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    Liverpool-Manchester City: Rodri Is the Premier League’s Best Player

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    Rodri’s genius is not in making things happen. He is employed by Manchester City, at least in part, to make sure they do not.Pep Guardiola would, in an unguarded moment, probably concede that he has a slight tendency toward hyperbole. With eyes wide and voice breathless, he will sing the praises of some hopelessly overmatched opponent his Manchester City team has just beaten by 6-1, his players’ jerseys untainted by sweat. “Guys,” he will say, “guys, they are so good. So, so good.”Where this reflex comes from is a matter of interpretation. The likeliest explanation is that it is just who Guardiola is: passionate and intense and deeply enthusiastic, still, about his sport. There might be just a dash of noblesse oblige in there, too, a little well-intentioned clemency from soccer’s great conqueror. And it is easy to wonder if Guardiola resents how much of his — and City’s — success is presented as an economic inevitability, and so feels the need to get his rebuttal in first.Whatever the truth, the effect is the same: At times, it can be difficult to be absolutely certain when Guardiola is being sincere and when he is indulging in some light lily-gilding.In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s Manchester derby, for example, he suggested that Phil Foden might be the “best” player in the Premier League. It is by no means an outrageous claim. Foden, 24, has been outstanding for City this season, the finest campaign of his young career. He has sparkled in a suite of roles, and deserves a considerable portion of the credit for the fact that City did not particularly seem to miss Kevin De Bruyne while he was injured.But at the same time, there is a good chance that Guardiola was exaggerating, just a touch. Not because he does not appreciate Foden’s brilliance, but because he — more than anyone — should be aware that Foden is not even the best player on his team. The best player at Manchester City, and the best player in the Premier League, is Rodri.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Premier League Needs a Commissioner

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      Allowing clubs to block rule changes and money to delay punishments feeds the perception that the same rules do not apply to everyone.Pete Rozelle’s immediate reaction could not accurately be described as unbridled enthusiasm. He was 33. He had, for the last three years, been the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. He was suave, charming and well liked. But he was nevertheless starting to wonder whether running an N.F.L. football team was really the job for him.And then, outside the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami in January 1960, he was cornered by a cadre of the league’s most fearsome power brokers: the Mara brothers, Jack and Wellington, owners of the Giants; Dan Reeves, the Rams’ benefactor; and Paul Brown, the coach and founder and all-purpose potentate of the team in Cleveland that still bears his name.They had an offer to make Rozelle. They did not want him to run a franchise. They wanted to put him in charge of the whole league.It was an offer, in Rozelle’s mind, that he had to refuse. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he told them, according to Michael MacCambridge’s magisterial history of the league, “America’s Game.” “That is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard.”Rozelle’s logic was simple. The job of N.F.L. commissioner looked an awful lot like a poisoned chalice. The league’s various owners were split on almost every issue imaginable — not only on who should be commissioner, but also whether to add another slate of expansion teams, whether to sign a collective television deal and how to stave off the threat of the rival American Football League.There was even contention over where, exactly, the league’s offices should be. Rozelle was not the only one who might have looked at the job description and decided he would have to be a fool, or a madman, to accept.Still, over the course of the afternoon, Rozelle was won over. He was persuaded by Reeves, Brown and the rest that his candidacy would be successful, that the issues could be resolved, that he would “grow into” the position. His wife, Jane, reassured him that he would be a good fit. Later that day, Rozelle was elected as commissioner.The challenges faced by the N.F.L. of the early 1960s are alien to the Premier League of 2023. The Premier League is, by almost any measure, a picture of health. It is the most popular domestic sports league of all time. Television has made it rich beyond measure. It is a playground for billionaires and private equity funds and nation states. It does not fear the emergence of a rival; if anything, its primacy is such that it is asphyxiating its former peers, a wealth gap that isn’t good for the game.This weekend, the Premier League will return after a brief hiatus for international duties with a top-of-the-table meeting between Manchester City and Liverpool, the game that has become its marquee fixture. City is the world’s dominant team. Liverpool is one of soccer’s grandest names. The two teams are packed with global stars and each is led by one of the most influential coaches of their generation. Millions will tune in to watch. If the Premier League is in crisis, it has taken a strange form.And yet, below the surface, the competition is buffeted by currents that Rozelle would recognize. This week, the clubs of the Premier League met in London for one of their periodic conferences. Among other matters, they voted on whether to introduce a ban on — and this is catchy — “related party loans.”In truth, this is hardly an existential matter for the league. (It is far more pressing, and far more problematic, elsewhere.) More and more teams in England, as is the case across Europe, are now part of so-called multiclub networks, in which owners possess not one but a whole stable of teams.The Premier League had, correctly, recognized that this offered teams a chance to circumvent the competition’s extremely lax rules on spending: Nottingham Forest could, say, take a player on loan from its sister club, Olympiacos, at a cheaper rate than it might have to pay on the open market, boosting its performance without affecting its balance sheet.The fact that this is only an issue now, of course, has nothing to do with Forest’s links to Greece or Brighton’s relationship with a team in Belgium but with Newcastle, which is owned by the same Saudi sovereign wealth fund that has spent the last few months stuffing its four domestic teams with superstars. The Premier League wanted to head off the prospect of those players being conveniently diverted to Newcastle at discounted rates.Bernardo Silva and Manchester City will enter Saturday’s showdown against Liverpool with a one-point lead in the Premier League table.Ian Walton/Associated PressBut the motion did not pass. The Premier League’s rules state that, to be approved, any vote requires the support of 14 of its 20 teams. This time, it fell one short. Seven teams decided, essentially, that the idea of related party loans was a good one. It is no surprise that those seven teams either are, or soon might be, part of multiclub systems.It would be naïve, though, to assume that the motives on the other side of the argument were any more pure. It is possible that some of the 13 who did back the idea of a ban did so because they believed the loophole might in some way undermine the integrity of the league, or because they felt there really ought to be rules governing a sporting competition. More likely — as suggested by the timing — they saw a chance to deny their rivals a possible advantage.There is nothing new in this. Several years ago, a number of teams put to the league the idea that they might pool the performance data produced by their games, so as to allow teams to better understand their opponents. Bundesliga of Germany had already adopted a collective approach. A majority of teams rejected it. Such a move would, they said, favor the clubs that had been early adopters of analytics.This is how the Premier League works: as a sort of tyranny of a self-interested majority. And, on the surface, teams confusing what is in their interests with what is in the interests of the league as a whole has done little harm. The league has grown to become a global behemoth. It is probably now Britain’s greatest cultural export.Increasingly, though, that approach appears to be nearing a breaking point. Manchester City has been charged with — though not found guilty of — 115 breaches of the league’s financial regulations. This month, Chelsea brought to its attention huge discrepancies in its books.Everton has vowed to fight a Premier League punishment, but its pockets are not as deep as those of rivals facing the same threat.Peter Powell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd the day before the league’s executives met in London to present craven self-interest as a form of democracy, Everton was stripped of 10 points in the standings for surpassing the maximum loss permitted by the league. (A lesson here: If you tell people that the aim is to lose no money, but that they can lose $130 million without being punished, they will assume that $130 million is not so much a ceiling as a target.)In a 41-page report exploring the Everton case, Paragraph 107 is the key. Part of the evidence submitted by Everton, it says, came from a representative of the club who explained that his job was not to make sure that it met the league’s financial requirements, but to “protect and interpret” those requirements “to the benefit” of his employer.