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    Where’s the Next Generation of Great Coaches?

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    Twenty years, it would appear, is a very long time indeed. This week, a brief video montage fluttered through the flotsam and jetsam that clog my (and your) social media feeds — the engagement-farming banalities, the craven attention-seekers, the willfully deranged Kate Middleton theories — to celebrate the glorious madness of 2004.That was the year, after all, when Greece won the European Championship, a triumph so unexpected that at least one squad member had to rearrange his wedding around the team’s progress. The Greek triumph came a few weeks after Porto, led by a charismatic young coach with hair more pepper than salt, lifted the Champions League trophy.That was after Werder Bremen finished the season as champion of Germany and Valencia secured its second Spanish title in three years. Whoever compiled the video did not even need to mention the victory by a Colombian minnow, Once Caldas, in the Copa Libertadores to declare that 2004 had been a year for the underdog.The compilation clip could, at a push, be used as a sort of generational Rorschach test. It might inspire, in older viewers, that bittersweet pang of nostalgia, the ghost of a memory that this is how things used — and therefore ought — to be. Werder Bremen should be able to win the Bundesliga. Porto should be contenders to be champion of Europe. You might not want to watch Greece win the Euros again, but it was nice that it happened.Younger fans, though, may well interpret it differently. They have grown up in an era of dominance and dynasty, in which the sport’s major teams have established unprecedented primacy over their rivals, and stasis has become the truest marker of excellence. The sight of all of these unfamiliar teams lifting trophies might reinforce their suspicion that soccer is rather better now than it was then.There are two things worth pointing out in rebuttal. The first is that 2004 was an outlier even by the standards of the time. The previous six editions of the Champions League, for example, had been won by Manchester United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and A.C. Milan. And the second — albeit obvious only with the benefit of hindsight — is that it was a liminal year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Title Near, Naples Shed Superstition and Starts to Believe

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      For the first time in three decades, Napoli stands on the cusp of an Italian soccer championship. Its city did not want to waste any time celebrating.NAPLES, Italy — The surveillance room at the Vesuvius Observatory, the oldest volcanology institute in the world, is barely a mile from the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona: a few minutes’ walk, or a single stop on the train line from Napoli’s home. It is just far enough, though, that the noise from the stadium does not quite reach it.Inside the observatory, a team of volcanologists, geologists, physicists and chemists continuously monitors a bank of screens, tracking the region’s three active volcanic centers: Vesuvius itself; the island of Ischia; and the largely submerged caldera of the Campi Flegrei, just off the coast.The screens display a continual screed of real-time data and images from a sophisticated network of measuring stations, thermal cameras and video surveillance systems, information that is of vital importance to Naples, a city of two million people. The monitors are never used to watch soccer.The surveillance room, though, does not need to see a game or hear the roar of the crowd to know, almost immediately, when Napoli has scored. “We don’t need to watch,” Francesca Bianco, the observatory’s director, said. “The instruments tell us.”It is not just home games, either. Goals scored hundreds of miles away have a notable effect, too. “If tens of thousands of people jump up to celebrate at the same time, we see it,” Bianco said. Her colleagues know to disregard these bits of data, of course, and she has not noticed anything particularly unusual over the last few months. Seismographically speaking, she said, all goals look the same.The only difference, really, is that they have been more frequent. There is an easy explanation for that. Napoli has scored more goals. It has recorded more wins. It has had more cause to celebrate. Inside the surveillance room, the scientists have noticed. That is what all that data on the screens is for, after all: to tell when something is about to explode.A Tempting FateAt his stall outside the Maradona stadium, Mariano pulls down yet another sky blue scarf and hurriedly, unceremoniously, flings it at a customer. It is emblazoned with the words “Napoli Campioni.” He barks out the price and stretches out his hand, impatiently, to take the bank note.His trade is brisk, and has been for some time. That was one of his last scarves. The banners decorated with the Italian flag and No. 3 have almost gone, too. Fans have gobbled up anything and everything celebrating Napoli’s coming league title, its first Italian championship since 1990 and only the third in its history. The fact that Napoli has not actually won it yet appears to be immaterial.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockAlberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFew expected the club’s — and the city’s — long wait for glory to end this year. It has been less than 12 months, after all, since a group of fans stole Manager Luciano Spalletti’s car and promised to return it only if he agreed to quit his job. Over the summer, Napoli lost its longstanding backbone — defender Kalidou Koulibaly, the homegrown playmaker Lorenzo Insigne and the beloved forward Dries Mertens — in the transfer market. It had the air of a transition season.Instead, Napoli has obliterated its competition. It has occupied the summit of Serie A for much of the year, stretching off into the distance as its theoretical rivals fell by the wayside one by one. A few months ago, its lead had grown to 19 points, the largest advantage the Italian top flight had ever had.In the last few weeks, that has been whittled somewhat. Napoli has faltered just a little, beaten heavily by A.C. Milan in the league and then eliminated by them in the Champions League. Lazio, its last remaining rival in the league, has cut its advantage to 14 points. Still, with only eight games to play, everyone agrees it is too late for Napoli to be reeled in now.As early as January, Roma Manager José Mourinho, was (possibly sarcastically) congratulating the club on winning the league. Stefano Pioli, Mourinho’s counterpart at A.C. Milan, declared that Napoli would win the league title after watching his team thrash it in Naples. “I only have good things to say about them,” he said.Even those inside the club are not worried about tempting fate. Spalletti has described his team as one that is winning the title. Victor Osimhen, the striker whose goals have proved so vital to Napoli’s ambitions, has said that he cannot wait to see the scale of the celebrations when the triumph is official.Perhaps most striking, though, is the fact that the fans share that confidence. Naples is a proudly superstitious city, its streets and its buildings and its people struck through with genuine belief in and respect for scaramanzia: the power of superstition.Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockStriker Victor Osimhen’s mask, once worn for protection, has taken on mystical powers of its own. Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It is in our DNA,” the journalist and author Michelangelo Iossa said. “It is a tradition, a way of connecting us to the story of our city, all the way back to Greek and Roman myth. We have absorbed aspects of a lot of different cultures over the last 2,000 years. It is part of our identity in southern Italy in general, but in Naples in particular.”At some point this season, though, Neapolitans seem to have collectively decided that it was all a load of hokum. Quite when that happened is disputed. “It was a few weeks ago, early in March,” said Michela, another vendor outside the Maradona. (Like Mariano, she declined to offer a surname.) Daniele Bellini, better known as Decibel, Napoli’s stadium announcer, dates it back further. “Everything changed after we beat Juventus, 5-1, in January,” he said. “That scale of victory had not happened since 1990.” That, to his mind, broke the seal.After that, the shibboleths started to melt away. The flags and shirts and scarves celebrating what was to come appeared for sale outside the stadium and across Naples. “We’re all loyal fans,” Michela said. “But now we’re comfortable selling them.”Mariano was a little more blunt. “È già fatto,” he said in Italian. It’s already done.No Time to WasteIn 1987, the year Diego Maradona dragged Napoli to its maiden championship, the celebrations were so frenzied that an iconic piece of graffiti appeared at one of the city’s graveyards. “You don’t know what you’ve missed,” it read. Naples has waited long enough to recapture that spirit. This time, it did not want anyone to die wondering.Naples does not so much have the air of a city waiting for a party to start as one of a place that is several drinks in. Napoli’s colors, sky blue and white, have been splashed not just in Fuorigrotta, the suburb where the stadium sits, but across the tight, winding alleys of the ancient districts that act as Naples’s heart: the Spanish Quarter, the Centro Storico, Rione Sanità.On crumbling buildings, flags hang from balconies and block out windows. Jerseys flutter off clotheslines. Shop windows feature mannequins decked out as Napoli players, regardless of what is for sale. Whole streets have sprouted canopies of banners and bunting.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlessandro Garofalo/LaPresse, via Associated PressThere are staircases painted to resemble the scudetto, the shield that graces the jerseys of Italy’s reigning champion. The No. 3, for the team’s third title, is omnipresent. Naples is no longer a city with a soccer team. It is a soccer team with a city attached.The decorations have become an attraction in themselves. One cafe in the Spanish Quarter has installed life-size cutouts of the team’s players, arranged on the cobbles in the tactical formation they would assume on the field. So many people — fans, locals, tourists — descended to take selfies with them one Sunday morning last month that the cafe ran out of coffee. The owner said they had sold about 3,000 foil-topped cups of espresso by lunchtime.“There are thousands of visitors every week,” said Renato Quaglia, the director of FOQUS, an organization working to improve education and opportunity inside the Spanish Quarter, still one of the city’s most underprivileged neighborhoods. “It is a new form of tourism.”The centerpiece is the top of Via Emanuele de Deo, where a giant mural of Maradona looms above the street. It has been a destination for years, Quaglia said, but its popularity has blossomed since Maradona’s death in 2020. “Great players, as well as film and TV personalities, have come to be seen here,” he said.Now, with Napoli on the edge of glory, the crowds have swelled even more. On the streets of the Spanish Quarter, it feels as if the imminent victory has the potential to change the city. The tourist boom has led to the rise of an impromptu, somewhat unofficial economy: street vendors and stall operators selling whatever they can think of, as long as it is Napoli blue and white.Quaglia does not quite see it that way. “This is a speculative bubble, a phenomenon to be exploited in the moment,” he said. Like all booms, he fears, it is underpinned by an inherent fragility. He hopes there may be some lasting impact: a few overnight businesses that survive and a few more tourists including the city on their itineraries, making their own pilgrimages. But that is not the same as solid, lasting, impactful change. Once the initial rush of jubilation ends, once the championship is won and the party is over, whole swaths of this new economy will disappear.“Winning the league is a priceless moment after 33 years,” he said. “But it is also the illusion of the redemption of a city.”Cesare Abbate/EPA, via ShutterstockThe image of Diego Maradona, the Argentine who delivered Napoli’s only previous championships, is still a fixture in the city.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhole cities do not change, not overnight, and particularly not ones that have stood for thousands of years. Naples may not feel much like a superstitious place, not when the sort of victory that will shake the earth is so close at hand, but that wariness is there, just beneath the surface.Osimhen, so integral to everything Napoli has nearly achieved, has spent the entire season wearing a face mask, the legacy of a collision with an opposing player in November 2021. It is not clear if he still needs it, medically, but it has become something of a talisman, for him and the team.Late in March, while away on international duty with Nigeria, he lost it. Nobody is quite sure what happened. A few days later, he picked up an injury. He missed Napoli’s league game against Milan. Napoli lost. He missed the first leg of the Champions League game against Milan, too. Napoli lost again. The club immediately commissioned a bespoke replacement to be made. Scaramanzia may be finished. The title may already be won. But there is no point in taking chances. More

