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      You Decide Which Games Matter

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      The F.A. Cup and the Conference League have meaning not because of tradition or design, but when the players, and particularly the fans, decide they are important.Only a little more than a year ago, the Europa Conference League was still just an idea. It did not, in truth, even seem like an especially good idea. Explaining where such a league would fit into the game’s pecking order, what its purpose would be, hardly had the making of a compelling elevator pitch.Europe already had two continental tournaments: the wildly popular Champions League and the broadly tolerated Europa League. Why not add a third, then — one that encompassed all of the teams that were not quite good enough to qualify for the other two competitions?Why not advertise this new tournament as a way to make European soccer more “inclusive,” a prize available to the sort of teams that have been locked out of major finals for decades? And make sure to include a single, resentful representative from each of the powerhouse leagues of western Europe? And how about a long, cumbersome and deeply unappealing name?And yet, though the Conference League as a concept seemed nothing short of folly, the sort of notion that could only be conjured up by a stifling and self-important bureaucracy, we are rapidly approaching the point where we have to acknowledge the improbable: It is, as it turned out, a good idea.Its games are competitive. Its stadiums are full, or close enough. The teams involved, even the ones that might have been expected to view this new league as an encumbrance, are sufficiently invested in the idea of winning it. There has been at least one angry encounter in a tunnel, the sure sign of a competition with meaning.Countries that have for years had precious little interest in the final stages of Europe’s showpiece tournaments have found themselves enjoying the best kind of soccer: winner-take-all in the springtime. Even those fans who initially saw the Conference League as a money-grab, a consolation prize and — worst of all — an entirely artificial construct have been won over.That unexpected, immediate success is intriguing. The prime charge against the Conference League — as it always is against any newfangled competition — was that it lacked history and therefore could not possibly have any purpose, authenticity or heft.Roma fans after their team beat Bodo/Glimt to advance to the Conference League semifinals.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockThe past is what soccer generally mines for meaning. Teams that win the Champions League or a domestic title are weighing themselves against all the teams that have gone before. By winning, these teams can etch their names in the pantheon of their predecessors.That the Conference League can matter to those involved without any of that history, though, suggests that meaning in soccer does not function quite as we have assumed it does.Value is not an innate thing. The Champions League does not carry more weight than any other tournament by divine right. It will not always necessarily be seen as the game’s highest peak; its beginnings, too, were accompanied by such considerable skepticism that the English decided, initially, not to deign it with their presence.Nor can significance be reliably measured in pounds, dollars and euros. The Champions League is not the most important tournament because it is the most lucrative; it is the most lucrative because it is the most important. Someone — probably SoftBank, if we’re honest — could launch a far richer competition at any point but would not make it more meaningful.No, value is not inherent. Rather, it is applied. It is a form of cultural convention, a tacit agreement among players and coaches and executives and, particularly, among fans: We determine which tournaments matter.The Champions League’s power lies, in part, in its stars and history.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThe Conference League illustrates that axiom perfectly. The tournament is important because those involved have decreed it to be important.So, too, in reverse, goes the fate of the F.A. Cup. Anyone who has ever spoken with an English soccer fan of a particular vintage will know that there once was a time when the F.A. Cup final was the highlight of the season.The buildup started hours before kickoff. Fans streamed down by train, car and horse-and-cart by the thousands, ribbons tied to their lapels, hands clasping rattles, just to be on Wembley Way to watch their heroes. To win the cup was, the myth goes, better than winning the league because the whole country watched the cup final.Myth is, perhaps, a touch harsh. As recently as the mid-1990s, the day of the F.A. Cup final was the centerpiece of the English soccer calendar. For years, it was the only game regularly broadcast on television. It was a more widely accessible occasion, and therefore a more memorable one.Mythical or not, the F.A. Cup’s status has diminished over the last three decades. The cup no longer matters quite so much as it once did, not because the competition has changed — it has not — but because the circumstances around it have.The creation of the Premier League necessitated proclaiming that competition’s significance at the expense of almost everything else, and after a while, the propaganda became self-fulfilling. Soccer’s natural order shaped itself around the league. The F.A. Cup became an afterthought.The Premier League, too, heralded the dawn of soccer as a televised product; the cup would no longer be exceptional merely because it was broadcast. At the same time, the game’s increased internationalism and the advent of the Champions League made Europe a priority for more teams than ever before and a richer prize, too. The F.A. Cup got a little lost in the mayhem.Liverpool and Manchester City, fresh off a meeting in the league, will renew their rivalry in an F.A. Cup semifinal on Saturday.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is not to say that, from the perspective of 2022, the F.A. Cup does not matter, or that it does not produce drama, romance, intrigue or glory. The competition does on all fronts. But its value relative to the rest of the game has been reduced, both for those involved with the games and those watching them.A competition’s meaning is not fixed. It can rise and fall, depending on our tastes. The game — that uneasy alliance of all of those who play and watch and run and love soccer — decides what matters.The Europa Conference League is a useful reminder. It might easily have failed, had the cynicism of the major European leagues — the ones who believe that all anybody wants is to watch the same teams play each other, over and over again, in various combinations — proved infectious. That it has thrived is not simply because it was a good idea. It is because we accepted that it was a good idea and because we decided that it mattered.Emotional IncontinenceKenny Shiels should probably rethink a few things. Liam Mcburney/Press Association, via Associated PressWe are, you will have noticed, in the future these days. You can tell because there is Wi-Fi on planes now. There is an app on your phone that lets you read any language under the sun, as in Star Trek, up to and including Welsh. There are electric cars on the road and countless, pointless NFTs and an ever-rolling culture war seemingly designed to splinter society because nobody ever guaranteed that the future would be good.And yet, for all that — despite the undeniable fact that it is 2022 — this week Kenny Shiels, a man employed as the coach of Northern Ireland’s women’s team, seemed to suggest that his players found it harder to respond to conceding a goal than a men’s team would because women are more “emotional” than men.Now, obviously, this is an offensive, absurd thing to say. It is self-evidently sexist and the perpetuation of a harmful stereotype by someone in a position of power and authority. It does not, really, suggest that Shiels is in quite the right job.But there is one question that is, perhaps, worth addressing. Has Shiels — a former player and the son of a former player — ever seen any men’s soccer?Has he not witnessed the histrionics, the performed outrage and the screeching hyperbole that accompanies every single result, good or bad; the gimlet-eyed fury of managers who feel they have been wronged; the overwrought celebrations that accompany the scoring of a simple tap-in or the garment-rending that follows the conceding of an avoidable goal?And if he has, has he never stopped and wondered if maybe the better question is whether men are too emotional for this game?What You May Have MissedSpeaking of histrionics: Manchester City edged Atlético Madrid on Wednesday night, not by rising above its opponent’s fabled cynicism but by matching it. “No team in the world is as good at this as Atlético,” the City coach, Pep Guardiola, said. His players did a decent impression, though, and for that they deserve credit.That game was, however, only the third most compelling story of the quarterfinals. Villarreal, written off as no-hopers before the last 16, let alone the final eight, snatched a late equalizer to eliminate Bayern Munich; Real Madrid, meanwhile, emerged triumphant from an evening of two comebacks against Chelsea, a game that instantly warrants a place in the ranks of modern Champions League classics.Étienne Capoue, center, and Villarreal are the surprise of the Champions League.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMore warranting of an emotional response is the story of the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk. That the team has been unable to return to its home city for years — ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — has slowly become one of those strange circumstances that European soccer just kind of accepts.Shakhtar has used Lviv, Kharkiv and, most recently, Kyiv as its residence-in-exile, and after a while everyone seemed to accept that rootlessness: Oh yes, Shakhtar is at home in the Champions League again, hundreds of miles from home.Now, as my colleague Tariq Panja noted, the club has been displaced again, this time to Istanbul, where its first team trained after leaving Ukraine, and to the Croatian city of Split, where its academy players have found shelter after the outbreak of war, once again. Central to organizing that offer of sanctuary was the club’s Croatian technical director, Darijo Srna (who ranks, as it happens, among my top 20 favorite players of all time).Srna knows some of what his young charges are going through. His life was interrupted by war in his homeland, too, when he was roughly the same age as some of them are now. His account of what the team has been through is well worth your time.CorrespondenceFirst of all, thanks to Daniel Shultz for expressing in precisely three sentences what it took me an entire column to outline.“The thing that blows my mind about the idea of every Champions League game being an event on the scale of the Super Bowl is that there is only one Super Bowl every year,” he wrote. “The N.F.L. doesn’t try to hype every football game like the Super Bowl. Do the powers-that-be in soccer have no concept of the value of scarcity?”A couple of you, meanwhile, followed up on last week’s column about Daniel Jeandupeux and the seismic effect of the backpass rule by pointing out other rule changes that deserve just a little bit of credit for forging the sport as we see it today.Henry Schultz suggested that the gradual — rather than overnight — change in what sort of tackles were and were not permitted slowly allowed a more technical approach to the game to flourish. “What little I remember of the 1990 World Cup final was the German players mobbing Diego Maradona with everything short of closed fists,” he wrote.Seamus Malin, on the other hand, highlighted the impact of increasing the incentive for victory. “Around the same time” as the backpass change, he reminds us, “the amount of points teams got for winning went from two to three, making the difference between a draw and a win more significant.”England was ahead of the curve in this rare case: The Football League introduced three points for a win in 1981, at the instigation of another relatively unlikely soccer visionary, the former player, coach and commentator Jimmy Hill. Not until 1994 did the World Cup adopt the measure, and it was another year still before FIFA officially got on board.Perhaps, in time, we will come to see Anthony Jackson’s suggestion as no less influential. “As I watch the end of a thrilling Real Madrid game against Chelsea and grow tired of the incessant time-wasting by tired Real players, I’ve had an idea,” he wrote. “In the final 10 minutes of each half, the clock stops for all stoppages. No more injury time. Just players playing the full 10 minutes of ball in action.”Doing so would not necessarily stop time-wasting, sadly. There would still be value in interrupting the momentum of your opponent, in ensuring that the final few minutes lacked fluency and rhythm. Besides, as the backless rule proves: Predicting where change will lead is not always easy. Often, its effects are unexpected. More

