Paris St-Germain FC (Soccer Team)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares179 Views

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

    by

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

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      PSG Says Kylian Mbappé Must Sign New Deal or Leave

      by

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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

      P.S.G. Attack, Still a Mystery, Ended Two Women’s World Cup Dreams

      by

      An assault case that rattled one of France’s best soccer teams remains unresolved despite a series of arrests. Its main characters have paid a heavy price.Aminata Diallo was being escorted from her foul-smelling holding cell to an interview room inside the Hôtel de Police in Versailles the first time she heard the name Tonya Harding.Harding’s name is infamous in sports, of course. A decorated American figure skater, she was a central figure in the notorious case involving the assault of her biggest rival only weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics. The scandal — a sudden and violent attack by a mystery man; accusations and denials; tabloid headlines — led to worldwide attention and, years later, a feature-length movie about Harding. But to Diallo, a 28-year-old French soccer player being led up a police station stairwell, the mention of her name — “Have you heard of Tonya Harding?” — produced only a blank stare.Diallo would quickly learn, however, that the police had reason to ask.Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, had been attacked by a man who beat her on the legs in an attempt to keep her from competing. Now, in France, a generation later, the police suspected a similar motive in an attack on Kheira Hamraoui, Diallo’s teammate at the French club Paris St.-Germain. Hamraoui had been dragged out of Diallo’s car on a cold November night in 2021 and, like Kerrigan, beaten on her legs in a clear attempt to injure her.It would take almost a year, and another spell in detention for Diallo, before the police officer’s offhand question became a formal accusation. Prosecutors last September charged Diallo with aggravated assault in the attack on Hamraoui. Documents in the case and leaks to the French news media have accused Diallo of masterminding a premeditated attack. The goal, that theory goes, was to eliminate a rival of Diallo’s for a spot in the lineup at P.S.G., one of the best teams in women’s soccer, and on the roster of the French national team, which will be among the favorites at the Women’s World Cup, which begins July 20.“Lots of people would like it to be me, but that’s not the reality,” Diallo said in an interview in Spain, where she had been trying to resurrect her career. “Tonya Harding, she did it. I didn’t.”Doubts, and QuestionsWith its parallels to a decades-old scandal; its themes of race and professional rivalry; and its unlikely cast of elite women’s athletes and shadowy characters, it is no surprise that the case continues to draw interest, or that it has spawned competing documentary projects.Diallo’s guilt or innocence is no clearer today than it was that morning in the police station in Versailles. A trial date is yet to be announced. But the consequences continue to ripple outward.The central police station in Versailles, where Diallo was brought for questioning.James Hill for The New York TimesFriendships have ended, as has at least one marriage. Two locker rooms were divided. Diallo was exiled from Paris. Hamraoui, too, became an exile in her own way, ostracized by some of her teammates and eventually forced out of her club.The police’s case apparently rests on text messages sent by Diallo, some suspicious web searches and a claim by at least one of the men charged in the assault that he had been acting on behalf of Diallo, even though he admitted the order had not come directly from her.Diallo and her legal team insist the charges are the actions of a desperate police force looking to secure convictions in a high-profile case, of a case built on flimsy connections and untrustworthy sources.Diallo said she views the documentary offers as a sort of compensation for everything that she has lost, like the privacy and anonymity she once enjoyed as a stalwart, if unspectacular, soccer professional, but, more materially, for the new contract with P.S.G. that she insists was all but certain before the attack changed the direction of her career and life.“I think for them it’s interesting whether I am guilty or not,” Diallo said of the filmmakers who have approached her.The charges she faces — three counts of aggravated assault and criminal assault — came after her second stay in custody and were accompanied by an order not to enter Paris or engage with her former teammates on P.S.G. That was how she found herself in Spain this spring, nibbling patatas bravas and garlic shrimp at a beachside restaurant in Valencia, her career saved only by a short-term deal to play for Levante, which has now ended.Hamraoui has left P.S.G., too; she was released at the end of the season after not being offered a new deal. Her departure was not a quiet one: On her way out, she accused the club of ostracizing her by treating her differently from her teammates, of victimizing her again.“In addition to the trauma I suffered that night, I would face this indifference, this cruelty, not to say a form of abuse toward me,” Hamraoui wrote in a book published recently that has been serialized in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.“The squad no longer speaks to me, and P.S.G. has only one objective: that I leave as quickly as possible,” Hamraoui said. “They treat me like a plague victim.”Kheira Hamraoui training with the Paris St.-Germain women’s team in September 2022.Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockIn Spain, Diallo’s life became a stripped-down version of what went before. Apart from training sessions, she spent most of her time alone at a rented apartment. (Qatar-owned P.S.G. had provided a home and a car, the one involved in the attack.) She was not a standout for her new team, and was often deployed as a substitute, a role she was grateful for, and accepted.