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      For Liverpool and Manchester City, a Showdown With Consequences

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

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      Remembering What Draws You In

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      Fandom can be an exercise in frustration. But for a supporter who grew up on American sports, soccer’s community offered a welcome sense of power that had been missing.Astead Herndon, who follows politics for The Times and Tottenham Hotspur because he just can’t help himself, is filling in for Rory Smith this week.Let’s start with the bad: Tottenham Hotspur has not won a trophy in the 13 years I have watched nearly every one of its matches.It did not win one while I was in high school in Illinois, where I settled on my Tottenham fandom after selecting the club at random in the FIFA video game. It did not win one while I was in college, when I was a regular at early-morning gatherings of the first Tottenham Hotspur Supporter’s Club in Wisconsin.The early years of Mauricio Pochettino happened when I lived in Boston. Back then, I would sneak away from my desk at city hall to watch matches at a downtown pub. No trophy.In Washington D.C., the next place I lived, I watched two Champions League runs. In New York I once swore off a bar that serves particularly excellent nachos for a full year simply because it was the place where I watched the 2019 Champions League final. No trophy.Let’s not talk about the José Mourinho era at all.Thirteen years of supporting Tottenham, by American millennial standards, makes me something of Spurs sage. (The day Tottenham sold Gareth Bale, I drank away my feelings at a bar in Wisconsin. A well-meaning friend texted, “Sorry about Gary.”) In the beginning, I had an elaborate system of absolutely illegal streams. Then the NBC Premier League deal brought my team to me every weekend. Now I can stream its games right on my phone.Sell us your cups, your shirts, your scarves. Just please don’t sell Harry Kane.David Klein/ReutersMy 13 years don’t make me special, of course, more deserving of sporting triumph that fans who have waited far longer than I have. I could have just as easily have picked West Ham or Newcastle or Manchester United or (shudder) Arsenal off that FIFA console. Every fan’s pain (and joy) is their own.But those 13 years have seen the sport change itself, influenced by a global landscape that has undergone rapid political and cultural upheaval. There is no denying: the influx of money has changed soccer, probably forever. And while millions of soccer fans, including myself, decried the idea of the world’s wealthiest teams joining in a Super League, the sport’s most powerful bodies seem hellbent on imminent, structural change.The specter of that kind of systemic disruption sometimes feels like a reversal of what first drew me — and probably you — to the game. I grew up watching American sports, where the fan is assumed to be powerless. Your team could move across the country in search of a better stadium, or better tax laws. Rivalries in college sports — but also in baseball, football and hockey — were routinely upended by conference realignments driven by the pursuit of rich television contracts.In soccer, though, structures felt sacred. Tottenham, for example, is still mad at Arsenal for a move the latter made more than a century ago. But most of all, there was a language of fan ownership in soccer that I enjoyed. We are Spurs. There was a supporter’s trust. It rejected the way American sports — and specifically the N.F.L. — seemed to bother me the most. There, I thought, fans didn’t matter.The Super League announcement reminded me of that feeling. It was not only what the team’s were proposing, but the flagrant nature of it all. A group of rich clubs secretly plotting to disrupt a global game, willing to sever century-old traditions and alter generational rivalries, and do it all without a bit of fan input. Soccer clubs, after all — big ones or small ones and especially bad ones — don’t get to pack up their gear and run away from their fans when things go bad.Fans are happy to offer their support. Most times, they just ask their team to deserve it.David Klein/ReutersStill, with the benefit of maturity, I now realize that I always saw soccer through rose-colored glasses. The wealth inequality that has grown in recent years was already present 13 years ago. There was, I’m sure, also some desire to be a hipster in a land of Midwestern, “American football” fans. Spurs are also firmly among the world’s richest teams, even if they are well behind some of their rivals. But isn’t soccer fandom different? That’s what the Super League owners underestimated: The sense among fans that the club is equally their own, and that their support still must be earned. For a decade, fans of my other team, the Chicago Bulls, complained about post-Michael Jordan management decisions (thankfully it’s better now). Tottenham supporters tried to stage a protest over the January transfer window. Every club has its crises, its test of its fans commitment — some more existential than others.As a fan, I think I’ve accepted that 13 years from now, soccer will look different. I will not be surprised if we see a zombie Super League, or a biennial World Cup that no one outside FIFA seems to want. There will be more reminders of our collective smallness as fans. More protests, too.But margins matter. And while the Super League announcement felt familiar to my experience in American sports, the reaction to it was not.So let’s end with the good.At Tottenham, fandom passes through generations, from father to Heung-min Son.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, Via ReutersFor 13 years, across new schools and new cities, new jobs and the campaign trail, the cadence of Tottenham has been a comforting structure. Even the disappointments feel good, sometimes, a reminder that while I don’t support the world’s best team, I do support the world’s funniest.I like to think there’s an open pessimism to soccer fandom. Only a few teams have a shot at the title every year, and there are no coming draft picks to save you. At Spurs, the pessimism is a feature, not a bug. It is a bonding point among the supporters.In a way, that culture helps distill fandom down to its irrational essence. There is no guarantee Spurs will ever win a trophy I can cheer, no assurance that my team — your team, any team — will always be closer to the top than the bottom. The gap is growing between the club and its rivals; even Newcastle United has money now.But for the next 13 years, and the 13 after that, I’m willing watch nearly every Tottenham match, just on the off chance that the facts as I’ve come to know them are wrong.Back to Regular Programming SoonThat’s all for this week, and Rory will be back soon. For now, get in touch at askrory@nytimes.com with any hints, tips, complaints or ideas. Twitter works for finding him sometimes, too.Have a great weekend. More

