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      El anuncio de la ‘Superliga’

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      THE SUPER LEAGUE

      PRESS RELEASE IMMEDIATE SUNDAY 18TH APRIL

      LEADING EUROPEAN FOOTBALL CLUBS ANNOUNCE

      NEW SUPER LEAGUE COMPETITION

      Twelve of Europe’s leading football clubs have today come together to announce they have agreed to establish a new mid-week competition, the Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.

      AC Milan, Arsenal FC, Atlético de Madrid, Chelsea FC, FC Barcelona, FC Internazionale Milano, Juventus FC, Liverpool FC, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid CF and Tottenham Hotspur have all joined as Founding Clubs. It is anticipated that a further three clubs will join ahead of the inaugural season, which is intended to commence as soon as practicable.

      Going forward, the Founding Clubs look forward to holding discussions with UEFA and FIFA to work together in partnership to deliver the best outcomes for the new League and for football as a whole.

      The formation of the Super League comes at a time when the global pandemic has accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model. Further, for a number of years, the Founding Clubs have had the objective of improving the quality and intensity of existing European competitions throughout each season, and of creating a format for top clubs and players to compete on a regular basis.

      The pandemic has shown that a strategic vision and a sustainable commercial approach are required to enhance value and support for the benefit of the entire European football pyramid. In recent months extensive dialogue has taken place with football stakeholders regarding the future format of European competitions. The Founding Clubs believe the solutions proposed following these talks do not solve fundamental issues, including the need to provide higherquality matches and additional financial resources for the overall football pyramid. More

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      European Super League to Include Six Premier League Teams

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

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      Champions League: Talent From Paris Leaks Away From P.S.G.

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      A deep-pocketed club’s Champions League ambitions run up against a familiar obstacle: opposing rosters studded with stars who got away.Paris St.-Germain could not, in the end, have sped Tanguy Nianzou along much quicker than it did. He was captain of the club’s under-19 side when he was only 16. He was called up to the first team at 17, training alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and the rest, and soon made his debut. He even started a game in the Champions League.And still, despite all those opportunities, he left. Nianzou had just turned 18 when, on July 1 last year, he was presented as a Bayern Munich player. P.S.G. did not even have the solace of being able to pocket a premium fee for a player it had nurtured. Nianzou’s contract was expiring. He walked out of his hometown club for nothing.His departure stung. It stung sufficiently that Leonardo, P.S.G.’s sporting director, was citing it as a sort of parable as recently as February, long before the teams were drawn to meet in the Champions League quarterfinals this week.“He played with us in the Champions League, and he has spent almost a year at Bayern without playing,” Leonardo said, undeterred by the fact that injuries — not a lack of quality — have limited Nianzou to 21 competitive minutes at Bayern. “The problem is thinking that there is paradise elsewhere. They say that P.S.G. lost a youngster, but sometimes I think it is not P.S.G. who loses, but the youngsters who leave.”P.S.G. had high hopes for Tanguy Nianzou, but when he turned 18 he signed with Bayern Munich.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLeonardo’s sensitivity — and his club’s — to Nianzou’s departure is only partially explained by the teenager’s talent. It is also because Nianzou is not the only prodigy P.S.G. has allowed to slip through its fingers. He is not even the only one at Bayern.Kingsley Coman became the youngest player to play for P.S.G. when he made his debut for the club in February 2013. He was the jewel of the team’s youth system, the standard-bearer for its future. A year later, he left on a free transfer. Last August, he scored the goal that won the Champions League for Bayern, against P.S.G.There are plenty of others like them. There are 11 players left in this year’s Champions League who either grew up in Paris or spent some time in P.S.G.’s youth academy. Only three play for the reigning French champion: Colin Dagba, Presnel Kimpembe and Mbappé, though of course he had to be restored to his hometown at great expense.Some of the others — Chelsea’s N’golo Kanté, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez and Benjamin Mendy, Borussia Dortmund’s Raphaël Guerreiro — grew up in the sprawling suburbs surrounding Paris but never caught the club’s attention. A few did: Like Coman and Nianzou, Dortmund’s Dan-Axel Zagadou and Real Madrid’s Ferland Mendy spent time at P.S.G.’s academy before leaving to make their names elsewhere.That would be galling enough; in reality, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Eleven more players born in P.S.G.’s backyard were eliminated from the Champions League in the round of 16, including Christopher Nkunku, Ibrahima Konaté and Nordi Mukiele at RB Leipzig and Jules Koundé of Sevilla.Dozens more can be found in Ligue 1 and across Europe, from Paul Pogba on down. P.S.G. is sitting on what is generally regarded as the richest gold mine of talent in world soccer, and yet it is allowing prospectors to spirit its treasure away by the truckload. Most of the time it receives nothing in return but the lingering, bitter taste of regret.It is understandable that Leonardo, for one, should have tried to blame the speculators. Scouts for rival French clubs have long trawled the Paris suburbs looking for the next big thing. In recent years, they have been joined by representatives of German teams and, before Brexit, Premier League clubs hoping to cut out the middleman.P.S.G. is not without Parisian stars: Kylian Mbappé returned from Monaco, and Presnel Kimpembe never left.Benoit Tessier/Reuters“The German clubs, mainly Bayern, Leipzig and Dortmund, attack young people and threaten French development,” Leonardo told Le Parisien this year. “They call parents, friends, family, the player himself, even with players under the age of 16. They turn their heads. Perhaps the rules should be changed to protect the French teams.”The problem, though, is not one that can be legislated away. Given the number of players emerging from Paris, it is unavoidable that P.S.G. should miss some of them, as it did with Kanté and Mahrez. What should concern Leonardo more is that — as Michael Zorc, Dortmund’s technical director, said — so many young players “see better permeability and greater potential for developing” away from P.S.G.A decade ago, when Qatar Sports Investments first invested in the French capital’s flagship club, it vowed not simply to acquire success; Nasser al-Khelaifi, the club’s president, spoke of wanting to find the next Lionel Messi, rather than buy the original. The owners put their money where their mouth was, investing tens of millions of dollars on the club’s youth system.But as P.S.G. has found in its pursuit of the Champions League trophy, the formula for success is rarely quite that simple. The club’s academy is regularly assessed as one of the best in France. In many ways, the amount of players it has produced for other teams is proof of its eye for talent and the quality of its coaching.All of that is irrelevant, though, if the leap from the academy to playing alongside Neymar and Mbappé is too great. It is here that P.S.G. has failed.What the stories of Coman and Nianzou and so many of the others have in common is that they made it to P.S.G., and all the way through the academy, only to find their path blocked at the last step: by a coach whose job was to focus on today; by an expensively acquired superstar brought in to win trophies; by a club moving too quickly to wait for youngsters to learn their trade.On one level, the loss of all that talent has delivered P.S.G. only a glancing blow. It has still established, with only one exception so far, an effective monopoly on the Ligue 1 title. It has made it to a Champions League final. It can call on some of the world’s finest players. Would Ferland Mendy or Guerreiro or Koundé have made much of a difference? Possibly not.But on another, more fundamental level, the impact has been considerable. Qatar has poured considerable time and resources into not only P.S.G. but French soccer as a whole, bankrolling the transformation of the club through Qatar Sports Investments at the same time it was effectively underwriting the league through broadcast deals with the Qatari broadcaster beIN Sports.It has always had a clear idea in its head of what it wanted P.S.G. to be — winner of the Champions League, mainly — but, 10 years since it arrived, it is not yet obvious that it knows how to get there. Coaches have come and gone, all of them different: the coaching superstar, the canny tactician, the pressing zealot, the former captain.The squad has a patchwork quality that suggests muddled thinking. Is it built around Neymar or Mbappé? Where do Moise Kean and Mauro Icardi fit in? Can any of these players do what the manager at the moment, Mauricio Pochettino, is likely to want them to do? Did they really suit Thomas Tuchel last season? P.S.G. is now, as it has been for a decade, a team in search of an identity.Coman, who had once dreamed of lifting the Champions League trophy with P.S.G., did it last year — with Bayern. The teams meet again in the Champions League on Wednesday.Pool photo by David RamosYet the easiest, most authentic identity has been at its fingertips all along: that of a team built around a Parisian core, young and dynamic and rooted to its location. Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, has spoken before about his ideal team being one that could compete for honors while being drawn exclusively from its own city. The pool of talent there, as almost everywhere else, renders that idea utopian. Everywhere, that is, except Paris.P.S.G. has failed to claim that birthright. As recently as 2018, coaches at teams in the banlieues expressed surprise at how disconnected the city’s biggest club was from the young players on its doorstep. Perhaps that can be blamed on conceit, a sense that Parisian prospects would always want to play for a Parisian team.Or perhaps it is representative of a broader failing at the club, one that places more weight on what Paris is seen to be than what the city actually is. In 2016, when P.S.G. revamped its stadium, it commissioned the architect Tom Sheehan to “breathe the identity of Paris into the Parc itself.” He drew a parallel between the new V.I.P. entrance at the stadium and the foyer of the Palais Garnier, the opera house.It is that tourist perception of Paris that Q.S.I. hoped would become the team’s identity: the celebrities in the stands, a soccer team as a glamorous boutique nightclub. But that is only one side of Paris. It has not engaged quite so willingly with the other side of Paris, the one that is found in the banlieues, the one that is not quite so easy to sell.Still, the talent keeps coming through. The club holds out great hope, in particular, for a 15-year-old central defender named el Chadaille Bitshiabu. French law prohibits him from signing a professional contract until he turns 16, on May 16, but all of the coaches who have worked with him are convinced he can make it. They can only hope it is with P.S.G. More

