to attain and will, therefore, be a source of eternal disappointment.Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, offering some thoughts.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Díaz tape, though, is a perfect distillation of what may be the most significant objection to V.A.R. Darren England’s response, both plaintive and brash — “nothing I can do” — is rooted in a belief that what matters, above all, is the correct implementation of protocol. The rules, the sainted Laws, decree that once a game has restarted, it cannot be stopped. Errors are material reality. The referee’s decision is final, even when it is known to be wrong.This is indicative of what V.A.R. has done to soccer. Recently retired officials have a cloying tendency to lionize the days when they could apply what is known, euphemistically, as “game management.” Generally, this means referring to players by their nicknames, indulging in a false and unreciprocated chumminess, and allowing the more famous participants in a game rather more leeway than their lesser colleagues.Such an approach is, of course, flawed, but it is perhaps preferable to the technologically induced alternative, which is a world in which any form of discretion has been almost entirely removed. Quite how much soccer has shifted to allow itself to be adjudicated from afar is overlooked worryingly frequently.The most obvious example of this is handball, the definition of which seems to change with the seasons. The motivation behind this is not an attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the game, but to make it possible for a decision to be made on a screen.There are others, though. The shifting thresholds for red and yellow cards and the shrinking border between reckless and malicious are both inspired by the need to make an objective decision, one that does not rely on any human allowance for context or intent.This is the atmosphere in which referees now function, one in which they are not there to apply the rules as they see fit, but in which the rules are unyielding and inflexible and do not brook any interpretation. It is a world in which what matters is not whether anything makes any sense, but in which protocol — officious and unapologetic and blind — is king.This search for absolutism has led, ironically, to a sense of greater arbitrariness. That, in the aftermath of the Díaz incident, almost every club could pick out a litany of its own injustices in the recent past was designed to illustrate that Liverpool’s response was somehow excessive or self-pitying. Instead, it highlighted more than anything how fractured fans’ belief in the fair implementation of the Laws of the Game — always portentously capitalized — has become.Nobody is quite sure what the rules are anymore, because they have a tendency to change so often. This week, this is a handball and the referees are clamping down on time-wasting or players who demand yellow cards, and next week they are not.Decisions are imposed without adequate explanation by an officiating body that has issued 14 formal apologies since the start of last season but seems still, for some reason, convinced of its infallibility. The letter of the law is applied rigorously, but the spirit of it has been lost almost entirely. And the feeling that follows is the same as that which can be detected in the Luis Díaz tape: a sense of unmitigated frustration, of wild confusion, of total powerlessness. There is nothing Darren England can do, and in that he is no different from the rest of us.The 2030 World Cup Will Be Held … EverywhereTomas Cuesta/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is to Gianni Infantino’s credit, really, that he resisted the temptation to announce the location of the 2030 World Cup in the style of Oprah Winfrey giving out cars. Spain: You get a World Cup. Portugal: You get a World Cup. Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and, for reasons that will have to be explained later, Paraguay: You can all have a World Cup, too.The FIFA president will insist that this plan is perfectly sensible. Admirable, even. Hosting the tournament across three continents, Infantino explained on Wednesday, sends a message of “peace, tolerance and inclusion.” It means spreading the financial burden of a 48-team tournament, and by consequence sharing the joy.There is even just a hint of romance. South America has long believed it would be fitting if the World Cup’s centenary edition took place back where it all began: in Uruguay, the host of the 1930 tournament, and Argentina, the losing finalist.It had looked for some time, though, as if that might be impossible. Even with their resources pooled, the South American bidders did not possess the infrastructure — specifically the stadiums — to meet FIFA’s exacting requirements.Infantino’s solution — handing the tournament’s opening three fixtures to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción and then shifting the rest of the tournament to the Pillars of Hercules — will doubtless be sold as an ingenious compromise. That this plan effectively clears the path for the 2034 tournament to go to Asia, and to Saudi Arabia, is obviously just a coincidence.At this stage, all of this is still just an idea. The plan still has to be ratified by a vote of all 211 FIFA members next year. That it has been suggested at all, though, makes the organization’s ecological attitude abundantly clear. The 2022 World Cup might have been the single most environmentally damaging event ever staged. The 2026 edition is being held across a whole continent. The likelihood is that 2030 will take place across three.That may be the most consequential objection, but there is something less tangible to be mourned here, too. Elite sports may now be a televisual event, dislocated and remote, but it is the connection to a place that lifts a World Cup into something beyond mere content to be consumed.It is a chance for a country to go on hiatus, to revel in itself, to spend a month being swept away. That was true of Russia in 2018 and of Australia and New Zealand this year. It was that sense of proximity, the feel of a global carnival, that illuminated Qatar, far more than the stadiums. Spreading the World Cup around does not diffuse that. It dilutes it. Sure, everyone gets a little piece of it, but that does not have the same effect. Not at all. More

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    At Liverpool, Man City Means a Red Alert

    A rough stretch, starting with Saturday’s game against Manchester City, will define Liverpool’s season. The harder work comes after that.Every year, in December, the BBC devotes an evening of programming to one of Britain’s longest-running broadcasting traditions. The Sports Personality of the Year Award was first presented in 1954; almost seven decades later, it is still going strong, a fixture in the country’s sporting consciousness.In an era when votes are no longer sent by postcard, it is possible to feel there is something a little quaint about the award. The criteria are pleasingly opaque: Last year, England striker Beth Mead beat out the cricket superstar Ben Stokes and Eve Muirhead, the skip of Britain’s Olympic curling team. Quite how their achievements should be compared is unclear.Still, the award’s existence is harmless, even kind of sweet. It is a chance, after all, to give athletes who devote years to their craft a celebration they deserve. More of a problem is the cultural gravity it exerts: In the months before the ceremony, there is a tendency to present any sporting success solely in the light of how it might affect the award’s destination.Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula 1 world championship, or Emma Raducanu the U.S. Open, or a British cyclist the Tour de France: Does this mean they are the favorite to be sports personality of the year? The actual sports themselves are reduced to nothing more than qualifiers.There have been times this season when the race to sign Jude Bellingham has taken on a similar air. The campaigns of the soccer clubs with designs on Bellingham, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, have frequently been treated not as attempts to win trophies or to qualify for the Champions League, but instead as auditions to serve as the 19-year-old’s new home.A few months ago, there would have been little to choose among the three prime contenders. Real Madrid offers glamour, Luka Modric and an enviable supply of Champions League trophies. Manchester City has unrivaled wealth, Pep Guardiola and four Premier League titles in five years. Liverpool had Jürgen Klopp and the memory of Steven Gerrard and had picked up every major honor available since 2019.Jürgen Klopp’s wry smile is easier to spot in the stands than on his face these days.Carl Recine/ReutersThis season, though, has changed the terms of the equation considerably. Real Madrid and Man City have continued to sail as smoothly as ever, of course, but Liverpool has collapsed. Klopp’s team has lost more Premier League games this season than in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22 combined. It has won only three times away from home.It left the Champions League with a whimper against Real Madrid, and its hopes of returning to the competition at all are diminishing. Liverpool currently sits sixth, seven points adrift of Tottenham in the final qualifying slot. The good news is that the next week brings three games to try to reduce that gap. The bad news? They are against City, Chelsea and Arsenal.A variety of factors have been identified as contributing to Liverpool’s rapid, unforeseen decline — fatigue, injury, predictability, the remorseless march of time — but the way it has manifested defies simple diagnosis.It has made a good sound bite to point the finger at the defense, or the midfield, or for some reason just at Trent Alexander-Arnold, but the truth is that the system that led Liverpool to three Champions League finals in five years, as well as its first Premier League crown in three decades, was complex, interwoven.When one aspect of the team sneezes, the rest of it catches cold: Liverpool’s defense looks vulnerable because its midfield has stopped functioning. But its midfield is suffering because the attack is not pressing as effectively. Just as it once worked in flowing concert, Klopp’s team has ground to a halt in unison, and whatever he has tried in an attempt to jump-start it has failed.The difference-maker: Jude Bellingham.