Manchester City (Soccer Team)

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      Manchester City Beats PSG, Advancing to Champions League Final

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      With a win over Paris St.-Germain, City worked past some demons and headed to the Champions League final.MANCHESTER, England — In those last few minutes, even with the game sealed and a place in the final secure, Manchester City’s staff members and substitutes could not sit still. They pulsed with energy. They roared at every poor challenge. They demanded action from the referee for every transgression. They cheered every completed pass.As the clock ticked into injury time, they fretted and fidgeted when Paris St.-Germain won a free kick within sight of Éderson’s goal. They cheered when it sailed over. The voice of Mark Sertori, the club’s longstanding masseur, bellowed out across the empty Etihad Stadium. “No chances,” he shouted. There were no more than 30 seconds left, and P.S.G. needed to score three times.To the rational brain, there was nothing to worry about. Two goals from Riyad Mahrez had long since put the outcome beyond doubt. The distant prospect of a P.S.G. revival had evaporated entirely when Ángel Di María, its Argentine wing, had kicked out at Fernandinho and duly been sent off. City had been home and dry ever since.But the rational brain goes quiet when the stakes are quite so high. For all that City has achieved in the past 13 years, as it has been transformed from hardscrabble makeweights to the pre-eminent force in English soccer, soon to be winners of three of the past four Premier League titles, and five of the past 10, the Champions League has become something of an open sore.Like P.S.G., City was built, at considerable expense, to win the Champions League. Not in the sense that it is the game’s final frontier, a team’s greatest ambition. It is that for City — this iteration of City, anyway — this competition is the ultimate purpose.It is why Pep Guardiola, the standout coach of his generation, was hired; it is why the people who hired him — his former colleagues at Barcelona, Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano — were hired. It is why he has been granted the chance to gather a squad that meets every single one of his demands at a training facility built to enable him to work in absolute serenity.Soccer does not, of course, work according to a formula, no matter how much money and expertise go into its construction. They have learned that at City the hard way.The long slog of the Premier League has proved easy to master in comparison with the chimera of the Champions League. There is, as Guardiola said, “something in the stars” in this competition, and it is hard to disagree: He has spent most of the past 10 years in charge of either a powerhouse Bayern Munich team or a Manchester City side of the most exquisite brilliance, yet this will be his first appearance in the final of this tournament since 2011.Riyad Mahrez scored both goals for Manchester City on Tuesday. With his team already at an advantage coming into the match, Mahrez left no doubt which team would advance.Martin Rickett/Press Association, via Associated PressThe disappointments have been startling in their variety, compelling in their unpredictability. Under Guardiola, City has been caught cold by a youthful and unheralded Monaco, and then blown apart by a surging and hungry Liverpool. It has had its heart broken by Tottenham and its brain frazzled by Lyon.And now, after a decade of trying, it has shattered that ceiling. What this game means for soccer is a question that — for all that the fans of both City and P.S.G. will resent its being asked — the sport must continue to contemplate.This, after all, involved two teams backed by the untrammeled wealth of Gulf States competing for a place in soccer’s most glamorous, most exclusive club competition. it should not be controversial to suggest that the motives behind their current primacy are not uniquely sporting.This may have been the first time they have met on a stage quite this grand, but the simple economics at play — particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic — suggest it will not be the last. They have spent their money differently, P.S.G. on individuals and City on the broader squad, but they have spent it in sums that few, if any, of their rivals can match.Ángel Di María of Paris St.-Germain was sent off after kicking Fernandinho during an altercation on the sideline.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesBut while the geopolitics and the morality and the broader ramifications matter, they do not matter — not in the moment — to the players and the staff who have been tasked with carrying Manchester City to the place where it wants to be. That is not the story they are part of, not to them.Instead, theirs is a story of personal ambition and childhood dreams and professional satisfaction, of seeing decades of dedication rewarded not by a lucrative contract or a high-profile transfer but by the long-anticipated chance to reach what is, in almost every sense, the pinnacle of their careers.That is why, a few minutes before the end, Kevin De Bruyne trooped from the field, his face flushed and his body heaving, and slumped into a chair. He, almost alone, did not spend the final few minutes bellowing and barking and chivying and chiding: There was not a drop of energy left in his body.He had spent it all chasing down P.S.G.’s defenders as they tried to play their way out of Manchester City’s relentless, lupine press, and haring back to snuff out danger on the rare occasions that Neymar threatened to pick a way through. He seemed, at one point, to lose his cool just a little, reacting to P.S.G.’s provocations, unable to resist the temptation to meet fire with fire. He had been cautioned already; he may have been removed for his own benefit.Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola with Phil Foden.Phil Noble/ReutersWhen the final whistle blew, he walked gingerly to the field, his legs heavy. His teammates were embracing in front of him. Guardiola’s coaching staff had arranged themselves in a line to greet every single player as they came off the field. Rúben Dias was shirtless in the bitter cold of what is in theory spring in Manchester, howling in the face of whomever he could find.Manchester City has waited more than a decade for this: the culmination of a project, the realization of a plan. Guardiola has waited 10 years to get back to the final of the competition that he, for one, cherishes more than any other. His players, though, have waited far longer. They have waited their entire lives, in fact, for this one shot. And that, in that moment, is what it meant. More

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      Manchester City Battles Premier League Over Alleged Rule Breach

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      City, the Gulf-backed soccer team on the cusp of a fourth English Premier League title, is fighting an investigation over financial control rules.LONDON — Manchester City, the English soccer team that is on the cusp of winning the Premier League for the third time in four seasons, is involved in a secret legal battle with the league over whether it complied with financial rules as it surged to become one of the sport’s dominant forces.The Premier League has been tight lipped since confirming in 2019 that it was looking into City’s finances a few months after the German news weekly Der Spiegel, citing internal club information, said the club had disguised direct investment by its owner, Sheikh Mansour, as sponsorship income. City has always insisted it has not broken any regulations and denounced the stolen documents as “out-of-context materials” that were published as part of an “organized and clear attempt to damage the club’s reputation.”City has spent millions of dollars defending itself since the allegations first emerged. Its lawyers are fighting against the league’s arbitration process, arguing that the club will not get a fair hearing, according to documents. City and the league did not immediately reply to a request for comment.City is challenging the Premier League in Britain’s civil courts, where hearings have been held behind closed doors, and where publication of material related to the case has been kept confidential despite intense public interest in the case. It is not known what action the Premier League would take if it found City to have breached its rules. Penalties in its rule book include points deductions and fines.City, backed by the billionaire brother of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, one of the richest men in the world, waged a successful battle in 2020 when it won an appeal against a two-year ban from the Champions League after being found to have breached separate cost control rules by the European soccer governing body, UEFA. City won its case at the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration after convincing judges that a time limit had elapsed on the evidence against it. The Premier League’s rules do not have similar deadlines.City requires just one more victory to be sure of the English championship. It is also on a charge toward securing its first Champions League crown. It holds a 2-1 advantage over Paris St.-Germain, another Gulf-controlled club, before Tuesday night’s decisive second semifinal game at its own stadium.The case is taking place against the backdrop of major scrutiny of owners in English soccer. A protest by fans of City’s crosstown rival, Manchester United, led to its game against Liverpool being postponed on Sunday after the two clubs joined City and three other English teams in signing up to a planned breakaway European competition. The plans were abandoned within 48 hours after a torrent of criticism and the threat of government action.Still, City won plaudits after becoming the first of the rebel English clubs to announce it had backed away from the project.City’s battle against the Premier League bears the hallmarks of its approach in the UEFA case. Before finding salvation through a technicality in the rules that set a five-year time limit on the infractions eligible for punishment, the club tried to have the case thrown out at the CAS before UEFA had even ruled.City’s stance in the Premier League case is a second major recent assault on the league’s governance structures. The owner of Newcastle United started legal action last fall against the league after it failed to clear a sale to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.City’s relationship with UEFA has strengthened significantly since it successfully appealed the Champions League ban. UEFA resisted appealing the CAS judgment even after Der Spiegel published new revelations that appeared to cast doubt on some of the evidence a senior City official provided to the court.UEFA told The New York Times in a statement that it had sought legal opinion on the chance of appealing the CAS decision after Der Spiegel published new emails. “The clear view was that such an appeal would stand little chance of success in forcing CAS to rehear the case and on the slim chance it did, the chance of success at a second hearing was also limited. A similar view was also taken on the possible success of a prosecution under the UEFA disciplinary framework,” said UEFA.Its president, Aleksander Ceferin, praised City personally, issuing a statement minutes after the team last month became the first to withdraw from the proposed breakaway competition.While the superleague proposals continue to attract widespread criticism, those involved in the negotiations insist part of the rationale behind them was to cool rampant spending that has imperiled the futures of some of the elite clubs as they seek to keep up with teams backed by wealthy benefactors, particularly those controlled by the Gulf nation states.Documents reviewed by The Times showed each team would have had to submit detailed financial information to financial auditors, as well as agree to rules forbidding owners from artificially inflating teams’ balance sheets. Penalties for breaches included a suspension or ban from the competition, as well as millions of dollars in fines.City’s backers say existing rules have been designed to keep historically dominant clubs from facing competition from up-and-coming teams. Sheikh Mansour has plowed more than $1 billion into turning City into the dominant force in English soccer over much of the past decade. His largess has been spent on acquiring top executives, players and Pep Guardiola, the pre-eminent manager of his generation.City has also spent millions on rejuvenating the deprived Manchester neighborhood where it plays its home games, building new facilities and creating jobs in an area that had suffered from high unemployment. More

