Manchester City (Soccer Team)

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      How Real Madrid Beat Manchester City

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      All but beaten in its Champions League semifinal, Real Madrid scored once, then twice, then a third time to snatch a victory and add to its legend.MADRID — There was nothing. There was no noise. The Santiago Bernabéu stood silent, subdued, waiting for the bell to toll. There was no spark. Real Madrid had long since run out of ideas, and they were running low on hope, too. Most pressingly, there was no time. There were 30 seconds left, plus maybe a little extra purgatory, and then it would be over.Real Madrid’s campaign in the Champions League this season has run on magic and miracles. The comeback against the glittering array of Instagram influencers arranged in the vague shape of a team by Paris St.-Germain. The revival against Chelsea that hinged on a single, unstoppable pass from Luka Modric.But there comes a point when reality has to intrude, when the chaos has to give way to order. There are certain inevitabilities that even Real Madrid, soccer’s great self-actualizers, a team that runs exclusively on the power of its own imagination, have to acknowledge. This was one of them. This was the point where all of it came to an end.And then, in a single, blinding flash, it happened. There were no warning signs, no rumbles of thunder, no auguries, no harbingers. One minute Manchester City was in complete control of its semifinal, leading by a single goal on the night and by two, a yawning chasm, on aggregate. Jack Grealish had missed a couple of chances to add a little gloss to the score line, but nobody seemed overly concerned.Then, in a beat, the world turned upside down. With 89 minutes and 30 seconds played, Rodrygo reacted quickest to Karim Benzema’s knockdown and stabbed a shot past Éderson. He gobbled the ball from the back of the net, and sprinted straight back to the halfway line. The Bernabéu stirred to life. There was noise.Even Real Madrid fans thought it was over. Until it wasn’t.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersOn the sideline, the fourth official, Davide Massa, was fumbling with his electronic scoreboard. He lifted it above his head, the number six illuminated in bright, lively green: six more minutes. Now, suddenly, there was time, and it carried hope in its wake. Real Madrid, though, did not need it. It does not work like that. It swept up the field again. Dani Carvajal conjured a cross. There was Rodrygo again, his header flashing past Éderson.This time, he did not seek out the ball. This time, he raced off, sprinting to the edge of the field, careering as close to the stands as he could. His teammates followed him. The fans poured over each other, a liquid mass, in their delirium. This is exactly what they had been expecting when they had arrived at the stadium a few hours earlier, and still they could not quite conceive of how, exactly, Real Madrid had done it.Vinícius Júnior collected the ball after Rodrygo’s second, and for the first time Real Madrid felt victory was within reach.Juan Medina/ReutersNor, for that matter, could anyone else. It does not seem too florid, too ethereal, to suggest that Real Madrid does not so much beat teams at soccer as overwhelm them by harnessing some elemental force, something that naturally occurs in its environment. Its players spend a considerable portion of their time encouraging their fans to make more noise, whipping them into an ever-increasing Eleusinian frenzy, for