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    When Saying Nothing Is Saying Something

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    Leagues and teams probably would have preferred not to take a public position on the Israel-Hamas war. That they could not avoid doing so is their own fault.By the end of last week, England’s Football Association doubtless felt that it had done the best it could, that after hours and hours of talks, it had settled on what might best be described as the least worst option.Last Friday night, England’s men’s team was playing an exhibition match against Australia. Most expected that the game would take note of the violence crackling across Israel and Gaza, commemorate the victims and acknowledge the suffering. Executives at the F.A. knew they would have to tread carefully.They had weighed the risk that a minute’s silence, soccer’s traditional manifestation of grief, might be interrupted, but they determined that having it was the appropriate thing to do. There would be black armbands. And to ward off the chance that either Israeli or Palestinian flags might appear in the crowd, they declared that all banners except for those of the competing teams would be forbidden.The most difficult decision, though, was to do with the Wembley Arch, the soaring steel beam that rises above the stadium.The Wembley Arch has become the way in which English soccer expresses its opinions. It was illuminated in the French tricolor in 2015, to show solidarity after the Paris terror attacks, and in Ukraine’s yellow and blue after that country was invaded by Russia last year. It has been used to mark the death of Pelé, to demonstrate admiration for Britain’s National Health Service and to show support for the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride campaign.John Mann, the British government’s antisemitism czar, assumed the F.A. would do the same for Israel. But, aware of the political sensitivity of such a gesture, he had suggested that the blue and white of the Jewish prayer shawl, rather than the Israeli flag, might act as a compromise.His suggestion was not adopted. It is hard to know, for certain, precisely why that was, but it seems a fair assumption that the F.A. believed it would be interpreted as taking a side at a time when civilians in Gaza were suffering, and dying, too. As fans starting streaming into the game, the arch stood dark.On this subject, more than most, saying nothing is interpreted in itself as saying something. The F.A.’s perceived inaction was met with fury. Rabbi Alex Goldberg, the chairman of the F.A.’s Faith in Football Task Force, resigned in protest. Eventually, the organization’s chief executive, Mark Bullingham, admitted that the decision had “caused hurt in the Jewish community.”Mann was rather less circumspect. “The Football Association,” he said, “looks hopelessly out of its depth.”England’s players before last week’s friendly against Australia.Naomi Baker/Getty ImagesThere is, of course, a very obvious reason for that. The issue of Israel and Palestine is the most intractable geopolitical problem of the modern age. Its complexity and its delicacy have perplexed diplomats, politicians, theorists and thinkers for more than half a century.For all that the F.A. employs plenty of sharp, bright minds, it is not a government. It does not have a department that deals with statehood. It exists, at least in part, to work out whom Mansfield will play in the cup, and to administer fines to part-time players who get yellow cards on Sunday mornings. It is not so much that it is out of its depth on geopolitics. It is that it occupies a wholly different pool.The F.A. is not alone, of course, in having struggled to calibrate its response to the devastation in Israel and Gaza over the last two weeks. The Premier League, too, has been accused of ducking the issue, of falling back on empty gestures and words picked clean of any meaning.The world’s most popular domestic league and the 20 clubs it comprises released almost verbatim statements last week, stating that they were “shocked and saddened by the escalating crisis” and condemning “the horrific and brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians.” They will, this weekend, wear black armbands and observe silences, too.Manor Solomon, the league’s only Israeli player, found that insufficient. The statement, he said in an interview on Israeli television, was “vanilla,” an attempt to say something while saying nothing. Erez Halfon, the chairman of the Israeli Professional Football Leagues, wrote to his Premier League counterpart, Richard Masters, to express his disappointment at what he perceived as an equivocal response from English soccer.At this point, it is worth pivoting away from the relative merits of these perspectives — the only thing less worthwhile than soccer teams commenting on a war is soccer writers doing it — and asking, instead, quite how the sport found itself in this situation.It is difficult not at least to acknowledge the faint absurdity of it all. The death toll from the conflict has already stretched beyond 5,000. Around a million people have been displaced. Many more have been deprived of water, gas and electricity. Quite why there should be so much energy expended on what English soccer thinks of it all is not clear.Armbands and moments of silence have been criticized as insufficient, an effort to signal something without saying anything.Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then perhaps the F.A. and the Premier League only have themselves to blame. Officially, both relentlessly self-define as apolitical. Such is soccer’s official sense of self: It is a force for unity, for joy, for bringing people together, not to divide and to pontificate and to judge.Obviously, that position has always been a bit of a stretch. Soccer indulges in plenty of politics. It has just conveniently decided that things are only political if it disagrees with them.And so the political symbolism of the poppy, for example, is ignored completely. The Premier League’s stance on ownership — that everything is fine as long as you are not a convicted criminal, essentially — is presented as a form of neutrality, rather than an ideological acceptance of Thatcherite economics and a tacit embrace of some of the most brutal governments in the world.In recent years, though, another of the sport’s defining traits — a self-importance that bleeds into pomposity — has made its stance even more tenuous. There was a point, not all that long ago, when it was relatively rare to witness a minute’s silence at a soccer game in England.If a beloved player or manager died, a club might identify a moment’s