“I’ve found it difficult to find the top, top level,” she said as the now finished season meandered toward its conclusion. “I’ve lost the pleasure to play. I’m playing with injustice.”Diallo contends that she has been wronged, that she is also a victim in the Hamraoui affair. Investigators in France contend she is at the heart of the conspiracy.Details of their case, leaked to the French news media, paint Diallo as the driving force of the attack on Hamraoui. The men who have been charged with the assault itself are said to have told the police that they believed they were acting on behalf of Diallo, who was driving the car when it was stopped and when Hamraoui was yanked out and beaten on her legs with an iron bar. Text messages from Diallo disparaging Hamraoui were discovered after the police seized her cellphone and computer, as were online searches for phrases like “breaking a kneecap” and “deadly cocktail of drugs.”In an interview last November at the offices of her lawyers in Paris, shortly after she was formally charged, Diallo offered explanations. The police had ignored all the positive comments about Hamraoui she had made to friends and associates, she said. The online searches were not unusual, she contended, for an athlete concerned with injuries and health.But she also contends that her race and background — she is a Black woman from a working-class neighborhood in Grenoble — had not only led the police to jump to conclusions about her, but others as well.“In France, when there’s a case like that, the media are quick to assume that you’re guilty,” she said. “They are going to bring up where you’re from right away, which is an argument to show that you are capable of doing that.”Now, in Valencia, Diallo produced her phone and brandished a screenshot of a diagram published by the French daily Le Parisien that used arrows and boxes to purportedly show links between the men involved in the attack, Diallo and unknown intermediaries. The fact that after all the investigations, the phone taps and the listening devices placed in Diallo’s home, the police still had not found any direct link between her and the arrested men highlighted the weakness of the case against her, Diallo said. She has, she added, “more hate” toward the investigators than Hamraoui, who fell out with Diallo and other teammates after they suggested she, and others at P.S.G., could have been involved in the attack.“It’s not her trying to find a case against me,” Diallo said of Hamraoui. “I don’t give a damn about her.”Choosing SidesAmong her protestations of innocence, Diallo pointed to messages sent by her former agent, Sonia Souid, who also represents Hamraoui. Diallo argued that those messages undermine the police’s belief that she orchestrated the attack out of professional jealousy.In one, a voice note sent about two weeks before the attack and played for a New York Times reporter, Souid told Diallo that she had met with P.S.G.’s sporting director. The club was pleased with Diallo’s performances, Souid reported, and was eager to make an offer to extend her contract, which was about to expire, for two seasons.Souid, who is one of the most influential agents in women’s soccer in France, said in an interview that while negotiations had not started, the club had made its intentions clear.Diallo playing for P.S.G. in 2021. She is now barred from contacting her former teammates.Aurelien Meunier/PSG, via Getty ImagesBut weeks after the November 2021 attack, Souid’s relationship with Diallo ended in a tearful meeting. The player informed the agent that she could no longer be represented by her because of her ties to Hamraoui. In March 2022, Souid said she met with police investigators. She declined to reveal what she was asked, but said the meeting had left her shaken.“The questions they asked me made me think something very wrong has happened,” Souid said.She suggested the police had covertly listened not only to Diallo’s conversations but also hers and those of others in the course of their investigation. “They knew everything,” Souid said. “They knew the exact moment calls were made and what was being said, and not just by me.”Souid said she had always found Diallo to be polite, respectful and serious in their interactions. But as details of the case filtered out, and as she processed the questions she had been asked by the police, she said she began to wonder whether Diallo had “another side.”Left OutAs the investigation continues, and as Diallo and Hamraoui — now both out of contract — await the next developments, the soccer world rumbles on toward what will be the biggest event in women’s soccer this year, the Women’s World Cup.Diallo will not be there; she had been a fringe player on France’s national team at the time of the attack, and the notoriety of her case and her long layoff — not to mention the court orders to stay away from her former P.S.G. teammates — effectively ended her international career.Hamraoui, who appeared for France as recently as February, had held out hope of playing her way onto the French team headed to Australia and New Zealand, even though her presence on the squad would not be universally welcomed by some, including a group of P.S.G. players close to Diallo and still furious at Hamraoui’s early insinuations that other players from the club might have been involved in her assault.Souid, Hamraoui’s agent, had harbored similar optimism. “The Americans are several times World Cup champions and all the players don’t like each other,” she said this spring.Hamraoui challenging Denmark’s Kathrine Moller Kuhl in February. She was left off France’s roster for the Women’s World Cup.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut when France’s new coach, Hervé Renard, announced his preliminary roster for the tournament, Hamraoui’s name was not on it. The decision prompted one French newspaper to run a poll asking whether the decision to omit her was “really a sporting choice.” Hamraoui suggested in a radio interview with France Inter soon after the announcement that it was not: She called her omission “an injustice.”The story, though, is not over. That is why, Souid said, filmmakers were interested in telling Hamraoui’s side of it. “It’s not easy to understand what happened to her,” she said.Diallo, adrift and impatient, might say the same.For now, both players wait for clarity on who bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on that dark night in the narrow street, for the end of their association with the case, and with Tonya Harding. Until then, Hamraoui will continue to pursue her soccer career. And Diallo will continue to defend her name.“I’m not hiding,” Diallo said before departing for another evening in her silent apartment, alone with her thoughts, and her furies.Tom Nouvian contributed reporting in Paris. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      PSG or Lens: Who Had the Better Season?