that very purpose.At times, it resembles a form of alchemy, the transformation of a succession of base metals — a smattering of garlanded veterans, a couple of raw hopefuls, a coach with an expressive eyebrow and an easy charm, a team with no recognizable, cogent plan beyond a pervasive sense of its own destiny — into something precious.Here, though, it was something else, something more akin to a Big Bang. Real Madrid did not particularly like the turn the universe was taking. It did not have any great desire to exist in a dimension in which Manchester City was in the Champions League final and it was not. So it simply, in the blink of an eye, created a new one, one it found much more to its liking.That second goal, the one that sent the game to extra time, marked the moment that one reality ended and another came into being. Manchester City was now living in Real Madrid’s world, and the ending in Real Madrid’s world is always the same.A few minutes into extra time, Karim Benzema tumbled over Ruben Días’s outstretched leg. The referee, Daniele Orsato, pointed with a theatrical flourish to the penalty spot. Benzema, obviously, scored, because Benzema was always going to score. In the space of five minutes, with a break and a breather in between, Manchester City’s understanding of how things worked had been shattered.Benzema sent Ederson the wrong way and sent his penalty into the side netting in extra time.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPep Guardiola’s team is not the first to experience that, of course. It is hard to tell whether it is something about the Bernabéu that does it, or whether it is the effect of feeling like you are living in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this place has an unrivaled ability to unsettle even the greatest players, the smoothest teams. It scrambles the brain, jumbles the code, shorts the wiring.It happened to P.S.G., too, when Gianluigi Donnarumma stumbled on the ball and Neymar and Lionel Messi disappeared from view. It happened, too, to Chelsea at the last — or what seemed, until very recently, like the last — with the European champion seemingly coasting to victory and then, without ever really noticing, staring down the barrel of defeat.City, more than anyone, should have been immune. It is hard to imagine a team more versed in its ideas than Manchester City — though Liverpool would have a case — or a team better equipped to remain steadfast to its principles.And yet City, too, froze. Even before everything fell apart, it had seemed inhibited, cagey, troubled by something, a reduced version of the team that might — with a little more ruthlessness and a touch more luck — have scored six or seven in the first leg last week. It had only found a little composure after Riyad Mahrez had scored, when the prospect of a place in the final against Liverpool at the end of May was so tantalizingly close.That, ultimately, is the effect of Real Madrid’s belief. It believes it will win with such conviction that it proves contagious. That is the form its magic takes: it is a glamour, the power to dazzle an opponent, to convince it that the world should be as you see it, as you would want it to be.It cannot be explained. It does not require specific ingredients, or any ingredients at all, really. There can be no noise, no hope, no spark and no time, and yet Real Madrid can still conjure it from the air, from the sky, from something deep within. It is something that happens, something that happens to Real Madrid, and to whoever has the misfortune to be standing in its way. More