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      Mourinho, Benítez and the Endless Pursuit of the Past

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      Why do two elite managers persist with a trophy-less, and seemingly joyless, slog toward a past they probably will never reclaim?In the sudden flood of spare time he had after departing Manchester United, José Mourinho filmed a commercial for a bookmaker. A couple of years and a couple of jobs on, it is still running on British television. It still works, after all. Mourinho is still a household name in Britain. The ad’s central concept holds up.Mourinho’s acting might be just a little hammy — as you might expect — but it is quite deft, too. Looking as tanned and healthy and relaxed as we all did in 2019, he earnestly walks viewers through what it takes to be “special.” The joke is that he should know: He is the Special One, after all. Get it?He plays it all, though, with a wink and a smirk. The tone is entirely self-deprecating. Mourinho variously pokes fun at his vanity, his boastfulness, his penchant for chicanery. He willingly, happily satirizes the cartoonish villainy that has, for 20 years, made him possibly the most compelling manager of his generation.It is worth noting, though, quite how dated so many of the references are. One of the gags is about him getting into a laundry cart, a nod to an incident that happened before the invention of the iPhone. There is another involving a piece of topiary shaped to look like three raised fingers, a gesture he first adopted before “Game of Thrones” had aired on television.Indeed, the commercial’s prime conceit, the idea of Mourinho as the Special One, predates the existence of YouTube by almost a year. That particular schtick comes from a time when it was still called The Facebook, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental company, and DVDs were things that people wanted. It is a struggle to describe it as current.That all of the jokes still landed, that they were all immediately comprehensible to their intended audience, is testament both to Mourinho’s enduring relevance and to the spell he has long cast over English soccer, which has long been and possibly always will be hopelessly in love with him. England has never really been able to move on from him.And nor, it would seem, has Mourinho. He is, increasingly, a manager in the same way the Rolling Stones are a live band. They have become, in some way, a tribute act to themselves. Nobody has any real interest in hearing their new material. The only appeal, now, lies in playing the hits.Mourinho’s identity was always as a winner. Then he stopped winning.Alberto Lingria/ReutersMourinho, for his part, keeps on doing just that. A couple of weeks ago, as he chewed over his Roma’s team’s engrossing defeat to Juventus — squandering a 3-1 lead to lose by a single goal — he claimed, variously, that his players were too nice, too weak, too afflicted by some sort of deep-seated psychological complex that he simply could not solve. Everyone, it turned out, was to blame except him.It was not the first time he had delved into his back catalog in his six months in Rome. After a humiliating 6-1 defeat to Bodo/Glimt, he claimed that the Norwegian champion had “better players” than Roma, despite operating on a fraction of the budget. He has squabbled with referees. He has highlighted the shortcomings of his squad after almost every defeat.And defeat has come more regularly than he would like. Mourinho’s tenure has not quite been a failure by the club’s standards: Roma sits seventh in Serie A, still at least theoretically in the race for a Champions League slot, roughly where it might have been expected to be. By Mourinho’s standard, though, it has been beyond deflating.Winning is not just central to Mourinho’s reputation, it is the cornerstone of his identity. For two decades, he has earned some of the most illustrious posts in soccer — Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Manchester United — not for the way in which his teams play but for the way his games end. Mourinho is a winner. He might be an acquired taste, but he gets results.It is tempting to wonder if, perhaps, the reason he has seemed so much more fractious in recent years, that the warming charm that always used to balance out the lurking snarl has all but disappeared from view, is because he has lost that sense of himself. He is a winner who no longer wins.Mourinho’s Roma is clinging to hopes of a Champions League place next season.Andrew Medichini/Associated PressHis last few seasons have served as a case study in decline. First, he celebrated finishing second with Manchester United, something a younger, more bellicose Mourinho would never have done. Then he took on the job of rebuilding Tottenham, but seemed to lack the patience and indulgence and gentle touch such a project required. It turned sour, fast. Choosing outcome over process, it turned out, is not a viable approach when that outcome is not predicated by economics.And now he finds himself at Roma, a fine and historic and weighty club, but hardly in a position to meet his ambitions. Roma, after all, is not Real Madrid. It is not capable of winning every game, of delivering the trophies and the glory that Mourinho craves, the ones that affirm his status and burnish his legend.The question that lingers, then, is why? What does Mourinho get out of this? He does not seem to elicit any joy from it: He looks far happier in that three-year-old ad than he has in his day job for some time. Is it greed, then? Perhaps, but then elite managers are paid handsomely to win, and then paid off equally handsomely if they do not. Mourinho has earned enough, in salary and in compensation, to buy all the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs he could ever want and never need.It may, then, be the status: not that of a winner, but that of a manager. Roma, like Tottenham, may be a second-tier post, but it remains prestigious and powerful and high profile. It means Mourinho can still command a crowd, a stadium, a room; it means, most importantly, that he is still what he has always been: a manager.Mourinho with Rafael Benítez in better days, which for both men is the past.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockPerhaps he, like his old nemesis, Rafael Benítez, simply cannot countenance the idea of not working. Certainly, it is hard to understand why else Benítez would have chosen, last summer, to sacrifice the lingering affection in which Liverpool’s fans held him to take charge of Everton, his former team’s bitter city rival.It cannot have been because Everton had an upwardly mobile air: The club has employed five managers in as many years, possesses the disjointed squad to prove it, and was turned down by at least one contender for the post last summer because the club looked so chaotic from the outside.It was operating under severe strictures in the transfer market after years of wild spending. Its expectations far outstripped its opportunities. Benítez’s background, meanwhile, made it obvious that the atmosphere would turn toxic at the first hint of trouble, and he would be fired. In many ways, it was remarkable that the inevitable denouement to an unhappy marriage of convenience did not come until last week.Benítez will have known all of that, and yet he took the job anyway, and for precisely the same reasons that convinced Mourinho to sign on at Roma and at Tottenham. It is not just a need to manage — their work long since having fused with their identity — but the pursuit of the one victory they now, truly, cherish: vindication.Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, was always an odd pick across town at Everton.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImageThey are driven on by a furious refusal to relinquish their primacy, by an avowed belief that they will be proved right in the end, by a conviction that they will have the last laugh. The game may change — the tactics and the training methods and the tools used, the data and the nutrition and the sports science — but it is striking how managers do not.Benítez remains wedded to the core approach that brought him his halcyon days at Liverpool and, before that, Valencia. Mourinho has seen how damaging it can be to hang his players out to dry in public, at United and Tottenham and Roma, but he keeps on doing it anyway, because that is what worked back before YouTube.As they age, managers become avatars for the systems they once merely adopted. They become one and the same as the approach they are seen to represent. They become set in their ways in a literal sense: They want not only to win, but to win in the way that they once did, as if to demonstrate that they were right all along, that the game has not moved on from them. It has happened to Benítez and to Mourinho, just as it once happened to Arsène Wenger.And so they keep moving, keep trying, keep working, taking jobs that bring them no joy in the vain hope that, one day, the innate superiority of who they are, of what they stand for, will be clear once again. And in doing so, they grow ever more calcified in their own ideas, their own pasts, unable to accept or admit that all those things that made them special were quite a long time ago.Narrow HorizonsThomas Tuchel, who led Chelsea to the Champions League title, won FIFA’s coach of the year award on Monday. Like every winner before him, he coaches a big European club.Harold Cunningham/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesNot once, in more than 30 years, has a player based outside Europe won FIFA’s men’s world player of the year award, no matter which guise it has taken at the time. None has, in fact, even come close.Martín Palermo did not make the top three after inspiring Boca Juniors to both the Copa Libertadores and a club world championship in 2000. Nor did Neymar, despite his youthful brilliance sweeping Santos to South American glory in 2011. By 2019, when Gabriel Barbosa won that year’s edition of the tournament for Flamengo by scoring twice in the dying minutes, nobody would even have considered voting for him.And, as unfortunate as it is, there is a logic to that. It is hard to dispute that, for at least 20 of those 30 years, the best players in the world have been in Europe. They have not all been Europeans, of course — Brazilians have won the FIFA award five times, and Lionel Messi has a collection of them — but they have all played in one of Europe’s major leagues. That, after all, is where the strongest teams are. It is where a player’s talent is tested most exhaustively.(The geography of the women’s award has been more varied: It has been won by players based in the United States, Australia, Japan and, for a stretch a little more than a decade ago, basically wherever Marta happened to be playing. That the last couple of years have been dominated by Europe perhaps says something about the shifting balance of power in the women’s game.)What is less simple to understand is why that same Eurocentrism should be applied to managers, both in the men’s and women’s categories. No manager of a men’s team outside Europe has finished in the top three since FIFA started handing out the prize in 2016. (Jill Ellis, the former coach of the United States’ women’s team, and her former counterpart with Japan, Asako Takakura, have both taken a podium place in the women’s voting.)This year, the omissions were especially egregious. FIFA’s own rules state that the prize should be judged on a coach’s performance between October 2020 and October 2021. In that time, Pitso Mosimane, Al Ahly’s South African coach, won the African Champions League. Twice. Abel Ferreira of Brazil’s Palmeiras won one Copa Libertadores and was well on the way to picking up a second in the same calendar year. Neither was even nominated.The logic that can be applied to the players’ awards does not hold with managers. It does not automatically follow that the manager who has won the biggest trophy has performed better than all of their peers. Management, after all, is about making the most of the resources available to you. It is about exceeding expectations in your own personal context.It is why, for example, it is possible to make a case that David Moyes’s taking West Ham into the Champions League would be a more impressive achievement than Pep Guardiola’s winning the title with Manchester City. Or why Chris Wilder leading Sheffield United to seventh in the Premier League was a better feat of management than Jürgen Klopp’s making Liverpool the league’s champion.And it is why there is no reason that neither Mosimane nor Ferreira were officially recognized for their remarkable success over the last 12 months or so. They were overlooked, instead, because soccer, on some structural level, has bought into the bright lights and the ostentatious self-importance of Europe. And in doing so, it sells itself short.CorrespondenceJosé Luis Chilavert. omitted last week but never forgotten.Matthias Schrader/Picture-Alliance/DPA via AP ImagesThe easiest way to handle the main theme of my inbox this week is to list all the people — Mark Brill, Bob Shay, Christopher Dum, Alex McMillan — who sent emails that contained the words “José Luis Chilavert” and “Rogério Ceni” in response to last week’s newsletter on Manchester City’s flirtation with having Éderson take its penalties.The readers are quite right, too: There have been a handful of famous penalty- and free-kick-taking goalkeepers, particularly in South America. As Christoph von Teichman mentioned, it has happened in Europe, too. “Hans Jörg Butt, a Bundesliga goalkeeper, scored 26 goals from the spot for three different teams (Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern), as well as one for each of these teams in Champions League games, curiously all against Juventus,” he wrote.As a man who considers himself an insufferable know-it-all, the fact that none of them were mentioned is a heavy blow to my self-esteem. Still, I think, the point holds: Pep Guardiola has wrought a drastic shift in English soccer’s conception of what is acceptable if we are open to an idea that always used to seem like something of a carnival trick.Firmer ground was provided by Will Allen, who asked a deceptively tricky question. “Why is an odd number of substitutions sacrosanct,” he asked. He’s right, too: The debate is either for a return to three or an increase to five. “How about everyone has four?” I don’t know, is the short answer. I mean, yes. Obviously. They should just have four. That’s a fair compromise, isn’t it? It is. So why does it seem morally and spiritually wrong? More

