Mbappe, Kylian (1998- )

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    At P.S.G., a Coach’s Vision Collides With a Star’s Power

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    The system may be the center of the modern soccer universe, but stars like Kylian Mbappé exert a gravity of their own.Ultimately, a single wrong answer cost Rafael Benítez his job, the one he had coveted for most of his working life. The slight downturn in results, the disaffection of the players, the sudden loss of trust from those who had chosen to employ him — all of it, he believed, could be traced back to that single, relatively harmless, misstep.Not long into his ill-fated reign as coach of Real Madrid, in 2015, Benítez had been asked what seemed, on the surface, a simple question: Did he regard the team’s star, Cristiano Ronaldo, as the best player in the world? Perhaps Benítez was trying to be clever. Perhaps he was trying to challenge his star. Perhaps he was, unadvisedly, being honest.Either way, he did not really see the big deal. Ronaldo was certainly one of the best players in the world, he responded. But then so was Lionel Messi. Benítez said he did not want to have to choose between them. “It would be like asking my daughter if she prefers my wife or me,” he said, by way of explanation.Barely four months later, Benítez was out at Real Madrid. The contemporaneous reports suggested he had struggled to build a bond with the players.The reality, as far as Benítez was concerned, was more straightforward. His answer, all those weeks earlier, had displeased Ronaldo, and the coterie of advisers and power brokers and hangers-on who surrounded him. They would not forget the slight. From that day, Benítez was toast.Rafael Benítez, well-traveled and battle-scarred.Ander Gillenea/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn that context is a lesson. Even the simplest question — the one that sounds and looks and feels so much like a softball, so basic and brief that it could not possibly do any harm — is at best a test. At worst, it is a trap.You are a coach in charge of one of the world’s most prestigious clubs. In your care is one of the game’s brightest stars. What you believe, what you feel, what the objective truth might happen to be is irrelevant.Do you think your player is the best in the world? For the purposes of harmony and unity and your own continued viability as an employee: Yes, you do.That Luis Enrique, the Paris St.-Germain coach, chose a different path when asked precisely that question last month, then, constituted something of a risk. He had just watched Kylian Mbappé, not only his team’s unquestioned star but also its most valuable asset, its cornerstone and its unofficial sporting director, score a hat-trick in a 3-0 victory over Reims.Mbappé had spent most of the previous two summers threatening to leave his hometown. The club had, at various points, mobilized every single one of its resources — up to and including Emmanuel Macron, the French president — to persuade him to stay. The team’s hierarchy was reported to have afforded him powers so extensive and unorthodox that it is safe to say the leaders are operating on the assumption he very much is the best player in the world.Luis Enrique, though, took even more of a risk than Benítez. “I’m not really happy with Kylian today,” he said after the win over Reims. “Why? Because managers are strange. About goals, I don’t have to say anything, but I think he can help the team more in a different way. I told that to him first. We think Kylian is one of the best players in the world. No doubt. But we need more, and we want him doing more things.”It is to Mbappé’s credit that, just as the storm was gathering, he did his best to quell it. Luis Enrique had said precisely the same thing to him privately, he confirmed. He had, even if he said so himself, taken the criticism “well.” “He is a great coach,” Mbappé said. “He has a lot to teach me. From Day 1, I told him he would have no problem with me.”Whether that will hold — and for how long — is impossible to gauge today, but it is another reminder of the inherent, inexorable tension between soccer’s two overriding urges — one that is far from unique to the modern Paris St.-Germain, but is perhaps drawn more clearly there than anywhere else.There is one, the one that plays out on the field, that holds that this is now resolutely a coach’s game, one in which strategy conquers all and players are cogs in a finely tuned wheel, each following intricate and comprehensive instructions about where to be and what to do. In this vision, everything is subordinate to the grand vision being concocted on the sidelines and in the data analyst’s office.And there is another one — the one that is rooted to some extent in the traditional economics of sports but has been exaggerated by the devotional nature of fandom in the digital age — that places individual stars at the front and center of a club. This theory has given these stars a heft and pull greater than the institutions that make and pay them.None of that is new, of course — managers have always been compelled to balance the needs of the team with the wants of the individual — but it has never felt so pronounced as it is now, the twin forces never quite so repellent. The system may be the center of the universe, but the stars exert a gravity of their own.Luis Enrique, still officially in charge.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersP.S.G. has been struggling with that equation for some time. It is not so long, after all, since it named a team that included Neymar, Messi and Mbappé, none of whom was especially keen to submit himself to the sort of defensive duties that are the preserve of lesser mortals.Things have improved — Messi and Neymar have moved on, of course — but Mbappé remains: a wondrous, uplifting, irreplaceable talent, but still an entity that somehow remains distinct from the team itself.Luis Enrique’s ethos is, like those of all modern coaches, based on collectivism, the complex interplay of 11 individual components. At times, particularly in the Champions League — where it has now failed to beat Newcastle United twice, been dismantled by A.C. Milan, and may not reach the round of 16 — P.S.G. has the air of a machine spluttering to find a gear.It is caught, in essence, in a trap. Luis Enrique’s vision cannot take hold if Mbappé is an exception. Mbappé cannot be exceptional if he has to spend all of his time dutifully tracking his opponents. The star cannot shine without the system, but the system cannot hold in the shadow of the star.Luis Enrique will do well to find a solution to that riddle. Sometimes, as those who have been in his shoes can attest, there are no simple answers.Curious LimboDavid de Gea awaits your call.David Klein/ReutersThe reflexive response to the sight of André Onana standing, yet again, with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped after Manchester United’s gloriously puerile draw with Galatasaray on Wednesday is sympathy. Last year, Onana was the standout goalkeeper in the Champions League. A few months at Old Trafford seem to have drained him of all confidence.It is difficult not to wonder, though, what David de Gea must make of it all. For a decade, de Gea was not only United’s first-choice goalkeeper but frequently its saving grace and, at points, its highest-paid player. That the club did not seek to renew his contract when it expired over the summer was no surprise — his form had waned, and his salary was exorbitant — but the fact that he has yet to be picked up by anyone now borders on the bizarre.Is he pricing himself out of the market? Is he turning down offers in the hope of the perfect opportunity? Has he lost the motivation to play? Or is it — and this may be the Occam’s razor solution — that soccer has an inclination toward a potent blend of recency bias, faddishness and groupthink?This … Might Work?A share stronger than yellow? Let’s try it.Peter Nicholls/ReutersAt this point, it would probably be a good idea if the International Football Association Board — the faceless, unaccountable gaggle of bureaucrats who seem to have decided that soccer has to be played according to their wishes — took a little time away. Most of the board’s recent interventions, after all, ranging from V.A.R. to whatever the handball rule is this week, might broadly be said to have been a mixed bag.The decision to investigate an “orange” card — leading to a player’s entering a 10-minute sin bin for a range of specific offenses — does, though, have some merit. There are a plethora of incidents that feel too serious for a yellow card but not quite deserving of a red.That has only become a pressing issue, however, because of the increased officiousness with which games are refereed, the blame for which can squarely be placed with the IFAB, but the fact that the board is solving a problem of its own making should not be a disqualifying factor.Some change can be good. This may be one of those times.CorrespondenceThis week, a friend pointed me in the direction of something called a PANAS personality test, as endorsed (or created; I’m not sure) by the academic Arthur C. Brooks. It struck me as flawed — it separates people into four emotional categories, and yet none of them are “Yorkshireman” — but, with five minutes to spare, it struck me as a harmless diversion.My sunny demeanor, it turns out, makes me a “cheerleader,” one of life’s optimists. Jim Murphy and Scott Rehr, by contrast, would both get “poet,” I suspect, with their tendency to linger on negative outcomes. The N.F.L.’s experience, Jim wrote, would suggest that a Premier League commissioner — the role raised in last week’s newsletter — would be “pretty much a lackey for the owners.”Scott, if anything, was more dubious. “The idea of a Premier League commissioner sounds great until I think about FIFA and Gianni Infantino,” he confessed. “Would a Premier League commissioner more naturally slide into the autocrat role demonstrated by Infantino?”That would, of course, be a risk. A Premier League commissioner would be vulnerable to manipulation by the people who paid the boss’s wages. It might be offset just a little, though, by accepting the wise counsel of S.K. Gupta. “The problem is the unenforceable and arbitrary rules, which can only be enforced retrospectively,” he wrote, a reality that often results in things decided in courtrooms instead of league offices.”He added, “Rather than limiting the loss which a team incur, the better system would be to have a transfer cap which teams can spend, based upon the winnings of the team in all of the competitions they have been in.”I’m not sure you even have to go as far as instituting a salary cap — something that is much more easily applied in sports played in closed leagues drawn from a maximum of two countries — but there’s no doubt that real-time enforcement of the rules would improve the situation. The Premier League should not be left to pursue deferred punishment; it should be in a position to impose immediate prohibitions on teams that transgress its financial requirements.Quite where Keith Kreitman would fall on the Brooks test is not for me to say, but I will admit to a sneaking inspiration for people who are exasperated by trivialities. “I wonder about the constant use of the term ‘unlucky’ whenever a player bangs a ball off the upright or the crossbar,” Keith wrote. “It’s not like a stray bird or a sudden burst of wind affected the flight of the ball. The player merely missed the target. There is simply no component of luck involved.”This is technically correct, which as we all know is the best way to be correct, and it is a point I have made over the years to several players. All I can tell you is that they don’t like being told they should have aimed better. More