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      Manchester City Beats Real Madrid in Champions League Semifinal

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      Manchester City had its way with Real Madrid — sort of. In the game’s aftermath, it was hard to shake the feeling that things had gone the other way.MANCHESTER, England — First thing Wednesday morning, Pep Guardiola’s staff will deliver to the Manchester City manager a meticulously annotated report of his team’s Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid. At roughly the same time, Carlo Ancelotti, his counterpart in the Spanish capital, will receive something very similar.Those dossiers will contain brief snatches of video, each highlighting some key tactical detail. There will be photos, too, offering a snapshot of a scarcely perceptible flaw in a player’s positioning or an expanse of the field left exposed or a darting run left unconsummated. There will, perhaps, be giant arrows in some lurid shade. There will certainly be reams of statistics.Guardiola and Ancelotti will settle down and comb through them, panning for whatever seam of wisdom they might find, mining deep into the detail in the hope of finding some kernel, some insight that might prove the difference when they play again next week. And as they do it, they will know, deep down, that it is all absolutely, fundamentally, unavoidably pointless.There is no hidden explanation, buried deep in a screed of numbers or encoded in high resolution pixels, for how Manchester City managed to beat Real Madrid yet ended the evening feeling like it had lost. Or for how it finished with four goals and the sensation that it should have had half a dozen more, or how it landed a succession of knockout blows only to find its opponent still standing there, smiling, complaining only of the mildest headache.Pep Guardiola had plenty of reason for concern during a win in which his team failed to capitalize on several opportunities.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesThe raw numbers of the game are not a magic eye puzzle; they are barely even a Rorschach test. No matter how long and hard you stare at them, they will not suddenly become an image, clear and sharp, of something that bears analysis and interpretation.They will not tell Guardiola how his team could be so obviously, so vastly superior by every available metric and in every conceivable way — slicker in possession and more inventive and creative and youthful and dynamic — and yet wholly incapable of shaking Madrid from its tail.And they will not enlighten Ancelotti as to how his team, somehow, remains alive and fighting in this semifinal, with a chance over 90 minutes in front of its own fans, baying and roaring, to defy all human logic and make the Champions League final. They will certainly not tell him how Real Madrid manages to keep doing this, over and over again, seeming to draw strength as it comes ever closer to the edge, continually finding the will and the wit to conjure its curious, self-perpetuating magic.Guardiola himself had acknowledged that before the game, half in jest, suggesting that there was not a vast amount of point in conducting the usual, instinctive analysis of Real Madrid because Ancelotti’s team is, by its very nature, so chimerical. He meant it, most likely, as a reflection on the virtuosity of Karim Benzema and Luka Modric, the ability of some of the finest players of their generation to bend a game to their will, but it sounded just a little like he was saying Real Madrid does not make sense.At times it felt like things could be far worse for Thibaut Courtois and Real Madrid, but several close calls ended up missing.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe is, of course, too respectful — even of Real Madrid, the club that stood as his archenemy for the first four decades of his career — to say that out loud, but his experience at the Etihad would not have contradicted him.Real was beaten within 10 minutes: two goals down, ruthlessly exposed, looking suddenly like the expensive collection of gifted but ill-matched individuals that all right-thinking people dismissed them as about four Champions League titles ago. David Alaba, his entire career spent among the elite, appeared to have been replaced by some callow ingénue. Toni Kroos appeared to age several decades with every passing minute.And then, from nowhere, Ferland Mendy slung in a cross, the sort that comes more in hope than expectation, and Benzema planted his foot and shifted his weight and scored, even though it was not immediately clear whether both the human body and the laws of physics are designed to work like that.No matter. City was still slicing Madrid apart at will. Riyad Mahrez hit the post. Phil Foden had one cleared off the line. A beat later, Foden converted an artful, clipped cross to restore City’s cushion, to relieve the tension swaddling the Etihad.The ball had come from the foot of Fernandinho, a creaking central midfielder reborn for the evening — in extenuating circumstances — as a marauding fullback. His rejuvenation lasted two minutes. Guardiola was still celebrating when Vinicius slipped past his makeshift opponent, sprinted half the length of the field, and slipped the ball past Éderson.Bernardo Silva and City had their moments to celebrate on Tuesday, but there were fewer of them than there could have been.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersCity came again, Bernardo Silva dispensing with all nuance and intricacy and simply kicking the ball, as hard as he could, his shot flashing past Thibaut Courtois. Benzema turned away, grinning ruefully, as though he could not quite believe the holes from which he has to retrieve his teammates.On anyone else, it might have looked like an admission of defeat, a final acquiescence to fate. But it is Real Madrid, and it is Benzema, and it is the Champions League, so obviously what happened was that Aymeric Laporte inadvertently — but inarguably — handled the ball in his own penalty area, and Benzema stood up and chipped a shot, languidly and confidently, straight down the middle of Éderson’s goal.Guardiola sat on an icebox in the technical area, his fingers steepling against his forehead, in horrified awe, as if trying to impose some reason on it all. It is a thankless task. This game did not make sense. Its outcome, the one that meant Real Madrid left Manchester with something more concrete than hope, with 90 minutes in front of a baying, willing Bernabeu between Ancelotti’s players and another Champions League final, did not make sense.There is no data point, no vignette, no piece of analysis that will adequately explain how Manchester City could beat Ancelotti’s team so comprehensively and yet leave with the tie poised so delicately. Real Madrid does not make sense, not in the Champions League, and all you can do is allow yourself to be washed away by it. More

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      Liverpool Edges City in Game of Early Goals and Managed Risks