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      The Premier League Race Is Over. The Champions League Lottery Is Here.

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      Everyone knows who will win the Premier League. Most can guess who will be relegated. All of the drama is in the race for a spot in the Champions League.Here, then, is the home straight of the Premier League season, the final quarter of a campaign that was heralded as the most chaotic, and least predictable, of them all.At times, throughout autumn and into winter, the combination of empty stadiums, a packed schedule and a frantic pace seemed destined to usurp the established order. Contenders seemed to rise and fall every week. Earnest conversations were held about whether Aston Villa could win the league or if Arsenal was in danger of relegation.It did not, it turns out, quite come to pass. It soon became clear that Manchester City — the team with the best and biggest squad, the side with the brightest coach — would be champion while spring was still fresh in the air. Pep Guardiola’s team sits 14 points clear of Manchester United, its fingers already brushing a third crown in four years.Relegation, too, is largely settled. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion will be playing in the Championship next season; all that remains to be decided is whether Fulham can muster enough momentum to condemn Newcastle, drifting and directionless, to a place alongside them.In that relative certainty, the Premier League is something of an outlier across Europe’s major leagues. Elsewhere, the curious circumstances of the pandemic season do seem to have had an effect. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid are slowly reeling in a stuttering Atlético Madrid. In Italy, Inter Milan has six points on its city rival, A.C. Milan, and 10 on Juventus and Atalanta. But with at least one fairly spectacular choke in fans’ relatively recent memory, that is not yet a gap broad enough to permit any comfort.In Germany, the title race may effectively be decided this weekend, when Bayern Munich travels to RB Leipzig on Saturday knowing that victory will all but see off its last remaining challenger. A couple hours earlier, the top two teams in France will meet, though neither Lille nor Paris St.-Germain is in a position to deliver a decisive blow. Lyon and a resurgent Monaco are within touching distance of both, four teams separated by four points.In the absence of questions at the top and bottom of the table, the Premier League has concentrated all of its drama, jeopardy and intrigue into the jostling for position immediately below Manchester City. There are three more spots available in the Champions League for next season and seven teams with a realistic shot at one of them.Some are fallen giants, teams desperate to salvage something from a bitterly disappointing season. Others are surprise packages, those teams that have best adapted to the strangeness of this season. It is at this point that the consequences of all the chaos and unpredictability of the last seven months are made flesh, and it is a race that is all but impossible to sort — at least not yet. “It will go until the last day,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Everton manager, said last month. The challenge, he said, is to make sure you are still in contention by then.Jamie Vardy and Leicester City enter the homestretch with a lead on the teams chasing them.Pool photo by Alex PantlingHead Starts and Tough RoadsA glance at the table would indicate that two of the seven Champions League contenders — Manchester United and Leicester City — have a considerable advantage. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United has an eight-point lead on West Ham, currently the first team outside the places in fifth. Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester side has a seven-point cushion.But in Leicester’s case, certainly, that head start could yet be canceled out by the fact that its remaining schedule is considerably steeper than some of its rivals’. Leicester faces Manchester City this weekend before traveling to West Ham. Three of its final four games are against direct rivals for a spot in the top four: trips to Manchester United and Chelsea, and a home game against Tottenham. Rodgers’s team surrendered a place in the top four on the final day last season; this year’s calendar brings with it the ghost of past regrets.No other team has quite such an arduous finish to the campaign, though Chelsea is close. The extent of Thomas Tuchel’s impact at Stamford Bridge will be gauged by visits to West Ham and Manchester City, and looming home games against Arsenal and Leicester.If the calendar is kindest to anyone, it is Liverpool, marooned in seventh after a dismal run since late December. That may prove scant solace for a team that has spent the last three months losing at home to Fulham, Brighton and Burnley, but it at least gives Jürgen Klopp’s side a slim chance of returning to Europe.The Price of DistractionsTottenham’s Europa League elimination had a silver lining: fewer games this spring.Darko Bandic/Associated PressIf anything has marked this season, it is the capriciousness of crisis. It is barely two weeks since José Mourinho accused his Tottenham players of being unable to display “the basics of football and the basics of life” during a humiliation at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb in the Europa League. Now he may wonder if being out of that competition is not such a bad thing.Nine league games remain of Spurs’ season, and Mourinho must also make room for the Carabao Cup final on April 24. But, that aside, he has a clear run. So, too, do West Ham and Everton. Leicester has one extra game than its rivals — an F.A. Cup semifinal — but the rest have more demanding commitments to juggle.Chelsea, for one, is still fighting on three fronts: An F.A. Cup semifinal against Manchester City beckons, as well as a two-legged Champions League quarterfinal with F.C. Porto. Should Chelsea reach the final of both competitions, it would have to play almost twice as many games as some of its rivals.Liverpool has a Champions League quarterfinal, too — a more arduous pairing, against Real Madrid — and Manchester United will be expected to reach the final of the Europa League, adding another five games to its schedule. At the end of a season that has been particularly demanding, the strain of any added workload to tired legs may prove crucial.The Fatigue FactorNo Premier League player has logged as many minutes as Harry Maguire.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThat injury has proved a defining factor in the outcome of this Premier League season is neither surprising nor particularly debatable. The root of Liverpool’s collapse lies in its loss of its central defense; Leicester’s form stuttered with the absence, at various times, of Jamie Vardy, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, among others; Everton’s results dipped when James Rodríguez was missing.It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the next two months will be decided by which teams sustain the fewest injuries, particularly to their key players. Liverpool, of course, is still missing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Tottenham is without Son Heung-min. Leicester is without Barnes, Maddison and James Justin, while Manchester United is sweating on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Anthony Martial.Injuries can, of course, be sheer misfortune — a bad tackle, a mistimed movement — but they can also be cumulative, the effect of a player pushed too far into what Arsène Wenger used to call the “red zone.” But that is not the only consequence of fatigue. Even if injury is avoided, performance can dip.It is this, more than anything, that should give Solskjaer and Manchester United pause. United’s captain, Harry Maguire, has played 3,946 minutes this season, an order of magnitude greater than every other outfield player in England. He has played the equivalent of five full games more this season than his nearest rival, Leicester’s Youri Tielemans.But Maguire is not alone. United has seven players who have played more than 2,700 minutes this season. Leicester and Everton have only one, Chelsea two, and Spurs and West Ham three. Even Liverpool, its options reduced because of all those injuries, has only five. If fatigue does prove to be a factor, the core of United’s side is more likely to be afflicted in the final stretch than anyone else.To some extent, of course, that is offset by its resources: Solskjaer has options should any of his key players be sidelined or suffer an alarming drop in form. Having to play Donny van de Beek because Bruno Fernandes needs a rest should be no great sacrifice.Indeed, that may well be the formula, more than any other, that comes to define the next two months, that serves to find the signal in the noise of this season. More than in any other season, the final prize on offer in the Premier League will go to the teams that can best minimize the effects of fatigue, thanks to a reduced workload or by possessing the strength in depth to ride it out. In all the chaos, in the end, there will be some sort of order. More

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      Everton Beats Liverpool at Anfield, Adding to the Champions' Pain