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      Kylian Mbappé Is Target of Record Offer From Saudi Arabia’s Al Hilal

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      Al Hilal of the Saudi Professional League made a bid to Paris St.-Germain to acquire the French striker in what would be the most expensive soccer transfer in history.Saudi Arabia’s turbocharged attempt to turn its domestic soccer league into one of the sport’s most glamorous has already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the greatest stars of his generation, and Karim Benzema, the reigning world player of the year. Those deals, though, pale into comparison with its most ambitious target yet: Kylian Mbappé.Over the weekend, one of the Saudi Professional League’s more prominent teams, Al Hilal, submitted an offer worth $332 million for the France striker to his current team, Paris St.-Germain. Should the deal go through, it would make Mbappé the most expensive player in the sport’s history by some distance, dwarfing the $263 million P.S.G. paid for the Brazilian forward Neymar six years ago.The official bid was sent to P.S.G.’s chief executive, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, on Saturday. It was signed by Al Hilal’s chief executive, and it confirmed the price the club was prepared to pay and requested permission to discuss salary and the length of a contract with Mbappé. On Monday, it was reported by some news outlets that P.S.G. had granted that request.Al Hilal was expecting to hold initial talks with Fayza Lamari, Mbappé’s agent and mother, early this week, according to three people with knowledge of the offer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details. It is likely that the club will have to commit hundreds of millions of dollars more in salary to persuade Mbappé, 24, who is regarded as the likely heir to Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as the finest player on the planet, to leave P.S.G. for a team in what was most recently ranked as soccer’s 58th strongest domestic league.Mbappé is already lavishly remunerated at P.S.G., his hometown club. Last summer, he was handed a contract worth $36 million a year, complete with a $120 million golden handshake.Even the amount of money that P.S.G.’s ultimate owner — Qatar Sports Investment, drawing on the wealth of the Qatari state — can afford to pay him, though, may not prove off-putting to his prospective employer: Al Hilal is now one of four Saudi teams majority owned by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.There is an element of opportunism in Al Hilal’s approach. Mbappé’s future has been the subject of intense speculation since the start of June, when the player informed P.S.G. that he intended to see out the final year of his current deal and walk away as a free agent in 2024.P.S.G. has insisted that it will not contemplate losing such a prized asset for nothing, informing Mbappé that he must sign a new contract — one that would extend his stay beyond 2024 — or face an uncertain future: either being sold or having to spend the season on the substitutes’ bench.The club has sought legal advice to gauge the strength of its position. Mbappé has maintained that he intends to spend the coming season in Paris, although he was omitted from the squad for the club’s preseason tour of Asia last week as a result of the standoff.Al Hilal headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Ahmed Yosri/ReutersAl Hilal is not the only team hoping to take advantage of the growing schism between P.S.G. and one of soccer’s most talented players and most marketable names.P.S.G. has received several inquiries about Mbappé’s theoretical price tag. Chelsea, now owned by a consortium that includes Clearlake Capital Group, the private equity firm, has asked P.S.G. how much the player would cost. Barcelona, the Spanish champion, has discussed a deal in which more than one of its own prime assets would arrive in Paris in an exchange.Real Madrid, long assumed to be Mbappé’s preferred destination, has yet to show its hand. Some executives at P.S.G. believe a deal is already in place in which Mbappé would move to the Spanish capital next summer.It is that expectation that Al Hilal — most likely not the sort of place that Mbappé, at this stage of his career, would ordinarily have considered as his natural next step — hopes may provide it with an advantage.It has been reported that, despite all the money it is prepared to spend to secure his arrival, the Saudi club would allow Mbappé to leave for Spain after just a season in the Middle East. More

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      PSG Says Kylian Mbappé Must Sign New Deal or Leave

