Lukaku, Romelu (1993- )

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    Messi and Ronaldo’s Last World Cup Is the End of Soccer’s Greatest Generation

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    The World Cup is bidding farewell to the starriest cast the game has ever assembled. The setting is a perfect fit for the game’s age of excess.DOHA, Qatar — One by one, they have exited the World Cup stage that has been theirs for so long. Some, like Luis Suárez, restless and helpless, on the substitutes’ bench, could not hold back their tears. Others, like Romelu Lukaku and Edinson Cavani, lashed out at whatever inanimate object crossed their path, unable to contain their rage.One or two have managed to greet the end with grace: a smile on the lips of Robert Lewandowski, satisfied that he had, at least, signed off with a goal; a subtle, sorrowful shake of the head from Sergio Busquets as he turned his back on the missed penalty that had all but drawn the curtain on Spain’s campaign.There are some who remain, of course, for now at least: Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, Ángel Di María and Luka Modric, Thiago Silva and Pepe. Some will depart over the next two days. Some will have a stay of execution for another week or so. One or two will have the ending they crave, inside the gleaming, golden bowl of Lusail Stadium, a trophy in their hands and ticker-tape at their backs. But whenever it ends, however they react, for all of them, this will be goodbye.It has felt, at times over the last two weeks, as if this World Cup is essentially a valedictory tour for Messi and Ronaldo, certainly the two standout players of their era and quite possibly any.For the better part of two decades, they have been the central characters in both the sport’s overarching narrative and its daily life; every story has, at heart, been about them. This tournament could not be any different: it is, after all, their last chance to claim the one treasure that still eludes them, to find the missing piece, to cement not only their legend but their apotheosis.Romelu Lukaku and Belgium’s golden generation didn’t survive the group stage.Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLuis Suárez and Uruguay followed them to the exit a day later.Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMessi and Ronaldo, though, have always been something else, too: the spearheads of and the torchbearers for a generation of players that has dominated soccer for more than a decade, the starriest cast that soccer has ever assembled. Whether it is the most talented is not, in a way, especially relevant. What is indisputable is that it is, by some distance, the most famous.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      The Hollywood Merger That Could Reshape Soccer’s Transfer Market

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      As two behemoths join forces against boutique agencies in the fight for control and commissions, some fear profits could come before players.LONDON — Everything about the deal seemed to connote vastness. Most obviously, there were the figures: The merger created a company with a combined value of an estimated $5 billion. There was the language, too. A “landmark,” according to Variety. “Seismic,” The Los Angeles Business Journal said.In this case, though, time is the best way to gauge scale. It was in September last year when word filtered out of Los Angeles that two of the world’s biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners, had decided to join forces, but it was not until June that the union was given the green light.The nine-month delay could be attributed to antitrust investigators combing through the deal, trying to establish whether the unified agency would wield too much power. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly cast an eye over the prospective merger.The central concern was the potential impact on Hollywood from having two of its most influential agencies become one market-dominating behemoth, and what that might mean for the industry. The Screen Actors Guild, for one, expressed concerns that its members might be “disadvantaged” by the deal.At no point did anyone feel the need to mention soccer. It is there, though, where the deal’s impact might be felt most keenly.Both CAA and ICM have, in the last three years, expanded into soccer. In 2019, CAA acquired Base Soccer, one of Britain’s biggest sports agencies, with more than 300 professional clients. A year later, ICM completed a deal to buy the even-bigger Stellar Group, in what was thought to be the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history.For years, Base and Stellar have been powerhouses — Stellar, the largest agency in the sport, represents more than 800 clients — but they have also been rivals, and not always cordial ones. But as soon as the Justice Department signed off on CAA’s acquisition of ICM, they became teammates.That has ramifications, of course, for the firms, the agents who staff them and the players whom they call clients — including stars like Gareth Bale, Jack Grealish and Eduardo Camavinga. But the scale of the combined venture may also have a profound effect on the delicate power balance in the fraught, lucrative player trading business which acts as the financial engine for the most popular sport in the world.Poetic LicenseErkut Sogut, an experienced agent, has written a novel about the sometimes sordid industry in which he works.Gualter Fatia/Getty ImagesThere is one element of Erkut Sogut’s debut novel that, he admits, belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. Soccer