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      Manchester City Ties Liverpool, Defending Its Turf and Its Lead

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      In a Premier League season of the finest margins, four goals add to the drama but don’t change the title math for Pep Guardiola and Manchester City.MANCHESTER, England — Midway through the second half, as the game on which a season hung started to build in a nerve-shredding, pulse-straining crescendo, Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold found himself waiting to take a throw-in within a couple of feet of Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager.Ordinarily, in these circumstances, the conventions of rivalry dictate that the two adversaries must studiously ignore each other’s presence. The manager offers instruction to someone standing in the opposite direction. The player averts his gaze, lest acknowledgment be mistaken for treachery.Guardiola, though, has little truck with convention. With Sunday’s game paused for an injury, he sidled over to Alexander-Arnold, draped his arm over his shoulder and initiated what can only be described as a chat. He was, as he always is, somewhere between animated and agitated, but there was a broad grin on his face, genuine affection in his gestures. It was unmistakable: In the game with everything on the line, Guardiola was enjoying himself.City’s Pep Guardiola and Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold defusing the tension, if only for a moment.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesThat should not, really, be surprising. The meeting of indisputably the best and second-best teams in England — order yet to be determined — and most likely the best and second-best teams on the planet, had produced an abundance of things to enjoy. The goals, of course: four of them evenly shared in a 2-2 tie, each of them brilliantly conceived and surgically executed. And the chances, too, the majority of them falling to City, all spun out of golden thread.All of that, though, was simply the product. The greater satisfaction, perhaps, was in the process, the compelling ebb and flow of two finely balanced forces, a high-speed, high-caliber call and response. City pressed Liverpool, breaking its rhythm, triggering errors. Liverpool withstood the onslaught, drawing the sting and striking back. City twice took the lead, through Kevin De Bruyne and Gabriel Jesus; Liverpool twice picked its way back, through Diogo Jota and Sadio Mané.That is not, though, the sort of thing that is supposed to appeal to a coach, particularly with quite so much on the line. This game had been pinpointed, months ago, as the one that would decide the Premier League title. As the season rolled on and rivals fell away, its significance had only grown.Manchester City is chasing a domestic and European treble. Liverpool can still, in theory, complete a clean sweep, winning all four of the trophies available to Jürgen Klopp and his team. This game had the air, from the outside, of the moment on which all of that would stand or fall. It was only after this that all that had gone before would have any meaning, any consequence.With all of that at stake, though, there was Guardiola, smiling away, laughing and joking with Alexander-Arnold as if he did not have a care in the world. Perhaps it was some sort of subtle psychological warfare. Perhaps he was trying to gain some sort of edge, to distract and discombobulate his opponent.Or perhaps Guardiola sincerely relished the experience, the chance to see if he could kill off the challenge — for now, at least — of Klopp, the coach he has described as the greatest rival of his career, and Liverpool, the team he has called, in the most complimentary terms imaginable, a “pain” in a particularly sensitive area.Most of the time, after all, Guardiola finds himself forced to try to unpluck the massed ranks of a defense, to overcome an opponent with little ambition and precious little hope. It is not every day that he finds a team willing to stand up to him, or capable of doing it.Or perhaps he knew that the day that had been declared decisive would not decide anything. Half an hour or so later, after all, the final whistle had blown on the 2-2 draw and everything remained as it was. Both teams stood where they had before. Manchester City, which now has seven games to play in the Premier League, has one point more than Liverpool, just as it had at the start of the day.It might have been better, of course: After 30 games and 94 minutes of the Premier League season, City’s Riyad Mahrez had found himself on the edge of the Liverpool penalty area, the ball at his feet and Alisson, the visiting goalkeeper, stranded. Mahrez seemed almost spoiled for choice. He attempted a deft lob, conjuring an artful parabola, but his calculations were off, just barely. The ball looped down, over the bar rather than under it, and the chance to win here, to stretch clear of Liverpool in the table, was gone.Who knows? In time, City may come to regret that miss. This is a Premier League season of the finest margins, and whichever of these teams wins the title, there will be precious little between them.But, for now, stasis was enough. Stasis, from Manchester City’s point of view, was acceptable. A sense of vindication, if not quite triumph, swept around the Etihad Stadium as the players stood on the turf, heaving breath back into their lungs. John Stones, the City defender, pumped a fist in the air.There was a feeling of one down, at least one more to go. These teams will meet again next weekend, in the semifinals of the F.A. Cup, and could yet find each other in Paris at the end of next month, with the Champions League trophy at stake. Guardiola, it is fair to say, probably would not enjoy that one quite so much.In the Premier League, though, Manchester City still has the advantage. For now, anyway. It is a slender one, but it is an advantage. Its fate is in its hands. Liverpool, by contrast, must rely on someone else to find a way to stop Guardiola’s juggernaut at some point between now and the end of May.City’s lead is a single point, and it has been earned over the course of nine long months. An entire season has gone into that single point. At the end, though, a single point is enough. When things are so finely poised, when there is so much to enjoy, a single point can be a chasm. More

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      For Liverpool and Manchester City, a Showdown With Consequences