reflection as suitable tribute. Occasionally, the sport would come together to commemorate a soccer-specific disaster — the Munich air crash, or the tragedies at Hillsborough, Heysel, Bradford and Ibrox — or, by governmental edict, to honor the death of a member of the royal family.Slowly but surely, that has shifted. This year alone, there have been minutes’ silences for the victims of earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Morocco and the flooding in Libya, as well as for the death of John Motson, a longtime BBC commentator. They are now so frequent, in fact, that some clubs are reported to have complained privately of “grief fatigue.”It is hard to argue that any of those instances were unworthy of remembrance — it is no great suffering, after all, to stay quiet for 60 seconds — but piece by piece they have helped to feed a sense that soccer must say something, must do something. That part of its role is to act as an arbiter of significance, a national barometer of sorrow.The conclusion of that, of course, was always going to be what happened over the last two weeks: the game’s being expected to make a statement about an issue that is inherently divisive, one in which both doing something and doing nothing could only be interpreted as political. It is tempting to say that, to some extent, English soccer brought this on itself.But it is not wholly true. That at a time of international crisis lawmakers have seemingly spent so much time focusing on soccer’s response is not simply a matter of political expedience — it being much easier to criticize someone else’s response than to think about one’s own actions — but a measure of the role the game plays in national life.Britain is an increasingly secular place: Only 6 percent of the country regards itself as actively Christian, and while (roughly) a quarter of the four million or so Muslims in Britain attend mosque, that still equates to only 1.5 percent of the population. The nation’s politics are, like everywhere else, a mess of tribalism and division. Very few national institutions could reasonably claim to offer a snapshot of the British public.Except, of course, for soccer. More than a million people attend soccer games across the country every weekend. Several million more watch on television, and still more do so internationally. The clubs themselves are seen not as transactional franchises but, with a naïve romanticism, as trusted civic institutions.It is in its soccer stadiums, more than anywhere else, that Britain can both see and project itself. It is there that people can, or at least feel like they can, make themselves heard. It is as good a gauge as any as to the country’s feelings, its mood, its priorities. It is where it speaks, and where it is seen to speak, whether it says something or nothing at all.Free Hit for BrazilNeymar will be out for months with a knee injury.Andres Cuenca/ReutersFor Brazil, the last couple of weeks started badly and then grew steadily worse. First, the country’s national team was held to a draw on home turf by Venezuela, traditionally one of South America’s afterthoughts. Several players, in the immediate aftermath, suggested they had been struggling to adapt to the methods employed by their new coach, Fernando Diniz.A few days later, Brazil traveled to Montevideo to face rather more daunting opposition: Uruguay, now under the tutelage of soccer’s foremost philosopher-purist, Marcelo Bielsa. The hosts won, 2-0.Neymar, still his country’s brightest star, left the field in tears just before halftime. Tests have subsequently confirmed that he tore the anterior cruciate ligament and the meniscus in his left knee. He could be absent for as much as a year. He described it as one of “the worst” moments in his career.That is the bad news. The good news is that, in contrast to the personal impact on Neymar, the consequences for Brazil will be vanishingly small.South America’s qualifying process for the World Cup has long been one of the most compelling, most exacting contests in global soccer. The pool is far smaller, and the reward far closer, than in Europe, Africa or Asia — 10 teams going for four automatic spots — but what it has lacked in variety it has always made up for in intensity.There might, after all, be two overwhelming favorites to qualify in every cycle — Brazil and Argentina — but their progress is rarely smooth and never straightforward. It is not just that a pack of as many as six teams lies in wait, more than capable of capitalizing on any misstep, but that the very geography of the tournament presents a challenge.Bolivia plays many of its home games 12,000 feet above sea level. Ecuador, which tends to play at an altitude of 9,000 feet, has lost just one competitive game on home soil this decade. Qualifying for the World Cup, for any South American nation, has always been climbing a mountain.Not so much these days, though. The World Cup’s expansion means that six South American teams will qualify automatically to play in the United States, Canada and Mexico in 2026. A seventh will be routed through the intercontinental playoffs. South American qualifying, for so long such a high-wire act, now operates with a colossal safety net. Brazil has had a bad start, yes, but in all likelihood it will mean little or nothing in a couple of years’ time. It is going to have to try a lot harder than this not to qualify for the World Cup.CorrespondenceJames Warren and Diane Kravif both came away from last week’s newsletter, on Ian Graham’s attempts to help soccer learn more about itself, feeling shortchanged. The idea sounds all well and good, they both wrote, but it was distinctly lacking on concrete examples.“What kind of data did Dr. Graham analyze and how did the team apply his analyses to improve Liverpool’s performance and outcomes?” Diane asked. James was thinking along similar lines: “Might you at some point give an example or two of how Graham helped Liverpool improve? What do they, and others, have data on regarding their teams, and how is that used to attempt to improve performance?”This is quite a complex thing to explain quickly, which is why it was omitted last week. So strap yourselves in: Graham’s view — shared by most people in what everyone now calls “the space” — is that data is still most effective in recruitment. Adding the right player to a team, he and others argue, can have a much more pronounced, and faster, impact than using complex algorithms to fine-tune tactics.That data (in Liverpool’s case; other teams will focus on other things) can essentially be boiled down to whether every decision made by an individual player makes it more, or less, likely that that player’s team will