Messi, Lionel
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Messi, Ronaldo and Soccer’s Golden Sunset
This year’s World Cup will be the last for some household names, meaning soccer will go into the tournament with one elite and emerge with quite another.In the heady, innocent days of 2016 — before all of the largely dreadful things that have happened since had happened — Nick Serpell was given what was, by the standards of the time, a faintly morbid task.As naïve as it seems in hindsight, a theory had taken hold on social media — the place where all theories take hold — that the year was cursed. It had started, it seemed, with the death of David Bowie, and it did not stop. Alan Rickman died. Zaha Hadid died. Harper Lee died, and Leonard Cohen, and Johan Cruyff, and Muhammad Ali, and Prince.Serpell’s job was to find out whether this really was unusual, or whether it was simply the effect of the public nature of grief in the social media age. As the BBC’s obituaries editor, he searched through the number of prepared obituaries that the broadcaster had published in the first three months of that year — the kind that all news organizations, including The Times, keep on file for a host of well-known figures — and then compared the total to the previous few winters.There had, he found, been a considerable leap: From January to March 2012, for example, only five people deemed worthy of a prewritten obituary had died. It had been eight in 2013, 11 in 2014 and 12 the following year. By 2016, though, that number had skyrocketed: In the first three months alone, Serpell found, the BBC had run 24 ready-made tributes.Serpell, though, remained unconvinced there was a curse; the explanation seemed to him to be far more prosaic. The apparent rise, he divined, was down to the fact that the world was now more than half a century on from the first great flowering of a shared popular culture — with the dawn of television, the growth of pop music and the global reach of Hollywood.Though some of those who had died in early 2016 were distressingly young, many more had been in their 70s and 80s, the products of that blossoming of mass popularity. It was not that a greater proportion of prominent people were dying; it was that there was, 50 years or so after technology made some form of worldwide celebrity more attainable, a much deeper pool of prominent people who might die.That phenomenon has an echo this year in a very different — and thankfully much less mournful — context. The 2022 World Cup will act as a profound watershed for soccer; it will, in a distinct, almost tangible way, mark the ending of one era and the start of another, a generational shift played out live on television.Dani Alves will be 39 when the World Cup opens in November. Brazil is going, but is he?Carl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat it will, almost certainly, provide the conclusion to the international careers of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — assuming Portugal makes it past North Macedonia in its playoff final on Tuesday — has long been assumed. Their starlight is so bright, though, that it has served to obscure all of the other farewells that will come on the kafala-built fields of Qatar.This World Cup will extinguish the light of a whole galaxy. It will, most likely, be the final time Luka Modric, Thiago Silva, Daniel Alves, Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller, Jordi Alba, Ángel Di María, Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani, Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann will grace the grandest stage sports has to offer. Robert Lewandowski, Gareth Bale, Arturo Vidal, Alexis Sánchez and James Rodríguez may yet join them, another clutch of superstars on a valedictory tour.World Cups, of course, have always had that purpose. Just as they are the forge of greatness, they act, too, as the place it takes its bow. It is not especially unusual that players — as Silva and Alves, in particular, have — should continue their careers to ensure one more shot at the greatest prize of all. The 2006 World Cup final was Zinedine Zidane’s last ride, after all.In that light, this World Cup is no different from any other. And yet the sheer numbers suggest something different; they give the impression that soccer will go into the tournament with one elite and emerge from it with quite another. That is not because there is a greater proportion of famous players at the end of their career than normal. It is because there are more famous players, full stop.It is likely that the last 15 years will come to be seen almost exclusively through the lens of Messi and Ronaldo. They have, after all, dominated this era of soccer, and so it is fitting, in many ways, that they should come to define it.Such an interpretation, though, would be reductive. It is better thought of, instead, as soccer’s first truly global age: an era in which fans across the world could watch almost every second of a player’s career, in which the great and the good encountered one another with unprecedented frequency in the Champions League and came into our homes through video games, a time when rare talent clustered together at a handful of superclubs.The generation that will exit the stage in Qatar is the last bastion of the first generation of players who started and ended their journeys in that ecosystem; they are the equivalent of that bloom of mass, shared popular culture that germinated in the 1960s. Lewandowski is far more familiar, far more famous than Gerd Müller, his predecessor at Bayern Munich, ever was. More people will notice when Suárez retires from Uruguay than concerned themselves with Enzo Francescoli’s departure.Luis Suárez collected souvenirs after Uruguay sealed its World Cup place.Pool photo by Matilde CampodonicoEdinson Cavani, like Suárez, will be heading to his fourth World Cup.Pool photo by Raul Martinez That they have been so prominent for so long has as much to do with the scientific and medical advances available as it is their ability. There was a reason, a couple of weeks ago, that the two standout midfield displays in the Champions League, all indefatigable energy and irrepressible dynamism, came from Modric, 36, and Vidal, 34. That level of performance, in that rarefied company, would not have been possible even 20 years ago; it has served to prolong their careers and, in doing so, expand their legacies.Qatar, for many of them, will be their last stand. It will lend the tournament a faint air of sorrow. A whole generation, one that we have watched from the start, one that we have come to know like none before, one that has become part of the fabric of the game, will depart, all at once, and we will, at last, have to say goodbye.That Horse Bolted. Quick, Lock the Door.UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, relented on his efforts to impose a U.S.-style salary cap on European clubs.Vasily Fedosenko/ReutersFinancial Fair Play — no, no, stay with me — was, like deep-dish pizza or the “Sex and the City” reboot, absolutely fine in theory. In the middle of the first decade of this century, it was abundantly clear that European soccer needed to find a way to make its teams less vulnerable to the caprice of reckless owners, to prevent them taking on colossal, unmanageable debts.The problem was with the application. The idea was twisted and contorted by the game’s elite clubs — aided and abetted by pliant governing bodies — until a set of rules that had been intended to promote sustainability became a method to entrench the status quo. Not that it mattered, really, because the punishments for failing to abide by them were pretty quickly proven to be toothless anyway.It is hard to see the system’s successor — the snappily titled financial sustainability regulations — being any more effective. The new guidelines, the product of a decade of squabbling and a year of negotiation, will have little or no impact on the way any of the major teams operate. The regulations’ impact, as before, will be to shut the stable door long after the horse is roaming free in the paddock, eating all of the best grass.By now, it is abundantly clear that the way to manage the central problem in European soccer — the lack of competition engendered by financial imbalance — does not lie in a set of fiscal rules. They are too easily circumvented, too lightly enforced and invariably introduced several years too late.Instead, the solution has to be sporting. The biggest teams will always make the most money — or at least