Manchester United (Soccer Team)

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      What Do We Mean by Good Soccer?

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      The best games manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent, but those that clear that bar are rare. And that presents fans with a choice.MANCHESTER, England — Jesse Lingard was streaking away, the ball at his feet, on the right wing. Their legs weary and their hopes dwindling, Arsenal’s defenders heaved and hauled to keep up with him, as if they were running into a stiff wind. And on the other side of the field, Cristiano Ronaldo started to sprint.It was a true sprint, too, a track sprint, a coached sprint: starting in a low crouch, his back straightening as he reached full tilt, head held high, arms pumping. The clock had just ticked past 90 minutes, but there seemed to be a magnet drawing Ronaldo to Arsenal’s penalty area, some elemental force. He had scented a chance from 60 yards, and he just could not resist the aroma.Ronaldo arrived in the penalty area roughly at the same time as Lingard, and the ball, but the chance never came. He came to a sudden halt, stood for a moment, and then doubled over, gulping down the air. It was fitting, really, a breathless end to a breathless game, the sort of evening that leaves the fans as drained as the players.Manchester United had won, 3-2, but the richness was in the detail: Arsenal’s opening goal, scored by Emile Smith-Rowe as David de Gea, the United goalkeeper, lay prone on the goal line, nursing an injury he had sustained by running into his own player; the quick thrust and parry early in the second half, as United took the lead and then offered Arsenal a reprieve almost immediately; the confected, compulsory drama of the referee, Martin Atkinson, walking achingly slowly to the monitor to award the penalty kick that won the game.As entertainment, it was difficult to beat. It was compelling and enthralling and pulsating, a sort of Platonic ideal of a Premier League game, all of the characteristics that English soccer prides itself on, that it sells to the world at a premium, distilled into 90 minutes. It was, by that measure, a good game of soccer.But by another, it was not. Michael Carrick had been in charge of United that night. His successor, Ralf Rangnick, was sitting in the directors’ box. At the end of the game, Carrick told his players that he would not only be stepping down but leaving the club altogether, off in search of fulfillment elsewhere.Ralf Rangnick pondering the scale of the job he has accepted at United. Jon Super/Associated PressUnited played like a team that had internalized that uncertainty. It had the air of a side between managers, one only just beginning to emerge from a month of confidence-sapping crisis. There was no shortage of individual talent, but there was a lack of organization, an undeniable jaggedness to their play. Martin Odegaard appeared wholly unmarked to score Arsenal’s equalizer. Passes went astray. Attacks bubbled and then fizzled out. It was obvious United wanted to win. It was not always so obvious that it knew how.Arsenal might have known precisely who its manager was, but it was no better. Mikel Arteta has crafted a young, game team, but with that youth and that exuberance comes a naïveté. Having taken the lead, it ceded the initiative. It squandered possession. It folded as United attacked. It ran out of ideas. Its most experienced player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, was irrelevant throughout.As a technical exercise, then, the match was hardly conclusive proof of the Premier League’s old boast that it is the best domestic competition in the world. It was mainly striking as an illustration of how far both United and Arsenal have fallen: watching on, Rangnick must have seen all of that haphazard defending, uncertain pressing, that rushed passing and thought that perhaps the Premier League was not so different from the Bundesliga after all.For everyone else, it was difficult to watch either team without being struck by how far both have fallen, to wonder quite what Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger would have thought if you had told them that the roles of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira would one night be taken by Scott McTominay and Mohamed Elneny.Those two definitions of good are not always in tension — the best games, of course, manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent — but, in truth, those that clear that bar are rare beasts. And that presents us, as fans, with a choice, one that strikes at the heart of what it is about sports that makes us want to watch, what we want a sport to be.Mohamed Salah and Liverpool: when a team morphs into one long knee slide.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAnnibale Frossi, the former Inter Milan manager, once declared that the “perfect result to a game of football is 0-0,” because that represents “a balance between the attacks and defenses on the field.” There is truth in that, but it does not sound as if it would offer a particularly gripping spectacle. Entertainment lies, often, in the imperfections: the lapse in concentration that leads to an attack; the mistake that concedes an equalizer; Harry Maguire. Which good do we want?If that sounds an ephemeral, philosophical question, it is not, not at the moment. European soccer’s financial imbalance — between the Premier League and everyone else; between the dozen or so superclubs and their underlings; between the state-backed and the self-sufficient — has allowed a handful of teams to achieve a level of excellence that is more sustainable than ever before.There exists a group of clubs that can carry squads of quite impossible depth, slipping in one $70 million player after another; gobbling up any talent that emerges elsewhere; acquiring the best in sports science and data analysis and youth development.Those teams are capable of playing soccer that touches perfection: Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Liverpool and Chelsea. Entering Friday, the Premier League’s top three had goal differences of +23, +32 and +26. Only two other teams have positive goal differences, and one of those is Manchester United, which is currently on +1. P.S.G. is already 11 points clear at the top in France. Bayern is on course for a 10th straight German championship.Alphonso Davies and Bayern Munich strolled through the Champions League group stage, winning all six games and outscoring their opponents by 22-3.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a pleasure in watching all of them, of course, as there is a pleasure in watching any master at work. The intricacy of City’s movement, the ruthlessness of the attacks of Bayern and Liverpool, Chelsea’s precision-engineered craft. But that is unrelated to whether they produce games that are compelling to watch. Just as Manchester United and Arsenal did not have to be good to conjure a good game, the converse is true. Good teams do not necessarily lead to good entertainment.To Chelsea, Bayern and the rest, that is of no concern: The professional part of professional soccer means that their only duty is to win, as much and as well as possible. It can feel a little dirty, too, to discuss soccer in these terms, gathering it under that great umbrella that encompasses television and cinema and music and all the rest.But, ultimately, that is what soccer is supposed to be: entertainment. It is because it is entertaining that we keep watching. It is, in part, why fans are quicker to turn on coaches who prioritize the dour and the miserly rather than those who speak airily of their visions of the game. Excellence can take the breath away. But it is the flaws that keep us coming back for more.The Not-So-Lovable UnderdogThe Atlético Madrid-Porto Champions League match in one photograph.Luis Vieira/Associated PressIt has been hard not to admire Atlético Madrid for the last decade or so. Not only because of what Diego Simeone has achieved — the two league championships, the two Champions League finals — but the circumstances in which he has done it, and the approach he has taken.Atlético has emerged as a consistent power in La Liga and the Champions League on a fraction of the budget enjoyed by its rivals both in Spain and in Europe. It has done so not by copying the stylistic orthodoxy of the elite, but by subverting it. Where others have sought elegance and beauty, Atlético has prized courage and grit and a snarling, street-fighting determination.That has made it a useful corrective in the era of the smooth, glossy superclub: Atlético is a reminder that power and money are not always everything, that there is more than one path to be taken, that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder.Criticizing Atlético always risks sounding prudish. Simeone’s team embodies certain martial values, after all, a vision of soccer that many cherish. Competitive sports is not meant to be gentle. And yet, on its journey through the Champions League, it has felt a little like something at Atlético has curdled. It has become the underdog you want to lose.At Anfield, a few weeks ago, Simeone’s team spent a considerable portion of the game trying to incite Sadio Mané into doing something reckless. Against Porto, on Tuesday, its response to coming under concerted pressure was to spark two full-scale brawls.When Atlético had a player dismissed, it did not grit its teeth and dig in; it set about leveling the field. This time, it worked. The Porto substitute Wendell reacted to Atlético’s provocation. Brushed on the touch line, the Atlético striker Matheus Cunha fell to the ground theatrically, and the referee duly produced a red card.Atlético went on to win the game, and book its place in the last 16. Not long ago, the frenzied scenes of celebration would have been quite uplifting, another demonstration of Simeone’s team’s indomitability. This time, it was not quite so appealing.Atlético no longer seems a team that can indulge in soccer’s dark arts — and there is a place in all sports, for gamesmanship, and it is even possible to marvel at their master practitioners — but a team defined by them. In another time, those brawls might have looked like a deliberate tactic: It is Atlético, after all. But not this time. This time, it looked like a team losing control, letting its demons run.Coming Saturday: M.L.S. CupNew York City F.C. players this week at Providence Park in Portland, Ore., where they will face the host Portland Timbers on Saturday in Major League Soccer’s championship game. N.Y.C.F.C. is making its first appearance in the final. More on them in The Times this weekend.Troy Wayrynen/USA Today SportsWarning SignsThis is a slightly strange week, it has to be said, to issue some grand proclamation about the strength of the Premier League. After all, only one of its four representatives in the Champions League recorded a victory in the final round of group games.Manchester City lost at RB Leipzig. Manchester United drew at home to the Swiss champion, Young Boys. Most damaging, Chelsea conceded a late equalizer against Zenit St. Petersburg that meant it did not win its group, making its task significantly more difficult in the last 16 (unless it draws Lille, the weakest of its potential opponents, on Monday).But the nature of that sole victory felt instructive. Liverpool did not need to beat A.C. Milan. Jürgen Klopp’s team had already won its group with ease, allowing him to change his side considerably. By a conservative estimate, he omitted eight first-team players from the game. Milan, by contrast, had to win to have any chance at all of qualifying for the knockouts.And yet Liverpool, with a team far weaker than it would ever dream of sending into a Premier League game, still strolled to victory. In the context of the week, that means little. But take a step back and it fits a pattern: England has provided both teams for two of the last three Champions League finals. Only one English team — United last year — has failed to make it out of the group stage since Tottenham in 2016.Raheem Sterling’s Manchester City was one of three Premier League teams to win their Champions League group. All four English entries made the last 16.David Klein/ReutersThere is nothing new in one league’s emerging as the best on the planet. Italy held that status in the 1990s. Spain has been able to lay claim to it for stretches of the current century. Perhaps it is just England’s turn again, as it was between 2005 and 2010 (give or take a little blurring at the edges.)The difference this time is the size of the gap. The Premier League’s financial advantage is growing at an alarming rate: its television revenues are increasing at the same time that most of continental Europe’s clubs are trying to claw back money lost to the coronavirus pandemic.Liverpool’s second team can include a $45 million defender like Ibrahima Konaté, and a $50 million midfielder like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. A.C. Milan, on the other hand, had the chance to sign Bernardo Silva from Manchester City this summer but simply could not come close to his $8 million-a-year salary.The nature of the Champions League — the vagaries of the draw, the immediacy of the format, the outsize influence of injury in a knockout competition — means it cannot be guaranteed that a Premier League team will win it this season. But there are, now, only one or two continental sides that might realistically match the English contingent.The financial gulf is now so great that the trend should only grow stronger over the next few years. Of course, continental Europe’s clubs could spend their money more wisely, they could recruit better, and they could play smarter (Italian and Spanish teams, for one, need to adopt a higher tempo to compete). But the imbalance is such, now, that it is hard to see how it is corrected.CorrespondenceThere was, it turns out, a glaring inaccuracy in last week’s newsletter. This is unacceptable, of course, and I will be duly censured for it — though my attempts to secure myself the traditional soccer punishment, a weeklong suspension on full pay, have been unsuccessful — but I think you may understand: apparently, Juventus is not the only club in the world to have its own font.Bea Reiter points to the Kansas City Current, of the N.W.S.L., which boasts a hand-drawn effort to “reflect the power and movement of the brand.” Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew can make the same claim, Harmon Vredeveld informs us: It has a bespoke font, too, called NineSix, a nod to the year of the club’s founding. Every day, as they say, is a school day.Apologies are also owed to Ben Myers and Naomi Farley, who were equally offended that I forgot to add Weston McKennie in my list of young players Juventus might, if it were so minded, try to build a revitalized team around. He warranted a mention, certainly, though I fear he may yet prove a victim of the club’s short-termism.Weston McKennie thanks you for your letters.Peter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersLet’s end on a positive note, because Zach Hollander has the kernel of an excellent idea to share. “Don’t you think it would be beneficial to have the Ballon d’Or decided after summer tournaments, but before the next season starts? That way it would take into account one full season, and let players who have an incredible club season not be “forgotten” for having a slow start to the next season.”This is thoroughly sensible, but the solution is far easier: Leave the Ballon d’Or where it is, for reasons of history, but move the other individual award — the FIFA one, rather cumbersomely called The Best — to the end of the season. That way, each award has its own, defined place, rather than sharing space: one for the calendar year, one for the soccer year. More