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      When the Goals Come Out of Nowhere

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      A Greek striker is one of the top scorers in Europe, and his play has caught the eye of big clubs. But are his goals a product of his talent, or his environment?Giorgos Giakoumakis had never scored goals. Not in great numbers, anyway. He had played 22 games, spread across three seasons, before he finally managed a single one for his first club, a team of modest ambitions and close horizons called Platanias, based on his home island, Crete.In the early stages of his career, he broke into double figures for a single campaign only once, mustering 11 goals in his final season at Platanias. It appeared, at the time, to be his breakthrough. That summer, he moved to A.E.K. Athens, one of the three powers that dominate the Greek capital.There, Giakoumakis would carve out his own little place in the club’s mythology. Midway through his debut season, he scored a 93rd-minute winner to settle a derby with Olympiacos, decisively swinging a finely poised title race in A.E.K.’s favor. It was his first league goal for the club. It would also prove to be the last.He spent much of the next two seasons out on loan, A.E.K. hoping either that he would find his form or that it might find a buyer. The signs were not promising. A spell back on Crete — this time with O.F.I. — brought two goals. A year in Poland, with Gornik Zabrze, produced only three.Giakoumakis seemed set for a career as a journeyman. There was nothing on his résumé that so much as hinted at what would happen next.This season, out of nowhere, Giakoumakis has been transformed into one of Europe’s most prolific forwards. He has scored 24 goals in 27 league games. He got three on his debut with his new club. He has scored four goals in a single game twice. He scored 11 — previously his career-best for an entire campaign — in January alone. That month, no player in Europe scored more.More impressive still, he has done it all while playing for VVV Venlo, a club struggling to avoid relegation at the foot of the Eredivisie, the Dutch top flight. It currently sits 17th out of 18 teams. Earlier this season, it managed to lose by 13-0 to Ajax. It has recorded only six wins all year, and has scored only 39 goals. Giakoumakis accounts for almost two-thirds of them. “Without him,” his teammate Christian Kum said, “things would have been much worse for us.”Giakoumakis after Venlo’s most notable result this season: a 13-0 defeat to Ajax in October.Olaf Kraak/EPA, via ShutterstockThat sort of form attracts attention. Giakoumakis’s career prospects have been, in the space of just a few months, utterly transformed. He is now a fully minted Greek international, having made his debut for his country in November. Clubs further up soccer’s food chain have suddenly taken an interest. Norwich City, recently promoted to the Premier League, has watched him. So, too, has Southampton.Many would caution them to treat his supernova burst with a degree of skepticism. This sort of thing happens, after all, with curious frequency in the Eredivisie. Dutch soccer has a long, proud and quite odd history of previously unheralded strikers suddenly hitting an almost impossibly rich vein of form.Sometimes — as in the case of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Luis Suárez or Klaas-Jan Huntelaar — it is a harbinger of greater things to come; they could score great gluts of goals in the Eredivisie because their talent, their dedication and their brilliance meant that they could score great gluts of goals anywhere.And sometimes — as in the case of Georgios Samaras, Vincent Janssen or, perhaps the most famous example, the Brazilian Afonso Alves — it is not. Sometimes, the volume of goals a striker scores in the Eredivisie is, if not quite an illusion, then certainly a trick of the light. Sometimes they do not go on to shine on a grander stage. Sometimes, their success says more about the shortcomings of Dutch soccer than it does about them.“You do wonder why it always happens here,” said Arnold Bruggink, formerly of PSV Eindhoven and now an analyst for ESPN. “It is because all the teams want to play in the Dutch way. Even among the smaller teams, there is a sense that you have to play well. Everybody wants to do the same, even if they don’t have the quality to do it.“It is a very young league, and it gets younger every year: it is not unusual here to have central defenders who are 19 or 20. A player who is 26 is a veteran. And young players make mistakes. If you look at the bottom teams in Spain or Germany, they will have conceded maybe 50 goals in 30 games. Here, it is often 60 or 70.”Vincent Janssen’s 27 goals at AZ Alkmaar earned him a move to Tottenham in 2016. He now plays for Monterrey in Mexico.Julio Cesar Aguilar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInstinctively, then, it feels as if Giakoumakis’s story is actually about Dutch soccer: Its moral is that because goals come fast and loose in the Eredivisie, their meaning is difficult to discern, a reminder that there is no correlation between how many goals a player scores in the Netherlands and how many they might score elsewhere.And yet there is a problem with that reading. Goals might be cheap in Holland, but not every Eredivisie team has a striker — every season — who scores them by the bucketload. The leading scorer at Ajax, as it canters to another championship this year, is Dusan Tadic, a midfielder. Something, then, must be different about Giakoumakis, just as something must have explained Alves or Janssen in years gone by.The answer, of course, lies in context. There is a degree of serendipity in how Giakoumakis found himself in Venlo. It is not the sort of club that can afford to be choosy. It plays in one of the smallest stadiums, and has one of the smallest budgets, in the Eredivisie. At Venlo, success is getting to fight relegation again next year.Stan Valckx, the man in charge of cobbling together its shoestring team, has no vast network of scouts. He cannot pay colossal transfer fees. He has to keep his eyes and his mind open, and he has to take risks. Most of all, he has no choice but to listen to every pitch from every agent for every player. “I always answer the phone,” he said.That is how he found Giakoumakis. Last March, he got yet another unsolicited call, from an agent suggesting he take a look at a 26-year-old Greek striker playing in Poland. Valckx did what he always does: a little cursory investigation. Giakoumakis’s numbers were not especially impressive. “If you just looked at the statistics, he probably would not have come to us,” he said.Giakoumakis has already made his debut for Greece.Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated PressFootage of his performances, though, was more promising. “We have a team that plays more often in its own half than the opponent’s,” Valckx said. “We need a striker with depth in his game, who can hold the ball up, who works hard.”Giakoumakis ticked those boxes. The club’s manager at the time, Hans de Koning, was encouraged by how Giakoumakis tended to celebrate his (rare) goals with his teammates, rather than taking the acclaim for himself. His salary was within Venlo’s reach. Valckx flew to Poland to watch him in the flesh, only to find that — because of attendance restrictions to combat the spread of coronavirus — he was not allowed into the stadium.Instead, he watched the game in a sports bar. Still, he liked what he saw. The next day, he met Giakoumakis in a hotel. The player had done his research. He knew a little about his prospective teammates. He could identify which system Venlo played. Valckx was convinced this was a risk worth taking.He does not pretend that he expected Giakoumakis to take Dutch soccer by storm. He did not think — he possibly did not even hope — that he was signing a player who might end the season as the Eredivisie’s top scorer, ahead of all the coruscating young talents at Ajax and PSV. He saw Giakoumakis as the sort of player who might “score a goal every now and