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe solution, to many, is apparent. Liverpool has spent much of the season being told that it needs to overhaul its squad. Most urgently, it needs to reinforce its aging midfield. To that end, it is monitoring Mason Mount’s contract talks with Chelsea. The club also has a longstanding interest in Matheus Nunes, the Wolves and Portugal player.Universally, though, it is common consensus that the key is Bellingham. Liverpool’s need to win the race for his transfer, likely to cost in excess of $130 million, has increased in inverse proportion to its chances of doing so.This is, in truth, an oversimplification. Partly, that is because the idea that teams can be “rebuilt” in short order is a myth. Neither Alex Ferguson nor Arsène Wenger, the only two coaches in recent English history to be credited with fashioning more than one great team, changed everything overnight. They committed to evolution, not revolution. Whatever form the new Liverpool takes, Klopp’s repurposed team will most likely include seven or eight players who are already at Anfield.But more significant is that just as Liverpool’s entropy cannot be traced to a single isolated factor, nor can it be addressed by signing one player or strengthening one area of the squad.Under Klopp’s aegis, the club has been able to outmuscle the bulk of its rivals — including those, like Chelsea and Manchester United, blessed with greater financial resources — and keep pace with Manchester City because of an accumulation of edges.Liverpool fans no longer recognize the team Klopp built into a champion.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockLiverpool had a smarter data department. It spent money, particularly on salaries, but it made every dollar count. It thought more about nutrition, throw-ins and the psychology of penalty shootouts. It combined them all under a coach who had a clear sense of how he wanted to play, who knew what sort of players he needed, and what he needed them to be able to do.Slowly, then suddenly, those edges have been dulled. Liverpool’s rivals, domestic and international, have sought to nullify every marginal gain the club made. In some areas, it is doubtless still a market leader, but the composite advantage is much smaller. Plenty of teams have sharpened their recruitment strategies, or invested in data, or started to take more care over the minute details of the game. (And where they have not, in certain cases money has made up the difference.)At the same time, Liverpool’s sense of clarity has become muddied. The image of Klopp as a “heavy metal” coach — a phrase he must, surely, now regret — has been outdated for some time. He has sought to turn Liverpool into a more controlled, more assured, sort of a team. The result, at times, has been a team caught between two stools, determined to move on from what it was but not yet sure of what it is supposed to become.As talented as Bellingham is, he cannot address those issues, not on his own. What made Liverpool competitive was not just the talent within its team; it was the way the club had put that squad together, how it asked it to play, the cumulative impact of all those imperceptible steps it had taken to provide the best platform for them to succeed.Given the competition, a parade of all that it has achieved under Klopp, all that it has already done, would not be enough to make Liverpool more appealing to Bellingham than Manchester City or Real Madrid. If it is to secure the player around which it intends to build its future, it needs to persuade him that it knows what comes next.The Demise of the MachinesThere is always something heartening about seeing a player enjoying a sudden flourish, granted belated recognition after a career spent toiling away from the spotlight. It acts as a reminder that talent is not always a gift. It can be a reward, too.Joselu, certainly, fits that particular bill. He is 33 now, having spent the last decade or so as an industrious, faintly unspectacular forward for a variety of teams that might fairly be described as “midtable.” Last week, though, long after he might have abandoned hope of representing his country, he was called up to Spain’s national team.On form, his appearances against Norway and Scotland in the first round of qualifiers should not have been controversial: Joselu has scored 12 goals in 22 games for a struggling Espanyol team this season. He got his chance with Spain not because of an unexpected romantic streak in Luis de la Fuente, the country’s newly installed coach. He has done enough to deserve it.Joselu made his debut for Spain last week, days before he turned 33.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThat does not necessarily mean it is a feel-good story for Spanish soccer, though. The team de la Fuente selected against Scotland — a game that resulted in just Spain’s third defeat in a qualifier in nearly two decades — also included David García, an equally unheralded 29-year-old defender. A 35-year-old, Iago Aspas, came off the bench. It is not to diminish Scotland’s achievement to suggest this was not a vintage Spain squad.The same could be said of Germany — its attack led by another late bloomer, Niclas Füllkrug, and duly beaten at home by Belgium — and Italy, which has had to scour Argentina to find its latest striker, the 23-year-old Tigre forward Mateo Retegui. Three of Europe’s great powers, all of a sudden, have found that their player pools are a little thin.In Italy’s case, that is nothing new: The country has long struggled to produce young players, largely because Serie A’s teams tend to believe that anyone who has not seen his 30th birthday is still an infant.It is not long, though, since Spain and Germany seemed to have established smooth, reliable production lines of talent. Both countries were praised, effectively, for having industrialized youth production. Now both find themselves increasingly stocking their squads — if not their first teams — with players like Joselu, Aspas and Füllkrug: the kind of journeymen they were supposed to have moved beyond.There is no immediate explanation for why that might be. Perhaps there is a roadblock on giving young players a chance. Perhaps their domestic leagues are too reliant on imports. Perhaps their lauded academies churn out identikit players, leaving gaps elsewhere. (The likelihood is that, combined with a bit of random chance, it is a blend of all three.)The consequences are a little clearer. Three of the continent’s traditional powers are not quite what they used to be. That has an impact not only on their traditional peers — England and France, in particular — but on smaller nations, like Scotland, that might suddenly find a little room to breathe now that the shadows of the giants have receded just a little.The Greatest AdventureHervé Renard: the right man for France’s Women’s World Cup moment?Molly Darlington/ReutersHervé Renard is one of those figures only the less conspicuous corners of international soccer can produce. He wears his shirts perfectly pressed, bright white, and often slashed almost to the waist. His hair is long, his face tan, and he has a tendency to pop up in unexpected places: Zambia, Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia. He is essentially the adjective “swashbuckling” in human form.He is also, as it happens, good at what he does. He turned first Zambia and then Ivory Coast into champions of Africa. He guided Morocco to the 2018 World Cup. He was last seen steering a dynamic, enthralling Saudi side to a victory against Argentina that ranks as one of the most eye-catching results in men’s World Cup history.His newest job is of a different order. Renard this week was confirmed as the successor to the perennially unpopular Corinne Diacre as coach of France’s women’s national team. On the surface, his task is an onerous one. First, he must persuade the swath of players alienated by his predecessor to return to the international fold. Then he has to craft a side coherent enough to challenge the best teams in the world. He has three and a half months, give or take, to do it.The potential prize, though, is worth it. France is home to two of the finest women’s club teams in the world. In Grace Geyoro, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani — not to mention Amandine Henry, Wendie Renard and the twins Delphine and Estelle Cascarino — he now has, at least in theory, some of the best players on the planet at his disposal.If Renard, the coach, can repair the country’s shattered team spirit, if he can forge all of that talent into a cogent unit, if he can succeed where Diacre consistently failed and provide a platform for his players to fulfill their potential, then there is nothing to stop France’s rivaling England and the United States and Germany as genuine contenders for the World Cup. Renard has spent his career traversing the globe in search of a challenge. He may have found the adventure that might seal his legacy at home. More