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      Soccer’s Problem With Silver Medals

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      It was notable when Spain’s players kept their runner-up awards after losing a final. It shouldn’t be.In all the photographs, there is one constant. In some of the images, Spain’s players stare at the ground, disconsolate, chewing over their loss to France in the final of the Nations League. In others, they give interviews, lead-faced and faintly forlorn. In one, Luis Enrique, their coach, offers respectful applause for his team’s conquerors.But in all of them, Spain’s players have thin, navy blue ribbons draped around their necks. Each of the players had walked to the raised platform hastily constructed on the field after Sunday’s final at San Siro in Milan. Each of them had taken the medal offered to him. And each of them had carefully placed it around his neck.That should not, of course, be especially noteworthy. In most sports, the athlete or the team that finishes second sees its silver medal as a source of pride. Occasionally, it might be with eyes glazed with tears. Sometimes, it is through gritted teeth. Often, it is with a lingering air of regret, a sense of what might have been. And it always takes the pain a little while to subside. Second — close, but no cigar — can hurt most of all.Ferran Torres and Spain lost to France in Milan, 2-1.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut only in soccer are silver medals treated as if they burn. Players and coaches frequently give the impression that they would rather not touch them at all. Last summer, the majority of England’s players made a point of refusing to wear the medals they had earned for finishing second in the European Championship.A few weeks earlier, most of their counterparts at both Manchester City and Manchester United had conspicuously refused to don the tokens they had received after losing the Champions League and Europa League finals. José Mourinho has made a habit of disposing of any reminder he might have that he ever lost a major final.This is, at a rough guess, a phenomenon that manifests very rarely outside soccer. The beaten finalist at a tennis major does not make a point, in front of the watching world, of handing whatever prize he or she has been awarded to a fan. Olympians do not regularly refuse to stand on the podium without their silver or bronze medals around their necks, nor do they hurl them into the crowd on their way out of the stadium/pool/velodrome/whatever the place where the horse disco takes place is called.In fact, the scorn for silver medals is not even a feature of all soccer. In 2019, the Netherlands players who had just lost the Women’s World Cup final to the United States kept their medals. Many emerged from their locker room to speak to the news media, eyes still a little raw, with the bittersweet spoils of their wondrous, uplifting summer draped around their necks.Even for teams used to winning it all, bronze can feel better than nothing.Andre Penner/Associated PressMen’s soccer, though, seems to have embraced the idea that second is just first last and turned it into a dogma. Perhaps that is because of the message it sends: The act itself is, without question, somewhat performative, a little piece of theater, a flourish for the fans to demonstrate that nothing less than total victory will do.Or perhaps it is because of the absolutism that drives so many of the defining characters in the men’s game. Plenty of the sport’s most successful managers have made a point of telling their players that they should not savor even their winners’ medals. Alex Ferguson, like Brian Clough and Bill Shankly before him, used to tell his squads that they should forget winning a league or a cup almost immediately, that it was to serve only as a springboard for further success. Soccer has long been consumed by a desire for dominion so intense that it is, when looked at in the cold light of day, just a little deranged.And as much as Mourinho is too often, too easily blamed for all of modern soccer’s ills, it would not be desperately difficult to trace a line from some of his more public rejections of anything short of gold to a wider embrace of the practice, to believe that once he had made it clear that silver was not acceptable to him, it made it almost inevitable that others would follow. A coach who cherished second, after all, would seem somehow callow in comparison.For José Mourinho, only finishing first will do.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhy it came about, though, is perhaps less significant than what it implies.It is curious how unrelated strands of loose narrative can coalesce. Last week, there was a minor commotion over Norwich City, the team rooted to the foot of the Premier League. A former player had wondered if Norwich added a vast amount to the league, what with the club’s insistence on being stable and sensible and cautious, all traits that act as synonyms for “boring” in the hyperbolic soap opera of England’s top flight. A couple of days later, Newcastle was bought by Saudi Arabia. Oh, no, sorry: by the sovereign investment fund of Saudi Arabia. The two are not linked. No, really.Newcastle’s fans greeted the club’s new owners as its saviors. Their appeal lay not only in detaching Mike Ashley, the hated former proprietor, from the club, but in the promise of what the new owners might do: Lavish money on the team, propel it toward the summit of the Premier League, fulfill all of the ambitions and the dreams of the long-suffering — for a given value of suffering — fan base.The juxtaposition of the two was curious. It was Newcastle, a team now owned for nonsporting purposes by what is most definitely not the financial arm of a nation state, that was portrayed as living some sort of fantasy. It was Norwich, a team which is run with a long-term plan, a clear vision and no little affection, that was having to justify its existence in the Premier League.These are, of course, the wrong way around. Norwich should be held up as the aspirational model — in conception, if not in results — rather than Newcastle. But then this is a sport that disdains silver medals. It is not an industry, an ecosystem, that is adept at gauging comparative success, at understanding that there is not only one winner, and lots and lots of losers, but that lots of teams can win or lose depending on their own horizons. It is not a place that fully grasps the idea that the journey matters — give or take — as much as the destination.It may well have been easier for Spain to take some small pleasure in the mementos the team was handed in Milan because of the circumstances in which they had been attained: in the final of the Nations League, a tournament that is just a step above an exhibition tournament. All athletes are competitive, but it is unlikely that Luis Enrique and his squad were experiencing the same sort of sorrow as England’s players at Wembley this summer.But even so, perhaps it hints at a subtle shift in the landscape, away from the brutal, zero-sum belief that victory can take only one form and that everything else is therefore necessarily failure, abject and shameful. Sometimes, coming in second is an achievement in itself. Grasping that, you sense, might make the sport just a little healthier, just a little happier, as a whole.Memory Plays Tricks on YouLionel Messi was, perhaps, trying to save his friend’s feelings. He has known Sergio Agüero for years, and so, when Agüero asked why he had never won a Ballon d’Or, Messi picked his path delicately. He did not, for example, say, “You have not won it because I exist, and so does Cristiano Ronaldo.” Instead, he was a little more diplomatic. You win the Ballon d’Or if you win the Champions League, Messi told Agüero, according to the latter. His failure was linked to that of his team.By Messi’s logic — and Messi knows a thing or two about winning the Ballon d’Or — that leaves only one winner this year. Four members of last season’s Chelsea team have been nominated, but only one of them won the European Championship, too. This should, by extension, be Jorginho’s year. (The