again, as a bonus.”But it is not only in the Eredivisie where what goals — or a lack of them — signify is difficult to pin down. What has enabled Giakoumakis to shine at Venlo is that the way the team plays suits him. His sole job is to be in the box, to win the ball in the air, to take chances. “I have never seen a striker so focused on goals as him,” Kum said. He is not asked to do anything he is not good at.The same is surely true of all of those improbable names who went before him, Samaras and Janssen and Alves and all the rest. They, most likely, thrived because they found themselves in teams that accentuated their strengths and disguised their weaknesses.That they could never burn quite so brightly as they did in the Eredivisie does not mean they were bad players who got lucky. True, perhaps, they benefited from those callow and generous defenses that make goals a little easier to come by in the Netherlands. And true, maybe their golden year was an exception, rather than the rule.But it seems likely, too, that some fundamental truth was missed: that goals and the ability to score them are not innate traits, something that can be smoothly transplanted from one place to another with nothing lost in transit.That nothing at all on Giakoumakis’s résumé suggested he was capable of this season did not mean it was impossible; that his time at Venlo has been so fruitful does not mean he will automatically be able to do the same next year, whether he is in the Netherlands or England or elsewhere.Whether he is good or bad or indifferent is not fixed; what came before will not define what comes after. What they say about goals is, perhaps, true of all players: What matters most is being in the right place, at the right time.Strength in DepthManchester City’s 2-1 win in Paris moved it within reach of its first Champions League final.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesFor the second time in three years, the Premier League stands on the cusp of a clean sweep. In 2019, English teams took up all four slots in Europe’s major finals — Liverpool beating Tottenham to the Champions League, Chelsea overcoming Arsenal in the Europa League final — and, in 2021, it is 90 minutes away from repeating the trick.Manchester City and Chelsea, certainly, are well-placed to make the Champions League final. City is in the stronger position, thanks to Paris St.-Germain’s second-half collapse, but Chelsea has less to fear: It turned out that beating a Liverpool team that had also lost to Burnley and Brighton did not prove Real Madrid was ready to reclaim its European crown.Christian Pulisic is the first American to score in a Champions League semifinal.Bernat Armangue/Associated PressManchester United, meanwhile, demolished Roma, 6-2, to seal — or as good as seal — its return to the Europa League final. Arsenal retains a hope of completing the set: Mikel Arteta’s flawed and fragile team lost at Villarreal, 2-1, but he will have seen enough to believe redemption is possible next week in London.It is dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from relatively small sample sizes, but the direction of travel seems clear. The coronavirus pandemic has eviscerated the finances of clubs all over Europe, but the same financial advantages that made the Premier League such a force in 2019 have enabled its clubs to ride the storm better than most.There will always be exceptions, of course. Perhaps the Europa League will return to its rightful home in Seville next year. Maybe Bayern Munich or Barcelona will be able to mount a successful Champions League campaign in 2023. No rule will ever hold entirely true. But it feels distinctly like prominence is now the Premier League’s to lose.Management Shake-Up at Red Bull HQJesse Marsch, who won a league and cup double at Red Bull Salzburg in 2020, will take over the company’s Leipzig operation next season, the club said Thursday. He will replace Julian Nagelsmann, who is moving to Bayern Munich.Pool photo by Maxim ShemetovCorrespondence: Super League SpecialIt might only have lasted two days, but what a two days it was. All that plotting, all that intrigue, all those appearances by Florentino Pérez on late-night Spanish television — I hope they do another superleague soon. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that the very notion of it brought a deluge of correspondence, the best of which I’ve tried to answer below.Dave Moore: How much of the intense anger has to do with Brexit and class antagonism? Yes, people resented having tradition and history messed with, but isn’t part of the ongoing white hot outrage directed at the feeling that in a world in which there is a finite amount of money, people like these owners have a lot of it, and then they wanted even more?Quite a lot, Dave. I think this is the same feeling that we would have toward things like Big Tech or governmental corruption if it didn’t all seem so complex and distant. The idea of the Super League upset fans on a sporting level — promotion and relegation is almost sacred, it seems — but the perception of greed from the already staggeringly wealthy was too much to bear.Walid Neaz: If the rules were slightly different, might the plan have succeeded? For example, if the 12 teams didn’t have a permanent spot beyond the first season, but could then be subject to relegation if they had a bad year?There is definitely a format that could have made this idea more palatable — I have an idea myself that I might be willing to share once everyone has stopped shouting — but a lot of the failure was a public relations one. Nobody ever made a good case for change, even if the change in question was bad.At Real Madrid, the big question is: OK, now what?Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBill Kelsey: How deep into dire straits are Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus if they are clinging to this idea?Deep, in the case of the two Spanish teams. Juventus’s problem is more sporting: The club’s executives know it isn’t possible to keep up with the Premier League teams or P.S.G. This was the only way of equalizing the revenue.Stephen Gessner: People forget that the Premier League was formed in 1992 by a breakaway group of owners who needed more revenue, mostly from TV.True, but the Premier League was always attached to the rest of the Football League by promotion and relegation. In one sense, it was a rebranding, more than a breakaway.Paul Speelman: Would some sort of salary cap be worth looking at?Yes, in principle, but no, in practice. How do you implement that rule across Europe, let alone South America and Asia? And how do you get lots of competing clubs who don’t trust one another to sign up for it?Michael Fisher: Don’t you think players need to be more involved in decisions concerning the future of soccer?Absolutely. I wonder if there is a time, now, for FIFPro — the global players’ union — to be more central in these discussions. More parochially, it strikes me that there is a pressing need for a Premier League-specific union within the broader English union, the P.F.A.Some of the most public protests against the Super League came from players who would be locked out of it.Pool photo by Mike HewittKathleen Hayward: Why is nobody discussing the $130 million penalty clause, which Florentino Pérez is unlikely to forgive?Good question, though I suspect the answer is that nobody is quite sure at this point how enforceable it is. As I understand it, there were clauses in the contract that made pulling out possible in certain situations. Besides, officially Pérez hasn’t given up on it yet ….Matt Watts: I’m interested that there was no mention of your change of stance on the issue: that something like this was inevitable?That was my stance, Matt, and you’re quite right: I hadn’t factored in how vitriolic the opposition to it would be, or how potent the impact of that would prove. Now I’m of the view that this idea is dead in the water for at least 10 years. But that said, in a way, I was right: It was inevitable that they would try it, and they did. (Is that a stretch? It feels a stretch.) More