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    Liverpool, Napoli and the Problem With Systems

    As system clubs start to falter, the future seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible.There is no such thing as a 4-3-3. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2. They are familiar, reflexive. But none of them exist. Not really.The way a team lines up to start a game, for example, most likely will bear very little relation to what it looks like during it as players whirl around the field, engaged in what anyone who has not watched a lot of mid-table Premier League soccer might describe as a complex, instinctive ballet.Most teams will adopt one shape when blessed with the ball, and another without it. Increasingly, many will shift their approaches in the course of the game, responding to the lunges, the parries and the ripostes of their opponents.A team presented in a 4-3-3 on a graphic before kickoff might be playing a 3-5-2 while that image is still fresh in the memory. A coach might choose to drop a midfielder between the central defenders to control possession, or push the fullbacks daringly high, or draw a forward a little deeper. The nominal 4-3-3 might, if it all comes off, be more accurately denoted as a 3-1-4-1-1. Sort of. Maybe.And besides, every manager will have a different sense of what each of those formations means. As Thiago Motta, the Bologna coach, has said: a 3-5-2 can be a front-foot, adventurous sort of a system, and a 4-3-3 a cautious, defensive one. How the players are arranged does not, in his view, say very much at all about their intentions.Luciano Spalleti’s aversion to a system is working just fine at Napoli.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockNone of that is to say that formations are completely meaningless. As a rule, managers tend to scoff at the very mention of them. They assume that hearing any value ascribed to the idea of “formation” is a surefire sign that they are in the helpless company of a slow-witted civilian, or perhaps a child.They are, though, useful shorthands: broad-brush, big-picture guidelines that fans and opponents can use to try to find a pattern in what can look — at first — like unfettered chaos. They are a way of establishing what you think a team might look like once it takes the field, what it might be trying to do, how it might be attempting to win.Or, at least, that is what formations have always been. It may not last. There is a chance, now, that soccer’s great leap forward will render all of those old, comfortable ideas almost entirely moribund.The three decades on either side of the Millennium — the period, in soccer terms, that starts with Arrigo Sacchi’s A.C. Milan and ends with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City — will, in time, be remembered as the sport’s age of the system, the first time its most coveted talents, its defining figures, have been not players but coaches.On the surface, there may be scant similarity between the tiki-taka that turned Barcelona into the finest club in history and the sturm-und-drang of the energy-drink infused, heavy-metal inflected German pressing game.Underneath, though, they share two crucial characteristics. They are both precisely, almost militaristically choreographed, players moving by rote and by edict in preordained patterns learned and honed in training. And they both rely, essentially, on a conception of soccer as a game defined less by the position of the ball and more by the occupation and creation of space.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, rejects the idea of rigid positions.Sergio Moraes/ReutersSoccer’s history, though, is a process of call and response, of action and reaction. One innovation holds sway for a while — the process happens increasingly quickly — before the competition decodes it and either counteracts or adopts it. Both have the same, blunting effect.And there are, now, the first glimmers of what might follow on the horizon. Across Europe, the system teams are starting to falter. The most obvious case is Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, struggling not just with a physical and mental fatigue but a philosophical one, too. Its rivals and peers are now inoculated to its dangers.But there are others: Jesse Marsch’s travails as the manager at Leeds United can be traced in some way to his refusal to bend from what might broadly, and only moderately pompously, be called the “Red Bull School.” Barcelona, its characteristic style now widely copied across the continent, is scratching around with limited success for some new edge. Even Manchester City, where suffering is always relative, seems less imperious than once it did.The future, instead, seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible and see their role as providing a platform on which their players might extemporize.Real Madrid, of course, has always had that approach, choosing to control specific moments in games rather than the game itself, but it has done so with the rather significant advantage of possessing many of the finest players on earth.Pep Guardiola has some thoughts.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockThat others, in less rarefied climes, have started to follow that model is much more instructive. Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli, the most captivating team in Europe, is barreling toward the Serie A title thanks to a free-form, virtuosic style that does not deploy the likes of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen as puppets but encourages them to think, to interpret, for themselves.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, has even given it a name: the “apositional style,” placing it in direct (but perhaps not intentional) conflict with the “positional play” that Guardiola and his teams have perfected.Diniz, like Spalletti, does not believe in assigning his players specific positions or roles, but in allowing them to interchange at will, to respond to the exigencies of the game. He is not concerned with the control of specific areas of the field. The only zone that matters to him, and to his team, is the one near the ball.In his eyes, soccer is not a game defined by the occupation of space. It is centered, instead, on the ball: As long as his players are close to it, what theoretical position they play does not matter in the slightest. They do not need to cleave to a specific formation, to a string of numbers coded into their heads.Instead, they are free to go where they wish, where their judgment tells them. If it makes it all but impossible to present a shorthand of how the team plays, then so much the better. After all, systems are designed by coaches with the express purpose of stripping the game of as much spontaneity as possible. Managers want, understandably, to control what a player does in any given circumstance. They crave predictability. They yearn for it.In that environment, it is only natural that unpredictability becomes an edge.Split VoteAlexia Putellas, world player of (some of) the year.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlexia Putellas’s year effectively ended last July 5, the day she felt a click in one of her knees during a small-sided training game. A few hours later, she was in the King Edward VII hospital in London, attempting to absorb the news that she had ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament with the European Championship only days away. She would miss the tournament, and at that stage her participation in this summer’s Women’s World Cup was in doubt, too.Putellas is, thankfully, making excellent progress. Her recuperation has gone sufficiently well that she is not only running again, but engaging in what everyone in soccer refers to as “ball work”: the delicate process of ensuring that the repaired connections in her knee can handle the sudden, jarring twists and turns that games will likely demand. Barring any major setbacks, Putellas will feature for Spain at the World Cup that opens in July, and the tournament will be all the better for it.It was hard, though, not to be struck by her election as the best female player on the planet at FIFA’s flashy awards show Monday night in Paris. It would be unfair to suggest that Putellas was an undeserving winner. She is an outstanding player, after all. But at the same time, she had played only half the year. She did not feature in the Euros, the year’s pre-eminent women’s tournament. Her club team, Barcelona, lost the final of the Champions League.The immediate suspicion, where any FIFA award is concerned, is that her victory is a testament to the power of reputation. Both the men’s and the women’s prizes, after all, have had a habit of reverting to the default: The national team coaches and captains, and the international media representatives, generally favor whoever is the most famous, the most high-profile, the safest choice.In the case of Putellas, though, it is likely to be something else. The European champions, England, did not have a single standout player, though a case could be made for Beth Mead, the leading scorer, or Leah Williamson, the captain. Keira Walsh of England was the tournament’s best player, but she is a defensive midfielder, and defensive midfielders do not win awards.Likewise, Lyon’s run to the Champions League title was not inspired by a single individual, as