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      Liverpool advanced to the F.A. Cup final by beating its Champions League rival at Wembley. But for both teams, every choice matters now.LONDON — In the single corner of Wembley bathed by bright sunshine, Kevin De Bruyne dutifully shuttled up and down. He stretched out his hamstrings and his calves. He made sure his ankles were nice and loose, and, with great time and care, made sure his laces were tight. He wanted everything to feel just right when the call came.It never did. With Manchester City trailing Liverpool by two goals, with its place in the F.A. Cup final and its aspirations of completing a domestic and European treble slipping from its grasp, City’s manager, Pep Guardiola, did not summon De Bruyne, his outstanding playmaker. The Belgian spent a few minutes in the sunshine, his gaze alternating between the game unfolding in front of him and Guardiola, and then he returned to his seat in the shade.Whether De Bruyne knew it or not, Guardiola had never considered anything else. He would, of course, have preferred to throw De Bruyne into the fray — or, indeed, to have him on the field from the start — but he felt, sincerely, that he could not.De Bruyne had sustained a four-inch gash on his foot in City’s Champions League clash against Atlético Madrid, in Spain, on Wednesday. It had been stitched closed before he returned to England, and he had been prescribed a course of antibiotics to stave off an infection. It was starting to heal. Introducing him into a game three days later, though, would risk reopening the wound. “Then we would lose him for more games,” Guardiola said. “At the end, I didn’t want to take that risk.”It was hardly surprising that Guardiola was a little coy on why, exactly, De Bruyne was dispatched to the touchline to warm up, given that he evidently had no intention of allowing him into the game.Perhaps it was a psychological ploy for the benefit of his teammates, a little boost as they sought to build on Jack Grealish’s second-half goal and further reduce the three-goal lead Liverpool had established in a dominant first half. Or maybe it was a little ruse to unnerve Guardiola’s Liverpool counterpart, Jürgen Klopp, to force him to contemplate what he might do if De Bruyne, arguably the most creative player in English soccer, suddenly entered the fray.Either way, the fact that De Bruyne was reduced to playing the role of theoretical threat encapsulated the greatest challenge facing these teams over the next six weeks.Both have been swept to the cusp of not just glory but some multiple of it — City hopeful, still, of winning both the Premier League and Champions League, Liverpool now in contention to complete a sweep of four available trophies — by the prowess of their players and the brilliance of their coaches, by virtue of being not only the most gifted teams but also the most intense, the most intelligent and the most industrious.What unfolds between now and the end of the season, though, will hinge as much on endurance as on ability. The line between absolute success and relative failure is as much a war of attrition as a battle of wits. What will define who wins the Premier League and, possibly, the Champions League will not be which team can soar highest but which can run deepest.Manchester City’s Fernandinho, left, and John Stones at the end of a long week.Tony Obrien/Action Images Via ReutersThat is particularly true for teams that find themselves competing on multiple fronts. Guardiola and Klopp both take great pains to stress that looking too far ahead can lead only to ruin, that allowing thoughts to drift to the hypothetical can serve only to distract from the concrete and the tangible.But every lineup choice, for both coaches, between now and the end of the season, must take into account not just the task at hand but also the challenges to come.Guardiola, at Wembley, named De Bruyne as a substitute despite knowing that he would not play. He was joined on that list by Ilkay Gundogan and Aymeric Laporte, both of whom were in De Bruyne’s boat, omitted from this game with hopes that they would be available for the next, against Brighton, in the Premier League, or so that they would not reduce their chances of playing in the Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid in 10 days.Strange as it seems to say it, for a team that has spent a decade or so building one of the two most expensive squads of all time — a team that includes among its alternates the most expensive player in British history — City’s list of available players is not particularly “long,” as Guardiola put it.“It is OK when everyone is fit,” he said. The subtext, of course, was that it would not be when injury and fatigue set in. Though Guardiola prefers a concentrated, high-caliber squad, for a club of City’s long-term vision — not to mention its unrivaled resources — that is more than a little surprising; it is hard to imagine that the situation will not be amended during the summer transfer window.Sadio Mané scored twice for Liverpool. But more — and bigger — games loom.Tony Obrien/Action Images Via ReutersKlopp has taken the opposite approach. Liverpool’s squad, bolstered by the arrival of Luis Díaz in January and somewhat untroubled by injury in recent months, is sufficiently well-equipped these days that he was able to rest some of his key figures against Benfica in the Champions League last week — a privilege Guardiola, facing a pitched battle with Atlético Madrid, was denied — and still advance. That, in turn, allowed him to name a full-strength side at Wembley on Saturday, a fact that likely proved the decisive factor.The catch, of course, is that Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and the rest of the team have only 72 hours before they face Manchester United in the Premier League, with a Merseyside derby against Everton lingering on the horizon. Their legs will be just a little more weary for those games because of their exertions against City.Klopp, in that sense, took as much risk as Guardiola; sticking is no less of a gamble than is twisting, after all. That is the position in which both coaches, and both teams, find themselves: weighing risk and reward, hoping they call it right, knowing that everything is on the line. More

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      You Decide Which Games Matter

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

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      Manchester City Fights Off Atlético Madrid in Champions League