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      Manchester City and Liverpool meet Sunday in the first of a series of collisions that could decide as many as three trophies. Neither team can be sure of what comes after that.MANCHESTER, England — Pep Guardiola lay on his bed in a Madrid hotel room, staring at the ceiling, contemplating his next move. He had already endured two sapping games, half a dozen choleric news conferences, more than a week of highly charged, thinly veiled animosity. He was exhausted and exasperated, and he was still only halfway through.In the space of 18 days in the spring of 2011, Guardiola’s Barcelona encountered José Mourinho’s Real Madrid four times across three competitions. There was a clásico in the Spanish league. There was a clásico in the final of the Copa del Rey. There was a pair of clásicos, home and away, in the semifinals of the Champions League.It was not the games, though, that drove Guardiola to the sanctuary of his room. The games, if anything, were a release, a blessed respite from the endless rancor, the pervasive friction of Mourinho’s total psychological war. Guardiola knew he was being tricked into losing his cool, being sucked into a fight he could neither avoid nor win.In retrospect, those 18 days — captured by the Italian journalist Paolo Condo in his book “The Duellists,” — were the culmination of the defining rivalry of soccer in the early years of the 21st century, a clash of cultures that reverberated well beyond the long and vituperative shared history of Real Madrid and Barcelona.A series of four clásicos in 18 days in 2011, games that featured Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and layers of drama, were a seminal moment for soccer of that era. Photo by Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty ImagesIt was not just the clásico. It was not just Lionel Messi against Cristiano Ronaldo. It was not just Guardiola against Mourinho, the finest managers in the world. It was two competing visions, two contrasting styles, two opposing forces: the creator against the cynic, the light against the dark.In the immediate aftermath, it was Guardiola who had the air of the victor. He did lose his cool, as Mourinho had hoped, and Barcelona did lose the Copa del Rey final. But Barcelona won both the league and the Champions League that year. Hindsight, though, would suggest all of that came at a cost for both men.A year later, Mourinho finally claimed a Spanish title. It would prove to be the high-water mark of his time in Spain and the end of his decade of greatness (though he would claim a couple of championships elsewhere). Something changed in Mourinho after Real Madrid. His fire never burned as brightly.Guardiola, too, bore the scars. He left Barcelona in 2012, drained and weary. He could not, he said, go on. He needed a break. Mourinho was not solely responsible for that fatigue, but it is hard to believe that the intensity of the rivalry was not a significant factor in it. It took Guardiola a year’s sabbatical in New York for him to refuel.Now, more than a decade later, he could be forgiven for hearing distinct echoes of 2011. Over the next seven days, Guardiola’s latest masterpiece, the Manchester City team he has guided to three Premier League titles in four years, will face its greatest — and only — domestic challenger, Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, twice, across two competitions.Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, professional admirers but not friends in the truest sense. Jason Cairnduff/ReutersFirst, on Sunday, the teams will meet in the Premier League at the Etihad, in a game that will likely decide England’s next champion. Next Saturday, they will face off again, this time at Wembley in the semifinals of the F.A. Cup. Both matches may well prove a prelude to a third, altogether more epochal meeting: Liverpool and City are favorites to reach the Champions League final on May 28 in Paris.The parallel with those 18 days in Spain, of course, is not perfect. Manchester City and Liverpool have fostered a fierce rivalry in recent years, but it lacks the depth and the context of the clásico. Its tendrils do not stretch back decades, nor is it bound up with questions of politics and history and, particularly, national identity.Likewise, Guardiola and Klopp do not have the same combustible chemistry that Guardiola and Mourinho did. It would be a stretch to say they are friends, but, almost a decade after they first ran into each other in Germany, they remain cordial. In 2020, Guardiola called Klopp in the small hours of the morning to congratulate him on winning the Premier League. Klopp describes Guardiola as the best coach in the world at every opportunity.Many of the other ingredients, though, are present. Just as with Real Madrid and Barcelona, everything rides on games between these two clubs. One of these teams will win the Premier League. One of them will go into the F.A. Cup final as the heavy favorite. Only Bayern Munich might be considered a peer in the Champions League.Both coaches have done what they can to quash the idea, but both are perceived as chasing multiples of glory: City, a domestic and European treble, last achieved by an English team in 1999; and Liverpool, an unprecedented and, in reality, improbable sweep of all four trophies available to them. Their meetings are, in that light, the whole ballgame.Liverpool and Manchester City fans at a Champions League in 2018. The teams could still meet in the competition this year.Anthony Devlin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat their aims are so lofty illustrates that Liverpool and City can reasonably be regarded as the best two teams on the planet — Bayern alone may have the right to quibble with that assessment — just as Real Madrid and Barcelona could be in 2011. They are again led by the two finest coaches of their generation, the two minds who have done more than anyone else to define and distill what elite soccer will look like in the 2020s, the two scions of two great schools of thought. The rivalry of City and Liverpool does not have roots in the past. But it does encapsulate the present.The absence of overt institutional hostility between the clubs, meanwhile, should not be mistaken for affection. The schism that runs between Manchester City and Liverpool can feel superficial, almost confected, a friction that is performed out of instinct rather than something heartfelt. But it is not.There have been a series of flashpoints, ordinarily deemed serious transgressions by one side and dismissed as petty by the other: City’s complaint at the improper accessing of its recruitment software by Liverpool’s staff in 2013, an offense for which Liverpool paid £1 million ($1.3 million) in compensation; City’s team bus being pelted with bottles on arrival at Anfield in 2018; Liverpool’s annoyance at a 2019 video of City’s players adopting a terrace chant referring to its rival as “victims of it all,” an insult that is often associated with the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, which caused the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans.All of these events, though, are rooted in a deep-seated clash of competing corporate philosophies. Liverpool’s hierarchy believes that Manchester City’s primacy has been achieved through a form of financial doping — as highlighted most recently by another cache of leaked documents published in Der Spiegel. Manchester City’s executives, in turn, see Liverpool as the prime example of a longstanding cartel that feels threatened by the emergence of genuine competition.The same can be said of the coaches. Klopp and Guardiola’s mutual admiration should not make one forget the intensity of competition between them.Guardiola and Klopp rare disguise their emotions on the touch line.David Klein/ReutersIn a scene in “All Or Nothing,” the documentary that followed City’s victorious Premier League campaign in 2018, Guardiola and his coaching staff discuss the threat posed by Liverpool’s famed front three. That, in itself, is not especially remarkable. What stands out is that they are doing it in the changing room at Goodison Park, a few minutes before a game against Everton.Guardiola has never made much secret of his focus on Liverpool. That same year, he told a seminar at the city’s university that he did not read many books these days, because after a few minutes of trying his mind would wander to “Jürgen Klopp and Liverpool.”Earlier this year, with City apparently sitting on a comfortable lead at the top of the Premier League, he was asked if anyone could catch his team. Of course, he replied: Liverpool. “They are always there,” he said. “They’re a pain.” On Friday, he described Klopp as the “greatest rival” of his career.“When I retire and I’m playing golf, I will look back on Liverpool as the hardest opponent I faced, without doubt,” Guardiola said.For the last four years, the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester City, between Klopp and Guardiola, has defined English soccer. The next seven days — and perhaps the next six weeks — may decide how its story is told in years to come. As Guardiola knows from personal experience, though, that level of competition leaves its mark. It is entirely possible that, when it has all come to an end, neither coach, and neither team, will quite be the same again. More

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      Can Liverpool and City Win When the Bar Is Set Too High?