it had been when the goals of Ada Hegerberg powered it to glory in 2019.This year’s field, in other words, was both broad and deep. In that context, both what Putellas achieved — Spanish champion, leading scorer in the Champions League — and what she could not played in her favor: The perception that Spain’s bid for the European Championship fell apart in her absence was supporting evidence for her legitimacy.More Like David AlibiThere comes a point, really, where everyone involved should take a look at their behavior and feel their cheeks flush with shame. There is a level of pettiness that is unavoidable in a rivalry as virulent and intractable as the one shared by Real Madrid and Barcelona. But then there is the controversy that engulfed David Alaba this week, which makes all concerned look like children.Alaba, the Real Madrid defender, is also the captain of the Austrian men’s national team. As such, he was eligible to cast a vote for The Best Men’s Player at FIFA’s sparkling celebration of self-importance. He picked, not unreasonably, Lionel Messi, as did an overwhelming majority of the appointed electorate. (A note, here, for the captain of Gabon and the coach of Botswana, who watched Messi inspire Argentina to the World Cup title and both declared Julián Álvarez the real star of the show.)Only Alaba, though, subsequently had to explain his decision. A Real Madrid player not selecting Karim Benzema, you see, was considered unacceptable not only by Madrid fans on social media but by several Madrid-based news outlets. That he would instead throw his weight behind Messi, so indelibly linked with Barcelona, was beyond the pale.Alaba, to his credit, indulged the nonsense, explaining that the Austrian team voted as a collective and that the majority of the players’ council had favored Messi. He wanted to make it plain that he considered Benzema the “best forward in the world.” Most impressively, he did this all without once mentioning how stupid the whole debate was, or noting that encouraging players to vote politically renders the concept of the award itself completely meaningless.Alaba was perfectly entitled to vote for Messi, whether in consultation with his teammates or not. Benzema would have understood that instantly. He would have been no more offended by Alaba’s selection than he would have been at the sight of France’s captain, Hugo Lloris, and coach, Didier Deschamps, not voting for him either. He is, after all, a grown-up. It is a shame that so many of those commenting appear not to be. 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    Real Madrid 5, Liverpool 2: Champions League Laugher at Anfield

    That Real Madrid delivered another memorable Champions League victory was no surprise. It was the manner of Liverpool’s defeat that spoke volumes.LIVERPOOL, England — It took a while for the frustration, the anger and the hurt to bubble to the surface. For about an hour on Tuesday night, Liverpool’s fans had watched with grim forbearance as their team was expertly dismantled by Real Madrid.They urged on Jürgen Klopp’s players after they threw away a two-goal lead in the first half. They stood by them as Real Madrid made it 3-2 and then 4-2 and finally 5-2, a loss turning into a rout. They remained stoic as they witnessed the collapse of their season, as they endured the most chastening evening in Anfield’s illustrious European history.But then there was the passing: The passing was the final straw. As the game wound down, as the crowd started to thin out just a little, Real Madrid decided to indulge in a little game of keepaway. They slipped passes between, beside and around their bedraggled opponents. They offered them a glimpse of the ball and then spirited it away at the last moment.They maintained it for a minute or two, Liverpool’s players lolling and lagging as they dashed around in hopeless pursuit. It was an indignity too far. It is one thing being beaten — particularly by Real Madrid — and it is quite another being taunted. The crowd started to whistle, and then to jeer: at Real Madrid, at its own players, chasing at shadows, at this whole long, damned, miserable season.Andy Robertson and Liverpool won’t play their second leg in Madrid until March, but their Champions League is effectively over after Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Real Madrid won at Anfield does not count as a surprise of any sort. This is Real Madrid, after all, and this is the Champions League. A stirring Real Madrid recovery is part of the deal. To a large extent it is increasingly odd that anyone else bothers entering the competition.Carlo Ancelotti’s team has mastered the comeback, turned it into an art form, boiled it down to its very essence. En route to European glory last season, Real Madrid generally required the full span of a two-legged tie, up to and including extra time in the second leg, to stage the miraculous recovery that has become its calling card.The only change this season — on this evidence — is that it has streamlined the process to such an extent that it now takes no more than half an hour, with a break in the middle for a quick bite to eat.Far more striking than the fact of Liverpool’s defeat on Tuesday, then, was the manner of it. Somewhere deep inside this Liverpool team is the muscle memory of what it once was, and not all that long ago. It is only nine months, after all, since it played its third Champions League final in five years, Klopp sufficiently confident that the halcyon days would keep rolling that he advised his team’s fans — even in defeat — to book their hotel rooms for this year’s showpiece.For 15 minutes, it was possible to wonder if this stage, and this opponent, might be enough to stir those ghosts to life. Liverpool surged to an early lead, thanks to an inventive, audacious flick from Darwin Nuñez, and then doubled it when Thibaut Courtois forgot how to work his legs and presented the ball to Mohamed Salah. In between, Salah had wasted two more chances. Here, at last, were the flickers that Liverpool’s fans had been waiting months to see.Darwin Núñez’s goal after four minutes had the Anfield crowd on its feet.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd then the reverie suddenly evaporated and reality descended. Vinícius Júnior scored one goal, wonderfully, and then had a second presented to him by the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson. It had the effect of breaking the spell. The clock struck midnight. Éder Militão made it three. Karim Benzema had a shot deflected into the goal for four, and then danced through, his shoes soft and his touch sure, to make it five.Liverpool, suddenly, looked to be what it has been for much of the season: a mid-table Premier League team caught in the throes of an awkward, jarring transition. The difference, this time, was that it was being forced to play the European champion.Quite how Liverpool’s collapse has happened remains, even now, something of a mystery. Thousands of words have been dedicated in recent months in an attempt to understand how a team that was so painstakingly constructed, put together with such thought and expertise and precision, could come apart at the seams so quickly and so easily. How something so good could prove so ultimately fragile.There are concrete factors that certainly seem to have contributed. Injuries have not helped, of course, compounding a failure to upgrade the midfield. The effects of last season, in which Liverpool became the first English team to play every game in every competition for which it was eligible — winning two trophies, but neither of the prizes it most wanted — have lingered, both physically and psychologically.But then there are the intangible factors, the theoretical and the emotional strands, the charges that can only ever take the form of questions: Has Liverpool been too loyal to the core of Klopp’s team? Has upheaval behind the scenes, the departure of several key members of the staff, disrupted the harmony the club had worked so hard to foster? If so, has that had any effect on performances?Karim Benzema finished off Liverpool with goals 12 minutes apart.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhatever the causes, the effects were all there, on the field, against a team that less than a year ago Liverpool could — largely rightly — consider its equal. When Klopp, upon reviewing last year’s final for the first time this week, commented that it was a game his team could have won, he was not simply presenting a brave face.Now, though, the gulf is wide. The temptation is to focus on the major mistakes — Alisson’s misjudgment for the second goal, the stationary marking for the third, Joe Gomez’s body shape for the fourth — but more telling are the little things.It is the speed with which Liverpool passes the ball, just a touch slower than before. It is the spaces between its players, a little too large, and the cohesion between its lines, now ever so slightly ragged. It is in the intensity of its press, somehow diluted and dimmed.Each element feeds on the others, eroding confidence and sapping purpose, until the whole system seems fractured beyond repair. And it was at that point that Real Madrid, with that air of total self-assurance, started to pass the ball around, Liverpool’s players powerless to stop them, their fall from the rarefied heights they once shared with these opponents complete. More

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    Liverpool FC Is Up For Sale by Fenway Sports Group