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      City, a team shaped by style, showed it was also skilled in the dark arts as it eliminated Atlético Madrid and moved a step closer to its first Champions League title.MADRID — Many things happened at the Wanda Metropolitano in the final 10 or 20 minutes, the ones that seemed to stretch on and on, long past the final whistle, until they almost constituted another self-contained bonus game, a separate third installment of a scheduled two-part drama.There was some hair-pulling. There was quite a lot of time-wasting. There was a full-scale brawl, dozens and dozens of players and team staff members all streaming down to a corner of the field to make their opinions known. There was a flurry of yellow cards, and a bright, angry red. There was Diego Simeone, conducting his orchestra, urging the stadium to bay and to howl and to snarl until the last breath.What there was not, the only thing missing, was much actual soccer. There were flashes, of course, Atlético Madrid charging forward, desperately hunting the goal that would break Manchester City’s resistance and take the game into extra time, extend their stay in the Champions League for another 30 minutes or, just maybe, another few weeks. For the most part, though, those endless last few minutes were a study in the art of not playing soccer.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesA foul by Felipe on Phil Foden sparked a sideline brawl.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressFelipe got a red card. Foden, and City, got a place in the semifinals.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is, of course, very much part of Atlético Madrid’s identity. Simeone has spent a decade crafting a team in his own image, one that plays, just as he did, with a “knife between its teeth.”Atlético should, by rights, be a heroic underdog among Europe’s elite, a countercultural alternative to the hegemony of pressing and possession. It does not, after all, have the resources of its overweening neighbor, Real Madrid, let alone the state-backed clout of Manchester City or Paris St.-Germain, and yet it refuses to wilt, to succumb to financial inevitability.It is a potent testament to Simeone’s work, then, and to the great effectiveness of his inculcation, that his team can so easily and so frequently play the role of the Champions League’s obvious villain: a side of cynics, provocateurs and cutthroats, designed and built to draw the beauty and the soul from the game, happy to subvert any norm available in pursuit of victory, and in defiance of convention, its opponents and the game’s sense of moral rectitude.And yet, in all the fire and fury, it was not only Atlético that realized that a place in the semifinals hung not on talent and technique but on grit and grizzle, on a willingness to do whatever it takes.There is no team more associated with beauty than Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. He has come, over the years, to stand as an embodiment of soccer’s higher values, its ultimate arbiter of taste, its aesthete in chief. Guardiola means sophistication and style, and he has imbued all of that into the team he has built.Those were not the virtues, though, that allowed his team to escape Madrid unscathed, its place in a Champions League semifinal with Real Madrid secured, its chase for a domestic and European treble intact. City did not beat Atlético by overcoming its dark arts. It beat Atlético by borrowing them.Even City’s Pep Guardiola didn’t shy from the fight on Wednesday.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesSome of them, at least. Just like its host, Guardiola’s team, for once, did not seem especially interested in playing soccer, either. It played, instead, for time. Every throw-in seemed to take an age, and every free kick and every goal kick, too. No injury was shaken off; even the most minor bump and bruise warranted an extended period of treatment. Balls that had run out of play were knocked just a little farther down the line, out of the reach of Atlético’s players. No slight was too minor not to be met with indignation.That should not be read as a criticism of Manchester City; far from it. Often, it is so easy to be dazzled by the brilliance of Guardiola’s side that its character, its courage, is overlooked. His record in the Premier League, in particular, in recent years has been built as much on defensive parsimony as attacking threat. City does not wilt and it does not doubt; it keeps going, remorselessly, absolute in its conviction that it will be proved right in the end.As the Metropolitano — this sleek, modern stadium built by the success of Simeone — somehow morphed into the Vicente Calderón, Atlético’s crumbling, intimidating, nakedly hostile former home, what carried City through was not its magic but its mettle. That is as much part of Guardiola’s recipe as anything else.And nor, for that matter, should it be read as a criticism of Atlético. “What matters more than anything in soccer is winning,” Simeone said after the game, not long after the players had confronted each other in the tunnel once more. “It does not matter how you do it.”Even Guardiola conceded that Atlético had come close to winning, that it might have scored, might have won, if it had only possessed just a little more luck. “They had the actions to score,” he said. “We had to live this situation. We had to suffer. We were in big, big trouble.” On another night, in another world, he seemed to say, everything could have been very different.That Simeone’s team had been able to run City so close was not despite its brinkmanship, but because of it. As Atlético did what it does, in those final few minutes, as the sense of outrage outside the steep concrete banks of the Metropolitano started to build, so too did the noise inside it. The crowd responded to its team’s snapping and growling, ratcheting up the pressure just a little more, shifting things imperceptibly in the host’s favor. Atlético is not the way it is for fun. It is the way it is because it works.“They know how to do this better than any other team in the world,” Guardiola said. Nobody, anywhere, does not play soccer better than Atlético Madrid.Guardiola sounded impressed, in a way. He knows there are times when that is what matters, that is what counts. He knows that his team will, at times, need to be a little like Atlético Madrid if it is to return here and celebrate again in a few weeks’ time, if it is to climb the only peak it is yet to scale, to claim the Champions League. More

