Manchester City (Soccer Team)

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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

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      The Premier League Crucible Produces Something New: Ideas

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      England has long relied on imported players, imported coaches, imported best practices. Now it’s trying something new for a change.Manchester City had been in possession of the ball for a minute, no more, but to the denizens of the Santiago Bernabéu, it felt like an hour or more. Pep Guardiola’s team moved it backward and forward and then backward again. It switched it from side to side, sometimes via the scenic route, stopping off to admire the view from midfield, and sometimes taking the express.Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned about this state of affairs. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semifinal that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around. The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerized by the swirling patterns.The crowd, though, did not like it one bit. The modern Real Madrid might be something of a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing itself as the game’s greatest statesman and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries its fans are not willing to cross.The idea that a visitor, no matter how talented, should come to the Bernabéu and look as comfortable as Manchester City did, in that spell on Tuesday night, was clearly one of them. Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that it might as well have had its feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.And so, as if to make its displeasure known, the crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to take a more aggressive stance, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.Real Madrid is not used to being bullied on its home field.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was hard, in that moment, not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is now horribly outdated. The idea that English soccer lacks refinement when compared with its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger viewers might struggle to believe it ever existed at all.The Premier League’s emissaries have, between them, conquered all of the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabéu. A couple of years later, Arsène Wenger’s team did the same thing to A.C. Milan at San Siro. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City itself have all won at Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they have been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might even have been just a little bit lucky.Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness that their opponents cannot match. England has not had any reason to be ashamed for some time.City’s display in Madrid might not have led to a victory — not yet, anyway — but the scale of its superiority was nevertheless noteworthy. In part, of course, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and molding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of its ideas.Pep Guardiola, imported innovator.Borja Sanchez Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockThere should be nothing especially controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, is not identifiably English, not in any real sense. It bears about as much relation to the century of English soccer culture that preceded it, in fact, as the modern Manchester City does to the club that occupied the stadium on Maine Road for all those years.The colors are the same, of course. Something about the atmosphere, too, is native, idiosyncratic, even if it is all a little quieter these days. Perhaps it is possible to discern a little Englishness in the tempo of the game, in how crowds celebrate corners, in the ongoing appreciation for a thundering tackle.But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well. The training methods, the organizational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.That, it should be stressed, is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped to transform what was once a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet. The transformation in England’s soccer culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.But while the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory. The soccer its teams play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers. Every tweak, every trend, every notion has washed up on these shores eventually (and, sometimes, a little reluctantly). It is a showcase of soccer’s contemporary thought.Rarely, though, have any of those ideas actually emerged in England. Perhaps a degree of skepticism is an enduring streak of Englishness, or perhaps it is a function of the league’s wealth: Why experiment when you can, in effect, pay someone else to take those risks for you?All of the innovations that have changed English soccer have been developed elsewhere, in the start-up cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time and Claude Makelele and his eponymous role all the way to the high press preached by Jürgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.It is, then, entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing, at Barcelona, or an ancillary midfielder, at Bayern Munich. Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.At the Bernabéu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control. It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the center of the field that meant Real Madrid had to be so passive that it risked the wrath of its home crowd.John Stones, the central defender unbound.Jose Breton/Associated PressNothing in soccer is ever truly new, of course. All of these positional switches are, as the journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted, simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played essentially as orthodoxy in the 1930s.Many of them have fluttered around elsewhere, too, occasionally popping up in the least likely of places. Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example, a team that regularly allowed its defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as soccer’s cutting edge.That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval, turns it automatically into best practice. Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England.Fitting FinaleMr. Messi will inform you of his decision when he is good and ready.Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNothing, Jorge Messi would like you to know, is decided yet. His adult son, Lionel, will not be making any decision on the identity of his future employer until the end of the French season. And with good reason. The Ligue 1 title race sure is a nail-biter, and Messi would not want any of the Paris St.-Germain fans who are so devoted to him to think his focus might have drifted elsewhere.That does not stop the speculation, of course. So far this week, there have been reports that Messi’s “priority” is to remain in Europe; that he has agreed to a deal to sign with a club in Saudi Arabia; that he is talking to a club in Saudi Arabia but has not yet signed on the dotted line; that he is waiting for the green light from La Liga before completing a move back to Barcelona.Needless to say, not all of these things can be true. It is hard to tell if any of them are. There is never any paperwork produced to support any of the claims. There are never any on-the-record quotes from people actively involved in the negotiations. Everything is hazy, indistinct, disguised behind what is, in this case, the coward’s or the liar’s veil of deep background.As previously noted, the most romantic conclusion to all of this is that Messi returns to Newell’s Old Boys, or failing that Barcelona. In many ways, though, it feels increasingly fitting that he should draw the curtain on his career in Saudi Arabia.What could better encapsulate this era of soccer, after all, than the sight of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two men who define the modern game, who crystallized everything that it is, eking out the final drops of their talent in a country that has sought to co-opt them, and their phenomenon, for its own purposes, effectively weaponizing their star power? Perhaps, in a way, that is where Messi should be. Perhaps Saudi Arabia was your destiny all along.Every End Has a StartFor Victor Osimhen and Napoli, it’s celebrations today and consequences later.Andrea Staccioli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmong soccer’s very worst traits is its restless, obsessive desire to know what comes next. Managers who pull off unexpected successes must, always, be encouraged to move to different clubs, bigger clubs, to see what they might do next. Players enjoying breakthrough seasons must immediately be photoshopped into the jerseys of their many and varied suitors. No achievement is allowed to exist merely for and of itself. Meaning is only bestowed when it is clear where glory might lead.It feels a little reductive, then, to ask what might come next for Napoli. It is hard to think of a less appropriate question. Napoli has waited 33 years to win Serie A for the third time. The city is still caught in a wave of euphoria. This is no time to think about the future. Worrying about all the chores you have to do tomorrow does have a habit of ruining the perfect today.It is intriguing to consider, though, whether those celebrations might become a rather more familiar sight, as Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, has intimated. As the author Tobias Jones has pointed out, Napoli’s title was not a stereotypically Neapolitan triumph: It had its roots not in the magical or the mystical but in the comparatively mundane details of intelligent recruitment and adroit coaching. Those are the sorts of things, of course, that can be repeated.They will have to be. It is not just fans or the news media that have a habit of assuming that all success is a steppingstone. Europe’s apex predators do, too. Manchester United, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are all casting covetous glances at Victor Osimhen, the Nigerian forward who did so much to carry Napoli over the line. Others are watching the Korean defender, Kim Min-jae, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the edge-of-the-seat Georgian winger.Napoli’s plan, as things stand, is to lose no more than one (most likely Osimhen), and then use the fee it receives — $150 million or so — not only to find his replacement but to add further ballast to its squad. If the club can invest as judiciously this summer as it did last, then it may be that the party in Naples is just getting started.CorrespondenceRoyale Union St.-Gilloise after reading last week’s newsletter.Yves Herman/ReutersExciting times for this newsletter, which treads virgin ground this week by issuing an apology to a whole nation. Well, a bit of one, anyway. “A small correction from a fan of Union Saint-Gilloise,” Flor Van der Eycken wrote. “The club is not Wallonian, but from Brussels.”My lawyers, of course, would point out that this subject was raised in a direct quote from a reader, and thus morally I am in the clear, but trying to apportion blame here feels churlish. It happened on my watch, and so it is my fault. I apologize, unreservedly, to any Belgians who feel let down.Tony Walsh, meanwhile, is evidently on a very similar page to me. One aspect of Napoli’s stirring victory in Serie A that has intrigued me — and probably warrants further investigation — is how those long-serving players who left the club last summer feel about it. Lorenzo Insigne, a Neapolitan to his core, and Dries Mertens, an adopted son of the city, are the best examples, but Tony wonders about someone else. “A penny for the thoughts of Kalidou Koulibaly,” he wrote. “Eight years in Naples, and then when they win the title he is amid the chaos at Chelsea.”And Carolyn Janus Moacdieh noticed a somewhat surprising parallel in last week’s note on Leeds, a club where fans have been taught that process is no less significant than outcome. “I will not defend the show ‘Ted Lasso,’” she wrote (unnecessarily: This newsletter is pro Lasso and the causes of Lasso.) “But Marcelo Bielsa’s philosophy at Leeds sounds a lot like the idea which the creators have integrated into the show: What you do is not as important as how you do it.”And another week, another suggested career path for my dog. “I think he can learn from Pretinha, a dog that supports my team, Fluminense, and celebrates each time the team scores,” Fernando Secco suggests. “Since Fernando Diniz became coach, the dog has been celebrating a lot.” I would suggest we are reaching a tipping point as we accumulate evidence that dogs improve soccer. Maybe the solution to how to make the game more engaging to teenagers was in front of our faces, tongue lolling and tail wagging, this whole time. More