is not, he wants to emphasize, actually controlled by a cabal of superagents who will resort to anything — sabotage, match-fixing, kidnapping, murder — to keep the game and its riches in their vise.Everything else, he maintains, is real. More than that, in fact: The plot of his book, “Deadline,” a thriller set against the backdrop of soccer’s transfer market, is drawn from firsthand experience. Sogut has spent 15 years as an agent, and he is best known for his longstanding association with Mesut Özil, the onetime Arsenal, Real Madrid and Germany playmaker. It is a world, he said, that does not demand a great deal of poetic license.The portrait of the industry he paints is not a flattering one. His characters are, by and large, hucksters and vultures, charlatans and sharks, operating in a sport rife with corruption and addled with cronyism. It is, though, intrinsically familiar: Soccer has grown accustomed to the depiction of agents as puppet masters in sharp suits and designer sunglasses, wielding ultimate influence over the fates of players and teams.That image, though, the one that suffuses Sogut’s novel, does not quite capture the reality of the industry as it stands now. The likes of Jorge Mendes — consigliere to Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho — may be cast as rainmakers possessed of sufficient clout to bend the whole market to their will, but they increasingly seem like the exception, rather than the rule. The world of agents is in convulsion, soccer’s latest battleground between new money and old hands.Though FIFA’s controversial decision, in 2015, to deregulate the industry opened the doors to any family member or friend who wanted to sign up to represent a player — a move that turned a chaotic and irrevocably murky world into a “complete free-for-all,” as one agent put it — the most significant new entrants in recent years have not been cowboy operators hoping to make a quick buck but established corporations panning for new fortunes.That market now includes not only CAA — which first entered soccer by handling the commercial deals of Mendes’s stable of stars — and ICM, but also the California-based sports agency Wasserman. The latter established a beachhead in English soccer in 2006, but has expanded rapidly in the last two years, acquiring another British agency, Key Sports, and the Spanish firm Top Value, as well as opening a German office.The appeal is no mystery. According to FIFA, agents and intermediaries made more than $500 million in commissions last year alone. In 117 deals, those paydays ran to more than $1 million. Even that seems like small change in comparison to, say, the deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City this summer: His representatives are reported to have earned somewhere in the region of $40 million simply for delivering his signature.Those sorts of figures are difficult to resist. “Football is the No. 1 sport in the world,” said Jonathan Barnett, a co-founder of Stellar. “If you want to be a major sports agency, you have to be involved.”The deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City paid off handsomely for him and his representatives.Craig Brough/ReutersThe Benefits of ScalePlenty of people have offered to buy Andy Evans’s business in the last few years. There have been inquiries from other soccer agencies and from firms that have never worked in soccer. There have been talks with several companies in Britain and at least one from the United States. None of the approaches, in Evans’s view, have felt quite right.Sometimes the finances have not added up. Sometimes Evans has not been sold on exactly what a new owner had planned for World in Motion, the agency he founded a quarter century ago. Mostly, though, he has not been inclined to sell at all. “I’ve been running it for a long time,” Evans said. “I’m not especially inclined to not run it.”The client list he has established is an impressive one — it includes Aaron Ramsdale, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and the England defender Conor Coady — but Evans has never had any desire to operate at the sort of scale of Base and Stellar. That was a conscious choice: He has long believed there was an advantage in being a David.He is conscious, though, that the arrival of the corporations, and in particular the merger between CAA and ICM, could start to alter that equation.Whenever he pitches a prospective client, Evans finds that the first question is always the same. “It is always, ‘Who else do you represent?’” he said. “Players want to know that more than anything else. They know that if you don’t know anyone, you can’t get anything done. People just wouldn’t pick up the phone.”That gives the monolith that has emerged from the union of CAA and ICM — and, as a result, between Base and Stellar — an almost unassailable advantage. Neither firm expects to lose any soccer agents as a result of the merger; the intention is to grow the client list rather than shrink it. The answer to the question “Who else do you represent?” might as well be “everyone.”