Laporta, Joan

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    Lionel Messi, Barcelona and Limited Options

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    The chase for a transcendent star in the twilight of his career requires a new term: GOATwashing.The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris St.-Germain. The downside is that he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled and jeered and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in — but if we are honest, not win — the Champions League.Option two: He could take the easy route, the smooth and seamless path that leads straight to the golden sunset. Al Hilal would very much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to the (European) Champions League. Pros: $400 million a year.A third path, to Major League Soccer — and more specifically, Inter Miami — can provide all of the same drawbacks and none of the same benefits. He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent from the club tournament he cherishes the most. He would have to be coached by Phil Neville. The pull of Miami, the lure of the United States and the prospect of the 2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to have the nature of the end of it decided for him.Lionel Messi in 2021, on the day he left Barcelona.Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockThe sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafa Yuste, Barcelona’s vice president, said last week. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barça. When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in love.”As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly sees some sort of sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club genuinely believes that success is more likely with him than without: both directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost to the brand that his presence would provide.But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine. Barcelona has come to see Messi as a Platonic ideal of its principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through its own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career was not able to give Messi the goodbye it wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to right the wrong.It would be naïve, though, to believe that is the only motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of its king is powered by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is but to what he represents.Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its loss of status.So much of what Barcelona has done in recent years has been inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of the seasons. The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi Hernández as manager, the mortgaging of its own future for immediate glory: This is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed its primacy was the natural order of things, and does not understand why the world has been allowed to change. Restoring Messi to azulgrana would offer the opioid comfort of a step back in time.Barcelona’s image of itself as a great club never wavers.Nacho Doce/ReutersAnd then, rather more tangibly, there is political necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona is not owned by an individual; it is a members’ organization, one that functions, at least in theory, as a democracy. Joan Laporta, the club’s current president, will soon enough have to seek another mandate from the team’s 143,000 socios.Currently, he would have to stand for re-election as the president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to claim to be the man who returned him to where he belonged.After all, possessing Messi is more than having arguably the greatest player of all time in your ranks. His move to P.S.G., two years ago, proved that he is as much symbol as star. Messi represents relevance and importance, glamour and appeal. He would be a sign that the lean days had come to an end, of Barcelona’s resurgent virility.Most urgent of all, though, is the reputational benefit, not to Laporta as a president but to Barcelona as a club. Once as pristine a sporting brand as could be imagined, the sort of team that considered its jerseys so sacrosanct that it refused to despoil them with a sponsor, Barcelona has been wracked by scandal for years.The Super League was — and is, given its ongoing refusal to abandon the project — a bad look. The allegations that the club’s former administration hired a public relations company to boost its own reputation and to tarnish a number of players, executives and critics were not much better.Neither, though, was nearly as damaging as the charge, currently under investigation by both the Spanish judicial authorities and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that the club paid a former vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee some $7.6 million over the course of 17 years.Rival fans now regularly shower Barcelona with fake money bearing the image of the club’s president, Joan Laporta.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressBarcelona, of course, has insisted it has done nothing wrong: The club has suggested the stipend it is accused of paying the official, José María Enriquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018 was for perfectly ordinary “technical reports into refereeing.” It is, the club has intimated, the sort of thing everybody does. There is, we have been told, nothing to see here.That line has not been universally accepted. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has described the allegations as the “worst reputational crisis” Spanish soccer has ever seen. (Barcelona responded by calling on Tebas to resign.) Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA, has called it “one of the most serious situations” he has seen in soccer. Regardless of any potential sporting penalty, the reputational blowback — should Barcelona’s staunch defense not hold — would be indelible.It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence that Barcelona’s pursuit of Messi has become extremely public in that context. It is not just nation states, after all, that are in the business of using the game’s brightest stars to rehabilitate their reputations, to draw the eyes of the audience, to cast the unpalatable and the unpleasant firmly in deep shadow. Mere soccer teams can do it, too.Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But its need for him — as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what it once was, as a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what it would rather you did not see — is greater still.He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all the same. Barcelona wants to use him to clean its image just as surely as P.S.G. wants to use him to prove its primacy and Al Hilal wants to use him to burnish a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami wants to use him to grow a league. There is no romance at the heart of any them, none at all. It is business, just business, and nothing more.Cold, Brutal and Entirely IrresistibleAntonio Conte talked himself out of a job at Tottenham.