score a goal.That is established by using both event data — passes, shots, actual things that happen, measured in detail sufficiently granular that it includes not only where a pass was played, but at what height and speed — and so-called tracking data, which examines where players move when they are not in possession of the ball. The metrics that soccer favors — such as expected goals (the quality of shots a team or player has) and expected assists (the quality of chances they create) — all flow from that model.That is not to say, though, that clubs like Liverpool have not used the information they possess to try to change the way their teams play. Liverpool has spent a long time working out how a team might best be spread across the field in order to dominate space, both in and out of possession. A lot of other work has been done, across the game, on what sort of offensive maneuvers are most likely to lead to shots on goal.In fact, that may well be where data has made its most obvious contribution to the way the game is played. There has, over the last decade, been a steady decrease in the number of shots teams take from long distance, a reduction that tracks quite neatly with the rise of analytics. A long-range effort is, by definition, a low-percentage chance. The data discourages such shots, and so teams, increasingly, do too.This newsletter would not be complete, though, without at least some airy, left-field challenge to an unchallenged convention. So thanks to Jeff Cadman for obliging.“Do we still need the offside rule?” he asked. “Would goal-hanging still occur in the modern game? It is hard to see any of the top teams changing their style or formation to have one player constantly standing next to the opposing goalkeeper.”This is a great question, and one I will admit to having previously contemplated. My conclusion was that Jeff’s thesis is basically right, but that soccer operates according to the law of unintended consequences: Nobody, when soccer decided to abolish the back pass to the goalkeeper, foresaw the rise of the high press. My guess is that abolishing offside would lead teams to defend deeper regardless, but I am also prepared to accept that my guess might be wrong. More

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      Selling Saudi Soccer, One Like at a Time

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      The standard of play in the Saudi Pro League doesn’t matter when no one’s watching the games.Neymar’s endorsement was not, perhaps, the most ringing. Back in Brazil to play for his national team this month, he had been asked — not for the first time — to address the lingering suspicion that, in leaving Paris St.-Germain for Saudi Arabia and Al-Hilal, one of the finest players of his generation might not have chosen the most challenging coda to his career.Neymar’s immediate instinct was to dismiss the premise. “I can assure you the game in Saudi Arabia is the same: The ball is round, we have goal posts,” he said with a slight smile and a nervous laugh. “For the names that have gone to Saudi Arabia, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Saudi league was better than the French,” he added. He was still smiling then, but it did not feel quite as warm.Clearly, the accusation — one thrown not just at Neymar, but at the dozens of players who have been enticed to the Saudi Pro League over the course of the summer — touches a nerve.That is no surprise. Nobody likes to be told that they have chosen the easy route. No athlete would tolerate the intimation that what they do, and where they play, does not really count. In general, soccer players fall philosophically somewhere between realism and cynicism, but even they tend to bristle when they are told their primary — their only — motivation is money. The early evidence, though, does not exactly play in Neymar’s favor.Neymar’s signing by Al-Hilal, like so many others this summer, was about attracting attention as much as talent.Associated PressEstablishing the comparative quality of different leagues is an inexact science. What makes one competition stronger than another? Is it the technical brilliance of the best teams? Is it incompetence of the worst? Or is it the cumulative accomplishment of the tournament’s constituents? Is it the peak, the trough, or the median?Or does it have nothing to do with the ability of the players at all? Is the best league the one that is most entertaining, or the most competitive, the one in which the greatest proportion of games are evenly balanced? (Other answers include: “The one in which you are most emotionally invested” and “The one with the highest production values and smartest marketing strategy.”)It is hard to believe, though, that the first installment of the new-and-improved Saudi Pro League outstrips France’s Ligue 1 — by common consensus the weakest of Europe’s five major leagues — on any of those criteria.(To be clear, it would be unreasonable to think it should. A whole competition cannot be transformed in a single summer, and even the Saudi authorities themselves accept it is an ongoing process. Those who have been working there for longer than Neymar regard the standard as hugely variable, still, with the strongest sides roughly on a par with mid-table Premier League teams, and the weakest some way below.)Still, Neymar — who missed more than 100 games through injury during his six seasons in France, a crude but not entirely irrelevant gauge of the intensity of that competition — cannot have failed to notice the difference.At Al-Nassr, Cristiano Ronaldo is the star even when he doesn’t score.Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Thursday, during Al-Ittihad’s win against Al-Okhdood, the Cameroonian striker Léandre Tawamba performed a nutmeg on another of the league’s high-profile recruits, the Brazilian midfielder Fabinho. The trick itself was neat, inventive, worthy of a ripple of applause. Fabinho’s reaction, though, was telling.He did not immediately snap at Tawamba’s ankles. He did not tussle with the forward, his brow furrowed in grim determination, as he surely would have done during his days at Monaco, or Liverpool. He chose, instead, just to stand and watch for a moment. So did the rest of Al-Ittihad’s midfield. The whole thing seemed to play out in slow motion.Any number of brief vignettes from the opening weeks of the Saudi season create the same impression. There are gifted players present, of course. There are moments of wonder. But for all the screaming headlines and the triumphalist spin that tends to greet another goal for Cristiano Ronaldo or another virtuoso improvisation from Karim Benzema, everything is undercut by quite how laissez-faire