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerA Collision at Anfield Does Little to Slow Liverpool’s FallEverton’s victory, a cause for deserved celebration, reveals a broken Liverpool team holding tight to a system that has stopped working.Mohamed Salah cut down by Tom Davies, a fair reflection of Liverpool’s afternoon, its month, its season.Credit…Pool photo by Phil NobleFeb. 20, 2021, 4:50 p.m. ETLIVERPOOL, England — It is every week, now, that Liverpool seems to lose another little piece of itself. An unbeaten home record that stretched back more than three years disappeared in January, spirited away by Burnley. The sense of Anfield as a fortress collapsed soon after, stormed in short order by Brighton and then by Manchester City.The golden afterglow of the long-awaited Premier League crown that arrived last summer has been dimming for some time, but it darkened for good last week, with Jürgen Klopp conceding the Premier League title while still in the bitter grip of winter.And then, as fireworks boomed and car horns blared across Merseyside on Saturday evening, came what may be the most hurtful shift of all. Everton had not tasted victory at Anfield this century. It had not won a derby at all in more than a decade. For Liverpool, the impotence of its neighbor and rival had been a source of such unbridled glee that it had long since been fused into part of its self-identity.But now, all of that, too, has gone. Richarlison put Everton ahead after just three minutes. Carlo Ancelotti’s team held Liverpool at arm’s length with a degree of comfort, ruffled only in flurries, for the rest of the evening.The only hint that the Everton players knew they were close to making — or, perhaps, ending — history came in their celebrations when Gylfi Sigurdsson settled the game from the penalty spot with 10 minutes to play, completing the 2-0 score line. The reactions were raucous and definitive, the sound of a curse being lifted. On the touchline, Duncan Ferguson, part of the fabric of Everton for almost all of that 20-year spell, first as a player and now as a coach, bounced and roared.Liverpool’s defeat was its fourth straight at home.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsEverton’s victory was its first at Anfield since 1999.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsOf course, Ancelotti and his players deserve praise and admiration for the precision and the poise of their performance, but the approach that brought them victory relies on a confluence of factors. First, of course, is that your team must be focused and disciplined and organized: not far from perfect, in fact.Second, you must be, if not lucky, then at least not unlucky: even the most finely laid plan can be undone by an unfortunate bounce of the ball, an arbitrary deflection, a moment of wonder.And third, you need your opponent to be found wanting. A team full of confidence and energy and ideas will, most often, pick a way through even the most masterful defense. Liverpool lacked all of those things utterly and absolutely.It is not desperately hard to work out why Liverpool has toiled so much this season. Klopp, certainly, does not believe there is any great mystery here. Liverpool has lost not only Virgil Van Dijk, but Joe Gomez and Joel Matip to injury, tearing the base out of its defense, of its team. Klopp has had little choice but to dismantle his midfield to patch up his defense.But that is just the start. At times, it has seemed as if everything that could have gone wrong for Liverpool this season has gone wrong. It is easier to list the players who have not spent at least a few weeks in the treatment room: Andy Robertson, Georginio Wijnaldum, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané.Fabinho, the first midfielder drafted into defense, is currently absent with his own injury. Jordan Henderson, the second, limped off in the first half Saturday with a groin injury. Alisson Becker, widely regarded as the one of the world’s best goalkeepers and the one reassuring presence in Liverpool’s make-do-and-mend back-line, made three glaring errors in the defeats to Manchester City and Leicester.Jordan Henderson became the latest indispensable Liverpool player lost to injury.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsIf the root of the problem does not require forensic investigation, though, the response to it might. Klopp has, at times, appeared noticeably more irascible than usual this season, clashing with television reporters, snapping at journalists in news conferences, exchanging cross words with opposing managers.When it emerged earlier this month that he had endured a personal tragedy — the death of his mother — it seemed as if that offered an explanation for the change in mood. Klopp, though, is adamant that he is able to compartmentalize his emotions; those who work with him say there has been no real change. Klopp has always been prickly. What has changed is the perception. Terseness from a position of strength is a flexing of the muscles. From a position of weakness, it looks a lot like a tantrum.Indeed, it is striking that, even as what started as a dip has become a slump and now, on the back four consecutive home defeats — the club’s worst run since 1923 — has the look of a spiral, Liverpool has not sought change of any sort.That is true of the club as a whole — its failure to have a central defensive reinforcement ready to go on January 1 was the act of a club operating in the old world, not the new — and it is especially true of Klopp. The style has stayed the same. The system has stayed the same. “The only way I know is to try it again, and again, and again,” he said Friday.It was a telling statement. Klopp is the archetype of what might be called a system coach: He has a way of playing that is baked into his soul. His counterpart at Everton, Ancelotti, is the opposite: a manager who once coached Andrea Pirlo but who is perfectly content, in a different time, to instruct Michael Keane and Ben Godfrey to punt the ball long and hopeful, over and over again, hoping to catch the right current in the wind.Everton’s victory pulled it even with Liverpool on points in the Premier League table. But the teams are headed in different directions.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsSuch pragmatism is anathema to Klopp. Changing his style, so integral to his identity, would mean changing himself. That is the trait that has brought him such success, of course; it is possible, though, that it might also be what limits it in certain circumstances, that his loyalty to the system is damaging when external factors mean the system itself can no longer work.Klopp has experienced a run like this — a period when it feels as though nothing goes right — once before, in his last year at Borussia Dortmund. Then, too, his squad was ravaged by injuries. He had, in the previous seasons, dealt with the departure of a raft of key players, too. He refused to compromise his beliefs. Dortmund finished seventh, and he stepped down.The echoes of that year grow stronger with every passing week at Liverpool, with every new and unwanted record that falls. Liverpool keeps doing the same things, expecting different results, a team banging its head against a brick wall. It keeps losing all those little pieces of itself, lost in the shadow of an identity that cannot countenance change.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Manchester City Routs Liverpool, Confirming the Obvious