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersGary O’Neil’s career as a Premier League manager began, unexpectedly, late last August. His predecessor at Bournemouth, Scott Parker, had talked himself out of a job a few days earlier, using the occasion of a 9-0 defeat at Liverpool to explain, in great detail, exactly how little chance the club had of avoiding relegation.O’Neil was supposed to be what is now, by convention, called not a caretaker or a place-holder manager but an “interim,” a coach who will be replaced by a safer pair of hands as soon as one could be identified. But he did well, avoiding defeat in his first six games and slowly helping the team acclimatize to the Premier League. Quietly, perhaps a little reluctantly, Bournemouth made his appointment permanent during the World Cup.Gary O’Neil is now the 10th longest-serving manager in the Premier League.There was a point, not so long ago, when it seemed English soccer had finally learned the benefits of patience. Clubs seemed to have internalized the idea that reflexively firing a coach at the first sign of trouble was not ideal from a long-term planning perspective. Just as significant, they were putting more thought into their appointments in the first place.That particular dam broke in the last two weeks of March. Crystal Palace firing Patrick Vieira, on the back of almost three months without a win, proved the decisive fissure. Between then and now, three more managers have gone. Leicester, now at grave risk of relegation, fired Brendan Rodgers. Antonio Conte committed dismissal-by-press-conference to get himself out of Tottenham. And, of course, Graham Potter met his inevitable, if accelerated, demise at Chelsea.None of those decisions were especially flagrant examples of the caprice of Premier League owners, of course, but the failures of both Conte and Potter probably say more about the people who appointed them than they do about the coaches themselves.Conte was handed a squad in need of a rebuild and tasked with winning immediately. Potter was placed in charge of a squad so large that the changing room at the training ground reportedly could not accommodate it — several players had to change on chairs brought in from elsewhere — and told to fashion a cogent team in only a few months.The ability to choose the right job, of course, is an invaluable part of the armory of any elite coach; Potter, still in the early stages of his career, will doubtless heed that lesson when he selects his next opportunity. But his failure at Chelsea, like that of Conte at Tottenham, is not solely his fault. He should not be allowed to become a scapegoat for those who made it impossible for him to succeed in the first place.After all, they are still in place. They are in charge, in fact, of choosing a replacement, with precious little evidence so far that they should be trusted to make the right selection.It’s HomeAndy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockEngland got a boost of confidence in its biggest game before this year’s World Cup by beating Brazil, 4-2 on penalties after a 1-1 tie, on Thursday in a meeting of the European and South American champions at Wembley. The victory, like England’s triumph in last year’s European Championship final in the same stadium, was delivered off the foot of Chloe Kelly.CorrespondenceA lingering sense of guilt has been gnawing at me for the best part of a week. On Sunday, you see, I arrived in Naples, eagerly anticipating seeing Napoli — you will have noted my enthusiasm for Napoli over the past few months — take another step toward a first Serie A title in more than 30 years by coolly dispatching A.C. Milan on home turf.It did not quite work out like that. Milan picked Napoli apart, strolling to a 4-0 win against a team that, for the first time this season, looked bereft of both purpose and poise. And, on some level, it felt as if it were my fault. This is a superstitious place, after all. Maybe I had tempted fate. Maybe I had invoked hubris.At times like these, it is important to remember that correlation is not causation. Which brings us, rather neatly, to Deborah Chuk’s email. Last week’s analysis of Liverpool’s assorted problems, she felt, missed out arguably the most significant. “Why does nobody mention the sale of Sadio Mané?” she wrote. “This was the glue that held the team together. They needed him badly.”This argument — that the star of the show was Mané, not Mohamed Salah, all along — is not an uncommon one, nor is it unreasonable. Mané was, for years, a stellar performer for Liverpool. He did not, at times, get the credit he deserved. His departure and Liverpool’s demise do, without question, overlap perfectly.And yet I’m not convinced. Mané’s form in his last couple of years in England had been patchy: spells in which he was as devastating as ever, and stretches in which he seemed a little faded. It felt like the right time to move him on. More relevant, I suspect, is that none of the players signed to replace him have had anything like his impact.James Spink, too, wanted to discuss something of a leitmotif. “Chelsea’s women’s side is coached by a remarkably gifted manager who knows the game, is articulate and honest and a great ‘man manager.’ Wouldn’t it be interesting if an owner had the guts to hire Emma Hayes to shatter that glass ceiling?”This one has a short answer: yes. It would, in fact, not just be interesting but wholly warranted. It won’t happen, though. Not when there are candidates with the glowing résumés of … Frank Lampard who can be hired instead. More

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      La Liga Must Register Barcelona’s Gavi, Spanish Court Rules

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      As rivals haggled over prices on the final day of the transfer window, Barcelona found a new way around the Spanish league’s financial rules.The frenetic last days of European soccer’s midseason player trading market — that whirlwind of spending and sales known as the January transfer window — are always full of drama. Rumors fly. Deals are made. For most clubs, the final hours, which arrived Tuesday, are spent engaged in last-minute haggling over the prices for new players.At F.C. Barcelona, the Spanish club trapped in a yearslong financial crisis, the close of this year’s window was even stranger than usual: While most of its rivals scoured the market for players, Barcelona went to court to keep hold of one of its own.The crisis was of the club’s own making. Having spent heavily on new talent last summer despite repeated warnings that its spending violated league cost controls, Barcelona was told by the Spanish league that it could not register any new players until it could find savings or new revenues. That did not stop the team from offering a new contract to Gavi, a prodigiously talented teenager who is one of the club’s most valuable assets.The new contract meant a new, higher salary and, crucially, a new registration with the league. The league balked, and refused to register Gavi. And so Barcelona turned to a hometown court, and on Tuesday it got the ruling it sought.In a statement, the club said it had persuaded a local commercial court to require Spanish league officials to register Gavi, an 18-year-old midfielder, before the trading window closed at midnight. The court had agreed with Barcelona’s argument, the club announced, that the league’s failure to register the player would have caused the club “serious, irreparable damage.”The Spanish league, known as La Liga, was not represented in the hearing. It said it would study the ruling before deciding the next steps, but it signaled that its battle with Barcelona over its financial controls was not over.“If the court tells us to register Gavi, we will,” a league spokesman said. “And if there are grounds for appeal, then we will appeal it.” Should there be a successful appeal, the league, the spokesman said, would deregister Gavi.The case of Gavi’s new contract highlights the dire financial straits Barcelona continues to find itself in, even after its president, Joan Laporta, swept back into office in 2021 on a promise to restore the club’s reputation and its finances after a fiscal collapse that had sent F.C. Barcelona spiraling toward bankruptcy.Laporta managed to raise money quickly. Lots of it, in fact, under a program in which Barcelona sold club assets — including years of commercial rights — to outside investors. But instead of using that influx of cash to balance the books, Laporta went on a mammoth shopping spree, bringing in a slew of new players. The acquisitions left the club’s fortunes reliant on sporting success, coupled with the need for even more new revenue sources.The results have been mixed. Barcelona sits atop the Spanish league with half the season remaining, but a humiliating — and financially disastrous — exit from the Champions League in the group stage has raised new doubts about its financial prospects.La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, this week offered an explanation for why Barcelona could not register Gavi. In the league’s view, he said, the new deal would put Barcelona in violation of financial limits when it went into effect.