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      At Real Madrid, the Champions League Can Still Slip Away

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      A history of Champions League success is part of the fabric at Real Madrid. No club has won it more often. But rivals keep driving up the price.Real Madrid knows the route. The first stop will be at Almudena, the Spanish capital’s cathedral. Then it is on to Puerta del Sol, in the heart of the city, before a reception at the Palace of Communications, where the local council sits. The formalities over, it is out on to Plaza de Cibeles, the fountain-cum-roundabout where Real Madrid always celebrates its triumphs.The path is a well-worn one. “Something of a routine,” as Real Madrid’s captain, Sergio Ramos, put it in 2018. The club has done it 13 times before; a substantial proportion of this current squad has done it four times since 2014.It has done it so often that there are rules in place now. The players are no longer allowed to climb up the statue of Cybele, in a chariot drawn by lions, that stands at the center of the roundabout, after one of their over-exuberant forebears managed to break her arm. Instead, one will be allowed to place a scarf, delicately, around her neck. Real Madrid knows what it does, where it goes and how it behaves when it wins the Champions League.From left, Marcelo, Cybele and Sergio Ramos. All are regulars at Real Madrid celebrations.Javier Lizon/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is no equivalent among the three teams who might yet deny Real Madrid a 14th crown this year. Manchester City has made it to the semifinals for only the second time in its history. Paris St.-Germain is here for only the third time. Chelsea, Real Madrid’s opponent in the semifinals on Tuesday, has at least staged one victory parade, in 2012, but precedent is not quite the same as tradition. Chelsea would have to plot a map for another. Real Madrid can do the journey on autopilot.This, then, is Real Madrid’s stage. In one light, Coach Zinedine Zidane’s team should be the last choice of the four remaining contenders to win European club soccer’s biggest prize. Manchester City is free and clear at the summit of the Premier League, on the cusp of a third title in four years under the guiding hand of Pep Guardiola, the finest coach of his generation.P.S.G. is propelled by not only the most expensive player of all time, but by Kylian Mbappé, the 22-year-old standard-bearer for soccer’s next generation. Chelsea, revived under the German coach Thomas Tuchel, was reinforced by $250 million worth of talent last summer — in the middle of a pandemic — and now only concedes goals to teams managed by Sam Allardyce.Real Madrid, on the other hand, is ravaged by injury. The player signed to sprinkle it with stardust, Eden Hazard, has barely featured in the two years since he joined. It failed to make the quarterfinals of this competition in 2019 and 2020, and came within a whisker of elimination in the group stage this time around.Though it has not lost in any competition since January, its form has been stop and start. It followed a week in which it beat Barcelona and Liverpool with scoreless draws against Getafe and Real Betis. It has not even been able to do what Real Madrid does best: take advantage when its neighbor and rival, Atlético Madrid, loses its nerve.But this is precisely the point when Real’s history becomes an active force, rather than a scenic backdrop. Every single one of the Champions League trophies Real Madrid has acquired is on display in the club’s museum. Twice, in recent years, it has had to expand the cabinet that holds them. This is not a problem any other team has. No other team feels quite so at home in this competition as Real Madrid.It is strange, then, that only a week ago the club’s president, Florentino Pérez, was busy trying to destroy it. The Super League project that he had spent three years developing — and substantially more time conceiving — might have been designed to “save soccer,” as he put it, but it could have done nothing but diminish the Champions League, the very trophy that plays such a central role in his club’s self-identity.He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little skittish when that point was made to him on one of the ill-judged and, significantly, solitary television appearances he made to defend the Super League.Would Real Madrid’s first Super League victory — it was never questioned that Real Madrid would win the Super League, which is telling in itself — be the club’s first victory in that competition, or would it be its 14th European Cup? “It might be the 15th,” he answered. “The 14th might arrive this season.”Pérez had to be oblique, to swat the issue away. He cherishes winning the Champions League more than anyone else; in that trophy is, in his eyes, all the justification, all the answer, he ever needs. Even as he concocted the Super League, he would have known that to diminish the Champions League would, by proxy, serve to diminish Madrid’s history, and his own.Real Madrid President Florentino Pérez with the club’s Champions League trophy collection in 2016, before he had to expand the case yet again.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhy he was prepared to do that can, in part, be gleaned from Real Madrid’s balance sheet. The club is drowning in debt, behind on its salary bill — another six-monthly installment of player salaries is due on June 30 — and hamstrung by the costs of renovations to its stadium, the Bernabéu. There is a loan from Providence, an American hedge fund, to pay back. There are transfer fees outstanding. Real Madrid, put simply, needed the money.But Pérez’s rationale can be seen, too, in the identity of those teams hoping to beat Real Madrid to the Champions League trophy in Istanbul next month: Chelsea, underwritten by the private wealth of a Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich; Manchester City, turned into a contender by its state backers in Abu Dhabi; Paris St.-Germain, the team that bought Neymar, financed by Qatar.This is the new world order that Pérez has long feared, coming to pass. He knows that Real Madrid cannot compete for resources with these teams, no matter how often the Spanish government agrees to buy its training facility. It only has so many training facilities to sell, after all, and besides, in a world in which P.S.G. can pay $258 million for Neymar — a fee paid, to some extent, with the specific aim of distorting the transfer market — even that may not be enough.It is hard to have too much sympathy. “They have to control costs, not increase income,” Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, said last week. It was a sensible sentiment; if Real Madrid, like Barcelona, cannot pay the salaries or the transfer fees of Europe’s rising powers, then they should cut their cloth accordingly.Both clubs have frittered away hundreds of millions of euros on poor signings and inflated salaries; neither has the sort of coherent vision for their future that Manchester City, say, has carefully (and expensively) nurtured. Their crisis is in no small part of their own making. They could start again, trust in youth, run themselves more sustainably, and still enjoy the vast advantages conferred on them by their revenues.But that, at Real Madrid, is easier said than done. It is not a club that will accept second best. Pérez knows that the continued popularity of his presidency rests on his ability to deliver “a time of total glory,” as he said in the aftermath of the club’s 13th Champions League trophy, now three years past.It is a club, instead, that knows by heart the route of its own valedictory tour, and that expects to make the journey every year. For years, it has felt as if the Champions League has belonged to Real Madrid, and yet here it is, slipping away, that familiar path becoming more and more arduous every year. More

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      Europe's Super League Is Gone. What Now?