      by

      P.S.G. will win another French title this year, and Lens won’t win a thing. But it’s worth asking: Who had the better season?Briuce Samba was trying, as best he could, to share the crowning glory of his career with his wife. The goalkeeper’s road to stardom had been a circuitous one. By Samba time he was 24, he had played only a handful of senior games. He spent the next few years toiling in the second divisions of France and England.Now, though, it had all paid off. In March, not long before his 29th birthday, Samba was told he had been selected for France’s squad for its upcoming European Championship qualifiers. He would be sharing a changing room with Kylian Mbappé, Antoine Griezmann and the rest. He would wear the No. 1 jersey.Naturally, it was an achievement Samba wanted to celebrate with his wife, Jessica. He called her on FaceTime to revel in the moment together, but it did not — by his own admission — really work. He was, as he put it in an interview with the French sports newspaper L’Équipe, too busy being “jumped on” by his delighted teammates at his club team, R.C. Lens.Samba’s long-awaited call-up has not been the only thing Lens has had to celebrate in the last few months. He was probably exaggerating when he suggested this has been the “best season the club has had in 120 years” — an assertion that the 1998 team, which won the French title, might reject — but not by much.Lens won’t win the French title, or any other trophy. But it has still been a fantastic season.Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThanks in no small part to Samba, a key element in the most miserly defense in France, Lens started the season with a nine-game unbeaten run. It did not lose its second game until the start of February. It beat Monaco in Monte Carlo, Marseille in Marseille and then swept past Paris St.-Germain on home turf.Thierry Henry, no less, described Lens as the best team to watch in France. “It is contagious when you see a team going forward, fighting together, regardless of the starting 11,” he said. As late as April, the Lens manager, Franck Haise, was being asked if his team — constructed on a shoestring by modern standards — had a chance of winning the title. “We can always dream,” he said. “We’re not going to forbid ourselves anything.”In the end, that will most likely prove a step too far. Lens is currently six points behind P.S.G. with only five games to play. The emphasis now, for Haise, is on beating second-place Marseille again on Saturday and securing a place in the Champions League for the first time in two decades.The title, as was always probable, will be returning to Paris. When it gets there, though, it will find a club in a starkly different mood to Lens.Angry Paris St.-Germain fans protested outside the club’s offices and a few players’ homes on Wednesday.Mohammed Badra/EPA, via ShutterstockThese are troubled times at P.S.G., though whether it is more troubled than any of the other times is not clear. Lionel Messi, the greatest player of all time, the jewel of the Qatari project to transform the club into a genuine European superpower, is currently on two weeks’ unpaid suspension, having traveled without permission to Saudi Arabia for a family vacation.(“Who thought Saudi has so much green?” Messi asked his 458 million Instagram followers this week. The answer, presumably, is “anyone who has seen your contract with the Saudi Tourism Authority.”)In the circumstances, it seems reasonably unlikely that he will be signing a new contract when he returns to Paris. Few will mourn his departure: not Messi, who has always given the impression that his relationship with the club has been emotionless, transactional; not the club, which can now part with him at no financial or emotional cost; and not the P.S.G. fans, who have spent most of the last five months jeering him at every opportunity.That will not be the summer’s only departure. A clutch of P.S.G. players, carrying the can for yet another year of disappointment in the Champions League, will be shipped out to make room for new signings.There is the lingering possibility that Neymar may be among them; it is possible that Kylian Mbappé, his relationship with the club’s hierarchy once again strained, might find his feet itching once again. Christophe Galtier, the manager, will not be around to coach, whatever happens. That job will go, instead, to whoever P.S.G. can find to manage them who is not Christophe Galtier.Winning yet another French title will make no difference to any of that. The club’s fans will be pleased, of course, by the passing of another year in which none of its rivals had any cause to celebrate. But it is hard to discern any emotion approaching genuine joy. This is just how things are now.P.S.G.’s Big Three (for the moment): Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar.Carl Recine/Action Images, via ReutersThis will, after all, be P.S.G.’s ninth French title in 11 years. It does not matter who the coach is. It scarcely matters who the players are. It makes no difference if the team is good, or bad, attractive, ugly, interesting, dull. It can win the league when it is riddled with dysfunction, falling apart behind the scenes. It can win the league when