say they make the most money — and will therefore have an advantage when spending is limited to a percentage of income. The more effective way to improve competition, both between clubs and between leagues, is to limit how they can spend it.A hard salary cap, the sort often seen in North American sports, is clearly not something the clubs are prepared to accept. But there is nothing at all to stop UEFA from instituting policies that demand all teams have a significant proportion of homegrown players, or a certain number of squad members under age 23. There is no reason it cannot cap the number of players any team can send out on loan, or even introduce rules that grant effective free agency to players who have not made a specific number of appearances.Any and all of those measures would discourage the hoarding of stars by a handful of teams. In turn, they would allow that talent to be spread more evenly around Europe’s various leagues. They would encourage teams to be more judicious in the market, to think more long-term. They would help to level the playing field not by suppressing some, but by lifting others.Passing on the PainArsenal’s Bukayo Saka complained about rough treatment at the hands of Aston Villa. Nick Potts/Press Association, via Associated PressThe strange thing is that Steven Gerrard knows, better than most, quite how devastating injury can be. By his own estimation, during his career he endured somewhere in the region of 16 operations. He has screws in his hips. He struggles these days to go to the gym.He is aware, too, that the impact is more than physical. A decade or so ago, after missing six months of Liverpool’s season with a groin problem, he admitted that he had been “as low as I have ever been.” He called it the “hardest period of his career.” He felt, at times, as if his “body had given in.”Injury, of course, is unavoidable. Many of the issues Gerrard faced can be attributed to wear and tear, the body buckling under the strain placed on it by any elite athlete. That is, after all, the most common source of injury: not a reckless tackle or a dangerous challenge, but the almost humdrum popping of tightly wound hamstrings or the tearing of overworked ligaments. Gerrard, now the Aston Villa manager, was right to say last weekend that pain is “part of the game.”That does not justify his conclusion, though. The Arsenal winger Bukayo Saka had complained after his team’s 1-0 win against Gerrard’s Villa that his opponents had been “purposefully” targeting him for rough treatment. Gerrard’s response was blunt. Saka, he said, had to “learn, and learn quick” that “it’s not a no-contact sport; tackling is allowed, physicality is allowed.”In part, that can be attributed to ordinary managerial hypocrisy — this was the same Gerrard, after all, who has previously complained that his teams do not “get enough protection” from referees — but it is also, in some way, the passing on of a generational trauma.Just because Gerrard and his peers were exposed to (and occasionally contributed to) a level of brutality that was entirely unnecessary does not mean their successors should have to do the same. Just because injury is part of sports does not mean we should not do all we can to minimize its effects. Players endure enough pain as it is. The game should be seeking to ensure they do not have to go through more than is necessary.CorrespondenceTwo fairly hefty questions dominated this week’s inbox. First, Ian Greig wondered what might happen to the “luxury end” of soccer when “the oligarchs, princes, petty dictators and willing killers of the world come to realize that sports-washing does not work? Who in Newcastle had ever thought about the rate of execution in Saudi Arabia before last weekend?”“When was the last time everyone in Paris had bad thoughts about a Gulf government?” he asked. “I’m willing to bet that there is more than one Qatari prince who understands that the attention brought to their country by the World Cup has not been flattering.”There are, I think, two sides to this. In one sense, I suspect Ian is quite right: I don’t think at least some of these regimes — particularly in Qatar — fully realized the scrutiny that would come with their co-opting of the world’s most popular game. My instinct is that Qatari officials didn’t really expect a decade-long discussion of the kafala system when they set their sights on the World Cup.Qatar: Ready for its close-up?Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockThe other, sadly, is less positive. Sports-washing most definitely does work, because national branding and reputation laundering are only the most superficial aim of the project. It is as much about enmeshing yourself — or your nation — into both the Western consciousness and the Western financial system as slapping “Dubai 2020 Expo” on some advertising boards.Manchester City is a prime example: Abu Dhabi has won plaudits for regenerating part of the city, yes, but much more important is that the club has become a way for the state to establish links with a whole variety of businesses, from tire companies to hedge funds. If you want a relationship with Abu Dhabi, then Manchester City serves as a convenient front door. And in that, it has been hugely successful.The second, even more challenging query comes from Dan Ross. “The real question isn’t, ‘Who is too evil to own a soccer team?’” he wrote, “but ‘Who gets to decide?’” After all, as he noted, “scoundrels can fly any flag.”“The only acceptable answer is that the world decides as a whole,” he concluded. “When a country becomes a pariah by global consensus (notwithstanding a few holdouts), its ruling class should not be allowed to participate in the global economy and culture — or sport.”This does, indeed, appear to be where we have landed, and I’m inclined to agree that there is no truly elegant solution at hand. That is not to say that more could not be done, though: It seems fairly straightforward to me that no nation state — or investment arm of a sovereign wealth fund — should be allowed to own a club, for one. That would apply just as much to Norway as it does to Saudi Arabia.Of course, plenty of people would be willing to find a way around that, and some would doubtless find a way through. But all that means is that it is incumbent on leagues, clubs and federations to make sure they are at least asking the right questions of prospective purchasers. That should not be too much to ask. More
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Lionel Messi Wins Record Seventh Ballon d’Or
The Paris St.-Germain star capped a year in which he led Argentina to the Copa América title by edging Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski.Some of the most illustrious names in soccer’s long history only managed to win the Ballon d’Or, the sport’s most prestigious individual prize, once. George Best, Zinedine Zidane and Eúsebio all have just a single award to their names. Ronaldo, the great Brazilian striker, won two. Johan Cruyff, arguably the finest European player in history, has three.After Monday night, Lionel Messi has seven.Messi, 34, effectively retained the trophy he last won in 2019 — controversially, the award was not handed out by France Football last year because of the coronavirus pandemic — after a year in which he ended his long wait for an international honor, winning the Copa América with Argentina, and left Barcelona, the club where he had spent all of his career, for Paris St.-Germain.When your dad wins an other Ballon d’Or 🙌#ballondor pic.twitter.com/UWKir71mX5— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) November 29, 2021