“It has been a huge advantage in terms of commercial, marketing, organization,” Barnett said earlier this year, before the merger had been approved by the Justice Department, but he was adamant that even becoming part of ICM had been “fantastic” for both his staff and his clients. The impact of joining forces with CAA could be only greater still.Heavy LiftingMichael Yormark in 2013. He joined Roc Nation a year later.Omar Vega/Invision/APMichael Yormark, with his cut-glass jaw and his close-cropped hair, does not seem the sort to be easily intimidated. A veteran agent, he has spent the last six years steering the expansion of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label into international sports, painstakingly building out a roster of clients that started, by accident, with Jérôme Boateng and has since grown to include the Belgian star Romelu Lukaku and the Chelsea defender Reece James.Yormark might then have been expected to greet the prospect of a colossal new rival on his turf with something sandwiched between reluctance and dread. Instead, in an interview at Roc’s London headquarters, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “That deal is great for us,” he said.His logic is straightforward. Roc Nation’s pitch to prospective clients is based on what Yormark described as a “360-degree service,” one that focuses as much, or more, on meeting their aspirations away from the field than on negotiating new contracts or arranging money-spinning transfers. The label keeps its client list small by design.“The heavy lifting is in helping build a brand, a platform, whatever they want to do,” Yormark said. That is not possible, his company contends, with a client list numbering in the hundreds. “It would be hard to do what we do with 150 clients,” said Alan Redmond, Roc Nation’s head of football. “It would be impossible if we had 400.”Inside CAA, those concerns are airily dismissed. Executives believe that the company’s scale belies its flexibility. The example often cited is the N.B.A. player Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans.Williamson, when selecting his representation, made clear that he wanted a “boutique” feel, precisely the kind of treatment that Roc Nation has made its hallmark. To win his signature, CAA pivoted. Williamson and his family, one CAA executive said, have two points of contact at the agency, no more. The fact that those representatives are merely a tiny part of a giant company is hidden from view.There are others, though, who worry that the type of representation players might receive is far from the most significant consequence of the merger.While the arrival of corporations — with shareholders and workplace cultures and public images to worry about — may hint at an encroaching professionalization in what has traditionally been the kind of lawless industry Sogut’s novel depicts, it also exposes players to the possibility that their futures will be determined by a greater need to bolster a parent company’s bottom line.“If you have an agent who is under pressure to move you early because it is the best thing for the agency, it can compromise a career,” as one veteran agent put it.That has always been a risk for players, of course. They have always been vulnerable to their careers being shaped by their agents’ interests outweighing their own. It is that tension that makes the world of agency such a rich, compelling setting for a thriller, for example. There have always been sharks in the water. The only thing that has changed is the size of the fish. More

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      Paulo Dybala, Juventus and the Problem With Italy

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      The travails of Dybala, whose contract with Juventus runs out this month, are emblematic of a soccer ecosystem that is often a world apart.Paulo Dybala did not, particularly, look as if he were ready to say goodbye. As the lights at the Allianz Stadium in Turin, his home for the last seven years, flashed and flickered, and Tina Turner’s “The Best” began its crescendo, he started to cry. Not in the sense of a single, elegant tear rolling down the cheek. He sobbed. He racked. His chest heaved as he gulped for air.As Juventus’s fans stood as one to applaud Dybala, Leonardo Bonucci, his longstanding teammate, rushed over to put an arm around his shoulder. It was not an act of consolation so much as one of support. His eyes red and his face raw, it looked momentarily as if Dybala might struggle to remain upright.Dybala had not wanted to leave. Not really, not deep down. Instead, his hand had been forced. His contract at Juventus expires next week. He had been set to sign a new one, one to keep him in Turin for four years, last October, but Juventus withdrew it. The club had scheduled further discussions for March, but those never materialized.Things had changed in the intervening months, the team’s executives explained to Dybala’s agents. The Juventus attack was going to be built around Dusan Vlahovic, a Serbian striker signed from Fiorentina in January. There would be no room for Dybala, either on the field or on the salary roll. His time was up. He was free to leave.Dybala in May, after his final game at Juventus.Massimo Pinca/ReutersDybala might, when the tears had dried and he had recovered his composure, have wondered if that was no bad thing to be this summer. Europe’s teams are still recovering from the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Most are not sufficiently flush to pay vast transfer fees, but that has not dimmed their desire for improvement. This is — as it was always going to be — the summer of the free transfer.Antonio Rüdiger has already taken advantage of it, swapping Chelsea for Real Madrid. His former teammate at Chelsea, Andreas Christensen, has done the same, joining Barcelona. Paul Pogba will, in the coming days, announce that he is returning to Juventus after his contract at Manchester United expired. All of them will have made sure that at least some of the money that they might have fetched in transfer fees on the open market now finds its