“The issue of not registering Gavi comes as a consequence of the fact that it is a registration that takes effect next season and has no effect in the coming six months,” Tebas said in comments reported by the Spanish news media this week. He said Barcelona’s budget deficit next season would be more than 200 million euros — more than $217 million — based on current income projections, “so it does not seem appropriate to accept that registration.”With the Spanish league unequivocal in its refusal to bend regulations to allow Barcelona to register any more players, the club’s board took its plea to the local court.In its submission, made on Friday, the club said not being able to sign Gavi to his new contract — which he had agreed to in September — by the close of the January window “would imply the player’s free agency and therefore cause serious, irreparable damage to F.C. Barcelona.”If the ruling stands, La Liga’s decade-old fiscal regulations, which had been drawn up with the clubs’ input in an effort to reduce volatility, would be rendered unenforceable, with teams able to bypass the regulations by challenging them in civil courts. Barcelona has largely been an outlier in failing to stay within the designated spending cap, which is calculated as a percentage of each team’s earnings from its soccer operations.The league in recent months has moved to tighten those rules further by limiting the impact of the type of asset sales Barcelona has employed on teams’ salary and player cost caps. More

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      For Africa Cup of Nations, Embrace the Unknown

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      The Africa Cup of Nations probably will be decided by players who earn their livings in Europe. But the best of the tournament lies in its surprises.It was the No. 8 who first caught the eye. He was tall, languid, just on the border between rangy and ungainly. It was not the way he moved, so much, but the way he did not. In the middle of all the bustle and hurry, he was unusually still. He did not sprint. He did not dash. He did not even run, not really. He strolled. He meandered. He moseyed.He was playing in midfield, but he did not look much like a central midfielder. There are, in modern soccer, precisely three acceptable profiles of central midfielder: slight and inventive; dynamic and industrious; physically imposing.The No. 8 was none of them. He towered over almost everyone who drew close, but he was slender, almost fragile. In another world, he might have been a mercurial playmaker who refused to leave his local team — Robin Friday or Tomás Carlovich — but, while his technique was flawless, his energy was not especially chaotic, particularly magical.But the No. 8 was, in theory, the team’s defensive linchpin. And yet he did not throw himself into tackles or busily chase down opponents. He played simple, unwaveringly accurate passes, and then he stood all but still, waiting for the game to come back his way.To an eye raised on watching European soccer, with its blend of tactical influences and its faintly South American inflection, the initial assumption was that he was not following instructions. But he was. Or, at least, he seemed to be. He was there to occupy space, to act as a fixed point, an anchor. He did it well. It worked, too.His name was Asrat Megersa, and he was, in 2013, a 25-year-old playing in midfield for Ethiopia in its first Africa Cup of Nations in three decades. The team’s first game was a match with the reigning champion, Zambia, in the South African city of Mbombela.Ethiopia midfielder Asrat Megersa, right, against Zambia in 2013.Manus van Dyk/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesOn the surface, Ethiopia stood little chance. Zambia could call on a sprinkling of players with experience in Europe. It had a coach, Hervé Renard, of international repute. Ethiopia did not. All but three members of its squad played in their homeland, for teams like Dedebit and Saint George and Ethiopian Coffee.And yet that was not how the game played out. In the bright summer sun, Zambia found Ethiopia entirely confounding. Megersa and his teammates did unexpected, unorthodox things. Their style was not recognizable, and often, neither were their intentions. They made choices they were not supposed to make.It seemed to unsettle the Zambians. An uncertainty, a doubt crept into their play. Zambia took a delicate lead. Megersa kept standing still, kept passing the ball, kept occupying space. Ethiopia struck back, then held on for a draw. In the stands, the fans who had made the long journey from Johannesburg on packed buses, out to the fringes of the Kruger National Park, blew happily, incessantly on their vuvuzelas.Ethiopia’s fortunes changed swiftly after that. A few days later, Burkina Faso held its nerve, and beat Megersa and his team, 4-0. Defeat to Nigeria in the final group game in Rustenberg meant Ethiopia was eliminated. But that day against Zambia left a lasting impression; eight years on, I can still remember the name of Asrat Megersa.It endures, I think, because it is so rare, in modern soccer, to see something truly different. Special happens all the time; Lionel Messi is beamed into our homes every week. But different is precious. Good ideas travel quickly in elite soccer. Best practice spreads rapidly. Some small advancement made in Argentina one week will have made landfall in Europe the next.The result is not homogeneity, not exactly, but a narrow spectrum of variety. Players fit specific, familiar molds. Teams pass or teams press. They play deep or they play high. There are those who absorb pressure and those who apply it and those who do a little of both. Some do it well and some do it badly, but they are all trying to do the same things.Mohamed Salah is among the dozens of European stars called in to bolster African teams.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersThat will be true of this year’s Cup of Nations, too. Most of the 24 teams gathered in Cameroon for this year’s tournament, which opens with two games on Sunday, will know that their hopes rest, to no small extent, on how the stars they have called back from Europe perform over the next month.If Algeria is to retain its title, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez will be a central part of it. Egypt will invest much of its faith in Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah. The backbone of Nigeria’s team plays in the Premier League. Morocco will lean heavily on Youssef En-Nesyri of Sevilla. Senegal, the paper favorite, can call on Edouard Mendy and Kalidou Koulibaly and Idrissa Gueye and Sadio Mané.But they are just the headline acts. Their supporting casts have largely been drawn from Europe, too. Every member of Senegal’s squad plays in Europe. Cameroon has called up 22 players who do. It is not limited to the continent’s traditional powerhouses, either. Guinea has 22 players from European teams. Cape Verde has 21. Burkina Faso can call on 18.That is testament, of course, both to soccer’s rampant and to some extent rapacious global reach and to the development of the sport in Africa; the talent has never been spread quite so broadly across the continent as it is now. There are 10 teams, perhaps, who have arrived in Cameroon with a realistic hope of emerging victorious.Algeria won the Cup of Nations in 2019.Suhaib Salem/ReutersBut that intercontinental connection brings with it, too, a risk of losing something valuable. Soccer has long been a common language, the game the world plays, but as it has grown