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      Manchester City Ties Liverpool, Defending Its Turf and Its Lead

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

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      For Liverpool and Manchester City, a Showdown With Consequences

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

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      Soccer’s Focus Needs to Be Product, Not Packaging

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      A simple rule change paved the way for the modern soccer we watch today. An obsession with Super Bowl-style changes won’t move it forward.Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could quite dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the estimable Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of soccer analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.The answer, as he found it, was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all of the other players combined. The best way to win in soccer, Jeandupeux had discovered, was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department, the part of soccer’s world governing body that looks after the actual soccer. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action. Jeandupeux had an idea of what that might be.His timing, it turned out, was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organization, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.A few months after that World Cup, Blatter had created what he called Task Force 2000, which is precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of identifying ways to make the game more appealing, more dynamic, more dramatic.Jeandupeux’s letter, passed to Platini and his fellow Task Force members, crystallized many of their thoughts. Now they not only had empirical proof that soccer had grown slow, cautious and dull, but a recommendation as to how to change it. Jeandupeux had suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a soccer cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEverything in modern soccer flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at soccer’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League — an entire century — is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of soccer itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux sat down and wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The soccer that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chairman of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris St.-Germain or chairman of BeIn Sports or chairman of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.They range from the rather vague — amounting essentially to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFTs” — to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes it is worth exploring the idea of an expanded European Super Cup, turning a semi-serious showpiece into a tournament in its own right, one that may be played outside Europe. He would consider a Final Four-style tournament for the Champions League. He would, reading between the lines, contemplate changing kickoff times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.Despite the very obvious self-interest of their source, despite the fact that not all of these ideas are his, and despite the circumstance — almost exactly a year since the sudden launch and swift death of the European Super League project — these ideas should not be rejected out of hand.They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, but nor are they entirely devoid of merit. Soccer would do well to remember that, at first, it was assumed that the backpass law would simply encourage goalkeepers to launch the ball at every given opportunity; nobody imagined that its ultimate consequence would be Éderson.Expanding the Super Cup is, on the face of it, a reasonable idea. It is possible that the benefits of staging the semifinals and final of the Champions League in a single location — the sense of occasion, the drama of a one-and-done knockout — would outweigh the undoubted complications in security, logistics and the loss of revenue and, crucially, atmosphere generated by semifinals on a club’s home turf.Albert Gea/ReutersEven the concept of teams’ being given a pass into the Champions League despite not qualifying domestically is not quite as absurd as has been presented: Though such a proposal would, doubtlessly, increase the inequality that remains the game’s greatest challenge, there is at least some logic in the idea that how you perform in the tournament itself should be rewarded.There is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, then, simply because they represent change. Change, as Jeandupeux would testify, can sometimes bring improvements, and in ways that are not immediately apparent. The problem, in fact, is the opposite; these ideas do not represent change enough.It was striking, for example, that Al-Khelaifi should cite the Super Bowl as an example of the sort of things soccer should be doing. Why, he asked, was the final of the Champions League not more of an event? Why was it not more of a show? Why was there not a litany of the world’s biggest musical acts lining up to play at the world’s biggest annual sporting fixture?These are all questions that soccer executives ask with alarming frequency. (The answer to that last one, for what it’s worth, is that the world’s biggest musical acts know full well that they would be jeered if they played the Champions League final, because all of