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      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

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      The teams drew the first leg of their Champions League semifinal as each tried to prevent the other from playing to its strengths.Erling Haaland had his instructions. His Manchester City teammates were methodically working the ball from the center circle all the way back to Ederson, the goalkeeper, but Haaland was not watching. He knew what was coming. Ederson pitched the ball high into the night sky, an unusually rudimentary opening gambit for a team coached by Pep Guardiola.Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend. He was moving to where it was going to make landfall. He started to gather a little speed. And then, just as the Real Madrid defender David Alaba met the ball — his header sending it back into the sky — Haaland arrived, crashing into him. Not dangerously or recklessly but, with only about 40 seconds elapsed, certainly ominously.Guardiola being Guardiola, of course, the working assumption has to be that this was all preordained, the sort of effort that he has spent time perfecting on the training ground for Tuesday’s match. An understudy would have been drafted to act as Haaland’s crash test dummy. Haaland, the Norwegian striker, would have been lectured on the finer points of clattering technique. No, Erling, don’t barge into him like that; lead with the shoulder just a touch more.In this case, though, perhaps the agency lay elsewhere. Standing behind Alaba, watching the opening skirmish unfold, was Antonio Rüdiger, the German defender. Happenstance had brought him into Real’s lineup — standing in for the suspended Eder Militão — but he is not the sort to back away from a test of strength.Rüdiger has that valuable knack, for a central defender, of ensuring he gets the game he wants. He may as well have been licking his lips at the sight of Haaland’s opening salvo on Alaba. Clearly, this was going to be his sort of evening.This Champions League semifinal was, on a macro level, always going to be cast not just as a tussle between old glory and new money, the establishment and the aspirant, but as a conceptual collision, too. Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid is inherently improvisational and player-centric; Guardiola believes, more than anything, in the power of his collective, his system. It is free jazz against orchestral arrangement. (The score, after the first of two legs, is 1-1; no sweeping conclusions on scant evidence can yet be drawn.)Vinícius Júnior, left, scored Real Madrid’s only goal.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut it was also — and at times, it seemed, mainly — an arm wrestle between Rüdiger and Haaland. That is not to suggest that either player is nothing but brawn, of course. Rüdiger’s job is to ensure that things do not happen; his successes are, often, inherently invisible to those not blessed with his foresight. Likewise, for someone so large, Haaland can make it very difficult to say with any certainty where he is at any given time, right up to the point when he materializes, peeling off an opponent’s shoulder.On this occasion, though, both players willingly indulged what might be described as their more muscular instincts. For an hour and a half, the two of them pulled and pushed and strained and tensed, relishing the atavistic thrill of it, each trying to establish nothing grander than sheer physical dominance over the other.Here was Haaland, dropping deep to pick up the ball, being thrown to the ground by Rüdiger. Here was Rüdiger, for some reason slipping his head through the crook of Haaland’s elbow, effectively giving his consent to be placed in a headlock, grinning in (presumably) accidental homage to Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he did so.Most judges, by the end, would have scored it a split decision: Haaland did not score, a rarity this season, and in truth had only a couple of sights of goal; his presence was central, though, in creating the space that led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equalizer for City, the strike that will make Guardiola’s team the slight favorite when hostilities are resumed next week in England.And that, perhaps, will not displease either coach. For all their philosophical differences, what was striking about this game was just how aware both teams were of the other’s strengths, their capacity to inflict damage. That, more than anything, might have been the enduring lesson of their encounter in a semifinal last season: Madrid conscious of just how good City can be; City conscious that a team can be as good as it likes against Madrid and still lose.Real, on home territory, was at times so passive that it tried its fans’ patience; the Bernabéu is not used, after all, to its visitors having the temerity to keep the ball for long periods of time. There was a point, midway through the first half, when City’s passing started to affront the crowd’s dignity: What had started as whistling turned, slowly but surely, into jeers.For Ancelotti, though, that was a price worth paying: Tactically, strategically, it made sense for Real to dig in, to sit deep, to lie in wait, and then to pick its moments. A few minutes later, his approach bore fruit: Eduardo Camavinga, playing the hybrid fullback/midfielder role that is so de rigueur these days, spotted a gap and levered it open, then found Vinícius Júnior in sufficient space to fizz a shot past Ederson.Even a goal down, though, City did not see the need to adopt a more assertive, more aggressive posture. Guardiola’s insatiable appetite for possession is not a purely offensive maneuver: To some extent, it is a defensive measure, too. More than he would like to admit, perhaps, he hews to his old rival José Mourinho’s adage that “whoever has the ball, has fear.”Kevin De Bruyne, right, scored Manchester City’s equalizer.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressIf Guardiola’s team is in control, he knows the opposition cannot score. In those moments, watching the ball sweep hypnotically between his players, he can feel safe. Against Madrid, a team whose superpower is its ability to score at any moment and effectively without any warning, that is doubly important.It was, both sorts of coaches seemed to have decided, that sort of occasion, one in which the focus was on preventing the opposition from expressing its identity. And so Haaland, the most devastating forward in Europe, a player who has seemed at times in his debut season in England like an inevitable force of nature, was employed — at least in part — as a battering ram.Guardiola and Ancelotti will both take heart that their approach worked, that nothing has yet been lost. Both will know, though, that at some point it will not be enough merely to stop the opposition; to win, someone will have to be themselves. More