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      How Much Does a Top Club's Manager Matter?

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      One set of researchers estimated a manager is responsible for only eight percent of a team’s results. But eight percent, when you think about it, is a lot.That first day, for an incoming manager at a new club, must be overwhelming. There is an entire squad of players to meet, to get to know, to win over. There is a staff, nervous of your intentions and fearful of what the future may hold, to convince and, hopefully, to command.There are training schedules to draw up and tactics to implement and a great pile of footage to watch, to try and work out where it went wrong — because it has, more often than not, gone wrong, and that is why you have a job — and how it might be put right. There are political currents to detect, alliances to forge, enmities to soothe. And there is no time, because there is a game looming on the horizon, a first impression to make.And yet, before all of that, there is one thing that seems to consume all new managers, young and old, fresh and wizened, hopeful and worldly-wise, one question that must be addressed before anything else can happen, one decision that will set the tone for your reign: Where do you stand, exactly, vis-à-vis ketchup?Managers seem to spend more time than might be expected establishing their precise policy on condiments. Within a few days of arriving at Aston Villa, Steven Gerrard had banned them. So, too, had Antonio Conte, when he joined Tottenham.Of course, as much as anything else, this is a power play. It is a way of establishing dominance over every aspect of the players’ lives, casting yourself as an authority figure, making plain that fitness is your absolute priority. (Most managers, when they take a new job, are struck by how terribly out-of-shape the squad of lean, musclebound elite athletes suddenly at their disposal seems to be.)Steven Gerrard banned condiments at Aston Villa. Enthusiasm is still approved.John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersThere is an alternative route, though: The absence of condiments can be diagnosed as a problem just as much as their presence. In cases where a manager is replacing an anti-ketchup extremist, some will consider reinstating them as an olive branch — well, a tapenade — to the squad, a way of signaling that the brutal, flavorless days of the previous regime are over, and that a more collaborative, trusting approach is at hand.The significance of all of this is, of course, overplayed. Journalists focus on minor details like whether a manager has banned ketchup because — to offer the kindest interpretation — it serves as an illustrative, immediately comprehensible shorthand for what sort of coach they intend to be, in a way that detailing exactly what sort of running drills they are doing does not.The news media’s apparently insatiable obsession with condiments does, though, hint at a greater truth, one that generally goes unspoken, one that flirts with breaking the fourth wall: that managers, as a rule, do not matter as much as we think they do. For the most part, they are tinkering around the edges, their decisions and their choices and their approaches largely irrelevant to how their tenures will play out, their power limited not to their own destiny but to what players can have with their main courses.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was given plenty of time to find a path forward at Manchester United. But last week, it ran out.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThat, certainly, is what almost every academic study on the influence of soccer managers has concluded. Some have entered popular discourse: the research in “Soccernomics” that estimated that a manager is responsible for only 8 percent of a team’s results; the work in “The Numbers Game” that placed the figure at around double that.Some have remained adrift in academia — one, in 2013, found that interim managers tended to have more direct impact on results than permanent ones — but reached the same broad conclusion.Only the true greats, people like Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, had a tangible, discernible impact. Everyone else was at the mercy of factors not entirely within their control: a club’s financial potency, the quality of player on the books, the strength of their opponents. It is only necessary to glance at Paris St.-Germain to know that, even with a high-caliber manager and a high-quality squad, sometimes the mix is not right; something has to spark, something between chemistry and alchemy, to make things work.That conclusion, though, is not quite as straightforward as it appears. Eight percent, to use the lowest available estimate, may not sound like a lot, but in the context of elite soccer, in particular, it is a huge and unwieldy variable.This is a sport, after all, of fine margins: a brief loss of concentration, a slight tactical distinction, a single decision made instinctively by a brilliant player can all decide a game. That the identity of a single staff member can be directly responsible for almost a tenth of the outcome is proof not of a manager’s irrelevance, but of the opposite.Manchester United has problems, but star power, talent and budget are not among them.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockManchester United — yes, them again — is a case in point. United has one of the most expensive, richly remunerated squads in soccer history. This is supposed to be the great corollary with performance: How much you pay your players is, in theory, the best gauge for where they will help you finish in the league.But, at the point that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was fired, United was marooned in seventh place in the Premier League. It had been humiliated, in quick succession, by Liverpool and Manchester City and Watford. There was little or no cohesion in defense, no identifiable plan in attack, no real sense that anyone knew what they were supposed to be doing at all.Not all of that is the manager’s fault, of course: United’s haphazard recruitment policy and its outdated, flawed structure were the primary culprits. But that the problems should have been so visible, so pronounced under Solskjaer, a coach so obviously out of his depth, serve as a potent reminder that, no matter how good your players, they are not enough on their own.They need to be organized effectively, too: not only to compete with City and Liverpool, two of the four best teams on the planet, but to survive against a straggler like Watford. In a sport of fine margins, after all, it does not take much to shift the balance, and to shift it drastically. A merely good manager may look like they do not have much of an impact. When one does not meet even that bar, the effect, as we have seen, is obvious, whatever they do with the ketchup.When the Reward Comes After the SeasonErling Haaland and Dortmund are out of the Champions League. He may be back in it before his old club is.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere are, at least, mitigating circumstances. Borussia Dortmund went into its game against Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League on Wednesday without a raft of first-choice players: no Mats Hummels, no Giovanni Reyna, no Raphael Guerreiro and, of course, no Erling Haaland. Marco Rose, the coach, had resources so diminished that he could not even fill his quota of substitutes.Still, that Dortmund’s involvement in the Champions League should be over not only before spring, but before December, should be regarded as something of a failure. Not least because — in Ajax, Sporting and Besiktas, the Turkish champion — Dortmund could hardly bemoan the cruel vicissitudes of a tough group-stage draw.That even that pool proved too much, though, hints that balance has been lost at Dortmund. For more than a decade, the club has been held up as a paradigm of how to thrive in soccer’s new world: Dortmund’s success has been built, essentially, on turning itself into a springboard for the world’s brightest young talents, a way-station on the road to greatness.That praise was not misplaced. Though there has been no Bundesliga title at Dortmund since 2012, the club has remained competitive — by and large — while regularly selling off or being divested of soccer’s next generation: Robert Lewandowski and Christian Pulisic and, most recently, Jadon Sancho.There is a sense, though, of ever-diminishing returns. While the stars keep forming — Haaland will go next summer, and probably Jude Bellingham the year after that — the results are dwindling.The suspicion is that Dortmund’s priorities have changed: that selling players is no longer a byproduct of composing a young team capable of competing, but that competing is now a happy, occasional consequence of composing a young team that can be sold. Not reaching the knockout rounds of the Champions League is a failure, of course. But that is not the trophy Dortmund was hoping to win this year. Its aim, instead, is to make sure that Haaland can be sold at a vast profit in the summer. That remains on course. Whether that is the right course, though, is a different matter.The Super League Will Come AgainIt is, in a way, the punishment they deserve. Six months ago, the architects of the European Super League had grand, hubristic visions of breaking free from the unwanted control of faceless, supranational bureaucracies. Now, their revolutionary idea only exists — so much as it exists at all — in the legalistic quagmire of the European Parliament.We will not dally on the details of this, because they are, by their very nature, intensely boring: This week, the European Union’s assembly passed a resolution opposing “breakaway leagues,” and pledging to uphold what it described as the “European model for sport.” The motion was nonbinding, so has no material consequence, but it represented yet another setback for the cabal of clubs who refuse to let the subject rest.Before the various uneasy allies who came together to suppress the revolt celebrate too loudly, though, it is worth considering the situation — as things stand — in the Champions League. All four English teams have made it safely through despite, in three cases, barely breaking a sweat, and in one, that of Manchester United, not being very good.Manchester City and its Premier League rivals are waltzing through the Champions League again.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat contrasts starkly with the reality of life at their traditional, continental counterweights. Juventus has made it through, but was humiliated by Chelsea. Both Atlético Madrid and Barcelona may miss the knockouts. Germany and Spain may have only one representative each in the last 16.The dynamics here are clear: England has emerged unscathed from the pandemic — as witnessed by the multibillion-dollar broadcast deal the Premier League signed with NBC last week — while most of Europe’s major leagues have not. A handful of teams, like Bayern Munich and Paris St.-Germain, might not have lost ground, but nor have they gained it. For most, though, the gap that was already opening between England and everyone else has suddenly become a chasm.There have already been two all-English Champions League finals in the last three years. The economic currents swirling around the game make it very likely there will be more, many more, in the near future.That is not, to be clear, healthy for soccer as a whole. It is obviously not healthy for Europe’s major powers. More and more may come to recognize that in seasons to come. The idea of a Super League — one excluding the English teams — may not remain tangled in the European Parliament for long.CorrespondenceLluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn excellent alternative viewpoint on last week’s newsletter from William Ireland, who from memory may, in fact, be a Bill.“The inability of Barcelona and Real Madrid to treat the Premier League as a feeder league is a problem for the Premier League, too,” he wrote. “The reality is that moving players before they grow stale and distracted has been great for the English teams. You wonder how much better their teams could be if some of their older players had been plucked away by the Liga duopoly. That problem is likely to get worse as teams keep acquiring more players and do not have any easy way to lose any from their current roster.”This is, I would agree, an issue that Premier League clubs are going to have to think about more and more. There is no longer a viable outlet for the players they would like to move on, either to cash in when their value is highest or their decline imminent, or because a newer, shinier trinket has captured their attention. Part of me wonders if it is a natural part of the cycle: the same phenomenon that has undermined Barcelona, say, but writ large across a league.George Gorecki, meanwhile, contests the idea that Africa should have more than five spots at a World Cup. “The African countries are among the least impressive, when it comes to their performances at the finals,” he wrote.“In every World Cup from 1990 to 2010, only one African team reached the knockout stage. In 2014, there were two, while in 2018, there were none. An African team has reached the quarterfinals only three times.” If anything, he suggested, this means “Africa should probably relinquish some of their places.”I would quibble with that. For one: Africa might send more teams to the knockout rounds if it had more teams in the tournament. Two out of five reaching the last 16 in 2014 is pretty good going, isn’t it?Second: African qualifying is substantially more arbitrary than it really ought to be. The final round of home-and-away playoffs, in particular, means there tends to be at least one, if not two, of the continent’s best sides left behind. I would agree, though, that Africa’s performances have not improved as it looked as if they might in the 1990s. But at least part of the responsibility for that, to me, is structural. More

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      Manchester United Picks Ralf Rangnick as Interim Manager

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      Rangnick, an architect of the Red Bull soccer empire, will take over as United’s manager while the club pursues a permanent replacement for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.Ralf Rangnick, the architect of the rise of RB Leipzig and the man widely regarded as the forebear of much of modern German soccer, has landed the most high-profile post of his career, albeit on a temporary basis: the 63-year-old Rangnick is expected to be named Manchester United manager, perhaps as soon as today.After three tumultuous, emotional years, United finally parted with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on Sunday, less than 24 hours after his team endured a humbling 4-1 defeat at Watford. That loss came only a few weeks after Solskjaer’s team, reinforced over the summer with the likes of Jadon Sancho and Cristiano Ronaldo, was humiliated in quick succession, at home, by both Liverpool and Manchester City.Michael Carrick, a member of Solskjaer’s coaching staff and like him a decorated player during a decade-long playing career at the club, took charge for United’s victory in the Champions League at Villarreal on Tuesday, but the team’s executives had made it clear that his appointment would be a brief one.In the aftermath of Solskjaer’s dismissal, United had determined that the best course of action was to appoint an experienced interim manager — to take the club through to the end of the season — while it considered a long-term replacement for Solskjaer. The club appeared to be working on the logic that there would be a fuller field of candidates for the permanent post available in the summer.While the likes of Ajax’s Erik ten Hag and Mauricio Pochettino are the most convincing contenders for the full-time role, United considered a variety of immediately available coaches for the caretaker position that has gone to Rangnick. Lucien Favre, formerly of Borussia Dortmund, and Rudi Garcia, a French champion with Lille, both were considered.It was Rangnick, though, who quickly emerged as the front-runner. He has spent much of the last decade establishing and fine-tuning the Red Bull network of clubs, taking posts at both Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig. He helped turn the former into regulars in the Champions League and the latter into one of the most consistent clubs in Germany.He came to prominence, though, by guiding Hoffenheim — a team with little or no history, based in the village of Sinsheim — from the lower reaches of German soccer into the Bundesliga, and by teaching and playing an intense, fast-paced style of soccer that formed the theoretical basis for the likes of Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel. To many, Rangnick is the godfather of the German pressing game that now permeates most top-level European soccer.He left the Red Bull group last summer, and established his own consultancy firm, together with his longtime friend and confidante Lars Kornetka. The company had taken on a handful of clients — including Lokomotiv Moscow — hoping to tap in to Rangnick’s experience and his club-building expertise.Those teams have accepted that Rangnick will place those projects on hold while he takes charge at United. His managerial role will last only until the end of the season. He will then move into a consultant’s role at United once a new manager is in place. More