women’s honor could go to any of the five nominees from the all-conquering Barcelona team that won the Champions League, but Alexia Putellas, as captain, seems the consensus pick.)It is interesting to consider how that will look in hindsight. A particular rabbit hole opened up on Twitter this week in which fans debated the merits of the 2003 winner of the award: Juventus midfielder Pavel Nedved. (Quite what spawns these hellmouths of unreason, and quite what draws you in, remains a mystery to me, but no matter.) Nedved was, it was decreed, undeserving, particularly in a year in which Thierry Henry had scored 32 goals in 56 games for Arsenal.Pavel Nedved, in his prime, was a worthy winner.Carlo Ferraro/European Pressphoto AgencyThat parallel is irrelevant, of course — Nedved was a midfielder, not a forward, so was not really employed to match Henry’s numbers — and it leaves out the context: Nedved pulled Juventus to the Champions League final and won Serie A. That season, Henry’s brilliance did not earn Arsenal a trophy.It was not a shock, at the time, that Henry had not won it; if there was any player who had a greater claim than Nedved — regarded as one of the finest players of his generation — it was Andriy Shevchenko, the A.C. Milan striker who scored the winning penalty to claim the Champions League.That it seems unusual now is, of course, testament to the cultural primacy of the Premier League; to Henry’s more enduring greatness, in comparison to Nedved’s; and, perhaps, to the nature of how we remember. Assessing individual contributions to team sports can be difficult — where Messi and Ronaldo are not involved, certainly — and so what lasts, as time passes and memories fade, are the numbers. And yet the numbers, as Agüero and Henry can testify, do not tell the whole story.Long Road, Short JourneyThe picture, now, is starting to drift into focus. We have the first two confirmed qualifiers for next year’s World Cup; predictable but sincere congratulations to Germany, which always qualifies easily, and a respectful raise of the eyebrow to a Denmark team that, it would appear, is now invincible. The rest of the field, meanwhile, is starting to take shape.In Asia, it is hard to imagine that Saudi Arabia — four games, four wins — will not qualify. In South America, Brazil and Argentina can almost be taken as a given, but the identity of the two countries that will join them as direct qualifiers is much more intriguing. In North America, just a glimmer of a gap has opened up between Mexico, the United States and Canada and everyone else.In Europe, there is a confected air to the fretting over whether France, Belgium and England will not qualify — they all will; stop worrying — but several of the other favorites face moderately stressful Novembers: Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are by no means guaranteed automatic slots.That leaves Africa — where the structure of qualifying makes the whole process unsatisfactorily arbitrary, but undeniably dramatic — and Oceania, where barely more than a year out from the tournament, qualifying has not even started.It has already been pushed back twice because of the logistical challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic; the latest plan is to stage a qualifying tournament in Qatar next spring, though what format that will take — and whether clubs will release players to compete in it — has yet to be settled.New Zealand, the regional heavyweight, had not played a game in almost two years before a pair of friendly victories against Bahrain and Curaçao in this international window. Quite how Danny Hay, the country’s coach, is supposed to forge a team capable not only of seeing off the rest of Oceania but then winning a playoff against a team from another confederation, scheduled for June next year, is not entirely clear. Hay has not lost hope. The last window’s friendlies, he said, were the “start of the road to the World Cup” for his team. Given the circumstances, it is hard to believe that is a road that will end in Qatar.CorrespondenceThe traditional mix of the serious and the trivial in the emails this week, as this newsletter is careful to curate its shades of light and dark. We had dozens of communiqués regarding Newcastle United’s new ownership, including one from Bob Lovinger, who wondered if “England is worse than other countries when it comes to the characters bankrolling its sports teams?”Worse — as it applies to the moral worth of ownership groups — is a value judgment, and not one that it would be fair to make. But in one sense, the word most definitely applies to England: The Premier League, in particular, has always made it clear that it is “ownership neutral,” and has taken great pride in it.The league basically does not care who invests in its clubs, as long as they haven’t committed any particularly obvious recent crimes and have pockets bulging with money. That does not strike me as the best policy if you are even vaguely concerned about safeguarding what are — and what we are told are — precious social institutions.In Newcastle, any new owner was good enough. A deep-pocketed one was better.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesK.L. enticed me, meanwhile, with an articulate and perceptive opening statement on the “vital idea that sport is less about actually winning than creating an infrastructure that allows hope to flourish, no matter how improbable silverware might be. You may be creating a fiction, but if it is a fiction your fans can believe in, you’ve done your job.”But K.L. lost me, just a touch, with the assertion that followed, regarding Newcastle’s abrogation of ambition under Mike Ashley. “Finishing 15th in the Premier League is objectively more important than winning England’s domestic cups, if the alternative to not finishing 15th is getting relegated.”That is indisputable, of course, and it was very much the logic adopted by Ashley, but it has always struck me as a false parallel. There is no conclusive proof, as far as I am aware, of teams that take the domestic cups seriously being relegated more frequently. There is not even a compelling body of proof that it necessarily makes the difference between finishing 15th and 16th.And an intriguing point from Paul Bauer: “I suspect the Premier League was going to find a way around the controversy of Saudi ownership, thinking if they did not allow it, the Saudis would likely go to other leagues with their money.”This idea has been raised elsewhere, not least by one of the lawyers involved with the takeover, but I’m not sure it is reflective of how the Premier League thinks. The major leagues in the United States seem — at least from the outside — to think strategically and collectively much more naturally, and much more frequently, than the major soccer leagues of Europe. Plenty of the Premier League’s members have an unfortunate tendency to conflate the best interests of the league and their own best interests.That was the serious stuff; the trivial comes in the form of the many enquiries as to the correct pronunciation of my name. It’s Roar-Ee — spelling it that way might actually be better — but just get as close as you can.There were a couple of suggestions that perhaps this was not the best parallel — my name is apparently reasonably common, though I’m not sure children in Leeds in the 1980s saw it that way — and that using it was indicative of my own privilege. First off: It wasn’t necessarily a serious example. But, having thought about it, I’m not sure I buy the idea of privilege on this one.Some names are hard for some people to say. That is universal; it cuts across creed and color and nationality and everything else. And I would have thought that accepting that is also universal. We should all make an effort, of course; I take great pride in putting my accents in the right places. But we should also make an effort to understand if people sometimes fall short.The final word, this week, goes to Joe Bellavance. “I was prepared to fall out of my chair, laughing, when you signed off as ‘Greg,’” he wrote, reminding us all of another universal truth: that the best jokes are the ones you forget to make. More