“The Commission notes that the Premier League already needs to devote considerable resources to monitoring compliance by its member clubs,” the report adds. “If all clubs were to adopt a similar approach, the Premier League’s task would become yet more challenging.”That should not be the case, of course. The teams of the Premier League should understand that for a sporting competition to have any validity, any meaning, it needs to have an agreed-upon set of rules. But what Everton, Chelsea and Manchester City prove — like the vote on related party loans — is that the clubs do not want to engage with those rules in good faith. They see them instead as rules to be manipulated and circumvented and sometimes ignored, and view doing so as all part of the game.Whether that does any actual damage is difficult to say. The allegations against Manchester City have done little to dampen enthusiasm for the league, just as the sight of Newcastle reaching the Champions League with Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo — on loan — would hardly drive fans away.There comes a point, though, when a fracture happens. Perhaps that is between the clubs, so ensconced in their own universes that they can no longer agree on anything. Or perhaps that is between the teams and the fans, once the asterisks start to pile up in previous seasons and nobody is sure whether what they are watching will actually count.There are two ways of averting that. One, rather utopian, is to persuade the clubs to work more collectively, to understand that growth is a shared endeavor and that their success is codependent. The other is to create an office, one with genuine power, to enforce the rules (ideally in real time), to issue punishments and to protect the interests of the league.On several occasions in the 1990s, the Premier League sent emissaries to the United States to see what English soccer could learn from America’s major leagues. They came back with an awareness of the power of television, an understanding of the significance of corporate revenue, and a surprisingly longstanding conviction that cheerleaders would be a good idea in a Yorkshire winter.Nobody, it seems, recommended instituting a commissioner to shape and guide their business. Given where the Premier League finds itself now, caught in an impasse between irreconcilable camps, it is apparent that is something of an omission. If the clubs cannot willingly work together, cannot operate for their own wider benefit, then it is obvious they have to be made to do so.The only problem, of course, is the obvious one. The clubs themselves would have to vote on not only the identity of the commissioner, but also the existence of one. As ever, they would do so entirely along the lines of their own self-interests. In that case, and in that case alone, though, they might just find an unfamiliar unanimity.A (Disputed) Vision of the FutureCristiano Ronaldo is confirmed for Saudi Arabia in February. Lionel Messi and Inter Miami? Not so much.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersIt is not absolutely clear, at this precise moment, if Inter Miami will be taking part in the tournament that everyone is talking about: the eternally prestigious Riyadh Season Cup.On Tuesday, Turki al-Sheikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in Saudi Arabia, was under the distinct impression that he had booked the world’s finest Barcelona tribute act to be part of a three-team tournament featuring Miami’s fellow “giants” — his words, not anyone else’s — Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal.A few hours later, sadly, it became clear that nobody had told Inter Miami. “Earlier today, an announcement was issued stating that Inter Miami is scheduled to play in the Riyadh Season Cup,” the club said in a statement that is, by any standards, a classic of the genre. “This is inaccurate.”It seems a fair bet to assume that this all ends with Inter Miami pitching up in Saudi Arabia in a few months anyway, and that the dispute was rather more about who was allowed to announce the news, and when, than it was about the actual content of it. Still, even if the whole thing does not materialize, it is hard to escape the impression that the episode offers a fleeting glimpse of soccer’s future.The appeal of bringing Miami to town, of course, is the prospect of bringing Lionel Messi and Ronaldo into direct competition again. It would be, as the now-disputed news release had it, a “Last Dance” sort of occasion, an assertion undercut only a little by the fact that: one, the actual “Last Dance” — the documentary series — is about a meaningful championship, not a friendly match; and two, there is every chance that either the Saudi authorities or M.L.S. will find a way to have them play each other again at the next available opportunity.Still, such quibbling is probably futile at this point. Inter Miami against Al-Nassr in Riyadh, in February, is not even a remote imitation of the sorts of games that defined the rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo. It is instead an exhibition, a staged production, more than a sporting contest. It is soccer as brought to you by W.W.E.But it is also, needless to say, what people want. Fans will buy tickets to see Messi and Ronaldo face-to-face once more. Broadcasters will pay — perhaps not much, but still — to show the game. People will tune in, idly, reluctantly, with half an eye on something else. And as they do, soccer will take another step on the road to becoming something further from sport and closer to what might best be described as “general entertainment.”CorrespondenceLast week’s newsletter touched, fleetingly, on Sweden, the only major men’s league in Europe that continues virgin and unsullied by the arrival of V.A.R. That means, of course, that Sweden is also blissfully ignorant of the infinite debate about V.A.R. that occurs every time anyone mentions V.A.R.(It seems now that soccer is essentially a year-round conversation about how much of our agency we should surrender to technology broken only by two breaks in which we talk about the acquisition of players. Perhaps, in years to come, we will finally do away with the actual sport entirely so as to concentrate exclusively on the bits we really like.)In honor of the Swedish approach, then, I am going to set aside the many emails about V.A.R. that arrived in the inbox this week and focus instead on three questions that are perhaps less pressing but almost certainly more original.“Why are Wolverhampton Wanderers referred to as Wolves by match commentators?” Rick Smith asked. “I can’t think of any other team regularly referred to by its nickname. The only thing I can think of is, way back in the days of print media, some editor or typesetter said Wolverhampton had too many letters to fit in a headline.”My sense here is that Rick’s assertion is essentially correct, though I can think of a few examples that come pretty close. The best is the Scottish team Heart of Midlothian, which is referred to almost exclusively as Hearts. It is increasingly common to see “Spurs” in a league table rather than “Tottenham Hotspur.” In all of these cases, I suspect the basic cause is the desire to abbreviate, both from the fans and the news media.Question No. 2 comes from Ted Richards. “With the margins in performance at the top level becoming smaller and smaller, and the improvements in data collecting and tracking, has there been any movement, at the club level, to preferring international players closer to home?” he asked. “Might a club prefer a Mudryk over a Martinelli, knowing international duty would not require hours in the air while crossing many time zones?”The short answer to this is yes. Clubs do factor international commitments into signing players — particularly in the context of African stars likely to be called up for the midseason Cup of Nations — but it is ordinarily only one factor to be weighed, rather than an outright red flag.And finally, Bob Bonpietro has hit upon another subject on which I already have thoughts. “After seeing France beat Gibraltar, 14-0,” he wrote, “isn’t it time UEFA reconsider its qualifying format for the European Championship? These types of games usually end in routs. Why not do something akin to Concacaf to winnow out the minnows?”Kylian Mbappé, Olivier Giroud and Ousmane Dembélé combined to score six of France’s 14 goals against Gibraltar.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe argument has always been that the smaller nations improve only by being exposed to the standard to which they aspire, and it is one with some evidence in its favor. Luxembourg, for example, traditionally one of Europe’s great walkovers, finished third in its qualifying group this time around. Albania, historically only a rung above, has now qualified for two of the last three Euros.All of that notwithstanding, the idea of holding some sort of prequalifying tournament does have some merit. Inviting the 16 “weakest” teams — decided by ranking, perhaps, or performance in the last round of qualification — to play off for a limited number of places in qualifying proper would allow those countries to play more meaningful games; would create a more attractive qualifying tournament; and would not stop the momentum of the upwardly mobile. More

