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      In One Moment, Messi and P.S.G. Make It All Work

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      The Lionel Messi goal that completed a Champions League win over Manchester City offered a flash of his past, and a glimpse of his new club’s future.PARIS — Lionel Messi picked the ball up in that spot, the one that has served as the starting point for so many of his finest moments, the one that he knows so well that it might as well be his spot. It has, for 15 years, been his base camp, his happy place: a few yards inside from the right touchline, a few yards from halfway.He was standing still as he controlled it. He had been standing still for some time, by that stage. Paris St.-Germain had taken an early lead, through Idrissa Gueye, and had spent most of the rest of the game desperately trying to fend off Manchester City’s unrelenting attacks.It had maintained its advantage a little through judgment — the industry of Gueye and Ander Herrera, the obduracy of Marquinhos, the sheer, indomitable size and improbable elasticity of Gianluigi Donnarumma — and a little through luck. City cut through, again and again, only for P.S.G. to repel the incursions at the last possible moment.As City, the Premier League champion, turned the screw, the forward line that acts as P.S.G.’s crown jewel seemed to lose interest. At first, both Neymar and Kylian Mbappé had lent a hand, dutifully following their runners, doggedly helping out their fullbacks. Even Messi, in the first half-hour or so, had made a point of hurrying and harrying his opponents.The longer the game wore on, though, the more sporadic those efforts became. That has always been the question with this iteration of P.S.G., of course: For all its formidable talent, how can a team built around three superstars — three players who, on most sides, would have other players to do the dirty work for them — thrive against the well-oiled machines that, for the most part, dominate modern soccer?In one sense, City and P.S.G. are mirror images. Both have been designed almost from scratch. Both are fueled by the bottomless wealth of Gulf States. Both stand for projects that see soccer as a means in some greater game, not as an end in itself. And both have been constructed as platforms for and monuments to individuals.The only differences, really, are that the individuals at the heart of the P.S.G. project run around on the field while City’s issues instructions from the side, and that City’s approach dovetails more neatly with the exigencies of the elite game: The system crafted by Pep Guardiola is king, and his billion-dollar squad must submit to it. At P.S.G., the system is secondary to the stars.As Tuesday’s game wore on, it felt as if that would be the lesson to be drawn. City had the ball. P.S.G. chased shadows. Or, rather, most of P.S.G.’s players did. Gueye and Herrera and the indefatigable Marco Verratti closed down spaces and put out fires. Increasingly, Messi and Neymar and Mbappé ambled around, no longer willing to chase back. A tenet of modern soccer said that the host’s luck could not last.Then Messi got the ball. He has to work through the gears just a little these days, so he gathered speed as he approached City’s penalty area, drifting just a touch more to the center with every step, as if drawn to the edge of the box by the gravity of the goal itself.It is here that Messi has always come to life. He was at full speed, but there was no sense of haste; it seemed he was waiting for all of the other moving parts of the scene to be just so before he played his hand. He saw Achraf Hakimi bursting down the right, unbalancing City’s shape. He saw Mbappé burst across the box at an angle. He waited.For much of the match, Messi had failed to play his usual role as the center of attention.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Messi signed with P.S.G., it was the prospect of seeing him play alongside Neymar — for so long his heir apparent — and Mbappé, the player most likely to inherit his crown as the best player in the world, that made the whole thing palatable.He did not, after all, want to leave Barcelona: He made that perfectly clear. The greatest player of his, or perhaps any, generation had been forced to leave only because of the suicidal economics of the modern game. When it emerged that Barcelona could no longer pay him, he had little choice but to sign for one of two clubs.Only P.S.G. and City, the two teams for whom money is no object, the two teams who have done so much to distort soccer’s economics, the two teams backed by nation states using the world’s most popular sport as a geopolitical pawn, could afford him. There was no romance here; it was cold, heartless business, nothing more.The chemistry has not been immediate. Mbappé and Neymar, occasionally, seem to butt heads, one complaining that the other does not share the ball quite as much as he might. Messi’s start had been slow, too, as he recovered from a delayed preseason. Even the Harlem Globetrotters, after all, have to practice their tricks.For much of this game, too, the P.S.G. trio seemed to be getting to know one another. They combined fitfully, in bursts, flickering to life and then subsiding again. It was possible to wonder if this grand experiment, this faintly pubescent attempt to bring FIFA Ultimate Team to life might be doomed to failure.On the edge of the box, Messi finally released the ball. There is a clairvoyant streak to Messi’s genius: It is not just that he seems to see the field from on high, a shifting geometric pattern playing out beneath him, but that he gives the impression he can see into the future, too. So when he finally released the ball, it came with instructions. He did not so much pass it to Mbappé as loan it to him. His teammate had little choice but to give it back.Messi did not, perhaps, know quite how Mbappé would do it — the slick back-heel that wrong-footed City’s defenders was a virtuoso testament to the French striker’s own brilliance — but he knew that, if Mbappé did return the ball, it would roll to his other favorite spot: on the arc just outside the box.With Aymeric Laporte snapping at his heels, the ball arrived just as Messi did. There was no time to take a touch, but Messi has never needed time, not here. He swept his left foot through the ball, a motion every bit as smooth and apparently effortless as a Roger Federer forehand.In City’s goal, Éderson set his feet and readied himself to jump. On the replays, the moment when he realized the futility of it was almost visible: the slight sinking look in his eyes as he saw the dip, the fade, the swerve on Messi’s shot.Messi was running for the corner before the ball hit the net, before the crowd had computed the physics, before it was possible, really, to understand that he had done it. The whole thing had taken no more than six or seven seconds, from standstill to bedlam, but that was more than long enough.It remains to be seen if this P.S.G. team, a 2-0 victor on the day, can work well enough to win the Champions League. It will take years to parse what this era of teams backed by unimaginable wealth means to the game, to fully comprehend the change that it has wrought. But for a moment, just a moment, the questions and the concerns did not matter.All there was, just then, was Messi, his arms outstretched, full of joy, and a stadium, with arms aloft, full of awe, marveling at what he had done, at what he can do.Ian Langsdon/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      The Problem When Soccer Clubs See Athletes as Assets