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      A Nets Coach, a Few Ex-Pros and a Spanish Club With a Plan

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      Mallorca, a Spanish team that has struggled to find its level but just won promotion back to La Liga, is finding out.Graeme Le Saux spent the last year mapping out two futures.In one, the club he helps run, Real Mallorca, would remain in Spain’s second division. Its budget would be halved, and difficult decisions would need to be made. Some players might have to be sold. Horizons would be lowered. That was, to borrow a term that has become familiar this last year, the worst-case scenario.In the alternative — the best case — Real Mallorca would be promoted, back to the bright lights of La Liga. The club’s cash flow would increase, and increase considerably, as television revenue poured in. The team would have to be bolstered, rather than deconstructed. Ambition, though modest, would flutter through the club.As a director of Mallorca, Le Saux saw the complication. It was, he said, a little like going to NASA and asking it either to put a satellite into orbit or to mount a fully-manned mission to Mars, but refusing to decide which until the day of departure. And you did not know the budget. Also, the same four people had to work on both projects. Le Saux was preparing for two futures that opened doors into divergent realities.Mallorca players last summer. In May, they clinched a return to La Liga.Isaac Buj/Getty ImagesLike everyone at Mallorca, Le Saux is acclimatized to that sort of uncertainty. Five years ago, a group headed by Robert Sarver — the owner of the N.B.A.’s Phoenix Suns — bought the club as it languished, anchored by debt, in Spain’s second division.The takeover attracted attention, at the time, because Sarver’s co-investors were not the usual faceless Wall Street types: they included Steve Nash, now the coach of the Brooklyn Nets, and Stuart Holden and Kyle Martino, both former United States internationals turned broadcasters.Andy Kohlberg, once a professional tennis player, would serve as team president. Le Saux — a former Premier League winner and England international, now a mainstay of NBC’s soccer coverage in the United States — came on board a couple of years later, first as an adviser and then as a director.It gave Mallorca the air of a grand experiment. Various teams in Europe — most notably Ajax and Bayern Munich — employ former players in front office or executive roles. But they are grand institutions, places bonded to longstanding traditions, more accustomed to trying to preserve tried-and-tested methods than forging new paths. Mallorca, by contrast, was effectively a blank slate. It was a chance to see what would happen if athletes could build a club in their own image.In a way, the result is almost underwhelming. It turns out, if the athletes were in charge, they would be extraordinarily sensible. They would think long-term. They would devote considerable time and energy to building what Kohlberg calls “a winning culture,” though Le Saux generally prefers “identity.”Steve Nash, center, and Stu Holden watching Mallorca play Barcelona in 2019.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say their investment and interest is not commercially minded. Before the coronavirus pandemic, one of Mallorca’s great innovations was to introduce the first “tunnel club” in Spanish soccer, a place where corporate guests or well-heeled fans could pay a premium price for a premium seat, taking in the game while eating fresh-baked pizza and drinking cocktails.It is the sort of idea that, in general, would be greeted with scorn and derision in many places in Europe: American owners trampling over the proud traditions of the game in an effort to make a quick buck. Kohlberg’s explanation, though, sounds eminently reasonable: It was a way of “segmenting the fan experience and the customer experience,” allowing ordinary fans to enjoy the game as they always have, while accepting that some people want to, well, eat pizza and drink cocktails.Of far more concern to all of them is the way the sporting side of Mallorca is run. The principles are the same ones that bind most of Europe’s upwardly mobile teams: having a single, stylistic thread running from the first team down to the youth ranks; focusing on and investing in the academy, allowing the club to harvest homegrown talent; making coaching appointments with that vision in mind, rather than jumping at whoever happens to be fashionable or successful at the time.It is not a particularly quick process. “It took 15 years with the Suns to build that culture,” Kohlberg said. It is not an absolute one, either. “It does not mean winning every year,” he said. “It means getting to the playoffs more often than not.” And it is not, crucially, one that has any shortcuts.Mallorca isn’t used to things breaking its way when it faces Spain’s giants.Juan Medina/ReutersSoccer is obsessed with the idea that there is some sort of magic formula to success: that it can be wholly attributed to a manager’s decision to ride a bicycle or that team spirit can be developed by a particularly moist banana bread. Most famously, allowing players to eat ketchup is a crucial ingredient in both success and failure.There is a reason for this: Trivia is imbued with explanatory power because the real difference between victory and defeat is long and painstaking and, deep down, not especially attention-grabbing.“A winning culture starts with management and ownership, and then it is finding people who are consistent with that,” Kohlberg said. “Whether they are involved with training or nutrition or physiotherapy, they all have to buy in to it. And it means not continuing with people who don’t fit into that culture.”Having an ownership group that instinctively understands that — that has experienced, firsthand, the sorts of environments that thrive and the sorts that do not — gives Mallorca an idea of what makes a difference, of what matters. The former professionals he can lean on, Kohlberg said, have an instinctive awareness of what a winning culture looks like.And yet they know, too, that no matter how hard you work, how good you are, how many things you get right, nothing is guaranteed. Mallorca’s long-term vision might always have been in sharp focus, but its perspective has rarely been still. In the five years since Sarver and his group arrived, it has not played in the same division in consecutive seasons.Mallorca’s stadium will host games in La Liga again next season, when the club’s biggest challenge will be staying up.Javier Barbancho/ReutersIn the ownership group’s first full season, the club was relegated to the regionalized third tier of Spanish soccer. “That was a real shock to them, I think,” Le Saux said. “But they knew that they had to make it the best thing that ever happened to them.” The club was promoted back to the second tier a year later, and then jumped straight to La Liga, too. “I had to explain that it was a unicorn moment,” Le Saux said. “It was not the sort of thing that really happened.”Mallorca narrowly fell short of retaining its place in the top flight last year. In the summer, it lost its chief executive, and its star forward effectively went on strike, trying to force a transfer.It spent this season battling for promotion, confirming yet another change of status last month, with three games to go. Only at that point did Le Saux know what the future looked like. Rather than another year in orbit, Mallorca would be going to Mars. And it had about two months to prepare.Many ownership groups would find that infuriating, proof of the ultimate irrationality of soccer. “We are trying to change the culture, the academy, the infrastructure, and that would be easier to do if we weren’t bouncing up and down,” Kohlberg said. Spanish soccer’s financial rules add to the complexity, since the owners are limited by what they are allowed to invest in the team.Some, in that situation, might abandon their principles, seeking an immediate fix just to stabilize. Others might, perhaps, launch some sort of breakaway project, to try to abandon the possibility of relegation altogether. It would be a stretch to say that anyone at Mallorca has enjoyed the uncertainty. “It has been difficult, emotionally and financially,” Kohlberg said.But it feels as if the athlete’s perspective is slightly different than the tycoon’s. Kohlberg takes great pride in having learned to be “nimble and conservative,” to foster an environment in which the club can take every twist and turn and yet never lose sight of its ultimate destination, or its preferred method of transport.Like Le Saux, and Nash, and Holden — Martino has divested his interest in the club — Kohlberg understands that, sometimes, you do not win. Sometimes you try your best and it does not work out. “You can only control what you can control,” he said.At the end of last season, once promotion was assured, Mallorca’s coach, Luis Garcia, decided to give a few of his lesser-used players a chance to take the field. “Not a weakened team,” Le Saux said. “Just a different team.” The club’s ultimate target already assured, the players might have felt able to go through the motions: Nothing, after all, was riding on these games.Instead, Mallorca won twice and, with the season almost over, was on course not only to win promotion but to claim the championship. “We were three minutes away from winning the league,” Le Saux said.Then its final opponent, Ponferradina, scored what Le Saux described as a “really good goal,” and that dream evaporated. He does not dress it up as bad luck, or claim the club was robbed of a glory that was its due. Sometimes, the other team scores a goal. Sometimes, in sport, you do not get what you want. You can only control what you can control. The athletes know that, even when they are in charge.A Lack of ImaginationCarlo Ancelotti, just starting his second stint at Real Madrid, with Zinedine Zidane, who just finished his.