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      Manchester United and the Perils of Living in the Past

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      Years of success under Alex Ferguson changed the way United viewed itself. But the glory days are gone, and the sooner the club admits that, the better.Old Trafford’s gangways were still packed with Liverpool fans, basking in the sight of their team’s sacking of the Theatre of Dreams last month, when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, representing himself, made the case for the defense.What he had just witnessed, he admitted, represented the “darkest day” of his three years in charge of Manchester United. But, he said, he would not — could not — countenance the idea of stepping down, of walking away. “We have come too far as a group and we are too close to give up now,” he said.Leaving Old Trafford that day, the idea that Solskjaer might emerge unscathed seemed fanciful. He had become something worse than an object of pity: He had become a punchline. That night, United’s executives met to discuss how to react. Somehow, they came to the same conclusion as the man they had appointed: Now was not the time to turn back. Solskjaer survived.There are several ways to explain Manchester United’s reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious, the mulish refusal of the self-styled biggest club in the world to recognize that its manager was way in over his head until it had not only been humiliated at home by Liverpool, but swatted aside with disdain by Manchester City and then humbled, plaintive and pathetic, by modest Watford.One explanation — the easiest one, the Occam’s razor one — is cool, uncaring cynicism: United’s hierarchy appointed Solskjaer, initially temporarily and then on a series of ever-extending permanent contracts, and demurred from taking a decision that would effectively be an admission of error, and the club’s owners did not mind who was in charge as long as the money kept rolling in.Another, far kinder version, would point to the curious sentimentality that seems to infect Manchester United: For an organization that behaves in almost every other sphere of its existence as a faceless corporate monolith, carving up and selling off its history to whoever will pay for a slice, United thinks with its heart, rather than its head, more often than might be expected.That sentimentality was there in the rush to award Solskjaer a permanent contract after the uplift of his early caretaker months in 2018 and 2019, and again when the club extended his deal last summer after finishing a distant second to Manchester City in the Premier League.Solskjaer is a former player — a club legend, as the fawning statement that announced his departure put it — and the romance that it might be him who restored the team to its place at the pinnacle seemed to be irresistible to those who employed him. Solskjaer was even permitted an exit interview, a chance to say goodbye on his own terms, with tears in his eyes.Perhaps that should be standard practice: Managers, even ones who have lost heavily at Watford, are human, and should be treated as such. Certainly, the affection for Solskjaer among United fans made the interview entirely understandable. It is not, though, the move that most hard-nosed, unapologetically ruthless businesses would make.But then United is not quite as hard-nosed as it might be, not all of the time. There will have been plenty within the club rubbing their hands with glee at the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return last summer: his vast Instagram following, his army of devotees, his huge commercial profile.It was not any of that, though, that persuaded Rio Ferdinand and Alex Ferguson and Patrice Evra to intercede when it looked as if Ronaldo might be about to join Manchester City. They helped make the case to Ed Woodward, the club’s central power broker, to intervene. Ronaldo’s talent played its part of course, as did the status he had acquired in all his years away, but so too did the allure of bringing home a prodigal son, the feeling that he was back where he belonged.United sent stars to Solskjaer’s rescue when what the club seemed to need was a strategy.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is not, of course, the “best in class” behavior that United would like to think is its hallmark. It did not take any great depth of knowledge, even in advance, to wonder if this little jaunt down memory lane might come at the cost of United’s balance, that Ronaldo might relegate the club’s future — Mason Greenwood and Jadon Sancho, in particular — to the shadows.It did not require any sort of tactical qualification to work out that Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba, as well as the rest of United’s glittering array of attacking talent, cannot be easily subsumed into a cogent system. No searing insight was required to see that the money might have been rather better spent on a defensive midfielder. After all, even Solskjaer knew that.But then that is the grand irony of the modern Manchester United, the one that sits at the heart of the third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for how the Solskjaer experiment lasted this long — through the loss to City and the collapse against Liverpool and the defeat in last season’s Europa League final and the 6-1 loss at home to Tottenham and the 4-0 mauling by Everton and all of the other bright, burning red flags.This is a club that, for 20 years, did nothing but win. There is a banner at Old Trafford that sets out just how central ultimate victory is to this club: images in silhouette of every trophy available to an English soccer team surrounding the slogan “We’ve Won It All.” Most of them were accrued between 1991 and 2013, when Ferguson turned Old Trafford into a monument to his own greatness.That is the standard that Manchester United’s current and future iterations must match; that is the measure by which they have failed, again and again, in the eight years since Ferguson stood on the field at Old Trafford, an emperor believing the sun would never set, and assured the fans that the good times would never end.Manchester United embraces glory days, even as they move further away every year.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAnd yet, for all that winning, there is precious little indication that anyone at Old Trafford understands quite how it happened. Solskjaer spoke often about restoring United’s traditions, but what they were was never made especially clear.In that, he joins a long and not especially proud list of Ferguson’s alumni to have tried to follow in their mentor’s footsteps and have failed. United had plenty of players during Ferguson’s tenure who looked cut out for management: the calm authority of Steve Bruce, the inspiring anger of Roy Keane, the fierce intelligence of Gary Neville, his brother Phil.None has lived up to the billing. Ferguson’s former assistants have fared a little better — Steve McClaren and Carlos Queiroz, in particular — but there is little evidence of a Ferguson school.It is not a unique phenomenon — Liverpool’s dynasty of the 1970s and ’80s did not produce a string of managerial titans, either — but it is, in the context of United’s failures since its totemic figure departed, noteworthy.In retirement, Ferguson has built a lucrative cottage industry in books on management and leadership. It is not to disparage his genius or his legacy to suggest that he did not pass those lessons on to those around him contemporaneously. Few of his former players absorbed them effectively, and, according to all available evidence, none of his theoretical superiors did. Ferguson does not seem to have left behind anyone at Old Trafford who truly understood the inner workings of his winning machine, who could reverse engineer his brilliance.Solskjaer in 2019, when United only saw sunshine ahead.Rui Vieira/Associated PressIt is easy to drift into meaningless jargon when listing all of the things required for success in modern soccer: a clear vision, a defined philosophy, a coherent structure. At times, their importance is overblown; Real Madrid won three Champions League titles in a row because it had the best players, after all. But whether they come by accident or design, most elite teams possess them. Manchester United does not.Perhaps that is why the club’s executives could believe Solskjaer when he said that, in the face of all that had happened against Liverpool, the club was “too close to give up now.” It was not clear what United was supposed to be close to, a few minutes after the yawning chasm between Solskjaer’s team and its greatest rival had been laid brutally and surgically bare.But how were the people charged with deciding whether he kept his job or not to know if he was right? They know that Manchester United ought to be great, because it was great under Ferguson, but they do not know how Ferguson made that greatness happen, so they have no way of measuring the club’s current proximity to it.Instead, they fell back on the solitary lesson that the club does seem to have learned from Ferguson: that success lies in the gift of a single great individual, and that all it needs to do to be restored to its perch is to find that person. They hoped, with all of their hearts, that might be Solskjaer. It was not. And so now they will set out on their search again, hoping to get close once more, even as they drift further and further away. More

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      Manchester United Fires Solskjaer After a Loss Too Far