the people in the stadium are there to see a soccer match, not a concert.)Patricia De Melo Moreira/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNobody, anywhere, is quite so obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run Europe’s soccer teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, or the reality that soccer is more popular by an order of magnitude worldwide than the N.F.L., and that it has achieved all of that despite not having a halftime show. It gives the impression that soccer’s leaders have startlingly little confidence in the sport in which they have invested.That is not the case, of course; the reasoning is a little more subtle. The game’s power brokers propose these things — fireworks, dance troupes, rebranded competitions, format changes and all the rest of it — because, while the changes that would have the most effect are far simpler, they are very much not in their interests.The way to make every game “an event,” as Al-Khelaifi put it, is not to invite Maroon 5. It is to increase the competitive balance between the two competing teams so that the result does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stages are not “compelling” is not because there is no Jean-Michel Jarre-style light show before kickoff; it is because it is a group stage, and so there is no genuine sense of jeopardy.Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of soccer — of sports — understands that: Memories only need to stretch as far back as last week, and the playoffs for the World Cup, to realize that drama is not generated by the staging of a game or even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.Al-Khelaifi, of course, is not going to propose any change that radical, any change that meaningful. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit P.S.G. or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues, even after the Super League debacle, to dominate UEFA’s thinking.Instead, he and his peers will continue to believe — and to insist — that soccer’s route to growth lies in improving the packaging, rather than the product. Like Jeandupeux, all those years ago, they very clearly sense in some way that things are just getting a little boring. The difference is that they are holding on to the ball, and they will do all they can to not give it back.Here’s What Else We Did This WeekKevin De Bruyne, center, and Manchester City broke through, eventually, Atlético Madrid’s defense.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night, it was very difficult to have any sympathy with the idea that the Champions League needs to change at all, other than perhaps by introducing some sort of rule that Karim Benzema’s presence should be compulsory in all matches.The previous evening, spent watching Manchester City try to break Atlético Madrid’s fearsome resistance, was not quite as entertaining. That is not because Atlético should not rely on grit and grizzle more than flash and flair, but because a cornerstone of any great defensive performance is some sort of attacking threat.And you may not have noticed, because FIFA has not been keen to publicize it, but it turns out we are not getting a biennial World Cup after all. Even the expanded Club World Cup seems to have faded from view somewhat. This happens a lot to Gianni Infantino’s big ideas, when you think about it.CorrespondenceA Qatar World Cup will turn off some viewers.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockIn good news for Alan Goldhammer, but bad news for both FIFA and the many and varied sports-washers of the world, we can now say with some certainty that he is far from alone.The audience for this newsletter is a self-selecting demographic, of course — one defined, let’s be clear, by its impeccable taste — and so cannot be treated as a broad sample. But it would appear that there are quite a few of you out there, like Alan, who do not intend to bless the Qatar World Cup with your attention.“I refuse to lend my eyes to an event which is designed by a nasty regime to bolster its image,” wrote Nathan Wajsman. “I also skipped the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing. It may not mean anything to the organizers, but it means something to me.Sjaak Blaauw has come to the same conclusion. “With 6,500 people having lost their lives, and many workers not having been paid what was their due, I cannot condone this,” he wrote.Some are a little more conflicted. “I am getting closer to Alan Goldhammer’s sentiment, but it is taking more time and thought for me,” wrote Rashmi Khare. “I feel more and more like I am being manipulated. If I participate, my eyeballs and my dollars will be used to justify the corruption that led to this tournament. If I do a full blackout, it’s just one less eyeball/dollar from billions.”And others still offered a different perspective. “Good on Mr. Goldhammer,” wrote Nick Adams, before acknowledging that rather than not watch, he would “put my mind to thinking how to make Qatar safe for all visitors, how I would voice a protest, and how I would do something to change the corrupt decision-making process” that led to the tournament’s being held there in the first place.There were many more submissions, all of them just as sincerely held and articulately expressed. Thank you to all of you who emailed, and please keep them coming. The correspondence on that subject has been rivaled only by the continued debate about deep dish “pizza,” including an assessment from Bart McKay that I enjoyed enormously. “Deep dish pizza,” he wrote, “is just casserole with better P.R.” More