way into their pay packets instead.Dybala might have expected to attract more suitors than all of them. He is 28, in the thick of his prime years. He was, for a while, arguably the most gifted player on one of the most successful teams in Europe. He has won Serie A titles and played in the Champions League final. He scored 113 goals in 283 games for Juventus. He is, by any measure, an elite forward. His signature would be a coup.It has not quite played out like that. With a week to go until he is no longer a Juventus player, Dybala has yet to find a new employer. Inter Milan, for weeks his most likely destination, has suddenly cooled on the idea, having already restored Romelu Lukaku to its ranks. A.C. Milan, the returned Serie A champion, would be an alternative, but no offer has yet emerged.Romelu Lukaku couldn’t wait to leave Chelsea and return to Inter Milan. His move ended one possible exit route for Dybala.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMore curious still is the apparent apathy from outside Italy. Dybala, a player who has previously captured the imaginations of Manchester United, Tottenham, Barcelona and Real Madrid, has received only one serious proposal from abroad, from Sevilla, that great collector of mercurial Argentine forwards. The catch is that it comes with a significant pay cut. One of the finest players in Italy is available at no cost, and much of Europe has barely blinked.In part, that is because of Dybala himself. His salary expectations rule out a vast majority of clubs. His injury record might give others pause. His form, over the last couple of years, has been a little inconsistent, though he would doubtless point out that Juventus has hardly played in a way that might extract his best performances.That, in fact, may be the most apposite factor. In an era when most teams play with some version of an attacking trident — two wide players cutting in, one central forward employed to create space — Dybala does not have a natural home.He is, by inclination and disposition, a No. 10, a position that has all but ceased to exist in modern soccer. Even Juventus, where the role — as much as the number — carries a certain “weight,” as one of the club’s executives said this year, is abolishing it. Elite soccer, now, does not have room for what Italian soccer has long called the fantasista. Dybala may prove to be the last of the line.But the limbo in which Dybala finds himself is part of a broader trend, too. Italian soccer is an increasingly isolated ecosystem, a world unto itself. It is not just that Italian players, as a rule, do not leave Italy: Only four members called to Roberto Mancini’s team for this month’s meeting with Argentina, the so-called Finalissima, played outside Serie A, the same number as he called up to his victorious squad for Euro 2020. It is that the country’s coaches travel less and less frequently, too. Carlo Ancelotti may have won yet another Champions League less than a month ago, and Antonio Conte might have helped Tottenham win back its place in Europe’s elite, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.Gennaro Gattuso was installed a few weeks ago at Valencia — a match made in Jorge Mendes’s idea of heaven — but he is the only other Italian coach in Europe’s big five leagues. The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany and Spain export great numbers of managers, seeding ideas and spreading philosophies. The graduates of Coverciano, Italy’s fabled coaching academy, tend to stay closer to home.Carlo Ancelotti is a rarity: a successful Italian coach working outside of Italy.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIncreasingly, too, Serie A has drifted free of its moorings at the heart of elite soccer’s economic system. According to the consultancy firm Twenty First Group, 138 players have left France’s top flight for teams in the other big-five leagues in the last five years. Ninety-eight have left Spain. Only 82 have left Italy, fewer even than the Premier League, soccer’s great apex predator.Some, of course, have been eye-catchingly successful: Liverpool plucked Mohamed Salah and Alisson Becker from Roma; Paris St.-Germain, a frequent importer of luxury Italian goods, has acquired the likes of Mauro Icardi, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Achraf Hakimi from the two Milanese clubs. There have been other, more low-key triumphs, too: Bayer Leverkusen’s signing of Patrik Schick and Leicester’s recruiting Timothy Castagne.But largely, Italian clubs now trade with each other. In the same time period, teams in France, Spain, Germany and England sold around 100 players apiece to their domestic rivals. Italian sides did almost twice as much business internally: 215 players have left one Serie A club for another since 2017.It is that, more than anything, that may have precluded Dybala’s having the choice he might have expected, once his sorrow at seeing his time at Juventus cut short had abated. Italy is no longer a place teams go to shop. One of the best players in Europe is out of contract next week, and only a handful of teams seem to have taken note. Not because of what he can do, or because of what he has achieved, but because of where he has done it, a global star who flourished in Italy’s own little world.Time to Say GoodbyeSadio Mané is happy. It’s OK to be happy for him, too.