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      The Premier League leaders will compete for three high-profile trophies this spring. But does failing to win them all turn a great season into a bad one?Manchester City had everything ready. A few days before the 2019 F.A. Cup final, the club’s executives had already mapped out the route for the victory parade. They had booked the open-top bus. They had arranged a whole day of festivities. They were well aware it was tempting fate, but they had no choice: These things, after all, take time and planning.Besides, whatever happened against Watford at Wembley, there would be plenty to celebrate. Pep Guardiola’s team had won the Carabao Cup, the first and the least of England’s domestic priorities, a couple months earlier. The previous week, it had seen off the spirited challenge of Liverpool to retain the Premier League title. The F.A. Cup would complete the set.The only thing left to decide was how to brand the achievement. Everything needs a name these days. Everything needs a hashtag. The previous year, it had been easy. Then, City had become the first team in English history to claim 100 points in a single season; the players who had done it were crowned not just champions, but Centurions, too.They were now on the cusp of following that with an even more impressive feat: becoming the first side in English history to win a domestic treble, a clean sweep of the league title and both cup competitions.Inside the club, though, there were qualms about using that word — treble — too loudly. Some executives feared it was too closely associated with Manchester United’s 1999 team, the one that won the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League. Needing to qualify City’s treble as “domestic” might, they worried, cheapen it somehow.Ferran Soriano, City’s domineering chief executive, felt there was another problem. City, he was adamant, would have four trophies to parade. It had, back in August, won the Community Shield, too. That the traditional curtain-raiser for the English season is, in effect, a preseason friendly with some fireworks at the end of it did not deter him. It was a trophy, Soriano said. City should celebrate it. He even had the nomenclature ready: the Fourmidables.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was more than a little unease at the suggestion. Several City executives cautioned that including the Community Shield would expose the club to accusations of résumé padding that were, in the circumstances, entirely unnecessary. Soriano, though, would not be swayed. Crucially, he had Guardiola’s support, too. A couple of days later, after City won the final, its bus picked its way through the streets of Manchester, the word “Fourmidables” plastered on its side.That Soriano was willing to ignore the concerns of his colleagues and subordinates, and withstand the allegations of hubris from rival fans, is instructive. Whatever else he might be — visionary, maverick, the sort of person one can imagine self-identifying as a “disrupter” — Soriano has an instinctive understanding of modern soccer. And in modern soccer, he knows, glory is measured in bulk.In the month or so since Liverpool lifted this season’s Carabao Cup, Jürgen Klopp has fielded questions about whether his team can win a “quadruple” — all of England’s domestic competitions, plus the Champions League — on an almost weekly basis. He has dismissed them equally frequently. “We are not even close to thinking about crazy stuff like that,” he said last month.Guardiola will know the feeling. He, too, has been peppered with questions — certainly since the turn of the year, if not before — about whether this edition of Manchester City can claim another treble this season, one that does not require the geographical qualifier. He, too, has done what he can to minimize expectations. “I try to say to the club ‘enjoy these moments during the season’,” he said. “Don’t wait to win the Premier League, the Champions League or the F.A. Cup to be happy. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the moment.”Once you’ve won the league, does the Carabao Cup measure up?Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is not hard to trace the roots of this obsession with doubles and trebles and, now, quadruples: In several leagues across Europe, the superclub era of the last decade or so has rendered winning a single league title essentially meaningless for the likes of Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich and — until its self-inflicted implosion — Juventus.Their domestic leagues are so hopelessly unbalanced that the destiny of the championship is rarely in any real doubt. With that trophy essentially preordained, they are left to find other targets. That may be a streak — picking up nine or 10 titles in a row — or it may be supplementing it with a glut of other prizes. Failure to do so can, with increasing frequency, cost a manager their job.That has, slowly, turned this into soccer’s age of the multiplicative. When Manchester United won its treble in 1999, it was the only team in any of what we now think of as Europe’s top five leagues to have done so (though Celtic, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven had all pulled it off previously). Since 2010, it has happened five times. Barcelona and Bayern have both done it twice.Domestic doubles — winning the league and the (main) domestic cup in the same season — are now so commonplace that they pass almost without notice: five for Bayern and four for Juventus and P.S.G. in the last 10 years, as well as three for Barcelona.The landscape in England, of course, is different. Competition between the country’s Big Six means City is the only team to have done the double since 2010. But its superclubs are not immune to the broader trend. For them, too, the currency of greatness is no longer primacy, but dominance.Liverpool and Manchester City will meet in the Premier League and the F.A. Cup in April, and could square off in the Champions League after that.Andrew Yates/EPA, via ShutterstockThat approach, though, carries with it an attendant danger, the risk that great teams — teams that have enjoyed remarkable success, that rank among the strongest the Premier League has ever seen — will somehow find themselves cast as failures: not for not winning, but for not winning enough.The final eight weeks or so of the Premier League season has long been set up as a battle between Liverpool, pursuing a quadruple, and Manchester City, chasing a treble. As they are already set to meet directly in two of those competitions over the coming weeks, both of them, by definition, cannot succeed. The likelihood, even at this late stage, remains that neither of them will.That raises the prospect of two teams, each with trophies to display and achievements to celebrate, being told to look back on their seasons with regret. If Manchester City wins only the Premier League, would that represent disappointment? It should not, of course, but in an era defined by a gluttony for glory, it might be presented — or even feel — like an anticlimax.What if Liverpool emerges from this campaign with only two domestic cups? Is that enough? Klopp’s team would have missed out on the two trophies that it most covets, of course, but that is not quite the same thing as falling short. If the only true victory is one that is total, all-conquering, absolute, then it suggests the bar has been set a little too high, that we have somehow concocted a world in which even success can be dressed up as failure.The Ignorance of IsolationQatar is expected to be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup.Franklin Jacome/Pool Via ReutersBy the time Argentina next takes to the field — at Wembley, for a meeting with the reigning European champion, Italy — it will be nearing three years since it last lost a game. Since succumbing to Brazil in the 2019 Copa América, Lionel Scaloni’s side’s only defeat has come against Sao Paulo’s health authorities. Other than that, it is played 31, won 20, drawn 11.It is, without doubt, the sort of record that should stir Argentine souls ahead of a World Cup that has particular resonance: 2022 will, after all, likely prove to be Lionel Messi’s final bow in an Argentina jersey, his last chance to emulate Diego Maradona and carry his country to the greatest prize of all.But it must still come with a caveat. That meeting with Italy — the so-called Finalissima — will be the first time Argentina has faced a European opponent since drawing with Germany in October 2019. Its run, these past few years, has been a distinctly local affair, built and made in South America.Brazil, as it happens, is in much the same boat. Since losing to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup quarterfinals, Tite’s side has faced only one European team — the Czech Republic — and that, too, was three years ago. Brazil is currently rated as the favorite to win the World Cup, a status that is based almost exclusively on its ability to beat the same South American teams over and over again.Brazil breezed through World Cup qualifying. But the World Cup may end differently.Silvia Izquierdo/Associated PressThat sudden isolation, of course, is partly linked to the coronavirus pandemic, but it is also connected to the rise of the Nations League in Europe and the exigencies of South America’s endless round of World Cup qualifying and Copas América. There has, since 2019, been very little chance to play friendlies.But as the World Cup draws closer, that absence of varied competition leads to a sense of ignorance. We can be sure that Argentina (which drew Mexico, Poland and Saudi Arabia on Friday) and Brazil (which will play Switzerland, Serbia and Cameroon in Qatar) are competitive in South America. We can have no idea at all how they will hold up against the European teams that both must overcome to emerge triumphant in Qatar.Three Euro-Centric World Cup PredictionsBelgium sits right behind Brazil in the world rankings.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is no question that soccer’s approach to draws is, deep down, extremely ludicrous. All of the pomp and the ceremony, the droning speeches and the self-importance, the window dressing and the time-wasting, all for the very simple act of some men in the warm embrace of middle age pulling pieces of paper from a bag.At the same time, though, Friday’s World Cup draw is extremely important in a way that we do not, perhaps, acknowledge as much as we should. The order in which names are flourished by a selection of soccer’s great and easily booked will not, perhaps, determine who wins the World Cup. But it will go a long way to deciding the fates of a whole clutch of teams.A kind group, for example, might make the difference between Senegal’s making the quarterfinals, or exiting after the first 10 days. A difficult one might cost Gregg Berhalter his job. It might turn Ecuador into the story of the tournament, or the Netherlands into a laughingstock. Random chance matters.It also, of course, makes it very difficult to guess at what might happen in Qatar this winter. Still, there is no harm in trying.1. A European team will win the tournament. It is now 20 years since a South American side (Brazil) won the World Cup, and only one team from the continent — Argentina — has made the final since. The balance of power has shifted in favor of the industrialized youth development systems of western Europe, and it is, sadly, hard to see that changing.Kylian Mbappé and France are chasing a second straight world title.Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via Shutterstock2. The surprise packages will not be much of a surprise at all: They will, instead, be the teams with the greatest concentration of players drawn from Europe’s major leagues. Those sides drawn from domestic competitions — Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Qatar — will struggle to make an impact.3. For the (relative) minnows and the makeweights, firepower will be the difference. Outside of the traditional elite, very few teams can call on high-caliber forwards. Those that can, like Morocco and Iran, will have an invaluable edge.CorrespondenceWorkers inside Qatar’s 80,000-seat Lusail stadium. It will host the World Cup final in December.David Ramos/Getty ImagesA note from Alan Goldhammer, whose surname remains the single greatest thing about this correspondence section, on an issue that we will confront over the next eight months. “I will not watch matches played in stadiums built largely by ‘slave’ labor,” he wrote. “It might be a minority view, but it was a decision that I arrived at 18 months ago and it did not require a great deal of thinking. I am sure the World Cup will have a giant viewership. That viewership will be diminished by one and I would hope many more.”If that applies to you, too, I would be interested in hearing from you. It is something we all have to be conscious of, whether we engage with the World Cup as fans, as journalists, or even as players: To what extent is that interaction a form of complicity?Paul Rosenberg, meanwhile, wants to know if there is “any shock comparable to Italy’s loss against North Macedonia?” In World Cup finals, the answer to that is yes: France’s losing to Senegal in 2002 and North Korea’s win over Italy in 1966, among several others. For qualifying, it is a little trickier, but I would suggest Ireland’s beating the Dutch to reach the 2002 World Cup might be up there.And, of course, there had to be someone who would leap to the defense of deep-dish pizza. (This was genuinely the first email that appeared in my inbox after last week’s newsletter; it obviously cut deep.) That someone was Rich Johnson. “I must express my deep disappointment at your recent pejorative characterization of deep dish pizza,” he wrote. “As a Chicago native, I can tell you that the only thing better than deep dish pizza is stuffed pizza, which is perhaps the perfect meal.”It may or may not be the perfect meal, but a stuffed pizza — like a deep-dish pizza — is not actually a pizza. More

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      In the Premier League, There’s No Looking Back