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      A Night at the Best Pickup Soccer Game in the World

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      As the players idled by the chain-link fence at the side of the field, taking great gulps of air and water and conducting an immediate autopsy of the game that had just finished, they focused their attention on three outstanding bones of contention. Instinctively, they separated into dedicated working groups to tackle each one.The first considered whether a penalty that had not been awarded absolutely should have been, as an aggrieved plaintiff was claiming. The second investigated if a particularly egregious foul was premeditated (yes) and/or warranted (also yes). The third explored the knotty issue of how many deflections preceded the last of the game’s 12 goals — estimates ranged from two to “about a million” — and whether allowing the goal could, therefore, reasonably be considered the goalkeeper’s fault.Before that matter could be settled, the debrief was cut short. Each player had to dig into wallets or pockets to find five pounds — just over $6 — to pay their share for the use of the field. As they strolled stiffly to the parking lot, the squabbling gave way to discussion of plans for the rest of the evening, and for next week.This is all part of the ritual of the scrimmage, the scratch game, the kickabout. It is a conversation that happens thousands of times a week, across the world, after thousands of games like this one. The only difference here is the qualifications of those involved.A typical chat before any pickup game, anywhere in the world. It’s just that Alex Bruce, center, played more than 300 professional games.The 20 players who have just paid about $120 to play for an hour on an unremarkable synthetic field in south Manchester are used to rather different surroundings. Between them, they have made more than 1,000 appearances — and scored more than 100 goals — in England’s Premier League. They have played professionally in a dozen or so countries. Among their number are players who have won trophies, tasted the Champions League, represented their nations.They wear their fame relatively lightly. There are no replica jerseys bearing their names. Only a couple go as far as to use shorts emblazoned with club crests. Watch them play for a few minutes, though, and it is clear this game is hardly ordinary.The quality on display, as one player has put it, is “frightening.” As it should be: The victim of the contested penalty is Ravel Morrison, once of Manchester United and West Ham. The judge of the debate on the foul is Joleon Lescott, a Premier League and F.A. Cup champion with Manchester City.It is universally agreed that the game’s most gifted regular participant — and most unapologetically competitive spirit — is Stephen Ireland, who played for a decade with Manchester City and Aston Villa. The two players stretching out their calves, tuning out the bickering, are Papiss Cissé and Oumar Niasse, once of Newcastle United and Everton.They are part of a rotating cast of professionals — most of them retired recently enough that rust has not yet set in — who come here every week to take part in what may be the best game of pickup soccer in the world.Papiss Cissé, formerly of Newcastle United, rising above Bruce for a header.It was not designed to be anything of the sort. The weekly game started a couple of years ago, as coronavirus lockdowns began to ease, when a group of friends — most of whom had played semiprofessionally, on the lower rungs of England’s soccer pyramid — set up an amateur team, the Farmers, to play together on Sundays.This part of Manchester, though, is a relatively small world. The city’s leafy southern suburbs, and the gilded villages of north Cheshire, are home to dozens of professional players, both current and former. It did not take long before a couple of them, friends of friends, had accepted invitations to join in.From there, it spiraled quickly, said Kial Callacher, one of the team’s founders. Soon, the Farmers were winning some games by “30 goals or so,” he said. “After a while, it wasn’t really fun.” The team’s opponents, presumably, were of broadly the same view. Everyone involved decided it might be better if the ex-pros just played among themselves.So their hourlong games, held on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, were born. The guest list only grew more stellar. Some weeks might feature Antonio Valencia, John O’Shea, Danny Simpson and Danny Drinkwater, all of them Premier League champions, or Nedum Onuoha, formerly of Manchester City and now an ESPN analyst. Dale Stephens, a Premier League player as recently as last year, is a mainstay.The consensus is that Stephen Ireland, once of Manchester City, is the most talented regular participant.Cissé and Oumar Niasse, who both also had Premier League careers, might disagree.There are many more who spent years in England’s Football League. Few, if any, of the 66 members of the team’s WhatsApp group do not have at least semiprofessional experience. Games are, to put it mildly, competitive.“I’ll get an early night the day before,” said Joe Thompson, a regular participant who spent 13 years as a pro, mostly for Rochdale. “I’ll stretch in the afternoon, eat right, hydrate: all of the things I did as a professional. You don’t want to do yourself a disservice, or take liberties with the standard. You feel like you are constantly on trial. You have to be on the mettle or the group will let you know.”There is no shortage of candidates eager to see if they can handle it; so many are waiting to join that there is now a one-in, one-out policy on the WhatsApp group. Priority is given to prospective new entrants who have made the most appearances in the Champions League and the Premier League.For some, the appeal is at least partly practical. “It keeps people ticking over,” Thompson said. “If you’re out of contract, looking for a club, you can keep as fit as you like in the gym, but nothing replaces match sharpness.” Simpson has said it helped him remain “football fit” as he waited for a new club. Many in the group expect Morrison, most recently with D.C. United in Major League Soccer, to be picked up soon as a free agent.For a vast majority, though, the game meets a spiritual need. Thompson is not a typical case. Twice, during his career, he was found to have a form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He returned to play on both occasions but retired on medical advice in 2019, at age 30. As a result, he said, he found it relatively easy to “make peace” with leaving the game.A single game last week produced 12 goals and at least three postgame inquests.Many find the transition much harder. Alex Bruce, a defender who represented 14 clubs in a career that spanned almost two decades, compared retirement to “dropping off a cliff.” “There’s no buildup, and then one day you’re at home, wondering what to do with yourself,” he said. As much as pining for the sport itself, players said they tended to feel bereft outside the confines of a locker room. “You’re institutionalized,” Bruce said. “You miss the environment.”The WhatsApp group — an ongoing stream of affectionate teasing, lighthearted criticism and off-the-cuff soccer punditry, according to members — offers a digital imitation of the daily rhythm of life inside a club. And the games themselves provide an outlet for the competitive urge. “It’s better than going to the gym and running on a treadmill on your own,” Bruce said.It is that, more than anything, that brings them all to an unremarkable field deep in south Manchester, whatever the weather.Being a soccer player is, of course, glorious, glamorous fun. But, Thompson said, “over the course of 20 years or so, it chips away at you.” The pressure is intense. The politics are toxic. There is little agency: A player’s fate can swing on an unfortunate injury, an unhelpful manager, a single bad decision.At the end, there is no sentiment whatsoever. “Most people don’t retire from the game,” Thompson said. “It retires them.” Soccer moves on, unforgiving. “You’re on a pitch, in the fresh air, with a ball,” one participant said as he watched his colleagues and friends slip into their cars. “It’s what it was like when we started playing.”Once a week, though, these players can engage with the game on their terms. There is no crowd. There is no money, other than the fee to use the field. There is no pressure, other than that which they put on themselves. They all carry the scars of a life spent playing a professional sport. Those days are over, now, but they do not want to say goodbye. What they want to do, instead, is to play.“You’re on a pitch, in the fresh air, with a ball,” Thompson said as he watched his colleagues and friends slip into their cars. “It’s what it was like when we started playing. I think for most of them, it’s an hour a week when they can feel free.”That is, they know, a precious thing. This summer, the group played a couple of exhibition games against local teams, operating under the moniker Inter Retirement. They have since been approached by a production company with the idea of launching a YouTube channel, of turning their private game into public content.They can see the merit in the suggestion, of course, but one drawback, above all others, gives them pause. The act of observation would change the nature of the event. It would turn soccer, once more, into work. They come to this field, once a week, because there are no cameras. There is no spotlight, no pressure.Here, at last, that they can play. More

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      Soccer’s Next Big Thing Is Buying in Bulk