it all seems to be.That is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Soccer does not have to be played in the pell-mell style that is de rigueur in England and Germany. Intensity does not always equal beauty. Argentina, for example, has long had a tradition of a slightly more thoughtful playing style. And besides, there are extenuating circumstances: Saudi Arabia, even on a September evening, is still really quite hot.More important, as Neymar and those who have made the same career choice this summer reflect on and come to terms with their decisions, there is a very good chance that the quality of the league does not matter in the slightest.Saudi Arabia did not spend the summer just signing superstars. Through its media rights partners, its soccer authorities also reached agreements with a host of international broadcasters. This season, the league’s games will now be available in more than 130 territories, among them the United States (Fox), Britain, Germany and Canada (DAZN), and, eager to see what real soccer looks like, France (Canal+).But that is not how the vast majority of people will engage with the Saudi league, because it is not how the vast majority of people engage with any league.Does it even matter that Karim Benzema and Al-Ittihad entered Friday atop the Saudi Pro League table? Maybe not to Saudi Arabia.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere has always been a discrepancy between live soccer’s value as content and the number of people who actually watch it. Even the most mouthwatering Premier League games attract only a couple of million viewers in Britain, and roughly the same number in the United States. (Where there are, you may have noticed, significantly more people.)Instead, most fans consume the sport in either an abbreviated form — game highlights — or an abstract one, as a rolling, character-based drama that plays out across various strands of the media. In recent years, social media has allowed those to dovetail: You can follow the plot interspersed with brief clips of Ronaldo scoring a penalty or Neymar fooling a defender or Fabinho not really bothering to tackle someone.It seems unlikely that Saudi Arabia is ignorant of that. The country’s approach has been sufficiently considered that it is reasonable to assume it has been factored into its plans. The way to win hearts and minds, in the digital age, is not to construct a league and imbue it with a slow-burn dramatic tension. That is hard, and takes time.It is much quicker, and much easier, to use a competition to generate digestible, fun-size content, the sort that can be quickly and easily shared on Instagram and TikTok and whatever Twitter is called now, the kind that generates neither an emotional nor an intellectual response but one that can be encapsulated in an emoji. If people do not watch the games, the standard is irrelevant. All that matters is that you hit that like button.Quite what that means for the future of the sport itself — of all sports, in fact — is not clear. Soccer’s authorities, the various feuding bodies in charge of the most popular pastime the world has ever known, have spent a surprising amount of time in recent years considering that very issue.For Neymar and the others, though, as for Saudi Arabia, the answer is no more pressing than whether the average game in the Saudi Pro League is as good as the average game in Ligue 1. Nobody is judging Saudi Arabia on what its billion-dollar, oven-baked competition looks like over 90 minutes. All it takes is a few seconds.Destination: TajikistanThe Asian Champions League schedule will send Cristiano Ronaldo and Al-Nassr to Tajikistan, Qatar and Iran.Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAll through the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010, it seemed impossible that Barcelona would not retain the Champions League title. Pep Guardiola’s team was, by some distance, the best in Europe. Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández, Andres Iniesta and their teammates breezed through the group. They blew past Stuttgart and then Arsenal in the knockout phase.There are two interpretations for what happened next. José Mourinho, the coach of the Inter Milan team that knocked Barcelona out in the semifinals, would tell you that his tactical acumen derailed his great philosophical counterpoint’s attempt to conquer the continent once again.Everyone else would suggest that the explosion of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that sent an ash cloud over Europe and forced Barcelona to travel overland to the first leg of its semifinal with Inter in Milan, might have had something to do with it.All of which is a long-winded, self-indulgent way of saying that — from this vantage point — any serious rationale for Manchester City’s not winning a second straight Champions League needs to involve at least one volcano. It is hard, certainly, to see it losing to any of its supposed rivals over two legs. (A final, I will concede, can be a little more arbitrary.)Perhaps, then, it is time to concede that the UEFA Champions League is not the most interesting continental tournament this season. It is not even the most interesting tournament of that name. For intrigue, it cannot hope to compete with the Asian iteration of the competition.There are, as you might have read, pros and cons to Saudi Arabia’s sudden taste for soccer teams and players, but it is hard to argue that seeing an Al-Hilal team featuring Neymar play in Mumbai is not a benefit. That is not all. Karim Benzema’s Al-Ittihad is set to travel to Iran, while — a personal favorite — Cristiano Ronaldo and Al-Nassr will make the trip to Istiklol, in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe.Partly, the pleasure is sincere: The prospect of welcoming Neymar, in the flesh, for a competitive game, is one that millions of fans in India will treasure. Partly, though, it is vicarious.Quite how Al-Nassr tempted Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia is not clear; precise details of the pitch remain private. It is hard to imagine, though, that at any point anyone mentioned the bit about a game in Tajikistan, an autocracy so repressive that even the Premier League might think twice before allowing it to buy one of its soccer teams.CorrespondenceNot really a correspondence section, this week, so much as a brief note to say thanks to all of you who have been in touch in the last few weeks to seek clarification on the future of this newsletter/my general whereabouts. Each message has been gratefully received, and hopefully this edition settles some of the more outré conspiracy theories. If not, I can happily provide a contemporaneous photograph with a copy of today’s newspaper for verification. More