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      England’s clubs are plowing ahead with their holiday schedule. But amid questions about Omicron and fairness, do they really have a choice?And so on we roll, heads down and teeth gritted, grimly determined to reach the other side, wherever and whenever that might be found. The Premier League had planned to stage a full suite of games on Boxing Day, but as you read this sentence, its best hope is still just to get through as many of them as it can. In midweek, it will try to do it all again, and then, after ringing in the New Year, once more for good measure.That is the plan, anyway. Nobody truly believes it will play out like that. Last weekend, the division lost more than half its schedule to Covid outbreaks. At least one more match, Chelsea’s visit to Wolves, took place despite a request from Chelsea to postpone it because of a rising case count. On Thursday, it lost two more.The chances that every single one of the 30 top-flight games stuffed into England’s holiday season would be completed were always slim. There will be more contagion, more positive tests, more players self-isolating, more games canceled at short notice, more fans left suddenly adrift in unfamiliar town centers, facing an empty afternoon and a long journey home.But as far as the league and its constituent clubs could see, there was no other choice. When they sat down virtually on Monday to discuss how — and if — to proceed, they had three options. One was to play on. One was to reduce the workload from three games in a week to two. The other was to shut down, indefinitely, until the Omicron surge abates.Instinctively, it is easy to assume that the Premier League has done what it always does: followed the money. Boxing Day — and the rest of what is contractually known as “the busy festive period” — is in many ways the centerpiece of English soccer’s calendar. It functions as a test of nerve as much as a test of strength; it is when contenders separate themselves from also-rans, when the outline of the season’s conclusion begins to be mapped out.The Premier League race may hinge on health as much as much as on form.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd while it is a tradition England cherishes and its rivals envy — the Premier League’s success is the reason that Italy’s Serie A, in recent years, has toyed with the idea of playing games the day after Christmas — it is also lucrative broadcasting.Not just because there is a captive audience at home, waiting to be sold things in commercial breaks, but because much of the rest of life — even in times less strange and unnerving than this — is on hold. The Premier League, soccer as a whole, gets to be just where it likes to be: front and center, the only show in town. Ultimately, it was never going to vacate that slot, not voluntarily.But that reading is, in truth, a little unfair. Neither of the available alternatives could be considered a right answer. Shutting down indefinitely — an idea that attracted no advocates in that virtual meeting — might feel like the moral choice, but it is not something that has been asked of any other industry. It also raises the question of how, precisely, you start again.There was more support for easing the burden, for allowing each club to postpone one of its three fixtures. Liverpool, among others, spoke in favor of that in private, just as its manager, Jürgen Klopp, has done in public. A couple of days later, the Liverpool captain, Jordan Henderson, made the valid point that nobody seems to have thought about asking the players what they want to do.The counterargument, though, was not without its merits. The Premier League is already facing a severe backlog of games — both Tottenham and Burnley have played three games fewer than some of their rivals — and there is a distinct shortage of space to fit them back in. Adding another whole round of games to that would create a logistical headache.The Champions League fate of West Ham, and of Tottenham, could be decided by the results of several rescheduled Spurs games next year.David Klein/ReutersOf course, to some extent this is the Premier League engaging in its favorite pastime: kicking the can down the road. This is an organization, we should not forget, that was beset by factionalism and fury over what to do with one season interrupted by a pandemic but did not think it worth it, in the aftermath, to draw up a protocol about what to do should another season be interrupted by the exact same pandemic. Thinking ahead is not, if we are honest, a strong suit.Deciding to play on does not preclude more postponements, more games to fit in to an overstuffed calendar drawn up by a whole range of organizations apparently unable to see beyond their own immediate requirements. Further cancellations and complications are almost inevitable. The Premier League is, effectively, simply gambling that there will be fewer than 10, that this is the least bad option.That approach comes with a cost, though. One of sport’s most abiding myths is that the league table does not lie. Every team plays each other home and away and, at the end of the season, all of the fluctuations of fate — the injury crises and the rotten luck and the good fortune and the decision not to send off Harry Kane — are evened out, and a true and, crucially, fair order of merit is established.It is a pretty fantasy, but it is a fantasy nonetheless. A league season is not inherently fair. It is simply unfair in a way that we, as a soccer culture, are prepared to tolerate.It is not, for example, entirely fair that Watford was able to play Newcastle United at home at a time when Newcastle’s squad was a ragtag bunch of journeymen. Three of Newcastle’s direct rivals for relegation — Leeds, Burnley and Norwich — have to play Newcastle at home after it has had a chance to inject $200 million into its team in the January transfer window. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the vagaries of the fixture schedule may determine which of those teams goes down.It is not entirely fair that teams can fire an underperforming manager at any point in the season — in a way not possible with players — giving their subsequent opponents a more challenging encounter than their previous ones, or that some teams get more rest between games than others.That is not to complain; these are trivial inequities, especially when compared with things like the vast financial chasm that exists between teams in the same league. It is simply to point out that no league season can be truly, unwaveringly, incontestably fair, and that it is something we can all accept.Just like fans, Pep Guardiola and his players now face Covid-19 checks at the stadium door.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThe problem with the Premier League’s decision to push through as best it can, commanding that any and every club with enough uninfected players to fill a team and the requisite number of substitutes must play on, canceling some games but continuing with others, is that it adds an extra — and perhaps excessive — level of competitive distortion.Tottenham, without question, will suffer for having to make up the three games it lost to its Covid outbreak. There will be busy weeks in the spring, and fatigue may weigh heavy. But will it suffer more than — say — Chelsea, which had to play on despite the fact that its manager, Thomas Tuchel, made it very plain that he felt he did not have enough players?Does Tottenham not now have a better chance of winning those games than it would otherwise? And what would a team like Leeds make of that, given that it has a far longer list of absentees but has had to endure simply because they had not — at least until Thursday — been missing because of Covid?It is easy, at this point, to say that the teams at the summit of the Premier League all have enough players to cope, and indeed they do. There is no reason to feel sorry for the poor little rich boys. But what if it happens at the other end of the table? What if Burnley must play through, but Norwich gets to reset? What if it proves the difference between survival and relegation? What if it costs people their jobs? Not the players, but the support staff whose income is dependent on continued access to the wealth of the Premier League?There is, again, no correct answer here, though there are other solutions available. Perhaps clubs should be made to play on — unless they cannot guarantee the health and safety of the opposing team — with whatever group of players they can cobble together? That is the usual sporting punishment for missing players, as Leeds is busy discovering.Or perhaps, as is the case elsewhere, they should be punished for failing to fulfill their fixtures, for not adhering to the coronavirus protocols well enough? Maybe each team that cannot complete a game should just suffer a 3-0 defeat? And yet that, too, is hardly an advertisement for fairness.And so the Premier League has done the only thing it can think of: to hit and hope, to assume that when it emerges from the thick fog of winter there will be something on the other side. What shape it will take, what difference it will have made and what damage it might have done are questions that can wait for later. Until then, it will do what it has always done, plowing on regardless, into the current.CorrespondenceLet’s start with a suggestion from Jeffrey Hoffman as to how to keep UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, from making a huge mess of pulling some balls out of a pot. “Go back to a straight knockout tournament. No seeding. No country protections. No nothing. If Paris St.-Germain plays Manchester City in the first round, so be it. Win or go home.”Now this is, it has to be said, quite a popular idea with — let’s put this diplomatically — a certain demographic: those over 45. It is not, though, one I agree with. Randomness is a welcome addition to the Champions League, but too much randomness is not. It makes sense to try to funnel the best teams toward the final rounds. It just doesn’t make any sense to filter them once they are there.Lionel Messi and Paris St.-Germain are 13 points clear at the top of the Ligue 1 table, the largest Christmas gap in any of Europe’s top five leagues.Christophe Ena/Associated PressBrion Fox, meanwhile, picks up on the idea that there are too many penalties. “There are too many penalties,” he said, “because there are too many fouls. We have so many, they have their own lingo: professional fouls, tactical, strategic, lazy, aggressive, late. Players are criticized for not being tough enough to foul. Some players seem to be on the field solely to provoke fouls. Others, to satisfy the desire of those who seek to provoke. The lack of flow of the game, with the constant starts and stops, is why I prefer the women’s game.”To round this out, maybe there are too many fouls because there are too many things that are considered fouls? Maybe if we decided that some things weren’t really fouls, we could concentrate on eliminating the ones that definitely are? (Statistically, Brion is right: There are fewer fouls in women’s soccer. In England, for example, it’s currently 17.5 per game in the Women’s Super League and 20.2 in the Premier League. So the difference is not vast, but I’d agree it’s probably noticeable.)And because it’s Christmas, we will finish with these gifts to you: two absolutely perfect emails from the inbox this week. First, a prime example of the sort of correspondence I love — questioning and imaginative and beautifully put — from Connor Murphy:“What is the optimal shape of the penalty area? That it’s currently a rectangle seems likely to be nothing more than historical accident, a consequence of our infatuation with right angles. Is a foul just outside of the top of the box and right in the center of the goal more deserving of a penalty kick than one occurring on a goal line corner of the box?”(Great question, don’t know, maybe the shape of a partially deflated hot-air balloon?)The penalty area at Villa Park, still a rectangle. For now.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via ReutersAnd then there was this mildly confessional missive from Dan Portnoy. “My son and I, both low-level referees, jumped out of our seats on the Antonio Rüdiger foul. We’ve been saying for years that players on the edge of the box, heading away from the goal, don’t deserve a penalty, even though they do deserve something.“We’ve called for a referee judgment call as to whether a foul in the box deserves a penalty, or, as an alternative, a free kick from anywhere outside the box that the offended team chooses. When I’m refereeing and a foul happens near the edge of the box, I often award a free kick, not a penalty, declaring that it happened just outside the box (please don’t tell anyone).”Don’t worry, Dan, I won’t.That’s all for this week, and for next week, too, when we take our one newsletter break of the year. If you can’t wait two weeks to be heard, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with any hints, tips, complaints or ideas. Twitter can perform much the same function, of course. We’re looking back on the year for the Set Piece Menu podcast this week, first for good, and then for bad. The good episode is heartwarming. The bad one is more fun.For those of you who celebrate, have a great Christmas. For those that don’t, enjoy the fact that everything is a little quieter than normal. More

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      In Premier League, Fear and Falsehoods Fill Vaccination Gap

