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      Lionel Messi, Barcelona and Limited Options

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      The chase for a transcendent star in the twilight of his career requires a new term: GOATwashing.The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris St.-Germain. The downside is that he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled and jeered and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in — but if we are honest, not win — the Champions League.Option two: He could take the easy route, the smooth and seamless path that leads straight to the golden sunset. Al Hilal would very much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to the (European) Champions League. Pros: $400 million a year.A third path, to Major League Soccer — and more specifically, Inter Miami — can provide all of the same drawbacks and none of the same benefits. He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent from the club tournament he cherishes the most. He would have to be coached by Phil Neville. The pull of Miami, the lure of the United States and the prospect of the 2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to have the nature of the end of it decided for him.Lionel Messi in 2021, on the day he left Barcelona.Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockThe sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafa Yuste, Barcelona’s vice president, said last week. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barça. When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in love.”As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly sees some sort of sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club genuinely believes that success is more likely with him than without: both directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost to the brand that his presence would provide.But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine. Barcelona has come to see Messi as a Platonic ideal of its principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through its own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career was not able to give Messi the goodbye it wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to right the wrong.It would be naïve, though, to believe that is the only motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of its king is powered by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is but to what he represents.Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its loss of status.So much of what Barcelona has done in recent years has been inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of the seasons. The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi Hernández as manager, the mortgaging of its own future for immediate glory: This is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed its primacy was the natural order of things, and does not understand why the world has been allowed to change. Restoring Messi to azulgrana would offer the opioid comfort of a step back in time.Barcelona’s image of itself as a great club never wavers.Nacho Doce/ReutersAnd then, rather more tangibly, there is political necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona is not owned by an individual; it is a members’ organization, one that functions, at least in theory, as a democracy. Joan Laporta, the club’s current president, will soon enough have to seek another mandate from the team’s 143,000 socios.Currently, he would have to stand for re-election as the president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to claim to be the man who returned him to where he belonged.After all, possessing Messi is more than having arguably the greatest player of all time in your ranks. His move to P.S.G., two years ago, proved that he is as much symbol as star. Messi represents relevance and importance, glamour and appeal. He would be a sign that the lean days had come to an end, of Barcelona’s resurgent virility.Most urgent of all, though, is the reputational benefit, not to Laporta as a president but to Barcelona as a club. Once as pristine a sporting brand as could be imagined, the sort of team that considered its jerseys so sacrosanct that it refused to despoil them with a sponsor, Barcelona has been wracked by scandal for years.The Super League was — and is, given its ongoing refusal to abandon the project — a bad look. The allegations that the club’s former administration hired a public relations company to boost its own reputation and to tarnish a number of players, executives and critics were not much better.Neither, though, was nearly as damaging as the charge, currently under investigation by both the Spanish judicial authorities and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that the club paid a former vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee some $7.6 million over the course of 17 years.Rival fans now regularly shower Barcelona with fake money bearing the image of the club’s president, Joan Laporta.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressBarcelona, of course, has insisted it has done nothing wrong: The club has suggested the stipend it is accused of paying the official, José María Enriquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018 was for perfectly ordinary “technical reports into refereeing.” It is, the club has intimated, the sort of thing everybody does. There is, we have been told, nothing to see here.That line has not been universally accepted. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has described the allegations as the “worst reputational crisis” Spanish soccer has ever seen. (Barcelona responded by calling on Tebas to resign.) Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA, has called it “one of the most serious situations” he has seen in soccer. Regardless of any potential sporting penalty, the reputational blowback — should Barcelona’s staunch defense not hold — would be indelible.It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence that Barcelona’s pursuit of Messi has become extremely public in that context. It is not just nation states, after all, that are in the business of using the game’s brightest stars to rehabilitate their reputations, to draw the eyes of the audience, to cast the unpalatable and the unpleasant firmly in deep shadow. Mere soccer teams can do it, too.Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But its need for him — as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what it once was, as a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what it would rather you did not see — is greater still.He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all the same. Barcelona wants to use him to clean its image just as surely as P.S.G. wants to use him to prove its primacy and Al Hilal wants to use him to burnish a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami wants to use him to grow a league. There is no romance at the heart of any them, none at all. It is business, just business, and nothing more.Cold, Brutal and Entirely IrresistibleAntonio Conte talked himself out of a job at Tottenham.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersGary O’Neil’s career as a Premier League manager began, unexpectedly, late last August. His predecessor at Bournemouth, Scott Parker, had talked himself out of a job a few days earlier, using the occasion of a 9-0 defeat at Liverpool to explain, in great detail, exactly how little chance the club had of avoiding relegation.O’Neil was supposed to be what is now, by convention, called not a caretaker or a place-holder manager but an “interim,” a coach who will be replaced by a safer pair of hands as soon as one could be identified. But he did well, avoiding defeat in his first six games and slowly helping the team acclimatize to the Premier League. Quietly, perhaps a little reluctantly, Bournemouth made his appointment permanent during the World Cup.Gary O’Neil is now the 10th longest-serving manager in the Premier League.There was a point, not so long ago, when it seemed English soccer had finally learned the benefits of patience. Clubs seemed to have internalized the idea that reflexively firing a coach at the first sign of trouble was not ideal from a long-term planning perspective. Just as significant, they were putting more thought into their appointments in the first place.That particular dam broke in the last two weeks of March. Crystal Palace firing Patrick Vieira, on the back of almost three months without a win, proved the decisive fissure. Between then and now, three more managers have gone. Leicester, now at grave risk of relegation, fired Brendan Rodgers. Antonio Conte committed dismissal-by-press-conference to get himself out of Tottenham. And, of course, Graham Potter met his inevitable, if accelerated, demise at Chelsea.None of those decisions were especially flagrant examples of the caprice of Premier League owners, of course, but the failures of both Conte and Potter probably say more about the people who appointed them than they do about the coaches themselves.Conte was handed a squad in need of a rebuild and tasked with winning immediately. Potter was placed in charge of a squad so large that the changing room at the training ground reportedly could not accommodate it — several players had to change on chairs brought in from elsewhere — and told to fashion a cogent team in only a few months.The ability to choose the right job, of course, is an invaluable part of the armory of any elite coach; Potter, still in the early stages of his career, will doubtless heed that lesson when he selects his next opportunity. But his failure at Chelsea, like that of Conte at Tottenham, is not solely his fault. He should not be allowed to become a scapegoat for those who made it impossible for him to succeed in the first place.After all, they are still in place. They are in charge, in fact, of choosing a replacement, with precious little evidence so far that they should be trusted to make the right selection.It’s HomeAndy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockEngland got a boost of confidence in its biggest game before this year’s World Cup by beating Brazil, 4-2 on penalties after a 1-1 tie, on Thursday in a meeting of the European and South American champions at Wembley. The victory, like England’s triumph in last year’s European Championship final in the same stadium, was delivered off the foot of Chloe Kelly.CorrespondenceA lingering sense of guilt has been gnawing at me for the best part of a week. On Sunday, you see, I arrived in Naples, eagerly anticipating seeing Napoli — you will have noted my enthusiasm for Napoli over the past few months — take another step toward a first Serie A title in more than 30 years by coolly dispatching A.C. Milan on home turf.It did not quite work out like that. Milan picked Napoli apart, strolling to a 4-0 win against a team that, for the first time this season, looked bereft of both purpose and poise. And, on some level, it felt as if it were my fault. This is a superstitious place, after all. Maybe I had tempted fate. Maybe I had invoked hubris.At times like these, it is important to remember that correlation is not causation. Which brings us, rather neatly, to Deborah Chuk’s email. Last week’s analysis of Liverpool’s assorted problems, she felt, missed out arguably the most significant. “Why does nobody mention the sale of Sadio Mané?” she wrote. “This was the glue that held the team together. They needed him badly.”This argument — that the star of the show was Mané, not Mohamed Salah, all along — is not an uncommon one, nor is it unreasonable. Mané was, for years, a stellar performer for Liverpool. He did not, at times, get the credit he deserved. His departure and Liverpool’s demise do, without question, overlap perfectly.And yet I’m not convinced. Mané’s form in his last couple of years in England had been patchy: spells in which he was as devastating as ever, and stretches in which he seemed a little faded. It felt like the right time to move him on. More relevant, I suspect, is that none of the players signed to replace him have had anything like his impact.James Spink, too, wanted to discuss something of a leitmotif. “Chelsea’s women’s side is coached by a remarkably gifted manager who knows the game, is articulate and honest and a great ‘man manager.’ Wouldn’t it be interesting if an owner had the guts to hire Emma Hayes to shatter that glass ceiling?”This one has a short answer: yes. It would, in fact, not just be interesting but wholly warranted. It won’t happen, though. Not when there are candidates with the glowing résumés of … Frank Lampard who can be hired instead. More

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

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

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      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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      It’s the World Cup Souvenir Everyone Wants. Getting One Is the Hard Part.