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      Chelsea and Manchester City have both found ways to monetize their army of spare signings by loaning them out. But should soccer incentivize that, or limit it?One of the things that appealed most to Manchester City about Marlos Moreno was his flexibility. The club spotted him as a teenager, coming off the back of a breakthrough season in which he helped Atlético Nacional, his hometown club in his native Colombia, win not just a national title but the Copa Libertadores, too.Moreno, then 19, had the air of a rising star. He was the sort of prospect who stood out among the thousands of players around the world whose names and performance data flash in front of the eyes of the scouts and analysts at Europe’s biggest clubs.City’s recruitment team liked what it saw: not just Moreno’s finishing, but his creativity, his ability to play in a variety of places. The club decided to strike, paying Atlético $6 million or so to sign him, and tying Moreno to a five-year contract. Executives were sufficiently excited by the acquisition of a player they felt was one of the most promising in South America to mention his name to Sheikh Mansour, City’s owner.“He’s a versatile player,” City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, said when Moreno’s arrival was confirmed. “We believe he has a fantastic future in the game, and with City.”That was five years ago, in August 2016. Moreno, 24, has now completed his initial, five-year deal with City. He has not played a single game for the club. He has, instead, spent the last half-decade on a series of loans. As it turned out, he has needed to be a very versatile player indeed. Just not in the way Begiristain intended.There is, on the surface, little pattern to the arc of Moreno’s journey these last few years, no easy evidence of some grand design at play. Sometimes, he has gone to clubs in Manchester City’s orbit — Girona and Lommel, two of his stops, are owned by City Football Group — and sometimes he has not. There have been spells in Spain, Portugal and Belgium, but also Brazil and Mexico. If there is a rhyme or a reason, it is difficult to discern.Marlos Moreno, left, signed with Manchester City in 2016 but has yet to play for the club.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockThis summer, Moreno left Manchester on loan again. (There has never been official confirmation that he has signed a new contract, but it can only be assumed that City extended his terms beyond their initial expiration date this summer.) He has joined Kortrijk, in Belgium. It is his seventh club in five years.Moreno is not, though, an outlier. There are plenty of players on City’s books who have a similar story to tell. Yangel Herrera, a Venezuelan playmaker, is now on his fourth team in four years since signing with Manchester City. None of them was Manchester City. Patrick Roberts, once considered something of a breakout star in English soccer, is with his sixth team in six years. He has, at least, appeared for Manchester City in a Premier League game. That was in 2015.But this is not simply a Manchester City phenomenon. Chelsea, too, has a troupe of players on loan: 21, in fact, after the closure of the transfer window. Some of them — like Billy Gilmour, the Scottish midfielder lent to Norwich City for the year — are undertaking a vital step in their development. The hope at the club remains that they will come back stronger, better, more experienced and ready to command a place with the first-team squad. Others, like the fullbacks Kenedy and Baba Rahman, are not.Chelsea is often credited — if that is the right word — with pioneering the idea of a soccer club as two separate but linked businesses: one designed to put the best team on the field, with the aim of winning trophies and claiming glory; and one set up to trade players, with the aim of making a profit that can then be reinvested in the other side of the company.Matt Miazga’s Chelsea tenure has been a European tour: He has been lent to clubs in the Netherlands, France, England, Belgium and, most recently, Spain, where he now plays for Alaves.David Aguilar/EPA, via ShutterstockWhether Chelsea invented the idea is a matter of debate. Several Italian teams might suggest they were operating along similar lines long before the current European champion. There is no question, though, that Chelsea has not only industrialized the concept, it has refined it, too.Its approach has two strands. Some players are bought, developed and sold a couple of years later, flipped like real estate. Others, though, are treated as rentals, lent again and again to different clubs, the return on the initial investment spread over several years of loan fees.This practice could, perhaps, be named in honor of goalkeeper Matej Delac, a Croat who spent nine years at Chelsea, and spent each and every one of them at a different club. The whole approach — of effectively spinning off a player-trading business as another part of a club’s identity — could easily be termed the Chelsea model.Except that it is, now, not just Chelsea. It is Manchester City, too, with Moreno and Herrera and others. Liverpool is doing it more frequently. There are players at Juventus and Real Madrid, among others, who have had similar experiences. It is now pretty much standard practice at most of Europe’s elite clubs.There is a reason it has been widely and quickly adopted: It is a good idea. It is a particularly good idea now, when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged most clubs’ finances and only a handful of teams are able to pay actual transfer fees. The loan market will grow and grow. Having players contracted for that very purpose ensures a steady stream of income: small beer, perhaps, for a team like Manchester City or Chelsea, but perhaps a vital source of funds for the teams expected to compete with them.The impulse behind it is not just economic; it is also, to some extent, sporting. The teams that are good at it — the ones that can identify talent and develop it, the ones that can command a market for those players, the ones that can place them adroitly at teams that allow their value and demand to grow — are the ones that are rewarded by the system. Chelsea can bring in Romelu Lukaku, to some extent, because it has developed an effective transfer strategy to offset some of the costs. That is to its credit.There is only one sticking point. It is a simple question, and it is one that does not traditionally detain soccer for long, but it is worth asking. Is this OK? There is economic sense here. There may be some sporting logic, too. But morally, is the idea of players not as athletes but as assets something we should not just accept but incentivize?The transfer market, as a whole, is underpinned by a deep weirdness. It is rarely mentioned — the soap opera of the market is sufficiently compelling that we, as observers, willingly suspend our disbelief — but it is unusual that an employer can prevent an employee from taking another job, one that is better paid or more appealing, regardless of what that employee wants.Manchester City signed Yangel Herrera as a teenager but has yet to play him. Instead, he has appeared in Major League Soccer and for three Spanish clubs.Savvides Press/EPA, via ShutterstockOf course, plenty of employees have contracts, which bind them to a company. But for the most part, they also have notice periods, giving them some sort of agency over their careers and lives. Perhaps a company might make life difficult should a star employee wish to leave. Perhaps it will place him on some type of gardening leave. There are not many examples where it will keep him until a prospective employer pays a wholly arbitrary sum in compensation.We tolerate this state of affairs in soccer partly because of tradition, partly because it protects sporting integrity; partly because we (wrongly) assume that everyone is extremely well paid anyway; partly because players do jobs we all dream of doing, so we adore them individually but hate them as a concept; and partly because the transfer market is an important and reasonably effective mechanism for wealth distribution.Even by these low and strange standards, though, the use of players as nothing more than assets — to be fattened for sale like livestock or to be rented to the highest bidder — feels like a step too far.It is akin, perhaps, to those complex derivative packages traded on financial markets, the ones that are bets on the outcomes of bets, on and on into eternity. The original purpose has been lost: It is no longer about trading to get better; it is simply about trading to make money. And the things being traded, in this case, are humans, ones who are no longer in control of their own destiny, not really.This is one of those rare problems in soccer that has a relatively easy solution: The authorities who run and, in theory, safeguard the game could quite easily rule that clubs can have only a certain number of senior professionals on their books. They could ban teams from having more than, say, five players on loan at any time.They could, but of course they won’t, which means there will be more cases like Marlos Moreno and Yangel Herrera and Matej Delac and all the others, forever on the move, hired out to whoever will take them, bonded to a club that sees them not for what they can do but for how much they can make.Selling TomorrowAntoine Griezmann completed a round-trip journey to Madrid. Barcelona paid coming and going.