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      The report spread like wildfire. Premier League players shared the link among their peers. Some passed it to their family members and closest confidantes. A handful were sufficiently troubled by what it seemed to suggest that they presented it to their clubs’ in-house medical teams, seeking advice.It had been produced by a website that says it tracks the number of “young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021 after receiving one or more Covid vaccines.” The report claimed to list 19 “athletes” — mostly in the United States — who it said had experienced heart attacks after being inoculated. Some of the attacks, the site noted ominously, had been fatal.Almost immediately, the doctors and others spotted the glaring flaws in the research. One of the examples cited was Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player, who had died in January. He was 86. Another name on the list, a former N.B.A. player, had been 64. The most cursory research showed that many of the younger athletes, too, had documented, underlying conditions.But that did not matter. Nor did the fact that the report was subsequently and comprehensively debunked. It had made the soccer players question whether they should agree to be vaccinated. The damage, at least in the view of medical experts, had been done.These are not easy weeks for the Premier League, which is currently enduring a surge in virus cases, a glut of postponements — two more games were postponed on Thursday — and calls even from within its ranks to take at least a temporary pause in the season. Those troubles have placed its lagging vaccination record under fierce scrutiny, and prompted questions as to why the richest league in the world has had such trouble convincing its stars to get the shot.In one light, the league and its teams have had considerable success: The Premier League has released figures suggesting that 84 percent of its stars are on their “vaccination journey,” meaning they have had at least one of a potential three shots since becoming eligible in the spring. The remaining 16 percent, though — around 100 players — has become a cause of concern.The Premier League has said that 84 percent of its players have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. But that means 16 percent have not, making the league’s vaccination an outlier in soccer, and elite sports.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersSix of the 10 Premier League games scheduled to be played last weekend were postponed after clubs were struck by Covid outbreaks. At least one of those matches is reported to have been called off not because of a raft of positive tests, but because a number of unvaccinated players were self-isolating, as British law requires, after being identified as close contacts of a confirmed case.The lost weekend highlighted the Premier League’s struggle to keep its vaccination figures on par with the rest of Europe’s major domestic competitions, and other top sports leagues around the world.Serie A, the Italian top flight, has vaccinated 98 percent of its players. In France, the figure stands at 95 percent, and in Germany 94 percent — numbers on par with the N.F.L., N.B.A. and N.H.L. in North America. Spain’s soccer authorities reported that, taking into account both vaccination and naturally-acquired immunity, 97 percent of players were fully covered. The comparison with England, then, is stark: In the Premier League, only 77 percent of players have had two vaccinations.Establishing the reason for that divergence is not straightforward. The New York Times spoke with an array of players, advisers, executives, officials and medical staff members, most on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss private health matters. Those interviews painted a complex, inchoate portrait of why vaccine hesitancy has been allowed to become so embedded in the richest soccer league in the world.“It’s tough to say there is one thing,” said Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Britain’s players’ union. “It really is on a case-by-case basis.”Concern about possible side effects has, certainly, become widespread. A spate of recent, high-profile incidents involving players enduring heart problems while on the field — including Christian Eriksen, the Denmark midfielder who collapsed at last summer’s European Championship, and Sergio Agüero, the Barcelona striker who just retired — has fueled suspicion of the vaccines among some players.For athletes sensitive about anything they put into their bodies, even the debunked claims can still seem persuasive.Craig Brough/ReutersSome medical staff at clubs contend the suspicion has been encouraged by a handful of retired players — including the former England midfielder Matt Le Tissier and Trevor Sinclair, once of Manchester City and West Ham — who have publicly identified on-field incidents as a possible consequence of vaccination. That Eriksen had not been vaccinated when he collapsed on a field during the Euros in June has made little difference.But incidents involving others are far from the only source of skepticism. According to reporting by The Times, several players have expressed concern that the vaccine might reduce their sperm count, and a number of doctors revealed they had faced questions about links to decreased virility particularly after the musician Nicki Minaj tweeted that a family friend had suffered “swollen testicles” as a result of the vaccine. (Both theories are unfounded.)Molango suggested that some players may have “concerns around religion,” too. Earlier this year, the P.F.A. and the Premier League arranged for Jonathan Van Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer — who has regularly used soccer-themed metaphors during his public statements — to address the captains of the league’s 20 clubs in a bid to encourage more players to be vaccinated.During the meeting, he was asked if it was true the vaccines contained alcohol — a concern for Muslim players. He confirmed that the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was alcohol-free, but acknowledged that others could contain trace amounts. But the amounts were so minuscule, he told the captains, that “there was probably more alcohol in the bread you ate this morning.”Others have “questions around the credibility” of those encouraging them to be vaccinated, Molango said. Some players have noted, too, that it was deemed safe for them to return to work last year, before the vaccines had been developed, and that they did not appreciate now being told to be vaccinated in order to keep on playing.In some cases, that has crystallized into something more implacable: an ideological refusal to have the shot. Most players, though, are more hesitant than opposed, team employees said — inclined to think that as healthy young men, they will not suffer even if they contract the virus, and therefore do not need to take whatever risk there may or may not be in a vaccine. Their bodies are their livelihoods, after all, and many have told medical staff members at their clubs that they would not take anything that is not irrefutably safe.And yet that does not fully explain why players in the Premier League — the overwhelming majority of whom are not British, let alone English — should be more resistant than their peers in other major leagues.While the proportion of Premier League players vaccinated is broadly similar to the number of people in their age group to have been inoculated in England, elite soccer is hardly a representative sample. It is, after all, gleefully international. The more apt parallel, then, may be with Serie A and La Liga and the others, where the mix of professionals is almost as global as it is in the Premier League, and where vaccination rates are far higher.The Premier League contends it has done as much as it reasonably can do to persuade its players to accept the inoculations. Van Tam not only addressed the captains of the league’s clubs but also released a video, highlighting the importance of vaccination and dispelling myths, to reinforce the message. He has visited teams in person. Other clubs, struggling to persuade their holdouts to be vaccinated, have been offered visits from experts eager to answer questions and allay fears.The clubs, too, have “played their part,” as Molango put it. Many have invited medical teams into their training facilities to make it as easy as possible for players to get a shot. At Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp has been an outspoken advocate of the “moral” imperative to be vaccinated. Leeds United officials have made vaccination a nonnegotiable part of a player’s duty to his teammates, and at other teams players have embraced vaccinations after being shaken by the experiences of teammates who tested positive, or the effect that Covid-related deaths have had on friends and colleagues.Other clubs, though, have been accused of being too light a touch, of not offering enough guidance to players early on, of giving the illusion that there was no real urgency. That, critics say, created a space in which misinformation could flourish. One Premier League team initially encouraged players to be vaccinated on their own time. When that did not receive much response, executives dropped the hint again. It was only after a few weeks that the club, realizing it had hit a wall, took the step of inviting a vaccination team to the training facility.Clubs’ approaches, though, are starting to shift. This summer, a number of transfer deals included clauses written into player contracts stating that vaccination was mandatory. Agents expect that to become the norm over the next few months: Klopp, like Aston Villa’s Steven Gerrard and Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, has made it clear that his club would prefer not to sign unvaccinated players.Internal measures are growing more strict, too. At least one Premier League club no longer permits unvaccinated players to dine with their teammates, and requires them to change into their training gear either before arriving or in their car, instead of in the dressing room. The Premier League is now considering adapting its protocols to make similar precautions more widespread.The hope, among those charged with keeping the players safe, is that a more active, more draconian stance will prove decisive among all but a few ardent holdouts. Until then, all the league can do is try to counteract the misinformation, change all the minds it can, and hope that the games can go on. More

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      What Do We Mean by Good Soccer?