more global it has started to lose its accents. Style and taste no longer shift across borders; everything is subsumed by the Platonic ideal of soccer as preached by the Champions League and the Premier League. An orthodoxy has taken hold: Soccer has become the game the world plays the same way.The Cup of Nations, though, retains just a couple of pockets of resistance. That was what made Megersa, and Ethiopia, special. This was his interpretation, their interpretation, of the game, the game as they wanted to play, not the game as they had been told it was played.Perhaps the same will be true, this year, of Sudan — with only two players drawn from abroad — or Malawi, with just two squad members called up from Europe. Or perhaps it will be true, once more, of Ethiopia. None of its players have come from Europe this time around, either. That diminishes the team’s chances of winning the tournament, of course, but it also makes it a much more enticing prospect.The only sadness is that Megersa is not in the squad. He is 34, now, still playing in his homeland, the place where he played the game as Ethiopia played it, a uniquely bright and joyous memory.Ignorance Is BlissThe first drips of poison came on Tuesday morning, as Manchester United was still absorbing the previous night’s defeat to Wolves into its bloodstream. Apparently, the club’s players were unimpressed by Ralf Rangnick, the bespectacled 63-year-old German coach who replaced Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a couple of months ago.By Wednesday, it was emerging that one or two of the players had not even heard of Rangnick before he was appointed; despite being professional athletes with many cars and houses, they had been forced to Google him to find out who he was, had been required to spend time on Wikipedia with the general public to work out his background. Drip, drip.By Thursday, it was a flood. Chris Armas, the former New York Red Bulls coach hired as Rangnick’s assistant, had yet to teach United’s coterie of international stars how to — and there is a little paraphrasing here, but not too much — play soccer while in possession of the ball, and they were troubled that perhaps he did not know how to do it.There’s still trouble at United? Everyone blame the new guys.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRangnick, meanwhile, was reported to be aloof and cold and also making them train at night, or at least in the dark — it is winter in the north of England; it is never anything but dark — and they did not like that at all. He lacked charisma, the whispers went. He lacked authority. He had fallen out with leading figures in the changing room. He had not impressed them in training. Drip, drip, drip.Whether any and all of these complaints — all of them let slip to various journalists on condition of anonymity — are true is, unfortunately, of secondary importance. What matters far more is the fact of their existence, the sad reality that at least a portion of United’s players are already doing what they can to ensure that the finger of blame for any future failure is pointed squarely at the coach who has been there for a few weeks, and not the players who have been there for several years.Those drips are what happens when something in a club — any club, not just Manchester United — has turned, when the atmosphere is toxic, when the strands of accountability and mutual support and collective responsibility that in ordinary times bind a squad and a staff together have snapped. That is always the rule: It is not the content of these pernicious leaks that matter, but the fact of them.Quite how United will proceed from this point is not entirely clear. Ed Woodward, the executive vice chairman, announced on Friday that he is leaving at the end of the month. He will be replaced by Richard Arnold, the club’s managing director. Rangnick has six more months before moving on to become a consultant. There will be a new manager, a new regime. The damage done by those drips, though, suggests that may only be the start of the upheaval.Learning LessonsJoan Laporta knows the safest position at Barcelona: right next to the club’s newest signing.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is, strangely, an answer to how Barcelona — in debt just a few months ago to the tune of $1 billion, as you may remember, and so concerned by the scale of their financial breakdown that they wanted to join a European Super League — could afford, right at the start of the month, to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.It is not an especially satisfactory answer, admittedly, encompassing as it does a loan from Goldman Sachs, some creative accounting, the sale of some players who have not yet actually been sold, and an odd loophole in Spanish soccer’s financial regulations that nobody had mentioned until Barcelona decided it wanted to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.But, still, it is an answer. Far more mystifying was the reaction of the Barcelona president Joan Laporta, a man who has spent much of the last year delivering tremulous warnings about the club’s dire finances, to the completion of the deal. “Everyone else should prepare themselves because we are back,” he said. “We continue to be a reference in the market.”This is a man, it should not need pointing out, who said those words at a time when his club could not officially register its new signing because of its ongoing financial difficulties.That Laporta should be feeling a little bullish is understandable: Torres is an astute signing at what is, by modern standards, a startlingly low fee. Laporta is in an elected position, too, and it is never too early to start campaigning.Indeed, in one sense, it is to be hoped that it is little more than hot air, that his refusal to dismiss the idea of signing Erling Haaland in the summer is little more than pride and defiance.The alternative, after all, is much more troubling: that rather than rebuild the team organically around the richly-talented cadre of teenagers it has produced over the last 12 months, Laporta is prepared to mortgage the club’s future once more, all in some quixotic pursuit of immediate success in a game now dominated by teams backed by nation states.Barcelona has been down that road before, and not long ago. It has only been a few months since it stood on the very edge of complete financial meltdown, after all. It is still only just starting to deal with the consequences. Barcelona does not need to be back, not in that sense, not for some time.CorrespondenceThis is the problem with having a little time off. You unwind, you relax, you allow your mind to drift, and then all of a sudden you’re back at work and none of it makes any sense at all. For example, why is Manuel Buchwald emailing me about the shape of the penalty area?“The logical alternative to the rectangular penalty box is the semicircular one, as is used in most other sports,” he wrote. “Field hockey, handball, lacrosse, basketball and ice hockey. In the latter case it’s the area protecting the goalie.” That is a valid point and would work at least as a basis for a new shape of penalty area in soccer, but why tell me?Not all penalties are equal.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersThe fact that Will Clark-Shim has also been in touch to complain about the “increased frequency of penalties in the game” jogs a memory. We were talking about something to do with penalties, weren’t we? “The game thrives on open and active play, honest industry, and clever coordination,” he wrote. “Increased penalties seem the result of incidental handballs, manufactured contact, and tedious reviews. They result in unexciting goals.”That’s a good point, too: Not all goals are created equal, and getting more goals through having more penalties is not necessarily a unilaterally positive thing. There is definitely a theme developing, because Bob Rogers has mentioned penalties, too. He is a (self-professed) “low-level referee,” and he would like to confess to calling fouls as outside the box even if they have occurred inside it, “when that is the fair value of the foul.”Ah, yes, that was it. We were discussing whether there are now too many penalties, and whether there might, perhaps, be a way of better distinguishing between fouls that warrant that level of punishment and fouls that just happen to take place in a fairly arbitrary area of the field. It always takes me a while to get up to speed, that’s all. More