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as time expired, the money started pouring in. The great bazaar of Barcelona had been open all summer, but it was only in the final couple of days that anyone came through the doors, the buyers and the bargain-hunters, all hoping to take advantage of soccer’s great distressed sellers.If the sale of Emerson Royal to Tottenham was a little strange — he had officially joined Barcelona only a month earlier — it is the departure of Antoine Griezmann that will sting the most: the sheer humiliation of allowing a player signed with great pomp and ceremony two years ago to return, initially on loan, to Atlético Madrid.Still, it could not be helped: Barcelona’s most pressing need was first to save and then to raise money, and at the end of the transfer window it had done just that. Lionel Messi has gone; Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué, Jordi Alba and Sergi Roberto have all agreed to reduced terms; Griezmann is off the salary bill. By next summer, when his move to Atlético is made permanent, Barcelona will have generated $115 million in sales.What Barcelona could not do, of course, is sell off the players that it most needs to sell: the high earners, the waning stars, the reminders of its years of folly. Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Samuel Umtiti are all still there. Barcelona does not have a vast amount in common with Real Madrid, but here, perhaps, there is some common ground.Whether Real’s approach (or approaches) to entice Kylian Mbappé this summer was real or not we will never know, not truly: Real Madrid insists it was, Paris St.-Germain is adamant it was not. Either way, the club has spent the last couple of seasons trying to raise the funds necessary to sign the 22-year-old Mbappé: funds that would either have been used as a transfer fee or as a golden handshake.To do that, it would have liked to sell players like Gareth Bale and Isco: big names on money to match. But nobody came forward, and so instead Real Madrid has had to cash in on a suite of promising youngsters: Achraf Hakimi and Sergio Reguilón and Óscar Rodríguez last season and Martin Odegaard this summer.The policy has worked, of course, but it brings with it an unavoidable question: How much brighter would Real Madrid’s future have been, how much more balanced would its side be, if it had been able to add Mbappé to a promising young squad, rather than having to sell off many of those players to finance his eventual arrival?It is the same question that lingers over Barcelona. Emerson, like Junior Firpo and Carles Aleña and Carles Pérez and Arthur before him, might not have made Barcelona great again, but he would, at least, have helped to rejuvenate an aging squad. Instead, he was sold, as they all were, to cover the costs of the mistakes of the past. Barcelona’s finances are in better shape now than they were a month ago. The price is a high one, though: It has had to mortgage tomorrow to pay for yesterday.CorrespondenceThere was an intriguing thought in an email from Jillian Mannarino, touching on the varying fortunes of Arsenal’s two senior teams. “Everyone following the Premier League is talking about how bad Arsenal men’s team is,” she wrote, “but no one seems to be talking about how good Arsenal’s women’s team is: stacked with superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Kim Little, Danielle van de Donk and Beth Mead, and consistently good for the last decade.”Arsenal has at least one team that is making its fans smile.Steven Paston/Press Association, via Associated PressWe will cover the start of this season’s Women’s Super League in England elsewhere this weekend. But it is worth pausing a moment on Arsenal, too, because there is a stark contrast between its two elite divisions.The women’s team recruits sufficiently and consistently well enough — including the arrival of Tobin Heath this week on a free transfer — to punch above its weight: It has not spent quite as much as Chelsea and Manchester City in recent years, but it remains a peer of those teams in a way that it is very much not in the men’s game. How can that be explained? Why can the club make good decisions for its women’s team, but not its men’s? Is it to do with the executives working on the women’s side? And if so, should someone maybe not ask their advice?These are questions I cannot answer — though I will endeavor to do so — but I can, at least, furnish Mary Jo Berman with a response. “Did Barcelona receive nothing in return for Lionel Messi?” she asked. “Couldn’t they have traded him or transferred him for cash?” They couldn’t, for the very simple reason that the club had allowed his contract to expire: He was free to move wherever he wanted. The fact that Barcelona allowed that to happen, too, remains the most interesting aspect of this summer.And Calvin Wagner was quite right to pull me up on a poor turn of phrase last week. “The transfers of Messi, Mbappé and Ronaldo are clearly more driven by the statement of acquiring their star power than footballing fit,” he wrote. “But surely the Lukaku deal has more sporting logic to it? It seems to me that he brings greater marginal gains in sporting quality to Chelsea relative to the other transfers mentioned in your column.”This is, of course, quite right. Lukaku makes complete sense from a sporting perspective — he fills a glaring need that Chelsea has — in a way that Ronaldo, for example, does not, particularly. Lukaku was included simply because of his cost, one that would have been beyond the reach of all but three or four teams this summer, rather than because of the motivations behind the deal, but that should have been made more clear.That’s all for this week. We may now be behind the paywall, huddling against the cold, but the usual rules still apply: Questions go to askrory@nytimes.com, urgent matters go to Twitter, all of the other thoughts I’ve had this week that I could not crowbar into this newsletter are littered throughout Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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      Mbappé, Ronaldo and the South Beach Moment

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      Lionel Messi moved to P.S.G. because Barcelona couldn’t stop him. Kylian Mbappé may have to stay put because his club holds all the leverage.Real Madrid’s first offer for Kylian Mbappé arrived, in writing, on Tuesday afternoon. It did not come as a shock to anyone at Paris St.-Germain, not really. Mbappé had only a year left on his contract. Negotiations over an extension had long ago hit an impasse. It was an open secret he had eyes only for Real Madrid. Clumsily, the Spanish club had made clear it reciprocated his affection.The only source of surprise was the figure attached to Real Madrid’s opening bid. It was prepared to pay $188 million, or thereabouts, for a player who would be available for nothing — other than his astronomical wages, and a bloated signing-on fee — in a year. P.S.G.’s executives were astonished. At that price, there was no choice to make. They had to reject the offer.This summer, the summer when Lionel Messi joined P.S.G. and Manchester City spent $137 million on Jack Grealish and Chelsea made Romelu Lukaku, cumulatively, the most expensive player of all time, and this week, the week when Mbappé may join Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo might sign for City, may come, in hindsight, to stand for many things.It will mark a definitive shift into an era in which the transfer of players is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, where what matters most is not what those players do or how much they win or how they perform for new club, but the act of signing them, the fact of possessing them. They are not being signed to win trophies: that is just a happy byproduct. The signing is the trophy, and the trophy is the signing.Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.Francois Mori/Associated PressReal Madrid does not have a particular vision of how it will use Mbappé, 20, one of the two most blistering talents in soccer’s new generation. Will he displace Eden Hazard on the left? Will he usurp the apparently ageless Karim Benzema, 33, as a pure, straight No. 9?Real has, quite probably, not thought that far ahead, just as nobody at P.S.G. paused and wondered where, exactly, Messi would fit into the intense pressing game preferred by its coach, Mauricio Pochettino. Real has not thought any further than the number of fans Mbappé’s name recognition will pull into an overhauled, over-budget Santiago Bernabéu.Ronaldo, of course, is an even more extreme example. He is, without question, one of the two finest players of his generation, and one of the finest of any generation. But for all that class and all that quality, it takes a leap of imagination to see how he fits into a team coached by Pep Guardiola.At age 36, Ronaldo does not lead the press. He does not subjugate himself to a system. He does not smoothly and easily interchange positions with his teammates. Instead, he is the system: To elicit the devastating best from Ronaldo now is to build a team in his service, one that allows him to roam as he wishes, to take up the positions where he feels he can be most effective.That is not to say, of course, that either move will come to be seen as a gratuitous mistake. Adding Mbappé turns an aging, somewhat listless, chronically unbalanced Real Madrid team into a force. Guardiola may well have some scheme in his mind for how to make the most of Ronaldo; even if he does not, the consolation prize is that Ronaldo remains a goal-scorer of almost unparalleled efficiency.The week’s new rumor is Cristiano Ronaldo to Manchester City. How he would fit in Pep Guardiola’s team is not entirely clear.