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      Manchester City Thumps Arsenal to Close on Premier League Title

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      Reeling in the league leaders after a season-long chase, City won Wednesday and, with less than 10 games left, positioned itself to claim its third straight Premier League title.MANCHESTER, England — Quite when Arsenal knew, for certain, that it was all over is difficult to pinpoint absolutely. There was still faith, presumably, after Manchester City’s first goal, which arrived roughly 370 seconds into a game that had been billed — for weeks — as the Premier League’s great championship showdown.Some small sliver of optimism might even have endured after John Stones scored the second, delivered on a satellite delay after a video review not long before halftime. The last couple months of a season are a time for intellectual gymnastics and leaps of faith, after all, for the ifs and buts and maybes that soccer grandly calls “permutations.” Maybe a draw would do. Maybe a draw would keep the hope alive.The third goal, though, was different. After the third, Arsenal’s Rob Holding stood with his hands on his hips, staring off into the middle distance. Gabriel Magalhaes sunk to his haunches, as if contemplating the nature of grass. Thomas Partey started to clap, softly, his reflexes telling him to encourage his teammates. He managed two, lost heart, and stopped.Converted by Kevin De Bruyne, the third goal had taken whatever wisps of hope that remained for Arsenal and not only extinguished them, but razed their memory from the Earth, and then salted the ground so that they might never arise again. By the time Erling Haaland, hair flowing behind him, made it 4-1, it was hard to believe any hope had ever existed.Erling Haaland delivered the exclamation point in City’s 4-1 victory.Phil Noble/ReutersArsenal remains atop the Premier League, of course, 2 points ahead of Manchester City, but having played two more games. The team’s coach, Mikel Arteta, is not prepared to cede anything just yet — “I have been in this country for 22 years,” he said, “and I have seen how quickly things shift” — but that lead now seems like a technicality, the consequence of a fractured timeline, a quirk of scheduling.There are no guarantees in sports. But common sense and recent experience would suggest that 2 points is not nearly enough to be sustained through the end of the season in late May. Arteta and Arsenal did not just lose to Manchester City on Wednesday night. They were deprived of more than just hope. The wild reverie that this might all end with a first Premier League title in almost 20 years was exposed as an illusion.The tendency both inside and outside Arsenal will, naturally, be to suggest that Arteta and his team brought this all upon themselves. It would have been different, after all, had they not spent the last three weeks allowing the lead they had accrued over the course of the season to be eroded.Arsenal led by two goals at Liverpool, and drew. It led by two goals at West Ham, and drew. It gave Southampton, a candidate for relegation, a two-goal head start at the Emirates, mounted a stirring comeback, and drew. At the time in the season when the pressure mounts and the great separate themselves from the merely good, the logic runs, Arsenal was found wanting.Arsenal, the league leader most of the season, and still despite Wednesday’s loss, looked as if it knew its title challenge was over.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersKinder observers would point out the various mitigating circumstances: Arsenal’s squad is among the youngest in the league, and is ahead of its anticipated development. The team has sorely missed William Saliba, the cherubic linchpin of its defense, who fell to injury at the point of the season when he was needed the most. His absence has proved that Arteta does not have the resources, just yet, to stay the course.All of that, though, is to buy into the illusion, to fall into the trap of believing that there was any other conclusion to the one that will spool out over the next few weeks, to indulge the fantasy that Arsenal — that anyone — could realistically ever have done enough to see off Manchester City.As it proved rather neatly against the team that it identified as its key rival from the earliest days of the season, Manchester City is not just the best team in the Premier League; it is the best in the Premier League by a gap so wide and so clear and so deep that it cannot, to all intents and purposes, be bridged.There are, essentially, three schools of thought as to how that has been achieved. One has it that City’s supremacy is rooted in the undoubted brilliance of Pep Guardiola’s coaching, combined with the club’s almost flawless recruitment.Another, less kind, would suggest that it has been constructed largely through spending a billion dollars, give or take, on some of the finest players in the world, building a squad that is no deeper than its rivals but of such a high grade that none of them can compete. (City signed Kalvin Phillips, then a mainstay of the English national team, last summer. You may have forgotten.)The third, the most damning of all, would point out that the club is currently under investigation by the Premier League for 115 breaches of the competition’s financial rules, all of which are strenuously and repeatedly denied by City but may yet place a stain on every one of its achievements in the last decade.Jack Grealish, left, with Kevin De Bruyne, after the latter scored City’s third goal. He also scored its first.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesGrealish later had a less cordial interaction with Thomas Partey after a foul in midfield.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersWhatever the cause, though, the outcome is apparent. Guardiola’s team is now on course for a fifth Premier League title in six years, and a third in a row. Only one other team has done that: Manchester United. Only one other English side has won the hallowed treble of the league, F.A. Cup and Champions League, too: also Manchester United. City could do both in one season.It is, without question, the pre-eminent force of its era. Its blend of wealth, power and intelligence — what Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal manager, once characterized as “petrol and ideas” — has swept all opponents aside. Manchester United has been through three managers and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep up, to no avail. Tottenham and Chelsea have imploded. Liverpool stayed the course for five years, and then crumpled.More than that, though, City’s dominance has changed the Premier League’s algorithm. Even when United was at its peak, the league always presented itself as more open, more democratic than Germany’s Bundesliga, say, or France’s Ligue 1, those personal fiefs of the high and mighty. Manchester City has exposed that as a fantasy. The Premier League is now no longer a competition a team wins. It is one that Manchester City loses.The idea that Arsenal, callow and naïve, might have stood in the way of that was — it turns out — nothing but an illusion. Arteta’s team has, as he was at pains to stress, led the league for “nine and a half months,” matching an “excellent side” stride for stride and, for a while, even outpacing it.There was always going to come a point, though, when it hit the wall, when Arsenal stumbled and City did not. It is the fate that has befallen everyone else. There was no reason to believe Arsenal would be an exception. In many ways, it is to the credit of Arteta and his players that the fantasy took so long, until the end of April, to break.But break it did, cold reality dawning under the lights of the Etihad. The game, the title challenge, the dream: They are all over now. By the time Haaland scored the fourth goal, it would not even have hurt anymore. It simply was, just as it was always going to be. More