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerCity’s Revival, Liverpool’s Fade and the Flaw in Overthinking ThemManchester City’s rout at Anfield provided some clarity in the Premier League title race. But the factors that led to it have been plain to see for months.Ilkay Gundogan missed a penalty but still scored twice in Manchester City’s 4-1 rout of Liverpool on Sunday.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperFeb. 8, 2021, 9:36 a.m. ETSometimes, the easy explanation tells the whole story. Or near enough, anyway. Why Liverpool’s crown as reigning Premier League champion has slipped before the first blooms of spring is no great mystery. There is little need to sift through performances, searching for some failure of character or imagination or ability, to understand how it came to this.Virgil van Dijktore a knee ligament on October 17, in the early minutes of the Merseyside derby. Not quite four weeks later, on November 11, his regular defensive partner Joe Gomez blew out a tendon while away on international duty with England. And that, to a large extent, was that. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that point, had to be downgraded.Soccer has a dispiriting tendency to scorn mitigating circumstances — in the lexicon of sports, explanation is too often seen as a synonym of excuse — as Roy Keane, the hard-boiled former Manchester United captain, rather neatly encapsulated in the aftermath of Liverpool’s humiliation by Manchester City on Sunday. “They’ve been bad champions,” Keane said. To be a “big club,” he said, is to cope with whatever setbacks are thrown your way.There is truth in that, but it carries with it an air of brutal, gleeful oversimplification. Liverpool cannot, of course, escape blame for the collapse of its title defense. The club chose not to add a central defender to its squad last summer, recruiting instead a reserve left back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the dying minutes on Sunday. That seemed a risk even without the benefit of hindsight.At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s manager, has cut an increasingly waspish figure as the season has unfurled. He also must shoulder some responsibility, though. He has leaned too heavily on a handful of players, rather than sharing the burden more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically drained as it looks.More important, Klopp has overseen a team that has become grinding and predictable, reliant on the methods that brought a Champions League triumph in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even as Liverpool’s high-energy, high-intensity press has tuned down and his raiding fullbacks have found their edge dulled.Liverpool’s opponents have learned — both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield in recent weeks, shutting down the champion using essentially the same playbook — but Klopp’s team has not, the manager apparently insistent on doing the same things over and over again in the desperate, vain hope that the outcome might be different next time.Goalkeeping errors by Alisson Becker led directly to two City goals.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperAnd yet all of that is inseparable from the fact that Liverpool has been playing for months without its first-choice central defense, and that its first reserve, Joel Matip, managed to start only nine Premier League games before his season, too, was ended by injury.To cope, Klopp has deconstructed his midfield, drafting first Fabinho and then Jordan Henderson into the back line. The team has lost its rhythm. A swarm of other injuries — Thiago Alcantara and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missing the first third of the season, Diogo Jota and Naby Keita the middle third, the usual wear-and-tear of a long, hard campaign — has left him with little choice but to play those members of his squad who were left standing.In those circumstances, trying to inculcate a new style of play is hardly realistic. Liverpool does need to evolve; with its resources, it should not be in a position where it is fretting about whether it can fend off West Ham, Everton and, possibly most pertinently, a surging Chelsea to finish in the top four. But in terms of retaining the title, it did not so much meet a setback as run into a roadblock.There is a useful contrast, here, with its most recent conqueror and its heir apparent. So entwined have been the fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City over the last three years that there is now a temptation to see them as being somehow inextricably linked, the success of one taken as a direct indictment of the other’s failure.This season only seems to reinforce the parallel. Liverpool’s struggles this year do not perfectly match those City faced in the last one: Where City was volatile, scoring great rafts of goals only to freeze completely every few weeks, Liverpool’s fade has been a slow-burn demise, set in motion even before the title was won, the team sputtering through the autumn and only stalling completely at Christmas.But at first glance, the cause and the effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt to be paid after two seasons at the most rarefied heights, the sense of a wall being hit, all of it coalescing as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, the pendulum swinging irrevocably back toward Pep Guardiola’s team.There is an easy explanation for that, too. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers knew their team needed more steel. City had lost nine games the previous season, its efforts to win a third straight title undone not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness but by its own glass jaw.So as much of European soccer fretted about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went and spent $140 million on two defenders: Ruben Días and Nathan Aké. And that, to a large extent, was that. Días has, in the months since, emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious, indomitable version of City, one that is now set to reclaim the championship.In this case, though, the easy explanation only scratches the surface. Guardiola has not simply slotted a new central defender into his team and pressed play. He has, instead, retuned his approach. His team has been a touch less expansive, a touch more controlled, built on a more conservative midfield. He has overseen this shift in the space of a few months, on the back of a summer in which he did not have a preseason, during a campaign in which there is scarcely any time for training.City’s ability, and willingness, to rest its stars has set it up to reclaim the Premier League title.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperPartly, Guardiola has hinted, he took that risk — and it was, ultimately, a risk — to suit the realities of this most congested season. But partly, too, it was driven by the same impulse that made him recruit Días and Aké: an awareness that City needed to evolve once more if it was to outwit opponents who knew what to expect.What has enabled him to do that is the one element that has eluded Klopp. City has not been free of injury this season — Sergio Agüero has barely played, and both Gabriel Jesus and Kevin de Bruyne have missed considerable stretches — but its burden has been undeniably lighter than Liverpool’s.Nine of Klopp’s players have started 17 of Liverpool’s 23 Premier League games. Nine have already racked up 1,500 minutes in the league. At City, by contrast, only four players have reached those figures. Or, to put it another way, 13 of Guardiola’s players have started 10 games or more.It is to his credit that he has rotated that heavily. Guardiola has more readily understood the contingencies of this season than almost all of his peers; he spoke, around Christmas, of urging his team to run less, not more, in the early weeks of the campaign.But it does not immediately follow that it is to Klopp’s detriment that he has not had the same realization, that he has not altered Liverpool’s approach sufficiently to enable his players to cope with the test in front of them. It may be tempting to see Liverpool and City as counterweights — the rise of one a comment on the fall of the other — but the circumstances and the contexts are different. Klopp might have followed Guardiola’s lead, had he had the opportunity. Or not. It is impossible to know. Sometimes the easy explanation tells the whole story. And sometimes it does not.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Newcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … Something