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockCarlo Ancelotti is back at Real Madrid. Massimiliano Allegri is back at Juventus. By those standards, Tottenham’s potential appointment of Antonio Conte, fresh from guiding Inter Milan to the Serie A title, would almost be dangerously novel. But whether Conte gets the job or not hinges, it seems, on whether Spurs can tempt Mauricio Pochettino to return from Paris St.-Germain.Every summer brings a game of managerial musical chairs, but two things stand out about this edition. The first is the sheer scale of it. It is not just Real Madrid, Juventus, Inter and Spurs looking for new coaches, or even those teams — Everton, Lazio and (possibly) P.S.G. — who suddenly find themselves in need of a replacement, but a pattern across Europe.There are still three Premier League jobs open, at Everton, Wolves and Crystal Palace. Roma, Napoli and Fiorentina all have new coaches. A majority of Bundesliga teams will go into next season under fresh leadership, and so will Lille, the French champion, and Lyon. It is verging on a complete reset.Except that it is not, because — Germany aside — so many of the names are so intensely familiar. The second defining trait of this year’s coaching carousel, particularly at the elite level, is how uninspired so many of these appointments are. Ancelotti is a fine manager, one of the best of his generation, but his return to Madrid — which he led to the Champions League title in 2014 and which fired him a year later — is an absolute failure of imagination, of vision.A mural of José Mourinho in Rome. His appeal to clubs never goes out of style.Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJuventus restoring Allegri is essentially an admission that the last two years have been a waste of everyone’s time. Spurs fired José Mourinho to find a coach with an expansive style and a belief in youth, and yet seem now to have fixated on Conte, who has neither, but does come with a thicket of championship medals around his neck.Mourinho at Roma, Luciano Spalletti at Napoli, Gennaro Gattuso at Fiorentina — these are all experienced, gifted coaches, ones who do not deserve to be condemned to the scrapheap, who still have something to offer. But still: They are hardly redolent of some grand vision for how to compete for trophies or restore a club for glory.Not one is a bold, daring choice, an effort to do something a little bit different, to see if there is another way. A stagnation has settled in, a risk aversion, one that will do nothing but perpetuate the status quo. This is a time for new ideas, but those ideas will not come from the same old faces.CorrespondenceA little nostalgia hit from Rod Auyang, who still “harbors a fondness for the ‘golden goal’ sudden death system for settling ties after 120 minutes,” rather than penalty shootouts. I quite liked the golden goal, too, though I’d like to see a slight amendment: maybe after every five minutes without a goal, each team loses a player?Tim Fuller is of the same mind. “Play an unlimited series of 10-minute periods in extra time,” he writes. “The first goal in extra time would be a ‘golden goal’ that ends the game.” To stave off fatigue-related injuries, he has two suggestions: one is to remove a player from both teams every few minutes (good), and the other is to forbid even the goalkeepers using their hands (bad, but potentially quite funny).Let’s check in with Chicago Fire fans after last week’s thoughts on their nickname.Eileen T. Meslar/Associated PressSeveral of you, including Joey Klonowski and Chris Conant, got in touch to say that Chicago is very proud of its fire, thank you very much, and I am happy to stand corrected. Whether the city is proud of the Fire, I’m not sure. And thanks to Jim Blaney, for pointing out that while Naples Volcanoes is a bad name, Naples Lava is a brilliant one. My other suggestion would have been the Naples Pyroclastic Flow, but Jim’s is better.And I loved this email from David Goguen, on the subject of authenticity. “I often let my 6-year-old son pick the matches we watch together,” David wrote. “The other day he chose a tie between Forward Madison [good name, needs punctuation] and Union Omaha.“He was tickled when the Madison fans started squawking like flamingoes in support of their club. An original gesture, perhaps a bit ridiculous, but traditions have been forged through less. And I thought it fitted right in with the quaint stands, the bucolic trees behind, and the smoke from the vendors’ grills.“It got me thinking about how every tradition has to start somewhere. There was a moment on Merseyside when the supporters heard ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ through the speakers for the first time, and maybe they were baffled. The first few times I heard FC Koln’s anthem I thought it was a lost track from Scorpions, but now it gives me chills. History has to start somewhere, and authenticity by it’s very definition can’t be faked. Here’s to real roots, however absurd, and more flamingos.”(On the subject of Forward, Madison! I loved this piece, by the sometime Times contributor Leander Schaerlaeckens, on the trend toward original, innovative jerseys not only in M.L.S., but throughout the American soccer landscape. The Kingston Stockade number, for one, is lovely. But it will have to go some to beat what longtime readers will know is officially the best jersey ever produced.) More

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      Tottenham Hotspur Fires José Mourinho

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      The Portuguese coach’s 17 months in charge at the North London club failed to deliver the successes that marked his career at teams like Chelsea and Real Madrid.Tottenham Hotspur said on Monday that it had fired José Mourinho, the manager it hired as the closest thing European soccer has to a guarantee of trophies, six days before he was to contest his first major final with the club.Spurs appointed the Portuguese manager in November 2019 in the hope that he would turn the team into serial contenders for honors. He was, as the club’s chairman, Daniel Levy, explained, “one of the most accomplished managers in world football,” and had delivered success at every previous stop in his illustrious career, winning championships at F.C. Porto, Chelsea (twice), Inter Milan and Real Madrid.His 17 months in North London, though, have been anticlimactic. The club finished sixth last season, and sits one place lower in the current standings after a run of just one win in its last five Premier League games. In that time, Mourinho also suffered what he described as one of the most humiliating nights of his career: an exit from the Europa League at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb.Tottenham’s players had been growing increasingly restless under his reign, taking particular exception at his frequent attempts to blame them for Spurs’ struggles, rather than accepting at least a portion of the responsibility for himself. Last week, when asked why his team did not have the defensive solidity of some of his championship-winning sides, he responded: “Same coach, different players.”Levy decided on Friday night — after a 2-2 draw with Everton — to part company with Mourinho, appointing two of his coaching staff, Ryan Mason and Chris Powell, to take charge of the club for the remainder of the season.Their first week will end with Sunday’s league cup final, the first domestic trophy to be decided in England, against Manchester City — precisely the sort of occasion that Mourinho was hired to reach and to win. He will not, now, be given the chance. More

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      The Premier League Race Is Over. The Champions League Lottery Is Here.