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      The best games manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent, but those that clear that bar are rare. And that presents fans with a choice.MANCHESTER, England — Jesse Lingard was streaking away, the ball at his feet, on the right wing. Their legs weary and their hopes dwindling, Arsenal’s defenders heaved and hauled to keep up with him, as if they were running into a stiff wind. And on the other side of the field, Cristiano Ronaldo started to sprint.It was a true sprint, too, a track sprint, a coached sprint: starting in a low crouch, his back straightening as he reached full tilt, head held high, arms pumping. The clock had just ticked past 90 minutes, but there seemed to be a magnet drawing Ronaldo to Arsenal’s penalty area, some elemental force. He had scented a chance from 60 yards, and he just could not resist the aroma.Ronaldo arrived in the penalty area roughly at the same time as Lingard, and the ball, but the chance never came. He came to a sudden halt, stood for a moment, and then doubled over, gulping down the air. It was fitting, really, a breathless end to a breathless game, the sort of evening that leaves the fans as drained as the players.Manchester United had won, 3-2, but the richness was in the detail: Arsenal’s opening goal, scored by Emile Smith-Rowe as David de Gea, the United goalkeeper, lay prone on the goal line, nursing an injury he had sustained by running into his own player; the quick thrust and parry early in the second half, as United took the lead and then offered Arsenal a reprieve almost immediately; the confected, compulsory drama of the referee, Martin Atkinson, walking achingly slowly to the monitor to award the penalty kick that won the game.As entertainment, it was difficult to beat. It was compelling and enthralling and pulsating, a sort of Platonic ideal of a Premier League game, all of the characteristics that English soccer prides itself on, that it sells to the world at a premium, distilled into 90 minutes. It was, by that measure, a good game of soccer.But by another, it was not. Michael Carrick had been in charge of United that night. His successor, Ralf Rangnick, was sitting in the directors’ box. At the end of the game, Carrick told his players that he would not only be stepping down but leaving the club altogether, off in search of fulfillment elsewhere.Ralf Rangnick pondering the scale of the job he has accepted at United. Jon Super/Associated PressUnited played like a team that had internalized that uncertainty. It had the air of a side between managers, one only just beginning to emerge from a month of confidence-sapping crisis. There was no shortage of individual talent, but there was a lack of organization, an undeniable jaggedness to their play. Martin Odegaard appeared wholly unmarked to score Arsenal’s equalizer. Passes went astray. Attacks bubbled and then fizzled out. It was obvious United wanted to win. It was not always so obvious that it knew how.Arsenal might have known precisely who its manager was, but it was no better. Mikel Arteta has crafted a young, game team, but with that youth and that exuberance comes a naïveté. Having taken the lead, it ceded the initiative. It squandered possession. It folded as United attacked. It ran out of ideas. Its most experienced player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, was irrelevant throughout.As a technical exercise, then, the match was hardly conclusive proof of the Premier League’s old boast that it is the best domestic competition in the world. It was mainly striking as an illustration of how far both United and Arsenal have fallen: watching on, Rangnick must have seen all of that haphazard defending, uncertain pressing, that rushed passing and thought that perhaps the Premier League was not so different from the Bundesliga after all.For everyone else, it was difficult to watch either team without being struck by how far both have fallen, to wonder quite what Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger would have thought if you had told them that the roles of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira would one night be taken by Scott McTominay and Mohamed Elneny.Those two definitions of good are not always in tension — the best games, of course, manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent — but, in truth, those that clear that bar are rare beasts. And that presents us, as fans, with a choice, one that strikes at the heart of what it is about sports that makes us want to watch, what we want a sport to be.Mohamed Salah and Liverpool: when a team morphs into one long knee slide.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAnnibale Frossi, the former Inter Milan manager, once declared that the “perfect result to a game of football is 0-0,” because that represents “a balance between the attacks and defenses on the field.” There is truth in that, but it does not sound as if it would offer a particularly gripping spectacle. Entertainment lies, often, in the imperfections: the lapse in concentration that leads to an attack; the mistake that concedes an equalizer; Harry Maguire. Which good do we want?If that sounds an ephemeral, philosophical question, it is not, not at the moment. European soccer’s financial imbalance — between the Premier League and everyone else; between the dozen or so superclubs and their underlings; between the state-backed and the self-sufficient — has allowed a handful of teams to achieve a level of excellence that is more sustainable than ever before.There exists a group of clubs that can carry squads of quite impossible depth, slipping in one $70 million player after another; gobbling up any talent that emerges elsewhere; acquiring the best in sports science and data analysis and youth development.Those teams are capable of playing soccer that touches perfection: Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Liverpool and Chelsea. Entering Friday, the Premier League’s top three had goal differences of +23, +32 and +26. Only two other teams have positive goal differences, and one of those is Manchester United, which is currently on +1. P.S.G. is already 11 points clear at the top in France. Bayern is on course for a 10th straight German championship.Alphonso Davies and Bayern Munich strolled through the Champions League group stage, winning all six games and outscoring their opponents by 22-3.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a pleasure in watching all of them, of course, as there is a pleasure in watching any master at work. The intricacy of City’s movement, the ruthlessness of the attacks of Bayern and Liverpool, Chelsea’s precision-engineered craft. But that is unrelated to whether they produce games that are compelling to watch. Just as Manchester United and Arsenal did not have to be good to conjure a good game, the converse is true. Good teams do not necessarily lead to good entertainment.To Chelsea, Bayern and the rest, that is of no concern: The professional part of professional soccer means that their only duty is to win, as much and as well as possible. It can feel a little dirty, too, to discuss soccer in these terms, gathering it under that great umbrella that encompasses television and cinema and music and all the rest.But, ultimately, that is what soccer is supposed to be: entertainment. It is because it is entertaining that we keep watching. It is, in part, why fans are quicker to turn on coaches who prioritize the dour and the miserly rather than those who speak airily of their visions of the game. Excellence can take the breath away. But it is the flaws that keep us coming back for more.The Not-So-Lovable UnderdogThe Atlético Madrid-Porto Champions League match in one photograph.Luis Vieira/Associated PressIt has been hard not to admire Atlético Madrid for the last decade or so. Not only because of what Diego Simeone has achieved — the two league championships, the two Champions League finals — but the circumstances in which he has done it, and the approach he has taken.Atlético has emerged as a consistent power in La Liga and the Champions League on a fraction of the budget enjoyed by its rivals both in Spain and in Europe. It has done so not by copying the stylistic orthodoxy of the elite, but by subverting it. Where others have sought elegance and beauty, Atlético has prized courage and grit and a snarling, street-fighting determination.That has made it a useful corrective in the era of the smooth, glossy superclub: Atlético is a reminder that power and money are not always everything, that there is more than one path to be taken, that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder.Criticizing Atlético always risks sounding prudish. Simeone’s team embodies certain martial values, after all, a vision of soccer that many cherish. Competitive sports is not meant to be gentle. And yet, on its journey through the Champions League, it has felt a little like something at Atlético has curdled. It has become the underdog you want to lose.At Anfield, a few weeks ago, Simeone’s team spent a considerable portion of the game trying to incite Sadio Mané into doing something reckless. Against Porto, on Tuesday, its response to coming under concerted pressure was to spark two full-scale brawls.When Atlético had a player dismissed, it did not grit its teeth and dig in; it set about leveling the field. This time, it worked. The Porto substitute Wendell reacted to Atlético’s provocation. Brushed on the touch line, the Atlético striker Matheus Cunha fell to the ground theatrically, and the referee duly produced a red card.Atlético went on to win the game, and book its place in the last 16. Not long ago, the frenzied scenes of celebration would have been quite uplifting, another demonstration of Simeone’s team’s indomitability. This time, it was not quite so appealing.Atlético no longer seems a team that can indulge in soccer’s dark arts — and there is a place in all sports, for gamesmanship, and it is even possible to marvel at their master practitioners — but a team defined by them. In another time, those brawls might have looked like a deliberate tactic: It is Atlético, after all. But not this time. This time, it looked like a team losing control, letting its demons run.Coming Saturday: M.L.S. CupNew York City F.C. players this week at Providence Park in Portland, Ore., where they will face the host Portland Timbers on Saturday in Major League Soccer’s championship game. N.Y.C.F.C. is making its first appearance in the final. More on them in The Times this weekend.Troy Wayrynen/USA Today SportsWarning SignsThis is a slightly strange week, it has to be said, to issue some grand proclamation about the strength of the Premier League. After all, only one of its four representatives in the Champions League recorded a victory in the final round of group games.Manchester City lost at RB Leipzig. Manchester United drew at home to the Swiss champion, Young Boys. Most damaging, Chelsea conceded a late equalizer against Zenit St. Petersburg that meant it did not win its group, making its task significantly more difficult in the last 16 (unless it draws Lille, the weakest of its potential opponents, on Monday).But the nature of that sole victory felt instructive. Liverpool did not need to beat A.C. Milan. Jürgen Klopp’s team had already won its group with ease, allowing him to change his side considerably. By a conservative estimate, he omitted eight first-team players from the game. Milan, by contrast, had to win to have any chance at all of qualifying for the knockouts.And yet Liverpool, with a team far weaker than it would ever dream of sending into a Premier League game, still strolled to victory. In the context of the week, that means little. But take a step back and it fits a pattern: England has provided both teams for two of the last three Champions League finals. Only one English team — United last year — has failed to make it out of the group stage since Tottenham in 2016.Raheem Sterling’s Manchester City was one of three Premier League teams to win their Champions League group. All four English entries made the last 16.David Klein/ReutersThere is nothing new in one league’s emerging as the best on the planet. Italy held that status in the 1990s. Spain has been able to lay claim to it for stretches of the current century. Perhaps it is just England’s turn again, as it was between 2005 and 2010 (give or take a little blurring at the edges.)The difference this time is the size of the gap. The Premier League’s financial advantage is growing at an alarming rate: its television revenues are increasing at the same time that most of continental Europe’s clubs are trying to claw back money lost to the coronavirus pandemic.Liverpool’s second team can include a $45 million defender like Ibrahima Konaté, and a $50 million midfielder like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. A.C. Milan, on the other hand, had the chance to sign Bernardo Silva from Manchester City this summer but simply could not come close to his $8 million-a-year salary.The nature of the Champions League — the vagaries of the draw, the immediacy of the format, the outsize influence of injury in a knockout competition — means it cannot be guaranteed that a Premier League team will win it this season. But there are, now, only one or two continental sides that might realistically match the English contingent.The financial gulf is now so great that the trend should only grow stronger over the next few years. Of course, continental Europe’s clubs could spend their money more wisely, they could recruit better, and they could play smarter (Italian and Spanish teams, for one, need to adopt a higher tempo to compete). But the imbalance is such, now, that it is hard to see how it is corrected.CorrespondenceThere was, it turns out, a glaring inaccuracy in last week’s newsletter. This is unacceptable, of course, and I will be duly censured for it — though my attempts to secure myself the traditional soccer punishment, a weeklong suspension on full pay, have been unsuccessful — but I think you may understand: apparently, Juventus is not the only club in the world to have its own font.Bea Reiter points to the Kansas City Current, of the N.W.S.L., which boasts a hand-drawn effort to “reflect the power and movement of the brand.” Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew can make the same claim, Harmon Vredeveld informs us: It has a bespoke font, too, called NineSix, a nod to the year of the club’s founding. Every day, as they say, is a school day.Apologies are also owed to Ben Myers and Naomi Farley, who were equally offended that I forgot to add Weston McKennie in my list of young players Juventus might, if it were so minded, try to build a revitalized team around. He warranted a mention, certainly, though I fear he may yet prove a victim of the club’s short-termism.Weston McKennie thanks you for your letters.Peter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersLet’s end on a positive note, because Zach Hollander has the kernel of an excellent idea to share. “Don’t you think it would be beneficial to have the Ballon d’Or decided after summer tournaments, but before the next season starts? That way it would take into account one full season, and let players who have an incredible club season not be “forgotten” for having a slow start to the next season.”This is thoroughly sensible, but the solution is far easier: Leave the Ballon d’Or where it is, for reasons of history, but move the other individual award — the FIFA one, rather cumbersomely called The Best — to the end of the season. That way, each award has its own, defined place, rather than sharing space: one for the calendar year, one for the soccer year. More