    Months after its Premier League rival Chelsea traded hands in a deal worth $3 billion, Liverpool’s owners hired bankers and said they would entertain offers for the club.The American owners of Liverpool F.C., one of soccer’s most storied teams, have hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to explore a sale of the club, a six-time European champion, according to two people with direct knowledge of the team’s plans.The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the potential sale.Word that Liverpool’s owners are mulling a potential sale comes only months after a group led by the California-based investment fund Clearlake paid a record $3 billion for Liverpool’s Premier League rival Chelsea. That deal was forced after Britain’s government slapped Chelsea’s former Russian billionaire owner with sanctions, but the sale price was high enough that it may have reset the market for the world’s biggest soccer teams.Fenway Sports Group, which also owns the Boston Red Sox, the anchor of its portfolio of sports holdings, resurrected Liverpool into a dominant force after acquiring the team following a forced sale in 2010 by its lenders as Liverpool teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.That £300 million price tag (roughly $400 million given exchange rates at the time) was described by its previous owners as an “epic swindle” that year; now looks like a steal in the other direction, with the club’s valuation soaring on the back of significant increases in broadcast and sponsorship income as Liverpool returned to the summit of domestic and international soccer.In 2019, under the guidance of its inspirational German coach, Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool added its sixth European Cup, before adding its first Premier League title a year later. That was a trophy its fans craved more than any other, as it came 30 years after the last of its previous 18 English league championships.Last season it fell just short of winning both when it lost the Premier League to Manchester City by one point and was defeated by Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League.F.S.G., led by the financier John Henry, has been exploring selling strategic stakes in Liverpool for much of the past half decade. Last year Redbird, a private equity company with stakes in several other sports teams, secured an 11 percent share of F.S.G. for $735 million. At the time, the owners talked about looking to secure further growth opportunities without putting its most valuable asset up for sale.John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group has owned Liverpool since 2010.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesNews of the potential sale was first reported by The Athletic, a New York Times company. Liverpool’s response later on Monday only fueled more speculation about the ownership’s intentions..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.“There have been a number of recent changes of ownership and rumors of changes in ownership at EPL clubs and inevitably we are asked regularly about Fenway Sports Group’s ownership in Liverpool,” the club said a statement. “FSG has frequently received expressions of interest from third parties seeking to become shareholders in Liverpool.”“FSG has said before that under the right terms and conditions we would consider new shareholders if it was in the best interests of Liverpool as a club. FSG remains fully committed to the success of Liverpool, both on and off the pitch.”In hiring Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Liverpool’s owners have hired two banking giants, known for extracting significant fees for mergers and acquisition transactions. F.S.G. had by contrast used the same boutique firm it had used when it purchased Liverpool to sell the minority stake to Redbird last March. The sale is being handled out of London, where Liverpool also has an office. Both banks declined to comment.The price paid for Chelsea was at the time more than had been spent on any franchise in any sport, and has only been bettered by the price secured by the outgoing owners of the National Football League’s Denver Broncos. Liverpool is more popular than both those teams, and most other clubs anywhere.Other soccer teams have also been sold for significant sums in recent months. In August Redbird, the minority investor in F.S.G., bought AC Milan for the equivalent of $1.2 billion, the highest fee for a soccer franchise outside of the United Kingdom. John Textor, another American investor, has agreed to lead a buyout of Lyon for about $800 million, the most ever paid for a French team.Forbes values Liverpool at $4.45 billion, about ten times what F.S.G. paid.The Boston-based group has also invested in the team’s infrastructure, revamping its historic Anfield stadium with two new stands and also built a new practice facility.But there has been growing concern privately among the ownership about whether the team can continue competing at the top of the league and in European competition against teams owned by Gulf states. Manchester City, which has been the dominant English team for much of the past decade, is owned by the brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and recently Newcastle was purchased by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. While Qatar has powered Paris St.-Germain’s rise to superiority in France.City’s spending has been particularly hard to match, with Liverpool among a group of Premier League clubs frustrated at the pace of an ongoing investigation into allegations City breached the league’s financial rules to fuel its success.Should a sale go through, Liverpool would yield an enormous profit for F.S.G., which has invested relatively little into the club compared to its biggest Premier League rivals in the decade it has owned the team. Sound management, smart appointments and success in the often fickle player trading market have instead allowed the team to compete atop English and European soccer.Since hiring Klopp, the team has managed to compete with City by improving its roster largely through money raised by selling other players, a process that has not been universally popular, with some fans believing the ownership’s prudence has stunted prospects for sustained success.The success has also been marked by moments of missteps, including an effort to raise ticket prices that was reversed following a fan revolt. But the biggest backlash came in 2021 when Liverpool joined 11 other top clubs in attempting to breakaway and create a new European Super League. Liverpool and American-owned Manchester United, Liverpool’s main domestic rival when it comes to global popularity, were at the forefront of those talks.“I want to apologize to all the fans and supporters of Liverpool Football Club for the disruption I caused over the past 48 hours,” Henry said at the time, making a rare public statement. “It goes without saying but should be said that the project put forward was never going to stand without the support of the fans. No one ever thought differently in England.”Those same fans now face new uncertainty.Michael J. de la Merced More

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    Erling Haaland, Darwin Núñez and Rediscovering the No. 9

    It took Erling Haaland a couple of seconds to notice something had changed. Late last month, Haaland, the Norwegian striker, was inside the Manchester Institute of Health and Performance, patiently and quietly going through the many and monotonous steps of the medical exam that was part of his move to Manchester City.At one point, stripped down to nothing but a pair of briefs, Haaland was asked to take a deep breath and stand perfectly still, so that the club could get an accurate read of his height. He did as he was told. “OK, 1.952 meters,” the physician guiding him through the exam said, jotting down the figure on a piece of paper.That, Haaland thought, was not right. Everyone knows their own height. He checked what the doctor had recorded. There was the answer again. 1.952. “Wow,” Haaland said, sounding genuinely pleased with himself. “I’ve grown. Almost a whole centimeter.” A meaningful one, too: those extra few millimeters had tipped Haaland over a threshold. At the age of 21, he was now, officially, 6 feet 4 inches.Size is significant when it comes to Haaland. That is not to diminish his rich array of other qualities as a striker — his technical ability, his movement, his intelligence, his capacity to drop deep and build play, the power and precision of his finishing from either foot — and it is not something that exists in isolation.Indeed, watching Haaland in the flesh, what stands out first is his speed. Haaland is quick. He accelerates almost instantaneously, and then eats up the ground in front of him, his stride long and elegant. It is only after a beat that it is possible to realize that what makes that speed so striking is that it is unexpected, that it is being produced by a man with that frame.Erling Haaland’s mix of size, speed and strength makes him a test for any defender.Andrej Isakovic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNor is it to pigeonhole the type of player he is, or to ponder how he will fit in to the intricate, delicate style of play preached by Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. Haaland has not been bought as some sort of battering ram. He is far more than a target man. It is just that, at first glance, that is how he is built.On a very basic level, Haaland is large, undeniably so. He is especially large in context. Elite soccer is populated, these days, by slight, almost elfin figures. Haaland is a head taller than most forwards. He towers over most fullbacks and wings. He has