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      P.S.G.-Bayern: Choupo-Moting Shows Benefits of the Slow Burn

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      Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting was never a can’t-miss talent. But as he leads Bayern Munich against P.S.G., he has proved he belongs right where he is.There were always plenty of things about Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting that caught the eye. The scouts dispatched to watch him tended to find that his build grabbed their attention first: tall but not rangy; broad-shouldered and muscular but lean. What held it, though, was everything else.He was quick: quicker than might have been expected for a player of his size. Choupo-Moting could be a target man, a flag that a team might plant in the ground to claim surrounding territory, but he could move. He could hold his own, physically, but there was a delicacy and a refinement to his touch, too.“He had a lot of positives,” said Kevin Cruickshank, a scout who tracked Choupo-Moting in the player’s native Germany for several seasons before helping bring him to England. “He had a combination of things that you do not see too often.”His most valuable trait, though, would not have been visible even to the most careful observer. Of all his many and varied characteristics, the one that has defined Choupo-Moting’s career more than any other has been his patience.These days, Choupo-Moting, a 33-year-old forward, is an established part of Bayern Munich’s squad, a member of the glittering cast at one of Europe’s great powerhouse clubs. This week, the draw for the round of 16 of the Champions League takes him to another of his alma maters, Paris St.-Germain. Choupo-Moting has spent the last five years on the grandest stages the game has to offer.Choupo-Moting with Neymar in 2020. He scored a vital goal in P.S.G.’s run and later played in the final against Bayern.Pool photo by David RamosHe has won domestic titles in France and Germany. He has scored to propel his team into a Champions League semifinal and played in a final. He has called some of the best players of his generation and the next teammates: Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, Robert Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer.Unlike most of them, though, he had to wait for it all to come. Choupo-Moting’s career has followed the sort of slow-burn trajectory that has become increasingly rare in modern soccer, where major clubs trawl the planet chasing any scent of juvenile promise and talent that is expected to ignite upon arrival.Choupo-Moting did not emerge, fully formed, from some hothouse academy, a teenager anointed for greatness. He spent his formative years at Hamburg, his hometown club, Germany’s great comatose giant. He left, at the age of 22 — by which time the game’s leading players are expected to have established themselves as stars — with an expired contract, a few dozen appearances and five goals to his name.By the time he was in his mid-20s, Choupo-Moting had earned a reputation as a steady, reliable Bundesliga forward. At Mainz, working with the club’s youthful, progressive coach, Thomas Tuchel, he scored 22 goals across three seasons. His three campaigns at Schalke proved similarly productive.He did not, though, worry that time was passing him by. “As a player, of course you have goals,” Choupo-Moting said in an interview last week. “But I always try to be happy for what I have. The highest level of success is happiness. I was happy at Hamburg, at Mainz, at Schalke. I was never sitting at home thinking: I am 24 already, I should be playing at another level. What if I don’t sign for a ‘big club’ this summer?“I never had that fear. I never had those questions in my head. I knew, as long as I tried everything, I would be happy. That’s all I wanted: to go home and say I tried my best. I was at Schalke, and for me Schalke was a big club. We played Champions League. That was one of my dreams. I had that fighting spirit to play on the highest level, but my parents always taught me to be patient.”Choupo-Moting scored five goals in his only season at Stoke City. When the club was relegated, his teammates said the bigger surprise was where he went next: P.S.G.Darren Staples/ReutersHis next step, in retrospect, seemed a backward one. He had always been attracted to England, drawn by the magnetic pull of the Premier League. When his contract at Schalke expired, Cruickshank and his colleagues at Stoke City — hardly a destination of choice — made their move.It was a deal rooted in pragmatism. Stoke saw in him a player “who could come in and help us straightaway,” Cruickshank said, rather than someone who could be molded into a star. That assessment proved basically correct. His payoff in a struggling team was modest: five goals and five assists in 30 games. Respectable, but not spectacular. Stoke was relegated.It was at that point that Choupo-Moting signed for P.S.G. His Stoke teammates had not exactly seen it coming.Doubtless, it helped that his former coach at Mainz, Tuchel, was now in charge in Paris. “He knew me,” Choupo-Moting said. “He knew what I could do, he knew I could still improve, that I could help a big team.” Despite all those years of waiting, and now closer to his 30th birthday than his teenage promise, the striker felt exactly the same way.Looking back, the transition has not been an easy one. Choupo-Moting had spent a decade or so in the relative shadows; the lights shine brighter at P.S.G., and Bayern, than they do anywhere else. “You have big players in front of you, players with bigger names, players with a lot of quality,” he said. Both in Paris and more recently in Munich, he had to wait for his chance to come.When it did, he felt he belonged. “You hear people ask why this player is at that club or another player at another club,” he said. “But you have to remember: Big clubs have a lot of quality people observing players.