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      The Champions League Ventures Down Memory Lane

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      Real Madrid-Manchester City is the headliner. A.C. Milan-Inter is the classic.The blockbuster matchup, no question, is the one that pits the establishment against the insurgent, the old guard against the new wave, the incomparable past against the inevitable future.Real Madrid against Manchester City has Pep Guardiola, Luka Modric, Erling Haaland, Karim Benzema. It is the team with more European Cups than anyone else against the team that wants a European Cup more than anyone else. It is a sequel, of course, but the Champions League — like Hollywood — loves a sequel. It is pure box office.It might, then, seem both distinctly counterintuitive and obviously pretentious to suggest that the other Champions League semifinal might somehow be more alluring. A.C. Milan against Inter Milan is very much the art-house offering, the feature directed at a niche, self-selecting audience. (Unless you are, of course, Italian.)It will not, make no mistake, have quite the production values of the show on offer at the Bernabéu and the Etihad. The cast list is not quite as glittering. And despite featuring two rivals so local they share a stadium, it does not offer quite such a straightforward, compelling narrative.Real Madrid against Manchester City, at heart, is about revenge and it is about power. It offers an insight into the ever-mutable nature of the Champions League, and by extension European soccer. There are conclusions to be drawn from its outcome.Diego Milito and Inter won the 2010 Champions League final.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter versus Milan, on the other hand, has just kind of happened. It is not to diminish their achievements to suggest that neither team expected, realistically, to be here. Their presence in the final four is not a consequence of rich form or stellar seasons; both have performed modestly in Serie A this season.It cannot even be read in good faith as proof of the resurgence of Italian soccer, which remains mired in debt, hidebound by bureaucracy and hamstrung by grinding conservatism. As the magazine Rivista Undici pointed out this week, nobody seriously believes that Serie A is now the best domestic competition in Europe because it provided three of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists this season. The successes of Inter, Milan and Napoli belong to the clubs themselves, not to the league as a whole.But for all that, the matchup’s appeal is undeniable. First and foremost, of course, it is a derby, one being played out over two of the biggest games of the club season. It is what was described, the last time it happened, as the “longest derby in the world,” a week of worry and stress and hope from which both heroes and villains will emerge.That it is fresh helps, too. No Italian team has reached the semifinals since Roma’s equally unanticipated surge in 2018. Neither Milanese side has made it this far since the last time they won the competition: Inter in 2010, Milan in 2007.Inter is the last Italian team to win the trophy.Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Champions League has long felt like a private club. The two sides of this rivalry, the Derby della Madonnina, make unlikely interlopers. Milan, with seven titles, has won the European Cup more than anyone except Real Madrid; Inter is eighth on the list, with three. Neither would accept the role of underdog either naturally or willingly, even as their presence is an infusion of new blood that the tournament needed.But most of all, for a certain vintage of fan, it has to do with memory. It was 2003, the last time these two teams were drawn together at this stage of this competition. (They would meet again, in the 2005 quarterfinal, a tie that A.C. Milan won with ease.)Back then, it was far closer to a curiosity than a miracle. Serie A, after all, was regarded as the finest league on the planet, and had been for 20 years or so. Milan — or at least the combined geography of Piedmont and Lombardy — was Italian soccer’s capital, and by extension the mistress of the world. That Inter and A.C. Milan might stand in each other’s way was only a matter of time, part of the natural order of things. A.C. Milan scraped through, that time. It beat another Italian team, Juventus, in the final.It is hard to pinpoint, precisely, when that world ended. Eras, in soccer, do not divide as neatly as journalists, historians and the subset of fans who think about these things like to pretend. Italian clubs won the Champions League three times in the first decade of this century: Milan twice, in 2003 and 2007, and Inter in 2010. Juventus made the final in 2003, too, and Milan in 2005.Filippo Inzaghi scored when Milan last won the Champions League, against Liverpool in 2007 in Athens.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd yet, by the time of Inter’s victory, few would have pronounced Serie A the best domestic competition on the planet. That title had passed first to the Premier League, and then, thanks to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, to La Liga.(It would return to the Premier League, by common consensus, no later than 2016. But again: In that time, English sides have won the Champions League twice. Real Madrid has delivered four more trophies for Spain. These things are unhelpfully messy.)Likewise, there is no single explanation for why or how it happened. Serie A lost its primacy in the same way that Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The stadiums started to look a little outdated, and then the style of play did as well. The debts piled up. The television product grew stale, the revenues dwarfed by those on offer in the Premier League.The players, as players do, gravitated to where the money was, and the money was in England and in parts of Spain. Violence flared with ever greater frequency in the stands. Attendances started to fall. Patches of empty seats appeared on screens.And against that backdrop came Calciopoli, the great referee-influencing scandal of 2006, dripping poison and doubt into Italian soccer’s bloodstream. Juventus was disgraced. Others were stained. Everyone suffered. Serie A was faded and diminished and now it was tarnished, too. It has never really recovered.That there is a Milan derby in the semifinals of the Champions League — that, for the first time since 2017, there will be an Italian team in the final in Istanbul — is not a remedy for that decline.Only Real Madrid (14) has more Champions League titles than A.C. Milan (7).Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Serie A that has emerged from the ashes of its past has plenty of attractive qualities. It is on course for a fourth winner in four years. It has a competitive balance that few of its peers can match. It is home to bold, intelligent coaches, giving rise to an enticing heterogeneity of style, and it has more than a few owners seeking to introduce a degree of innovation.But it is not on the cusp of reclaiming its place at the summit of world soccer; that crown is awarded not by artistic merit or even by popular acclamation but by brute economic power. Serie A was not king in the 1990s or 2000s because of the weather, or the food, or some innate cultural supremacy. It just paid more. Now the deepest pockets are in the Premier League, and that is not going to change anytime soon.It is there, though, that lies the appeal of Milan against Inter, twice in six days, for a place in the biggest game of the year. It is a break from the present, a chance to drift just a little in a past that has disappeared. There was no notice issued when Serie A slipped — or stepped off — its pedestal. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. Now, two decades later, there is an unexpected reminder of how the world used to be, before things moved and shifted and changed forever, when the light in Italy just seemed a little brighter than anywhere else.Details, DetailsAt Bayern Munich, it’s back to the drawing board.Leonhard Simon/ReutersBayern Munich will not take this well. It is less than a month since the club fired Julian Nagelsmann, a manager it had paid more than $25 million to hire, at least in part because he went skiing at a time deemed inappropriate. The club is unlikely to shrug its shoulders at being eliminated from not only the Champions League but the German cup, too, in the space of a few days.Thomas Tuchel, freshly installed as Nagelsmann’s replacement, should be safe for now, but all around him will be a blur of change. Oliver Kahn, the iconic goalkeeper turned chief executive, is under scrutiny. Hasan Salihamidzic, another former player and now Bayern’s sporting director, will not be resting easy. Herbert Hainer, the club’s president, already has hinted that there will be churn in the squad, too.Whether any of this will have the desired effect is a different matter. There was a sense, watching Manchester City hold Bayern at bay on Wednesday evening, of two clubs moving in opposite directions. An era that belongs to City, and to its fellow avatars of the new soccer, is doubtless beginning. The one dominated by Bayern and its ilk is slipping into the past.And yet the whole picture is much more complex, and substantially simpler, than that.No, Bayern cannot compete with City, not in the long term: The combined forces of Bavarian corporate culture are no match for that particular blend of Premier League wealth and nation-state resources. The days when Bayern could function essentially as a Bundesliga All-Star team — plucking the finest players from its rivals to perpetuate its domestic dominance and its European relevance — are over. Like Juventus and Barcelona before it, Bayern Munich will at some point bow to, or be bowed by, England’s economic primacy.But decade-spanning macroeconomic trends are not easily distilled into roughly two hours of soccer. Even in a game that seemed to define the direction of the whole sport, the margins were impossibly fine. In this case, it came down to the fact that City has a fearsome goal scorer — Erling Haaland, you may have heard him mentioned — and Bayern, essentially, does not. Tuchel’s team created half a dozen good chances before Haaland scored in Munich. It just did not take any of them.And, frustrating though that might be, it is also a significantly easier problem to solve than the imbalance in financial prowess between the European continent and the acquisitive, swashbuckling utopia that sits shimmering just off its shores. (The Premier League, that is. Other adjectives are available for the current state of Britain.)Should Bayern secure the services of Victor Osimhen or Randal Kolo Muani this summer — or even, the club’s ultimate dream, Harry Kane — it will certainly be back in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next season, and there is a better than even chance the outcome will be different. Long term, big picture, Bayern cannot keep up with the wealth of the Premier League in general, and Manchester City in particular. But then it does not need to, not really. It just needs to be able to overcome it for 90 minutes at a time.Correspondence: Your Ideas, RatedThe good news: Many, many of you have been in touch to pitch ideas for how soccer might follow baseball’s example and tweak its rules to make the game more engaging for idle teenagers. Not quite as many as got in touch to tell me about why banning the shift in baseball is a good thing, but still, a lot.The bad news: None of you got the correct answer, which was Extra Time Sudden Death Multi-Ball, so nobody wins the special prize of an afternoon of blue-sky thinking with Gerard Piqué.There were, alas, too many emails to address every suggestion, so here is a fairly representative selection, each condensed into a pearl of wisdom and then assessed by an expert panel — me, talking to my dog — who considers the suggestion’s merit and then makes a slightly condescending remark about its viability.Paul Kassel: “Shrink the field. It would compel tighter passing, fewer over-the-top balls that go nowhere, a bit more chaos. It would speed up the game, and likely increase scoring.”I like the theory, but if anything I’d go the other way: Teams are too well-organized now, so let’s space them out a bit. Grade: B.Charles Kelly: “The most obvious way to restore any modicum of sanity to the offside and handball rules is to restore their enforcement to the judgment of the referee. Accept that such calls are a judgment. Will some judgments be wrong? Of course. That’s the nature of judgment, and reasonable people know and accept that.”Thoroughly sensible, certainly for offside. Handball would be better served if there had to be deliberate motion toward the ball, as was the case at some point, I think. All of this falls down on relying on people to be “reasonable,” obviously. Grade: A for idea, F for execution.The referee will hear your complaints in order. Please take a number.Azael Rodriguez/Getty ImagesKirk Farmer: “I would change the offside rule so that a player is onside if any part of his/her body is even with the defender.”Wouldn’t we all, Kirk? Well, you, me and Arsène Wenger, which is not a bad group to be in, unless you’re Wenger. Grade: ASteve Elliott: “Some league somewhere should stop awarding points just for showing up, and say to get points in the table, you need to score goals on the field. No points for a goal-less draw.”Hard pass, I’m afraid, Steve, but there is the kernel of an idea here. Could an away draw earn more points than a home draw? Could scoring three goals or more earn a bonus point? Grade: C for you, D for me.Gregory Crouch: “Punish time-wasting by adding all those extra minutes like they did at the World Cup. Punish intentional tactical fouling more harshly.”Yes to both. But you lose points for the third suggestion, omitted here, of making refereeing more consistent. Too vague. Grade: BLaura Goldin: “How about enforcing the six-second rule that is supposed to be how long the keeper can handle the ball?”This was the rule for at least a decade, and as far as I know, still is. We just seem to have stopped enforcing it. Grade: A, with an asterisk because it already exists.Fred D’Ambrosi: “The solution to soccer’s problems is the salary cap. It will never happen, but leveling the playing field solves many more problems than cutting the game time by 30 minutes.”A salary cap or some other alternative that bridges the massive, yawning rift between the rich and everyone else and that we have, for some reason, all decided is actually great? If anything, this idea is insufficiently outrageous. Grade: A More