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      Lopsided defeats against Liverpool and Manchester City had the one-time fan favorite teetering. A humbling loss at lowly Watford finished him off.Manchester United had not done it after a humiliation by Liverpool. And the club’s executives had managed to tolerate the sight of Manchester City’s cruising to victory at Old Trafford while barely breaking a sweat. After each defeat, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the manager who had overseen both calamities, somehow remained in his post.He could not, though, survive a third. Solskjaer had promised, two weeks on since that defeat against Manchester City, that his team would react, that it would use the embarrassment as fuel for the rest of the season. Instead, his squad, one of the most expensively assembled in soccer’s long and lavish history, went to Watford — struggling at the foot of the Premier League, the sort of team United used to swat aside, unthinking — and contrived to lose on Saturday, 4-1.That was the end. A board meeting was called. A decision was made. Solskjaer, a favorite son finally out of rope, was out.Manchester United can confirm that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has left his role as Manager.Thank you for everything, Ole ❤️#MUFC— Manchester United (@ManUtd) November 21, 2021
      “Ole will always be a legend at Manchester United and it is with regret that we have reached this difficult decision,” the club said on Sunday in a statement that seemed to take pains to avoid saying Solskjaer had been fired. “While the past few weeks have been disappointing, they should not obscure all the work he has done over the past three years to rebuild the foundations for long-term success.”The decision to remove him, though, did little to resolve the uncertainty around United’s future. United said Michael Carrick, Solskjaer’s assistant and another former United player, would take over on an interim basis “while the club looks to appoint an interim manager to the end of the season.” That decision — naming a placeholder for a to-be-announced interim manager — raised new questions about the direction of the club, the most decorated team in English soccer but one that has not won the league since 2013.Saturday’s defeat had seemed to spark a sudden shift in the players’ attitudes. United’s squad had, for the most part, remained staunchly behind Solskjaer: He is, and has been, well-liked by his charges. After the loss at Watford, though, United’s long-serving goalkeeper David De Gea acknowledged that it appeared his team did not “know how to defend.” He bemoaned his colleagues’ tendency to give up a host of “easy chances, easy goals.”For the first time, that view appeared to be shared by United’s hierarchy, too. Solskjaer’s managers convened a meeting on Saturday evening to discuss the best course of action. The conclave’s very existence was message enough: From that point on, Solskjaer’s departure was a matter of when, rather than if.He could not have been surprised. Solskjaer returned to Old Trafford almost exactly three years ago, answering his former team’s distress signal after the firing of José Mourinho. His reign has been variable in the extreme: mercurial, in a kind light, and violently erratic, in a harsher one.He restored morale to a team heavily exposed to late-stage Mourinho. He masterminded several surging, emotional runs of good form, and he put together a record-breaking streak on the road. He sent out a team that eliminated Paris St.-Germain from the Champions League. He reached a Europa League final. He finished (a distant) second to Manchester City in the Premier League.But he also failed to harness all of the richly talented players at his disposal into something approaching a coherent unit. He lost home games to the lesser lights of the Premier League at an alarming clip. He lost that Europa League final. He did not win a trophy. After the 5-0 defeat to Liverpool last month, he was subjected not just to anger and pity but also to ridicule. He became, to his team’s rivals, a laughingstock.Particularly in the early days of his tenure, Solskjaer made a habit of evoking Manchester United’s glorious past, the history in which he had played such a stirring role. He would joke about the club’s tendency to score late goals or to mount comebacks or to make things dramatic. The leitmotif might have chafed after a while, but Solskjaer was nothing if not sincere.He cherished United’s history. He felt, keenly, that it was his job to make sure that this iteration of the team lived up to the standards set by its predecessors. He can have few complaints, then, that his time in charge has come to an end after a month in which it has become abundantly, painfully clear quite how far from that level it has fallen.In a way, his departure is vindication of his belief in the importance of United’s history. To tolerate three humiliations, Liverpool and Manchester City and Watford, would have been to betray how Manchester United sees itself; how Solskjaer sees it. To be true to what the club is, United had no choice but to part ways with the man who saw it as his job to maintain that standard. More

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      From Beckham to Ronaldo: When the Solution Is the Problem