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      Everyone knows who will win the Premier League. Most can guess who will be relegated. All of the drama is in the race for a spot in the Champions League.Here, then, is the home straight of the Premier League season, the final quarter of a campaign that was heralded as the most chaotic, and least predictable, of them all.At times, throughout autumn and into winter, the combination of empty stadiums, a packed schedule and a frantic pace seemed destined to usurp the established order. Contenders seemed to rise and fall every week. Earnest conversations were held about whether Aston Villa could win the league or if Arsenal was in danger of relegation.It did not, it turns out, quite come to pass. It soon became clear that Manchester City — the team with the best and biggest squad, the side with the brightest coach — would be champion while spring was still fresh in the air. Pep Guardiola’s team sits 14 points clear of Manchester United, its fingers already brushing a third crown in four years.Relegation, too, is largely settled. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion will be playing in the Championship next season; all that remains to be decided is whether Fulham can muster enough momentum to condemn Newcastle, drifting and directionless, to a place alongside them.In that relative certainty, the Premier League is something of an outlier across Europe’s major leagues. Elsewhere, the curious circumstances of the pandemic season do seem to have had an effect. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid are slowly reeling in a stuttering Atlético Madrid. In Italy, Inter Milan has six points on its city rival, A.C. Milan, and 10 on Juventus and Atalanta. But with at least one fairly spectacular choke in fans’ relatively recent memory, that is not yet a gap broad enough to permit any comfort.In Germany, the title race may effectively be decided this weekend, when Bayern Munich travels to RB Leipzig on Saturday knowing that victory will all but see off its last remaining challenger. A couple hours earlier, the top two teams in France will meet, though neither Lille nor Paris St.-Germain is in a position to deliver a decisive blow. Lyon and a resurgent Monaco are within touching distance of both, four teams separated by four points.In the absence of questions at the top and bottom of the table, the Premier League has concentrated all of its drama, jeopardy and intrigue into the jostling for position immediately below Manchester City. There are three more spots available in the Champions League for next season and seven teams with a realistic shot at one of them.Some are fallen giants, teams desperate to salvage something from a bitterly disappointing season. Others are surprise packages, those teams that have best adapted to the strangeness of this season. It is at this point that the consequences of all the chaos and unpredictability of the last seven months are made flesh, and it is a race that is all but impossible to sort — at least not yet. “It will go until the last day,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Everton manager, said last month. The challenge, he said, is to make sure you are still in contention by then.Jamie Vardy and Leicester City enter the homestretch with a lead on the teams chasing them.Pool photo by Alex PantlingHead Starts and Tough RoadsA glance at the table would indicate that two of the seven Champions League contenders — Manchester United and Leicester City — have a considerable advantage. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United has an eight-point lead on West Ham, currently the first team outside the places in fifth. Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester side has a seven-point cushion.But in Leicester’s case, certainly, that head start could yet be canceled out by the fact that its remaining schedule is considerably steeper than some of its rivals’. Leicester faces Manchester City this weekend before traveling to West Ham. Three of its final four games are against direct rivals for a spot in the top four: trips to Manchester United and Chelsea, and a home game against Tottenham. Rodgers’s team surrendered a place in the top four on the final day last season; this year’s calendar brings with it the ghost of past regrets.No other team has quite such an arduous finish to the campaign, though Chelsea is close. The extent of Thomas Tuchel’s impact at Stamford Bridge will be gauged by visits to West Ham and Manchester City, and looming home games against Arsenal and Leicester.If the calendar is kindest to anyone, it is Liverpool, marooned in seventh after a dismal run since late December. That may prove scant solace for a team that has spent the last three months losing at home to Fulham, Brighton and Burnley, but it at least gives Jürgen Klopp’s side a slim chance of returning to Europe.The Price of DistractionsTottenham’s Europa League elimination had a silver lining: fewer games this spring.Darko Bandic/Associated PressIf anything has marked this season, it is the capriciousness of crisis. It is barely two weeks since José Mourinho accused his Tottenham players of being unable to display “the basics of football and the basics of life” during a humiliation at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb in the Europa League. Now he may wonder if being out of that competition is not such a bad thing.Nine league games remain of Spurs’ season, and Mourinho must also make room for the Carabao Cup final on April 24. But, that aside, he has a clear run. So, too, do West Ham and Everton. Leicester has one extra game than its rivals — an F.A. Cup semifinal — but the rest have more demanding commitments to juggle.Chelsea, for one, is still fighting on three fronts: An F.A. Cup semifinal against Manchester City beckons, as well as a two-legged Champions League quarterfinal with F.C. Porto. Should Chelsea reach the final of both competitions, it would have to play almost twice as many games as some of its rivals.Liverpool has a Champions League quarterfinal, too — a more arduous pairing, against Real Madrid — and Manchester United will be expected to reach the final of the Europa League, adding another five games to its schedule. At the end of a season that has been particularly demanding, the strain of any added workload to tired legs may prove crucial.The Fatigue FactorNo Premier League player has logged as many minutes as Harry Maguire.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThat injury has proved a defining factor in the outcome of this Premier League season is neither surprising nor particularly debatable. The root of Liverpool’s collapse lies in its loss of its central defense; Leicester’s form stuttered with the absence, at various times, of Jamie Vardy, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, among others; Everton’s results dipped when James Rodríguez was missing.It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the next two months will be decided by which teams sustain the fewest injuries, particularly to their key players. Liverpool, of course, is still missing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Tottenham is without Son Heung-min. Leicester is without Barnes, Maddison and James Justin, while Manchester United is sweating on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Anthony Martial.Injuries can, of course, be sheer misfortune — a bad tackle, a mistimed movement — but they can also be cumulative, the effect of a player pushed too far into what Arsène Wenger used to call the “red zone.” But that is not the only consequence of fatigue. Even if injury is avoided, performance can dip.It is this, more than anything, that should give Solskjaer and Manchester United pause. United’s captain, Harry Maguire, has played 3,946 minutes this season, an order of magnitude greater than every other outfield player in England. He has played the equivalent of five full games more this season than his nearest rival, Leicester’s Youri Tielemans.But Maguire is not alone. United has seven players who have played more than 2,700 minutes this season. Leicester and Everton have only one, Chelsea two, and Spurs and West Ham three. Even Liverpool, its options reduced because of all those injuries, has only five. If fatigue does prove to be a factor, the core of United’s side is more likely to be afflicted in the final stretch than anyone else.To some extent, of course, that is offset by its resources: Solskjaer has options should any of his key players be sidelined or suffer an alarming drop in form. Having to play Donny van de Beek because Bruno Fernandes needs a rest should be no great sacrifice.Indeed, that may well be the formula, more than any other, that comes to define the next two months, that serves to find the signal in the noise of this season. More than in any other season, the final prize on offer in the Premier League will go to the teams that can best minimize the effects of fatigue, thanks to a reduced workload or by possessing the strength in depth to ride it out. In all the chaos, in the end, there will be some sort of order. More