nobody is enjoying themselves. It can win the league and it changes nothing.In time, few at P.S.G. will remember much about this season. Not the good parts, anyway. There will be some dim recollection of Messi’s unauthorized trip, of the surprising amount of greenery in Saudi Arabia, of Galtier’s brief, unhappy stint in charge, but little else. It will blur, quickly, into nothing but a fuzzy outline of disappointment.Lens, by contrast, will end the season with nothing but happy memories, recollections of one of the finest campaigns in the club’s long history. There will be no trophy to commemorate it, but no matter. The year that Samba was called up to the France team, that Lois Openda scored all those goals, that Haise might have won something, will be etched into legend.It is tempting to ask, then, which of those two teams has experienced the better season? Which has enjoyed themselves more? Soccer is, after all, about emotions as much as it is about glory, and the emotions on offer in the heart of Pas-de-Calais seem substantially healthier than those playing out in Paris.It is, though, perhaps better to ask whether all of that wealth, all of that power, has truly made P.S.G. happy, or whether — more than a decade on from the arrival of its Qatari backers — one of the richest clubs in the world, the pre-eminent force in French soccer, the team that employs Mbappé and Messi and Neymar, might look at little old Lens and think: That looks like fun.Lens, living its best life.Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA Test of What MattersThe journey, then, is complete. In the space of three short years, Leeds United has traversed the full range of soccer’s theoretical spectrum: from Marcelo Bielsa at one end, with his unwavering belief in spectacle and romance and aesthetics, all the way to Sam Allardyce.There is, presumably, a parable in here somewhere. More than one, perhaps. It might be an example of how revolutions can only triumph if their leaders remain loyal to their principles. Or it might illustrate how pragmatism and compromise have a habit of intruding on even the purest, the most innocent, among us. It might be that ideas do not always survive an encounter with reality. It might be that they are abandoned too quickly by the callow and the plain.Either way, Leeds now stands as a curious case study. During Bielsa’s tenure, it was not simply the outcome — promotion back to the Premier League, a top half finish — that restored pride to the team’s fans, but the methods. Leeds had a style, an identity. The club, at long last, stood for something.Big Sam: reporting for duty.Sang Tan/Associated PressAllardyce, appointed this week with the desperate, urgent task of somehow staving off relegation by sheer force of reputation, represents a permanent break with that. Allardyce is not always given the credit he deserves for the farsightedness he displayed early in his career, but he would not argue with the assertion that he is an outcome-oriented manager. He wants results. He does not much care how he gets them.Whether Leeds fans can buy into that, though, is a difficult question. They have spent the last few years, after all, cherishing the idea that the journey matters as much as the destination, internalizing the Bielsista logic that what you do is not as important as how you do it. Soccer has long believed that fans are happy if they are winning; everything else is window dressing. Leeds may provide a petri dish to find out.Please Do Not Be So Emotional, They ScreamJürgen Klopp would like to speak to the manager.Carl Recine/ReutersA torn hamstring — Grade 2C, six weeks out — was the least Jürgen Klopp deserved. His racing over to celebrate in the face of a slightly bemused and utterly undeserving fourth official in the aftermath of Liverpool’s late winning goal against Tottenham last Sunday was, without question, an inherently ugly act. The Liverpool manager will, deservedly, be punished.Severely, too, because he has form for this sort of thing. He has already served one touchline ban this season. He can expect his second to be substantially longer, partly for the flagrancy of his offense and partly because the incident — broadcast live in the Premier League’s flagship Sunday afternoon slot — was sufficiently high-profile that it has become a lightning rod for the State of Our Game. The Football Association, in these circumstances, feels compelled to look and act tough.It is not to excuse Klopp’s actions, though, to suggest that — as ever — there is something missing from the conversation. Every so often, managers, coaches, players and fans are informed in arch, censorious tones that they must control their emotions better. They must not get too angry, or too impatient, or too passionate, or even, at times, too gleeful.And yet at no point does anyone seem to connect that emotionality with the sustained pitch of frenzy laced into the rhetoric that surrounds soccer: the constant calls, on broadcasts and in print, for players to be dropped or sold or replaced; for managers to change their methods or lose their jobs; for fans to fear or rage or despair.Is it any wonder that some of the participants in the game struggle to maintain their equanimity when they are endlessly