“If a player gets there, they deserve to be there. After that, it is on you, on the player, to show your potential, to show you deserve to stay at that level. With time, the quality you have determines if you get the chance. Some players get that chance straightaway. Sometimes you have to work more. But if you work hard, success will come.”That is what Choupo-Moting has found. At both clubs, it was assumed he would be a deputy to the frontline stars. At both, he more than proved his own worth. He scored a 93rd-minute winner in a Champions League quarterfinal for P.S.G. Though he largely had to fill in around Robert Lewandowski at Bayern, his numbers were impressive, averaging nearly a goal in every 90 minutes of playing time in the Bundesliga last season, and closer to two goals per 90 in the Champions League. When Robert Lewandowski departed Bayern last summer, the club decided not to acquire a replacement, preferring instead to trust in Choupo-Moting.Choupo-Moting is surrounded by bigger names at Bayern. “If a player gets there, they deserve to be there,” he said. After that, he added, it is on the player “to show you deserve to stay.”Nacho Doce/Reuters“It is difficult, because when a striker scores goals, you have to be patient,” Choupo-Moting said of the two years he spent as Lewandowski’s understudy. When Lewandowski left for Barcelona, he said, “I knew I would have a more important role. I always knew I could help the team. I had no doubts. From the beginning, I always told the people upstairs, the bosses, that I knew I could.”That he has made it, at last, to where he always felt he belonged is testament not only to his perseverance, but perhaps to something of a shift in the game itself. Players of Choupo-Moting’s profile — technically smooth but physically imposing strikers — have always been rare, but as the role of the forward has changed in recent years, they have become rarer still.“Maybe there was a time, when Pep Guardiola was with Barcelona, teams wanted to play with a real, strong No. 9, and it worked out,” Choupo-Moting said. Since then, he wonders if the game has come full circle. “It has changed,” he added. “Nowadays it is more and more important to have a striker who is strong, good with the ball, has that combination.”Soccer itself, in other words, has moved toward Choupo-Moting. The most exclusive teams on the planet have, belatedly, seen what was there all along. They might have taken their time. It is fortunate, then, that Choupo-Moting never had a problem with being patient. More

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      Kylian Mbappé Is Ready to Make Messi’s Moment His Own

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      The France and Argentina stars are teammates at Qatar-owned Paris St.-Germain. But when they collide in the World Cup final, both have much to gain, and a lot to lose.DOHA, Qatar — In those early months of the season, before anything was decided, the superstars of Paris St.-Germain mostly talked about what they could win together.The French championship was surely viewed as a formality; P.S.G. these days always seems to win that title. The Champions League was seen as a bigger prize; the team, assembled with the outlay of vast quantities of Qatar’s considerable wealth, had never won it.But in the locker room at Paris St.-Germain’s training facility, the team’s three headliners — the star forwards Neymar of Brazil, Kylian Mbappé of France and Lionel Messi of Argentina — also had another trophy on their minds. As they exchanged gentle ribbing and regular banter inside the aging locker room at Camp des Loges, a former French military camp surrounded by forest on the outskirts of Paris, all of them knew the World Cup was coming, and all of them desperately wanted to win it.“Everybody defends his country,” Mbappé said, laughing as he described the exchanges during an interview at The New York Times’s Manhattan office this summer. “But we laugh a lot. We’re gonna say: ‘Yeah, my country’s gonna win. We’re gonna beat you. No, we are gonna beat you.’”Mbappé in October with his Paris St.-Germain teammates Lionel Messi and Neymar. Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut now what for months served as background chatter, a way for top athletes to blow off steam, has suddenly become very real.Neymar has already left the conversation, and the World Cup. But Mbappé and Messi are safely through to Sunday’s final at the stadium in Lusail. Messi, who has said he is playing his final World Cup, will be seeking to claim the only prize that has eluded him in a glittering career. Mbappé is after a different honor: He can become a double World Cup winner if France wins on Sunday, repeating a feat last achieved by the Brazil teams of Pelé in 1958 and ’62.Mbappé had already written his name alongside Pelé’s four years ago in Russia, when he joined the Brazilian as the only teenagers to score in a World Cup final. His stunning run of form then, not only the goals but the unshakable confidence he showed in helping to deliver France’s title, elevated his status to genuine superstar overnight.In Qatar, Mbappé could no longer have the comfort of being the coming man, someone who might emerge from the shadows. Excellence, he knew, would be expected.“It’s different because I’m a different player,” he said of his second World Cup. “When I arrived in my first World Cup, I was a young teenager. I was a young guy. Everybody in the world didn’t know me well. I was a big player of P.S.G. but not really famous around the world. Now it is different. Everybody knows me — the pressure is different.”So far, Mbappe appears to have handled that pressure.He and Messi are tied in the race to be the tournament’s top scorer, with five goals each. While he has not always been at his very best, including curiously quiet stretches against both England and Morocco in the knockout round, Mbappé has regularly shown glimpses of the pace and explosiveness that will leave little doubt that he carries on his shoulders France’s chances of conquering Argentina, and Messi.“For me it is the biggest thing in world football,” Mbappé said. “Because when you talk about football, you have the World Cup in your mind. Because this is the only competition that everybody watches. You don’t need to love football to watch the World Cup.”Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMbappé helped usher Argentina out of the 2018 World Cup, at top, and beat Australia at this one.Issei Kato/ReutersFrance saw off Raheem Sterling and England in the quarterfinals, and Morocco in a taut semifinal.Elsa/Getty ImagesThe mass appeal will only be heightened on Sunday. The final’s predominant story line — Messi’s final shot at the one trophy he craves more than any other — has in part cast Mbappé as a foil in the narrative, the key man who could keep Messi from getting his Hollywood ending.The two have been teammates for more than a year now, the young contender and the aging star, and it has sometimes felt like a bumpy accommodation. As if sharing a field, let alone one ball, might not be enough to assuage the collections of talent — and egos — assembled by P.S.G., Mbappe said the noise that sometimes surrounds those relationships is not always an accurate reflection of reality.After all, he said, like any other soccer-loving child, he would have dreamed of lining up alongside Messi and Neymar.