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      The plan hatched by Europe’s elite clubs was wrong on almost every level, but its architects got one thing right: Soccer’s economy, as it stands, does not work.Sign up for Rory Smith’s weekly newsletter on world soccer, delivered every Friday, at nytimes.com/rory.After all that, there is one thing we still do not know. We know what the dozen venture capitalists and industrialists and petrochemical princelings behind the Super League intended to do. We know what the future they had mapped out would have looked like. We know, or we can at least imagine, the damage they might have done.What we do not know, not really, is why.We have the platitudes, of course, the blandishments offered by Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid, in that brash appearance on a gaudy Spanish talk show: that this was the only way to save soccer, that the rising tide lifts all boats, that there was no other option.And we have the presumption, too, the Occam’s razor explanation: that deep down this was about nothing more than money, the relentless, insatiable, metastasizing pursuit of it, a cynical and grasping attempt to hoard as much of it as possible, made by those who already have far more than most, and far more than they need.But while one of those points is considerably more valid than the other, neither quite satisfactorily explains what united these 12 disparate club owners behind a single, slapdash scheme like the Super League. They have, after all, spent much of the last decade quarreling among themselves. Their motivations, priorities and concerns are all quite different. They are, in the cold light of day, not so much one another’s solutions as they are one another’s problems. So the question stands: Why?It is easiest, perhaps, to divide the 12 into three groups. In one, there are the English teams under American, or American-inflected, ownership: Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham. Their aim is not just to make more money, it is also to spend less of it. They want cost controls, salary caps, financial regulation. They want stable income, and restricted expenditures.Their issue is the presence, in European soccer, of the second group: the outlier teams, Manchester City and Chelsea, backed by owners who would favor the abolition of such limitations. Their principal interest is in using their private wealth to gain a competitive edge. They are not involved in soccer to make money. They care little for the bottom line. They are here to win popular acclaim, and, through it, obtain cultural and political legitimacy.And then there is the third group, comprising the six Spanish and Italian teams. Their problem is not only the bottomless wealth of Manchester City and Chelsea and a few others, but also the existence of the first group. The financial juggernaut that is the Premier League has inflated salaries around Europe. It has placed Real Madrid, Barcelona and the rest at a disadvantage in the transfer market. It has forced them to build up mountains of debt, leaving teams that believe themselves to be in soccer’s front rank facing a second-class future.Florentino Pérez and Real Madrid are in the middle of extensive renovations of the Bernabéu. The Super League was going to help pay for them.Emilio Naranjo/EPA, via ShutterstockClearly, they all decided — some with rather more consideration than others — that a superleague was their way out. The first group could write in various cost-control measures, denting the power of the second group, leveling their private playing field; in exchange, City and Chelsea would get the prestige that made their projects work. The third group, meanwhile, would no longer have to gaze longingly at the Premier League’s broadcasting deals.That it did not work is a blessing, of course. That it was scuttled within 48 hours of its launch — undone, almost immediately, by a startling combination of amateurish planning, botched communications and underestimated backlash — was greeted as a victory for the sport as a whole, a blow delivered by the masses to the aristocrats, a bloody nose for the forces of global capitalism.And, to some extent, that is precisely what it was. The threat of a superleague, in one form or another, has hung like a cloud over European soccer for decades. It has been wheeled out every few years, surfacing in every negotiation over how the money generated by the Champions League, in particular, should be divided.Now that has gone. It is possible that, by the end of this weekend, as either Manchester City or Tottenham celebrates winning the League Cup, as Bayern Munich inches ever closer to yet another Bundesliga title, as Inter Milan closes in on a Serie A crown, all of this will feel like a fever dream. On the surface, it will be behind us. The insurrection will have been defeated, condemned to the past. Everything will be back to normal.Teams left out of the Super League still operate in the same troubled soccer economy.Pool photo by Neil HallBut that is an illusion, because though the Super League never had a chance to play a game — it barely had time to build out a website — it may yet prove the catalyst to the salvation of soccer. It has, after all, stripped the elite of their leverage. They played their cards, and the whole thing became a bluff. Now, for the first time in years, power resides in the collective strength of the game’s lesser lights.They will need to use it. The Super League was wrong on almost every level, but though its architects never quite had the nerve to come out and say it, they did get one thing right. Soccer’s economy and ecosystem, as they stand, do not work.This was recognition of what ultimately explains how 12 teams, in those three distinct groups, could stand together under the same flag, albeit briefly, albeit without seeming to notice that it was adorned with a skull-and-crossbones.The status quo does not work for the American owners who need cost controls. It does not work for the grand old houses of continental Europe, who cannot compete with the Premier League’s riches. And infinitely more important, it does not work for almost everyone else.It does not work for the teams condemned to life as cannon fodder for Manchester City or Paris St.-Germain, or for the domestic competitions withering in the long shadows of the Premier League, La Liga and the Bundesliga, or for the famous names — Ajax and Benfica and Red Star Belgrade — reduced to bit-part roles in European tournaments, ever farther from a return to their glory days.Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA and the man who led the counterattack in what will come to be known as the Sunday-Tuesday War, knows that. The issue of competitive balance is the one that animated his rise to his current position. One of the many ironies of this whole sorry farrago is not only that those whom Ceferin fought know it, too, but that they have given him the perfect opportunity to do something about it.Aleksander Ceferin fought off one challenge this week. Others remain.Richard Juilliart/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose governing bodies that resisted the Super League make for unlikely heroes. UEFA has, after all, been no less complicit than the domestic leagues and national federations in selling out soccer to the highest bidder. It has, for decades, not only sat by and watched but also actively encouraged the influx of money into the game, never once questioning where it might all be heading.A charitable interpretation would be that all of them were in thrall to, or in fear of, the elite teams. Suddenly, though, there is no longer need to be afraid. Behind Ceferin there is a confederation of governments and executives and players and fans, all of whom have made plain their objection to soccer’s inexorable journey down this same path.Now there is the impetus and the appetite for change: not their change, the kind that would barricade the elite in their palaces, insulating them from the currents and the crisis outside their gates, but change that might allow more teams to benefit from the rewards the breakaway clubs sought to cordon off for themselves.What form that might take is open for discussion. The rolling back of the reforms to the Champions League, passed this week while soccer was engulfed by civil war? A rebalancing of the way money is shared in the Premier League, after years of gradual erosion of the egalitarian principle that stands as the competition’s bedrock? Increased solidarity payments from UEFA across the Continent?Whatever the next move is to be, it requires more than the commitment of all of those who stood against the Super League and the willingness of lawmakers to take action, rather than just to score cheap political points. It also needs fans to establish, among themselves, quite how far they are willing to go, exactly what they mean by change.Wanting your cold nights in Stoke is one thing. Becoming Stoke, a one-time Premier League club now languishing in the middle of the Championship’s table, is quite another.Matthew Childs/ReutersIn those first few hours after the Super League was announced, a narrative took hold, particularly in England. This was, it went, an attempt by American owners to remake soccer in their own image: They wanted a closed league, one more like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., one in which stability of place brought security of income.The parallel was imperfect, of course; it was, really, nothing more than a shorthand to explain and to demonize the structure of the proposed breakaway. Indeed, if anything, it is the suggestions for changes made in the aftermath of the Super League’s launch and swift collapse that might remake European soccer along more American lines.The prime difference between sports in the United States and soccer in Europe is dynasty. Dominant teams will, occasionally, surface in the major leagues of North America: The Golden State Warriors will win three championships in four seasons; the New England Patriots will sustain their success over nearly two decades.But as a rule, there are checks and balances in place — through player drafts and the presence of a salary cap — to ensure that today’s weak have at least a chance to become tomorrow’s strong.Soccer has no such mechanisms. It is, instead, driven by a desire not just for success now, but for success in perpetuity. It is a sport defined by dynasty. It is that which encourages not just teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid — owned, in theory, by members, and therefore run by presidents who must seek re-election — but also private entities, like Juventus and Manchester United, to spend recklessly in the pursuit of success.It is not possible, the executives of those teams know, to sit out a season. It is not possible to rebuild slowly and carefully toward some distant aim. Teams are expected to compete now, to contend now, to win now. If they do not, managers are fired and players are sold and new managers are hired and new players are bought.A season in which Bayern Munich does not win the Bundesliga is a disaster. Juventus, this summer, might fire a rookie coach because he has not won Serie A — not just in his first season at the club, but in his first season, full stop. Liverpool has been treated, at times, as a laughingstock because a lengthy injury list stopped it from winning a second Premier League title a year after claiming its first in 30 years.This is the sport’s dominant ethos: That, as Alex Ferguson used to put it, once a trophy is won, you forget about it and seek to win the next. But while that is part of soccer’s appeal — that one victory is never enough — it gives those that run its clubs a problem: There is always another triumph to plan, always another peak to conquer, always another player to buy. That is, ultimately, what fans have been conditioned to expect, and so that is what they demand.Pérez, instinctively, understands that. It is why, in his second television appearance of the week, he mentioned that, without a Super League, Real Madrid could not countenance signing players like Kylian Mbappé or Erling Haaland. The finances, in his eyes, simply do not work (though that has, in fact, never stopped him before).It was a transparent ploy, a form of emotional blackmail. Pérez knows that what matters most to Real Madrid fans is that the club should be making the sort of signings, building the sorts of teams, that can win the Champions League — not just this year, but next, as well. Give us what we want, he said, and we can give you what you want.But that approach is not sustainable in a model where wealth is spread more evenly. That does not make it bad; it does not even make it worse than what soccer has now. But that does make it different and, without changes in the way the sport is governed and in fan expectations, might also make it unsustainable.Would Real Madrid fans accept a few lean years as their club cut costs? Would the fans of any Super League club?Jose Breton/Associated PressIt would not be possible, of course, for the elite to be forced to relinquish more of their revenue in a game that was still open to investments of the sort that supercharged the rise of Chelsea and Manchester City. It would not hold: All that would happen is that Everton or Newcastle United or Harrogate Town, with the aid of new backers, would trample unencumbered across the landscape.More complex is that fans would have to redefine what success looks like. When Manchester United fans ask for the introduction of the admirable 50+1 rule — borrowed from German soccer — are they prepared to tolerate what follows? A watering-down of their own team’s chances of trophies?Will the Liverpool fans sincerely decrying their owners’ greed be happy to have a year or two of seventh-place finishes as the team rebuilds? Do the Chelsea fans on the streets want a world where a good decade means one league title? It is this that Pérez was driving at: He has to spend money because his fans demand it, so to meet that demand, he needs more money.The desire to share more of the lavish fruit of soccer’s growth is sincerely held, and it is morally sound. The idea of a dozen or more teams harboring genuine championship hopes at the start of every season — rather than the handful of clubs that do so now — sounds faintly idyllic, like a return to soccer’s roots.But it would come at a cost: It would mean that at the end of the campaign, your traditionally elite team would be less likely to be the one standing tall. The redistribution of wealth means the redistribution of success, too.Here, then, is another thing we do not know: Do those fans who stared down their owners this week for their greed and their ambition and their hubris want this to be the start of something new, or simply the safeguarding of the old? How much soccer can ever change will depend on the answer.That’s all for this week: There has, after all, only been one story in town. I’ve had plenty of communication on the Super League, but perhaps it is best gathered together next week. Any thoughts on the week that shook soccer should go to askrory@nytimes.com. Say what you like about the whole thing, but it’s been great for my Twitter interactions. And you’ll never guess the subject of this week’s Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend. More