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat the moves may go through anyway, though, suggests that soccer has moved into a new age, one in which the system is secondary to star power. For a decade, the game has been defined by its most prominent coaches — Guardiola, Pochettino, Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel and the rest — all of whom, at heart, believe that the idea comes before the individual.For a handful of teams, that has been inverted. Pochettino’s task at P.S.G. is no longer to outwit his peers to lift the Champions League trophy, to have a better idea than Guardiola; it is to provide a platform on which Messi and Neymar can express their abilities, lift fans off their seats, captivate an audience.That it is only a handful — P.S.G., Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, and possibly, somewhat unexpectedly, Real Madrid, too — should not go unmentioned. It is not insignificant that the whirlwind chaos of this week has come after a summer in which most teams, even in Europe’s big leagues, have been trying to cut costs, rather than opting to incur new ones.It is not just on the field that a new era has been born. The financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic, and its related shutdown, has sent soccer headlong down a path it was taking anyway. As has been noted before, the financial advantage enjoyed by a handful of sides may come, in time, to make the proposed, abortive Super League look like an exercise in open competition.And that, perhaps, forms part of the most telling conclusion that can be drawn from this summer, and from this week. It will be remembered for the deals that did happen, of course — for Messi standing on the field in Paris, looking as if he had only just realized quite how far his adoration had spread; for the prospect of Mbappé in Madrid white, and Ronaldo in City sky blue — but just as significant were the deals that did not.Not long after P.S.G. turned down that first offer for Mbappé, Harry Kane declared that he would be remaining at Tottenham, rather than continuing to seek his own $200 million move to Manchester City. (City itself moved on quickly: By that night, it was already discussing whether to sign Ronaldo.)Spurs had received an offer, too, a few weeks ago, reported to be worth around $140 million. It had turned it down, despite the damage done to its finances by the pandemic. Unlike P.S.G., it did not treat the play for Kane as an opening bid. It did not use it to maintain a dialogue, to haggle, to hash out a deal. It just said no. Kane, with three years left on his contract, eventually had little choice but to stay.Harry Kane is staying at Tottenham because he traded his leverage for security.Dylan Martinez/ReutersKane, the player who did not move in the summer when everyone did, will come to be seen — by other elite players, and by the agents who steer their careers — as a salutary lesson in the danger of what happens when you lose leverage.Players have, for decades, favored longer contracts, believing that what is sacrificed in control will be more than made up for through financial security. Money, in elite soccer, is rarely money as we understand it. It is better understood not as a currency used for the trade of goods, but as a gauge of status. The more a team pays you, the more it values you.The same goes for contract length: The longer a team says it will pay you, the more you mean to that team. That view has been encouraged by agents, either because they recognize that a career is brief and fragile, vulnerable to a single injury or a loss of form, or because they earn a proportion of the player’s salary, or both.The pandemic, though, may have changed that. Only a few clubs can now afford to pay premium transfer fees. A handful of others, as indicated by Tottenham, are sufficiently financially robust to resist all but the most lavish of offers. Suddenly, a long contract looks less like security and more like a shackle.It is more than a decade, now, since LeBron James revealed that he would be “taking his talents” to South Beach. It is three years since Antoine Griezmann, then of Atlético Madrid, produced his own, somewhat anti-climactic version of the show that became known as The Decision.And yet it may well be that this summer, this week, is what changes soccer’s approach to free agency, bringing it into line with the American model, where it is an opportunity to be seized, rather than a purgatory to be avoided.For players at elite clubs, increasingly, running down your contract may be the only way to get a move. It is not a coincidence that both Mbappé and Ronaldo had only a year left on their current deals. For players hoping to get a move, it may be the only way to make that a reality: When nobody can pay or nobody will sell, when the transfer market has ground to a halt, there is little other choice.It is that, ultimately, that this summer, and this week, may come to stand for. The year when Messi moved, when Mbappé moved, when Ronaldo moved: It sounds like a transfer window to end all transfer windows. And in a sense, perhaps, as players realize that they have to take control of their careers, rather than letting clubs trade them at their will, that is precisely what it will prove to be.Change Is as Good as a ResetThursday’s Champions League draw produced a rare treat: group-stage drama.Tolga Bozoglu/EPA, via ShutterstockThe answer, it turned out, was there all along. UEFA has been fretting for years over how to make the group stages of the Champions League more interesting. Too often, the first three months of the tournament that serves as club soccer’s crown jewel was little more than a phony war, a box-ticking exercise, a predictable, idle procession for the great and the good.It has been only a few months since it arrived at last — and at the cost of a brief, furious civil war that threatened to tear soccer apart — at a solution. The Champions League as we know it has just three editions remaining. From 2024, the group stage will be replaced by a so-called Swiss Model system, one that guarantees more meetings between the elite and fewer dead-rubber fixtures.After all that work, then, it is a bit of a shame that the draw for this year’s group stage proved rather neatly that there was a workable alternative. The problem with the Champions League, it turns out, was not the format of the tournament itself. It was, instead, the nature of the leagues that feed into it.Of this year’s eight groups, only three — those involving Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid — feel immediately predictable, and even they are not without their charm: Chelsea will face Juventus twice, Bayern will play Barcelona, and Real Madrid will meet Inter Milan.The other five, though, all contain precisely the sort of intrigue that UEFA — as well as Europe’s most vocal, most self-satisfied clubs — have been craving. Manchester City not only has to face Paris St.