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      Networks of clubs help top teams streamline their scouting, methods and player acquisition. But who do they really serve?On Wednesday evening, the Colombian club Atlético Huila decided to treat its players and its coaching staff to what could be best thought of as an office night out. Huila has had a rough season. It finished at the bottom of the Apertura, the first half of the Colombian campaign. It won only five of its 20 games. A field trip was more a restorative than a reward.It was a good night, too. Huila’s squad has spent the last week in Sangolqui, a suburb of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, finishing off its preparations for the second half of the season as guests of Independiente del Valle. The host duly offered Huila an invitation to watch its Copa Libertadores game against Argentinos Juniors at its compact, modern stadium.What Huila’s players saw was, first and foremost, rousing entertainment. Thanks to a last-ditch goal from Kevin Rodríguez, Independiente won, 3-2, securing the top spot in its group in the process. More important, as they posed for a group photograph against the empty stands of the Estadio Banco Guayaquil after the final whistle, Huila’s players will have known they had seen a glimpse of their — or at least their club’s — future.Back in March, speaking at the Financial Times Business of Football summit, the Newcastle United minority owner Amanda Staveley confirmed that the English club was exploring the idea of establishing a worldwide network of teams.That, in itself, was no great surprise. Over the last few years, the concept of building a stable of clubs has become de rigueur in soccer. Red Bull pioneered the model, in Salzburg and Leipzig, New York and São Paulo. Manchester City, through City Football Group, industrialized it; its portfolio now encompasses more than a dozen clubs, spread as far afield as Uruguay and India.Since then, anyone who is anyone has followed suit. Indeed, that is what was most striking about Staveley’s announcement: not what she said, but how she said it. Newcastle, she told the conference, was pursuing “multiclub.” Not “a multiclub model.” Just “multiclub.” Owning multiple teams across disparate leagues has become so commonplace that it is now a noun.Dozens of teams have now been subsumed into these models. Genoa, Standard Liège, Hertha Berlin and Sevilla are all part of the same group. Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and Lyon are linked through another. Brighton has a connection to Union Saint-Gilloise (everyone has a club in Belgium). This week, Chelsea’s ever-disruptive owners bought a majority share in the French team Strasbourg.Manchester City has built an extensive network of clubs around the world.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesCity’s teams, which include New York City F.C., have had varying degrees of success.Vincent Carchietta/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConThe rationale, on paper, is this: Owning a network of teams should allow owners to share best practices more easily while reducing risk and increasing efficiency in the transfer market. A network should, if constructed correctly, function as a two-way talent pipeline: The best players rise to the top of the pyramid, while those who fall by the wayside have landing spots farther down, meaning there is far less waste.That is the theory. The practice is a little different. Leipzig and Salzburg apart, it is not clear if anyone has managed to make the idea work, at least at scale. Players do not move from Montevideo City Torque to Girona to Manchester City. The portfolio approach to soccer, for now, remains very much in beta.There is a reason people keep trying it, though. For the clubs that form the networks — especially for those teams outside the wealthy enclaves of England’s Premier League and Europe’s elite — collective safety offers a degree of economic stability. It may even, at some point, give them access to a higher caliber of player than they’d otherwise get.And yet, in another light, the trend represents something significantly more troubling: not so much an inevitable conclusion to the sport’s flirtation with high finance but something far closer to an existential threat.Often, that is framed as an issue of competitive integrity: What will happen, for example, if two teams from the same group encounter each other in European competition? But perhaps more pressing is whether being part of a larger group fundamentally changes the purpose of a club. Does it alter the meaning of a team when it is no longer an entity trying to succeed on its own terms but is instead either a proving ground for talent or a parking lot for castoffs?These are questions UEFA, at least, does not seem in a hurry to answer. The organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has performed a significant about face on the subject, going from immediate, reflexive objection to hinting that the body will change its rules to accommodate the new reality. The conclusion, as always, is that soccer is happy to grant forgiveness, even if you do not ask permission.Still, there is sufficient organic skepticism that — as a rule — these deals are announced as gently as possible. Freshly minted member clubs are offered soothing reassurances about their autonomy. The connections are, to some extent, downplayed. The precise purpose is always oblique. There are, it is fair to say, not many cases where one team poses happily for a photo in the stadium of its new stablemate.Last month, Atlético Huila was acquired by Grupo Independiente, an investment consortium headed by Michel Deller, an Ecuadorean real estate magnate. His wealth, though, was not the main source of the group’s appeal.Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was instead the success he and his partners have had with Independiente del Valle, the club they bought 15 years ago and turned, at blistering speed, into what may be the most forward-thinking team in Latin America.As Juan Carlos Patarroyo, the outgoing president of Huila, said, Independiente now stands as the “guru” of South American soccer, a “pioneer in training, creating, producing and marketing professional players.”The sophistication of its youth system is the envy of the continent: the regional training bases placed deliberately in the most fertile areas of the country, the in-house tournaments that attract scouts from across the world. Independiente has produced not just Ecuador’s current golden boy, Moisés Caicedo, but also Kendry Paéz, his heir apparent. It is not bad going, given that Paéz, at 16, is older than the current iteration of the club.No less impressive have been the results. Independiente is not just a finishing school. Deller, thanks to considerable investment and a sharp eye for coaching talent, has turned his project into a genuine continental force. Independiente was a Libertadores finalist in 2016, and it won the Copa Sudamericana in 2019 and 2022.Most significant, though, has been its broader impact on soccer in Ecuador. At the World Cup last year, 10 of the 26 players on Ecuador’s squad bore Independiente’s imprimatur: They had spent some, or all, of their careers in Sangolqui. Led by Paéz, Ecuador finished as runners-up in this year’s South American under-17 championship, ahead of Argentina, to earn a place in the under-17 World Cup.And now, through Huila, Deller has set himself the target of doing exactly the same in Colombia. The conditions, he believes, are similar: an abundance of young talent, much of it currently lost through carelessness, to be harnessed; a club more than willing to adopt his methods and apply his knowledge.“We are going to contribute a lot with know-how and experience,” Santiago Morales, Independiente’s general manager, said after the takeover was completed. “We will give new ideas and initiatives, but above all we have a commitment to train players. Soon, we will have Colombia playing in youth tournaments in South America and the world.”That is the plan, anyway. Given all Independiente has accomplished, it is easy to believe they will be able to meet their lofty promises. In doing so, they would not only lift Atlético Huila, but Colombia as a whole. And more than that, they may even prove that there is a way to make soccer’s latest theory work in practice, too.Common Sense RevolutionManchester City and Manchester United are two of the biggest spenders in women’s soccer, too.Molly Darlington/ReutersFrancesca Whitfield is not exactly a household name. As the head of group planning at Manchester United, she probably would not expect to be. Her background is in the corporate sector; United recruited her, initially, as a financial analyst. Still, this week she did two things so rare, and so unexpected, that they deserve to be celebrated.It is impressive enough that, while speaking at the inaugural Women’s Football Summit — the European Clubs’ Association had not thought to organize one before 2023, which is pretty telling, really — Whitfield suggested that women’s soccer should seek to “adopt financial regulation much earlier in the women’s game than we did in the men’s.”This is, of course, so sensible that it almost borders on obvious, but Whitfield’s belief — that women’s soccer should not seek to “emulate or replicate” the men’s game — remains surprisingly revolutionary. Curiously few people in women’s soccer seem to be aware that they do not have to be hidebound by a set of flawed conventions designed for a bygone age.More striking still, though, was the context for Whitfield’s comments. She works for one of the game’s apex predators, and yet she was publicly pushing for financial controls — either an “anchoring system” or “even something akin to a hard salary cap” — that might enable smaller clubs to compete.“The wage inflation we are seeing is contributing to the gap between the larger and the smaller clubs,” she said, pointing out that while teams backed by major men’s clubs can cope, those run on tighter budgets are effectively being railroaded into irrelevance. “They can’t possibly ever be competitive with how things are.” She would like, she said, to see the issue addressed not by the leagues themselves, but “on a European level.”Quite what form that financial control should take — a salary cap, a designated player system or even introducing a draft for out-of-contract players — is open to debate.The sentiment, though, is worth heeding, not solely for women’s soccer, but the game as a whole. Everyone should be thinking about how to make the sport more competitive: between clubs, between leagues, between continents. Everyone, in other words, should be thinking a little more like Francesca Whitfield.AfterthoughtAlex Christian, right, and Haiti stunned Qatar at the Gold Cup, 2-1, on Sunday.Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the end, nobody felt the need to remember the start. It seemed too long ago, so much crammed into the month that had elapsed that it felt distant, as if it had happened in another era, or on another planet. Lionel Messi, rather reluctantly wearing a bisht, had lifted the World Cup trophy after a final that will likely go down as the greatest of them all. Qatar had the story it wanted, the tournament it wanted, the stage it wanted all along.In the rush to unpack precisely what that meant — for soccer, for politics, for the Qatar’s human rights record and for the migrant workers who had died so that all of it might happen — it was easy to forget that it had begun with a humiliation.Three minutes into the tournament’s opening game, Qatar’s national team had conceded a goal to Ecuador. It was — very narrowly — ruled out for offside, but it set the tone. Inside 16 minutes, Qatar was behind. The host lost that game. Then it lost to Senegal, ensuring it would not reach the knockout stage. A final defeat, to the Netherlands, marked Qatar as the worst-performing host of all time.Given the cost and the scale and the sheer controversy involved in staging the tournament, it is easy to assume that the Qatari authorities never really cared about the soccer part of it. That is not quite true: The country had spent years trying to hone a team to fly its flag.It built the Aspire Academy, ensuring its young players had the finest facilities in the world, and explored using it to develop talent from across the planet. It invested in Eupen, a minor Belgian team, to expose its hot-housed prodigies to European soccer. It hired expert — and able — coaches to oversee their progress.And it all failed. Qatar was not humiliated during the World Cup, but it is fair to assume that three games, and three defeats, was not quite the return it had anticipated. The results have not improved since then. In its opening game at the Gold Cup, Qatar’s national team — now under the aegis of the grizzled, irascible Carlos Queiroz — lost to Haiti.There is a romance there, of course: Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth, embattled in so many ways, sticking one in the eye of one of the richest countries. But it is a reminder, too, that while Qatar will look back on the World Cup as a resounding success, there was one aspect of the whole endeavor — the sporting one — that remained entirely beyond its grasp.CorrespondenceThis newsletter likes to regard itself as a safe space. It’s best, perhaps, to think of it as a thought workshop: a place to challenge conventional thinking, to gaze upon the blue sky, to move so far outside the box that you realize the box itself is a circle. No idea is a bad idea: That’s the credo. Except for this one, from Shawn Donnelly.“I just thought of a way to make soccer more exciting,” Shawn wrote, in what I can only assume was the very small hours of the morning. “Take a page out of the N.B.A.’s book and add three-pointers: three points for shots from outside the 18-yard box, two for shots from inside, and one for penalties.”You’ll have spotted the problem here: What Shawn has done is not so much as take a page from the N.B.A.’s book as copy-and-paste it, verbatim.Let’s think this through, though. Is the idea that teams who score more goals than others not something that should be incentivized? Could there not be a bonus point, as there is in rugby, for sides that score — say — four or more? Or would that simply give the elite teams even more of a structural advantage? Probably, but it is worth considering. This is why we should always workshop every idea, even if the raw material is, um, lacking. All goals should count equally. That is not a part of soccer we need to adjust.U.S. striker Jesus Ferreira scored three goals in a 6-0 win over St. Kitts and Nevis in the Concacaf Gold Cup on Wednesday. The Americans close the group stage against Trinidad and Tobago on Monday.Jeff Curry/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConWalid Neaz, on the other hand, has an idea that needs very little tweaking. “Why are the continental champions not awarded a spot in the World Cup?” he asked. “If it’s the showcase tournament, then it would stand to reason the champions for each continent have earned a spot?”Yes, absolutely. This makes perfect sense. The reigning champions of each confederation should, of course, earn a bye straight into the World Cup. It would, as Walid points out, help to alleviate fixture congestion, just a little. It would reward long-term planning. And it may even increase the prestige of a couple of the continental tournaments.Sadly, Walid already knows why it won’t happen. “More games means more eyeballs and more revenue to be sold for FIFA,” he pointed out in the coda to his email. (I’d add that it would mean the individual confederations’ accepting that their tournaments are upstream of the World Cup, which is not something their pride would allow.) More

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      Champions League: Manchester City Bends the Story to Its Will