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      Manchester City Eliminates Bayern Munich in Champions League

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      City dispatched Bayern Munich to reach the Champions League semifinals. But, as usual, getting close won’t be good enough.MUNICH — Suddenly, quietly, improbably inconspicuously, Manchester City finds itself within touching distance once more of the thing it does not like to talk about but is never far from its thoughts, the one prize that has eluded Pep Guardiola at City, the ultimate victory that has long felt like the inevitable conclusion of all that the club has done, all that it has spent, all that it has wanted.It has never been an easy subject to broach with Guardiola, the team’s head coach. How he reacts tends to depend on his mood. Sometimes, it makes him irascible, sometimes weary. There are occasions when he plays it for laughs, and moments when he goes for playful indulgence, like a man talking to a dog, as if the very thought of one of the most expensive and ambitious sports-political projects of all time gobbling up trophies is risible.“Forget it, forget it,” he said last month. “When you start to talk about that, you start to lose competitions and drop competitions.”Familiarity lies at the root of his contempt, of course. He has been asked about the possibility of winning “The Treble” — when spoken, the phrase is always capitalized — in every single one of his seasons at City, with the possible exception of his fact-finding first. For a while, convention dictated it not be mentioned until at least springtime. These days it is broached when, jet-lagged, he first steps off the plane on some far-flung preseason tour.If anything, though, it is a curious and admittedly somewhat contorted form of flattery. The treble — victories in the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League — is held up as an almost mythical achievement in English soccer. It stands as the ultimate seal of greatness: It has, after all, only been achieved once, though Manchester United mentions it rarely, and only when prompted.Pep Guardiola, with Manuel Akanji and Bernado Silva.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockThat it seems to fit so readily in his purview is not just testament to soccer’s rapid-onset ossification into immutable hierarchies and to the irresistible power of money, but to the scale of dominion that Guardiola has established at Manchester City. He has already won the Premier League. He has retained it. Twice. He has broken the division’s points record. He has done a clean sweep of domestic honors. What other worlds are there left to conquer?(He might also like to direct a gentle admonishment in the general direction of his employer. In 2019, when City won the league and both domestic cups, Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, commanded that the team be hailed as the “Fourmidables.” It would, he believed, thus overshadow United’s treble. Guardiola’s staff pointed out that including the Community Shield, an exhibition game taken seriously only by the winner, might be technically correct but had the effect of cheapening the achievement. They were overruled.)This season, though, has brought a minor — but telling — shift. City’s quest to clear that final hurdle has bubbled along in the background, as it always does, but it has hardly been front and center.Partly, that has to do with a deference to logic: It would be a little bit gauche, after all, to discuss one team winning every competition in sight when another is several points clear at the top of the Premier League. And partly it has to do with the distracting presence of Erling Haaland, who has spent much of the year forcing people to wonder if there is a number big enough to capture his eventual goals tally.All of a sudden, though, it is the tail end of April and the stars once more seem to have aligned. If Manchester City wins all of its games, it will claim the Premier League trophy for the third year in a row: another item ticked off Guardiola’s bucket list. It is in the F.A. Cup semifinals, and an overwhelming favorite to reach the final. And here on Wednesday in Munich, City filled in the last administrative duty before taking its place in the final four of the Champions League.Aymeric Laporte bending soccer’s rules, and Bayern’s Kingsley Coman.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressBeating Bayern Munich handsomely eight days earlier had made this game seem like a formality, though in reality it did not always quite feel like that. There were moments, particularly in the first half, when Kingsley Coman or Leroy Sané were tearing at City’s flanks and it was possible, just about, to believe that it might not be over.But then Erling Haaland scored, and it was. Bayern equalized, late on, through a penalty by Joshua Kimmich, but by that stage the Allianz Arena had long since given up hope.Magnanimously, Guardiola suggested that the aggregate score of 4-1 did not reflect the true nature of the home-and-home — probably correctly — but then these games, as he said, are defined by details. And the details, in this case, were that Bayern could not take its chances. City, by contrast, grasped those that came its way with a cold certainty, an unforgiving inevitability.It is a useful trait to have, of course, as the season enters its final, defining stretch. The challenges that remain, the obstacles between the club and the achievement that represents the absolute, unavoidable culmination of Abu Dhabi’s vision for soccer, are hardly trifles.Guardiola’s team still has to play, and beat, Arsenal, the Premier League leader. Manchester United or Brighton might await in the F.A. Cup final. Most ominously, Real Madrid lurks in the semifinals of the Champions League, just as it did last year. Nobody at City will need reminding how that ended. Guardiola regards those sorts of fixtures as a “coin flip.” He knows as well as anyone that nobody calls it better than Real Madrid.With Bayern out of the way, City will line up against Real Madrid in the semifinals.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then City has not so much as dropped a point in the Premier League since February. In March and April, it has so far scored 31 goals and conceded only four. It has the look of a team gathering momentum, a blend of speed and force and purpose. It has the feel of a storm brewing. All of a sudden, almost surreptitiously, City has crept closer to the summit of its own grand ambitions than it has ever been.Quite what that means for soccer as a whole is a subject that will, rightly, come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, as Guardiola steers his side on those last few steps, the most delicate, the most treacherous of all. For him, though, as for his team and for the people who took a club and turned it into something else entirely, spinning it out of whole, golden cloth, this is where the path has always led. All that is left, now, is to get there. More

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      At Liverpool, Man City Means a Red Alert