informed that their jobs are on the line, that everything except eternal victory is failure, that each and every setback is evidence, deep down, of some moral shortcoming on their part?There is a reason that exists, of course: The soccer industry thrives on controversy and debate and drama and outrage. The people passing judgment act as observers when they are, in fact, participants. Klopp deserves to be barred. He needs, obviously, to calm down. He needs to control his emotions better. He is not, though, the only one.A Step Too FarTo return to a theme: Soccer does not, as a rule, know how to gauge relative success. Arsenal’s (men’s) team will, for example, spend much of the next month or so having its very character pored over and picked apart and dredged for clues as to why, exactly, it did not win the Premier League title.The fact that this in itself represents a considerable triumph — that Arsenal was in a position to be criticized for not winning the Premier League — will receive considerably less attention.With any luck, the club’s women’s team will avoid the same fate. On Monday night, Arsenal lost at the death in the semifinals of the Women’s Champions League: a single lapse, after more than two and a half hours of soccer, from Lotte Wubben-Moy that allowed Pauline Bremer to sweep Wolfsburg to a 5-4 aggregate victory.Pauline Bremer’s late goal in extra time lifted Wolfsburg over Arsenal, and into a Women’s Champions League final against Barcelona on June 3.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesIt would be possible, of course, to point out that the ongoing failure of the clubs of the Women’s Super League to establish some sort of competitive dominion in Europe is, given their financial edge, a substantial disappointment. Or to suggest that Arsenal, with home-field advantage and an early goal, had lacked the composure to see the game out. Or to take the path of least resistance and just blame Wubben-Moy for being caught in possession.But again: Success is relative. Arsenal made it to the last minute of extra time in the semifinals of the Champions League without its captain, Kim Little, and its three best players, Leah Williamson, Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema, all of them victims of long-term knee injuries. Getting so far, coming so close, in those circumstances, is not failure. It is quite the opposite.CorrespondenceNever let it be said that this newsletter does not confront the most pressing issues in sports: corruption, engagement, how to get your dog into soccer games. “I would suggest you approach a club and offer him as a mascot,” Stephen Gessner wrote. “You might have to teach him some tricks: bark when the opposition scores, growl at the referee, jump on the opposing manager.”This is a perfectly valid suggestion for most dogs. Sadly, it does not apply to my dog, who needs to be in my presence at all times for his own peace of mind and who has a steadfast objection to learning anything. He does have a natural indisposition toward authority figures, though, so he could probably tick the “growling at the referee” box.“Maybe if I wear a scarf they won’t notice.”David Klein/ReutersThe good news is that Phil Aromando might have solved the problem. “I have no idea if your dog is interested in Major League Soccer,” he wrote. (Not sure, I’ve never asked.) “But St. Louis City S.C. has just opened a pet friendly section at their stadium.” Moving to St. Louis strikes me as extreme, but also somehow more realistic than teaching him to walk at heel.I wondered, meanwhile, if we had exhausted our seam of suggestions to improve soccer, but there is still time for a couple of doses of common sense.“Why can’t incidental, or nonthreatening, handballs in the box just be punished with indirect free kicks from the spot of the infraction?” Doug Lowe asked. “It would give the team a scoring opportunity that isn’t brutally punished, as it is with a penalty.” Great question, Doug, because this seems perfectly logical to me.Adam weighed in on the need to engage the next generation of fans. “As a high school math(s) teacher,” he wrote, “I fully agree with the assertion of ‘to hell with pleasing restless, bored teenagers.’ They’re entitled enough as it is.” I have redacted Adam’s surname for his own protection, in the very unlikely event that any of his teenage students get this far into the newsletter.And finally, Lee Gillette is here with an eternal plea: Why don’t more people talk about Belgium? “As refreshing change goes, Union St.-Gilloise almost ended its first season in the top division for 48 years with a title, and it is in the running once again,” he wrote. “In Belgium’s infuriating four-team title playoff, Union is surrounded by Flemish clubs. The only Walloon club to win the title in years was in 2009, and Union hasn’t won a title since 1935.”He is quite right, of course: We have covered the club’s rise before, but Union should nevertheless have been included last week as a potential usurper to the established order. Mind you, perhaps be grateful that it slipped my mind: Dortmund, naturally enough, blew its chance at a first title in a decade at the first available opportunity. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Soccer