“I think the problem comes from outside because everybody asks questions they don’t have answers for, so they put some problem between us,” Mbappé said in the summer, amid whispers he had demanded control as the price for his re-signing with P.S.G. News reports about discord, he said, were untrue. “We have a great relationship.”But it is hard not to see that relationship tested on Sunday. One of them will leave the field a champion, the other with his heart broken.Messi’s ability to alter games all by himself could be France’s biggest hurdle in Sunday’s final. Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesMbappé said he knew what to expect. Able to study Messi’s game at such close quarters at his club for more than a year, he said that he has been in awe of the Argentine’s ability to pick the right move, to play the right pass, to measure the moments requiring his intervention with perfect timing, no matter the chaos around him.“He is calm, always calm,” Mbappé said of Messi. “Calm with the ball. Calm before he shoots. He always has control of everything he does.“It’s really impressive because sometimes there is big pressure with the game and with the fans, with the people. But he is always calm to make the right decision in the right moments.”Sunday, too, may be decided in one moment, by one moment of genius from Messi or, just maybe, a winning goal from Mbappé.Outside Al Bayt Stadium earlier this week, in the early hours as Wednesday turned into Thursday after France defeated Morocco in a semifinal match, there was a sense of relief as well as pressure in Mbappé’s camp. Fayza Lamari, his mother and a cornerstone of his relentless march to stardom from the earliest days, emerged from the arena near the V.I.P. entrance yelling, “We won! We won!” as she made her way toward the exit.She was not the only one smiling. Qatar, which has spent more than $200 billion on staging the World Cup, now has its dream final. In a few weeks it will welcome both Messi and Mbappé to P.S.G., reuniting its two biggest stars on the Qatari-owned club after they have squared off in a showcase final in Lusail.For Qatar, the question of Messi or Mbappé does not really matter. It has already won.Carl Recine/Reuters More

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      Keeping the National in National Team Coach

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      There is nothing in the rules that requires a World Cup team to be managed by someone born, raised or otherwise connected to that country. So should it matter?DOHA, Qatar — Brazil’s players already seem to have identified their preferred candidate. They had known, long before their quarterfinal defeat to Croatia sent them out of the World Cup, that Tite — the affable, cerebral coach of the national team for the past six years — would be stepping down. Now, they had decided that the most exacting job in international soccer should go to Fernando Diniz.The 48-year-old Diniz certainly had a strong case. The squad’s elder statesmen, Daniel Alves and Thiago Silva, offered glowing references. So did a couple of the team’s younger members, Antony and Bruno Guimaraes, who had worked with him early in their careers. Most important, he had Neymar on board: As long ago as July, Brazil’s most influential star had tweeted about his admiration for Diniz.Not everyone is quite so convinced. Ronaldo, the World Cup-winning striker who has functioned, essentially, as a ghost at the feast during this tournament, suggested he did not “see many options” for Tite’s successor among Brazilian coaches. Diniz, he said, was the best of them, but he was far more enthused by the idea of something unprecedented: appointing a foreigner to coach the Brazilian national team.The Italian Carlo Ancelotti, the Spaniard Pep Guardiola, the Portuguese Abel Ferreira were all, Ronaldo said, more appealing. “I get a good feeling from these names,” he said.Several Brazilian players have suggested that Fernando Diniz, a Brazilian, should be the national team’s next coach. Others are pressing for the country’s first foreign coach.Sergio Moraes/ReutersBrazil is not the only country to have left Qatar rather earlier than expected that finds itself wrestling with this issue. A quarter of the teams in the tournament had barely picked up their baggage from the carousel before they parted company with their managers. A couple, the Netherlands and Spain, have moved quickly to appoint replacements. Six more are beginning their search for candidates. A handful of others, including England and Portugal, may yet join them.That task, though, is not quite as easy as it sounds. Managing a national team is not — and has not been for some time — the pinnacle of a coach’s career. Most of the game’s most feted managers, obsessives who thrive on fine-tuning their complex, intricate systems on a daily basis, find the disjointed nature of international soccer unattractive.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Brazil Feels the Familiar Sting of Failure

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      DOHA, Qatar — Once more, then, Brazil’s World Cup ends in the dance the country has come to know better than any other. The players were still cocooned in the locker room at the Education City Stadium, trying to process the bitterness and regret of elimination at the hands of Croatia, but the fingers were already being pointed, the blame being assigned.The primary target, of course, was the same as it always is: the coach. Just a couple of days earlier, back when things were light and fun, Tite had been at pains not to take too much of the credit. Brazil might have been strutting and gliding through the tournament, its jersey shining as brightly as it had for a generation, but the 62-year-old Tite did not want anyone thinking it was because of him.He was, if anything, nothing but a facilitator. The glory should go to the players, he said, the ones who were out on the field, making things happen, sweeping the country to within touching distance of that elusive sixth World Cup. “It is the athletes,” he said. “They are the whole painting.”Brazil’s Tite consoled his players, but he could not appease his critics.Matthew Childs/ReutersSuch is the bargain coaches make. Tite did not feel entitled to any of the credit, but as soon as things grew dark and heavy, he was the primary outlet for much of the blame. “It’s not about being a hero or a villain,” he said, his devastated players still not yet able to face the public. “But I understand that I am the most responsible.”There was no shortage of people willing to agree with him. In the immediate aftermath of the game, Tite had been sufficiently composed to offer what was, by some distance, the most reasonable, the most rational, analysis of Brazil’s elimination. “When their goalkeeper is the best player on the field, the game is talking to you,” he said.He was right, too. Brazil created a flurry of chances against Croatia. With a little more luck or a little more poise, it would have been out of sight long before penalties, long before Bruno Petkovic’s equalizer, long before extra time. “Sometimes we have a great performance, we shoot at goal, and the ball deviates,” he said. It is cruel, of course. “But it is normal.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Brazil’s World Cup Hopes Fell Apart in 15 Minutes