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      The European Super League Explained

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      Whether you’re a lifelong fan or an outsider who doesn’t know your Manchesters from your Madrids, we’ve got answers to your pressing questions.A little more than a year after European soccer found a renewed sense of unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the sport now faces its greatest crisis in a generation.Late on Sunday night, 12 of the world’s biggest soccer clubs unveiled a plan to launch what they called the Super League, a closed competition in which they (and their invited guests) would compete against one another while claiming even more of soccer’s billions of dollars in revenue for themselves.The announcement cast doubt not only on the ongoing viability of the Champions League — the sport’s showpiece club competition — but also called into question the very future of the domestic leagues that have been soccer’s cornerstone for more than a century.All of a sudden, it is not clear where soccer is heading, or what it will look like when it gets there. Here, then, is what we know so far.First things first: What is a Super League?The concept has been around for decades: a Continental competition that incorporates all of the most famous names from the Europe’s domestic leagues every year into an event all their own. For a long time, it has effectively been something between an aspiration and a threat. Sunday night, though, was the first time anyone had given it a physical form.Who gets to play in it?So far, there are 12 founding members. The teams that have been the driving force behind the project — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — have kindly invited eight other clubs to join them: Barcelona and Atlético Madrid from Spain, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan from Italy, and the rest of the Premier League’s self-appointed Big Six: Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal.They expect to be joined soon by three more permanent members, though it is not clear yet why those teams have yet to disclose their involvement. Paris St.-Germain in France and the Portuguese giant F.C. Porto were seen as likely candidates, but both have distanced themselves from the project. The organizers are eager to have a team like Bayern Munich, the reigning European champion and one of the world’s biggest clubs, but on Monday, Borussia Dortmund’s chairman said that not only was his team out but also that Bayern agreed with his position.Whatever the final roster, those 15 founding teams will form the league’s bedrock. The full allotment of 20 clubs each season will be fleshed out by a rotating cast of five more teams, chosen through some sort of formula that the organizers haven’t gotten around to deciding just yet.That sounds a lot like the Champions League.It does, to be fair. But the roster for the Champions League is set each year based on clubs’ performance in their domestic leagues. The Super League will have permanent members who face no risk of missing out on either the matches or the profits.The ‘Super League’ AnnouncementTwelve leading European soccer clubs issued a statement on Sunday confirming their plans to form a breakaway league. Here’s what they said at the time.Read DocumentHow will it work?The 20 teams will be split into two divisions — 10 teams in each — and then play one another home-and-away. At the end of the regular season, the top four clubs in each division will progress to a knockout round that will be familiar to viewers of the Champions League. The difference is that those playoffs will be held over the course of four weeks at the end of the season.Will the Super League teams still play in their current domestic leagues?That is absolutely their plan. It may not be the leagues’ plan.Is this about money?Yes. According to their own estimates, each founding member stands to gain around $400 million merely to establish “a secure financial foundation,” four times more than Bayern Munich earned for winning the Champions League last season.But that is just the start, really: The clubs believe that selling the broadcast rights for the Super League, as well as the commercial income, will be worth billions. And it will all go to them, rather than being redistributed to smaller clubs and lesser leagues through European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. At the same time, the value of domestic leagues and their clubs will diminish drastically as they are effectively rendered also-rans every year.Two architects of the Super League: Liverpool’s John Henry and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockWon’t the Super League teams fight over all that money?The founding members have decreed that spending on transfer fees and wages will be capped at a certain percentage of revenue, which — theoretically at least — gives owners far more chance to restrict their spending at the same time as they are maximizing their income.Sounds good for those clubs. Their fans must be happy?Not so much, no. The reaction has been one of spittle-flecked rage at the betrayal of tradition. It does not help that, though several of the clubs have released statements insisting they will consult with fan groups as the project develops, nobody thought to do that ahead of time.It is hard, though, to be sure how universal the sense of outrage and betrayal is. There is a little evidence — though it is hardly overwhelming — of a demographic split in the reaction to the idea, and it may be that this is what the clubs are banking on: that older fans may be more wedded to tradition, and younger ones may be won over more easily. More

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      Europe's Super League Plan on Brink of Collapse