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      Nasser al-Khelaifi, the president of Paris St.-Germain, was introducing the team’s new coach when he turned to tough talk on the future of his team’s biggest star.It was at the unveiling of yet another new coach that Paris St.-Germain’s president made his first public statement on the future of his team’s best player. He did not equivocate and left little room for compromise.Kylian Mbappé, the marquee player for P.S.G. and France, must sign a new contract this summer or leave, Nasser al-Khelaifi told reporters, who were ostensibly gathered to hear the first pronouncements from the new coach, the Spaniard Luis Enrique, but eager to hear what the club planned to do about the uncertainty created by Mbappé after his public declaration last month that he wished to move on after next season.Such a scenario would leave the club in the unenviable situation of losing, without compensation, a player in whom it has invested more than $500 million in transfer fees, bonuses and wages. That is something al-Khelaifi said would not be allowed to happen.“We do not want him to leave for free in 2024,” al-Khelaifi said.“Our position is clear,” he continued. “If Kylian wants to stay, we want him to stay. But he needs to sign a new contract.“We don’t want to lose the best player in the world for free. It’s impossible.”And that was that. Al-Khelaifi, as he stood to leave the raised platform he had shared with Enrique, told the assembled members of the news media that he expected they had gotten what they came for. The new coach, for his part, declined to say whether he expected Mbappé to be in Paris when the new season gets underway this summer.What is clear is that for a second straight summer, the fate of where Mbappé plays is going to overshadow P.S.G.’s efforts to prove that it is now a serious contender for soccer’s biggest prize rather than once again the central stage for the sport’s biggest intrigues.A news conference on Wednesday was intended to introduce Luis Enrique, left, as P.S.G.’s new coach, but that was overshadowed when Nasser al-Khelaifi, right, addressed Mbappé’s future.Aurelien Morissard/Associated PressEnrique, who most recently coached Spain’s national team, arrived on Wednesday and is charged with bringing order to a club that has been characterized by disorder in recent seasons. Just this week, his predecessor, Christophe Galtier, who arrived just last summer, became the latest P.S.G. coach to be shown the door before completing his contract.No club in soccer has spent more money on talent since Qatar Sports Investments acquired P.S.G. about a decade ago. Few top clubs have cycled through as many coaches, and fewer still have wasted as much time and money trying to find an identity and a style underpinning all that largess.Last summer, P.S.G. persuaded Mbappé to sign a new contract rather than sign with Real Madrid, the Spanish super club he has long dreamed of playing for. P.S.G. had wanted to build a new model, with Mbappé as the central star in a constellation of mostly young, mostly French talent. Without him, that master plan would once again require reimagining.Later on, al-Khelaifi was even more strident. Sitting down with members of the domestic news media, he said Mbappé had a “maximum” of two weeks to decide whether to sign a new contract. The club, he said, would not allow such a valuable asset to leave for nothing in 12 months. Mbappé could, it was pointed out to al-Khelaifi, just decide to stay, making it impossible for the club to dictate his fate.Al-Khelaifi said that would be unthinkable — that Mbappé would be breaking an unwritten convention of some sort, by doing something that the world’s best players simply do not do. He did not mention that P.S.G. had done that very thing two summers ago, signing the Argentine great Lionel Messi as a free agent when Barcelona, the team Messi had played on for his entire career, could no longer afford to keep him.“If he doesn’t want to sign,” al-Khelaifi said, “the door is open.”Privately, the club has been exchanging letters with Mbappé’s management team, which is led by his mother, Fayza Lamari. This week, the latest missive, running to three pages, expressed disappointment with the position Mbappé had taken and reminded the player and his family how much P.S.G. had invested in the forward since his teenage years.In signing his contract, Mbappé was allowed a rare level of influence over the club’s activities, including a say over recruitment of the players who would line up alongside him. The club’s letter, which expressed a demand for an urgent meeting, said as much, acknowledging that while the club had not been able to fulfill all his requirements for reinforcements, it had done as much as it could given the constraints placed upon it by European soccer rules on spending.P.S.G. resumes practice on July 10, but Mbappé, along with others who played for their national teams in June, will return on July 17. By then, the club hopes to have clarity on whether he will accede to its demand to sign a new contract. It hopes he will, even though his doing so would not reduce the possibility that he would leave next summer. A new contract dated beyond the end of next season would allow P.S.G. to recoup a fee. Shortly after signing his current deal last summer, Mbappé told The New York Times in an interview that it would not have felt correct to leave the club via free agency.In the rarefied world Mbappé inhabits, for both his talent and his earning potential, the pool of clubs he could sign with is a shallow one and may actually be limited to one: Real Madrid.That club is searching for a marquee forward, having lost the veteran striker Karim Benzema to Saudi Arabia’s soccer land grab, and Mbappé has spoken of playing there one day. For the stars to align, the club would have to be convinced to make P.S.G. an offer for a player it knows it could bring in without a fee next year. So far, it has remained tight-lipped about its plans.In her time representing her son, Lamari has become an experienced hand in securing the best possible deal. Last summer, with a deal with Real Madrid in hand, and the suggestion that the Premier League club Liverpool, an unlikely suitor, also had a firm interest, she managed to secure a huge new contract. It guaranteed a bonus of more than $100 million just as a re-signing fee even before his stratospheric new salary was included.P.S.G. announced that the deal would run through 2025, and it even had Mbappé wear a jersey emblazoned with the year on his back. Only later did it transpire that the third year was an option that only the player could exercise.Lamari will once again take center stage as face-to-face talks with club executives take place over the next few days. Only then will it become clear whether, as al-Khelaifi told reporters, “No one player is bigger than the club.”​​ More

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      Luciano Spalletti and the Power of Walking Away