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      A game-worn Lionel Messi jersey is the most coveted collectible in Qatar. Good luck getting hold of the one (or two) he wears in the World Cup final.DOHA, Qatar — There is something about the idea of obtaining one of Lionel Messi’s jerseys that makes even the most experienced, sober opponents revert to heartfelt, eager fandom. They pursue him at halftime, surround him at the final whistle. Teammates squabble among themselves for the right to claim a precious memento of their brush with greatness.Other than a World Cup winners’ medal, there will be no prize more sought-after when France meets Messi’s Argentina at Lusail Iconic Stadium on Sunday than the 35-year-old Messi’s jersey. It is, after all, likely to be the ultimate limited edition collectible, one of only four — at most — in existence: a jersey worn by the world’s finest player in the world’s biggest game.The bad news is that it is unlikely to be unavailable, to anyone.Quite how many genuine, match-worn Messi jerseys are in existence is difficult to pinpoint. Argentina’s win against Croatia in Tuesday’s semifinal was, officially, the 1,002nd appearance, for club and country, of Messi’s senior career. That does not mean, though, that there are 1,002 Messi jerseys. The true figure, in fact, is more likely to be closer to double that.Many players, after all, choose to use two jerseys during games, switching into a fresh number at halftime. Whether Messi does that in every match is not clear, but he has certainly done so on occasion. In 2012, for example, executives at the German team Bayer Leverkusen had to admonish two players for arguing over who would get Messi’s shirt at halftime.That there may be several thousand Messi jerseys in circulation that contain trace amounts of his sweat, though, does not mean they are any easier to obtain. Messi maintains a strict protocol on swapping jerseys. His first rule is: He never initiates the exchange. He has only ever made one exception. Early in his career, he approached Zinedine Zidane, then with Real Madrid, and asked if they might exchange jerseys. Other than that, he has said, “I don’t ask for shirts.”His second rule: He would rather swap with another Argentine. In 2017, he posted a photo to his Instagram account of the room in his Barcelona home that he had devoted to a display of all the jerseys he has collected over the years, each of them impeccably arranged, immaculately presented.Many of them bear the names of some of his era’s brightest stars: Thierry Henry, Luis Suárez, Philipp Lahm, Iker Casillas. A majority, though, belong to his countrymen: not just his peers and friends, the likes of Ángel Di María, Sergio Agüero and Pablo Aimar — the player that Messi himself has described as his hero — but lesser lights, too: Chori Domínguez, Oscar Ustari and Tomás De Vincenti, all beneficiaries of his Argentina-first policy.“I got quite a few over the years,” said Maxi Rodríguez, a friend and former international teammate of Messi’s. “I played against him quite a lot when I was in Spain, when I was with Espanyol and Atlético Madrid. We never arranged it beforehand or talked about it. It was just whenever we had chance.”Rodríguez said that he had several Messi jerseys in his own display cases, though he slightly sheepishly admitted that he does not maintain his collection as fastidiously as Messi. Still, he is doing rather better than some players who swapped jerseys with the Argentine earlier in his career, before he became Messi.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      La Liga Chief Javier Tebas Takes His Feud With PSG President to Court