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerNewcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … SomethingWandering about without a plan inspires neither affection nor success. So why do so many clubs still do it?Newcastle has won only one of its last 11 Premier League games.Credit…Pool photo by Stu ForsterFeb. 6, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETNEWCASTLE, England — The sound system at St James’s Park crackled into life just as the whistle blew and the players took the knee, as they have done for every Premier League game since the spring. The announcement was brief and sweet, an unexpected relic of days past: “Enjoy the game.”In the silence, it was not quite clear who the announcer was addressing. There are only 300 people inside the stadium: the players on the field, the two coaching staffs, a handful of executives, a smattering of stewards and security and journalists. Everyone was there for work, rather than pleasure.And besides, even if the announcer’s words were meant for those in exile at home, the people who would ordinarily pack the empty stands, this is Newcastle United. Few, if any, of the fans would suggest they have enjoyed anything to do with this club for some time.Newcastle is — and has been for a long time — a club in the grip of endemic drift. Its owner, Mike Ashley, wants to sell, so much so that he has sought legal recourse against the Premier League for blocking a potential sale to a Saudi-led consortium last year.The fans, tired of Ashley’s absentee management and his lack of investment, either emotional or financial, want him gone so desperately that they appear ready to embrace any would-be savior, no matter how many concerns there might be about charges of content piracy or human rights abuses.If the loathing for Ashley is universal, the contempt for Steve Bruce — the manager installed by the owner last season — is getting there. It is not just that Bruce used to manage Sunderland, Newcastle’s fierce rival. It is not just that Bruce replaced Rafael Benítez, an object of adoration among the fans. It is not just that Bruce was appointed by Ashley and so — in a way that never applied to Benítez — is perceived as an emissary of a hated regime.Newcastle’s fans are confident they have identified the club’s problem.Credit…Eddie Keogh/ReutersIt is that Bruce, like Ashley, seems to have so little ambition for the club. He has articulated no grand vision of what Newcastle could be. His aspiration seems to stretch no further than stasis, the bare minimum required to maintain the club’s Premier League status. He has no vision beyond the literal wording of his job description: manager.In the middle of another difficult winter at Newcastle, Bruce spoke of addressing a slump in form by doing things “his way.” It was not entirely clear, then, whose way he had been following up to that point: He has been in charge for a season and a half. Quite what his way might be, too, remained a mystery.Those who have worked with him say that Bruce is a good coach, thorough and diligent and likable, if perhaps a little staid, a little cautious. But he espouses no distinct philosophy. He does not have a tightly-defined idea of how the game should be played, or what a squad should look like, or what a team should do. He does not seem to believe in anything in particular. He does not represent anything. He does not stand for anything.Steve Bruce’s Newcastle may be saved from relegation only because three teams are playing worse.Credit…Pool photo by Lee SmithHis counterpart last week, crouching on the touchline a few yards away, is the opposite. Before the game kicked off, Newcastle and Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United were not having vastly different seasons. Both were skirting the edges of the relegation battle: Leeds had 23 points and Newcastle 19, despite having played one extra game.The coverage of the teams — and the mood around them — could not, though, have been more different. Newcastle, as always, was a morass of discontent and bubbling crisis. Leeds, on the other hand, had taken the Premier League by storm, hailed by fans and neutral observers for their courage, their style, their adventure.Bielsa’s team had spent the season as a source of fascination and praise and, lately, a little resentment: No other team could lose by 6-2 to Manchester United, for example, and come out of it not just without criticism but with credit. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to the fact that Leeds, unlike Newcastle, was newly promoted, playing the Premier League for the first time in 16 years. Oscillations in form were to be expected, tolerated.But much of it is down to Bielsa. The Leeds that he has created is, innately, fun: fun to watch, and, though demanding and energy-sapping, apparently fun to be. His players give the impression they are enjoying themselves. Luke Ayling, the right back, charges out of defense like a toddler doped up on sugar. Jack Harrison scurries around like an eager Labrador. Stuart Dallas, in his first season in England’s top flight, has developed a taste for pinging cross-field passes. They put together wonderful, exuberant moves. They score intricate, breathtaking goals.More important, Bielsa’s dogmatism, his fundamentalism, his refusal to compromise his beliefs — all the things that, previously in his career, have been held against him — are now strengths. Leeds stands for something: a way of playing, a series of assumptions about how the game should be, a theory, a creed, an ideal.Leeds Manager Marcelo Bielsa has defenders, and critics. But his players know exactly what he expects.Credit…Andy Rain/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, soccer has slowly, grudgingly accepted the idea that managers who adhere to a philosophy, a certain set of ideas, are not selling snake oil. It is understood, on some level, that possessing a clear sense of what you want your team to be offers a competitive edge: It helps recruit the right players, it makes coaching them more effective, it offers a barometer of success and purpose that is not reliant on individual results. At an executive level, it can even, at times, ease the transition between one manager and the next.But the benefits of a cogent philosophy are not purely sporting. It has been striking, in Leeds’s low moments under Bielsa, how little discord there has been about his methods. Most fans, if not all, are happy to absorb the lows as an unfortunate, but necessary, recompense for the highs.Subscribing to Bielsa’s philosophy gives them something to take pride and solace in, even when the score line offers no succor. It affords the club, and by extension the fans, an identity. They stand for something that does not depend on results. Newcastle is the opposite. A few days after losing to Leeds, Bruce’s team won at Everton. His side produced a smart, disciplined performance, and the victory alleviated mounting concerns over relegation. It did absolutely nothing to dispel the enduring unhappiness.That contrast, between Leeds and Newcastle, holds outside England’s two great one-club cities. Fans, increasingly, no longer see a manager talking about a philosophy and a vision as marketing jargon or corporate bunk. It is, instead, something to cling to and believe in, a reason to be proud.For much of this season, criticism has swirled around Graham Potter and Brighton. The team has lingered in the lower reaches of the table, its neat, attractive, flexible style of play winning plaudits but few games. He did not flinch when he was told he had to deviate from his methods to get results. More impressively, few of the club’s fans did, either. They understood, and appreciated, his plan. In the space of four days this week, Brighton beat Tottenham and Liverpool.The opposite is true at Chelsea. The dismissal of Frank Lampard and his replacement by Thomas Tuchel, vastly more qualified for the role, was made in order to win trophies; that, after all, is Chelsea’s modern, corporate identity. But it left fans feeling rootless: What mattered to them is not just the outcome, but feeling that the route taken has some deeper meaning.Newcastle has big-club resources. What it does not appear to have is a plan.