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose of you not regularly exposed to Britain’s soccer content-industrial complex might be blissfully unaware of the fact that a variety of retired players have declared Sadio Mané’s transfer to Bayern Munich a bad one. Michael Owen is “struggling to understand” why a player with one year left on his contract would leave Liverpool for a European giant.Ally McCoist, meanwhile, finds it “very strange.” Paul Merson was equally baffled. Dean Saunders believes Mané, the Senegal forward, will “ruin the best two years of his career.”To some extent, of course, the thing that comes out worst from this whole confected farrago is the soccer media in Britain, thanks to its willingness to lend weight to the words of almost anyone who has ever kicked a ball and its desperate need to drag out whatever thin talking point it can find in a long, slow, balmy June.The reality, of course, is that there is nothing to say about Mané’s departure from Liverpool. Indeed, it is something of a unicorn: a player swapping one major club for another with absolutely no acrimony whatsoever.The rationale behind Mané’s decision is blindingly obvious: He has spent six years at Anfield, won everything, and now wants to try something new. Bayern Munich offers not only a guarantee of trophies but a consistent place in (at least) the Champions League quarterfinals and the sort of salary that Liverpool was not prepared to pay.It is so simple that even the one faction that might be expected to have criticized Mané’s decision, Liverpool’s fans, seems satisfied. There is a disappointment that the club’s beloved front three is no more, of course, but there has been no fury, no resentment and no accusations of greed or treachery.That has partly to do with the affection and esteem in which Mané is held, but it also has to do with the timing of his departure. Mané goes having achieved everything he set out to achieve at Liverpool. There are no unanswered questions, no sense of what might have been, no reason to regret. There is also no feeling that he lingered too long. Perhaps that is what has caused the confusion. Perhaps that is what that legion of former players is struggling to understand. Transfers are not meant to happen like this. Someone is meant to be angry. Everything falls apart if they are not.Welcome to FIFA’s Party. B.Y.O.Gianni Infantino and FIFA’s golden goose.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersEnvironmentally, it borders on the criminal. Logistically, it will be a nightmare. There are too many teams and too many games and, as begrudging as it sounds, too many venues. If this year’s World Cup threatens to be too compact, too tight, then the 2026 iteration seems too sprawling, too vast.Still, for all of that, it is hard not to find the prospect of a World Cup scattered across North America tantalizing. A final in Los Angeles, Miami or (the correct answer, for reasons not quite as partisan as they might seem) New York? A debut for the men’s tournament in Canada? A return to Mexico, to the Azteca, the quintessential World Cup venue? Soccer at Arrowhead? All of it is perfect.That, of course, is not why FIFA awarded the tournament to North America. It did so because it will be the most lucrative World Cup in history. It might well be the most lucrative World Cup there could ever be. The North American bid team’s own projections estimated that FIFA will leave the United States, Canada and Mexico with an $11 billion surplus.Not that FIFA needs the money, of course. The organization’s cash reserves already run into the billions. And yet it still felt the need to demand various tax breaks from candidate cities, simply to make the whole exercise more money-spinning for itself.All of that, though, simply makes the question more urgent. What, precisely, does it intend to do with the infusion 2026 will bring? Will there be a sudden, dramatic improvement on the amount of money it can pump into the game in less-developed soccer nations?A FIFA employee may well have provided the answer. Earlier this month, Arsène Wenger — a little ham-fistedly — suggested that soccer was missing out on talent because the infrastructure to find it was not as advanced in Africa as it is in Europe. There are no prizes for guessing whose responsibility that is. FIFA already has the money to redress the balance between Europe and, well, everywhere else. After 2026, it will have no excuses for failing to do so.CorrespondenceShawn Donnelly has a question. “It’s easy to find out how much money athletes are making during the season. Why is it so difficult to get the same information for European soccer players? It seems like these figures are state secrets. As a fan, it’s tough to get a full picture of how much the players are making, and so to know the real cost to the clubs.”This is meat and drink for the correspondence section: an Atlantic cultural divide. There is, as a rule, traditionally a greater degree of transparency in American sports. (I always enjoy American journalists who complain, understandably, that teams increasingly won’t let them into the locker room; try shouting a single question at Harry Winks in a parking lot, only for him not to answer it.) That seems the most obvious explanation.But I might be tempted to flip the question on its head, too. Why are American sports and American athletes so willing to divulge their salaries? As a journalist, obviously, I’d encourage it. As a fan, too. Fans have a right to know these things. But I’m not sure any of us especially enjoy talking about how much, or how little, we earn, just as I’m not sure any of us like being questioned about our performance at work while in our underwear.Speaking of asking questions, there were plenty of submissions for commentary bugbears, too. Karl Thompson pitched, “well, there was contact,” when discussing whether something should or should not be a penalty. Benson Lieber dismissed my suggestion of “interrogating” because it has “become one of the most prominent buzzwords in the literary humanities,” which is more than enough to rule it out. And Josh Curnett volunteered, “showed a clean pair of heels,” which feels evocative enough to be allowed a pass.And special mention to Andrew Melnykovych, who wondered: “Are you asking questions of asking questions?” More