-Germain, Lionel Messi and all, but RB Leipzig. Liverpool has been paired with Atlético Madrid and A.C. Milan. The groups containing Borussia Dortmund and Sevilla look completely open.Lille’s Ligue 1 title affected the Champions League seeds. The competition is better for it.Ian Langsdon/EPA, via ShutterstockThe reason for this is easy: Last year, Europe had several unlikely champions. Lille lifted the title in France, Atlético in Spain, Inter in Italy, Sporting Lisbon in Portugal. Villarreal won the Europa League, rather than a team that had dropped out of the Champions League. All of them were placed in the top group of seeds for this year’s Champions League.The result is an unusually compelling group stage. Had P.S.G. claimed the Ligue 1 title, for example, both the French club and Manchester City would have had a far more straightforward path to the knockout rounds, and the next three months would have had far less to commend them.And the lesson? Well, the lesson should be obvious to everyone. Stronger domestic leagues lead to a better Champions League. The way to increase interest is not to guarantee more meetings between the elite, with little or nothing riding on them, but to ensure the “elite” is as broad a category as possible. What the competition needs is not height, but breadth. For once, for one of the last times, it has that.CorrespondenceThis week’s entire final section could have been dedicated to the proper usage of the word “prevaricate,” which several of you got in touch to discuss. That would not, though, make especially compelling content, so let’s all agree that I got it right once and could, in a certain light, have meant “equivocate” once in last week’s edition and move on.More interesting was the note from Paul Bauer, wondering what happens if the sovereign states that absolutely do not run various soccer teams as a way of embedding themselves in the global consciousness “lose interest in this grand scheme? The financial implications of Inter that you wrote about will repeat on a larger scale.”There must, presumably, be a point at which these teams have served their purpose — whether you want to dress that purpose up as an advertising vehicle or as something more sinister — and are no longer seen as pet projects. When that point is, I have no idea. What happens afterward, though, can be narrowed down to three possibilities.The Pride of the Blue Half of Manchester, and the U.A.E.Rui Vieira/Associated PressOne is, effectively, what has happened to Chelsea: The club is run with the general aim of being self-sufficient, but with a benefactor on hand to inject capital whenever it is needed/they have some lying around.The second is that the club is sold: These are not investments designed to make a profit, of course, but — because, as ever, money in soccer is not really about money — a couple of billion dollars would both vindicate all of the work put in and provide cover for a change in policy.And third? Well, the third is the one that fans of the teams to whom this applies would probably rather not contemplate: the money dries up, the interest wanes, and what has happened at Inter happens again. That is not, I think, desperately likely, but we have seen this summer that it is not impossible.That’s all for this week. I don’t know if you’ve noticed — it has been pretty subtle, after all — but this is the last time this newsletter will be available to anyone who does not have the good fortune or good sense to be a Times subscriber.I really can’t recommend subscribing to the Times enough: Of course, most readers across the world know us for our soccer coverage, but we’ve made real strides in recent years in adding other, lesser strings to our bow. Not only do we do all of the “American” sports — the one with the bat, the one with the hoop, the one with the advertising breaks — but there’s cooking, there’s politics, there’s culture, there’s technology, there’s something called Spelling Bee. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told people: Yes, the Times does stuff other than soccer.Of course, not all of you will take up that offer, despite it being excellent value. So, to you, I’d just like to say thank you: for signing up, for opening this email every Friday — well, most Fridays; sometimes you’re busy, I get it — for reading, for replying, for sending all of your hints, tips, complaints and ideas to askrory@nytimes.com. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that it has occasionally given you something to think about. Even if that thing is: “Actually, it’s called ‘football.’” If this is your last edition, then thank you. And good luck with your future endeavors. If not: Thank you. See you next week. More

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      Manchester City Chases New Trophies With an Old Friend: Money

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      Manchester City’s winning formula has delivered trophies. But to win the Champions League, it may need to make a few expensive changes.All these years on, it is hard to identify the exact straw that broke the camel’s back. Perhaps it was the night when Carlos Tévez, in the thick of a Champions League game against Bayern Munich, seemed to refuse to come on as a substitute. Maybe it was the evening Mario Balotelli spent setting off fireworks in, and setting fire to, his own bathroom.Ideally, really, as a way of illustrating the mounting absurdity of it all, it would be what became known as the Birthday Cake Incident: the time that Manchester City either did or did not buy Yaya Touré a birthday cake, but most definitely did not buy him a Bugatti, a decision that prompted Touré’s agent at the time to declare that one of the club’s greatest ever players wanted to leave.Most likely, of course, the last straw was all of them and none of them. It was their weight, taken together, the apparently endless stream of minor problems blown out of proportion, that persuaded City — at some indistinct point, six or seven years ago — that buying the biggest and the brightest stars was more trouble than it was worth. That the club would, instead, take a different tack.Where that led was cast, most clearly, when Pep Guardiola’s team encountered, and overcame, Paris St.-Germain in last season’s Champions League semifinals. City and P.S.G. are often presented as two sides of the same coin, the twin vanguard of soccer’s new order: both soaringly ambitious, both unimaginably wealthy, both bankrolled by private individuals who are definitely not acting with the backing of Gulf states.For all that they have in common, though, their approaches have been starkly different. Their squads for those two games in the spring made that abundantly clear. In the second leg, as P.S.G. searched in vain for a way back, Mauricio Pochettino had to throw on the on-loan Moise Kean, the unheralded Mitchel Bakker and the unremarkable Colin Dagba.In recent years, City has generally had a star and a spare at every position.Carl Recine/ReutersAs Guardiola looked to see the game out, he could introduce Raheem Sterling, Sergio Agüero and Gabriel Jésus. That left Aymeric Laporte, Rodri, Ferran Torres and João Cancelo all waiting on the bench. P.S.G. might have had the greater star power — even before its signing of Lionel Messi this week — in Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, but its resources seemed much shallower than City’s.Where P.S.G. had concentrated its wealth on acquiring a handful of superstars, City had spent the previous few years gathering a squad of unrivaled and unprecedented depth.City was not shy of big names, of course — including Kevin De Bruyne, Agüero and Riyad Mahrez — but only a handful, like Raheem Sterling, might have been considered major stars before they arrived at the club. There was no sense of a divide between the headline acts and the supporting cast. Instead, City’s team seemed to have two $70 million players for every outfield position.The policy that built Guardiola’s squad had been instituted painstakingly, deliberately, with the club investing substantially more time and energy than before on making sure it was recruiting players who were humble, hard-working and unlikely to cause any reputational damage on or off the field. There had been quite enough drama in the years of Tévez, Balotelli and Emmanuel Adebayor.A decade ago, City’s stars sometimes offered more headlines than goals.Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto AgencyCity took great pride in its approach, regularly defending itself against accusations that it had spent its way to success by pointing out that most of its rivals had more expensive acquisitions within their ranks: Manchester United had spent more on Paul Pogba, Liverpool more on Virgil Van Dijk and Chelsea more on Kepa Arrizabalaga than City had on its (then) record signing, the defender Rúben Dias. In some cases, quite a lot more.Besides, the approach worked. The Champions League title might continue to elude City — like P.S.G., it has played, and lost, one final in the competition it desires to win above all others since its reinvention — but City now stands as the pre-eminent Premier League team of its era; champion in three of the last four seasons, five times in the last decade, and a favorite to add to that tally this year.Last season, as City marched to the domestic league title, Guardiola regularly rotated as many as half a dozen players in and out of his team every few days. His side retained a freshness, an energy, that nobody else — not even in the money-soaked, recession-resistant heights in which City operates — could match. City’s success is rooted not in the brilliance of its strongest player, but in the competence of its weakest.And yet, this summer, all that has changed. City