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      This season’s City might be Pep Guardiola’s coaching masterpiece: a juggernaut so fearsome that not even Hollywood writers dared suggest it could be beaten.The writers of “Ted Lasso,” the acclaimed, sugar-sweet Apple TV comedy, never particularly worried about being hidebound by reality. The world they created was, after all, based on an inherently fantastical premise: an American coach with no knowledge of soccer succeeding in the tumult of the Premier League.There would have been little point, then, in dismissing as too far-fetched the idea of a makeweight sort of a team signing a proxy for Zlatan Ibrahimovic just because its owner insulted him in the bathroom, for example, or a dog being killed by a wayward penalty kick, or West Ham being invited to take part in a global super league.It was notable, then, that there was one line the writers felt they could not cross. At the end of “Ted Lasso” — in all other aspects a determinedly romantic and uplifting show, an unabashed underdog story of empowerment and personal growth and the overwhelming power of nice — Manchester City still wins the Premier League. Even in fiction, City cannot be dislodged.City is not the villain, not really, in the Lasso Cinematic Universe. That role goes, instead, to a combination of conventional thinking and West Ham. Pep Guardiola even makes a cameo appearance in the show’s penultimate episode, offering a brief, distinctly Lassoist homily about winning being significantly less important than his players being good people.Rather than the bad guy, City serves as what the show’s eponymous hero refers to as his “white whale.” It functions as the series’ final level boss, a portrait of immutable sporting perfection, the one opponent that cannot be overcome by Lasso’s mustachioed, good-humored positivity.Even when his team eventually defeats Guardiola, the victory proves futile. The following week, City goes and wins the league anyway. Lasso, like so many others, finds that second place is the best outcome available to everyone else. “Such a shame,” one character tells Lasso in the show’s final scenes. “City are just too good.”As a piece of analysis, it is hard to top. This year, as for five of the last six, City has been far too good for anyone else in England. Even when it sat eight points behind Arsenal in the Premier League table, the season drifting to its conclusion and the distance to the finish line winnowing, it felt like City’s title to lose.From the middle of February — when a wasteful draw at Nottingham Forest prompted a full and frank exchange of views among the City players that Guardiola himself has described as the season’s pivotal moment — until the moment the title was won, City played 12 games in the Premier League and won them all. In that three-month spell, as The Independent pointed out, it found itself behind in a match only once. The unusual state of affairs was rectified after 10 minutes.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe F.A. Cup was the second leg of Manchester City’s quest for a treble.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Premier League trophy came first, City’s fifth title in six years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven as it reeled in Arsenal, Guardiola’s team had an even grander prize in its sights. It was sailing smoothly through both the F.A. Cup and the Champions League, the prospect of a treble — victories in the league, the cup and in Europe — starting to loom on the horizon.The treble is, in truth, a distinctly English obsession. Manchester United’s 1999 squad is the only English team to have won all three major trophies in the same season. Though the feat has become significantly more common in recent years — Barcelona and Bayern Munich have both done it twice in the last decade and a half — it still functions as a trump card, the ultimate claim to greatness.Its rarity is precious, to United more than anyone else. That last week’s F.A. Cup final should have pitted the two Manchester clubs against each other felt fitting: Here was United’s chance to preserve the club’s honor, to protect its proudest accomplishment. It duly held out for roughly 12 seconds. The last vestige of English soccer’s resistance melted away. City, it turned out, was just too good.Nowhere, though, has that been made more plain than in the Champions League. That it is glory in Europe that Manchester City’s power brokers and paymasters — as well as its coach — crave more than anything else has long since drifted into cliché.Winning the Champions League has become, if it has not always been, Manchester City’s animating force: its final rite of passage, its final challenge, its white whale. To some extent, it is the purpose of the whole project.Everything — the fortunes spent on players, the state-of-the-art academy, the appointment of Guardiola, the global network of clubs, the accusations of breaches of financial regulations in both the Premier League and the Champions League, the legal battles, the risk that everything it achieves may yet be tainted, the distortion of the sport’s entire landscape — will be vindicated, at least in the club’s own estimation, only if and when City can call itself champion of Europe.City has, then, attacked the Champions League with a singular determination this season. Bayern Munich was obliterated in the first leg of the quarterfinals. Real Madrid held out for a little longer in the semifinal, but was routed at the Etihad in the second leg, the reigning champion dismantled both surgically and brutally.Guardiola made an exception for that victory against Real Madrid — it was, he conceded, among the very finest of his tenure — but as a rule he tends toward the coy when presented with all of the superlatives his team attracts. Habitually, he will always insist that his Barcelona team remains the finest he has ever coached, simply because it was spearheaded by Lionel Messi. His presence alone, Guardiola believes, automatically elevates any team.Perhaps that is true: Messi did lend Barcelona a wonder, a sense of the breath being taken away, that no other player — not even Erling Haaland or Kevin De Bruyne — can hope to match. And yet, by the same token, perhaps that makes the team Guardiola has crafted at City even more impressive. From a coaching perspective, it may be that this is his true masterpiece.Pep Guardiola with his most recent Premier League winner’s medal. He’s desperate to add a Champions League version.Carl Recine/ReutersCity has, of course, provided Guardiola with the most conducive working environment in the sport. He benefits not only from a budget that, effectively, allows him to obtain whichever players he wants, but from the sort of complete, uniform institutional support that can only ever be an aspiration at most clubs.That he has used it to produce a team that does not have a single apparent flaw, though, is testament to nobody but him. Manchester City, the 2023 edition, barely concedes chances, let alone goals. It scores from set pieces and counterattacks and long spells of possession. It can hurt opponents on the ground and in the air.It does not, as previous versions might have done, have an ever so slight tendency toward profligacy, thanks to the seamless integration of Haaland into Guardiola’s side, something that — perhaps more in hope than expectation — many expected to be at least a little bit of a challenge when the Norwegian arrived last summer.But that is not the switch that defines this vision of Manchester City; Guardiola’s most significant contribution, this season, lies elsewhere.John Stones anchored a rebuilt Manchester City defense that held Arsenal, and every other opponent, at bay.Adam Vaughan/EPA, via ShutterstockLast summer, he was concerned, just a little, about his resources at fullback, a key position in his system. Oleksandr Zinchenko had left. His replacement, Sergio Gómez, had initially been pointed out to the club as an investment for the future. João Cancelo’s form was patchy and his attitude, at times, questionable.And so Guardiola invented a solution. Rather than asking one of his fullbacks to step into midfield, as he had for the last year or two, he gave the task to a central defender, John Stones, and drafted in Nathan Aké and Manuel Akanji, two of the less prominent members of his squad, to balance things out.He explained the idea relatively briefly to his players; they had a few training sessions to try to iron out any kinks. And then, a couple of weeks later, they were trying it in a game. There were one or two who felt it was a risk, but it proved worth it: Stones, as much as Haaland, has emerged as City’s key player.More than anything else, it is that change that has made City untouchable in England, and in Europe, since the turn of the year. It has already delivered two trophies; only Inter Milan, now, stand in the way of a complete set.It is curious, then, that it should also — effectively — be one of the major plotlines in the final season of “Ted Lasso”: the coach has an epiphany, and everything clicks into place. That, of course, was a mere piece of fiction. Guardiola’s success is concrete, factual, real. Both have the same ultimate conclusion, though. In the end, Manchester City wins. More

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      Champions League Final: Inter Milan Tries to Live in the Now