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      The Napoli coach led his team to a long-delayed title and then left because the job was done. That is worth celebrating.Luciano Spalletti’s farm sits high on a ridge outside Montaione, a peaceful, strikingly pretty Italian village set on a hilltop an hour or so southwest of Florence. It is picture-perfect Tuscany: cobbled piazzas lined with cafes; echoing, cobbled streets; a panorama of deep blue skies and verdant olive groves on rolling hills.It is, though, just a little off the beaten path. The stretch of the Tuscan countryside Spalletti calls home is not quite so well-touristed as, say, Chianti. But Spalletti grew up here, in the medieval walled city of Certaldo, and he saw in the farm the chance to draw more people to the region. The five vacation cottages he has constructed on its grounds can be rented for a (surprisingly competitive) few hundred euros a night.Business was not his primary motivation. The farm serves as Spalletti’s haven. He has turned it into something approaching the Platonic ideal of an idyll. As he says in a promotional video on the farm’s website, it is “a place to rediscover simple, forgotten emotions, between nature and animals.”He makes his own olive oil. He uses the grapes from his vineyard to produce his own wine. There are hens and ducks, donkeys and horses and alpacas, and even a couple of ostriches. The view stretches all the way from Pisa, in the west, to the Apennines in the east. “For my family, it was love at first sight,” he tells prospective visitors.It is here, to his own little slice of Arcadia, that Spalletti withdrew at the start of the month, his two-year spell as the coach of Napoli at an end. He had informed the club of his decision a few weeks earlier. “I told them I needed a year off,” he said. “I will not work for any club. I’ll rest for one year.”Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, top, and Victor Osimhen, who led Napoli to the Italian title, will eventually follow Spalletti out the door.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSpalletti, of course, has earned the break. His first year at Napoli ended as most first years at Napoli do: in a swirling eddy of uncertainty and disappointment and regret. The club’s ultras stole his car and vowed to return it only once they had proof of his resignation. A raft of key players left.His second season, though, was utopian. For the first time in 33 years, Napoli won the Italian title. That is, in fact, underselling it. Napoli swept to the Italian title, obliterating the rest of Serie A. It lifted the trophy with a month to spare. Its final few games were a carnival, a celebration. Spalletti and his players found their images splayed across the city, afforded the same kind of worship as more traditional religious icons.That he should choose precisely that moment to step away, then, is so unorthodox that it borders — in soccer’s traditional thinking — on heresy.Napoli was vastly superior to all of its domestic opponents. Spalletti’s team was on autopilot for the last five games of the campaign and still finished 16 points ahead of second-place Lazio. Even allowing for the impending departures of two key players, Victor Osimhen and Kim Min-jae, there is little reason to assume it will not at the very least compete for the title next year.More important still, it was at Napoli that Spalletti, 64, had finally made manifest his vision of how the sport should be played. He had, for much of his career, been admired as a gifted coach, a sophisticated tactician, even an occasional visionary. It was Spalletti, during his time at Roma, who either pioneered or popularized the idea of the “false nine.”He was, though, widely — and not a little affectionately — regarded as one of the sport’s “nearly” men. He almost won Serie A with Roma, but did not. He almost won it with Inter Milan, but did not. He was one of several managers dismissed as the possessors of “zeru tituli” — zero titles — by José Mourinho, for whom significance is only gauged by the honors section of a Wikipedia page.At Napoli, Spalletti’s style finally found its substance. His team played no less attractively, no less innovatively, no less imaginatively than the sides he had forged elsewhere, but this one won, and won, and won. Napoli was his masterpiece, and yet no sooner had he completed it than he left it abandoned.Long a runner-up, Spalletti finally became a champion this year.Pool photo by Ciro FuscoHe did not do so, as tradition would dictate, to take on a bigger, or better, or more lavishly remunerated role. In his own telling, he did so because he wanted to take a break, to retreat to his farm, to find sanctuary from the stress and the strain of the last two years. The real rationale, though, is in the subtext. Spalletti left because his job was finished.There is an adage in soccer — in sports in general, in fact — that there is no such thing as a happy ending. All managers are fired, sooner or later, regardless of what they achieve or how much they win. At some point, results will turn, and take the fans and the front offices with them.That is true, of course, but it is partly true because managers are so rarely willing to do what Spalletti has done, and walk away. There is always some problem to solve, some improvement to make, some slight flaw to polish and burnish and finesse. There is always the chance that next year will be even better. And there is always, most of all, another trophy to win.The finest managers are — as they should be — conscious of their legacies. They are driven not just by proving their superiority to their peers, but by winning their place in history. There is a reason that Alex Ferguson, and Arrigo Sacchi, and Pep Guardiola are held in the first rank of managers: They are the coaches, after all, who attained not just dominion, but dynasty. Their example encourages managers to twist, rather than stick.Spalletti has done the opposite. At some point in Napoli’s monthlong celebration, he decided that he had reached the pinnacle, and that whatever came next would inevitably involve a descent.Rather than risk tarnishing what he has achieved, rather than doubling down, he has preferred to leave it, perfect and inviolable, where it stands. He has his prize, and in winning it he has his monument, too. In doing so, he has done what so many others expend so much energy doing: He has ensured that his legacy will remain unsullied, untouched. In the haven he has built for himself on the outskirts of Montaione, Spalletti will savor the simple, forgotten joy that comes from knowing when to step away.In announcing his decision early, Spalletti and the fans got to say goodbye.Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockHimbo JesusAt some point in the far-off future — when his role in public life is limited to a sofa in a television studio, just another bromide dispenser — someone will make a documentary about the 72 hours of Jack Grealish’s life that followed Manchester City’s victory in the Champions League final last weekend.That film will do a small service to Grealish, because the chances that his memories will be anything other than hazy are fairly slim. Corroborating witnesses will be required to answer key questions: Where, exactly, did he and his teammates ask the team’s plane to fly on the way back from Istanbul? What is this thing with the turkey about? How did so many of them acquire luminescent jackets, and why?Jack Grealish: life of the Man City party.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is possible — churlish, but possible — to suggest that Grealish’s celebrations were, if not excessive, then probably not the sort of thing that should be glamorized too much. For English fans of a particular age, it brought an uncomfortable, unhappy echo of Paul Gascoigne. And it is legitimate, certainly, to wonder if a Black player having the same weekend as Grealish would have been indulged in quite the same way by the news media.Grealish’s unapologetic revelry, though, served two important functions. It acted, first, as a reminder that while the meaning of Manchester City’s triumphs is far more complex than the club’s fans would like, the players themselves are athletes who have made countless sacrifices, who have committed years of their lives, to reach this point. That release, at times, can be lost in the broader story of financial rules and foreign investment; in his delight, Grealish brought the joy front and center.But even more significant, it was a powerful rebuke to soccer’s traditional stoicism. Alex Ferguson, among many others, always held it as an aphorism that one medal should simply be used as motivation for the next. In his mind, there was no such thing as an ultimate victory. Celebrating was simply a harbinger of complacency.It is an approach that to a large extent has become grizzled, hypermasculine dogma. It is also entirely miserable. If you are not going to enjoy your victories, then what is the point in pursuing them? What is the point, in fact, in the whole exercise? Manchester City has won a treble. If that is not the sort of occasion that warrants an impromptu flight to Ibiza, then what does?Do as I Do, Not as I SayKylian Mbappé wants you to know that his future lies in France. Until it doesn’t.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKylian Mbappé would like you to know that he is perfectly happy at Paris St.-Germain, thank you very much. “I have already said that I am going to continue next season,” he wrote on Twitter, the formerly popular social networking platform, on Tuesday.He would also like you to know that he does not need another intervention from Emmanuel Macron, the French president, to persuade him to stay. “He hopes for me to stay, and I hope so too,” he said while on international duty with France on Thursday. “My only option is to stay at P.S.G. I plan to be there when the season starts.”It’s refreshing, really, to have all this cleared up so early in the summer. No long, drawn-out transfer saga. No will they, won’t they, Ross and Rachel drama with Real Madrid. (In this scenario, Real Madrid is 100 percent Ross.) Mbappé is happy. Mbappé wants to stay. Macron can get on with lesser matters of state.Except, of course, that Mbappé’s stance is deeply disingenuous. Or, more kindly: He is telling the truth, but he is not telling the whole truth.As my colleague Tariq Panja reported this week, Mbappé used another formerly popular social networking platform — the letter — to inform P.S.G. that he does not plan to extend his contract beyond 2024. (The exact timing of Mbappe’s communicating his desire to the club is in dispute, but it is almost entirely irrelevant to the meat of the case.)Mbappé knows full well that effectively forces P.S.G. at least to contemplate the idea of selling him this summer. The unpalatable alternative, after all, is to lose him for nothing next year. And that is perfectly reasonable. P.S.G. is not a club that easily attracts sympathy. Mbappé has every reason to feel he would be better off elsewhere.Presumably, he does not want to come out and say that for fear that it would damage his brand in some vague, ephemeral way. And yet the approach he has taken, hiding behind sophistry and omission and innuendo — all delivered with a straight face; he knows that we know he knows — has exactly the same effect.Mbappé has always seemed an intelligent, judicious sort of a character, impeccably prepared for the fame that has been his destiny since he hit his teens. Doubtless, that reputation is warranted. Still, it took some time to build. As things stand, the longer this draws out, the more threatened it will become.CorrespondenceWe’ll start, this week, with a bitterly disappointed Mark Harris. “Your bitter invective every time you cover Manchester City has finally turned me off once and for all,” Mark wrote. (This was not his first piece of correspondence on the subject.) “It is as if you can only see Novak Djokovic through the eyes of his father’s Russian sympathies, or Tiger Woods through his failings as a husband. Follow the sport. The back story will be elsewhere, no doubt.”It’s a frank letter, so I may as well respond in kind. Writing about Manchester City, at this stage, is difficult. Everyone knows the context. Every avenue for original thought on that subject has long been clogged. But merely “following the sport” is unsatisfactory, too, for two reasons.The first is that leaving the context to others is a professional dereliction. The general idea is to present the full picture, rather than merely one aspect of it. To ignore everything else that Manchester City represents is, effectively, to choose a side. (Perhaps not ignoring it is, too.) The second, and more important, reason is that it is impossible to separate the two: The sport and the financial, political and diplomatic project are inextricably bound together, because the former is the manifestation of the latter.Elena Zlatnik’s disappointment is rather better placed, I think. “If I were married to a footballer, or the daughter of one, I would be outraged if he chose to play in Saudi Arabia,” she wrote. “Anyone who is already rich from years in Europe’s top leagues but chooses to go to a place where his wife can’t wear what she wants, can’t go out by herself or with a male friend, can’t play football herself, is an anti-feminist.”They have already painted murals of Lionel Messi in Miami.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressAnd let’s finish with a slightly more uplifting subject. “This Lionel Messi business has me wondering: Who, outside of Miami, has the most to gain from his arrival?” asked Austin Underhill. “Millions of new fans are coming to Major League Soccer. Thousands will stay even after he leaves. Who are they going to follow?”My guess is that there are two ideas running in parallel here. One is that Inter Miami dominates the sudden attention, and converts at least a portion of it into long-term interest. The second — a corollary, really — is that those who tune in for Messi eventually stay because of everything else M.L.S. offers. Predicting how that will manifest, though, is tricky. Perhaps it will be a team that beats Miami? Perhaps it will be a team that loses pluckily? Or perhaps it won’t work like that at all, and the counterweight to the spike in interest that having Messi generates is the drop that comes when he is gone. More

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      Mbappé’s Split With P.S.G. Widens Into a War of Words