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesThis is not a uniquely English phenomenon. In Europe, fans “no longer recognize themselves in their clubs,” as Le Monde wrote of Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille this week, three teams with no apparent broader purpose or identity. [A hat-tip to reader Manuel Buchwald for pointing me in the direction of that piece.]For years, fans have endured a growing sense of dislocation from their clubs, feeling unmoored as teams have morphed into superstores and retail brands and content farms and their players into millionaire entrepreneurs. That feeling will, of course, have only been exacerbated by the physical distance enforced by the pandemic.In that environment, clubs now effectively have to stand for something, anything: a reliance on youth, a certain style of play — expansive or exciting or muscular or intense, whatever it may be — or a distinct, bespoke approach. Those who do, like Leeds, earn not only patience from but also the admiration of their fans.Those who do not, like Newcastle, find that when there is no reason to enjoy the game — not the result, not the journey — the fire of fury and regret can quickly curdle into something much more dangerous for a business reliant on the unyielding affection of its public: apathy. That is the lesson Ashley, and Bruce, can teach the rest of soccer, that those who stand for nothing risk dwindling away into it.Maybe We Were Just Early in the Season?Why are these men smiling again? Take a look at the Premier League table.Credit…Pool photo by Nick PottsThis has been, you will have heard, the most unpredictable Premier League season in history. Well, since Leicester City won it, anyway. It has definitely been the most unpredictable season since that one, five years ago.The reality is slightly different. Yes, pretty much the whole top half of the Premier League might still nurse an ambition to qualify for European soccer next season. But the three teams at the foot of the table seem cut adrift, and by the close of play on Sunday, the title race might have swung fairly dramatically toward Manchester City.If City can beat an exhausted, uninspired and injury-ravaged Liverpool at Anfield, Pep Guardiola’s team most likely will have killed off the reigning champion’s dwindling hopes, and gone at least three points clear of its nearest rival — a vastly improved, but still unfinished Manchester United — with a game in hand. City has won 13 games in a row. It has not conceded a goal since the Franco-Prussian War. In a season of twists and turns, it has found a straight road.There is a strong possibility that, the race for the top four aside, a season that was meant to be marked by the unpredictable will end up with the most predictable outcome imaginable. And, though the circumstances of this year have been unusual, it feels as if this is a sensation we have had before.The table is always tight, chaotic, fluid for the first half of any season. The gaps between teams are smaller, because they have played fewer games, and so it takes a while to settle. In the opening few months, every season has an air of uncertainty.It is only now, as we turn the corner into the home straight, that order emerges. That has happened later, chronologically, this season — because the start was delayed by two months — but at the same time as it always does, in terms of games played. The effect has been more pronounced, thanks to the compacted schedule, the empty stadiums and the greater impact of injury and fatigue, but it is not unique. This is what always happens. It is just that we always forget.CorrespondenceThis Danny Ings goal was ruled offside. Yeah, we don’t know why either.Credit…Pool photo by Michael SteeleSadly, Laurence Dandurant has far too much clarity in his thinking to be consulted on how soccer can extricate itself from the nonsense — as any Southampton fan would describe it — it has made of its own offside rule. “Why don’t they change the offside rule to just a player’s boots? This would end the maddening shoulders and armpits debate.”Personally, I’m an advocate of the daylight rule — if any part of the player’s body is onside, the player is onside — but this works just as well.As I was expecting, last week’s column on the Old Firm inspired quite a bit of feedback, though (amazingly) none of it was especially angry. That must be a first. You raised quite a few points I’d like to address, so bear with me.“I completely agree with the sentiment of the Old Firm buying older players hampering their development on a European stage but think the greatest impact has been on the Scotland national team,” Benjamin Livingston wrote. “The Old Firm and the league as a whole are signing journeymen players from down south, rather than giving their own youth a chance.” This is a really important point: the future for Scotland, like (say) Belgium, is in having a much younger league.Catherine Pereira, meanwhile, pointed out that while Scotland’s men’s team has not been to a major tournament for two decades, its women’s team was at the World Cup in 2019, and performed credibly. “The team is ranked 21 in the world by FIFA,” she wrote. “It’s not great, considering Scotland’s history, but it’s not quite as disappointing as the men’s.” Quite right, too, though much of the praise for that should go to a Glasgow team that is not in the Old Firm.Glasgow City played a Champions League knockout-round match last year. Neither Rangers nor Celtic can say that.Credit…Alvaro Barrientos/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWilliam Bradley noted, quite correctly, that last week’s piece ignored the sectarian roots of the Old Firm animosity. “Your story did not touch on or even mention [that], which I must say from your story’s journalistic quality.” That was deliberate. Everyone involved believes sectarianism to be a stain on Scottish soccer that should be left in the past. In a column addressing the future, I decided to take the same approach.And thanks to Ian Stewart, who has touched on something that is, I think, really important. “There seems to be a strain of thinking that prizes turning clubs into machines of player development, churning out young stars to be sold off to fund the next round of stars-in-development,” he wrote. “This is a front-office mind-set, not a fan’s. As a fan, I simply want to see the best team possible being fielded as often as possible.”This is a tension that a host of teams — right up to the likes of Borussia Dortmund — have to navigate: Soccer would lose a lot of its richness if everyone apart from the established financial elite decided their role was simply to feed the insatiable appetite of the powerful. There is a logical counterargument, though: The process of development-and-sale, if done well, can not only help you win today, but enable you to win more in future, as those funds are reinvested in better-quality players. Perhaps, in this case, a front-office mind-set is healthy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In Defense of Television, Soccer's All-Purpose Villain