has already broken the British transfer record to sign Jack Grealish from Aston Villa. It remains quietly confident of having the chance to do so again: It would cost, most likely, $200 million or so to pry Harry Kane, the England captain, from Tottenham, but City appears prepared to do it. It will, alas, no longer be possible for the club to claim that its spending power is no greater than anyone else’s.Is Harry Kane the final item in City’s shopping cart this summer?Pool photo by Shaun BotterillQuite what has prompted this significant, and costly, sea change in approach appears — on the surface — to be obvious. City is desperate to win the Champions League. It came closer than ever last season, strangely acquiescent in defeat in the final against Chelsea, and its executives and its manager are united in their desire to take that one last step.City has been richer than Croesus for 13 years; its patience is wearing thin. Guardiola has not won the trophy that means the most to him since 2011, when he was at Barcelona; so is his. Grealish was, by some measures, the most dangerous player in the Premier League last season, and second in Europe only to Messi. Kane is among the world’s finest strikers, a position where City, following Agüero’s departure, is noticeably light. There is no mystery here: This is a club pursuing the exact two players it thinks it needs to achieve its mission.And yet a couple of questions linger. Grealish is a brilliant player, imaginative and courageous and tirelessly inventive, but he has never played in the Champions League. He cannot, then, be a surefire guarantee of success in it. Kane has made a final, of course, but he is both more expensive and substantially more difficult to extract from his current club than, say, Romelu Lukaku proved to be.Grealish and Kane would, doubtless, make Manchester City even better than it already was. Whether they make it $300 million better, though, is a more taxing question. Whether City had to spend quite that much for a similar effect is a more compelling one. That both questions can be posed suggests that it is not inconceivable that there are other, off-field considerations at play.It may be, for example, that City feels it needs just a little more star power, not only to help it over the line both in England — where Guardiola has said it will take a haul of 90 points or more to win the title once more — and in Europe, but also to increase its commercial reach. Kane is the captain of England. Grealish, this summer during Euro 2020, became his country’s darling. City has learned to its cost, previously, that headline names can mean headline trouble; perhaps, as soccer continues its gradual lurch from competitive sport to content farm, that is not quite so unappealing.City’s first outing, the Community Shield against Leicester, produced a defeat. Don’t expect too many more.Pool photo by Tim KeetonA squad devoid of fixed reference points — big names who demand inclusion in specific positions — is ideal, of course, for Guardiola; his Platonic ideal of a team is 10 midfielders, interchanging positions at will. Both Grealish and Kane are more versatile than is perhaps realized, but their cost — if the latter joins the former — dictates that Guardiola must build around their strengths, at least to some extent, rather than deploying them as transferable cogs in his machine.That, too, offers a glimpse of another possible rationale for their arrival. Guardiola has regularly complained that his players do not win all of the individual awards for which they might be considered contenders. That they do not is rather less to do with some insidious campaign against his club among the news media and more centered on the fact that no star, at City, shines quite so brightly as the manager.No matter how many games De Bruyne dominates, no matter how many positions Sterling masters, no matter how many goals Ilkay Gundogan suddenly and inexplicably scores, their success is always subsumed by Guardiola’s; their brilliance always sits downstream from his. (Guardiola, and his entourage, are not displeased with this.)City’s squad had been built in Guardiola’s image. In many ways, the club has been shaping itself to suit his needs ever since its first title victory. That has proved devastatingly effective, but it also carries with it a distant cost: At some point, when he goes, a squad of players acquired by him, crafted by him and loyal to him will have to adapt to life without him.Not so, of course, Grealish or Kane. Both would, doubtless, thrive under Guardiola. More important, both — ready-made, plug and play stars — would continue to thrive after he is gone. That may not be next summer, or even the summer after that, but it will come at some point in the span of their contracts.They are both, first and foremost, signings for today: proof that this is a club desperate, urgent in its intent to thrive in the immediate. But their cost, their age and their profile suggest that they are something else, too: evidence that City is thinking not only about how to win even more under Guardiola, but how to keep winning once the brightest star it has ever known has gone.Game OnBayern Munich and its new manager, Julian Nagelsmann, open the Bundesliga season on Friday.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrictly speaking, this is not the weekend when soccer is back, since soccer never really went away. The early rounds of the Champions League were being played during the European Championship. The Gold Cup carried on until late July. And it is only a week since the French season started, right as the Brazilian men and the Canadian women won gold medals at the Olympics.But this is the weekend when the major European (men’s) leagues kick off, and thus this is officially The Weekend When Soccer Is Back. With fans, too: full stadiums in England, increasingly full ones in Spain and Italy, half-full ones (mostly, for now) in Germany. Soccer’s ghost era, with any luck, is nearing its end.The prospect of noise, color and life is not the only reason to greet the new season. The Bundesliga has a suite of managers in new roles, led by Julian Nagelsmann at Bayern Munich and Marco Rose at Borussia Dortmund. In Spain, the demise of Real Madrid and Barcelona may yet open the door for Sevilla to join the title chase. Juventus has a crown to regain in Italy.Erik Lamela will strengthen a Sevilla team with title hopes in La Liga.Cristina Quicler/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is England, though, where all of the ingredients are in place for a vintage campaign (after what was, if we are all completely honest, a fairly dull one last time around). Manchester City will start as the title favorite as it seeks to retain its championship, but Chelsea — bolstered by Romelu Lukaku, and buoyed by its status as European champion — carries considerable menace, too. So does Manchester United, newly embroidered by Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho.Better still, there is a pack of clubs gearing up to try to close the gap on the league’s great powers, a group containing not just the obvious names — the likes of Tottenham and Arsenal — but a smartly improved Leicester, a revamped Aston Villa, an engaging Leeds United and, possibly, Rafael Benítez’s Everton, a team that will, whatever happens, be one of the most compelling stories of the year. For those back in the stands, for those still afar, there is plenty to savor.P.S.G. Has Already WonLionel Messi was greeted by the masses in Paris on Wednesday.Yves Herman/ReutersThere were thousands of fans outside the Parc des Princes, clutching flags and burning flares and waiting for a glimpse, however fleeting, of the man who had made their dreams come true. There were hundreds more outside Paris St.