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      Barcelona Fires Manager Ronald Koeman and Casts Eye at Xavi

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      Successive defeats to Real Madrid and Rayo Vallecano convinced Barcelona to fire Koeman, its Dutch manager. Xavi Hernández is a favorite to replace him.Ronald Koeman knew even before he arrived in Barcelona that his journey as the club’s manager had ended. His team had just lost for the second time in four days, beaten by Real Madrid on Sunday and then by modest Rayo Vallecano on Wednesday. It was marooned in ninth place in La Liga. There could be, the club decided, no way back.The decision to fire Koeman was made while he and his players were still in transit. Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, had spent the flight back from Madrid consulting with several executives, according to Sport, the Catalan newspaper, and then informed Koeman that he had decided to end his 14-month tenure. A statement from Barcelona made the decision official a little after midnight.FC Barcelona has relieved Ronald Koeman of his duties as first team coach— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona) October 27, 2021
      For all the urgency of those last few hours, Koeman’s demise has been anything but swift. He led Barcelona to a disappointing — but hardly disastrous — third-place finish in his first, and only, full campaign at the club, the season salvaged somewhat by a victory in the Copa del Rey.The summer, though, brought sweeping change. Koeman had to manage the sudden departure of Lionel Messi — a seismic shift for which he was not even forewarned, let alone forearmed — and then try to build a squad to regain the Spanish title, and compete in the Champions League, while operating under considerable financial constraints.Despite the rise to prominence of a clutch of talented youngsters, including the midfielders Gavi and Pedri, and the return to fitness of another, forward Ansu Fati, Koeman had struggled to forge a cohesive unit. His summer recruits had done little to improve the team’s fortunes: Memphis Depay had flickered occasionally, but both Eric Garcia and Luuk De Jong had struggled to make a positive impact.By the end of September, the club had already lost ground in the Spanish title race, and it had twice been embarrassed in the Champions League: beaten first by Bayern Munich, 3-0, and then by Benfica. It retains some hope of qualifying for the knockout rounds in the spring after an unconvincing win against Dynamo Kyiv last week.That victory seemed to have afforded Koeman a stay of execution, but it proved, instead, a false dawn. On Sunday, Real Madrid beat Barcelona, 2-1, for its fourth successive triumph in the Clásico. Afterward, dozens of angry fans surrounded Koeman’s car as he and his wife tried to leave Camp Nou after the game.And then on Wednesday, a single goal from the veteran striker Radamel Falcao condemned Barcelona to defeat against Rayo, a humble, impoverished club from the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Whatever good will there was toward Koeman — an iconic former player for Barcelona, scorer of the goal that brought the team its first-ever Champions League title — evaporated, both inside and outside the club.Koeman was expected to visit Barcelona’s training facility in Sant Joan Despí on Thursday to say goodbye to his players; by that stage, the club hopes to have identified or, perhaps, even appointed his successor. For now, the job will go to yet another former Barcelona player, Sergi Barjuán, who was installed as the club’s caretaker manager on Thursday. Sergi had most recently been the coach of Barcelona’s B team.Though both Marcelo Gallardo, the coach of the Argentine team River Plate, and Imanol Alguacil, manager of Real Sociedad, have some support as potential permanent replacements, Laporta is thought to see another former Barcelona player, Xavi Hernández, as the standout candidate.Xavi’s managerial experience remains moderate — he has spent the last three seasons at Al Sadd, the Qatari team where he ended his playing career, and enjoyed some success — but his popular appeal is unmatched.He was not only part of the great Barcelona team that lifted three Champions League trophies in the space of six years under Pep Guardiola and then Luis Enrique, but came to be seen as the apogee of the philosophy and playing style that has underscored the club for decades. To Laporta, restoring him to his spiritual home would serve as a way of connecting Barcelona’s present to its glorious recent past. More

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      Barcelona Wants to Keep Lionel Messi. La Liga May Not Allow It.

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      Barcelona’s financial woes and the expiration of its star’s contract have left the club in a bind. And the only solution — about $200 million in salary cuts — won’t be easy.When Lionel Messi stepped off the field late Saturday night after the final of the Copa América, the Argentina captain — one of the most celebrated athletes in history — was, at long last, a champion in his national colors.He was also, only weeks after his 34th birthday, unemployed.Messi’s talent has never been in question. A six-time world player of the year, he is among the best players of his or any generation. His professional future, though, and even his ability to suit up for F.C. Barcelona next season, is suddenly very much in doubt.Messi wants to stay at Barcelona, the only professional home he has ever known, and Barcelona desperately wants to keep him. But the club’s dire financial straits and a series of fateful decisions by team management — including the potentially disastrous one to let Messi’s contract expire at the end of June — have imperiled what is arguably the most successful association between a club and a single player in soccer history.And the vise, in the form of Spanish soccer’s strict financial rules, is tightening by the day.Lionel Messi and his teammates received a hero’s welcome on their return to Argentina after winning the Copa América.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni/EPA, via ShutterstockMessi said nothing about his contract situation over the last month while leading Argentina to victory in the Copa América in Brazil. And Barcelona’s new president, Joan Laporta, has tried to present a confident front. “Everything’s on track,” he told news crews camped outside his offices last week, when he and other Barcelona executives had huddled in search of a solution.But the problem is that Messi’s future may no longer be in the player’s hands, or his club’s. Spanish league rules limit each club’s spending to only a percentage of club revenue, and league officials have said repeatedly that they not will weaken their rules to accommodate Barcelona, which is far over that limit.In short, if Barcelona cannot cut 200 million euros, or about $240 million, from its wage bill this summer — an almost impossibly large sum in a soccer economy cratered by the pandemic — it will not be allowed to register any new players, including Messi, for next season. (Barcelona’s decision to allow Messi’s contract to expire last month means he now must be registered as a new signing, instead of a renewal, which might have been easier.)A rupture between Messi and Barcelona would be seismic for both sides. Messi has been the focal point of Barcelona for nearly two decades, the architect of much of its success on the field and