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      A rough stretch, starting with Saturday’s game against Manchester City, will define Liverpool’s season. The harder work comes after that.Every year, in December, the BBC devotes an evening of programming to one of Britain’s longest-running broadcasting traditions. The Sports Personality of the Year Award was first presented in 1954; almost seven decades later, it is still going strong, a fixture in the country’s sporting consciousness.In an era when votes are no longer sent by postcard, it is possible to feel there is something a little quaint about the award. The criteria are pleasingly opaque: Last year, England striker Beth Mead beat out the cricket superstar Ben Stokes and Eve Muirhead, the skip of Britain’s Olympic curling team. Quite how their achievements should be compared is unclear.Still, the award’s existence is harmless, even kind of sweet. It is a chance, after all, to give athletes who devote years to their craft a celebration they deserve. More of a problem is the cultural gravity it exerts: In the months before the ceremony, there is a tendency to present any sporting success solely in the light of how it might affect the award’s destination.Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula 1 world championship, or Emma Raducanu the U.S. Open, or a British cyclist the Tour de France: Does this mean they are the favorite to be sports personality of the year? The actual sports themselves are reduced to nothing more than qualifiers.There have been times this season when the race to sign Jude Bellingham has taken on a similar air. The campaigns of the soccer clubs with designs on Bellingham, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, have frequently been treated not as attempts to win trophies or to qualify for the Champions League, but instead as auditions to serve as the 19-year-old’s new home.A few months ago, there would have been little to choose among the three prime contenders. Real Madrid offers glamour, Luka Modric and an enviable supply of Champions League trophies. Manchester City has unrivaled wealth, Pep Guardiola and four Premier League titles in five years. Liverpool had Jürgen Klopp and the memory of Steven Gerrard and had picked up every major honor available since 2019.Jürgen Klopp’s wry smile is easier to spot in the stands than on his face these days.Carl Recine/ReutersThis season, though, has changed the terms of the equation considerably. Real Madrid and Man City have continued to sail as smoothly as ever, of course, but Liverpool has collapsed. Klopp’s team has lost more Premier League games this season than in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22 combined. It has won only three times away from home.It left the Champions League with a whimper against Real Madrid, and its hopes of returning to the competition at all are diminishing. Liverpool currently sits sixth, seven points adrift of Tottenham in the final qualifying slot. The good news is that the next week brings three games to try to reduce that gap. The bad news? They are against City, Chelsea and Arsenal.A variety of factors have been identified as contributing to Liverpool’s rapid, unforeseen decline — fatigue, injury, predictability, the remorseless march of time — but the way it has manifested defies simple diagnosis.It has made a good sound bite to point the finger at the defense, or the midfield, or for some reason just at Trent Alexander-Arnold, but the truth is that the system that led Liverpool to three Champions League finals in five years, as well as its first Premier League crown in three decades, was complex, interwoven.When one aspect of the team sneezes, the rest of it catches cold: Liverpool’s defense looks vulnerable because its midfield has stopped functioning. But its midfield is suffering because the attack is not pressing as effectively. Just as it once worked in flowing concert, Klopp’s team has ground to a halt in unison, and whatever he has tried in an attempt to jump-start it has failed.The difference-maker: Jude Bellingham.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe solution, to many, is apparent. Liverpool has spent much of the season being told that it needs to overhaul its squad. Most urgently, it needs to reinforce its aging midfield. To that end, it is monitoring Mason Mount’s contract talks with Chelsea. The club also has a longstanding interest in Matheus Nunes, the Wolves and Portugal player.Universally, though, it is common consensus that the key is Bellingham. Liverpool’s need to win the race for his transfer, likely to cost in excess of $130 million, has increased in inverse proportion to its chances of doing so.This is, in truth, an oversimplification. Partly, that is because the idea that teams can be “rebuilt” in short order is a myth. Neither Alex Ferguson nor Arsène Wenger, the only two coaches in recent English history to be credited with fashioning more than one great team, changed everything overnight. They committed to evolution, not revolution. Whatever form the new Liverpool takes, Klopp’s repurposed team will most likely include seven or eight players who are already at Anfield.But more significant is that just as Liverpool’s entropy cannot be traced to a single isolated factor, nor can it be addressed by signing one player or strengthening one area of the squad.Under Klopp’s aegis, the club has been able to outmuscle the bulk of its rivals — including those, like Chelsea and Manchester United, blessed with greater financial resources — and keep pace with Manchester City because of an accumulation of edges.Liverpool fans no longer recognize the team Klopp built into a champion.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockLiverpool had a smarter data department. It spent money, particularly on salaries, but it made every dollar count. It thought more about nutrition, throw-ins and the psychology of penalty shootouts. It combined them all under a coach who had a clear sense of how he wanted to play, who knew what sort of players he needed, and what he needed them to be able to do.Slowly, then suddenly, those edges have been dulled. Liverpool’s rivals, domestic and international, have sought to nullify every marginal gain the club made. In some areas, it is doubtless still a market leader, but the composite advantage is much smaller. Plenty of teams have sharpened their recruitment strategies, or invested in data, or started to take more care over the minute details of the game. (And where they have not, in certain cases money has made up the difference.)At the same time, Liverpool’s sense of clarity has become muddied. The image of Klopp as a “heavy metal” coach — a phrase he must, surely, now regret — has been outdated for some time. He has sought to turn Liverpool into a more controlled, more assured, sort of a team. The result, at times, has been a team caught between two stools, determined to move on from what it was but not yet sure of what it is supposed to become.As talented as Bellingham is, he cannot address those issues, not on his own. What made Liverpool competitive was not just the talent within its team; it was the way the club had put that squad together, how it asked it to play, the cumulative impact of all those imperceptible steps it had taken to provide the best platform for them to succeed.Given the competition, a parade of all that it has achieved under Klopp, all that it has already done, would not be enough to make Liverpool more appealing to Bellingham than Manchester City or Real Madrid. If it is to secure the player around which it intends to build its future, it needs to persuade him that it knows what comes next.The Demise of the MachinesThere is always something heartening about seeing a player enjoying a sudden flourish, granted belated recognition after a career spent toiling away from the spotlight. It acts as a reminder that talent is not always a gift. It can be a reward, too.Joselu, certainly, fits that particular bill. He is 33 now, having spent the last decade or so as an industrious, faintly unspectacular forward for a variety of teams that might fairly be described as “midtable.” Last week, though, long after he might have abandoned hope of representing his country, he was called up to Spain’s national team.On form, his appearances against Norway and Scotland in the first round of qualifiers should not have been controversial: Joselu has scored 12 goals in 22 games for a struggling Espanyol team this season. He got his chance with Spain not because of an unexpected romantic streak in Luis de la Fuente, the country’s newly installed coach. He has done enough to deserve it.Joselu made his debut for Spain last week, days before he turned 33.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThat does not necessarily mean it is a feel-good story for Spanish soccer, though. The team de la Fuente selected against Scotland — a game that resulted in just Spain’s third defeat in a qualifier in nearly two decades — also included David García, an equally unheralded 29-year-old defender. A 35-year-old, Iago Aspas, came off the bench. It is not to diminish Scotland’s achievement to suggest this was not a vintage Spain squad.The same could be said of Germany — its attack led by another late bloomer, Niclas Füllkrug, and duly beaten at home by Belgium — and Italy, which has had to scour Argentina to find its latest striker, the 23-year-old Tigre forward Mateo Retegui. Three of Europe’s great powers, all of a sudden, have found that their player pools are a little thin.In Italy’s case, that is nothing new: The country has long struggled to produce young players, largely because Serie A’s teams tend to believe that anyone who has not seen his 30th birthday is still an infant.It is not long, though, since Spain and Germany seemed to have established smooth, reliable production lines of talent. Both countries were praised, effectively, for having industrialized youth production. Now both find themselves increasingly stocking their squads — if not their first teams — with players like Joselu, Aspas and Füllkrug: the kind of journeymen they were supposed to have moved beyond.There is no immediate explanation for why that might be. Perhaps there is a roadblock on giving young players a chance. Perhaps their domestic leagues are too reliant on imports. Perhaps their lauded academies churn out identikit players, leaving gaps elsewhere. (The likelihood is that, combined with a bit of random chance, it is a blend of all three.)The consequences are a little clearer. Three of the continent’s traditional powers are not quite what they used to be. That has an impact not only on their traditional peers — England and France, in particular — but on smaller nations, like Scotland, that might suddenly find a little room to breathe now that the shadows of the giants have receded just a little.The Greatest AdventureHervé Renard: the right man for France’s Women’s World Cup moment?Molly Darlington/ReutersHervé Renard is one of those figures only the less conspicuous corners of international soccer can produce. He wears his shirts perfectly pressed, bright white, and often slashed almost to the waist. His hair is long, his face tan, and he has a tendency to pop up in unexpected places: Zambia, Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia. He is essentially the adjective “swashbuckling” in human form.He is also, as it happens, good at what he does. He turned first Zambia and then Ivory Coast into champions of Africa. He guided Morocco to the 2018 World Cup. He was last seen steering a dynamic, enthralling Saudi side to a victory against Argentina that ranks as one of the most eye-catching results in men’s World Cup history.His newest job is of a different order. Renard this week was confirmed as the successor to the perennially unpopular Corinne Diacre as coach of France’s women’s national team. On the surface, his task is an onerous one. First, he must persuade the swath of players alienated by his predecessor to return to the international fold. Then he has to craft a side coherent enough to challenge the best teams in the world. He has three and a half months, give or take, to do it.The potential prize, though, is worth it. France is home to two of the finest women’s club teams in the world. In Grace Geyoro, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani — not to mention Amandine Henry, Wendie Renard and the twins Delphine and Estelle Cascarino — he now has, at least in theory, some of the best players on the planet at his disposal.If Renard, the coach, can repair the country’s shattered team spirit, if he can forge all of that talent into a cogent unit, if he can succeed where Diacre consistently failed and provide a platform for his players to fulfill their potential, then there is nothing to stop France’s rivaling England and the United States and Germany as genuine contenders for the World Cup. Renard has spent his career traversing the globe in search of a challenge. He may have found the adventure that might seal his legacy at home. More