-Germain’s shop in the center of the French capital, patiently waiting for their chance to get a jersey emblazoned with a name they never thought they would see.In a sense, of course, the story of Lionel Messi and P.S.G. is only just beginning: The club, as its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi rather oddly said at the news conference held to unveil the greatest player of all time, has “won nothing yet.” Still, nice to know that he doesn’t think that stream of French titles mean a vast amount, either.But in a way, too, it is over. The point of signing Messi, for P.S.G., is not what comes after: It is not the games he plays or the trophies he wins. It was the theater of the day itself: the crowd at the airport, the congregation at the stadium, the countless news crews, the endless content.No victory — perhaps with the one exception of the Champions League, but not necessarily — will attract quite so much attention, will compel as many eyeballs, will engender in fans the same feelings of excitement and awe as the piece of performance theater that captivated the planet over the course of last weekend. A transfer is not a means to an end, any more. It is the end in itself.CorrespondenceIt would appear that Brendan O’Connor has been gifted with just a touch of clairvoyance. “Why did Harry Kane sign a six-year contract? There is obviously huge benefit for Spurs in tying down their star player for six years in his prime,” he wrote. “But what’s in it for the player? He has no bargaining power or leverage in trying to engineer a move away.”I can’t give a definitive answer, sadly, but my reasonably educated guess would be that his reasoning was a blend of security — as a rule, players assume that longer contracts are safer and therefore better — and belief, three years ago, that he could fulfill his ambitions at Tottenham. The club, then, was coming off the back of two seasons of genuinely contending for the Premier League title, remember; a year later, it would make the Champions League final.As a rule, though, contracts of that length are likely to become less and less common, particularly for the game’s best and brightest: partly because the financial commitment for the clubs is too onerous, and partly because players (and their agents) know that the way to maximize earning potential is to keep transfer fees comparatively low. Players need leverage. Kane may yet come to stand as a warning of what happens when they do not have it.And, from Gavin MacPhee, an excellent theory on what it is that makes Lionel Messi so special. “Messi just about passes the test as coming from the Latin American street soccer development school. Yet he just happened to move [to Barcelona] at the point where the industrialization of player development by Western European countries was really starting to kick into gear. Messi is unique as a combination of the two great development environments.”That just about holds water to me, Gavin. So I suppose the question, now, is whether that blueprint can be repeated? Not to the same level as Messi, of course — his talent is what truly differentiates him — but can European teams use South America as a forge of very young talent, or (and better) can South American teams become as adept at polishing players as their counterparts across the Atlantic? More

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      Messi, After Signing With P.S.G., Is Greeted With Cheers in Paris

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      The soccer great Lionel Messi, speaking at a news conference, said leaving Barcelona had been a “very hard moment” but he was excited to join his new club.PARIS — When Lionel Messi said goodbye to Barcelona, his home since childhood and the place he grew to become one of soccer’s greatest ever players, he was in tears.Three days later, when he was formally introduced on Wednesday by his new club, Paris St.-Germain, any tears in the crowd were expressions of joy.“It’s wonderful,” said Alexandre Marienne, 32, carrying his 8-year-old son Kamil on his shoulders. “He’s going to help us build something incredible — Paris is definitely competing with the big names now.”When Messi addressed reporters, sitting next to the club’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, he said leaving Barcelona was “a very hard moment” but that he was “very happy” to be in Paris.“I still want to play and I still want to win,” he said. “I want to keep growing and keep winning titles.”Messi, right, speaking alongside Paris St.-Germain’s president, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, on Wednesday.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was the culmination of stunning few days, in which Barcelona’s fans and players bid farewell in shock to the club’s greatest player, while in the French capital, P.S.G.’s fans hold their breaths, many unable to fathom what was happening.Messi repeated that he didn’t want to leave the club that made him who he is, that he had done “everything to stay.” His devoted fans wanted him to stay in Barcelona. The club wanted him to stay in Barcelona.But the financial forces that drive the game were greater than either individual or collective desire. The club could not afford Messi, even after he offered to cut his salary in half.So here he was, in Paris, about to play in the French Ligue 1, where financial rules akin to those that tied Barcelona’s hands will not come into force for a few more years.“The moment I arrived here, I felt very happy,” he said.Rarely has an athlete in the modern era been so associated with a single team. Maybe Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is the closest comparison for American sports fans.But Messi’s connection to Barcelona ran deeper: He arrived at the club when he was only 13.Messi wept during a news conference in Barcelona on Sunday.Albert Gea/ReutersSo it was a strange sight to see him holding the jersey other than one sporting the familiar colors of Barcelona.But the legions of fans who greeted him in his new home city opened their arms in an embrace that, for the moment, overshadowed the darker message his transfer sent about the sport that Messi has so dominated.They did not come to discuss the danger posed by the immense advantage a small number of superrich clubs have in buying and keeping players.They came simply to see Messi.Men and women, many with their children by their side, came from all over Paris and other French cities far and near. Some were not from France at all. But they were all bonded by Messi.They gathered at the Parc des Princes, Paris St.-Germain’s stadium, to catch a glimpse of their talisman, who arrived in the French capital on Tuesday and signed a two-year deal with the French club.Mr. Messi called the ecstatic reception “crazy,” and said he was excited to get back to the business of playing soccer with some of the best players in the world.Messi in Paris on Tuesday, after arriving to sign a contract with his new club. Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersFor many, the signing was no surprise: P.S.G., bankrolled by the state of Qatar, was only one of handful of clubs that could afford the 34-year-old star from Argentina.Yet countless supporters could still not believe it.“It’s just crazy stuff — we were not even dreaming of it,” said Yohan Aymon, a 19-year-old P.S.G. fan and forward for F.C. Sion, a Swiss club, who drove from his native Switzerland overnight.Since Qatar became the main stakeholder of Paris St.-Germain in 2012, supporters have watched the coming of a steady stream of the world’s most expensive players.From Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Neymar, David Beckham to Kylian Mbappé, Gianluigi Buffon to Sergio Ramos, no club has signed as many stars in the past 10 years.That has drawn criticism from countless clubs, players and managers in France and abroad, who argue that the competition is now unfair and biased toward state-sponsored teams like P.S.G. or Manchester City.But none of them, it seems, compares to Messi’s arrival. Fans lined up around the stadium at dawn on Wednesday, chanting and shouting as a giant photo of the player adorned the Parc des Princes, less than a day after Messi’s face was removed from the Camp Nou in Barcelona.“He made football magic, beautiful, and he’s a winner,” P.S.G.’s president said about Messi, as he stood next to him at a news conference on Wednesday. “There’s no secret he’s the best player in the world.”Messi will earn 35 million euros a season, or about $41 million, and will wear the number 30, which he had at Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Neymar will keep his number 10.“We are entering a new dimension,” said Mr. Marienne, who said he had moved his vacation in southern France with his family to see Messi. “P.S.G.’s possibilities seem unlimited now.” More

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      Messi's Arrival in Paris Reflects a Troubling Time in Soccer