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      The Parable of Inter Milan

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      Fast money from China led a storied team back to the top of Italian soccer. Now the money has dried up, and its title-winning squad is breaking apart.This is a preview of the On Soccer With Rory Smith newsletter, which is now reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly.The first alarm rang in February, a warning from thousands of miles away.Jiangsu Suning was one of the mainstays of that strange period, five or six years ago, when soccer awoke — almost overnight — to discover that China had arrived, its pockets bottomless and its ambitions unchecked, intent on inverting the world.At first, Europe saw this new horizon as it sees everything: as a market. China’s corporate-backed clubs were, as Turkey’s and Russia’s had been years before, a convenience and a curiosity, a place where they could offload unwanted players from bloated squads.And then, when the Chinese teams kept coming back, attempting to coax away not the supporting cast but the headline acts, Europe realized that this was something else: a takeover. China’s clubs were buying not just players, but things that were more valuable, things that made them a threat: interest and prestige and relevance.There was, suddenly, something of a backlash, a degree of pearl-clutching and garment-rending at the very idea that a new league could just come along and drive up prices, an approach that no European league would ever dream of adopting. There were fears that the Chinese Super League would distort the market so much that it would drive European clubs to the brink of financial destruction, a job Europe had long been capable of doing itself, thank you.Jiangsu was in the thick of that, along with all of the other names of that era: Guangzhou Evergrande, Shanghai S.I.P.G. and all the rest. It was Jiangsu that signed Ramires, a Champions League-winning midfielder in the prime of his career, from Chelsea. It was Jiangsu that outbid Liverpool to sign Alex Teixeira, a player Jürgen Klopp had identified as his first-choice reinforcement after taking over at Anfield.It proved a bubble, of course. The world’s best players never did make it to China. But, occasionally, one of the Chinese teams would try. In the summer of 2019, Jiangsu approached Real Madrid to inquire about the possibility of signing Gareth Bale. It intended to pay him, according to reports, more than $1 million a week. Bale prevaricated, and decided against the move. It proved a wise decision. Eighteen months later, in February of this year, not long after winning the Chinese title for the first time in its history, Jiangsu ceased to exist.This was the warning. Jiangsu was not the Suning conglomerate’s only soccer operation: The company had also owned a majority stake in Inter Milan since 2016, installing Steven Zhang — son of the company’s principal — as the youngest president in the club’s history. Suning’s arrival had been greeted as Inter’s salvation: a chance, at last, to restore the team to the ranks of first Italy’s, and then Europe’s, elite, to give it the financial firepower to compete with the superclubs.In February, Suning seemed set to deliver, at last, on its promise. Inter was marching toward a first Serie A title since 2010. It had the best coach in the country, Antonio Conte. It had the finest player in the league, Romelu Lukaku. It had a squad constructed with no expense spared, brimming with bright young talent and seasoned old heads.The collapse of Jiangsu, though, hinted at what was to come. Suning had cited financial difficulties as the cause of the Chinese club’s dissolution, though the suspicion remains that the decision had a political element: The company had vowed to concentrate on its “core” retail business, dispensing with other investments, in line with China’s abiding state policy.Jiangsu Suning won the Chinese Super League title in November 2020. Four months later, the club ceased to exist.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSuning had already sought a bridging loan from Oaktree Capital — an investment management firm specializing in distressed assets, a description which would not have made Inter fans especially confident — to see out the Italian season. “I hope what happened to us does not happen to Inter,” the former Italy striker Éder Martins, who had played for both clubs, said.Inter has been spared that fate, of course, but that is scant solace for its fans. It was only at the start of May that tens of thousands of Inter fans poured onto the streets of Milan, in defiance of the social distancing regulations then still in place, to celebrate confirmation of its Serie A title. Zhang, on the ground in Italy for the first time in months, vowed that his company remained committed to Inter for the “mid-to-long term.”Since then, the championship team has unraveled at lightning speed. First, Conte left, as he had tried to do last year, with ominous mention of the fact that his “project had not changed” as he did so: The club’s, it went unsaid, very much