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerSpeaking Up for the Armchair FanTelevision, which influences everything from salaries to kickoff times, is soccer’s most convenient villain. But for the vast majority of fans, it’s the only connection they have.Critics of television’s influence on soccer ignore that it’s still the way most fans experience the game.Credit…Felix Schmitt for The New York TimesJan. 15, 2021, 1:22 p.m. ETTelevision is not a dirty word. It is not the sort of word that should be spat out in anger or growled with resentment or grumbled through gritted teeth. It is not a loaded word, or one laced with scorn and opprobrium and bile. It is not a word that has a tone. Not in most contexts, anyway.In soccer, television is treated as the dirtiest word you can imagine. It is an object of disdain and frustration and, sometimes, hatred. Managers, and occasionally players, rail against its power to dictate when games are played and how often. They resent its scrutiny and its bombast. Television is never cited as the root of anything pleasant. Television is the cause of nothing but problems.There is no need to linger for long on the irony and the hypocrisy here. Television, of course, is also what pays their wages. It is what has turned them into brands and businesses. It is television that means managers can accumulate squads full of stars, and it is television that means that, when they are fired, they leave with generous compensation packages. Television, and the money it pays to broadcast soccer, is what makes the whole circus possible.If anything, though, the contempt of players and coaches for television pales in comparison with that of most fans. They, too, talk about television with a certain tone: television as the force behind the erosion of the game’s values, television as the driver of unwelcome change, television as the root of all evil.Match-going fans in Germany have protested Monday games (Montagsspiele), which they deride as a surrender to television’s priorities.Credit…Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockTo many fans, television has become something close to an antonym of tradition. It is television that has eaten away at the way the game used to be, distorting its form for its own ends. It is because of the needs of television that fixtures are spread across a weekend, rather than packed into a Saturday afternoon, as they always used to be. It is because of television that fans are forced to travel vast distances at inconvenient times. It is because of television that the game feels more distant, a religion reduced to just another form of entertainment.There is, and always has been, a strict hierarchy of authenticity among fans. At its head sit those who follow their team home and away, who devote countless hours of their lives, and whatever money they have, to the greater glory of the colors. They might, in some cases, be ultras, or members of some organized fan group, though that is not necessarily a prerequisite.Below them are those who hold a season ticket for home games. A step down are various stripes of match-going fans: those who attend regularly, those who go sometimes and so on, until we come to the bottom, where those who follow the game, their team, from the comfort of their own homes, through the television, reside. And there, almost audible, is that tone again.Both that hierarchy and that attitude are baked into the conceptual landscapes of most fans. It is as close as soccer comes to a universal truth. Even broader organizations, the ones that speak for fans’ rights and work to protect their interests, hover somewhere between disinterest in and outright scorn for “armchair fans.”In the latest annual report of the Football Supporters’ Association — a well-meaning, important body that represents soccer fans in England — there is a section entitled “TV Hell.”“In previous years this chapter has been full of the misery that broadcast changes have inflicted on match-going fans,” it begins. “From late changes to kickoff times, to Monday night away games 300 miles away, supporters’ encounters with broadcasters have been fraught and adversarial.”For the vast majority of fans, a television is part and parcel of the matchday experience.Credit…Boris Streubel/Getty ImagesWhat follows is not to suggest that any of those complaints are invalid. By the time fans return to stadiums after the pandemic, it would be nice to think that both leagues and broadcasters — having become painfully aware, in their absence, of how crucial they are to the spectacle of soccer — would take the needs of match-going fans into account far more than they once did.Capping ticket prices would be a start, a way of ensuring that seeing live sports in the flesh is no longer an innately privileged activity, one only readily available to certain demographics. Crowds need to become younger, more diverse in both color and gender, and cost — as the Chris Rock joke about luxury hotels has it — is the primary barrier to that.Beyond that, subsidizing travel to games — as happens in Germany — would reflect the importance of fans to the experience. So, too, would scheduling them in such a way to make it as easy as possible for fans to attend. No more Monday nights for Newcastle fans in London; no more games that finish after the last train home has left.But for an organization like the F.S.A. to suggest that the relationship between fans and television is inherently adversarial is a comprehensive misunderstanding of the dynamic between the two. It is one that it is far from alone in making, but it is one that serves to reinforce what is, in truth, an entirely false schism.With stadiums closed during the pandemic, television revenue has been paying a significant share of soccer’s bills.Credit…Pool photo by Julian FinneyThat is because we are all, deep down, armchair fans. If not all, then overwhelmingly: there may, it is true, be a few hundred die-hards attached to each team who travel to watch their side home and away and never watch another game of soccer.But for most of us, even match-going fans, television is the way we consume the sport, whether we are season-ticket holders who follow away games remotely or fans who, by pure accident of geography, happen to live thousands of miles from the stadium our team calls home.You might be an ardent supporter of a team mired in the lower leagues who regularly tunes in to watch whatever the big game of the weekend is. You might find yourself idly watching a distant Champions League game most weekday evenings in fall and spring. You might support one team, but take pleasure and hold interest in the sport as a whole. You might just like falling asleep in front of “Match of the Day.” Whatever their circumstances, television is the vector by which most fans get the bulk of their hit.And those fans — although the traditional hierarchy does not recognize it — deserve an advocate for their interests, too, because