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      Reshaping a team to suit a single player comes with a heavy cost: The thrills fade, and the problems remain.Not once, in two decades, had David Beckham heard the moment. He had witnessed it at the time, of course. More than that, in fact: He had summoned it and created it and lived it. He had, presumably, watched the moment more than once in the intervening years, too. But it was not until a couple weeks ago that he sat down and listened to it.The moment he did was — obviously — captured for posterity, a social media post as meta as they come: a man recording his own reaction to a recording of himself.As Beckham listens, he has a look of fierce concentration on his face, mixed with just a little genuine concern, as if he really does not know how it all ends. The audio plays in the background, an echo of his past: the last couple minutes of the BBC radio commentary of England’s meeting with Greece on the road to the 2002 World Cup.David Beckham listens to the commentary from his iconic England goal vs. Greece for the first time.His reaction says it all 🤩 pic.twitter.com/TYu7lRNWjJ— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) October 6, 2021
      Twenty years later, the game ranks among England’s most iconic. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team, the still-gleaming golden generation, needs a point from its final match, at Old Trafford, to qualify. But — drama! — Greece takes a first-half lead. Teddy Sheringham, by then a veteran, ties the score in the second half, only for the Greeks to retake the lead. The clock ticks. The crowd frets.And then, more than two minutes into injury time, England wins a free kick. The ball sits in that liminal zone: just close enough to goal for a shot to be worthwhile, but too far out for it to be the obvious play. Beckham stands over it, his head shaven and his shorts billowing.He glances up, and then back down at the ball, only one thing on his mind. Pulses raise. He rushes toward it, his arm acting as a counterweight as he whips his right foot around the ball. It arcs and streams toward the corner of the goal. Antonios Nikopolidis, the Greece goalkeeper, flies hopelessly toward it. Old Trafford inhales, and erupts.David Beckham against Greece in 2001.Darren Staples/ReutersIn the popular imagination, that game represents Beckham’s finest moment in an England jersey, the ultimate atonement for his sins three years earlier, when he was vilified after his country’s early exit from the World Cup in France. It was not just the last-minute goal, salvation at the death, but the performance that preceded it. Beckham was, nominally, playing on the right wing but he was not hidebound by such simple things as formations or instructions.Instead, he was everywhere: breaking up play, instigating attacks, setting the tempo, dictating the rhythm. He played as if he was trying to live up to some Platonic ideal of an English captain: refusing to be cowed, unwilling to countenance a lost cause, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Blitz Spirit distilled into a diamond ear-stud and a pair of Predators.Scott Murray, the author and journalist, once suggested that the most significant player in the history of English soccer was a fictional one: Roy Race, the blue-eyed, blond-haired star of a series of long-running comic books.Each of his adventures followed a similar trajectory: Race’s team, Melchester Rovers, would be struggling in a game — because of malevolent opponents or a helicopter crash or terrorists or whatever — until Race, the unassuming but impossibly gifted hero, produced some devastating run or some booming shot to deliver victory, at the last, from the maw of defeat.Murray’s thesis was that Race imprinted on young readers’ minds the idea that soccer was, at heart, an individual sport, its outcome decided not by system or style or even collective competence but by individual will. The sport was, in effect, an embodiment of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history: what happened was not subject to a miasma of colliding forces, but shaped by the mind and body of single, outstanding individuals.Race’s legacy, then, means England has always had a particular weakness for players who seem to grab games by the scruff of the neck, to bend events to their liking: Bryan Robson, Manchester United’s Captain Marvel of the 1980s, or Steven Gerrard, Liverpool’s Captain Fantastic 20 years later.Steve Gerrard in Liverpool: countless memories, multiple murals, no Premier League titles.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Gerrard, in particular, shone brightest when folded into a system that accentuated his abilities is never really mentioned. Nor is the fact that what may have been the lowest moment of Gerrard’s career — Liverpool’s defeat by Chelsea in 2014, effectively costing the team, and its icon, a Premier League title — was a direct result of his belief in heroes.Gerrard, that day, offered a glimpse of what happens when Roy Race exists in flesh and blood, rather than on the page: an endless round of hopeful, hopeless shots, each one more desperate than the last. Liverpool, so brutally effective that season, was suddenly blunted by its own captain’s conviction that salvation was a one-man job.Beckham’s performance against Greece stands in contrast to that, an example of the potency of the Raceian approach. His decisive intervention at the last moment, that picture-postcard free kick, seemed plucked straight out of the Melchester back catalog. Here was England’s soccer history being shaped, live on television, by a Great Man.There is, though, an alternative reading of that game, one that at least one elite manager privately endorses. Beckham’s positional indiscipline fundamentally undermined England’s balance. By abdicating his specific role, Beckham undermined his own team. He played well that day, but as a function of that, the rest of the side did not — and could not.It is a hypothetical, of course, but it is entirely possible that England might not have needed Beckham to score a last-minute free kick to rescue a point if he had not felt so compelled to be the captain, to be the hero. He may, in fact, have simply delivered England from a problem of his own making.That example is worth contemplating when assessing Beckham’s immediate — and current — successor as Manchester United’s No. 7.That Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the greatest players ever is not in question. That he has, since returning to England, scored a raft of crucial goals for Manchester United is indisputable. He scored the late goal that beat Villarreal in a Champions League group stage match. He scored the late goal that beat Atalanta in another one. Just this week, he repeated the trick against the latter, his 90th-minute strike salvaging a point for United in Bergamo, Italy.Ronaldo has, then, been cast as the solution to United’s problems, a plaster that covers his team’s many flaws. And that interpretation is, by pretty much any measure, correct.But it does not necessarily contradict the idea that Ronaldo’s presence diminishes other aspects of United’s play as the side heads into Saturday’s Manchester derby. As a former teammate at Juventus, Giorgio Chiellini, has said, when you have Ronaldo on your team it is impossible “not to play to him.”Cristiano Ronaldo keeps scoring goals. But is that all Manchester United needs?Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat means reshaping the attack to suit Ronaldo’s needs. It means not being able to press from the front, which means not being able to play a high defensive line, which means allowing your opponent more space in which to play and, most likely, more chances to score.United might not need to score quite so many late goals if it could play another system effectively. It might be the case that Ronaldo is solving problems that are, to some extent, a consequence of his presence, or at least the fact that his coach, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, has not yet hit upon a system that masks his flaws while highlighting his strengths.It is, of course, a measure of Ronaldo’s talent that he can still deliver his little miracles so reliably, just as it was a testament to Beckham’s brilliance that his free kick swept beyond Nikopolidis, and carried England to the World Cup. There was a wry smile as Beckham heard the last of the commentary, 20 years on, just the hint of a twinkle in his eye.What was not mentioned was what happened next: England made it to the quarterfinals, only to be beaten by a Brazil team stocked by impossibly talented individuals — Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and the rest — but coached by Luiz Felipe Scolari, the ultimate pragmatist, a manager who always put the system first. Only in comic books are games won by individuals. In real life, sometimes the solution and the problem are one and the same.The Only Place to BeAntonio Conte delivered just what Tottenham wanted in his debut: a win.