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      A multimillion-dollar dispute between the Spanish league and its Qatari broadcast partner, beIN Media Group, is the latest flare-up in the battle between two of the most powerful men in soccer.For months, it seemed, the feud between the leader of Spain’s top soccer league and the president of the Qatar-owned French team Paris St.-Germain has played out noisily, and in public.Javier Tebas, the outspoken president of La Liga, would regularly criticize Paris St.-Germain and its Qatari leaders, accusing them of flagrantly breaking European soccer’s financial rules. And occasionally, the P.S.G. president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, would respond to Tebas with his own accusations, questioning the health of Spanish soccer, or trade barbs with him in the news media and in speeches.The more high-stakes fight, it turns out, was taking place behind the scenes.This week, after almost two months of wrangling, Tebas and La Liga secured a court order to freeze tens of millions of dollars of the assets of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-owned broadcast network headed by al-Khelaifi, in a dispute over unpaid broadcast-rights payments.BeIN, one of the most prolific spenders on broadcast rights in the world, owns the rights to La Liga matches in swaths of Asia and the Middle East as well as some key European markets. But according to a court document reviewed by The New York Times, the network had so far failed to pay more than 50 million euros it owed the Spanish league for this season’s games.In the 11-page order, the court said it had frozen the assets because of the risk that the funds would be repatriated to Qatar.BeIN Media Group learned about the case, and the order freezing its assets, from a New York Times reporter. “Our reputation is founded on decades of significant investment, best-in-class broadcasting, long-term and trusted relationships with rights-holders, and a track record of payment,” the company said in a statement.The beIN spokesman said 10 million euros of the debt had been repaid on Oct. 5. But the company said it would not discuss its private, contractual discussions with La Liga or any rights-holder, adding, “That is not how business should be conducted, certainly not by professional and dignified institutions.”The outstanding debt represents only a fraction of the money beIN Media Group has paid over the years to La Liga, with industry estimates suggesting the total amount contracted between the league and the network to be as much as $1.5 billion since 2018.Delays in payments to sports organizations are not uncommon, either, with broadcasters often known to negotiate payment plans with their partners. What is uncommon is the lengths La Liga has gone to ensure it receives the money it says it is owed. BeIN continues to broadcast La Liga games across its networks.The case is certain to bring renewed focus on the influence in soccer of Qatar, which in addition to hosting next month’s World Cup also plays a leading role in European soccer through its free-spending ownership of P.S.G., the dominant force in French soccer, and beIN, which has paid out billions of dollars to acquire the broadcast rights to some of soccer’s top competitions.But it also will shine a spotlight on the influence of al-Khelaifi, whose simultaneous roles as the chairman of P.S.G. and beIN Media Group and as a board member of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, have made him one of the most influential figures in the sport.Al-Khelaifi has for years emphatically denied the accusation that he wields too much power given his various roles; he has said that in the past, he sought legal advice whenever such conflicts have arisen and that he regularly recuses himself from meetings in which his various roles could clash.Qatar’s beIN Media Group is a prolific buyer and broadcaster of European soccer matches.Olya Morvan for The New York TimesTebas told The New York Times that beIN has been delaying payments since last year, and he rejected the network’s claim that it was facing financial challenges, saying, “I don’t believe them.”Instead, Tebas suggested, the broadcaster is attempting to renegotiate its deals with La Liga, which cover territories stretching from France to the Middle East and Asia to New Zealand.But Tebas also suggested there was another motive for the missed payments: He said they were an effort to pressure him to relent in his criticisms of al-Khelaifi. In June, for example, Tebas filed a complaint with UEFA in which he accused P.S.G. and Manchester City, another team backed by a Gulf state, of being in “continuous breach” of the organization’s financial regulations.“He knows exactly what he is doing,” Tebas said of al-Khelaifi. “He’s trying to get to the point where clubs will tell the president of the league we prefer to get the money and have you talk less.”BeIN made its disdain for Tebas clear in its response. “If we ran our operations reacting to certain executive’s comments on others within the sports industry, we wouldn’t be in business,” the company said.Much of Tebas’s fury about P.S.G., and al-Khelaifi, stems from the French club’s ability to lure star players from La Liga, spending that he contends has unfairly altered the game’s economics. In 2017, P.S.G. broke the world transfer record when it paid 222 million euros, at the time more than double the highest amount previously paid for a player, to acquire the Brazilian star Neymar from Barcelona. It also managed to lure Lionel Messi to Paris in 2021 after Barcelona could not afford to renew his contract. And earlier this year, P.S.G. paid the French star Kylian Mbappé a signing-on fee of more than $100 million to reject the overtures of Real Madrid.While other soccer leagues and executives have privately expressed concerns about the spending by state-owned teams, Tebas has been by far the most outspoken. “People in football are cowards,” Tebas said Wednesday, explaining why others have not been as outspoken as he has about the market-altering influence of teams like P.S.G. and Manchester City. “Football executives always want to make sure they have good relations and eat well instead of stepping outside their comfort zone.”Al-Khelaifi has had little use for Tebas’s critiques; in June, he said he would not take lessons from Tebas, suggesting what the Spaniard had to say was not relevant.For UEFA, the running dispute between two of its most prominent voices is proving to be awkward because both Tebas and al-Khelaifi are members of its executive board. The latest court fight will do little to lower the temperature, and it is not over.The ruling freezing beIN’s assets, according to the document, is only a temporary measure; the court will hold a full hearing on the merits of the case, but the timetable is unclear. More