      Lionel Messi’s Bitter Divorce From P.S.G.

      by

      The moment the private jet carrying Lionel Messi to a lucrative sponsorship engagement in Saudi Arabia taxied onto a French runway early this week, his career at Paris St.-Germain was effectively over.The suspension would come a day later. The official parting won’t happen until his contract expires in a few weeks. The blame game may go on for months.But by Wednesday there was no doubt on the main points: Messi will never play for P.S.G. again, and both the player and the club are just fine with that.The ending will not have come as a surprise to either side. Theirs had always been a business relationship, one lacking the emotional weight of Messi’s previous tenure at Barcelona. And while there had been talks about renewing the forward’s contract in the weeks and months after Messi led Argentina to the World Cup title in December in Qatar, neither side appeared committed to consummating a deal.But by skipping a practice on Monday, a day after fans in Paris had jeered the league leaders for a home loss to Lorient, a middling team that P.S.G.’s stacked roster was expected to swat aside, any idea of a renewal extinguished.P.S.G. fans had regularly jeered Messi and his teammates this spring.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersMondays are traditionally a day off for P.S.G.’s players after a victory. When they lose, however, the players are expected to train.By Monday afternoon, though, Messi and his family were already being photographed in Saudi Arabia, fulfilling a part of the player’s multiyear contract to promote the Gulf kingdom’s tourism authority. In Paris, club officials were formulating their furious response to their star’s unapproved absence.By Tuesday evening, word started to spread that P.S.G. would not indulge Messi. Officially, the club has been tight-lipped. But the penalties meted out to Messi were quickly leaked: He had been suspended from practice and games for two weeks, during which time he would not receive a cent of his gargantuan salary, reported to be close to $800,000 a week. Privately, a club official said it was unlikely Messi would ever wear the club’s colors again.Like P.S.G., Messi and his representatives remained publicly silent as speculation grew that their relationship was falling apart behind the scenes. Messi’s camp has, though, briefed a variety of media personalities on his side of the story. Messi was under the impression that he had the club’s permission to carry out his commercial endeavor, those reports said this week. Messi had decided a month ago, one reported, that he would not stay in Paris for a third season. He had even transmitted that decision to the club, the reports said.The club, meanwhile, was doing the same. The immediate concern, it seemed, was not to repair the relationship but to control the narrative. But focusing on the specifics ignored the obvious: This week’s denouement represents the nadir in Messi’s transactional relationship not only with P.S.G. but perhaps also with the state of Qatar. The former had heralded his arrival in Paris less than two years ago — a soft landing after Messi’s budget-driven, tear-filled exit from Barcelona — as a triumph. The latter has gone to great lengths ever since to associate itself with Messi’s genius.Messi with the P.S.G. president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, in 2021, when he became the Qatar-owned club’s latest star signing.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMessi with Qatar’s emir after leading Argentina past France in the World Cup final.Hannah Mckay/ReutersThe marriage of convenience could not have gone better for player, club and country. Messi signed one of the richest contracts in sports. Qatar-owned P.S.G. added another world-class name in its to-date-fruitless search for a Champions League title. Qatar the nation, meanwhile, added a headliner before the biggest event in the country’s history, the 2022 World Cup, and then watched Messi play a starring role in a tournament that ended with his being draped in a bisht — a traditional ceremonial cloak — by Qatar’s emir and then paraded through the streets of Lusail like a trophy.Figures close to P.S.G. expressed surprise on Wednesday with the characterization of Messi’s exit being presented on his behalf. They said it was the club that had gone slow on the idea of a contract renewal, as part of a plan to refashion the club away from its addiction to superstars like Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and toward one that is more reliant on homegrown talent. Messi’s camp, they insisted, had even put a number on what it would take him to stay, proposing a salary increase that was far beyond anything the club had tentatively offered in January. By then, though, it may have been too late.Defeat to middling Lorient on Sunday meant more jeers from P.S.G.’s fans, and practice on Monday for the players.Christian Hartmann/ReutersStorm clouds had started to gather almost as soon as Messi returned from Qatar as a world champion. P.S.G.’s form started to dip as the league season resumed in the new year, and its once-unassailable lead in the league started to shrink. The team was dumped out of the French Cup and — most frustratingly for its Qatari owners and its Parisian fans — from the Champions League, too.All the while, the jeers and whistles of the P.S.G. ultras grew louder, and the angriest voices increasingly started to focus on Messi, whose form and output — perhaps as expected for a 35-year-old coming off an exhausting World Cup — dipped below his customary brilliance.Messi watchers, part of a cottage industry attached to the player’s stardom as much as his soccer prowess, have in recent weeks speculated about where he might land next season. A return to Barcelona, perhaps? An American adventure in Miami? An extended stay in Saudi Arabia? All are surely on the table now.As Messi poses for photos with his family in Riyadh, one thing is crystal clear: His future will not be in Paris. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      Overshadowed by PSG, Paris FC Tries to Raise Its Game