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      Manchester United and the Perils of Living in the Past

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      Years of success under Alex Ferguson changed the way United viewed itself. But the glory days are gone, and the sooner the club admits that, the better.Old Trafford’s gangways were still packed with Liverpool fans, basking in the sight of their team’s sacking of the Theatre of Dreams last month, when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, representing himself, made the case for the defense.What he had just witnessed, he admitted, represented the “darkest day” of his three years in charge of Manchester United. But, he said, he would not — could not — countenance the idea of stepping down, of walking away. “We have come too far as a group and we are too close to give up now,” he said.Leaving Old Trafford that day, the idea that Solskjaer might emerge unscathed seemed fanciful. He had become something worse than an object of pity: He had become a punchline. That night, United’s executives met to discuss how to react. Somehow, they came to the same conclusion as the man they had appointed: Now was not the time to turn back. Solskjaer survived.There are several ways to explain Manchester United’s reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious, the mulish refusal of the self-styled biggest club in the world to recognize that its manager was way in over his head until it had not only been humiliated at home by Liverpool, but swatted aside with disdain by Manchester City and then humbled, plaintive and pathetic, by modest Watford.One explanation — the easiest one, the Occam’s razor one — is cool, uncaring cynicism: United’s hierarchy appointed Solskjaer, initially temporarily and then on a series of ever-extending permanent contracts, and demurred from taking a decision that would effectively be an admission of error, and the club’s owners did not mind who was in charge as long as the money kept rolling in.Another, far kinder version, would point to the curious sentimentality that seems to infect Manchester United: For an organization that behaves in almost every other sphere of its existence as a faceless corporate monolith, carving up and selling off its history to whoever will pay for a slice, United thinks with its heart, rather than its head, more often than might be expected.That sentimentality was there in the rush to award Solskjaer a permanent contract after the uplift of his early caretaker months in 2018 and 2019, and again when the club extended his deal last summer after finishing a distant second to Manchester City in the Premier League.Solskjaer is a former player — a club legend, as the fawning statement that announced his departure put it — and the romance that it might be him who restored the team to its place at the pinnacle seemed to be irresistible to those who employed him. Solskjaer was even permitted an exit interview, a chance to say goodbye on his own terms, with tears in his eyes.Perhaps that should be standard practice: Managers, even ones who have lost heavily at Watford, are human, and should be treated as such. Certainly, the affection for Solskjaer among United fans made the interview entirely understandable. It is not, though, the move that most hard-nosed, unapologetically ruthless businesses would make.But then United is not quite as hard-nosed as it might be, not all of the time. There will have been plenty within the club rubbing their hands with glee at the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return last summer: his vast Instagram following, his army of devotees, his huge commercial profile.It was not any of that, though, that persuaded Rio Ferdinand and Alex Ferguson and Patrice Evra to intercede when it looked as if Ronaldo might be about to join Manchester City. They helped make the case to Ed Woodward, the club’s central power broker, to intervene. Ronaldo’s talent played its part of course, as did the status he had acquired in all his years away, but so too did the allure of bringing home a prodigal son, the feeling that he was back where he belonged.United sent stars to Solskjaer’s rescue when what the club seemed to need was a strategy.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is not, of course, the “best in class” behavior that United would like to think is its hallmark. It did not take any great depth of knowledge, even in advance, to wonder if this little jaunt down memory lane might come at the cost of United’s balance, that Ronaldo might relegate the club’s future — Mason Greenwood and Jadon Sancho, in particular — to the shadows.It did not require any sort of tactical qualification to work out that Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba, as well as the rest of United’s glittering array of attacking talent, cannot be easily subsumed into a cogent system. No searing insight was required to see that the money might have been rather better spent on a defensive midfielder. After all, even Solskjaer knew that.But then that is the grand irony of the modern Manchester United, the one that sits at the heart of the third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for how the Solskjaer experiment lasted this long — through the loss to City and the collapse against Liverpool and the defeat in last season’s Europa League final and the 6-1 loss at home to Tottenham and the 4-0 mauling by Everton and all of the other bright, burning red flags.This is a club that, for 20 years, did nothing but win. There is a banner at Old Trafford that sets out just how central ultimate victory is to this club: images in silhouette of every trophy available to an English soccer team surrounding the slogan “We’ve Won It All.” Most of them were accrued between 1991 and 2013, when Ferguson turned Old Trafford into a monument to his own greatness.That is the standard that Manchester United’s current and future iterations must match; that is the measure by which they have failed, again and again, in the eight years since Ferguson stood on the field at Old Trafford, an emperor believing the sun would never set, and assured the fans that the good times would never end.Manchester United embraces glory days, even as they move further away every year.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAnd yet, for all that winning, there is precious little indication that anyone at Old Trafford understands quite how it happened. Solskjaer spoke often about restoring United’s traditions, but what they were was never made especially clear.In that, he joins a long and not especially proud list of Ferguson’s alumni to have tried to follow in their mentor’s footsteps and have failed. United had plenty of players during Ferguson’s tenure who looked cut out for management: the calm authority of Steve Bruce, the inspiring anger of Roy Keane, the fierce intelligence of Gary Neville, his brother Phil.None has lived up to the billing. Ferguson’s former assistants have fared a little better — Steve McClaren and Carlos Queiroz, in particular — but there is little evidence of a Ferguson school.It is not a unique phenomenon — Liverpool’s dynasty of the 1970s and ’80s did not produce a string of managerial titans, either — but it is, in the context of United’s failures since its totemic figure departed, noteworthy.In retirement, Ferguson has built a lucrative cottage industry in books on management and leadership. It is not to disparage his genius or his legacy to suggest that he did not pass those lessons on to those around him contemporaneously. Few of his former players absorbed them effectively, and, according to all available evidence, none of his theoretical superiors did. Ferguson does not seem to have left behind anyone at Old Trafford who truly understood the inner workings of his winning machine, who could reverse engineer his brilliance.Solskjaer in 2019, when United only saw sunshine ahead.Rui Vieira/Associated PressIt is easy to drift into meaningless jargon when listing all of the things required for success in modern soccer: a clear vision, a defined philosophy, a coherent structure. At times, their importance is overblown; Real Madrid won three Champions League titles in a row because it had the best players, after all. But whether they come by accident or design, most elite teams possess them. Manchester United does not.Perhaps that is why the club’s executives could believe Solskjaer when he said that, in the face of all that had happened against Liverpool, the club was “too close to give up now.” It was not clear what United was supposed to be close to, a few minutes after the yawning chasm between Solskjaer’s team and its greatest rival had been laid brutally and surgically bare.But how were the people charged with deciding whether he kept his job or not to know if he was right? They know that Manchester United ought to be great, because it was great under Ferguson, but they do not know how Ferguson made that greatness happen, so they have no way of measuring the club’s current proximity to it.Instead, they fell back on the solitary lesson that the club does seem to have learned from Ferguson: that success lies in the gift of a single great individual, and that all it needs to do to be restored to its perch is to find that person. They hoped, with all of their hearts, that might be Solskjaer. It was not. And so now they will set out on their search again, hoping to get close once more, even as they drift further and further away. More