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      In dueling statements, the French striker and Paris St.-Germain disputed basic facts about the breakdown of their relationship.The summer’s biggest soccer soap opera may have just begun.One day after news broke that Kylian Mbappé, the French star of Paris St.-Germain, had told the club via letter that he would not extend his contract beyond 2024, Mbappé broke his silence.In a statement and on social media, Mbappé said his decision not to extend his contract had been communicated to P.S.G. last summer, a declaration that was immediately rejected by the club. And on social media, Mbappé denied a French newspaper report that he wants to join Real Madrid this summer, calling any such suggestion “lies.”He was, he wrote on Twitter, “very happy” at the club.MENSONGES…❌En même temps plus c’est gros plus ça passe. J’ai déjà dis que je vais continuer la saison prochaine au PSG où je suis très heureux. https://t.co/QTsoBQvZKU— Kylian Mbappé (@KMbappe) June 13, 2023
      By then, however, the player and the club were engaged in a contentious, and very public, back and forth.P.S.G. officials had privately expressed shock and surprise on Monday after receiving the letter informing them that Mbappé would leave the club next summer, which had been leaked to French news media before it arrived at the club’s offices. The team believed it had been making progress in negotiations over a new multiyear contract, according to an executive familiar with the negotiations who was not authorized to discuss the sensitive talks publicly.But in a statement sent to France’s national news agency on behalf of Mbappé, the player’s representatives denied there had been any negotiation on a contract extension and said the letter was merely a written confirmation of what Mbappé had told the club a year ago, less than two months after signing his current nine-figure deal. The club knew then, Mbappé’s side said, that he would not be taking up his option to remain with the team for a third year, despite holding up a team jersey with the year “2025” printed on the back at his signing ceremony.The club made no public statements about Mbappé or his plans on Monday. But after his claim that he had never discussed renewing his contract, it issued a curt response. “It is emphatically untrue to say Mbappé’s team have not been involved in renewal discussions,” a club spokesman said.The rising divide between Mbappé, one of the world’s most famous athletes, and the club, one of the richest teams in European soccer, could lead to an endgame P.S.G. had hoped to avoid: Mbappé’s exit from Paris, his hometown, perhaps as soon as this summer.But as was the case during a similar period of brinkmanship last summer, the possibility remains that player and club could still reconcile — but only if he agrees to change his stance and sign a contract extension.Mbappé in the stands at Sunday’s French Open men’s final. He said suggestions that he was trying to force P.S.G. to sell him to Real Madrid this summer were “lies.”Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesMbappé’s statement said his intention was to stay in Paris for the final year of his current contract before moving on. But the statement also raised unanswered questions, including why the letter had been signed and dated July 15, 2022, the day he said he informed the club verbally of his intentions, but only delivered to the club this week.It also ensured that Mbappé’s club status will be the talk of soccer for the second straight summer.Last year, it required the personal intervention of the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, to finally persuade Mbappé to commit to at least a few more years in Paris. Now the club is gaming out possible outcomes: Should it sell Mbappé’s playing rights immediately, rather than risk losing him for nothing as a free agent next year? Or can it find a way to persuade a club to pay a sizable transfer fee now to secure the promise of Mbappé’s signature once his P.S.G. contract ends?What is unthinkable, at least from P.S.G.’s perspective, is for the club to receive nothing for a player in which it has invested more than $500 million since his arrival in 2017. Just last year, P.S.G. paid a signing bonus of more than $100 million to seal his new contract. Now, club officials fear Mbappé has already given his word to Real Madrid that he will sign with the Spanish club.Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, did little to tamp down that paranoia this week, when he responded positively to a question from a fan about whether the Spanish club would recruit Mbappé. Pérez replied that Madrid would pursue the French star, “but not this year.”For now, Mbappé has reiterated in his statement his intention to stay in Paris for one more season.“After maintaining publicly in recent weeks that he would be a P.S.G. player next season, Kylian Mbappé has not asked to leave this summer and has just confirmed to the club that he would not be activating the extra year,” read the statement attributed to Mbappé and his representatives.The publication of the letter by the French news media before the club had received it, the statement said, had “the sole aim of damaging their image and the discussions with the club.”P.S.G. had expected that Mbappé would eventually move on, and club officials knew — given his stated affinity for Real Madrid — that any negotiations to extend his contract might have failed. But the club did not expect his intentions to be made public via Monday’s letter, according to the executive familiar with the talks between the club and the player. The executive said the P.S.G. president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, had discussed the matter with Mbappé’s mother, Fayza Lamari, and that other club executives had reached out to Mbappé directly. But there was little clarity over what had happened, only confirmation of the player’s intention to leave. More

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      Kylian Mbappé Tells P.S.G. He Won’t Extend Contract in 2024

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      Mbappé has one year left on his current deal. His decision not to extend it could force a long-awaited move to Real Madrid.First it lost Lionel Messi. Now Paris St.-Germain, the Qatar-backed French soccer champion, could be facing the loss of another of the game’s biggest stars: Kylian Mbappé.Mbappé, 24, one of the world’s most famous athletes and the cornerstone of the club’s plans to rebuild its identity around a core of top French talent, has informed P.S.G. in a letter that he will not renew his contract when it expires next June, according to an executive familiar with the discussions between Mbappé and P.S.G. The executive was not authorized to speak publicly about the talks, given their sensitive nature.Mbappé’s decision could force P.S.G. to consider a move it would prefer to avoid: selling Mbappé’s playing rights as soon as this summer, rather than risk losing him for nothing when his deal expires. If the club does entertain offers for Mbappé, P.S.G. will be expected to demand a price well in excess of $200 million, and possibly one that might eclipse the world record for a player.P.S.G.’s top officials were surprised by Mbappé’s letter, according to the executive, and learned of it after first being contacted by a French news outlet claiming to have received a copy of it before it was sent to the club. A spokeswoman for Mbappé did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives of P.S.G. also did not comment on the letter or how the club was informed of Mbappé’s intentions, which were first reported by the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.Mbappé, center, helped P.S.G. collect another French league title this season.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesP.S.G. had faced a similar crisis over Mbappé’s future only last summer, as the forward, then out of contract, had been poised to join Real Madrid before a last-gasp effort, and cold, hard cash, persuaded him to stay in Paris. Keeping him was a priority for Qatar, which has bankrolled P.S.G. for more than a decade and was eager to keep its team’s biggest star in its colors during a year when it was to host the men’s World Cup.The contract Mbappé eventually signed was a two-year deal, with a player option for a third season. In his letter, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times, Mbappé told the team that he would not exercise the option, meaning his current contract, and most likely his association with P.S.G., will end after the coming season — unless P.S.G. finds a team willing to pay to acquire him sooner.Once again, the most likely destination for Mbappé is Real Madrid, the Spanish club that was his favorite team when he was a boy, and which offered him the richest contract in its history only a year ago.Since then, Mbappé’s star has only grown, notably at the World Cup in Qatar, where he led France to the final against Messi and Argentina. Mbappé almost single-handedly wrestled a second consecutive championship to France by scoring all three of his team’s goals in a thrilling final that Argentina won in a penalty-kick shootout.Both Messi and Mbappé then returned to Paris and helped lead P.S.G. to its second straight French league championship.Mbappé’s stated desire to leave P.S.G. comes only days after Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, responded positively to a question from a fan about whether the Spanish club would recruit Mbappé. Pérez replied that it would, “but not this year.” That may be about to change.Last summer, in an interview with The Times ahead of the European season and the World Cup, Mbappé discussed his admiration for Real Madrid, a club that had invited him to Spain to train even before he reached his teens, and whose stars once peered out at him from posters on the wall of his childhood bedroom. After his invitation to train in Madrid, Mbappé vowed to return to the club one day, he said, but his decision to reject a record offer from Madrid to re-sign with P.S.G. had raised doubts about whether his dream would ever be realized.“You never know what’s going to happen,” Mbappé said at the time, acknowledging that even though he had not played for Real Madrid, the team had orbited his professional career in the most profound way. “You’ve never been there, but it seems like it’s like your house, or something like this.”Real Madrid’s presence in negotiations last year had helped bid up Mbappé’s price. When Real Madrid offered a contract worth more than $250 million over three years, P.S.G. was forced to counter with an even richer deal, one that included the opt-out clause he now plans to exercise.While P.S.G. was not particularly sad to see the back of Messi after his two seasons in France, the potential loss of Mbappé, a French national treasure groomed in the Paris banlieues, the ring of suburbs and satellite towns that surround the capital, would herald a major crisis about the direction of the club.Mbappé had largely escaped the wrath of the club’s supporters for a season that yielded yet another French title, a success that has now become so commonplace that it is hardly celebrated, but included another year of failure in the Champions League, the biggest prize in European soccer.Mbappé with Lionel Messi, who has already left P.S.G., and Neymar, who might.Carl Recine/Action Images, via ReutersMessi, in his final months with the team, became an object of scorn: jeered by fans during matches and suspended for two weeks by the club after an unauthorized late-season vacation to Saudi Arabia. Fans this season also voiced their anger at other key players, including Neymar, the Brazilian who with Messi and Mbappé formed the most-feared forward line in soccer. After signing his extension with P.S.G. in 2022, Mbappé said in an interview in New York that his decision to stay with the club was partly out of a desire not to leave the club as a free agent, thus depriving it of a nine-figure transfer fee. “I think even if I was a great player, and I wrote the history in the past in the league, and with the national team, it was not the best way to leave,” he said. Now he and the club find themselves in exactly the same situation.Under his current deal, Mbappé had until July 31 to inform the club whether he would sign up to automatically extend his contract on terms that the club believes are the richest in European soccer. In the months before sending his letter this week, Mbappé’s family and his lawyer had been in discussions with the club about a new multiyear agreement.His apparent desire to move could mean a reprise of the same soap opera that gripped France last year, when even France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, was enlisted to persuade Mbappé to remain in France as it prepared to defend the World Cup title it won in 2018.For P.S.G. the biggest impediment to winning over Mbappé again is not a financial one, but a sporting one. The team, which despite its routine domestic success, seems to be locked in a perennial crisis behind the scenes: It is already facing a rebuild on and off the field, including the hiring of a new coach for the second straight summer.Messi’s departure — he has expressed a desire to join Inter Miami in the United States — was predicted, and the club is open to selling Neymar as it retools. Losing Mbappé, too, under the circumstances, could plunge a team long known for its stars into a worrying period of uncertainty. More