their interests are our interests. Indeed, their interests are soccer’s interests.Cameras are an intrusion until the moment they’re not.Credit…Pool photo by Fernando VergaraThis is the part that is always missed, whenever the sport bemoans the power of television: Television, that dirty word, does not actually mean television. It does not even, really, mean the broadcasters who produce the content and carry the games. It means, at its root, the fans who watch, the ones who buy the subscriptions and watch the games and make the advertising space valuable.Because, ultimately, television does not pay for soccer: We do. The broadcasters only pay a prince’s ransom for rights to leagues because they know that we will tune in. Their aim is to make a profit from their investment, whether direct — through the advertising sales and subscriptions — or indirect, as is the case in Britain, where both Sky and BT, the Premier League’s principal broadcasters, see soccer as a weapon in the war to dominate the country’s broadband market.Deep down, it is not television that keeps the circus rolling, it is us. We are the ones that pay the salaries, that provide the millions, that have turned the players into stars. (This very same argument, as it happens, can be applied to the issue of the need for more transparency in soccer.)The relationship between television and fans is not adversarial because, at heart, television is the fans. When soccer comes to consider how it will look in the post-pandemic age, it would do well to remember that: not to present those who go to games and those who do not as antagonists, but as two overlapping groups, with interests that dovetail more than they divide. Television should not be soccer’s dirty word. Television, at heart, means all of us.Political Football (Reprise)Just checking: Anyone hugging? No? Carry on then.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsBritain’s hospitals are close to their breaking point. Intensive care departments are full, or close to it. Ambulances are lining up at the gates. More than a thousand people are dying a day. Case rates are soaring. The population, or at least that part of it that is not being compelled to go to work, is locked down once more.Underprivileged children are being sent individual potatoes and zip-lock bags full of cheese in lieu of school meals. The bleak realities of Brexit are starting to bite at the country’s ports and docks. And yet, listening to a substantial portion of the country’s public discourse this week, it is almost as if Britain’s most pressing issue is soccer players who hug after scoring a goal.We have been here before. Back in the spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, British lawmakers seized eagerly on the idea that the Premier League’s millionaire stars should all take a pay cut, as many of their clubs were requesting. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, used a news briefing to urge them all to “make a contribution,” even though it was not clear how them allowing the billionaire owners of their teams to save money would help the beleaguered National Health Service.This time, the central axis of the debate is a little different. The government is concerned, apparently, that players’ celebrating goals is “sending the wrong message” at a time when the country as a whole is forbidden by law from even seeing friends and family, much less hugging them. Lawmakers have written to the leagues to remind them of the need to follow restrictions. The leagues have, duly, written to their clubs. The news media has brimmed with fulmination.To be clear: there are protocols in place that players and their clubs must adhere to if soccer is to continue in the pandemic, rules that exist for their own protection and the protection of society as a whole. Players who are proved to have broken those protocols away from the field, if anything, have not been punished enough.But a ban on celebrating goals is not part of those protocols. The players have all been tested, often more than once a week. If they are on the field, we have to assume they are clear of the virus. If we cannot assume that, they should not be playing at all. They are no closer during celebrations than they are at corner kicks. If the former is not safe, then neither is the latter. There have been no cases of transmission between teams during games, or even among a single team: Where there have been outbreaks, they seem to have taken place at training facilities.Celebrating goals, in other words, is a nonissue. That it has been allowed to become a controversy, to take air away from all of those things that genuinely matter, is because lawmakers are once again in need of a convenient villain, and because sections of the news media cannot resist a chance to indulge the cheap thrill of click-inducing indignity. And both, in such circumstances, know exactly where to look.CorrespondenceThat’s George Best on the right there. Not to be confused with Pete Best.Credit…Victor Boynton/Associated PressFirst, to address a query expressed by a couple of readers: Yes, I am aware that George Best was not actually in the Beatles. No, I am not mixing him up with Pete Best. How could I? Pete Best never won a European Cup, for a start.The confusion arose from some poor phrasing in last week’s column (a lesson, here, on the importance of precision in language). I wrote that Best (George) was “regarded as the fifth Beatle,” though perhaps “presented as a fifth Beatle” would have been better.As the story goes, Best (the footballer) was nicknamed “O Quinto Beatle” by the Portuguese news media after starring in a game between Manchester United and Benfica in 1966. That was then picked up by the British newspapers, who referred to him as “El Beatle.” Presumably because the idea that Portuguese and Spanish were distinct languages was too much for them. Still, we all go wrong with the direct article sometimes.On the subject of the fading of the F.A. Cup, George McIntire wonders whether the most conclusive proof of its reduced status came from Arsenal. “What truly sealed its declining relevance was the futility of three wins in four years to save Arsène Wenger’s job,” he wrote. “There’s no Wenger Out campaign if he wins three leagues or Champions Leagues.” This is entirely right, and it’s interesting to note that — at certain clubs — domestic titles appear to be going the same way.And a depressing note to end on from Casey Lindstrom. “You wrote that fame and values are interlinked,” he wrote. “However, one does not need to look far [outside sports] to see those who are famous with all the values, ethics and integrity of robber barons.” This is also entirely right, and I do not have a convincing response to it. Though I find it hard to imagine that an athlete would achieve, say, Marcus Rashford’s level of prominence espousing less admirable views, and that is some solace.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More