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      Manchester City Beats Arsenal, and the Premier League Season Pivots

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      Manchester City’s 3-1 victory lifted it over Arsenal and into first place in the Premier League. But the title race is far from over.LONDON — Erling Haaland was just starting to sprint when he remembered his manners. He was about to race off to celebrate yet another goal with Manchester City’s fans when he stopped, turned on his heel, and bounded over to Kevin De Bruyne instead, grabbing him by the forearm, roaring wordlessly in his face.In the ecstasy of the moment, it was not entirely clear what Haaland wanted his teammate to do. De Bruyne, certainly, seemed a little confused. Was Haaland merely thanking him for the assist on his goal? Was he inviting him to join in the celebrations? For a breath, both players stood at an impasse, wondering what to do next. And then Haaland took off again, hurtling toward the traveling supporters at full speed, his arms flailing in the air.By this stage, it is a wonder Haaland, the Norwegian striker, elicits any excitement from scoring. His latest goal gave him 26 in only 22 games in the Premier League since joining Manchester City last summer. He is on 32 in all competitions. Haaland does not so much harvest goals as factory farm them. He knew, though, that Wednesday’s was not just another goal. This one was different.Not just because it sealed City’s 3-1 win against Arsenal, or even because it confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team would leapfrog its opponent at the summit of the Premier League. Its significance was more deep-rooted than that. That goal, this victory, effected a profound shift in the psychology of the title race. It had the air of the hinge on which the season turned.Erling Haaland and Manchester City pulled ahead of Arsenal, for the moment, in the Premier League standings.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola, of course, had stressed this week that February is far too early for a single game to be conclusive, no matter how apocalyptic the tone of the prematch hype. The campaign is only narrowly past its halfway point. There are, as he said, so many games remaining. And besides, the arithmetic is skewed. Arsenal has a game in hand. Nothing, he was very clear, has been decided yet.Judging by the tableau of reactions to Haaland’s goal, that message had not quite made it through to City’s players. As Haaland tore away from De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan was in the corner, punching the air; Rúben Dias was locked in a tight, tender clinch with his coach, Guardiola cradling the defender’s face in his hands; Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish, both recently substituted, were racing back onto the field; and City’s coaching staff was howling into the night sky.It is only 10 days or so since Arsenal’s lead over City seemed if not insurmountable then certainly commanding. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team had beaten Tottenham in enemy territory, and had swatted aside Manchester United at home. Its lead over City had stretched to eight points. Arsenal’s youthful exuberance was slowly crystallizing into an imperious momentum; at some point, it had gone from being a club that hoped and become one that believed.Suggesting that tenor has been extinguished over the course of the last two weeks would be a stretch, but it is hard to deny that Arsenal has sputtered. First, Everton, its loins girded by a new manager, Sean Dyche, shut out the league leader at Goodison Park. Then Brentford, the Premier League’s specialist giant slayer, left the Emirates Stadium with a draw that was simultaneously fortuitous and largely merited.Suddenly, the daylight Arsenal had so painstakingly claimed at the top of the table had disappeared. City was right there, its breath hot on the necks of Arteta’s players. This game became less an examination of the comparative merits of two title contenders and more a test of Arsenal’s mettle.Martin Odegaard and Arsenal are winless in three games.David Klein/ReutersThe fact of defeat — to an opponent that has won four of the last five Premier League titles (for now, at least) — will sting rather less than the manner of it.Arsenal was hurried, rather than urgent, frantic, rather than intense. It looked, in other words, like exactly what it is: a work in progress, a young team on a steep trajectory but one that is yet to reach its apex. City’s first two goals, scored by De Bruyne and Grealish, came from avoidable errors, rushed decisions, poor choices. That happens to teams as they grow, of course. It was just not a great time for Arsenal to have a learning experience.City, by contrast, has honed its ruthlessness over the course of five seasons. On Wednesday, Guardiola’s team might not have played with its habitual control, the poise and the certainty that has become its hallmark; there was, instead, a frenzy to its performance, too, a fury that the club ordinarily reserves for any governing body that questions the legitimacy of its financial results.The temptation is to draw a direct link between the team’s performance and the 115 allegations of rule-breaking made by the Premier League last week, to suggest that Guardiola has successfully used those charges to convince his players — whom he had accused, not so long ago, of being rather too happy to rest on their laurels — that they have a cause to fight for, an injustice to set right.Perhaps that is true. Perhaps City’s squad has bought into the club’s conviction that it is on some rebel crusade, persecuted by the vested interests intent on doing it down. It is entirely possible that the players have been jolted out of whatever torpor Guardiola had detected by the seriousness of the allegations.Far more likely is that City’s players realized this was their chance. Manchester City has not been taking Arsenal lightly: that much was obvious when Ederson, the goalkeeper, was booked for time-wasting after barely half an hour, and when the team’s captain, Gundogan, was twice asked to calm his teammates down by the referee, Anthony Taylor.The difference, more than anything, was that City could channel that desperation, that hunger. That it could sense weakness and exploit it when Arsenal could not do the same. It does not mean anything is over, that Arsenal’s race is run. But for the first time in months, it feels like City has the edge, and that is often all it needs. More