the engine of its financial might away from it.But while Barcelona has collected money at breathtaking speed in recent years — in 2019 it became the first club to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue — it also spent with even more alacrity, living life on the financial edge through impulsive management, rash decisions and imprudent contracts. Messi’s most recent four-year deal alone, if he met every clause and condition, was worth almost $675 million, a sum so large that it had an inflationary affect on the salaries of all of his teammates, fueling a payroll that now eats up about three-fourths of Barcelona’s annual revenue.Now, facing debts of more than 1 billion euros and losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Barcelona is struggling to balance its books in a way that adheres to league rules.It is partly because of Messi, of course, that Barcelona finds itself on the brink. Its losses in the past two years have surpassed more than $500 million, much of that because of rich contracts like the one Barcelona’s former administration gave Messi in the fall of 2017.Details of the 30-page deal, which was leaked to a Spanish newspaper, are a testament to Barcelona’s taste for living on the edge: A salary of about $1.4 million a week. A signing bonus of $139 million. A “loyalty” bonus — to a player it has employed since he was 13 — of $93 million.A new contract, yet to be completed, almost certainly will require Messi, one of the world’s most valuable athletes, to accept a substantial pay cut.Victor Font, one of the losing candidates in this year’s presidential election, said he was surprised the team had yet to make the financial arrangements required to keep Messi. But like Laporta, he said he was convinced Messi would remain with the club.“The alternative would be so much of a disappointment that I cannot think there’s an alternative,” Font said in a telephone interview.Messi’s contract with Barcelona expired last month. Signing him to a new one that doesn’t require a significant pay cut will be difficult.Albert Gea/ReutersThe team is not getting any sympathy, or preferential treatment, from the Spanish league. Javier Tebas, the league’s chief executive, told reporters this week that Barcelona only has itself to blame for its financial crisis. Yes, he told reporters, the coronavirus pandemic had battered the team’s finances, but other teams — notably Barcelona’s archrival Real Madrid — have found ways to operate within the league’s rules.The issue, Tebas said, was that Barcelona has no room to maneuver. The league calculates different limits for each team based on each club’s income statements, but caps spending at 70 percent of revenues.“It’s not normal for clubs to spend right up to the last euro of the salary limit,” Tebas said.It is not just Messi’s fate that hangs in the balance, either. Barcelona has already announced the signings of his friend and Argentina teammate Sergio Agüero for next season, as well as those of the Netherlands forward Memphis Depay and the Spanish national team defender Eric García.All three arrived as free agents, meaning Barcelona did not have to pay multimillion-dollar transfer fees to their former clubs, but the league will not register any of them, or Messi, until the club first makes deep cuts to its costs.Barcelona’s new president, Joan Laporta, introduced Sergio Agüero as a Barcelona player in May. But the club is currently not able to register him with the Spanish league.Joan Monfort/Associated PressIn an effort to create some financial wiggle room, the club has been furiously working to offload players, tearing up contracts with fringe talents and negotiating the exits of some of its other stars. But all of its biggest earners remain, and with the transfer market deflated by the lingering effects of the pandemic, it is unlikely to receive significant offers from rivals for players those teams know it needs to sell.Instead, Barcelona may be pushed to sell off key players — the German goalkeeper Marc Andre ter Stegen, the Dutch playmaker Frenkie de Jong and even Pedri, the latest locally reared Barcelona starlet, would most likely bring the highest returns — in order to make ends meet.Font said he expected that Barcelona would prioritize re-signing Messi, even if that meant some of the team’s newest signings, or other key players currently under contract, would have to go.“It’s a matter of trade offs,” Font said. “You may not register other players, but you will not prioritize others over Messi.”But if, as is likely, Barcelona will not be able to make the necessary cuts, it will find itself in another bind. Under the Spanish league regulations, a team can spend only a quarter of the money it receives from player sales on new contracts. That means even if it can clear tens of millions of dollars off the books, it will have only a fraction of that total available to sign Messi — or anyone else.Could the unthinkable — Barcelona’s losing Messi for free — be imminent? Perhaps. But La Liga said as recently as last week that there would be no exceptions, no special rules to keep him in Spain.“Of course we want Messi to stay,” said Tebas, La Liga’s chief executive. “But when you are running a league you cannot base decisions on individual players or clubs.” More

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      FIFA Has a Plan for Africa. But Who Does It Serve?

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      Our experts separate fact from fiction in the talk about an African super league. Plus, a Champions League update, World Cup qualifying upsets and Erling Haaland’s next move.A couple of weeks ago, a tweet caught my eye. It seemed, unexpectedly, to reveal that a continentwide African Super League was under construction. Cross-border leagues, as regular readers will know, are something that this newsletter generally supports: They are the most readily available way of addressing soccer’s chronic financial imbalance.On the surface, notwithstanding the complex logistics, Africa is a prime candidate for such a venture. Many of the continent’s domestic leagues struggle to find investment, to retain talent, to compete for interest with the European tournaments beamed onto their television sets. Africa’s major clubs would, I think, be stronger together.There is, though, always a below the surface. As a rule, whenever I want to know what it is, I ask my colleague Tariq Panja, who spends so much time in the depths that he could be a submarine. For the last week or so, we’ve been exchanging emails on the subject. This conversation is the result.Rory Smith: Something strange has happened, Tariq. A few weeks ago, someone drew my attention to a tweet from Barbara Gonzalez, the chief executive at Simba, one of the biggest clubs in Tanzania, that seemed to reveal a plan that would change the face of African soccer: a pan-continental super league.But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is that it turns out it’s the brainchild of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president. As a general rule, making sure you’re on the opposite side of any argument from Infantino is a solid strategy. But in this case my instinct is to say that, at least as an idea, this kind of makes sense.Please explain to me why I am wrong, so that the world can be restored to its axis.Tariq Panja: As with everything when it comes to FIFA — and typically FIFA under Gianni Infantino — the devil is in the detail. Or, in this case, the lack of detail.Infantino first announced his big idea for Africa in 2019, but it had been dormant until this random tweet (more on that in a minute). But when Infantino first went public, people inside FIFA say there was no business plan: just Gianni firing from the hip, claiming it could generate $200 million in revenue. That’s a big number as far as African club football is concerned, but there is no evidence of where it came from.To be clear: African already has a continental competition, the Champions League. Egypt’s Al Ahly won its record ninth title last year.