“It’s incredible to be here again,” Messi said. “Two years ago I thought it was the last time. Winning the Copa América was the key.”“I don’t know how many years I have left,” he added, “but I hope many more.”Messi finished with 613 points in the voting, only 33 more than the runner-up, Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski. In 2019, the last time the trophy was awarded, Messi beat Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk by only seven points.Barcelona may have lost Messi this year, but it still took home some hardware on Monday: Alexia Putellas, a star midfielder on its treble-winning women’s team, became the third winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or, and the teenager Pedri, a rising talent who is already a fixture for Barcelona and Spain’s national team, was honored as the world’s best player under 21.Messi, who had arrived at the gala at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in a shimmering tuxedo, a look matched by his three young sons, was typically soft-spoken in accepting his award. He praised his former teammates at Barcelona and his countrymen with Argentina, and vowed to fight for new trophies with his new club, P.S.G.Messi defeated Lewandowski in voting by 176 journalists and conducted by France Football, which awards the Ballon d’Or (almost) every year. Many experts argued Lewandowski deserved the honor in 2020, when it was not handed out because, organizers said, disruptions to the soccer calendar had made it impossible to judge. Messi said he agreed with that position.“I think you deserved to win the award last year,” Messi told Lewandowski from the stage, calling it “an honor” to stand against him for top honors in 2021.Jorginho, the Brazil-born Italy midfielder, was third in the balloting, reward for a season in which his club team, Chelsea, won the Champions League and Italy won the European Championship. Real Madrid and France striker Karim Benzema was fourth, and Jorginho’s Chelsea midfield partner, N’Golo Kanté, was fifth.Ronaldo, who finished sixth in the voting, was absent from Monday’s ceremony, but his rivalry with Messi was not. On his Instagram account, Ronaldo angrily took issue with a comment made recently by France Football’s editor in chief, Pascal Ferré, in an interview with The New York Times about the award’s prestige.“Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” Ferré said, “and I know that because he has told me.”Ronaldo — despite suggesting as much in other interviews — denied he had made the comment, saying, “Ferré lied, used my name to promote himself and to promote the publication he works for.”“It is unacceptable,” he added, “that the person responsible for awarding such a prestigious prize could lie in this way, in absolute disrespect for someone who has always respected France Football and the Ballon d’Or.”Though 2021 has hardly been a vintage year by Messi’s standards — Barcelona was beaten to the Spanish title by Atlético Madrid and eliminated from last season’s Champions League in the round of 16 — his achievement with Argentina, as well as the attention drawn by his move to France after winning six Ballons d’Or at Barcelona, was enough to convince the award’s jurors.That Messi had never won an international trophy with his national team had always been held against him in the debate over whether he warrants the status as soccer’s greatest ever player. His rivals, after all, had triumphed with their countries as well as their clubs: Pelé led Brazil to three World Cups, Diego Maradona inspired Argentina to one and Cristiano Ronaldo helped Portugal claim the European Championship in 2016.Messi finally put that idea to rest in this summer’s Copa América, breaking down in tears on the field after Ángel Di María’s goal had given Argentina its first international trophy since 1993, beating Brazil, the host, in the final.His tally of seven Ballons d’Or now puts him two clear of Ronaldo, his great rival: The Portuguese forward remains on five, but he has not won the prize since 2017, and at age 36 he is more than two years older than Messi.Putellas, the 27-year-old midfielder who is captain of Barcelona’s all-conquering women’s team, won the women’s Ballon d’Or. Her victory completed a clean sweep of last season’s prizes, after she led her Barcelona side to the Champions League title and a league and cup double in Spain, and then was honored as Europe’s player of the year.Her main rivals for the Ballon d’Or were mostly familiar faces: Barcelona had become the first women’s team to register five nominees in a single year, and two of Putellas’s teammates — Jennifer Hermoso, who was second, and Lieke Martens, who was fifth — finished in the top five in the voting.“Honestly it’s a bit emotional, and very special,” Putellas said. “It’s great to be here with all of my teammates, since we have lived and experienced so much together, especially in the past year.”“This is an individual prize,” she added, “but football is a team sport.” More - in Soccer
The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?
The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?Rory SmithReporting on global soccer ⚽️Michel Euler/Associated PressWith Qatar 2022, arguably the most controversial World Cup in modern soccer history, now a year away, the field is starting to take shape.This is where things stand so far → More
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For Qatar, the World Cup’s Glamour Is the Payoff
As the 2022 field starts to take shape, there is a sense that the host nation, after a decade of scrutiny and criticism, will at last get the return it expected.There have been times, over the last 11 years, over a decade of acrimony and accusation and controversy and scandal, when it has felt entirely reasonable to ask whether, deep down, in private moments and surreptitious whispers, some of those involved in winning the 2022 World Cup for Qatar might have wondered whether it has all been worth it.The cost of the project, the stadiums summoned from dust, the cities imagined out of nothing, the thousands of acres of grass and trees grown in desert sand, was all anticipated, built into the proposal. But those hundreds of billions are not the only price that has been paid.That one decision changed soccer on some fundamental, irrevocable level. This week, when the Premier League revealed its calendar for next season, it proudly claimed that it had hit upon a way to “limit” the impact of World Cup 2022 to a single campaign. In one sense, that is true. In another, the impact of the tournament is such that it has shot through the very fabric of the sport.Awarding the tournament to Qatar brought down an entire court of grasping, grifting princelings at FIFA. It led to sweeping anticorruption investigations and dawn raids on luxury hotels. It landed more than a few people on wanted lists and in jail. It ended the career of Michel Platini. Ultimately, it toppled Sepp Blatter.More than that, it undermined trust — perhaps fatally — in the body that is supposed to represent the best interests of the game. It violently ruptured the relationships between FIFA and all of the organizations that feed into it: the confederations, leagues, clubs, unions and fans.The Al Thumama stadium, which was christened last month, is one of eight constructed or refurbished for use at next year’s World Cup.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe vote for Qatar in 2010 is not quite soccer’s original sin: The antipathy and mistrust that characterizes the sport predates the moment Blatter, to an audible gasp, revealed that Qatar would stage the biggest — second-biggest, for readers in the United States — sporting event in the world. But it is difficult not to believe that, from that day on, those divisions became more pronounced, more concrete, more bilious, and that the game has never recovered.Those involved in the vote, those targeted by the investigations, those hounded out of office or raised from their beds by the Swiss police would, most likely, be of the view that perhaps it might have been better if Australia had won.So, too, of course, would those migrant workers who have died during Qatar’s unprecedented building spree in the years since it won hosting rights. Estimates of how many have lost their lives for a nation’s quixotic ambition vary: 38, apparently, according to the event’s organizing committee; 6,500 from five South Asian nations alone, according to a less invested investigation. Tragically, the latter report is likely to be the more accurate. Either number is too high.But if next year’s tournament has not been worth it for soccer, and has not been worth it for those whose lives were lost — or the many tens of thousands more whose safety has been put at risk — it has also been hard to make a case that Qatar has emerged well from the project.In one light, after all, these last 11 years have brought nothing but scrutiny: on the system of indentured labor that compelled all those migrant workers to go to work in searing heat on projects of triumphal scale and Midean hubris, and prevented them from leaving the country, from going home, without their employer’s permission; on Qatar’s abysmal human rights record; on its intolerance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.This was not, it is likely, the reaction that Qatar expected when it won the vote, when the streets of Doha filled with a delirious