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      Chelsea and Manchester City are said to reverse course, imperiling a project that would have remade world soccer.Plans for a European soccer superleague appeared on the brink of collapse on Tuesday, a potentially spectacular implosion for a multibillion-dollar proposal that had prompted howls of outrage from nearly every corner of the sport since it was announced on Sunday.Chelsea, one of six English teams that had signed up as founding members of the new league, was preparing documentation to officially withdraw from the project, according to a person familiar with the club’s discussions. A spokesman for the club declined to comment.Manchester City, which leads the Premier League, was also close to pulling out of its agreement, according to people with knowledge of the situation. City’s about face came soon after its celebrated Spanish coach, Pep Guardiola, had slammed the plans for a closed competition, saying, “It is not a sport if it doesn’t matter if you lose.” A Manchester City spokeswoman, citing legal reasons, declined to comment on the club’s plans.The loss of two giant Premier League clubs would most likely be a death knell for the Super League, stripping the project of some of the competitive legitimacy that would have made it attractive to sponsors and broadcasters, and forcing the other clubs — especially the four other Premier League teams that had signed on — to rethink their participation.Other top clubs in Europe had already rejected the project. The French champions Paris St.-Germain, a deep-pocketed team that had been courted by the Super League, announced Tuesday that it would not take part. Its decision came a day after the German powerhouses Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund had gone public with their opposition. The perennial Dutch champion Ajax, a four-time winner of the Champions League, soon came out against the plan as well.The Super League, an alliance of a dozen of the world’s best, richest and most popular teams, would have redrawn soccer’s structures and economics, and brought about one of the largest redistributions of wealth in sports history by funneling billions of dollars to a handful of clubs that would be permanent members of the new elite competition. Some of the biggest brands in soccer — including Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — were to be part of the league.Instead, it appeared set to fall apart amid a growing wave of internal revolt, political threats, fan outrage and, most ominously, humbling U-turns by several of its founding teams.European soccer officials had erupted in fury over the plans over the weekend, seeing them as a direct challenge to the domestic leagues and continental competitions that have served as the backbone of European soccer for a century.That outrage soon spread. Players on the prospective Super League clubs came out publicly against the plan. Coaches did little to disguise their opposition. And politicians in England and France pledged to oppose the plan with official action.Hundreds of fans protesting the Super League marched on Chelsea’s stadium before its game with Brighton on Tuesday, a day after Liverpool fans had surrounded the team’s bus as it arrived for a Premier League game at Leeds United.Chelsea, like some of the other founding clubs, has been taken aback by the strength of opposition to the proposals from its fans and the wider British public. The strength of feeling led to the team’s change of heart, according to the person with knowledge of the club’s plans.The Guardian newspaper reported the team was forced to pull out after a revolt by players concerned they would not be able to participate for their national teams in global events like the World Cup or regional tournaments like this summer’s European Championship and the Copa América in South America.Those threats had come from UEFA, which oversees soccer in Europe, including the Champions League, and FIFA, the sport’s global governing body.FIFA had warned clubs in January that it would bar them and their players from international competitions if they pressed ahead with plans for a new league, and the organization’s president, Gianni Infantino, seemed to renew that threat — without repeating it — in an address to a European soccer congress on Tuesday in Switzerland.“If some elect to go their own way then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” Infantino said in a speech to European soccer leaders in Montreux, Switzerland. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out. You cannot be half in and half out. This has to be absolutely clear.” More

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      The Moral Case for Buying Erling Haaland