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      P.S.G.’s Star System Has Run Its Course

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      Even with Messi, Mbappé and Neymar, the French champion is a Champions League also-ran once again. Is buying local the way forward?Nobody at Paris St.-Germain seemed particularly upset at being knocked out of the Champions League. Christophe Galtier, the coach, made all the right noises, of course. It was a terrible disappointment, he said. A great shame, because this is a competition that really means a lot to the club. Very sad for all concerned.Kylian Mbappé, meanwhile, came across so phlegmatic that he seemed almost detached, as if the whole thing had happened only in the abstract. He had promised that P.S.G. would do the best it could in the Champions League, he said. So it must logically follow that being eliminated by Bayern Munich in the round of 16 was the best it could do. “That is our maximum,” Mbappé said.Certainly, there was none of the fury or frustration that has typically greeted P.S.G.’s shortfalls in this competition over the last decade. None of the club’s executives tried to barge into the referees’ room to complain about a decision. There was no boiling indignation or bubbling sense of injustice. Just as it had on the field, P.S.G. slipped from view without rage or rancor.It would be easy to attribute that meekness to familiarity. After all, failing in the last 16 of the Champions League is kind of what P.S.G. does: Writing in L’Equipe, Vincent Duluc referred to it as the club’s “culture.” It has lost at this stage in eight of the last 10 seasons. It still hurts, of course, but it does not hurt as much, not when you are steeled for the blow.New cast, same ending.Andreas Schaad/Associated PressThere is, though, a kinder diagnosis. After a decade in which they have spent an obscene amount of state-supplied money putting together one of the most expensive, star-spangled squads ever conceived — gathering immense, unchecked political power and dangerously distorting the financial landscape of European soccer in the process — the power brokers at P.S.G. have, belatedly, started to wonder if they are doing this whole thing wrong.The club’s Qatari leaders have realized that what they would call their “squad-building model” has left the club with an unbalanced, ill-fitting sort of a team, one that any manager would struggle to forge into a cogent unit.They have heard the long, consistent complaints from the club’s fans that they cannot identify with a motley collection of superstars, picked up and plucked down with little apparent rhyme or reason beyond how many followers they have on Instagram. And they have, at last, decided to do something about it.There is, within the club, a desire to repurpose the squad this summer so that it has not just a more French flavor, but a more distinctly Parisian one. The French capital has, after all, been the most fertile proving ground in world soccer for years. It has long been absurd that it has had only the dimmest reflection in the city’s only top-flight team, not least because a team stocked with local talent is effectively a shortcut to a genuine identity, one that fans appreciate and cherish.That will mean, as the plan runs, more opportunities for players from the club’s youth system. It was telling that P.S.G. finished Wednesday’s game with two teenage prospects on the field in Munich: defender El Chadaille Bitshiabu and midfielder Warren Zaïre-Emery, neither of whom is old enough to rent a car.El Chadaille Bitshiabu, a 17-year-old defender from the Paris suburbs, made his Champions League debut on Wednesday.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that kind of reconstruction will also require the club to repatriate some of the prospects who eluded its grasp in the recent past, the players whose successes elsewhere effectively function as an ongoing rebuke of P.S.G.’s failure to make the most of the talent on its doorstep.That will not be a cheap endeavor. Marcus Thuram, the Borussia Mönchengladbach forward, may be out of contract this summer, but his club teammate Manu Koné is not. Neither is Randal Kolo Muani, the France international currently with Eintracht Frankfurt. Koné and Kolo Muani have been identified as prospective recruits for this new-look P.S.G. The club cannot expect a discount for buying local.That is not the only point at which the theory — logically sound though it may be — collides with an unhelpful reality. It is not really possible to “overhaul” a squad, not in the way that the news media presents it, fans understand it and executives tend to mean it.It is all very well that P.S.G. wants to add more Parisian players to its ranks, but what does that mean for the squad that is currently in situ, the one made up of highly decorated internationals on generous, legally enforceable contracts?While it is vaguely feasible that Lionel Messi will take one decision, at least, out of P.S.G.’s hands by electing to move back to Barcelona, or back to Argentina, or by deciding to fill the only gap on his glistening résumé and spend a couple of years being taught the finer points of the game by Phil Neville in Miami. (The fact that P.S.G. would ideally like both to rip up its squad and start again and extend Messi’s contract is an irony the club appears not to have noticed.)Kylian Mbappé, Neymar and Lionel Messi remain, for now, the centerpieces of an imperfect team.Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersBut while Messi, like Neymar, draws much of the focus, they are not really the problem. Far more complex are their teammates, the ones earning P.S.G. money and playing Champions League soccer who would have to be persuaded to forgo at least one of those things to allow the club to accommodate the reinforcements.How many teams are there, for example, who would both be willing and able to match Marco Verratti’s salary? And how many of those clubs would Marco Verratti actually want to join? Or would P.S.G. find itself with a squad caught between two eras: half-stocked with young Parisian players, restored to the hometown club that scorned them, and half-filled with the remnants of its flawed, futile past?That is the issue, of course, with trying to impose an identity on a team, rather than allowing one to develop organically. And regardless of the provenance of the players, that is precisely what P.S.G. would be trying to do: turn the club, overnight, into a sort of high-status Athletic Bilbao, just as it has spent a decade trying to craft an image of Barcelona-en-Seine.It would not be authentic, not in any real sense. It would simply be an identity that can be assumed for a while and then discarded whenever it is convenient, just as all the others have been. It would, effectively, be nothing but a rebranding. And it is difficult to believe that it would lead to any other destination to the one that P.S.G. knows so well: the one where the disappointment is so familiar that it no longer hurts the way it once did, where defeat is borne not with anger but weary resignation, where everything has to change but nothing really will.Two Bad OptionsPhilippe Diallo said he was left with no choice except to fire France’s coach, Corinne Diacre.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCorinne Diacre can take pride, really, in lasting this long. She was, eventually, dismissed from her post as coach of the French women’s team on Thursday. But her position had been untenable for the better part of a year, if not more.Senior players had complained about her methods, her managerial style, her selection choices, her approach to communications — basically anything and everything you could possibly think of — before last summer’s European Championship. An ever-growing number of her squad had publicly refused to represent their country as long as she was in charge.In the end, then, the only surprise was that the French soccer federation, the F.F.F., waited so long. “I was confronted by an unease that had already existed for several years,” said Philippe Diallo, the federation’s interim president. “It is up to me to decide it, but I did so by choosing between two bad options.”In speaking to the players, he said, he had been told of “a difficulty between the coach and a certain number” of the squad. He decided he had no choice but to “follow their recommendation,” not least because there is a World Cup in a few months and France would, presumably, want to have most of its best players available to play in it.But while the strength of the players’ feeling is not in doubt, what lies at the root of it is less clear. Diacre is known to be cold, brusque even. She gives the air, certainly, of being an unforgiving, vaguely old-school sort of a coach. She is not, in the words of one colleague, a “natural communicator.”Those are all flaws, of course, but flaws are not the same as fireable offenses. (There has never been a suggestion of anything more untoward at the heart of the French players’ complaints.) It is not necessarily the coach’s job, after all, to be liked by the players. It is not necessarily in the interests of the federation that the players feel empowered to remove any coach that they do not agree with professionally.Diallo, clearly, felt he had no choice but to remove Diacre in the hope of ending the impasse. He is probably right to worry, though, that the precedent is not an encouraging one. More