populace, when it seemed to take top billing on the world stage. Its aims may have been more subtle, more complex than just one blast of good P.R., but it is safe to assume the feedback has not quite been as the bid’s masterminds would have hoped.And yet, it is now that they might start to feel that — for all the trouble, for all the fury, for all the glaring spotlight — they will, somehow, still, get the return they wanted. There is a glamour to a World Cup: a dazzling, bewitching quality, so strong that even now, a year out, it is possible to sense its first glimmers.This is the week, after all, that the tournament’s field will finally start to take shape. Only four teams have qualified so far — the host, Germany, Denmark and, after a win on Thursday, Brazil — but by next Wednesday, more than half of the European contingent will have been decided. Spain and England, surely; most likely France, the defending champion, and Belgium; possibly Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands.Brazil, which hasn’t lost a game in qualifying, booked its place in the World Cup with a 1-0 victory over Colombia on Thursday.Sebastiao Moreira/EPA, via ShutterstockNow that Brazil is in, Argentina should be following in its rival’s wake. Mexico should be in a strong position. Iran and South Korea are almost there. Saudi Arabia may well have joined them.The draw remains months away, of course, but that is not the World Cup’s only appeal. This will be the last time either Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi graces soccer’s biggest stage; it will be the final chance for both to cement their legacies. It may be the moment England’s golden generation blossoms. It might prove the stage for South America, for the first time since 2002, to wrest the crown from Europe.It is impossible not to be intrigued by all of those possibilities, to feel the slightest judder of anticipation at what is to come. There is an atavistic thrill to the World Cup: its appeal lies in what it makes you remember, where it takes you back, to your first encounter with its great carnival spirit, the first moment you clapped eyes on this great, global festival.But there is a danger there, too, because that is why Qatar went to such trouble to claim the tournament, why it endured all of the criticism, why it placed all of those workers’ lives in jeopardy: because the World Cup’s power is to make you remember, and in doing so, to make you forget.That is what Qatar has spent $138 billion to acquire: that feeling, that giddy excitement, that irresistible smile. For that, it determined there was no price too high. And that means it is more important now than ever, as the soccer itself begins to work its amnesiac magic, that we do not lose sight of what this tournament has cost.No Next Step on the Ladder (Reprise)Is Steven Gerrard’s latest move just a way station in his career?Francisco Seco/Associated PressThere was something telling about the way Steven Gerrard’s appointment as Aston Villa’s manager was framed. A promising young manager’s taking a considerable step up — in terms of quality of opponent, at least, if not necessarily scale of club — accounted for a portion of the coverage.So, too, did a historic, ambitious — and expensively assembled — team appointing a relative neophyte at a delicate stage of its season, at least partly because of his illustrious playing career (this is a plan that never, absolutely never goes wrong, of course). But more than anything, Aston Villa’s union with Gerrard was presented as a story about another club entirely.It is no secret that Gerrard wishes, one day, to manage Liverpool, the team he supported as a child, and the team he gave the best years of his career. It does not require any great detective work to establish that, in his mind, leaving Rangers — the club to which he delivered the Scottish championship last summer — for Aston Villa is a step on that journey.But it is not a sign of an especially healthy culture that a major decision at a team of Villa’s scale and scope should be seen through the lens of what it might mean for Liverpool. That is a sign that England’s current elite, perhaps, occupy rather too much conceptual space in soccer’s never-ending discourse.That Gerrard sees Villa as a springboard, the logic goes, is good for the club: If he succeeds Jürgen Klopp at Anfield when Klopp’s contract expires in 2024 — the point when Klopp has made plain he intends to leave England — it will be because he had lifted Villa from its current station into a better one.That is not quite the whole story. There is, of course, a risk for Villa in the appointment: It is possible Gerrard will not be able to succeed in England as he did in Scotland. But the greatest risk is for Gerrard, for two reasons. First, it is not entirely clear what Villa regards as success: Is it finishing in the top 10? Is it qualifying for Europe? Is it winning a cup?And second, even more opaque is what form of success he would need to enjoy at Villa to convince Liverpool that he is ready not only to do the job on which he has his heart set, but that he can do it well. Would taking Villa to seventh make him a more compelling candidate than — say — a coach who has won a Bundesliga title, or thrived in the Champions League, or managed a phalanx of superstars? Probably not.It is tempting to believe that, for Gerrard, it may not matter. His bond with Liverpool may be strong enough that anything other than abject failure is the only proof his alma mater requires. But Fenway Sports Group, the club’s owner, is not the sort to be distracted by sentiment, or dazzled by stardust. It will want Gerrard to show he is up to the task. The problem is working out whether it is possible.Just Getting StartedMarta Torrejón and Barcelona thumped Hoffenheim, 4-0, in the Champions League on Wednesday.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesMarta Torrejón does not betray even the slightest hint of envy. She is only 31, but she knows that is old enough, in women’s soccer, effectively to belong to a previous generation. When her career started, she was not fully professional; nor was the game she played, not in Spain. She did not have access to state-of-the-art training facilities until her mid-20s.She has still built an impressive career: she has represented her country — 90 times, no less, before retiring after the 2019 World Cup — and she has been, for eight years, a cornerstone of the Barcelona team that has risen inexorably to become the pre-eminent power in the women’s game.She knows, though, that those who follow in her footsteps may well cast her into shade. What was most striking, talking to those involved with Barcelona Femení last month for an article The Times published this week, was their conviction that they have barely scratched the surface of their potential.“There are girls here who have been in a professional environment since the age of 12,” Markel Zubizarreta, the club’s sporting director, said. “The talent is the same, but when they turn professional, they will be much better prepared.”Torrejón has seen that firsthand, as the first products of Barcelona’s investment in youth start to drip feed into the club’s first team. “The players who are 15, 18, 20 have had a physical training that will help them compete at the professional level,” she said.The same process, of course, is playing out at dozens of clubs across Europe, where the first generation to have been given access to the sort of resources their male equivalents have enjoyed for decades are only just emerging. And that raises a compelling question: What if the boom in women’s soccer — in Europe, at least — is not actually the boom at all? What if this is just the prelude?CorrespondenceIt might seem an exaggeration, but this newsletter may have finally reached its zenith, thanks to a single sentence from Shane Thomas. I have an overwhelming sensation of despair, because I am self-aware enough to recognize that I will never write a sentence more compelling than this: “The biggest criticism of Batman is that he uses all his wealth to fight crime, but comparatively little of it to tackle crime’s underlying causes.”It would spoil it, just a little, if I told you how that sentence came up — it was in a thoughtful, cogent email related to last week’s column on the problems caused, and solved, by the presence of outsize individuals in the context of a team — so I will not. Better, I think, to use the time wondering what more Batman could be doing.Leon Joffe, on the other hand, leapt to the defense of a different superhero, though one who, if we are all being honest, also did very little to combat the underlying causes of crime.