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesFor two years, maybe a little more, Tottenham Hotspur has made nothing but poor choices. Firing Mauricio Pochettino, the coach who had not only established the club as a regular presence in the Champions League but who had taken a team constructed at a fraction of the cost of some of Europe’s heavy-hitters all the way to the final, was a poor choice.Still, every club makes mistakes. A smart replacement might have at least mitigated the damage. Instead, Tottenham appointed José Mourinho, that recidivist fire-starter, compounding the error.Firing Mourinho, back in the spring, could have been the point at which Spurs restored course, throwing a veil over a failed experiment and shifting back into the light. Except that the club dispensed with him in the week of a cup final — one that it lost — without the faintest idea of who might replace him.In the end, Spurs appointed Nuno Espírito Santo. He was, by most estimates, the sixth choice for the job, and he lasted only a little more than three months. This week, Spurs replaced him with Antonio Conte, a serial winner of championships with Juventus, Chelsea and Inter Milan, and without question the finest out-of-work coach in the world.There is something slightly off-kilter about this, as if it runs vaguely against some sort of natural law. Tottenham has done almost nothing right for two years. It has fallen at a rate that should not, really, be possible in a game as stratified as elite soccer, going from a Champions League final to the Europa Conference League — like the Europa League, but without the veneer of purpose — and the no-man’s land of the Premier League’s midtable. And yet, in Conte, Tottenham has not a punishment but a reward. It has failed so much it gets to win.And yet the appointment, in a sense, was inevitable. Spurs might not, on the surface, look extremely appealing to a coach of Conte’s caliber, but consider the alternatives. The jobs at Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool are taken. Manchester United remains stubbornly wedded to being coached by a DVD of the 1999 Champions League final. Barcelona and Real Madrid have no money.Below them, there are a host of other clubs — Sevilla, Borussia Dortmund, Marseille and all the rest — who have either history or ambition or both, but none of them have the resources to match the team in ninth place in the Premier League. Tottenham, simply by virtue of being roughly the sixth-biggest team in England, is the most appealing proposition available to one of the finest managers on the planet: not because the club has done anything to deserve that status, but simply because of where it plays, and who it plays against.Red FlagThe Dutch referee Danny Makkelie sent a message with a red card on Wednesday.Dylan Martinez/ReutersThere was a nonchalance to Felipe that was hard, deep down, not to admire. His Atlético Madrid team was by 2-0 down at Anfield, with 10 minutes or so left until halftime. Sadio Mané was midway inside Liverpool’s half, the ball at his feet, starting to break forward with no little menace.Felipe could have sprinted to keep up with him. He could have drawn deep, heavy breaths and done all he could to stay on Mané’s heels, or at least made sure he was back in time to help out as Liverpool’s attack completed its crescendo. Or he could simply, without giving the impression of thinking too much about it, kicked Mané on the back of his calf, sending him tumbling to the grass, stopping the move at its inception.Felipe chose option B. Pretty much every player in his situation would have done the same. The so-called tactical foul is a fairly standard element of the game. Almost every elite team has at least one player employed, at least in part, because they are more than willing to use foul means, as well as fair, to stop a counterattack. Fernandinho does it for Manchester City. Fabinho does it for Liverpool. Sergio Busquets has done it for more than a decade.Ordinarily, the only punishment is a free kick. Occasionally, for flagrant examples, a yellow card might be flourished. Quite why, at Anfield, the Dutch referee Danny Makkelie went one step farther and sent off Felipe is not entirely clear. Diego Simeone, the Atlético coach, said the official told him it was because he “stamped” on Mané. Others argued the decision may have been related to Felipe’s obvious dissent after the foul.Either way, it may prove a useful precedent. I have never found the cynical side of the game off-putting. Dark arts, well-mastered, are arts nonetheless. But soccer is a spectacle, first and foremost, and it is hard not to think that spectacle might be improved if the truly blatant tactical foul was removed from the equation.It has happened before: The professional foul, now more generally referred to as Denial of a Goal-Scoring Opportunity — DOGSO, in the jargon — was only incorporated into the Laws of the Game in the early 1980s. That applied to instances when a player was through on goal, only to be deliberately brought down by an opponent. There is no reason it could not be extended to the rest of the field. The rules can change if doing so makes the game better. And if, as in this case, they might better reflect the spirit of the sport.CorrespondenceAn entirely valid criticism of last week’s piece on coaches from Pablo Medina Uribe, who points out something that should have been addressed. “Is Marcelo Gallardo really trapped?” he wrote. “As you said, River Plate is one of the biggest teams in the world. Certain teams in Europe might have and pay more money, but is that enough to consider going there a step up?”This is slightly tricky, because Pablo is right: River Plate is a far, far “bigger” club — whatever that means — in terms of history than quite a few of the teams now considered Europe’s elite. It would be admirable, and understandable, if Gallardo regarded River as the ultimate destination.But at the same time, coaches, generally, want to work with the best players, and those players are now clustered in Europe. Perhaps we can agree on this: Gallardo should be being offered these jobs. It’s up to him whether he takes them.Felipe Gaete noticed a name that should have been mentioned, too. “Manuel Pellegrini’s career path is quite similar from the one you say Gallardo must follow: started in his native Chile with not much ‘success,’ champion in Ecuador, in Argentina, put Villarreal on the map, until he got the job at Real Madrid only to be dismissed after one season because they opted for someone who played a double role: manager and showman,” he wrote. “Isn’t that a reason why the managers you mention don’t get the big step up? Because they wouldn’t produce headlines? Is it only down to the C.V. or also for marketing? Since managers don’t sell shirts, they might be expected to sell papers.”That is a very good point, I think. Club executives are easily impressed by a figure who gets major media play, and as a rule — as far as Europe is concerned — that discounts anyone who works anywhere else.The newsletter favorite Fernando Gama was also moved to write, explaining why Gallardo would be especially well-qualified for a move to Europe. “No one faces more pressure than the big clubs in South America: Visits from ultras, violence, a schizophrenic journalism that is only result-driven (well, this may be everywhere), the irrational ire of fans,” he wrote. “I don’t say these are good things. But they exist. At a crazy level.“The stakes may be different, especially in terms of money, but the pressure in South America is much more than the pressure in Europe. I’m pretty sure Gallardo is well-prepared. The two things that have made it harder for him to make the leap are his salary — he is very well-paid — and whether players will believe in him: European players also believe the gap with South America has always been insurmountable.” More

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      At Elite Teams, a Shrinking Vision of What a Coach Looks Like