      by

      PARIS — The contrast could not be more stark.On a frigid Saturday evening earlier this year inside the Stade Charléty, a World War II-era stadium tucked alongside a highway, the stands are barely a quarter full. Only about 3,000 fans have turned up to watch Paris F.C., a crowd so small that when the home team goes to salute its support after its victory, the players need only to go to one corner of the stadium. The other sections are not even open, given the paltry demand for tickets.On Sunday, another Paris team takes the field, and fans around the world tune in to ‌watch. This Paris team, the billion-dollar project you know from the Champions League, the one with all the money, all the glamour and all the stars, has traveled to Marseille for another installment of French soccer’s biggest rivalry. There, it ‌takes another step toward its latest championship behind goals from Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi.‌That yawning gulf between the teams is something that the owners of Paris F.C. are eager to close. They argue that the Paris region, with its population of more than 12 million, deserves an elite league rivalry, the kind that courses through European cities like London and Lisbon, Madrid and Milan.The problem, Paris F.C. is finding, is that even with soccer’s deepest pool of talent on its doorstep and backing from its own Gulf royals, closing the gap in a one-team town is extremely hard.Fans are often sparse at the Stade Charléty. Paris F.C. is confident promotion will change that. Second TeamSitting in a brasserie close to his home in an upscale neighborhood that houses the tomb of Napoleon, Pierre Ferracci, the majority owner of Paris F.C., is ruminating on why Paris — one of the world’s great cities and the producer of more soccer talent than just about any other metropolis in the world — has only one top-division team, Paris St.-Germain.Ferracci, 70, lists a group of European capitals before moving on to other large cities to underline the outlier that is Paris. He eventually lands on London, less than a three-hour train ride away, which currently has so many teams playing in the Premier League that Ferracci gives up on naming them all.He explains away the contrast between France and England (and Germany and Spain and Italy) as a type of French exceptionalism. “It’s cultural,” Ferracci says. “We are less hung up on football than other countries.”He knows that devotion to the sport, at least in Paris, does not run deep. “The supporters here come when there is success, when we climb the rungs of the ladder,” he said. “They stop coming when the team descends.”In the stands at the Charléty, the few supporters seem to confirm that view as they offer different motivations for their presence. Zouber Hadj-Larbi, a self-described P.S.G. fan, said he decided to attend his first Paris F.C. game because it was a much cheaper option than a ticket for the team he actually supports.Pierre Ferracci, the president of Paris F.C., has taken on foreign investors even as he tries to maintain his team’s French roots.“It’s also a lot less spectacular,” he said, laughing as the home team struggled to muster a shot on goal. Others in the crowd are tourists; a few say they are taking in the game only because P.S.G. was on the road.Nearby, Laurent Pinet, part of Paris F.C.’s small cohort of regular fans, commiserated with a friend about the team’s struggles to attract a following. “It’s harder to be a football club in Paris than anywhere else,” he said. “You need immediate results to attract the public.”Ferracci, who has been the majority owner of the club for 13 years, is confident fans will turn out in greater numbers if the team is playing in the top division, drawn by both its success and its name. “The opportunity we have,” he said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”He admits his club is unlikely to ever be a true rival to P.S.G., and definitely not as long as its neighbor is bankrolled by Qatar. But careful and deliberate plans have been laid to build a team that could finally give Parisians a second top-flight option.That plan is reliant on tapping a resource Paris has in abundance: talented young soccer players.Buying EarlyFerracci’s ideas for reviving Paris F.C. crystallized after a dinner with the famed French manager Arsène Wenger a couple years after he took control of the club in 2008. Wenger used hard