“I have a different recollection of Roy of the Rovers than the one you describe,” he wrote. “Goals were not only scored by Roy, but always a team effort, with one of the teammates usually passing expertly to the goal scorer. Blaming a young soccer captain’s playing style, years later, on the comic book, is quite weird.”Lana Harrigan, meanwhile, pointed out that Ronaldo can hardly be blamed for Manchester United’s defense. “I’m no tactician,” Lana wrote, “but the defense looks pitiful at times.” Gary Brown went one step further, arguing that “the argument that Ronaldo and the pressing game don’t mix would be stronger if United had routinely played a pressing came before his return. Which we didn’t. Perhaps CR7 makes it difficult to improve that part of the game, but I don’t think he’s single-handedly turned off something that in truth was scarcely ever turned on.”Do Manchester United’s issues run deeper than Cristiano Ronaldo? Hmmm ….Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd we’ll finish, in finest newsletter style, with one of the blue-sky ideas that — until we got into the business of critiquing Batman’s methods — has long been this missive’s strong suit.“I am bothered by the intentional use of fouls to benefit a team,” wrote Paul Sumpter. “It is a real detriment to the excitement of the game, but issuing red cards risks ruining the contest, as it did during the Liverpool-Atlético Madrid game. The hope would be that the threat of a red card would largely stop players committing professional fouls. I am not so sure. So, I would like to see an experiment whereby the offending player is sent off but the team can replace them with a substitute, if they have not already used all their allowed substitutes.”This is an idea worth exploring — as is an orange card, where a player guilty of a tactical foul is taken out of the game for 10 minutes, say — but my immediate worry would be that this basically guarantees three significant tactical fouls per team, per game. More
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In One Moment, Messi and P.S.G. Make It All Work
The Lionel Messi goal that completed a Champions League win over Manchester City offered a flash of his past, and a glimpse of his new club’s future.PARIS — Lionel Messi picked the ball up in that spot, the one that has served as the starting point for so many of his finest moments, the one that he knows so well that it might as well be his spot. It has, for 15 years, been his base camp, his happy place: a few yards inside from the right touchline, a few yards from halfway.He was standing still as he controlled it. He had been standing still for some time, by that stage. Paris St.-Germain had taken an early lead, through Idrissa Gueye, and had spent most of the rest of the game desperately trying to fend off Manchester City’s unrelenting attacks.It had maintained its advantage a little through judgment — the industry of Gueye and Ander Herrera, the obduracy of Marquinhos, the sheer, indomitable size and improbable elasticity of Gianluigi Donnarumma — and a little through luck. City cut through, again and again, only for P.S.G. to repel the incursions at the last possible moment.As City, the Premier League champion, turned the screw, the forward line that acts as P.S.G.’s crown jewel seemed to lose interest. At first, both Neymar and Kylian Mbappé had lent a hand, dutifully following their runners, doggedly helping out their fullbacks. Even Messi, in the first half-hour or so, had made a point of hurrying and harrying his opponents.The longer the game wore on, though, the more sporadic those efforts became. That has always been the question with this iteration of P.S.G., of course: For all its formidable talent, how can a team built around three superstars — three players who, on most sides, would have other players to do the dirty work for them — thrive against the well-oiled machines that, for the most part, dominate modern soccer?In one sense, City and P.S.G. are mirror images. Both have been designed almost from scratch. Both are fueled by the bottomless wealth of Gulf States. Both stand for projects that see soccer as a means in some greater game, not as an end in itself. And both have been constructed as platforms for and monuments to individuals.The only differences, really, are that the individuals at the heart of the P.S.G. project run around on the field while City’s issues instructions from the side, and that City’s approach dovetails more neatly with the exigencies of the elite game: The system crafted by Pep Guardiola is king, and his billion-dollar squad must submit to it. At P.S.G., the system is secondary to the stars.As Tuesday’s game wore on, it felt as if that would be the lesson to be drawn. City had the ball. P.S.G. chased shadows. Or, rather, most of P.S.G.’s players did. Gueye and Herrera and the indefatigable Marco Verratti closed down spaces and put out fires. Increasingly, Messi and Neymar and Mbappé ambled around, no longer willing to chase back. A tenet of modern soccer said that the host’s luck could not last.Then Messi got the ball. He has to work through the gears just a little these days, so he gathered speed as he approached City’s penalty area, drifting just a touch more to the center with every step, as if drawn to the edge of the box by the gravity of the goal itself.It is here that Messi has always come to life. He was at full speed, but there was no sense of haste; it seemed he was waiting for all of the other moving parts of the scene to be just so before he played his hand. He saw Achraf Hakimi bursting down the right, unbalancing City’s shape. He saw Mbappé burst across the box at an angle. He waited.For much of the match, Messi had failed to play his usual role as the center of attention.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Messi signed with P.S.G., it was the prospect of seeing him play alongside Neymar — for so long his heir apparent — and Mbappé, the player most likely to inherit his crown as the best player in the world, that made the whole thing palatable.He did not, after all, want to leave Barcelona: He made that perfectly clear. The greatest player of his, or perhaps any, generation had been forced to leave only because of the suicidal economics of the modern game. When it emerged that Barcelona could no longer pay him, he had little choice but to sign for one of two clubs.Only P.S.G. and City, the two teams for whom money is no object, the two teams who have done so much to distort soccer’s economics, the two teams backed by nation states using the world’s most popular sport as a geopolitical pawn, could afford him. There was no romance here; it was cold, heartless business, nothing more.The chemistry has not been immediate. Mbappé and Neymar, occasionally, seem to butt heads, one complaining that the other does not share the ball quite as much as he might. Messi’s start had been slow, too, as he recovered from a delayed preseason. Even the Harlem Globetrotters, after all, have to practice their tricks.For much of this game, too, the P.S.G. trio seemed to be getting to know one another. They combined fitfully, in bursts, flickering to life and then subsiding again. It was possible to wonder if this grand experiment, this faintly pubescent attempt to bring FIFA Ultimate Team to life might be doomed to failure.On the edge of the box, Messi finally released the ball. There is a clairvoyant streak to Messi’s genius: It is not just that he seems to see the field from on high, a shifting geometric pattern playing out beneath him, but that he gives the impression he can see into the future, too. So when he finally released the ball, it came with instructions. He did not so much pass it to Mbappé as loan it to him. His teammate had little choice but to give it back.Messi did not, perhaps, know quite how Mbappé would do it — the slick back-heel that wrong-footed City’s defenders was a virtuoso testament to the French striker’s own brilliance — but he knew that, if Mbappé did return the ball, it would roll to his other favorite spot: on the arc just outside the box.With Aymeric Laporte snapping at his heels, the ball arrived just as Messi did. There was no time to take a touch, but Messi has never needed time, not here. He swept his left foot through the ball, a motion every bit as smooth and apparently effortless as a Roger Federer forehand.In City’s goal, Éderson set his feet and readied himself to jump. On the replays, the moment when he realized the futility of it was almost visible: the slight sinking look in his eyes as he saw the dip, the fade, the swerve on Messi’s shot.Messi was running for the corner before the ball hit the net, before the crowd had computed the physics, before it was possible, really, to understand that he had done it. The whole thing had taken no more than six or seven seconds, from standstill to bedlam, but that was more than long enough.It remains to be seen if this P.S.G. team, a 2-0 victor on the day, can work well enough to win the Champions League. It will take years to parse what this era of teams backed by unimaginable wealth means to the game, to fully comprehend the change that it has wrought. But for a moment, just a moment, the questions and the concerns did not matter.All there was, just then, was Messi, his arms outstretched, full of joy, and a stadium, with arms aloft, full of awe, marveling at what he had done, at what he can do.Ian Langsdon/EPA, via Shutterstock More