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      Inter made the Champions League final with Italy’s oldest squad and its highest debts. Whatever happens in Istanbul cannot stop the financial squeeze to come.Barely six weeks ago, Inter Milan defender Milan Skriniar was lying in a hospital bed in France, recovering from spinal surgery. A lumbar issue had been bothering him for some time and, reluctantly, he had decided that endoscopic intervention was required. He had not played a second of competitive soccer since the early days of March, nor has he played since.Yet when Internazionale names its team for the Champions League final against Manchester City on Saturday — the club’s most significant game in 13 years — Skriniar will, in all likelihood, be among the available substitutes.His teammate Henrikh Mkhitaryan, the veteran Armenian midfielder, has not played for three weeks after picking up an injury in Inter’s semifinal win against A.C. Milan.His treatment began immediately: His thigh strain was being addressed even as the celebrations of that victory unspooled around him. Mkhitaryan has not yet been given medical clearance to train with his teammates. Still, there is a decent chance that he will be named in the starting lineup for the biggest game club soccer has to offer.Manchester City, the overwhelming favorite to win this season’s Champions League, arrives in Istanbul best represented by Erling Haaland: a perfectly tuned, purpose-built machine, running smoothly, silently, an irresistible masterpiece of engineering.Inter, on the other hand, is best represented by the likes of Skriniar and Mkhitaryan: It is a team that is creaking, straining, pushing at the outer limits of its ability, an avatar for a patched-up, jury-rigged sort of a club that is held together, these days, by little more than bandages and hope.Joaquin Correa and Inter held off their city rival A.C. Milan to reach the Champions League final.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere have, certainly, been less likely Champions League finalists than Inter, one of the great old names of European soccer: Bayer Leverkusen in 2002, perhaps, or Monaco a couple of years later, or even Tottenham in 2019. Few, though, made it to the game’s grandest showcase against a background of such uncertainty.It is not just that Simone Inzaghi, the club’s coach, presides over the oldest squad in Italy, a team in which the focal point of the attack — Edin Dzeko, 37 — might regard the cornerstone of the defense, the 35-year-old Francesco Acerbi, as a youthful ingénue.Nor is it simply that, for as much as half of the team, this may be the final hurrah in an Inter jersey: Skriniar is one of 11 players whose contracts will expire, or whose loan spells will end, at the close of the current season. That reality has left the club facing the prospect of having to restock its squad almost from scratch.Inter, though, has far graver concerns about its future. In 2016, Suning, the Chinese retail conglomerate, paid $307 million to take a 70 percent stake in Inter, a deal that was — at the time — seen as the spearhead of China’s sudden, lavish and state-approved investment in European soccer. The new ownership would, in theory, finance Inter’s return to the game’s head table. The team’s training facility would be upgraded. So, too, would the club’s offices. And, of course, the players would follow.Simone Inzaghi became Inter’s manager in 2021, after his predecessor quit rather than sell off his title-winning squad.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRomelu Lukaku, right, left in that purge but has since returned. Lautaro Martínez chose to stay.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSuning’s ownership has not, on the field, been disastrous. In 2021, Inter won its first Italian title in more than a decade. Inzaghi has subsequently added the Coppa Italia, both this season and last, to the club’s honors. Inter has become something of a mainstay of the Champions League; it made the round of 16 last year, and has reached the final this time.That relative return to success, though, has come at a cost. Inter is the most indebted club in Italy; according to its most recently published accounts, its total liabilities run at around $931 million. In the last two years for which information is available, it recorded losses of almost $430 million, leading to punishment from European soccer’s governing body. It fined the club 4 millions euros (about $4.3 million) for breaching fiscal controls last year, and it has threatened a bigger penalty (26 million euros, or roughly $28 million) if it does not get its finances in order.Inter has been caught in a sort of rolling financial crisis for several years, thanks to the combined impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the dwindling support of the Chinese state for investing in European soccer and, most notably, Suning’s own troubles.In 2021, the conglomerate had to accept a $1.36 billion bailout, financed in part by local government, in the face of its spiraling debts. The same year, it permanently closed its Chinese team, Jiangsu Suning, months after it secured the title, citing the need to focus exclusively on its core retail business. Last year, Steven Zhang, the 32-year-old son of Suning’s founder who serves as Inter’s president, was held liable for $255 million of debt and defaulted bonds in a Hong Kong court.If Inter has been shielded from the worst of the fallout — it continues to exist; its players still get paid — then it has suffered at least some collateral damage. Suning has been engaged, for years, in efforts to cut costs: In 2021, Antonio Conte, the coach who delivered the Serie A title, stepped down when it became clear that many of the players who had delivered the trophy would have to be sold.Inter’s two most valuable assets, the forward Romelu Lukaku, now returned to the club on loan, and the defender Achraf Hakimi, left anyway. To save its investment, Suning secured a $294 million loan from Oaktree Capital, a California-based asset management firm, to help with the club’s running costs.Ever since, Inter’s days of plenty have receded further and further into the past. This season, it spent several months playing without a sponsor on the front of its jersey, a significant and ordinarily reliable source of income for all of Europe’s major teams, after DigitalBits, a cryptocurrency firm, failed to make scheduled payments on its $80 million agreement.Inter’s blank jerseys were a throwback look for the latter stages of the Champions League, but the reason behind them was a problem.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Saturday, Inter’s jerseys will instead bear the logo of Paramount+, the streaming service that broadcasts both Serie A and the Champions League in the United States. The arrangement is the product of a last-minute deal reportedly worth $4.5 million. For the same fee, Paramount’s branding will appear on the backs of Inter’s jerseys next season.That sum, though, does not begin to address Inter’s problems. The loan to Oaktree is due next May. With interest, the total sum to be repaid stands at around $375 million. The revenue from Inter’s unexpected run in the Champions League will certainly help with that, but so, too, would acquiescing to another fire sale of talent.If the club cannot meet its obligations, Suning will automatically cede control of the club to its creditor. “Paying a debt at the level of interest that the club is paying Oaktree is not sustainable,” Ernesto Paolillo, the club’s former general manager, said last month. “Steven Zhang won’t be able to export capital from China and nor will he be able to cover the debt with other resources. He will have no choice but to default on the agreement and sell the club to them.”“It’s not our plan,” Oaktree’s managing director, Alejandro Cano, said in March, when asked if the firm’s intention was to take control of the club. “We want to work as excellent partners and offer support. But who knows?”Suning reportedly has opened talks with Oaktree to extend the loan, but it has also started exploring another possibility: an outright sale. Zhang has twice denied that Inter is on the market, insisting last October that he was not “talking with any investors” and reasserting in April that he had “not had talks with anyone.”Inter’s president, Steven Zhang, with Inzaghi after the club won the Coppa Italia final in May.Daniele Mascolo/ReutersIn September 2022, though, the boutique investment bank Raine — the firm that handled the sale of Chelsea to Todd Boehly and Clearlake and which is currently overseeing the Glazer family’s efforts to divest itself of Manchester United — won the mandate to seek new ownership for Inter.Several parties have expressed an interest in buying the club, according to executives with knowledge of the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive discussions. A handful, largely drawn from the United States and including both private families and equity investors, have been given a tour of Inter’s facilities and a broad rundown of its accounts.So far, though, there has been one major sticking point: the cost. Suning values the club at around $1.2 billion, not coincidentally the exact amount that RedBird Capital Partners paid to buy A.C. Milan last year. Given the realities of Inter’s financial position, nobody has yet been willing to bite.That has left Inter in purgatory. In negotiations, the club remains defiant: Those who have worked on transfers with Inter in recent months have noted that at no point have its executives pleaded poverty. The club retains an undeniable, undimming appeal, too. Lautaro Martínez, its World Cup-winning striker, was presented with a chance to leave last summer but chose to reject it, so settled did he feel in the city and at Inter itself.Pride, though, does not pay the bills. There have been times when cash has been in such short supply that the club has not been up-to-date on its share of the payments for the architects and designers working on the stadium it is intending to build, together with A.C. Milan, not far from San Siro.Inter, perhaps, cannot afford to think about the future now. It arrives in the Champions League final battered and bruised, taped and strapped, aging and fading. There is a chance — slim, but a chance nonetheless — of glory in the immediate present. What it means, where it goes from here, can wait for another day. More

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      Man City to Burnley and Back? Vincent Kompany Says Not So Fast