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      French Women’s Player Charged in Attack on Teammate

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      Aminata Diallo was detained and then released last year after her Paris St.-Germain teammate was beaten by masked men. On Friday, the police charged her with aggravated assault.A former Paris St.-Germain women’s soccer player was charged with aggravated assault on Friday as part of the investigation into a violent attack on one of her teammates last year by masked men wielding a metal bar.The player, Aminata Diallo, was taken into custody early Friday morning. Later in the day, she was charged in what the prosecutor in the case said was a planned and premeditated attack on her P.S.G. teammate at the time Kheira Hamraoui. Diallo, according to the prosecutor’s statement, has been temporarily placed in prison pending further talks with the investigating judge. The prosecutor has called for her to face pretrial detention, meaning she would remain in prison while she awaits further developments in the case.The attack on Hamraoui became headline news in France and beyond last year because of the nature of the assault and the subsequent detention of Diallo. The cinematic story line — masked men wielding a metal bar on a dark street, reports of marital infidelity and unsubstantiated reports that a battle for playing time had factored in the attack — has led filmmakers to approach both women about collaborating on projects.But the incident also convulsed both the P.S.G. team and the French national team, on which both women had played, and it even led to the breakup of the marriage of a celebrated former French men’s player, Eric Abidal. Abidal’s wife, Hayet Abidal, filed for divorce last year, claiming that her husband had admitted to an extramarital affair with Hamraoui.Prosecutors said three men had acknowledged being at the scene and that a fourth had admitted striking Hamraoui. All four men, the prosecutor’s statement said, implicated Diallo as organizing the attack on her orders, and they contended the plot was an effort to take Hamraoui’s place on the P.S.G. team.Those details bear striking similarities to the notorious attack perpetrated on the Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. Kerrigan was attacked at that year’s United States championships in a plot orchestrated by the ex-husband of a rival skater, Tonya Harding. Kerrigan was assaulted after a practice session by a man who hit her repeatedly in the legs with a police baton.Diallo has maintained her innocence from the start, and she was released without charges after 36 hours in her first detention last year. Neither she nor her lawyer made any public comments on Friday.The attack on Hamraoui followed a team dinner last November at an upscale restaurant in a park on the outskirts of Paris. Diallo had offered Hamraoui a ride home but, after dropping off a third teammate at her home, their journey was interrupted when two men emerged in front of the club-issued car that Diallo was driving, opened the passenger door and dragged Hamraoui out. One of the men then began beating Hamraoui with a metal bar, focusing on her legs and leaving her cut and bruised. Diallo told the police that she was pinned to the steering wheel by another man while the attack took place.A week after the attack, Diallo was arrested, and she was kept in police custody for 36 hours. The Versailles prosecutor’s office confirmed at the time that an acquaintance of Diallo’s, a man in Lyon who had been in jail on unrelated charges, had been questioned and then released.Kheira Hamraoui in a game with France in February. She has not played for P.S.G. this season.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe incident has wrecked the careers of both women. Diallo, 27, retired from professional soccer this summer after her contract with P.S.G. expired. Hamraoui, 32, remains under contract at P.S.G., but she is in a dispute with the club about her treatment after having not been selected to play by the team’s current management.Both players were left off the France squad that competed in this summer’s European women’s championship in England.Diallo’s lawyer, Mourad Battikh, did not reply to a request for comment on Friday. Earlier this week, however, after several men were arrested in connection with the attack, Battikh had said that there was no link between them and Diallo. “Aminata is innocent and has claimed her innocence since the beginning,” he said. More

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      Our Interview With Kylian Mbappé: Audio Excerpts

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      ‘I’m Going to Stay a Player’0:40Mbappé’s new contract has given him a new status and importance at P.S.G. But that also gave rise to reports that he now has the power to hire and fire coaches, or otherwise shape the direction of the club and its roster.That’s just not true, he told us. More