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At F.C. Barcelona, a Sensation Worse Than Sadness
The Camp Nou’s reaction to a humbling defeat in the Champions League was a measure of how far and how fast a mighty team has fallen.They would have expected anger. As Barcelona’s players chased shadows on Tuesday night, as Bayern Munich toyed with them and teased them and tore through them, time and time again, they would almost have been waiting for the fury to come, for the Camp Nou to bare its teeth.That is the way it has always been, after all. Barcelona has never been an easy crowd. The club has long worried that it is, in fact, a theater crowd: sitting there, quietly, demanding to be entertained, quick to make its displeasure known if not just the result, but also the performance, is not up to scratch.There were plenty of points on Tuesday night when the crowd might have turned. After the second goal, perhaps. After yet another uninterrupted Bayern attack. After it became clear there was no way back, not in 90 minutes, and maybe not for some time. The players would certainly not have been surprised by it. They might even have been anticipating it.And yet it did not come. Even as Bayern ran in a third, completing Barcelona’s humiliation, there was no shrill chorus of whistles, no torrent of jeers washing down the stands, no great guttural roar of frustration and disappointment. There were flashes — Sergio Busquets and Sergi Roberto were booed from the field — but they were occasional, fleeting.Instead, the players were subjected to something far more damning, far more telling, infinitely worse: pity.That, more than anything, was a measure of how far and how fast this club has fallen. On a Champions League night, as its team was dismantled by a putative peer and rival, the Camp Nou crowd — among the most demanding in sports, an audience spoiled by a decade of some of the finest soccer in history — was not spitting fury but offering gentle, sincere encouragement.Robert Lewandowski, Thomas Müller and Bayern Munich now set a standard Barcelona can no longer match.Albert Gea/ReutersThe fans sang the name of a teenager, the midfielder Gavi, not because of anything he had done but simply because of what he had not. They applauded when Barcelona threaded a handful of passes together. They urged the team forward. They recognized, in essence, that for the first time in ages, Barcelona needed their support.There is no great profit in dwelling, yet again, on how it has come to this, or in chastising the club for its profligacy, its absurd recruitment, its financial recklessness, its pigheaded belief that the sun would always shine and the good days would last forever.There is no point listing the succession of nadirs that have served as signposts: the defeats in Rome and Liverpool and Lisbon; the loss of Neymar and then, this past summer, of Lionel Messi himself, both to Paris St.-Germain.They have been illusions, after all. Nobody knows quite, not yet, where the bottom might be, how far Barcelona might still fall. In its own way, this defeat to Bayern was no less harrowing than the 8-2 loss in Lisbon a year and a lifetime ago: not as dramatic a collapse, of course, not as eye-catching or as immediately shocking, but just as comprehensive, and just as instructive.It was not just that Bayern was better in every single position: stronger and fitter and more technically adept. It was not just that Bayern was better coached and better organized and more precise.It was that Bayern seemed to be playing modern, elite soccer, full of pressing triggers and rote movements, while Barcelona — for so long the team and the institution that defined cutting-edge — had the air of a team from the past, parachuted in from the 1950s and told that now the game is actually about inverted wingers occupying half-spaces. The 8-2 was, in a certain sense, a freak result. This was not. This was just an illustration of how much better Bayern is, these days, and of how far from the pinnacle Barcelona has drifted.Pedri, Barcelona’s brightest young thing, might be a luxury the club can no longer afford.Albert Gea/ReutersAnd perhaps, in that, there is a glimmer of hope. The era of the superclubs, and the shrieking hyperbole with which those teams are covered, has a distorting effect. Obviously this Barcelona team is weaker than its predecessors, drastically so. Evidently this Barcelona team is a long way short of Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Chelsea and the two or three other teams that might harbor some sort of ambition of winning the Champions League.But it is not, in terms of its raw materials, a bad team by global standards. Marc-André ter Stegen remains one of the finest goalkeepers in the world, and Jordi Alba one of the game’s best left backs. Gerard Piqué is not, all of a sudden, a terrible defender. A midfield built around Pedri and Frenkie De Jong has a rich potential. Once Ansu Fati and Ousmane Dembélé return, there is promise in attack, too.A smart, innovative coach might not be able to turn that team into a Champions League winner, might not even be able to craft a side that could beat Bayern Munich. But there is certainly talent enough there not to be humiliated, not to look passé. Teams like Red Bull Salzburg have only a fraction of Barcelona’s ability — yes, even this Barcelona, reduced as it is — and yet can emerge with credit from games with Europe’s grandest houses.There is no reason to believe that Barcelona, with a more progressive coach than Ronald Koeman in charge, could not level the playing field at least a little. Without question, it should be possible to forge a team that does not look surprised at the fact that an opponent from the Bundesliga might press high up the field.It is likely to be a forlorn hope. There has been little to no indication from Barcelona that this is a club likely to make an imaginative, forward-thinking coaching appointment. The likeliest replacement for Koeman is Xavi Hernández, a player raised in the school of Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola, an echo of the past rather than a glimpse toward the future. Nostalgia is Barcelona’s opium. It dulls the pain, but it deepens the problem.There is no reason to believe it is even a team ready to build around its young talent. After all that cost-cutting this summer, Barcelona celebrated by signing the journeyman Dutch striker Luuk De Jong on loan. It remains a place affixed to the short term. Both Pedri and Fati are out of contract at the end of this season; so parlous are the club’s finances that it may yet find that it cannot retain one or both of them.The bad news? Barcelona’s loss to Bayern on Tuesday might not be the bottom.Albert Gea/ReutersWithout that sort of intervention, then, this is all that is left: a hollow shell, a shadow team, a side that looks like a bootleg imitation of Barcelona rather than Barcelona itself. For more than a decade, those blue and red jerseys represented style and panache and adventure and excellence.The sight of them, for all but the most hardened Real Madrid fans, brought a jolt of excitement, a sharp thrill of expectation to anyone who loved soccer. They were Messi and Ronaldinho and Rivaldo and Romário and Guardiola and Laudrup and Cruyff. They were Berlin in 2015 and Wembley in 2011 and Rome in 2009 and Paris in 2006. They were Real Betis fans standing to applaud in defeat and the Santiago Bernabéu rising to its feet in despair.That