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      Opening the Post-World Cup Mailbag

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      Was Argentina-France the greatest final ever? Or a dull game with a great finish? Readers have their say, and our columnist holds his ground.For the better part of six weeks, the number has been ticking inexorably higher, the angry red of the icon on the corner of my inbox indicating the urgency of the situation. There was a flood of messages after the end of the World Cup, a steady flow as the holidays started, even a trickle on Christmas Eve, dashed off as gifts were being wrapped and stockings hung.Many of the notes were generous, touching messages of thanks and support, but others contained thoughts and ideas and comments and questions, and though they were all appreciated, they weighed heavy, too: all of those emails left unattended, unanswered, howling at me in their void.Well, New Year, New Me: at last, a chance to sit down and catch up on all of the passionate, intelligent, funny and occasionally downright outraged correspondence that has drifted into my inbox in the last few weeks. Thanks for every single one of them. Even the ones that are, as outlined below, wrong.Let’s start with the subject that seems to have animated more of you than any other: the assertion that December’s World Cup final might have been not just the greatest final of all time, but the greatest game.Perhaps, many of you suggested, that was written in the heat of the moment. It had been a long month in the dissembling unreality of Qatar’s, and FIFA’s, Snow Crash vision of the future. The lights had been so bright and the music so loud that it had, at times, been impossible to think clearly. Maybe that effect lingered?“Your judgment and perspective are usually spot on, but ‘Greatest World Cup final’? Really?” exclaimed Richard Fursland. Just as baffled was Greg Zlotnick: “The first 80 minutes were fairly dreary, and France barely made it into the Argentine half. Extra time was intense and exciting, but does the best game ever start with 80 of the first 90 minutes being lopsided and end in penalty kicks?”Lionel Messi, with the prize he chased for two decades.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStuart Forbes, on the other hand, was straight to the point. “You are drinking the FIFA Kool-Aid,” he suggested, inadvertently offering for free the sort of sponsorship suggestion FIFA would happily pay a consultant a six-figure fee to make.“It was very entertaining, but surely Argentina dominated the first 75 minutes against a distinctly off-color France? Was it really the greatest World Cup final ever? And was the move for Ángel Di María’s goal better than that for Carlos Alberto in 1970?”With the benefit of a couple of weeks of perspective, looking at all of this in the cold light of reality — and there is no colder light of reality than Yorkshire in December — I would say: yes, to both.As the novelist Christopher Priest has put it, there are three parts to a magic trick. The first is the Pledge: something fundamentally routine, unremarkable, such as the first 80 minutes of the final. The second is the Turn: Kylian Mbappé’s devastating two-minute intervention.But both of those are building to the Prestige, the denouement that brings the audience to its feet. What happened in those final 40 minutes at Lusail is not separate from, or in some way diminished by, the relative ordinariness of what preceded it. The slow burn and the sudden ignition are all part of the same trick.Indeed, only one thing might have improved this year’s final: the swift, ruthless judgment of penalties should not count against the majesty of the game, but either Randal Kolo Muani or Lautaro Martínez scoring in the final minute of injury time in extra time would, admittedly, have proved more satisfactory, somehow.Still, though, it is hard to think of a compelling way to answer Robert Lanza’s question. “What other finals would be contenders as the greatest?” he asked, before pitching Uruguay’s victory against Brazil in 1950 as perhaps the most convincing.That was not quite a final, though: The tournament was not a pure knockout then; Brazil would have won the World Cup simply by avoiding defeat. A case can be made for England’s extra-time win against Germany in 1966 — a last-minute equalizer to take the game to extra time, a controversial, match-defining goal — and Argentina’s win in Mexico in 1986.Is it even possible to compare iconic moments from different eras?Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as in 2022, both of those finals had overarching narratives: England’s quest to win its first World Cup in the former; Diego Maradona’s attempt to prove his status as the best player on the planet in the latter. Perhaps the answer is time, and age, and circumstance: The World Cup, after all, means different things to different people. Lionel Messi has been the player of my lifetime; his triumph, his glory, resonates in a way that Bobby Charlton’s or Maradona’s does not, for me.On the goal, there is less scope for mitigation and interpretation. Mary Loch may not even have regarded Di María’s strike as the best of the game — “I believe Mbappé’s second goal was the greatest goal of the final,” she wrote — but I’m inclined to go with the counterargument, as provided by Jurek Patoczka.“I would challenge anybody to show me a goal, anywhere, anytime, that was scored after a sequence of six one-touch passes,” he wrote. “And this was on the grandest stage possible.”Having relitigated all of that — and changed absolutely nobody’s minds in the process — we can move on, grumbling with discontent. Jacqueline Davis wanted to know if this would be the last time we see the World Cup take place in both the Arab world and the European winter.“I heard Saudi Arabia was being encouraged to throw its hat in the ring for 2030,” she wrote. “Would that not present many of the same difficulties as Qatar? Did the experience of 2022 improve the Arab world’s chances?”The answer, there, is unquestionably yes. If anything, Qatar has effectively provided a blueprint for what FIFA would like the World Cup to look like in the future. The nostalgic, romantic choice for 2030 is a South American bid that includes Uruguay, host of the first tournament a century earlier. The practical one, from FIFA’s point of view, is an impossibly wealthy autocracy that can provide the same sort of fantasyland as it enjoyed in Doha.Three men who got everything they wanted out of Qatar’s World Cup.Dan Mullan/Getty ImagesGunnar Birgisson is more concerned by the format of future tournaments. He worries that 32 teams is too few, but that 48 — as planned for 2026 and beyond — means teams that “don’t really have the quality to participate” will end up as seat-fillers and cannon fodder, rendering “qualification in North and South America largely meaningless.”His solution is both original and elegant. “Keep the 32-team format but create more playoffs between teams in different continents as a sort of pre-World Cup tournament,” he suggested. Continents would have a certain number of guaranteed slots, but an additional number of teams would participate in the playoffs, allowing a continent to earn additional spots.That is an idea FIFA has skirted, at times, as part of its ongoing Big Thoughts approach to growth, and it is one that has some merit: retaining the symmetry of the current set-up while allowing for some expansion. The downside, of course, is that it would take longer, and teams that have to go through the extra qualifiers would be at something of a disadvantage for the finals tournament itself.Given that FIFA has accepted that its original plan, for 16 groups of three teams, was as awful as everyone could see it would be as soon as it was mentioned, there is still room for these sorts of ideas to be adopted in time for 2026, though there is a different question occupying Jacob Myers.“What will it take for soccer fandom in America and Major League Soccer to take off following the 2026 World Cup?” he asked. “There has been this thought that the World Cup in the U.S. in 2026 will automatically launch the sport into new heights. There’s likely to be a boost, but this idea of soccer all of a sudden gaining a ton of popularity year-round is offered up without any interrogation of the logistics.”The problem with this question — and we ask a version of it on the other side of the Atlantic, too — is I’m never quite sure what the bar is supposed to be. Does the United States have a popular domestic league? Are attendances pretty strong? Is youth participation booming? Are your television schedules infused with endless soccer coverage that would have been unimaginable a decade ago?It’s very much a yes, to all of the above, right? Of course, M.L.S. can continue to grow in popularity. Viewing figures can go up. Things like the World Cup final will help to bring in new fans. But, from a few thousand miles away, it looks an awful lot like soccer is now embedded in the U.S. sporting consciousness. In such a competitive landscape, that is no mean feat. 2026 is not, in that sense, soccer breaking new ground; it is, if anything, its coming out party, a showcase of just how much it belongs.If that does not convince you, let’s finish on this, from Paul Bauer. “Living in a senior citizen condo complex in New Jersey, I am surrounded by neighbors whose understanding of soccer is that it exists,” he wrote. “This World Cup changed that. After the final, neighbors who never watch approached me and shared with me how much they enjoyed the game. I’m so glad that they now understand my passion for football. The rest will follow.”The Glaringly ObviousCody Gakpo should improve Liverpool’s attack. But attack isn’t Liverpool’s main problem.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJürgen Klopp is, as a rule, right about soccer’s unhealthy obsession with transfers. He is right to be exasperated, and more than a little irritated, by not only the demand for constant churn but the veneration of it, by the deep-seated belief that every problem is a recruitment problem, by the ease with which fans spend their own teams’ money.He must know, by now, that trying to persuade people to his way of thinking and Liverpool’s way of working is — in his own words — like talking to a microwave. But there is something admirable in the fact that he continues doing it. “We signed an outstanding player like Cody Gakpo,” he said last week, “and then next thing you can read is: ‘Who next?’ It’s like we didn’t have a team.”The problem, in this instance, is that those voices telling Klopp to spend money — not just fans, but members of the Premier League’s grand constellation of talking heads — are not doing so because they are bored, or fickle, or because they are unreconstructed spendthrifts. They are doing so because Liverpool, very clearly, has a problem in midfield, one that the $50 million signing of Gakpo — a wide forward — does not address.There might, in time, be a recognized condition in soccer in which a manager’s desire for their advocated approach to be proved right begins to impact, negatively, on their ability to win games. It might be called Mourinho Syndrome, for the camera-shy Portuguese, or Wengeritis, for the noted FIFA apparatchik.Ordinarily, it affects the way a manager wants their team to play, manifesting in a refusal to adopt new methods or ideas, or to amend obvious shortcomings on the field. Klopp is too open-minded, too happy to delegate, to be at risk of that. It is possible, though, that he has reiterated so often that not every problem is to do with personnel that he is either no longer able or no longer willing to recognize when that is precisely the issue. More