had. Then Achraf Hakimi, the player whose acquisition and performance had lifted Inter above all of its domestic rivals, was sold, the money raised earmarked not for the squad but to balance the books.That was supposed to be it: Simone Inzaghi, the man tapped to replace Conte, insisted when he was introduced as Inter’s new coach that he had been assured that nobody else would be leaving.A few weeks later, though, that reassurance was proved hollow. Chelsea paid Inter $132 million for Lukaku, the club’s great shining star. He had always wanted to play for Inter — his childhood idol had been Ronaldo, the great Brazilian striker — and he was happy in Milan and, for all the problems he had faced, in Italy. He wanted to stay. The club, though, could not afford not to sell him. And perhaps not only him: Lautaro Martínez, his strike partner, had been offered around, too, to Tottenham and Arsenal and Atlético Madrid. The protests against Suning’s continued ownership have been long and loud.Romelu Lukaku, who helped bring a title to Inter Milan, will line up for Chelsea this season.Daniele Mascolo/ReutersThis is not the future as Inter had envisaged it. Its fate, compared to that of Jiangsu, is hardly a miserable one: Inzaghi is a fine coach, and he will retain the core of the squad that won Serie A last year. The club has signed Edin Dzeko to replace Lukaku; Marcus Thuram, from Borussia Mönchengladbach, or Duvan Zapata, of Atalanta, may follow. Nicolò Barella, Marcelo Brozovic and the best defense in Italy are all still in place.But the title, won after such a long wait, no longer looks — as Zhang had promised — like the beginning of something. Rather, it has the air of a definitive end. Juventus, reunited with Massimiliano Allegri this summer, is expected to reclaim primacy as Serie A starts this weekend. Roma, under the aegis of José Mourinho, and Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli may both pose more of a threat than Inter. So, too, may A.C. Milan and Atalanta.There is a sorrow in that, of course, for Inter’s fans: a simple story about risk and reward, about cost and benefit, about the price of a dream made flesh. There is an undeniable cruelty in the proximity of the celebration and the collapse, though perhaps that is — boiled down — what sports are all about: The absence of Lukaku this year makes last season all the more special, the memories of it all the more potent.The Inter president, Steven Zhang, shooting a selfie in the good old days. Last year.Pool photo by Lars BaronFor the rest of us, though, there is a warning, one from far closer to home. What has happened, overnight, to Inter — and what happened, even more dramatically, to Jiangsu — is what happens when clubs are bought and sold not in pursuit of sporting glory or even, as distasteful as it may be to say, eventual profit. It is what happens when soccer allows itself to be used for politics and for posturing and, above all, for power.Inter is not the only club that has been bought for reasons other than love of the game, and it is not the only club whose success depends not on the decisions it makes on the field — or even off it — but on social, political and diplomatic currents that have little or nothing to do with the game itself. Inter is not the only club that should hear the alarm.The Definition of FairP.S.G. got Messi and City got Grealish, but Chelsea got the biggest prize of them all.Pool photo by Carl RecineThey are all, on the surface, sound ideas. A little more than a year since a combination of the coronavirus pandemic and the Court of Arbitration for Sport brought an end to UEFA’s first attempt at introducing the concept of fiscal responsibility into European soccer — yes, that’s right, this bit is about Financial Fair Play, but I promise it’s not boring — the outline of F.F.P. 2.0 is starting to emerge.Quite what form the regulations will take once Europe’s competing clubs and leagues and their many and varied lobbyists have had a run at them is anyone’s guess, of course, but UEFA’s ideas are certainly worth exploring.Real-time enforcement of the rules, so that teams in breach are punished immediately, rather than at some ill-defined point in a distant future. A luxury tax, borrowed from Major League Baseball, for transgressors, which would function as a solidarity mechanism more in theory than in practice. Some form of a cap on how much of a club’s revenue can be spent on its squad. This all makes sense. Some of it could work. But, even now, it is possible to say with some certainty that it won’t.Reading the proposals brought to mind a line in “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” the Joshua Ferris novel concerned with identity theft, religion and dentistry. “The history of making money in this country is a history of exploiting the policymakers,” one of his characters, a Wall Street billionaire who made his money shorting the market in 2008, says at one point. “Let the policymakers act, and then study the places ripe for exploiting.”This is the fundamental problem with F.F.P., whatever form it takes. No matter what the rules are, no matter how much sense they make, no matter how pure the intent or dire the punishment, none of it will have any effect if those meant to be governed by the new system set out to circumvent it.The previous iteration of F.F.P. was flawed, of course. There were considerable and meaningful problems with the “financial” part of it. But that was not what scuttled it, in the end. What brought about its demise, ultimately, was that quite a lot of clubs were much happier if things were not especially