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      AL RAYYAN, Qatar — They couldn’t believe it.On the sideline at Education City Stadium, forward Richarlison stared ahead. Pedro, another forward, hunched over with his hands on his knees. And the superstar Neymar, the man responsible for Brazil’s go-ahead goal, started crying, then sat at midfield and cried some more.Stunned and heartbroken, Brazil’s players struggled to process what had just transpired on the field and how they had blown a 1-0 lead against Croatia with 15 minutes left in extra time. Without a shot on goal to that point, Croatia pried the game from the jaws of defeat, tied the score in the 117th minute and then beat a leading World Cup favorite, 4-2, in a penalty shootout in the quarterfinals on Friday.After going 105 minutes without scoring, Brazil’s talented attack finally broke through a tough Croatian defense. Suddenly, it felt like all the pressure on Brazil had been lifted, its joy had returned and it just needed to play keep-away for the second period of extra time. But, then, it all unraveled so quickly and Croatia, the wily 2018 World Cup finalist that has excelled at winning penalty shootouts in the knockout stage, was victorious once again.“It’s hard to find the words to describe this moment,” Neymar said, pausing at times to compose himself as he spoke to reporters two hours after the final whistle.As Richarlison walked toward the team bus and stopped to talk to reporters, his eyes were still bright red from the earlier tears. “It hurts,” he said.Croatian players celebrated after Marquinhos missed Brazil’s last penalty kick.Petr David Josek/Associated PressRicharlison was one of many players on Brazil’s side who broke down in tears after the loss.Matthew Childs/ReutersBrazil may come to regret several moments of its loss to Croatia. How did Brazil fail to convert more of its 19 shots — 11 of them on goal — with all of its speed and dazzle? How could it not defend for the final 15-plus minutes of the game? And how could Brazil let two substitutes on a counterattack following a turnover — Mislav Orsic sprinting with the ball down the left side and then centering to Bruno Petkovic, who fired the shot — catch it off guard?A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Every Team Left in Qatar Is a Contender

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      France and England, Argentina and Brazil, Messi and Ronaldo: The quarterfinals offer everything except an easy path to the trophy.DOHA, Qatar — And then there were eight. In a little more than two weeks, the World Cup has whittled its field from 32 hopefuls to eight genuine contenders, most of whom would regard anything less than the ultimate success as something of a failure.Not all of them, of course. Morocco, the standard-bearer for both Africa and the Arab world, has made the quarterfinals for the first time. It will not go lightly now, but anything else, from this point on, will be a welcome bonus. A rational analysis would suggest this may be Croatia’s limit, too.All of the others, though, were never here for the atmosphere. They are in Qatar for glory. England and France have a depth of resources none of other teams can match. Portugal wants to deliver a final triumph for Cristiano Ronaldo, even if he is not starting. Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach, has repeatedly said that playing soccer is pointless if you’re not trying to win.And then there are the twin South American giants: Brazil, probably the most impressive side in the tournament so far, the scent of a sixth World Cup in its nostrils; and Argentina, inspired by and devoted to Lionel Messi, determined that it should be here that his career reaches its climax.Vinícius Júnior, Lucas Paquetá and Neymar of BrazilManan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCroatia vs. BrazilFriday, 10 a.m. ET, Al RayyanThere is no sight more ominous for the teams left in this tournament than that of Brazil having fun. Its last three World Cup campaigns, at least, have been long months of angst and tension and inevitable heartache. In Qatar, Neymar, Vinícius Júnior and the rest of Tite’s team are light-footed, spring-heeled, and all the more menacing for it.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Neymar, Brazil’s Star Player, Out With an Injury

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      Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star, will not be playing in the team’s next World Cup match after he was injured on Thursday while playing against Serbia.Neymar injured a lateral ligament on his right ankle and has small bone swelling, said Rodrigo Lasmar, the team’s doctor, in a written statement on Neymar’s website. Another player, Danilo, injured his left ankle and also will not play in the next game, which will be on Monday against Switzerland, the statement said.“I can say in advance that we will not have both players for the next match, but they remain in treatment with the objective of trying to recover them in time for this competition,” Lasmar said.Both players received treatment after the match and were re-evaluated on Friday morning, with scheduled daily follow-ups planned. Neymar’s ankle was visibly swollen as he walked off the field on Thursday.Brazil beat Serbia 2-0 in its first match of the 2022 World Cup. After Switzerland, the team will play Cameroon on Friday.“Tough game, but it was important to win,” Neymar said on Twitter on Thursday. “Congratulations team, first step taken.”Thursday’s injury was one of the hardest moments of his career, Neymar said on his Facebook page. In the 2014 World Cup, he broke a vertebra after being kneed in the back and was sidelined for the rest of the tournament.“Yes, I’m injured, it’s frustrating, it’s going to hurt,” he said in the Facebook post. “But I’m sure that I will have a chance to return because I will do whatever possible to help my country, my teammates and myself.” More