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      Barcelona is looking for a new manager, and Manchester United may need one soon. But the pool of coaches elite clubs hire from is getting smaller every year, and that’s a problem.Marcelo Gallardo has the sort of managerial résumé that should make him irresistible to most, if not all, of Europe’s elite clubs.He has been in his current post for seven years, long enough to prove he is no mercenary, flickering brightly and briefly before moving on elsewhere. He has demonstrated that he can cope with the deepest pressure and the loftiest expectations. He has shown that he can ride the political currents that swirl around any major club. He has learned to work on a (relative) budget.Most of all, he has won. He has won over and over again. At River Plate, Gallardo has collected a dozen major trophies as a manager. He has won two continental championships, and come within two minutes of a third. One of his predecessors at the Buenos Aires club, Ramon Díaz, has described him as the greatest coach in the team’s history.It is not hard to understand, then, why Gallardo’s name is frequently linked with Europe’s great houses — most recently with the vacancy created by Barcelona’s decision to end Ronald Koeman’s loveless 14-month tenure. That the speculation never seems to coalesce into anything, that there always seems to be a preferred candidate that is not him, requires a little further explanation.Gallardo has won a dozen trophies, and two continental titles, at River Plate.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesSeveral of Europe’s most illustrious teams have, in recent years, appointed managers who made — by traditional metrics — little or no sense. Some of them have been successful: Zinedine Zidane, for example, won three Champions League titles in three years at Real Madrid, despite finding himself in his first coaching job.And some of them have, well, turned out a little differently. Andrea Pirlo was appointed Juventus manager around three weeks after being given his first coaching role, in charge of the club’s under-23 side. He had never taken charge of an official game. He was dismissed after a single season. Frank Lampard lasted a little longer at Chelsea. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is still clinging on, somehow, at Manchester United.A variety of factors have gone into that trend. One, of course, is the desire — shared by almost every major team — to find and nurture its own version of Pep Guardiola. Those searches are rooted in the widespread delusion that, at every club, there is some revolutionary genius lurking somewhere in the shadows, waiting for the chance to transform the game as we know it.There is, too, a cynical calculation at play. Iconic former players have always been fast-tracked into management, aided by a belief, one that can withstand even a flood of evidence, that their talent can be passed on, and also abetted by a knowledge among executives that appointing a club legend generates instant good will and — more precious still — patience among fans.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s popularity and pedigree as a player may be extending his run at Manchester United.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut perhaps the biggest shift is in what the superclubs regard as relevant prior experience. A track record of success in management is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary. Or, rather, a particular stripe of success is no longer regarded as valid, because what constitutes success is so difficult to measure.Instead, much more important is a knowledge of how these giant, sprawling temples of self-importance work, a sense of being comfortable within them, a feeling of belonging. It is that change that has deprived Gallardo, and many coaches like him, of a chance. And it has given the superclubs something of a problem.There was, at some point in the dim and distant past, a distinct ladder for a manager to climb. A coach would start at some lower rung on the ladder — either as an assistant or at a smaller team — and slowly prove their worth. They might win promotion to the top division, take a smaller team on a European run, turn a contender into a champion.Then, and only then, would the superclubs strike. It is the approach that took Jürgen Klopp from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund and then on to Liverpool. It is how Carlo Ancelotti went from Reggiana to Parma to Juventus and on to almost every other major team in Europe. It is how Mauricio Pochettino made it from Espanyol to Southampton to Tottenham and then, after a brief break, to Paris St.-Germain. All of them took one club to another level, and were rewarded with a step up themselves.Mauricio Pochettino’s track record with Tottenham’s stars earned him a star-studded second act at Paris St.-Germain.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is the mechanism that should, now, promote Gallardo. He is ready for it. He has more than proved his worth on one rung. But there is an overriding sensation that it does not quite work like that anymore, that the rules of the game have changed, and that, all of a sudden, everything he has done does not count. And it does not count because of where he has done it.All of Gallardo’s success, so far, has come in South America. He won a league championship with Nacional in Uruguay and was rewarded with a post at River Plate, one of the biggest clubs in the world by anyone’s standards, an environment as impatient and demanding and expectant as anywhere. There, he has twice delivered the Copa Libertadores.But while Europe’s major clubs have no problem appointing Argentines — several of Gallardo’s countrymen work in high-profile posts in European soccer, including Pochettino and Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone — they have long felt that success does not easily translate to the Old World.Occasionally, that fear has been well-placed: Carlos Bianchi turned first Vélez Sarsfield and then Boca Juniors into the finest teams in Latin America, but struggled to make an impact at Roma and then, a decade later, at Atlético. Others, like Marcelo Bielsa, have made the leap a little more easily.That skepticism, though, no longer applies just to South Americans. Europe’s superclubs increasingly see an ocean all around them. Gallardo is not the only coach who might, by now, have expected to receive the call from one of the game’s giants. He is not the only one who has built a body of work that should make him a compelling candidate.There is Erik ten Hag, the Ajax coach, who has turned his club into a powerhouse in the Netherlands and is on the verge of his second deep run in the Champions League. There is Rúben Amorim, a decade or so younger, who has already ended Sporting Lisbon’s two-decade wait for a Portuguese title. There is Marco Rose, who has risen from Red Bull Salzburg to Borussia Mönchengladbach and then Dortmund.These are the coaches Barcelona or Manchester United should be looking to appoint now. They are the coaches Real Madrid or Juventus might have approached in the summer. They are, most likely, the next big things.Instead, Barcelona is hopeful of replacing Koeman with Xavi Hernández, less for his stint at Al Sadd in the Qatar Stars League than for his emotional connection with the club. Manchester United has vowed to stand by Solskjaer; if and when it changes its mind, it is expected to go for Antonio Conte or Pochettino, persuaded by their proven success.At Barcelona, the big job is not for everyone.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBoth Barcelona and United are, at least, exhibiting more imagination than either Real Madrid or Juventus: When their positions came up a few months ago, both handed them back to managers they had already fired. Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid — taking over from Zidane, himself on his second stint — and, two years after the club declared itself ready to move on from him, Massimiliano Allegri was restored at Juventus.This is not just a lack of foresight; it is a self-inflicted inability to read meaning into a manager’s achievement. The elite clubs have believed — rightly or wrongly, but certainly logically — for some time that the only reliable guide to a manager’s suitability is previous experience at that level.That is why, for example, Eddie Howe’s success with Bournemouth was not deemed enough to get him a job at Liverpool or Arsenal. He might have proved his ability in the Premier League, but that was of secondary relevance to demonstrating an aptitude at Borussia Dortmund or Sevilla, teams that compete in the Champions League and have budgets and pressures to match.The issue is that the game has become so stratified, so quickly, that the pool of clubs deemed suitable hunting grounds has withered to almost nothing. The elite are now so vast, so powerful, that only a few teams can serve as a reasonable approximation.Dortmund’s Marco Rose is following what used to be the path to a big club. That might not be true anymore.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCertainly, there is nowhere outside Europe’s major leagues, which counts against Ten Hag, Amorim and Gallardo, and within those competitions there are only a handful: the Milan clubs, perhaps; probably Dortmund; possibly Lyon and Marseille.And even then, it is not entirely clear what a manager would have to do to stand out. Klopp’s star rose when he led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title in successive campaigns. Rafa Benítez shot to prominence by making Valencia champion of Spain. José Mourinho captured the imagination by winning the Champions League with F.C. Porto.The game, in 2021, has been shaped to mitigate against repeats of all of those achievements. If Rose takes Dortmund to second place behind Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, is that success, or is it simply meeting expectations? What does it mean if Ajax wins the Eredivisie, again? Is it failure if Amorim’s Sporting is eliminated in the group phase of the Champions League, or is all of this nothing more than economic determinism? How can any of this be parsed?It leaves the elite teams in a peculiar Catch-22: They want to employ managers with the right sort of experience, but the only way those managers can get that experience is by being employed. Still, it is hard to feel too much pity for the superclubs: They are the ones, after all, who have done so much to distort soccer’s reality in their favor.Far more deserving of sympathy are the coaches, like Gallardo, who find themselves trapped by a game whose rules have shifted underneath them. He, like the others, has done all he can. He has twice conquered a continent. He has built an irresistible résumé, only to be told that he has done it all in the wrong place.Right Idea, Wrong TeamsDiego Maradona’s memory has never faded in Naples.Yara Nardi/ReutersThere could, in many ways, have been no more fitting tribute. A year after the death of Diego Maradona, two of his former clubs have announced plans to face each other for a cup in his honor. The game, between Boca Juniors and Barcelona, will be played in January. It will be staged in Riyadh.We could probably just leave it there, but to be clear: Maradona spent two seasons at Barcelona, one of them interrupted by injury, and often traced many of the demons that haunted him to his time there. He may be indelibly associated with Boca, and his love for the club is not in question — after retirement, he maintained a private box at the Bombonera — but he enjoyed only a single campaign there in his prime. By the time he returned in 1995, he was a shadow of what he had been.It is a shame that both of these teams, then, should be trying to lay claim to his legacy. Far more fitting would be a two-legged tie between the teams where he spent the bulk of his career, staged at the stadiums that now bear his name: the home of Argentinos Juniors, where he started his career, and that of Napoli, where he sealed his legend.The brands of Barcelona and Boca Juniors are much more potent than either of those clubs, of course. They are far more glamorous targets for Saudi cash in that country’s attempts to dress itself up as a sporting powerhouse rather than, you know, a repressive autocracy. But they should not be allowed to contort history to suit their own ends, to weight Maradona’s story in their favor, to erase those places where he wrote the majority of it from the record.CorrespondenceEvents, ultimately, have a habit of making fools of us all. Scarcely 48 hours after a finely crafted newsletter appeared in your inboxes, explaining how Manchester United had perfected the art of soccer-as-content, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer let his team lose by 5-0 to Liverpool, raising the possibility that the club might actually do something to get out of its content sweet spot, with the devastating consequence that last week’s column might have seemed wrongheaded.Liverpool 5, Manchester United 0. Ronaldo? Still the star of United’s drama.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, let’s look for silver linings: Manchester United remains trapped by self-doubt, and so has not (yet) fired Solskjaer; defeat has proved, once again, that what is bad for Manchester United the team can be good for the exposure of Manchester United the brand; and Jim O’Mahony has paid me the compliment of thinking I am too young to remember the 1990s.“You are too young to have witnessed United’s heroic efforts saving themselves from defeat in the final minutes of a game during the 1990s,” he wrote. (I’m not.) “United of the 1990s would often play badly in the first half and then change momentum, often with a heroic substitute, and win the game. The name of one key substitute for United from that era was Solskjaer.”This is all true, of course: Manchester United long ago had a taste for the dramatic comeback. I’m not sure it happened quite as much as we think it did, though. I’m also not sure it’s something that should serve as an aspiration. Much better to have games won nice and early.George Weissman is not a man who seems to respect my need to fill a word count. “Your column boils down the incontrovertible fact that the whole should always exceed the sum of its parts, and that is rarely the case since the retirement of Alex Ferguson,” he wrote. That basically sums up Manchester United, yes. But it does not fill a newsletter.We’ll end on a more philosophical question from David DeKock, channeling his inner Charles Hughes. “On every throw-in from the penalty area sideline, teams should heave it into the danger area and see what happens,” he wrote. “Why do teams not do this every single time? Have there been studies on percentages?”For a long time, the answer to this would have been stylistic: A long throw-in was seen as unsophisticated, a little agricultural, the sort of thing that Stoke City did. Now, though, I do sense that it is changing: Brentford and Midtjylland, two of the more forward-thinking teams, treat throw-ins as David would advocate. So, too, does Liverpool, which employs a specialist throw-in coach. All three are analytically driven, which leads me to believe that they have numbers to explain their choice, though they have not (as far as I know) chosen to share them. More