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      Manchester City or another wealthy club might need to sign Erling Haaland, if only to save soccer from financial calamity.As the danger bubbled to the surface, there was an audible intake of breath among Manchester City’s substitutes. Once it had passed, a few seconds later, as they exchanged glances — of admiration, of relief — came a little murmur of appreciation. In the silence of the stadium, you could hear the sounds of game recognizing game.The chance had come out of nothing, really. Mahmoud Dahoud, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, had worked himself a scintilla of space in the middle of the field and slipped a ball into the path of Erling Haaland.It had led to nothing, too. Haaland’s shot was saved by Éderson, the Manchester City goalkeeper. Dortmund would lose the game, thanks to a late goal from Phil Foden. A week later, after another defeat, it was out of the Champions League altogether. City would have its place in the semifinals.In that moment, though, it was not the outcome that mattered, but the process. Haaland is too tall to be that quick, and yet here was visible proof to the contrary, his sudden, brutal acceleration a storm gathering out of a clear blue sky. City defender Ruben Días has, for most of the season, been imperious and intimidating, and yet as he ran, Haaland shrugged him aside like a rag doll. It all left the impression that the Norwegian is less a promising young striker and more the physical manifestation of some ancient prophecy.The previous day, Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, had poured cold water on rumbling speculation that Haaland’s appearance at the Etihad Stadium was something of an audition. Manchester City, Guardiola said, did not have the money to meet Dortmund’s $180 million asking price for its crown jewel.Pep Guardiola already has more stars than starting spots.Wolfgang Rattay/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThough it required at least some willing suspension of disbelief, it would have suited City’s rivals to believe Guardiola. His record of incorporating archetypal strikers into his teams is, it is fair to say, mixed: Robert Lewandowski fit his Bayern Munich side perfectly, but neither Samuel Eto’o nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic quite suited the masterpiece he built at Barcelona.His attitude to Sergio Agüero, arguably City’s finest-ever player, has been a little uncertain over the last five years, too. It is perhaps relevant that Agüero, who turns 33 in June, will leave the Etihad when his contract expires this summer, after a decade of prolific service, despite initially expressing an interest in extending his stay as recently as the start of this season. Guardiola would have to tweak his approach, at least a little, to suit Haaland.But still: It would be entirely understandable for those teams tasked with keeping pace with City to prefer not to have to find out if he could make it work. In theory, at least, the combination of a team as good as City — currently on course for an unprecedented domestic and European quadruple — and a striker as devastating as Haaland would make the club close to unstoppable for years to come.It is not, though, quite that simple. There are countless reasons for City’s rivals and peers to hope the club does not sign Haaland, but there is one counterargument sufficiently compelling to render all of them moot. Manchester City might need to sign Erling Haaland to save soccer from financial calamity.As the season reaches its climax — down to the final four in the Champions League and Europa League, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Ajax and Sporting Lisbon all brushing their fingertips against championship trophies — it is possible to believe that soccer has successfully played through the pandemic. The ball, the show, the money from broadcast deals: It has all kept on rolling, stanching the losses and limiting the damage.In reality, it has only cleared the first hurdle; the economic impact of the pandemic has yet to bare its teeth. Clubs’ accounts across Europe are already littered with multimillion dollar losses. More than a year of empty stadiums has left teams large and small with a shortfall in revenues that they cannot simply, or quickly, make up.If a rich club meets Dortmund’s price for Erling Haaland, the money will trickle down through the soccer economy.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven for those lucky few cosseted by wealthy benefactors or cushioned by European prize money or covered by the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals, money is scarce; scarcer than it used to be, anyway. That much was evident in January, as transfer spending dropped precipitously. Teams are tightening their belts and hoping to get through.As much as it is easy to rail against soccer’s transfer market — the obscenity of the sums involved, the conspicuous consumption, the pervasive dogma that problems are solved by acquisition, rather than improvement, the unease at the idea of players reduced to assets to be traded by institutions — that is a problem, and potentially an existential one.Not for those, perhaps, at the top of the tree, the ones who might have to make do with the squads stuffed full of internationals already at their disposal for a year or two, but for everyone beneath them.The transfer market is, for all but a handful of teams, a crucial conduit for wealth: a “solidarity mechanism,” as Vincent Mannaert, the chief executive of Club Bruges, the Belgian champion, put it last year. It is how the money at the top flows down, from the Premier League and the super-clubs on through Europe’s minor leagues and out into the world.The fear stalking executives and owners is that the fallout from the pandemic will disrupt that mechanism. In France, where the losses from soccer’s hiatus a year ago have been compounded by the league’s decision to abandon last season and the collapse of a television deal, clubs would ordinarily sell players to balance their books.The problem, this time around, is that they are not sure who they will sell them to: Their usual buyers in Spain, Germany and Italy are all suffering, too. England, perhaps, remains a viable market, but greater supply than demand will serve to depress prices; so, too, the fact that French clubs are now perceived as distressed sellers.To some, that is just the start of it. Norman Capuozzo, one of the leading agents in South America, believes clubs at all levels will prioritize shedding wages. “Below the elite, there will be a lot of players released, a lot of free transfers, a lot of loans,” he said. The market, in other words, will be flooded to the point of saturation by castoffs and bargains.The only thing that can change all of that is an injection of cash: enough to crank the market mechanism back into gear, enough to enable teams not to cut players from their squads, enough to help teams spend a little, enough to keep the wheels turning and the money flowing, from the top on down.The millions spent by City and P.S.G. and Real Madrid eventually find their way to places like Wolfsburg and Ajax and Club Bruges, above.Johanna Geron/ReutersIt is here that Manchester City comes in: a club that felt confident enough in the middle of a pandemic to establish the biggest salary bill in English soccer history. There are alternatives, of course: Paris St.-Germain, maybe, which set out to inflate the transfer market beyond everyone else’s reach when it signed Neymar in 2017; or Chelsea, the modern game’s defining Gatsby, happy to spend $250 million last summer, only a few months after soccer had been on the brink of implosion; and Manchester United, a commercial juggernaut so powerful it emptied its stadium and posted a profit.None of that should be read as a criticism. It is merely as an assertion that these teams have been happy to shape the transfer market to further their own success, as is their inalienable right, overpaying on both fees and wages when it suited them, with the side effect/added benefit of driving up prices for everyone else.For once, though, there is cause even for those teams who believe themselves to have suffered from the rise of the superclubs to be thankful for their presence. The money that City — or P.S.G. or Chelsea or Manchester United — might give Dortmund for Haaland would, after all, travel a long way.Much of it would not rest at Dortmund. Perhaps some of it would trickle down through the Bundesliga: to Augsburg for Felix Uduokhai and Wolfsburg for Maxence Lacroix and Borussia Monchengladbach for Florian Neuhaus.From there, on it would go: from Wolfsburg and Mönchengladbach to teams in France, and from those French sides to Belgium, and from Belgium out to Scandinavia and Africa and Colombia, the transfer market suddenly liquid after a year of heavy, unmoving solidity, teams willing to pay fees and able to pay wages.It should not be especially controversial to suggest that the owners of Manchester City, P.S.G. and Chelsea are not involved with soccer exclusively because of their love of the game. They did not necessarily buy into the sport because of their desire to compete, either, or even just to make money (as is the case at Liverpool and Manchester United, for example).They all bought into soccer because of what soccer can do for them. Perhaps, then, this summer is a chance for payback, for them to do something for soccer. It should not, really, be too much to ask. All they have to do is what has come so easily to them in years past: spend money and sign players.The Final FourIt should not, perhaps, be much of a surprise that three of the teams with the capacity to buy Erling Haaland are also in the Champions League semifinals: City, Chelsea and P.S.G. were, after all, in an unusually strong position to ride out the financial impact of the pandemic, and to mitigate the sporting consequences.There will be time, in a couple of weeks, to assess the geopolitical consequences of the two semifinals — and whether, as the memes have had it, we are in the unusual position of seeing Real Madrid as the good guys — but, for now, let us focus on how they might play out on the field.Will Olivier Giroud, Christian Pulisic and Chelsea play a cautious and dour game against Real Madrid?Julio Munoz/EPA, via ShutterstockThe immediate reaction is to assume that one semifinal will be cautious and dour, and the other crackling with light. Chelsea has been miserly since Thomas Tuchel took over, after all; Real Madrid held off Liverpool at Anfield on Wednesday night with a performance of obdurate discipline. All of the brio and the verve will, presumably, come from the meeting of P.S.G. and Manchester City.That interpretation feels a little off, though. Real defended astutely against Liverpool — it had a commanding lead to protect — but it still gave up four or five gilt-edged, clear-cut chances; even with Sergio Ramos and Raphael Varane restored to the defense, relying on Chelsea’s finishing being as bad as Liverpool’s is a recipe for disaster. (Nobody’s finishing, at this point, is worse than Liverpool’s.)P.S.G., meanwhile, thrilled in attack against Bayern Munich, but might easily have conceded seven in the first leg alone. It remains a team of neon moments, less coherent and complete than Manchester City, but it will take encouragement from the fact that City’s form has dipped just a little in the last few weeks: not by much, but enough to give Neymar and Kylian Mbappé reason to believe.The Steph Curry MomentLong-range shots, like this one by Ronaldo, have fallen out of favor.Francisco Seco/Associated PressAt last, long-awaited vindication. I wrote in this column earlier this year that it felt as though the idea of shooting from range was dying out in soccer, dismissed by the sport’s data-dominated thinking as an outdated inefficiency. This week, a paper presented by researchers at the Belgian university KU Leuven to the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has borne that out.Long shots have, they found, decreased over the last six years (the first season considered, 2013-14, dovetails with the rise of data in soccer pretty neatly). There are now 2.2 fewer shots from range in any given game; the number of shots from inside the penalty area, by contrast, has increased.That is only part of the vindication, though. The academics did not conclude that this was a great leap forward, proof of the triumph of science over hope, but wondered if perhaps the trend had gone too far. “The potential payoff of not shooting is that an even better shot may arise down the line,” the paper said. Using artificial intelligence, though, they concluded that “there is no guarantee of this happening.”Instead, the lead researcher, Maaike van Roy, said that there were “specific zones” where teams should be shooting rather than recycling possession; having a go, to use the technical term, may be no more or less of a gamble than working the ball out wide and flinging (again, apologies for the jargon) a cross in.Fans have known this for generations. After all, it does not take Rinus Michels to work out that there is a value in shooting that extends beyond the likelihood of scoring from the effort itself: There may be a rebound, or you may win a corner, or the shot might hit a beach ball. You do not need to be Arrigo Sacchi to understand that the mere possibility that you might shoot forces defenders to break their lines to close you down.But this is not a defeat for analytics; it is not proof that the reliance on data has gone too far. The relationship between science and tradition does not need to be inherently antagonistic. Instead, it is best understood as a case of the advancements in analytics helping to refine the traditional reading of the game.Yes, sometimes it is worth shooting from range, but only from certain areas, in certain situations and at certain times. You and I might have ideas about when those circumstances might arise, but it is only through the use of data that we can be sure that they are right. Analytics is there to deepen our understanding of the game, not to counteract it.CorrespondenceAs was to be expected, the book recommendations have flooded in over the last few days. “The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro,” “The Glory Game,” “How Football Explains the World” and “Soccernomics” all received multiple recommendations, all of which I endorse.Several of you nominated Fever Pitch, too, which I’m sure is very good; its influence, certainly, makes it worth your time. I can’t personally vouch for it, though: I have, appallingly, never read it. Or seen the film. Generally, I try to avoid reliving unpleasant childhood memories, and the one that centers on Michael Thomas’s most noteworthy contribution to English soccer history is at the very top of that particular list.Roland Mascarenhas, meanwhile, asked if the reader who started this conversation — Alexander Da Silva — would be willing to consider expanding the book group beyond whichever circle of friends he was presumably thinking about inviting. If others wish to join, I’m happy to put it to Alexander and see if you meet his no doubt exacting criteria.(This is risky, isn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that ends with me, Alexander and Roland in front of a special committee of the Senate, answering questions about how we’re using people’s data and whether we have accidentally become a vector for the collapse of democracy. And all because Roland didn’t just buy my book like he should have done.)Rachel Block asked if last week’s column dispensed too easily with the idea that Chelsea might beat Real Madrid in a Champions League semifinal. Possibly, though not intentionally: it was merely an attempt to say that it’s hardly a stretch to believe that Real could knock Chelsea out. Either way, hopefully that has been addressed this week. More