data, anecdotes and a list of professional players who had grown up in greater Paris to make his point. Ferracci now often does the same.By his reckoning, 13 percent of all registered soccer players in France are from Paris or its ring of suburbs, and a staggering 50 percent of the professionals making a living in France’s top two divisions grew up in the capital or its shadow. Those players populate not only France’s national team but several others: Morocco. Senegal. Tunisia. Algeria. At last year’s World Cup, for example, Paris F.C. could track seven of its own alumni among the participants.Just being close to the best players, though, is not enough, said Jean Marc Nobilo. A well-traveled coach, Nobilo was hired two years ago to lead Paris F.C.’s youth development section, and he knows that every big team in Europe now shops for players in Paris.Ferocious competition for that talent means Paris F.C. is required to unearth it before it has been spotted by others. Bidding wars are typically won by richer teams, thanks in part to French soccer rules that allow clubs to pay fees — sometimes as much as $100,000 — to the parents of gifted children.Paris F.C. is struggling along in France’s second division again this season. Promotion will have to wait at least another year.For economic reasons alone, Nobilo said, “we must be on the case before the others.”To ensure that Paris F.C. can do that, Ferracci has enlisted star power and Gulf money of his own. The former arrived in the form of a Paris Saint-Germain legend, the retired Brazilian midfielder Raí, who was hired to be a club ambassador and a connection to soccer’s other great talent basin, São Paulo.The much-needed money arrived as an investment from the rulers of Bahrain, the Gulf emirate that three years ago became a minority owner in Paris F.C.Ceding stakes to foreign partners — in addition to the Bahrainis, there are Americans, an Indian group and also Armenian equity owners of Paris F.C. — has been somewhat bittersweet for Ferracci. The cash has helped finance a multimillion-dollar makeover of the club’s training facilities, located on the edge of Paris close to Orly airport, and has helped the club to invest in new talent and the staff to find more of it.But it has also made Paris F.C. yet another club reliant on foreign capital, a trend that Ferracci laments even as he benefits from it. He says his Gulf royals have been far less munificent than the Emirati owners at Manchester City or the Qataris at P.S.G. — Paris F.C.’s annual revenues of 23 million euros ($25.4 million) are roughly half of what Messi is earning to play across town — and Ferracci is fine with that.“What I don’t like are countries like the Emirates and Qatar investing in football because it sets the bar too high,” he said, before launching into an unironic soliloquy about how Gulf-funded clubs have destabilized the soccer industry, forcing rivals to risk financial ruin to try to keep up.Ferracci is determined to maintain control of his team for as long as he can.“Today I still want the majority of the capital to be in local hands, that the majority stays French and national,” he said. “Why? Because if we continue like this, every club in the top two leagues will be in the hands of foreign investors, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”“The opportunity we have,” Paris F.C.’s president said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”For the moment, he is focusing on what his investors, and his plan, have allowed him to pursue: a dream of creating the best finishing school in French soccer. New facilities, the chance to play close to home and the ability to offer teenagers an earlier shot at first-team soccer all give Paris F.C. a fighting chance of meeting its aim of filling at least a third of its roster with homegrown talent. Five players in Paris F.C.’s current squad came through its youth ranks. But it needs even more.How it handles those recruits and the others that arrive will determine the success of his project. Paris F.C. is currently bumbling through another year in the middle of the second division standings. That means rubbing shoulders with P.S.G., even as a minor irritant rather than a true rival, will have to wait at least another year.“For now, they are aware of our existence,” said Pinet, one of the team’s regular fans. “We’ll talk about rivalry later.”Tom Nouvian contributed reporting. More