fair.All Brazil, All the TimePalmeiras breezed past São Paulo to move a step closer to returning to the Copa Libertadores final.Pool photo by Nelson AlmeidaIt is not just in Europe that competitive balance is a pressing issue. The semifinals of this year’s Copa Libertadores contain three Brazilian teams: the reigning champion, Palmeiras, as well as Atlético Mineiro and Flamengo. It could have been a clean sweep, too, if Fluminense had not lost to the Ecuadorean side Barcelona S.C. on away goals on Thursday night.That kind of one-nation dominance had never happened, but it feels as if it has been coming. Brazilian teams have won the last two editions of the tournament — Flamengo’s last-gasp defeat of River Plate in 2019 and Palmeiras’s victory in a stultifying, pandemic-delayed all-Brazilian final against Santos in July — and three of the last four.Still, the nature of the domination is troubling. Brazilian teams topped five of the eight groups this time around; Brazil had six teams in the last 16 (admittedly the same as Argentina). In the quarterfinals, Flamengo swept past the Paraguayan team Olimpia, and on home soil Atlético Mineiro made short work of River Plate. Palmeiras qualified in style, too, in a game that was a win-win, from a Brazilian perspective: Its opponent was its city rival, São Paulo.The explanation, though, is simple. Brazilian teams have access to far greater resources than the vast majority of their opponents. Only a couple of Argentina’s giants have anything like the revenues of the powerhouses from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Pôrto Alegre and Belo Horizonte.In one sense, of course, the rude economic health of the Brazilian game is welcome. In the long term, the hope has to be that it can provide some sort of counterweight to 30 years of European domination of what is meant to be a global sport. The risk is, in the short term, that yet another of soccer’s crown jewels becomes the plaything of a small coterie of clubs.CorrespondenceKudos to all of those Liverpool fans (I presume) who noticed that Jürgen Klopp’s team did not make an appearance in last week’s swift Premier League preview. “Are you not writing them off rather early?” asked Ron Bartolini. “You didn’t mention Liverpool!” pointed out Ronak Shah, though he put it all in capitals, to let me know he was shouting at me. “You’ve already written off Liverpool as a contender?” said David Nolan.There were, needless to say, others, and they deserve an explanation. The truth is that I prevaricated, just a little, on where to put Liverpool. My instinct is that the Premier League season will play out with a cigarette-paper top four until March or so, at which point Manchester City and Chelsea will pull away, leaving Manchester United and Liverpool to the comfort and consolation of a return to the Champions League.Welcome back to the newsletter, Mohamed Salah and Liverpool.Rui Vieira/Associated PressBut at the same time, I’m aware that there is a tendency — particularly prevalent during the summer months — to assume that every transfer will prove to be a resounding success; we presume that there is a direct correlation between how much a team spends and how well it will fare over the coming season. Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United have spent a lot, and therefore their prospects are brighter than the (comparatively parsimonious) Liverpool.That is, of course, basically true in the round; in individual cases, though, it is far less accurate. Which, all in all, is a long-winded way of saying that yes, I have written off Liverpool (to emerge as champion, anyway) but that I know I am wrong to do so. With all that in mind, then, it felt safer just not to say anything.And a note from Brian T. Love, who has the sort of name that demands a middle initial. “There were no reminders of the fan protests at soccer grounds that brought down the breakaway Super League. Maybe I noticed a green scarf at Old Trafford during the Manchester United match. Four months removed, are fans placated?”There is no brief answer to that, Brian, but it is a subject worth returning to, I think, in time. More

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      Belgium Beats Portugal at Euro 2020, Sending Cristiano Ronaldo Home Early

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      A failed strategy sent defending champion Portugal out early at Euro 2020 and kept alive the title hopes of Belgium’s golden generation.The list of people who had let Cristiano Ronaldo down was, by the end, a long and illustrious one.Their transgressions had varied, in both nature and severity, and so had their punishments: Diogo Jota, failure to pass, hard stare; Renato Sanches, not getting out of the way of a free kick, baleful finger-point; Bruno Fernandes, speculative and wildly inaccurate shooting not entirely unfamiliar to Ronaldo himself, primal scream into Seville’s stifling night sky. More

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      Belgium Falls to Italy and Searches for a Silver Lining

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      A loss to Italy at Euro 2020 sent another star-studded Belgian team home empty-handed. But not before it offered a peek at its future.Belgium’s players were still, their faces blank, as they heard the clock strike midnight. At the other end of the Allianz Arena in Munich, Italy’s players were being slowly consumed by their fans, released only once they had surrendered their white jerseys and their green training bibs and, in some cases, their muddied shorts for use as future sacraments. More