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      As he looked ahead to the summer, Vincent Kompany realized he was entering unfamiliar territory.He had spent his whole career with barely a moment to catch his breath. During his playing days, the seasons whirled by: league games, cup games, European games, international games, all piled on top of each other. Summers were squeezed into the brief gap between major tournaments and energy-sapping, globe-trotting preseason tours.As a manager, if anything, Kompany’s summers had been more hectic still. Not that it had come as a surprise: He had chosen Burnley, freshly relegated from the Premier League to England’s second tier, as his first head coaching post outside his native Belgium. The Championship is proudly, unapologetically, gleefully grueling, a competition that self-identifies as an endurance event. “Just mentioning the name is fatiguing,” Kompany said.And so it had proved. From the outside, Kompany and Burnley had made it all look rather easy. The club had confirmed an immediate return to the Premier League by clinching promotion with a month to spare. It ended the campaign with more than 100 points. To Kompany, though, that was a misconception. “This league is brutal,” he said.As evidence, he pointed to the fixture list: 46 league games crammed into 39 weeks, with the season wrapped up by May 5. “And we had a month’s holiday for the World Cup,” he said. The most valuable reward of promotion, in his mind, is not the riches that it brings but the prospect of not having to go through all of that again.“Coming out of the Premier League is the best motivation for getting back into it,” Kompany said.Kompany with midfielder Jack Cork after Burnley clinched its return to the Premier League in April.Richard Sellers/Press Association, via Associated PressAll of that, of course, had been precisely as he had expected. The trouble was figuring out what to do once the motion stopped. There would be three months between Burnley’s last game in the Championship and its first of next season in the Premier League — a break far longer than Kompany had previously experienced. All of a sudden, there was too much time.The solution he alighted on — something he had, by his own admission, never tried before — was in effect to give his players two preseasons. They would have two tranches of vacation on either side of a training camp in Portugal, an attempt to find a balance between allowing them to recharge and not permitting their sharpness to dull.He did not, though, quite practice what he preached. His season did not finish with the conclusion of the Championship schedule. On his first free weekend in 10 months, he attended four games: three in the Premier League, already scoping out the opposition for next season, and one at Salford, in England’s fourth tier.That combination, of a perfectionist’s attention to detail and an obsessive’s work ethic, is characteristically Kompany. It is what those who played with him, particularly at Manchester City, remember most clearly: a focus, a sense of responsibility and a studiousness that is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that he used to record all of the various (and largely warranted, he was not an unjust ruler) fines he had levied as captain in an actual ledger.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockJames Boardman/EPA, via ShutterstockKompany was a reliable defender and serial trophy collector in his days at Manchester City. Some see him as a potential successor for Pep Guardiola.Phil Noble/ReutersAnd it is what made his move into management — first with Anderlecht, the club where he started and finished his playing career, and then at Burnley — seem so natural, so obvious, so clearly destined for success. It is impossible, of course, to predict with any surety which players will make fine coaches; Kompany, though, seemed a pretty safe bet.Safe enough, certainly, that Burnley was not his only option last summer, or his only offer since then. Kompany has a policy of not engaging with speculation on any level; the only time he grew at all flustered, during an interview at Burnley’s training facility this month, was when his determination not to discuss it chafed against his natural inclination to openness.And so while he did acknowledge that he turned down a number of “really big clubs” last summer in favor of joining Burnley in the Championship — thereby volunteering to partake in what even he describes as a “fight with a load of hungry dogs” — he would not be drawn whatsoever on what has happened since.Fortunately, others are not quite so discreet. Those voices said Tottenham got in touch after it fired Antonio Conte. Chelsea, a team seemingly permanently on the hunt for a new manager, approached him, too. Leeds considered him as a replacement when it fired Jesse Marsch. He said no to them all.This summer would, doubtless, have brought more offers, not just because of the fact that Kompany led Burnley to promotion, but the manner of it. In the space of 10 months, he has completely refashioned the club’s style, taking a team that had for years been defined by a gruff, battle-hardened, pared-back style and filling it with youth, and flair, and élan.“I built on the values that defined Burnley,” Kompany said. “Culture is different to style. What was Burnley before? Hard-working, brave, tough. I say to my players that while we might not be the biggest team any more, we can still be the toughest, the smartest, the bravest. There is a grit to our game. That hasn’t changed. We couldn’t have the flair players that we do if they did not understand what it is to be a Burnley player.”He may not see it quite as the transformation it appears to be, but it is an impressive body of work nonetheless. Rather than parlay that into a lucrative offer elsewhere — the Spurs job is still available, and Chelsea’s will doubtless come up again in a few weeks — Kompany elected, just before the end of the season, to sign a new five-year contract with Burnley.It was an unorthodox, vaguely heretical decision. Elite soccer is a shark, forever moving forward. Managers, like players, are conditioned to believe that they have to grasp bigger, better things the very instant they appear.Rather than accept offers from bigger and richer clubs after leading Burnley to promotion, Kompany signed a new five-year contract. “We are still really far from our ceiling,” he said.Matt McNulty/Getty ImagesThis, surely, was Kompany’s moment. He is only 37 — in his infancy, by managerial standards — and he had served his apprenticeship. Now was the time to clamber up another rung on the ladder toward what many assume to be his ultimate, inevitable destiny: to replace Pep Guardiola as manager of Manchester City, whenever he chooses to step aside.That Kompany chose to wait instead can be attributed, in part, to his relationship with the hierarchy at Burnley — “I trust the people” — and his excitement at what is left to achieve. The game’s economic reality might place winning the Premier League with Burnley, for example, out of his reach, but he is confident that his team, this club, has not yet topped out. “We are still really far from our ceiling,” he said.Mostly, though, his decision to stay is down to his conviction that speed should not be confused with progress. Soccer, Kompany knows, offers very few “good settings” for coaches, places where they can hone their abilities and define their methods without worrying about needless interference or the sudden, wild mood swings that can come on the back of a couple of dispiriting weeks.At Burnley, he feels he has found one. “If I am with the right people, that is a big advantage,” he said. Moving on, moving in what most would see as the general direction of up, treating management as a series of challenges to be met and levels to be passed might not be the accelerant it seems. Standing still might be a better guarantee that he gets to where he wants to go.“The only destination I have in mind, from a coaching perspective, is to be the best,” he said. “The pathway is not how quickly I get there. I want to be the best, whatever the steps are, and that outcome takes time in any walk of life.” In his mind, it is a “universal recipe,” though perhaps it is best thought of as an equation.Kompany clearly has an aptitude, and a talent, for management. His work at Burnley proves that. But talent is just the first step. “You develop talent into quality through time and effort,” he said. He has never been short on the latter. It is what has marked his whole career. For once, he feels he has the former, too. He has time, and he is prepared to take it. More

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      Manchester City’s Premier League Success Leaves Many Cold

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      City claimed its third straight Premier League title on Saturday. But admiring its excellence is not the same as accepting its methods.As it turned out, Manchester City had already done all it needed to do. On Saturday night, Pep Guardiola’s team’s last remaining rival — a bone-tired, spirit-sapped Arsenal — finally stumbled and fell. For the third time in three seasons, Manchester City was untouchable at the summit of the Premier League.The coronation will come on Sunday, City’s home game with Chelsea transformed into a processional, but it felt somehow fitting that the title should be decided without the league’s undisputed sovereign so much as kicking a ball. This has, after all, been a fait accompli for some time.Quite where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been City’s dismantling of Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in February. Or its humbling of the same opponent at the Etihad Stadium two months later.Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he has said, with an impromptu meeting in the aftermath of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, that his players buckled down, took control, and bent the Premier League to their will.Or, perhaps, none of that is true. Perhaps there is no turning point to identify. There is a very good chance that the season has simply ended the way it was always going to end, the way that Premier League seasons increasingly tend to end. Perhaps the outcome was preordained. Perhaps we all knew, deep down, how this was going to go.Advancing to the Champions League final kept City on track for three trophies.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRegardless, that is another item crossed off Manchester City’s bucket list of inevitabilities. Only a handful of teams — four, to be precise — have ever won three English titles in a row: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United, twice, in the early part of this century.It is an accomplishment that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of only two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed its coach in the middle of its run.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold for greatness, the game’s pearly gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, have now passed through it.In doing so, they have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate, concerted campaign to build a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club side England has ever produced.Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City has gobbled up every record it can find, etching its name at the top of almost every one of the sport’s statistical leader boards. It has the most points any team has ever collected in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign, and had the highest goal difference, and the biggest winning margin.It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. In Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to possessing the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, it may not even need that caveat: Haaland has five games to score 12 goals and pass the all-time high-water mark. If he does not do it this year, he may well do it next.Erling Haaland: goal machine.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIndeed, such is City’s domestic supremacy that the only worlds it has yet to conquer are on more distant shores. See off Manchester United in the F.A. Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would be just the second team in English history to complete the fabled, sanctified treble.After that, its ambitions would have to turn to the faintly fantastical. No team has ever won four English titles in a row. Nobody has ever won seven competitions in a single year, or done a quadruple. No English side since Nottingham Forest has retained the European Cup. Perhaps City could try and become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, or while only using their left feet, or with a lineup comprised solely of people called Neil.It has become a reflex to suggest that this is simply the nature of soccer. There is, as the former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, always an “ogre,” a team that sits at the top of the pile, that towers over the landscape, that sucks up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”There is some truth in that logic, but it is not a whole truth. In its years of plenty, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool was undeniably a rich club: In the years before broadcast revenue and television deals and money-spinning global tours, it had the one advantage available, that of being a big city team in a big city stadium.For Pep Guardiola, every option is a good option.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersBut it was not drastically richer than most of its rivals. Its challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but they were also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The game’s hierarchy was much flatter, its stratification not nearly so ossified.Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the British transfer record, but only for a sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg, and then Ian Rush to Juventus. In that time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City all spent more money on a player than anyone had previously. Liverpool did not break the £1 million barrier until 1987.United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognizable, built on the club’s commercial heft. It is worth parsing, though, one of the phrases that entered the sport’s lexicon during that period: Fergie Time, the idea that referees generally gave United as much time as required in a game to find a way to escape disappointment.That was not true, of course. The reason United developed a reputation for late winning goals was because of the character and resilience of Ferguson’s immensely gifted team. But the idea stuck nonetheless.United was the dominant team of its age. It was possible, though, for opposition fans to trick themselves into believing it was all down to luck, to the grace and favor of the powers that be, and that if only the fight was fair then United would receive its comeuppance.The same cannot be said of Manchester City. All of those records, the monopoly it has started to exert on the game’s history, point to a type of hegemony that English soccer has not previously experienced. City has not just reconfigured what it takes to succeed in the Premier League, but redefined how the game thinks of excellence. Its dominance feels more extreme than anything that went before, largely because it is.And yet the response to it has not been the loathing that was generated by Liverpool and United — an animus so potent that it has been passed down from one generation to the next — but a sort of acquiescence. Guardiola’s style of play is widely admired. The beauty of his team, the ingenuity of his ideas, draws fulsome and fawning praise.Guardiola is most likely one victory from his fifth Premier League title.Molly Darlington/ReutersThe success of the club itself, though, feels somehow cold, clinical, detached. Manchester City has the air of a machine, both in the way the project has been constructed and the manner in which the team plays. It should not be a surprise, then, that it should elicit roughly the same emotional response. This is a state-backed enterprise of bottomless wealth and grandiose vision. It is impossible to resist. But it is also difficult to adore.City’s advantage is not, as is often suggested, that it can spend more than anyone else, though few teams could afford the squad that Guardiola has at its disposal, or indeed the Catalan himself. Manchester United has frittered away hundreds of millions in the transfer market. Chelsea, too. Liverpool commits almost as much in salary to its squad.The edge is in the consistency. City is rarely — if ever — forced to sell a player on anything other than its own terms. That is what separates it, as much as anything, from all of its peers. Plenty of clubs have a plan. City is the only one that has the privilege of seeing it through without being subject to the arbitrary tides of reality.That is not the same, though, as not playing by the same rules. It is a coincidence, doubtless, that the run of form that will end with Guardiola’s team claiming yet another title began after the club was charged with 115 counts of rules breaches — dating back over a decade, the whole span of its dominion — by the Premier League.Those charges retain the capacity to alter, on some fundamental level, all of the mosts and firsts and bests that City has accrued over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records — they are all contingent on that case.Jack Grealish, still the most expensive British player in soccer history.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is just about possible for fans, for the game, to swallow the idea that a club owned and operated for the purpose of furthering the interests of a nation state is acceptable. It is just about possible for the television networks and media outlets that rely on the draw of the sport’s rolling soap opera to wallow in whatever moral gray area they can find.It would be much harder to excuse and explain and — above all — to accept that one team felt that the rules it had signed up to did not really apply, to decide that it did not need to be subject to the same constraints as everyone else.Many of the charges might feel historic, dated, but this has always been a long-term project. What happened 10 years ago led, inexorably, to today, to this, to Manchester City having a third title in three seasons, standing on the verge of a treble, its name scored next to almost every record English soccer can offer.What it has done, over these last few years, is plain for all to see. How it will be remembered is yet to be decided. More