is not what you think of when you see Barcelona now. You think, instead, of what it was and what it has become. You think of a club that has had its bones picked clean by its rivals, that has been left grasping at the shadows of its past. You think of how it used to be and how this is not the same. You see a team dressed as Barcelona but not a Barcelona team.Not so long ago Barcelona inspired awe. Now, that has been replaced: by sorrow at how far it has fallen, by regret that it has come to this, and most of all, most damning and most telling of all, infinitely worse, what Barcelona inspires above anything else is what the Camp Nou showed its team, its diminished heirs of impossible giants, on Tuesday night: pity.78 HoursThree days after winning in his return to the Premier League, Cristiano Ronaldo watched from the bench as United lost in the Champions League.Arnd Wiegmann/ReutersThis is how it is with Manchester United, these days. It is endemic, habitual, seemingly scored into the very fabric of the club over the last eight years.On Saturday evening, Old Trafford was lightheaded, still swooning from the sight of Cristiano Ronaldo in a red jersey once more. United had beaten Newcastle. Ronaldo had returned with two goals. The club was top of the Premier League, being spoken of not only as a title contender — and let’s face it, Manchester United, four games into a season, is always a title contender — but as a force restored by the gentle touch of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a colossus once more bestriding the world.By Tuesday night — 78 hours or so later — it felt as if United was on the verge of crisis. It had been beaten, in the last minute of extra time, by Young Boys of Bern, the sort of team that English soccer culture pigheadedly refuses to take seriously, in the sort of game that a Premier League team is told it has to win by a succession of pundits who have never seen its opponents play.What a difference a few days can make in United’s mood.Phil Noble/ReutersSolskjaer’s tactics were under the spotlight. His substitutions were being queried, his choices questioned, his capability doubted. Could United hope to fulfill its soaring ambitions while he remains at the wheel? Would the club be able to rescue its season by qualifying for the last 16 of the Champions League, or was disaster waiting around the corner?The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Manchester United is a very good team. It is stocked with enormously talented players, including one of the greatest of all time. But its squad lacks the coherence of some of its rivals — most notably Manchester City and Chelsea — and its style is not as highly defined as, say, Liverpool’s. Solskjaer is not a dogmatist, like Pep Guardiola, and he is not a tactician in the same league as Thomas Tuchel. The fanfare and the fatalism are both overblown.What is significant, though, is the persistence of both, and how quickly the atmosphere around the club can flit between the two. There is no team quite so volatile in European soccer as the modern Manchester United. That does not necessarily predicate against success — if it did, José Mourinho would have had a very different career — but it does suggest that the club is not quite where it wants, or needs, to be.CorrespondenceAn extended section this week, reflecting the fact that so many of you got in touch to offer your own ideas as to how soccer’s calendar might be amended — and improved — from 2024 onward. I can say with some certainty that the readership of this newsletter is substantially more creative than FIFA’s task force on the subject. Admittedly, that is a low bar, but still: Well done, everyone.Let’s start with Will Clark-Shim, who proves the value of simplicity. “Here’s my uneducated flyer: What about the World Cup every three years? While I appreciate the value of scarcity, it’s a real shame that we don’t get more meaningful intercontinental games between top national teams. A three-year cycle would allow for a World Cup one year, continental tournaments another, and a respite for the men (with the women taking center stage) in the third.”England and the rest of Europe’s women’s teams spent the week preparing for World Cup qualifiers. Will soccer’s new calendar leave room for them?John Sibley/Action Images Via ReutersIt is strange, isn’t it, how we are all in thrall to the tyranny of even numbers? We have major sporting events every four years because that is what the ancient Greeks did — an Olympiad, like a lustrum, is one of my favorite weird units of time — but there’s no real reason for it to be the case now, and there is a neatness to a three-year cycle that is appealing.Arvand Krishnaswamy goes even bigger, asking: “Can’t the World Cup become a knockout cup like the F.A. Cup? Every country participates and like the F.A. Cup you may end up with unexpected victors.” This is hugely impractical, Arvand, but it would be extremely enjoyable. There is, too, the core of an idea here that might work: Would it not be possible to blur the lines more between qualifying and the finals, so that it all feels like one tournament?An alternative from Arthur Amolsch, who sees the value in turning “the regional national team tournaments into World Cup qualifiers. That occurred to me as I watched the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup. The top ‘X’ number of teams would qualify; in CONCACAF, that would be three. Absolute ties would be settled with a one-game playoff in a neutral country.”This would have value in several confederations, and most clearly in South America, except for the fact that it reduces the income streams for everyone, by cutting the number of games. That would, I suspect, make it unpalatable across the board.Adding World Cup qualifying consequences might raise the stakes, and the profile, of continental championships like the Nations League and the Copa América.Stephen R. Sylvanie/USA Today Sports, via ReutersTo his enormous credit, nobody had more ideas than Fernando Gama, whom I have come to think of as a reliable source of common sense. The pick of them were reducing the number of teams in top flights — he proposed a maximum of 16; I would go up to 18 — and condensing “all international matches to a six-week break from mid-December to the end of January.”He would also advocate a clear demarcation of mid-May and June for further international engagements — either more qualifying or a major tournament — with July ring-fenced as a month of vacation for all players every year.Two more, unrelated to the World Cup. The first is from Joe Morris: “Do you think transnational leagues have died a death as an idea to strengthen domestic football among smaller nations? Obviously the Super League was transnational, but that was very much about entrenching the advantages enjoyed by the elite, rather than improving the prospects of a Dinamo Zagreb, IFK Goteborg, Red Star Belgrade or Celtic. Will these ideas be left for good or do you see them making a comeback?”At this point, it feels as if they are not at the forefront of anyone’s mind. Combining the Dutch and Belgian leagues was floated by some Belgian clubs last year, but with little to no support from the other side of the border. That’s a shame: Cross-border leagues, to my mind, are both spectacularly straightforward and hugely needed to help smaller markets close the gap just a little.An F.A. Cup-style format might allow for more World Cup stunners, like Oman’s victory over Japan in a qualifier this month.Agence France-Presse, via Jiji Press/Afp Via Getty ImagesS.K. Gupta, meanwhile, combines the last two editions of the newsletter in one suggestion. “You have covered the problem of players on loan who never play for their own clubs. One of the solutions to these issues would be allowing the consolidation of clubs to include B teams in lower leagues. This would give teams a financial incentive to develop players, give them regular playing time in lower leagues, and not constantly loan them out.”I do not like B teams as a concept — though I see the advantages — but I am convinced that partnerships should be allowed: elite teams pairing with lower league sides, investing in their facilities, training their coaches, and loaning them the cream of their youth teams. That enables the smaller team to retain its identity, but provides the bigger one with something it lacks.All of these ideas are available to Arsène Wenger, should he wish to get in touch. More
- in Soccer
Why Are Soccer's Stars Talking to Ibai Llanos?