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      Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Is Target of Taunts but Not Alone in Blame

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      A thrashing by Liverpool showed that problems with Manchester United extend well beyond Solskjaer, the team’s manager.MANCHESTER, England — Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s name was still ringing around Old Trafford. It was not, though, coming from the corner of the Stretford End, which contains Manchester United’s most fervent, most vocal fans. Those fans stood silent, fuming, as their nightmare unfurled in front of them.Instead, it was the Liverpool fans, corralled at the other end of the stadium, the afternoon’s events taking them from delight to ecstasy and then all the way to something approaching delirium, offering the hymns in his praise on Sunday. Humiliation on the field is one thing. It is the mockery off it that may prove too much for Manchester United to endure.Until now, Solskjaer has always commanded the loyalty of United’s fans. No matter how many false dawns his team has endured over the last three years, no matter how frustrating it has been to watch a side that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble veer between triumph and disaster, often in the same game, no matter how unclear his vision for the club has been, they have stood by him.Manchester United’s manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was mocked by Liverpool’s delighted fans during and after the rout.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockHe was, after all, a hero for the club as a player; his love for Manchester United has never been in question. His reverence for United’s traditions might, at times, come across as a touch sentimental, but it is doubtless sincere. After the mercenary years of José Mourinho and Louis van Gaal, when the well-being of the club came a distant second to the burnishing of their legacies, he has been a welcome palliative.But there is, necessarily, a limit to sentimentality. There is no reason, in particular, to believe that Sunday’s 5-0 thrashing by Liverpool will prove a watershed for the club’s hierarchy: Solskjaer’s iteration of Manchester United has ricocheted almost constantly between hope and despair, and the club has never shown anything but blind faith in him.5th minute Naby Keita’s opening goal was the perfect start for Liverpool on Sunday.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images13th minute Diogo Jota doubles the lead, stunning the Old Trafford crowd into silence.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesThe fans, too, did not aim their fire in his direction. There were no chants demanding his ouster, no public manifestations of dissent. Equally significantly, though, there were no defiant expressions of support, as there have been in previous low moments. This, perhaps, might have been the day that something significant shifted.It would be difficult to overstate the scale of United’s collapse. How best to express it? That Liverpool did not play particularly well in the first half, giving the ball away cheaply in midfield and inviting pressure reasonably frequently, but still made it to the break with a four-goal lead?Or that midway through the second half the streets outside the stadium were full of fans seeking sanctuary from what was unfolding inside, more and more bolting for the exits as the game wore on and the suffering worsened? Or that Jürgen Klopp’s team was so dominant that it spent the last half-hour, after Mohamed Salah had scored his third goal, and his team’s fifth, toying with United, its rival and peer, playing with all the intensity of a warm-down training session?38th minute Mohamed Salah’s first goal was just a sign of things to come.Phil Noble/Reuters45th minute + 5 Salah’s second, Liverpool’s fourth, came just before halftime.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesOr, perhaps, it would be the fury and the frustration that should have seen Cristiano Ronaldo sent off for lashing out at Liverpool’s Curtis Jones at the end of the first half, and eventually did see Paul Pogba — only a few minutes after his introduction as a substitute — dismissed for a wild, reckless challenge on Naby Keita.Both were, as much as anything, an expression of United’s absolute impotence, an abdication of control rooted in the embarrassment being inflicted on Solskjaer’s players. They were powerless to match Liverpool. They were unable to stop Keita, Salah and Roberto Firmino, in particular, cutting through them at will. They had lost the game, and so they lost their cool.It was Solskjaer who had to bear the brunt of that, of course. It was Solskjaer who had to stand there, on the touchline, his head ever so slightly bowed, as Liverpool’s fans crowed and taunted and, with a cruel and obvious irony, invoked his name.It was Solskjaer who had to answer the questions at the end, who had to conjure whatever explanation he could, who had to give an instant, taped deposition for what will be, largely, an inquest into his own continued viability. And it is Solskjaer who will be dismissed, in some quarters, as nothing but a frontman for the great Manchester United tribute act, a sort of glorified mascot for a club whose business model is based on milking former glories.That is the way it is, the way it has always been, but it should not disguise the fact that he is not solely to blame. The core difference between United and Liverpool is not just in the quality of their coaches — Solskjaer, granted his job on the basis of his playing career, and Klopp, who earned his because of what he had achieved as a coach — but in the coherence of their structures.50th minute Thousands of United fans were already on their way out when Salah scored his third.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images60th minute United’s day managed to get worse when Paul Pogba was sent off for a two-footed tackle on Keita.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesPogba started on the bench here because there is, in effect, no system available to Solskjaer that enables him to get the best out of the galaxy of stars at his disposal. Playing a way that suits Pogba means negating Bruno Fernandes or dropping Marcus Rashford or sidelining Mason Greenwood.The club signed Cristiano Ronaldo this summer — get the band back together for the last, ever, world tour — partly out of romance, partly out of cynicism, partly because it was worried he was going to join Manchester City and partly, of course, because he is one of the greatest of all time. But it did so with no real idea of how he would fit into the team, with no regard for the fact that it meant effectively stalling Jadon Sancho’s Manchester United career before it had begun.These are not things Liverpool does. They are not, for that matter, things that Manchester City or Chelsea do. It is Solskjaer’s fault that he cannot get the best out of these players, that he sent out a team so woefully overmatched against Liverpool, but it is not his fault that his resources are so uneven, their shapes just not quite dovetailing with each other.That was of little or no solace as he stood on the touchline, the scoreboard emblazoned with the proof of his humiliation, Liverpool’s fans singing his praises. It was hard, in fact, not to feel sorry for Solskjaer at that moment, and that may be the most worrying thing of all. It is one thing to be beaten, to be criticized. It is quite another to be where he is now, the butt of the joke. A manager can recover from many things. Being a punchline is not one of them.Michael Regan/Getty Images More