aerial clearance over central midfielders. He might even find the majority of central defenders a little diminutive.Darwin Nuñez, the Uruguayan forward added to Liverpool’s ranks by Jürgen Klopp this week, is similar. He is not quite so tall — only 6-foot-1, unless he, like Haaland, still has growing to do — but he possesses a similar profile. He drifts wide, rather than deep, to find space. He accelerates rapidly. He moves smartly.But he is, as Klopp noted, “powerful,” too. Liverpool’s forward line, these last few years, has been constructed around three players — Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah — who fit the accepted mold for modern forwards. They are nimble, fleet-footed, technically flawless. None, though, could be described as “powerful,” not in the sense that Nuñez is powerful.Klopp did have a more robust option at his disposal, in the form of Divock Origi, when he felt it was required — such as when needing a goal in a Champions League final, or playing Everton. Origi was, though, viewed more as a chaos agent than anything else; he was deployed almost exclusively as a Plan B. Like Guardiola, Klopp seemed to have moved beyond the idea of what might be called a “traditional” center-forward.The Uruguayan striker Darwin Núñez joined Liverpool from Benfica this week.Armando Franca/Associated PressThat both have, this summer, committed considerable proportions of their transfer budgets to inverting that mode, then, is significant. The explanations may be distressingly straightforward. City creates a plethora of chances every single game; adding Haaland is a surefire way to ensure more of them are turned into goals. Liverpool has, in Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, a precise aerial supply line. It makes sense to exploit it.Or it may, perhaps, hint at a shift that has ramifications outside the rarefied air of the Premier League’s top two. Strikers — pure, thoroughbred strikers — have become vanishingly rare over the last decade. Between the generation represented by Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema, Sergio Agüero and Luis Suárez — all in their mid-thirties now — and the one spearheaded by Kylian Mbappé, Haaland and, possibly, Nuñez, the No. 9 almost died out.True, there have been occasional oases in the desert: Harry Kane, a late bloomer at Tottenham Hotspur, and Romelu Lukaku, who flowered sufficiently early in Belgium that despite being five years younger than Suárez, both made their debuts in the Premier League in 2011.As a rule, though, soccer’s journey over the last 10 years has been away from what might be termed focal point forwards. The tendency, instead, has been to engineer more fluid, more dynamic attacking lines, built around players who can drift and roam and transform, depending on the situation: a generation encapsulated by generalists like Mané and Neymar and Raheem Sterling, rather than specialists.There is, most likely, no single explanation for why that might be. It may partly be philosophical: Guardiola, in particular, pioneered an approach in which a fixed No. 9 was optional and an aerial approach was deemed unsophisticated, while the German school that produced Klopp prioritized a player’s dynamism in the press. The rest of the sport followed suit.Haaland’s arrival could change the look of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.Lynne Cameron/Manchester City FC, via Getty ImagesBut the drift away from target men may have its roots, too, in the race to industrialize talent production over much the same time period. Soccer’s elite academies respond, in part, to what is being asked of them: If first-team coaches do not have much need for strikers, their counterparts in youth systems will not provide them.They will, instead, pour their energies into finding the types of players — ball-playing midfielders, inverted wingers, creative fullbacks — that the professional game now cherishes above all others.That pattern holds not only in Europe. Presciently, Arsène Wenger declared the better part of a decade ago that the old world, reliant on its academies, was no longer producing forwards. Only in South America, he felt, were the predatory instincts necessary to excel in the position still being honed on the street.Now even that no longer holds. In Brazil, clubs respond to the demands of the European market. They craft the raw materials into something they feel can be sold. And, for some time, pure strikers have not sold all that well.There is another relevant factor, though. Academies naturally place greater weight on the sorts of players they can produce. A well-honed youth setup, full of dedicated and talented coaches, can take gifted teenagers and turn them into neat, clever midfield players, or inventive inside forwards. What it cannot do is make them 6-foot-4.Haaland wearing soccer’s new favorite number for Norway last week.Ntb/Via ReutersIt is, then, difficult to be entirely certain what came first: Did Europe, in particular, stop producing strikers because soccer’s elite coaches felt they had moved beyond them? Or did soccer’s elite coaches move beyond strikers because none of the requisite level were emerging from the ever-more-prolific academies?What Guardiola and Klopp have spotted, then, is a competitive edge. Only a handful of teams possess a high-quality powerhouse center-forward. Only one or two boast one that is not already well into the autumn of their careers. Perhaps that is the next step in the evolution of the related, but distinct, styles both coaches have crafted: the repurposing of old virtues to fit the new game.That, in turn, will have a profound effect on soccer’s incessant pipeline. If the perception is that center forwards in the style of Haaland and Nuñez are back in fashion, then there will be value in producing them: if not the target-men of old, perhaps, then certainly a modern version, players able to fit into complex counter-pressing systems but also, in a very basic, very real way, extremely large. Size may matter once more. The No. 9 may yet have another day in the sun.Brick WallsZinedine Zidane: Next manager up?Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe last few weeks have passed in a curious limbo for Mauricio Pochettino. He is still, officially, the coach of Paris St.-Germain, in the sense that he has not yet been fired. There has been no announcement, no expression of gratitude and regret, no statement offering him the club’s best wishes for the future, no mournful image of a drooping corner flag posted on social media.At the same time, though, Pochettino is very much not the coach of P.S.G. If he has not been fired by the time you read this, then he will be fired very soon indeed. His tenure can be measured in days, maybe. Weeks, at the absolute outside. He knows it. The club knows it. The fans know it, and so do the players.It is hard to say it is cruel, this Schrödinger status, because it is only soccer, and because there are plenty of prospective employers out there for a coach of Pochettino’s caliber, but it is a little undignified. It does not suggest a club that has a concrete plan of action, a crystal-clear foresight.More damning still are the identities of the two coaches competing to replace him. Zinedine Zidane makes sense: not just a glossy name for a superficial club, but a coach with a proven ability to take a motley collection of superstars and turn them into a cogent force. He certainly has a more compelling case than the alternative, Christophe Galtier, who might have won the French title with Lille last year, but his specialism is in helping the overmatched punch above their weight.But then does appointing Zidane as coach fit with the hiring of Luis Campos as P.S.G.’s de facto sporting director? Campos’s expertise is in spotting young talent, the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Victor Osimhen. Those are not the kinds of players P.S.G. allows to flourish. They are not, particularly, the kind of player Zidane has worked with before.Such is the modern P.S.G., though, a club that remains happy to throw as many ideas as possible against a wall and see what sticks. Whoever replaces Pochettino, it seems a fair bet that in a year, maybe two, they will find themselves in exactly the same position, waiting to be put out of their misery, doomed not by their lack of ability but by a club unable to commit to a direction, to choose where it wants to go, what it wants to be.Draw Your Own ConclusionsShould this man still be running soccer clubs?Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Gérard López relinquished his ownership of Lille, the club was both on its way to the French title and drowning in debt. Despite bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in player sales on a reasonably regular basis, two of his main lenders, JP Morgan Chase and the activist investment fund Elliott Management, were growing concerned that López would not be able to meet his loan obligations. Eventually, late in 2020, they forced his hand.Six months later, López was back in French soccer. He had bought Bordeaux, a national champion only a little more than a decade previously, at a reduced price after its previous owner, an American investment firm, had placed it in administration. López had, it was said, saved the club from bankruptcy.Last month, Bordeaux was relegated from Ligue 1 after finishing last in the table. Things, though, may still get worse: This week, citing the club’s precarious finances, French soccer’s licensing body demoted Bordeaux again. The team has said it will take up its right of appeal against a “brutal” decision, but as things stand, Bordeaux will begin next year in France’s third tier.Still, at least it has not suffered the same fate as Royal Excelsior Mouscron, a team across the border in Belgium. In May, Mouscron was stripped of its license and relegated to Belgium’s fourth tier. Last week, saddled with debts of $4.5 million and unable to find a willing investor, it filed for bankruptcy. Mouscron is — was — owned by López.Last year, the Portuguese side Boavista was banned from registering new players by FIFA. This year, Fola Esch, a team in Luxembourg, was implicated in a suspected money-laundering scheme involving Lotus, a now-defunct Formula 1 team. The common thread in all the stories, again, was their owner: López.Doubtless, there are differences in each of these cases. The roots of the problems will vary from club to club. But one question hovers above all of them, a question that should be addressed not to López but to soccer’s authorities: Why has he been allowed to keep buying clubs? How could he be deemed a suitable owner for Bordeaux six months after being forced out Lille because of the club’s debts? Who, exactly, is looking after the game?CorrespondenceA couple of bugbears requiring attention in this week’s correspondence section. Bruce Tully, for example, is perhaps slightly unreasonably aggravated by “stutter-step penalty kicks.”“They look ridiculous, and they’re not in the spirit of the game,” he wrote. “Penalty takers already have a tremendous advantage. They don’t need to resort to silly gimmicks that serve only to embarrass the goalkeeper. Neymar and Jorginho are perhaps the worst offenders.”His suggestion — to limit the number of steps a taker is allowed in the run-up — is a sensible one. I have a deep-seated distrust of the stuttering run-up, based on the entirely woolly logic that you’re more likely to lose your rhythm. I suspect we will see it less frequently in the next couple of years, on the grounds that goalkeepers have now worked out, both with Neymar and Jorginho, that standing still is the best approach.If anything, David Krajicek has identified an even more obscure irritant. “Is there a more overworked cliché in Premier League broadcasting than the worn-out trope of teams ‘asking questions’ of the opposition’s defense?” he wrote. “Are Brits contractually required to use it? Did they learn it in school?”This is difficult for me to share, because “asking questions” is part of soccer’s lexicon to me. It encapsulates what analytical types might refer to as a game state, in which one team is enjoying the majority of the attacking possession but is not, necessarily, taking lots of shots or scoring lots of goals. (The stage after “asking questions” involves “peppering” or “laying siege to” the goal.) An alternative might be useful, though. I’ll start the bidding with “stress-testing.” More

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    Champions League Final Preview: Liverpool vs. Real Madrid

    Real Madrid and Liverpool will square off on Saturday in Paris. The game is a rematch of the 2018 final.PARIS — As collisions of star power, pedigree and history go — and provided you don’t support one of their rivals — it would be hard to conjure a better Champions League final this season than Liverpool vs. Real Madrid.The teams meet Saturday in Paris to crown Europe’s club champion. Real Madrid, which won the Spanish league this year, is chasing a record 14th Champions League title after narrowly dodging elimination in the semifinals. Liverpool, the runner-up in the Premier League but holder of two cups already this spring, will be hoping to lift the Champions League trophy for the seventh time.Here’s what you should know.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHow can I watch the game?Saturday’s final will be broadcast by CBS (English) and TUDN (Spanish) in the United States, and streamed on Paramount Plus. Coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time but — and this is critically important — the game will not start for another 90 minutes. Plan your day accordingly.Not in the United States? You can find your local viewing options — from Canal+ to Canal Dos to the wonderfully named Silknet and Wowow — on this list of UEFA’s television partners.What time is the final?The ball will roll off the spot at 9 p.m. in Paris, which is 3 p.m. Eastern. It will almost certainly travel backward, though that hasn’t been required by the rules for eight years now.Federico Valverde may start on Saturday. His son is not expected to play.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressWhat’s the vibe in Paris?Our correspondent Tariq Panja was on the streets on Friday, where he reports that it was oddly quiet compared with previous finals. His dispatch:France is the center for world sports this weekend, with the Champions League final at the Stade de France in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, the French Open across town at Roland Garros and Formula One’s Monaco Grand Prix on the south coast, if you prefer your sporting twists and turns in the literal sense.Paris was easily able to absorb the influx of fans, though in its usual tourist hot spots there was little sign that soccer’s biggest game was in town. That might have been owed to a warning issued to supporters of both teams that they risked fines of 135 euros (almost $150) if they turned up wearing club colors in places like the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Élysées, the grand avenue that is typically flooded with visitors.Instead, the tournament organizer, UEFA, and city officials hosted fans of the rival teams in separate venues closer to the city limits. That could be normal caution, fears of the coronavirus or the fact that France may not be entirely thrilled to have the game: It only got the hosting rights in February, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it untenable to go to the original host city, St. Petersburg.Still, the final — the first to be played in front of a full stadium since Liverpool last won the tournament in 2019 — did attract the well-heeled and well-connected, with UEFA’s luxury hotel a magnet for former players, high-ranking officials, politicians, agents and assorted extras.About a mile away, Real Madrid’s leadership, led by the club president, Florentino Pérez, gathered before heading in a convoy of buses to watch the team train at the Stade de France. Perez traveled to Paris with a security detail amid concerns his presence might be seen as provocative only a week after he failed in his efforts to lure Kylian Mbappé, the star player on France’s biggest team, Paris St. Germain, to Madrid.The final also was the first time that Pérez and the UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, met in person since a Pérez-led effort to create a European Super League failed spectacularly just over a year ago. Pérez, who is still suing UEFA over the Super League’s demise, and Ceferin, who called some of the plotters behind it “snakes” and “liars,” sat alongside one another at an official dinner at the Louvre on Friday night.Let’s hope the meal didn’t require sharp knives at each place setting.What kind of game can we expect?Luis Díaz, second from left, and his Liverpool teammates kept the mood light at their final training session on Friday. Frank Augstein/Associated PressOur soccer columnist Rory Smith offered a quick preview in his newsletter this week (sign up here):Paris St.-Germain almost looked as if it were waiting for the wave to crash. Chelsea seemed determined to resist, right up until the moment that the storm hit. Only then did Thomas Tuchel’s team realize its powerlessness. Manchester City, meanwhile, had almost made it to shore. Once it felt the tide change, though, it could do nothing but succumb.It is difficult, on the eve of the Champions League final, to avoid the suspicion that this Real Madrid story cannot possibly end in a dispiriting 2-1 defeat to Liverpool in Paris. There has been too much drama, too much magic, in the last two months for it to conclude in any way other than smoke and fire and white ticker tape drifting down from the sky.Indeed, the test for Liverpool on Saturday — more than technical or tactical or systemic — is psychological. Real Madrid has been able to snatch victory from defeat against three of the best-equipped opponents in Europe because its players believe in the club’s almost mystical refusal to wilt.But Madrid has been helped by the fact that the opposition are inclined to believe it, too. Particularly in the Bernabéu, there is a distinct, almost palpable edge to otherwise accomplished teams, a discernible awareness that at some point — almost entirely unannounced — Real Madrid is going to do something elemental and unfathomable, and nobody will be able to stop it.To win its seventh European Cup on Saturday, Liverpool will have to break that sequence. Its manager, Jürgen Klopp, said this week that he finds it more helpful to focus on preventing Real Madrid from getting into a position to wreak its particular brand of havoc — easier said than done, of course — than simply to watch the highlights of those two frenzied minutes against Manchester City, over and over again. “There are another 88 minutes in the game,” he said.In that sense, Liverpool is probably the toughest test Madrid could have faced in the final. Not necessarily because it is a better team than Manchester City — the Premier League table, indeed, rather suggests it is not — but because it will see in this Madrid an echo of its former self.Don’t worry: Marcelo is fine. Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThe Madrid players at Carlo Ancelotti’s disposal are of a higher quality, of course, and the experience of his squad — many of his stars are going for a fifth Champions League crown in nine years — is incomparable. But the nature of the way the team plays, conjuring those irresistible surges, is not.It was that sort of style, after all, that carried Liverpool to the final in 2018, the one it lost to Real Madrid in Kyiv: the ability to “finish” a game, as Klopp put it, in no more than a couple of 10- or 15-minute stretches. The roles have reversed completely now. Liverpool will seek to control events in Paris, while Madrid waits for its storm to gather from a cloudless sky. It will come. Liverpool will know that. The challenge is what you do when it breaks.Haven’t we seen this movie before?Liverpool and Real Madrid met in the 2018 final in Kyiv.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYes, in a way. Both teams have been regulars in the latter stages of the Champions League, and regular visitors to the final, over the last decade.Liverpool is playing for the trophy for the third time in five years, a stretch of some of the most thrilling — and most beautiful soccer — in its proud history. Real Madrid is in the final for the fifth time since 2014; in each of its previous four visits since 2014, its fans will quickly point out, it has left with the trophy.But despite their storied histories, Liverpool and Real Madrid have met in the final only twice.Liverpool beat Real Madrid, 1-0, in 1981, when the tournament was still known as the European Cup, and when it was Liverpool that was in the midst of a string of recent titles.Real Madrid won the rematch by 3-1 in 2018, continuing its own string of recent titles.That final still stings for Liverpool, which endured two horrible mistakes by goalkeeper Loris Karius that sealed its fate and lost forward Mohamed Salah to an ugly tackle from Real Madrid supervillain/legend (descriptions may vary) Sergio Ramos in the first half.Salah was forced from the game with a shoulder injury after the tackle, in which it appeared Ramos had hooked his arm as they fell. Ramos no longer plays for Madrid, but Salah does not appear to have forgotten.“We have a score to settle,” he said this week.Any injury concerns?It doesn’t look like it. Liverpool’s Thiago, who has been the precision-passing engine of its midfield, and Fabinho, who does a lot of the hard work behind him, were both back in training this week, Coach Jürgen Klopp said.I haven’t prepared. Tell me something I can say to sound smart.“The matchup between Vinícius Junior and Trent Alexander-Arnold on the wing should be fascinating, given how involved Alexander-Arnold usually is in Liverpool’s attack despite playing right back. If he gets caught forward too often, Vinícius can punish him.”My friends say I should skip the final because soccer is boring.Get better friends. More

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    How Liverpool’s Dream Was Delivered, and Villarreal’s Dashed

    Outplayed for a half, Liverpool scored three goals to reach its latest Champions League final. For Villarreal, though, all was not lost.VILLARREAL, Spain — In the corner of the Estadio de la Céramica, the one left totally at the mercy of the elements, the fans started to unfurl their scarves. On the scoreboard at their backs, the clock had ticked beyond 90 minutes. On the field in front of them, Villarreal was on borrowed time in the Champions League.It was then that they started to sing. As Liverpool enjoyed a rare moment of calm after a storm of an evening, and put the finishing touches on its 3-2 victory, the rest of the stadium noticed what was happening in the corner, and picked up the tune. They held their scarves aloft, too, a gesture of defiance, and loyalty, and gratitude.And then, when the whistle blew and it was all over, as Villareal’s players walked mournfully around the stadium, heads bowed and eyes raw, the tempo quickened. The scarves started to twist and to whirl, the mood shifting from regret at what had been snatched away to celebration of all that remained. In the pain, they found pride.Even in defeat, Villarreal’s fans filled Estadio de la Cerámica with noise, and pride.Biel Alino/EPA, via ShutterstockIndeed, quite how much it hurt was, perhaps, the best measure of quite how close Unai Emery’s Villarreal had come. This team was not supposed to be in the Champions League semifinals, not really; the very structure of European soccer’s elite competition is built to make it vanishingly unlikely that a team of its stature could travel this deep into the tournament.Villarreal was certainly not supposed to stand a chance going into the second leg. It had, by common consensus, been summarily dispatched at Anfield last week, its limitations exposed by the depth of Liverpool’s resources and the scope of its firepower and the sheer gravity of Jürgen Klopp’s team. The return leg was, more than anything, an administrative hurdle to be cleared, a form to be completed.Villarreal, the town, is a curious place to stage a game of this magnitude: a satellite of nearby Castéllon, more than anything, quiet and refined and, after a day spent under a torrential downpour, almost entirely deserted. Snatches of songs, in both English and Spanish, echoed around the streets.If the sense of occasion that ordinarily accompanies the most seismic games in Europe’s calendar was missing outside, it was palpable inside. For the first time, Villarreal had arranged a mosaic: a blue submarine against a yellow background, the club’s slogan, Endavant, picked out in giant letters. The public address announcer talked about believing in comebacks.Any doubters would have been converted within three minutes, as Boulaye Dia tapped home from Étienne Capoue’s not entirely intentional cross, and the Céramica seemed to melt. All of a sudden, everything felt possible. Liverpool, so seamless and so smooth in a 2-0 victory six days ago, struggled to complete a pass.Boulaye Dia got Villarreal off to the flying start with a goal in the third minute. Alberto Saiz/Associated PressBy halftime, its rhythm had been broken and its confidence sapped and then, just when it thought it might make it through, its advantage had disappeared completely. Capoue crossed, on purpose this time. Francis Coquelin headed home. Villarreal’s bench emptied onto the field, coaches and substitutes and sundry assistants all scarcely able to believe what they were seeing.At that moment, tied at 2-2 halfway through the second leg, Villarreal’s players stood within touching distance. The final was there, right there, and they could seize a place within it. Villarreal would be the smallest town, by some distance, to send a team to the biggest game in soccer.In an era defined and designed by Goliath, it would be this team, constructed on a shoestring, that did what Ajax and Monaco and RB Leipzig could not and made it all the way. And they could do it by etching their own entry in the Champions League’s ever-expanding book of eye-watering comebacks, a miracle to call its own, just like Barcelona (2017), Roma (2018), Liverpool (2019) and Real Madrid (passim).Hope and belief exist at different points on the same axis. Villarreal, in the space of 45 minutes, had traveled all the way along it.And then, just when it was there, within their grasp, it was taken away. Klopp took off one $45 million forward, Diogo Jota, and introduced another, Luis Díaz. The switch changed the momentum irrevocably. Trent Alexander-Arnold hit the bar. Díaz tried a spectacular overhead kick. And then Mohamed Salah slipped Fabinho through and his shot squirmed through Géronimo Rulli’s legs. In that moment, it was all over.Five minutes later, Díaz had scored, drifting in to head a cross under Rulli. Five minutes after that, Sadio Mané had put Liverpool ahead on the night, latching on to a pass from Alexander-Arnold, darting past Rulli as he charged out of his goal and into midfield, and then calmly rolling the ball into the net.Andrew Roberton, left, with Sadio Mané after Liverpool’s third goal.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesPerhaps, in hindsight, it would have been easier had Villarreal not heard that siren call of possibility. Perhaps it would have been easier to go quietly, to succumb to the inevitable. That might have hurt less. But then the journey is not defined by the destination.Villarreal beat Juventus in Turin in the round of 16. It silenced Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals. And it produced 45 minutes that saw Liverpool — a team now on its way to a third Champions League final in five years, a team pursuing an unprecedented and scarcely possible clean sweep of trophies — so scrambled that when Klopp asked his assistant, Peter Krawietz, to identify a “single instance” of good play from the first half and show it to the players for inspiration, he came back and told him there was nothing to be found.And it did it all on a budget that is a fraction of its rivals, in an ecosystem in which the big beasts consume most of the oxygen, and with a team patched together from the discarded and the dismissed. There was a common root to the pride and the pain: At times, an aching wound can feel like a badge of honor.“Soccer is beautiful,” Villarreal’s captain, Raúl Albiol, said. In time, he knows, what will matter is not that Villarreal fell 45 minutes short of a Champions League final, but that it came to be in a position to fall 45 minutes short of a Champions League final.“This was a defeat,” he said, “but we’ll always remember this run.”Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More