Outside, in the bright Parisian sunshine, the world’s news media lined up on the edge of the field at the Parc des Princes. Producers fiddled busily with cameras and boom microphones. Reporters chattered away, dutifully filling airtime before their designated interview slots.They were under strict instructions and constraints: three questions apiece, a few minutes, no more, to mine the details of the biggest sports story of the summer, to get to the heart of a transfer that ended one era and ushered in another. And then their time would be up, and Lionel Messi would have to move on.Ibai Llanos’s setup was different. He had been ushered inside the players’ tunnel, along with two of his oldest friends, Ander Cortés and Borja Nanclares. They had no sound equipment. They were filming on a phone. Yet Llanos had, at that point, an audience of half a million people watching him.Llanos, 26, had, without really trying or particularly meaning to, usurped every news outlet on the planet. Messi’s first interview after leaving F.C. Barcelona for Paris St.-Germain would not be with a television network or a major newspaper. It would instead go out exclusively on Llanos’s Twitch channel.Over the last couple of years, Llanos has interviewed a succession of soccer’s biggest names, from Sergio Ramos to Paulo Dybala. He now counts some stars, like Sergio Agüero, as friends, and others, like Gerard Piqué, as business partners.Players who habitually distrust the news media have been happy to spend as much as a couple of hours talking to Llanos on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service. That is turning him into a breakout star of the internet age in Spain and, at times, occasionally invoking the wrath of journalists from more traditional outlets who envy the access he enjoys and disdain his lack of training.Llanos, with the Argentine creator Momo, got his start as a teenager by filming himself and his friends playing video games. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe interview with Messi was, by some distance, the most high-profile moment of his relatively brief career. It was also, from a journalistic perspective, a little unorthodox. Llanos was nervous. When he watched the video later, he saw that he had been threading a pen between his fingers throughout his talk with Messi without noticing. “It was a bit like having vertigo,” he said.Operating under the same strictures as everyone else, Llanos asked Messi if he had “eaten a lot” at the farewell dinner he had held for some of his closest friends in Barcelona a couple of days earlier. “Did I behave myself?” Llanos asked. Messi assured him that he had.Llanos asked Messi only one soccer question, on the appeal of playing alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, and so there was only one soccer answer, delivered in that dampening monotone players adopt whenever their sport is brought up. Mostly, the entire exchange was light and cordial, its intimacy only undercut by Llanos’s referring to the world’s best soccer player as “Messi” — not Lionel, not Leo, not Señor Messi, but the word on the back of his jersey, somewhere between an honorific and a schoolyard nickname — throughout.That was exactly what Llanos had promised. “I am not going to ask him about Mauricio Pochettino’s tactics,” he had explained on his livestream just before Messi arrived. Llanos is not a journalist. He does not pretend to be a journalist. He is not trying to become a journalist. And that is what allowed him to get the exclusive every journalist wanted.Llanos has been a streamer since before the term existed. At age 15, he and some friends from Bilbao, his hometown in Spain, set up a YouTube channel, filming themselves playing the video game Call Of Duty. “It was growing, but it wasn’t so normal at the time to see gaming on YouTube,” Llanos said.They built a small but impressive audience — some videos attracted 20,000 viewers, he said — and earned a little money. “It was 30 euros a month, something like that,” he said. “It wasn’t money to live on, just to buy a little bit of equipment. It was a hobby, a pastime. It wasn’t a business.”He was still deciding “what to do with my life” when he noticed an advertisement for a casting call from the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (L.V.P.), Spain’s esports league, looking for announcers. He and Cortés applied and, in August 2014, got the job.The pay was initially “quite low,” Llanos said, but he enjoyed the start-up energy not only of the company, but also the scene. “There was a lot of love,” he said. As the league grew, so did his profile. “There were more and more events, collaborations with brands, athletes,” he said. He moved to Barcelona. He did an ad for the release of the PlayStation 5.But Llanos turned into a more mainstream cultural phenomenon only last year. He had left the L.V.P. just before the coronavirus pandemic — “there was a bit of a generational shift, and I felt saturated” — and dedicated himself to creating content for an esports team, G2 eSports, streamed on his own Twitch channel. Cortés, Nanclares and several other creators joined him.Everything changed with the pandemic. As Spain went into lockdown, its population cloistered at home, Llanos saw his viewership figures explode: His Twitch channel currently commands 7.8 million followers, making him one of the 10 most followed creators on the platform. His YouTube account attracts a similar audience.After he announced plans for a virtual version of La Liga — filling the void left by the suspended league — it emerged that a number of high-profile players already ranked among his fans, including Sergio Reguilón, the Tottenham defender; Borja Iglesias, now of Real Betis; and Messi’s new teammate at P.S.G., Achraf Hakimi.“There are a lot of players that play video games in their free time,” Llanos said. “And because they could not go out, because in the first lockdown they did not have training or games, they had more time to dedicate to it.”Llanos streams his videos and interviews from the basement of his house near Barcelona. Sometimes, star players pop in for visits.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe most significant guest, though, may have been Aymeric Laporte, the Manchester City and Spain defender. “Laporte was already following me,” Llanos said. “We agreed to play Fortnite and stream it, and while we were playing he told me that he had messaged Sergio Agüero and invited him to play, and asked if it would be OK if he joined us. It was his first time on Twitch.”Others have followed. Earlier this year, Llanos launched a weekly, longform interview segment on his channel: Charlando Tranquilamente, or Chatting Quietly. The likes of Dybala, the Juventus forward, Ramos, the former Real Madrid captain, and Agüero himself have all appeared as guests.That a 26-year-old streamer could attract names of that magnitude sparked criticism from more traditional news media outlets.“Who is Ibai? I called Agüero for an interview, but Ibai beats me, and if Ibai beats me, I have to retire,” the Argentine announcer Gustavo López said. “They talk to the powerful, and disregard those of us who are paid in pesos.” Others derided Llanos as an “entertainer,” rather than a journalist.To Llanos, though, that is kind of the point. “Maybe I am the sort of person they like,” he said of players. “A little bit different.” He does not attempt to pry into their personal lives. He does not try to ask them challenging questions about what, for them, is often simply their work. Instead, he tries to talk to them as informally as possible, while doing something — playing video games — that they enjoy.“They come because they like it,” he said. “They don’t get paid. They come because they want to come.”The players’ motivation is perhaps a little more calculating than that. “Twitch is the Generation Z platform,” said Julian Aquilina, a broadcasting specialist at the media research firm Enders Analysis. “It skews very young, and quite male. It is quite a different audience to traditional broadcasters.” Llanos offers a precious route into that audience: His interview with Dybala, for example, attracted more than 100,000 live, largely teenage viewers.That soccer’s biggest stars find it a more appealing prospect than a more formal interview, though, is not in doubt. “Twitch has much more of a community vibe,” Aquilina said. “It’s much more interactive.” To at least one of Llanos’s guests, the allure was that talking to Llanos did not feel like an interview at all. There was no camera, no sound equipment, no call-and-response of questions, no defined structure. The players feel safe talking to someone who seems like a friend.In his underground studio, Llanos can play a game, interview a soccer star and stream it all live at the same time.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat, ultimately, has been the secret to his success. He and Agüero have grown close enough that the striker invited Llanos, surreptitiously, to Messi’s farewell dinner in Barcelona. The encounter earned Llanos his invitation to Paris, to Messi’s presentation, and to his world exclusive.At the table that night, too, was another player now firmly in Llanos’s orbit: Gerard Piqué. The Barcelona defender was the first guest on his talk show segment; he is now, in effect, Llanos’s business partner.In August, the two men bought an e-sports team. This was after Piqué’s investment vehicle, Kosmos, bought the Spanish streaming rights to this summer’s Copa América, and broadcast it on Llanos’s Twitch channel. It did the same for Messi’s first game as a P.S.G. player last month.That match also was shown on Telecinco, a Spanish broadcast network. About 6.7 million people watched at least a little of the game on television; Llanos attracted roughly 2 million viewers (though he also has a large following in Latin America, so the figures are not immediately comparable).It is an approach, Aquilina said, that may become more common. “Twitch is becoming a broadcaster,” he said. “Amazon has done that with some N.F.L. games, putting them on Twitch as well as Prime. If you have the rights to something, you want it distributed across platforms: You can sell the broadcast rights but still have an online presence.”Llanos was not thinking about that, he said, that day in Paris. He was, instead, simultaneously dealing with the nerves from “the most pressure I have ever felt,” and marveling a little at “being able to do this with two of my best friends.” The combination was enough to give him that dizzying feeling of vertigo. He, and the revolution he represents, are not going anywhere, though. He will get used to the height. More