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      With Stakes at Their Highest, Manchester City Rises Higher Still

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      MANCHESTER, England — No matter what happens from here, regardless of whether Manchester City’s campaign in the Champions League ends with medals and parades and the realization of the club’s ultimate, meticulously-planned dream, it felt as if something shifted amid the delirious, crowing tumult of the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night.It is not enough to say that Manchester City defeated Real Madrid to seal a place in the Champions League final for the second time in three years. It is not just that Pep Guardiola’s team demolished the reigning champion, outclassing the club that regards this competition as its own private party by 4-0.It is that City did so with a performance — given the circumstances, given the stakes, given the identity and reputation and talent of the opponent — that surely ranks among the finest, the most dominant, this tournament has seen. This was Manchester City sending a message, making a statement, proving a point. And in the process, it was also Manchester City vanquishing its ghosts.Midfielder Bernardo Silva scored Manchester City’s first two goals.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJulián Álvarez had the fourth, moments after he came on as a substitute.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola’s travails in this tournament are well-known. He is, by common consensus, the finest coach of his generation, and yet he has spent much of the last decade or so finding new and inventive ways not to win the Champions League. He has contrived to lose to Monaco and Lyon, Liverpool and Tottenham. He lost a final to Chelsea because he fiddled with his team. He lost a semifinal to Real Madrid in the blink of an eye.It has become a trope that Guardiola, in his urgency, overcomplicates matters. There is a theory — one that he himself alluded to here — that his background, as a Barcelona fan, has given him what might look in certain lights like a slightly unhealthy fixation with this tournament.He has always scotched it as nonsense, of course, dismissing the idea that there might be a pattern, attributing the repeated disappointments to nothing more complex than the vicissitudes of the game. That has done little to quell the sense, though, that the Champions League had become his — and by extension Manchester City’s — Achilles’ heel, the one world that the club’s bottomless, state-backed wealth and knife-edge precision could not conquer.

      .css-fg61ac{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;position:relative;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-fg61ac{margin-bottom:0;-webkit-flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);}}.css-1ga3qu9{-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-preferred-size:50%;flex-basis:50%;}.css-rrq38y{margin:1rem auto;max-width:945px;}.css-1wsofa1{margin-top:10px;color:var(–color-content-quaternary,#727272);font-family:nyt-imperial,georgia,’times new roman’,times,Songti TC,simsun,serif;font-weight:400;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1wsofa1{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;}}@media (max-width:600px){.css-1wsofa1{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}.css-1nnraid{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;margin:0 auto;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1nnraid{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;height:auto;gap:8px;}}.css-1yworrz{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row-reverse;-ms-flex-direction:row-reverse;flex-direction:row-reverse;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1yworrz{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);gap:8px;}}The many moods of Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.

      Perhaps, given the nature of the City project, that was always likely to evaporate eventually. This is a club, after all, that has an unavoidable mechanized quality. For all the richness of its style, the gleam of its talent, it is hard not to discern the cold, calculated precision with which it has been constructed.It is a club that feels as if it has been built — to the exact specifications of the best coach in the world, and then equipped with the best of everything that money can buy — rather than one that has grown. At some point, that was always going to tell. At some point, establishing yourself as the Champions League’s dominant force is less a sporting challenge and more an economic formula.That, though, should not be allowed to disguise the style with which City swatted aside Real Madrid. Guardiola had, in the days preceding the game, detected in his players the three ingredients he believed would be required if they were to seal a place in the final against Inter Milan in Istanbul on June 10.There was a sense of “calm,” he said, a lack of panic and anxiety and nerves. There was “tension,” too, the edge, the alertness that is necessary to perform. And, crucially, there was the “pain” of what happened last year, when City fell victim to that peculiar magic that is wielded by Real Madrid and Real Madrid alone. For a year, Guardiola said, his team had been forced to “swallow the poison” of that game. This was the chance to purge it.In the first half, in particular, it felt as if this might come to be remembered as the high-water mark of Guardiola’s project in Manchester, the culmination of the team he has spent the past six years constructing, honing, polishing, perfecting.By halftime, City led by 2-0, thanks to two goals from Bernardo Silva, and it would have had every reason to feel more than a little disappointed. Erling Haaland had missed two glorious opportunities. Kevin De Bruyne had whipped an effort across the face of goal.Real Madrid had spent 45 minutes pinned back not only in its own half but in its own penalty area, apparently powerless to break City’s spell, to escape its stranglehold. Its players, many of them veterans of multiple triumphs in this competition, seemed harried and frantic, suddenly stripped of their poise and their prowess.Toni Kroos and Luka Modric of Real Madrid after Silva’s second goal.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesLuka Modric could not judge the weight of his passes. Toni Kroos kept giving the ball away. Vinícius Júnior, stranded on the left wing, forlornly urged his teammates to step forward. Federico Valverde, overwhelmed in midfield, seemed continually baffled to discover that there was always another light blue jersey behind him.Real Madrid’s reputation is such, of course, that even when wounded most teams would consider it a threat. At no point, though, did City consider shrinking into itself. Guardiola, clearly, had scented something: not just the chance to win a game but to change the story, to shift the emphasis.Riyad Mahrez came on. Phil Foden came on. Whirling, gesticulating, prowling on the touchline, Guardiola urged his players forward. Manuel Akanji made it three. Julián Álvarez, in the dying embers of the game, added a fourth. A victory turned into a triumph, and then morphed into a rout.This was not simply City taking revenge on Real Madrid for last year. It was City exorcising all of those demons it has built up over the years, all of the disappointments it has endured, all of the times the machine that Guardiola has built has stalled at precisely the wrong moment.At the final whistle, as Real Madrid’s players sank to their haunches — bereft at the defeat, relieved the humiliation was at an end — the Etihad Stadium was filled with wild, discordant noise. The club was playing Gala International. The fans were roaring, booming, exulting. The word “Istanbul,” displayed in neon pink, was emblazoned on the giant screens in the corners of the stadium. Guardiola, his energy almost frantic, was hopping and jumping and dancing with his players.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGreatness now rests in Manchester City’s grasp. It should claim the Premier League title this weekend, its third in a row. It has already qualified for the F.A. Cup final, against Manchester United. It will, though Guardiola protested it, be an overwhelming favorite in the Champions League final. It is 270 minutes, no more, from winning a treble. Whatever happens, though, whatever comes next, this victory was not simply a step on the way. It was a destination in itself, the night that Manchester City vanquished its ghosts. More