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersIt reminds me of the time Gianni walked into a FIFA Council meeting and told the board to sign a document that would allow him to sell the Club World Cup to private investors (who turned out to be SoftBank). The members, led by European officials, wanted details. An internal audit found the event was worth considerably less than Gianni had suggested.Now, back to the tweet: It turns out FIFA officials were surprised, too. Barbara González walked up to Gianni at the Confederation of African Football Congress and asked to have her photo taken with him. Five minutes later, she sent out the tweet. Now I’m not saying a league in Africa is a bad idea, but surely there must be a robust plan before such a major project is undertaken?RS: If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of that, not least because Infantino strikes me as precisely the sort of person who would fall for the old “as you were saying” ruse.There does, as you say, have to be a robust plan: economically, of course, but in a sporting sense, too. The basic idea strikes me as sound. Certainly south of the Sahara, African club soccer struggles horribly for investment. That means that the vast majority of nations that produce a constant stream of players for European clubs rarely see any of that talent on show in domestic leagues. That, in turn, hardly entices fans to go and watch games live. And that completes a neat but vicious circle, because it means that, yes, clubs struggle horribly for investment.A Super League would address some of those issues. A better television deal, if nothing else, would enable clubs to invest in infrastructure. That might help nurture young talent and keep it for a little longer. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that a Pan-African league might be able to rival one of the talent-generating leagues in Europe — the Netherlands or Portugal, say — for quality in a relatively short space of time.Of course, there is one thorny issue that I haven’t yet had the nerve to bring up. I reckon I could come up with a fairly cogent list of 20 or so African teams that would have a good case for inclusion, thanks to history or support or location. But I am guessing that Infantino and CAF, which is now run by a staunch ally of his, might have a different system in mind?Infantino recently helped an ally, Patrice Motsepe, win the top job in African soccer.Themba Hadebe/Associated PressTP: The little we know so far is that there is an expectation that participating teams would have to invest at least $20 million per season, for five seasons. For clubs in Africa, that is a significant outlay, and it suggests it would not be the most popular teams, so much as the ones that have the backing of wealthy benefactors. But again: Beyond the odd tweet and Gianni’s off-the-cuff remarks, we have nothing concrete.There are other ways of trying to come up with likely participants. You could use the CAF club coefficient, which is essentially a points system for clubs in the region based on their historic success. But that would mean a league dominated by clubs from wealthier North African countries, with only a dozen or so of the continent’s 54 countries likely to be represented.RS: That lack of representation would, I think, ultimately be unavoidable. For a tournament like this to be valid, there are certain clubs that would have to be included. Al Ahly and Zamalek from Cairo, would be names one and two. Both Raja and Wydad from Casablanca, and Esperance and Étoile du Sahel, the twin totems of Tunisian soccer.You would certainly need South Africa’s Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. And you could throw Mamelodi Sundowns in there, too: It is owned by Patrice Motsepe, Infantino’s ally and the new CAF president. Simba, of Tanzania, clearly expect to be involved. TP Mazembe, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, would have to be.Congo’s TP Mazembe, in black, and Morocco’s Raja Casablanca would both merit places in any pan-African super league.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond that, the continent’s powerhouse nations — Cameroon, Senegal, Algeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and, particularly, Nigeria — would command at least one place each. Suddenly, the whole thing looks pretty full, even before thinking about Angola, Sudan and Ethiopia.TP: If there was a method to wrap this league into the existing pyramid, there would probably be far more buy-in. The idea that teams from across the region would have — at least in theory — a shot at one day making it into the competition would make the proposition far more palatable to those, even among the larger clubs, who are not enthused about it.Even then, there are the logistics of it: not only to create a level playing field, but a sensible calendar and schedule, given the enormous differences in weather and transport infrastructure across the region. Given the uncertainty and sense of unease among the African football community, there needs to be an urgent and transparent discussion about what this is, and what this is not. A series of clandestine meetings followed by a high-profile announcement that does not stand up to scrutiny is not enough.RS: There is, definitely, a back-of-a-cigarette-packet air to the idea. And worse still, it has the feel of something that is being imposed on Africa, rather than generated from within it. The problem of representation bears that out: this sort of thing is much easier to conceive if, deep down, you regard Africa as a single, homogeneous entity, grateful for your interest.And that — given Infantino’s apparent passion for the idea — makes you wonder what the purpose of it all is. Has it been suggested in an attempt to make African domestic soccer stronger, a challenging but essentially admirable aim? Or is there something else at play here?TP: There’s a suspicion that Gianni’s motivations may be less to do with securing the future of African soccer and more his hopes of creating a club competition that can rival and, eventually, overtake the Champions League. For that to happen, the expanded Club World Cup needs teams from all over the world who can compete with the powerhouses of Europe.Bayern Munich won the most recent Club World Cup. FIFA has plans to expand the event.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersIn that light, Africa might just be the start, the canary in the coal mine. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but those involved should be clear about their intentions. And a defining project for the future of African soccer should be guided by those with skin in the game, no question, rather than a Swiss bureaucrat intent on a legacy project.RS: Ah, that’s a relief. I feel as though I am on much more solid ground now: the idea might have some merit, but the rationale behind it may not. That may not be good news for African soccer, which finds itself being used as a pawn in a broader power game, but it’s good news for my personal moral compass, because it means I don’t have to worry about being on the same side of an argument as Gianni Infantino.Pushing Back Another Bad IdeaNo one has proposed melting down the Champions League trophy to sell the silver. Yet.via ReutersThere was, just as there was always going to be, one last hurdle to clear. Most European soccer executives were expecting a blueprint for a new vision of the Champions League to be approved — both by UEFA, the competition’s organizer, and the European Clubs Association, Andrea Agnelli’s bad-idea factory — and announced this week.That had to be pushed back, though, when several of the continent’s major teams blew up the deal at the 11th hour: It turns out that actually they want to have final say on the competition’s commercial rights, too. Suddenly, it seems as if the new-look Champions League may end up being the lesser of two evils.Quite how that revamped competition will work is laid out clearly and concisely — and, crucially, in the form of a graphic — here. So clearly and concisely, in fact, that for the first time it is possible to say without fear of having missed something that this iteration of the Champions League will make the tournament immeasurably worse.Not, though, for the reasons so often given. Yes, there will be more meetings between the game’s superpowers, and for lower stakes. Yes, the whole thing is bloated. Yes, it will starve domestic competitions of oxygen. And yes, it still might serve to entrench the financial inequality that is the real enemy of the game’s ongoing health.But the main problem is much simpler: The redesign reduces the Champions League’s competitive integrity. It is, essentially, invalid to draw up a league table in which all of the teams play different opponents. It renders it meaningless. And it is quite likely that fans, who are not as stupid as they are taken to be, will notice.The Week the Tables TurnedNorth Macedonia’s Eljif Elmas, right, with Stefan Spirovski, after scoring the winning goal in a World Cup qualifier at Germany.Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via ShutterstockA few days ago, as England threatened to run up the score in a World Cup qualifier against San Marino, the poacher-turned-pundit Gary Lineker suggested it was time to admit that these mismatches — which characterize a substantial amount of international soccer — were of benefit and interest to precisely nobody.Instead, he said, perhaps it would be in everyone’s interests for some of Europe’s smaller nations to engage in a prequalifying tournament, playing one another for the right to face the continent’s elite, and England. The reaction — Do I really need to say this? You know what the reaction is, because it’s always the same reaction — was furious.To Lineker’s critics, those who accused him of trying to ghettoize soccer’s underdogs, what followed was karmic retribution. Luxembourg won at Ireland. Spain needed a late goal to avoid a draw with Georgia. Latvia tied Turkey. And, best of all, North Macedonia beat Germany, the country’s first loss in a World Cup qualifier for 20 years.It goes without saying that all of these results were welcome, impressive, and hilarious. But it does not mean that the idea Lineker espoused — one that has been around for years — should be dismissed.First of all: That is how qualifying works in Africa, Asia and North and Central America. It helps to thin the calendar a little, something that matters at a time when players are being run into the ground by all of the teams they represent. Second: The success of the Nations League has shown that games between smaller nations are more competitive, and therefore both more entertaining and more educational, than watching the same teams be steamrollered by the giants.And third: At the same time as all those shocks were rumbling through Europe, England was scoring five against San Marino, the Czechs ran in six in Estonia, and both Belgium and Denmark scored eight, against Belarus and Moldova. Worse still, a team managed by Frank de Boer scored seven against Gibraltar. Some of soccer’s lesser lights are competitive. Some are not. If only there was a way of selecting which teams fell into which categories.The Haaland ShakeDortmund, like everyone else, may have trouble holding on to Erling Haaland.Pool photo by Marius BeckerWe have been here before. On Thursday, it emerged that Mino Raiola and Alfie Haaland — respectively the agent and the father of Erling Haaland, the goal cyborg — were in Catalonia for a meeting with Joan Laporta, the freshly-minted president of Barcelona. The race for the hottest property in European soccer is, it seems, on.It is a move straight from the playbook that eventually led the younger Haaland to Borussia Dortmund, his current home, about 15 months ago. Expect Raiola and Haaland’s father to turn up in relatively short order in Madrid, too. They will almost certainly stop off in London after that: Chelsea harbors hopes of signing the 20-year-old Haaland. They may need two days in Manchester; they would not want to rush United or City.The fact that they are doing their due diligence on their client/son’s next home is, then, no surprise. More eye-catching is the fact that they feel Barcelona’s hopes of signing Haaland are valid, given that Dortmund has made it plain that it will not sell him for less than $150 million, and because Barcelona is, well, currently about $1 billion in debt.Laporta, clearly, feels he can make a deal work. Perhaps he can. Perhaps there is some way of shifting the money around enough for Barcelona to remain a viable candidate. The appeal is obvious: Signing Haaland would, almost at a stroke, turn Barcelona into major players again. But then so, too, is the problem: After all the club has been through, would it really be a good idea?The Final SprintAside from the virgin hope of opening day — and possibly the breathless frenzy of Christmas — this is the best part of the soccer season. The end of the March international break heralds not only the arrival of spring, but the start of European club soccer’s race to the summit. Over the next two months, closure will arrive.Better yet, this time around, we hit the ground running. The top two in both France and Germany will meet on Saturday: first, Lille visits Paris St.-Germain, the two of them level on points, and only a nose ahead of Lyon and Monaco. (I’ll have a story on Lille posting in a few hours.) No sooner has that finished, though, than RB Leipzig hosts a Bayern Munich deprived of Robert Lewandowski, and knowing that a win would close the gap at the top of the Bundesliga to a single point.RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich: back at it on Saturday.Pool photo by Alexander HassensteinIn England, meanwhile, the ultimate prize is off the table: It is a matter of when, not if, Manchester City claims a third title in four years. But the battle to finish second, third and fourth — and therefore obtain a place in next season’s not-yet-ruined Champions League — promises to be enthralling. My money would be on Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester, in that order, but it’s so close that it wouldn’t be much of my money.CorrespondenceOnly space for one, this week, from Charles Knights. “I’m trying to figure out how much disappointment is warranted right now as a supporter of the United States,” he wrote. “How do you rate the U.S.A. men’s team’s failed attempts to qualify for Tokyo? There’s a lot of talk about the Olympics as a training ground for the next generation, but when I look at the U.S. squad, the next generation is playing senior friendlies in Europe.”This is only a personal perspective, Charles, and it is a distinctly European one: My view would, I think, be different if I was South American or African. But in the narrow context of soccer, I’m not convinced the Olympics matter particularly.The United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. Honduras is going to its fourth in a row.Refugio Ruiz/Getty ImagesIt is special for the players to win a gold medal, of course, particularly when it at least rivals the high-point of that country’s soccer achievements thus far (Nigeria in 1996, Cameroon in 2000, Mexico in 2012) or when it is Argentina (2004 and 2008), and the World Cup brings nothing but misery.But in terms of being used a signpost for greater things to come? In men’s soccer, no, not really. Put it this way: I had to check who won the gold at Rio in 2016. Turns out it was Brazil! They must have enjoyed that. It probably didn’t make up for what happened in a different tournament on home soil a couple of years earlier.Women’s soccer, of course, has historically placed much more importance on it — the cover of Abby Wambach’s autobiography describes her as a gold medalist, rather than a World Cup winner — but I wonder if that, too, will change with the increased focus on the Women’s World Cup. More