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      Pele’s Breakthrough Gave Soccer a Black Star

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      Pelé’s reign atop the most popular sport on earth began in an era defined by political struggles against colonialism and racial inequity around the world.Pelé’s graceful genius was just one part of what made him unforgettable.He was a dervish, a magician, an artist whose speedy precision, bullet drives and twirling bicycle kicks were brush strokes offering a challenge to the staid, stationary, and traditional standards of the game he came to dominate.The soccer field was his canvas, where he created masterpiece after masterpiece, starting at the very beginning of his career. In 1958, he was only 17 and just a few short years removed from learning soccer on the streets of an impoverished Brazilian favela that was his home. But at that year’s World Cup, he scored six goals, including three in the semifinals against France and two in a 5-2 win over Sweden, the home team, to clinch the championship.That’s the genius, precocious and pure.But the other part, what made Pelé the indelible gold standard of the global game, was timing. I do not mean the timing on the field that Pelé possessed — and did he ever. I mean how his rise lined up just right with changes in the world.After winning that 1958 World Cup, Pelé would quickly stride to the top of the most popular sport on earth and remain there for nearly 20 years, in an era defined by political struggles against colonialism and racial inequity around the world.The world changed in ways that lined up perfectly for Pelé, gilding his mystique, and TV was a prime mover.Think about when he emerged. He would solidify his status as the game’s greatest star, the first from the African diaspora to achieve such acclaim, in the 1960s, before topping off his career in the ’70s by pushing Brazil to a third World Cup title. He then attempted to capture the hearts of soccer-skeptical America by playing for the New York Cosmos. Television became ubiquitous, and so too did Pelé.Pelé drives past Antonio Girardo (6) of Napoli to score one of his two goals for Santos in an exhibition match on Randall’s Island in 1968.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesGrace and genius and the luck of perfect timing. That’s Pelé.It was just a few short weeks ago, on Dec. 18, when we once again saw Pelé-style brilliance displayed at the World Cup. Argentina defeated the reigning champion, France, on the wind of penalty kicks. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé conjured a final of such tension and quality that many called it the greatest World Cup game.It shredded nerves, brought tears of joy and pain in equal measure, and spawned a new round of arguments. Who is better — Messi or Mbappé? And more than that, with Messi finally fulfilling his World Cup dream, did he have a case as greatest soccer player of all time?Could the whirling Argentine be better than Pelé? Or had he not yet topped his countryman, Diego Maradona?That argument will not be solved here. It could go on until the end of time. But notice the throughline: Pelé is the ultimate measure.Only one player is held in such high regard that he is seen as the prime example of greatness by which all others should be compared. Sports evolve constantly, but evolution must begin somewhere.Pelé was soccer’s Big Bang. The great players of the present day, and of the future, will follow his lead.There is another, less talked about way that Pelé was unique. He was Black and he burst forward into the global consciousness when people of color around the world were clamoring anew against entrenched power. This cannot be overlooked.Nuance is needed here, for Pelé was famously — some would say infamously — agnostic regarding the great struggles of the day. He shared the same élan and mastery as another champion of the era, Muhammad Ali, yet he lacked Ali’s outspoken conviction.“Ultimately I don’t understand anything about politics,” he said in a 2021 documentary.Pelé shared the same élan and mastery as another champion of the era, Muhammad Ali, yet he lacked Ali’s outspoken conviction away from competition.Richard Drew/Associated PressOf course, he endured plenty of criticism for not standing up to the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for roughly two decades, beginning in 1964 and lasting through Brazil’s victory in 1970.“A lot of people look less at what he did on the pitch, and more at what he did off of it,” said Paulo César Vasconcellos, a Brazilian journalist, in the documentary. “Off the pitch, he’s characterized by his political neutrality. At that moment in history, that worked against him.”But not every prominent athlete needs to be a firebrand. And it would be a mistake to cast judgment on Pelé while failing to recognize the deep history of Brazil and how its particular culture shaped and muted Black citizens for centuries.He was not Ali. Being Pelé was feat enough to push the world forward. A Black athlete who stirred a soul-deep passion in virtually every corner of the world. A Black athlete not just dominating, not just bringing a breathtaking aesthetic to the pitch, but becoming the mold by which all others are compared.Now we are on to the next.As fate would have it, in this year’s World Cup championship match defeat, France’s Mbappé netted a hat trick and won the Golden Boot award, recognizing him as the tournament’s top scorer. Black, lithe like Pelé, speedy like Pelé, possessing touch and alacrity and daring that feels oh-so-very-much like Pelé, Mbappé continues the evolution.In sports, greatness is transposed, and sometimes polished, player to player, era to era. And in soccer, each generational great, each Mbappé or Messi, each Marta or Abby Wambach, each Maradona or Cristiano Ronaldo, each graceful genius who will play the beautiful game of the future, comes created in the mold of Pelé, the one and only. More