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      He could not stay where he wanted; few teams could afford him. Even one of the best players of all time was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.In those frantic, final hours in April, before a cabal of owners of Europe’s grandest clubs unveiled their plan for a breakaway superleague to an unsuspecting and unwelcoming world, a schism emerged in their ranks.One faction, driven by Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, and Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, wanted to go public as quickly as possible. Agnelli, in particular, was feeling the personal pressure of acting, in effect, as a double agent. Everything, they said, was ready; or at least as ready as it needed to be.Another group, centered on the American ownership groups that control England’s traditional giants, counseled caution. The plans still had to be finessed. There was still debate, for example, on how many spots might be handed over to teams that had qualified for the competition. They felt it better to wait until summer.If the first group had not won the day — if the whole project had not exploded into existence and collapsed in ignominy in 48 tumultuous hours — this would have been the week, after the Olympics but before the new season began, when they presented their self-serving, elitist vision of soccer’s future.That the Super League fell apart, of course, was a blessed relief. That this week has, instead, been given over to a dystopian illustration of where, exactly, soccer stands suggests that no great solace should be found in its failure.On Thursday, Manchester City broke the British transfer record — paying Aston Villa $138 million for Jack Grealish — for what may not be the last time this summer. The club remains hopeful of adding Harry Kane, talisman of Tottenham and captain of England, for a fee that could rise as high as $200 million.And then, of course, dwarfing everything else, it emerged that Lionel Messi would be leaving — would have to leave — F.C. Barcelona. Under La Liga’s rules, the club’s finances are such that it could not physically, fiscally, register the greatest player of all time for the coming season. It had no choice but to let him go. He had no choice but to leave.Everything that has played out since has felt so shocking as to be surreal, but so predictable as to be inevitable.There was the tear-stained news conference, in which Messi revealed he had volunteered to accept a 50 percent pay cut to stay at the club he has called home since he was 13, where he scored 672 goals in 778 games, where he broke every record there was to break, won everything there was to win and forged a legend that may never be matched.As soon as that was over, there came the first wisps of smoke from Paris, suggesting the identity of Messi’s new home. Paris St.-Germain was, apparently, crunching the numbers. Messi had been in touch with Neymar, his old compadre, to talk things through. He had called Mauricio Pochettino, the manager, to get an idea of how it might work. P.S.G. was in touch with Jorge, his agent and father.Then, on Tuesday, it happened. Everything was agreed upon: a salary worth $41 million a year, basic, over two years, with an option for a third. As his image was stripped from Camp Nou, a hole appearing between the vast posters of Gerard Piqué and Antoine Griezmann, Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, boarded a plane in Barcelona, all packed and ready to go.Messi and his wife, Antonela Roccuzzo, on their way to Paris on Tuesday.Instagram/Antonelaroccuzzo/Via ReutersJorge Messi assured reporters at the airport that the deal was done. P.S.G. teased it with a tweet. Messi landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, wearing that shy smile and a T-shirt reading: “Ici, C’est Paris.”This was not a journey many had ever envisaged him making. But he had no other choice; or, rather, the player for whom anything has always been possible, for once, had only a narrow suite of options.There is a portrait of modern soccer in that restricted choice, and it is a stark one. Lionel Messi, the best of all time, does not have true agency over where he plays his final few years. Even he was not able to resist the economic forces that carry the game along.He could not stay where he wanted to stay, at Barcelona, because the club has walked, headlong, into financial ruin. A mixture of the incompetence of its executives and the hubris of the institution is largely responsible for that, but not wholly.The club has spent vastly and poorly in recent years, of course. It has squandered the legacy that Messi had done so much to construct. But it has done so in a context in which it was asked and expected to compete with clubs backed not just by oligarchs and billionaires but by whole nation states, their ambitions unchecked and their spending unrestricted.The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the onset of calamity, and so Barcelona was no longer in a position where it could keep even a player who wanted to stay. When it came time for him to leave, he found a landscape in which only a handful of clubs — nine at most — could offer the prospect of allowing him to compete for another Champions League trophy. They had long since left everybody else behind, relegated them to second-class status.And of those, only three could even come close to taking on a salary as deservedly gargantuan as his. He should not be begrudged a desire to be paid his worth. He is the finest exponent of his art in history. It would be churlish to demand that he should do it on the cheap, as though it is his duty to entertain us. It could only have been Chelsea or Manchester City or Paris.To some — and not just those who hold P.S.G. close to their hearts — that will be an appetizing prospect: a chance to see Messi not just reunited with Neymar, but aligned for the first time with Kylian Mbappé, who many assume will eventually take his crown as the best, and with his old enemy Sergio Ramos, too.That it will be captivating is not in doubt. And doubtless profitable: The jerseys will fly off the shelves; the sponsorships will roll in; the TV ratings will rise, too, perhaps lifting all of French soccer with it. It may well be successful, on the field; it will doubtless be good to watch. But that is no measure. So, too, is the sinking of a ship.Paris Saint-Germain supporters waited for Messi to arrive at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris, on Tuesday. Francois Mori/Associated PressThat the architects of the Super League arrived, in April, at the wrong answer is not in doubt. The vision of soccer’s future that they put forward was one that benefited them and left everyone else, in effect, to burn.But the question that prompted it was the right one. The vast majority of those dozen teams knew that the game in its current form was not sustainable. The costs were too high, the risks too great. The arms race that they were locked into led only to destruction. They recognized the need for change, even if their desperation and self-interest meant they could not identify what form that change should take.They worried that they could not compete with the power and the wealth of the two or three clubs that are not subject to the same rules as everybody else. They felt that the playing field was no longer level. They believed that, sooner or later, first the players and then the trophies would coalesce around P.S.G., Chelsea and Manchester City.It was sooner, as it turns out. P.S.G. has signed Messi. City may commit more than $300 million on just two players in a matter of weeks, as the rest of the game comes to terms with the impact of the pandemic. Chelsea has spent $140 million on a striker, too. This is the week when all their fears, all their dire predictions, have come to pass.There should be no sympathy, of course. Those same clubs did not care at all about competitive balance while the imbalances suited them. Nothing has damaged the chances of meaningful change more than their abortive attempt to corral as much of the game’s wealth as possible to their own ends.But they are not the only ones to lose in this situation. In April, in those whirlwind 48 hours, it felt like soccer avoided a grim vision of its future. As Messi touched down on the ground near Paris on Tuesday, as the surreal and the inevitable collided, it was hard to ignore the feeling that it had merely traded it for another. More

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      Lionel Messi Leaves Barcelona for PSG

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      Leaving Barcelona, Messi is set to join P.S.G. on a two-year contract that highlights the growing gap between soccer’s rich and its superrich.Paris St.-Germain, the French soccer powerhouse bankrolled by the state of Qatar, has agreed to a two-year contract with Lionel Messi.The agreement, which comes days after Messi bid a tearful farewell to F.C. Barcelona, the club where he had spent his entire professional career, concluded a brief and exclusive bidding war for Messi and reunited him with his former Barcelona teammate Neymar on one of the most expensive and talented attacking teams in soccer history.The deal also highlighted how Gulf riches have so altered modern soccer’s economics that even some of the world’s biggest, richest and best-supported teams are now no match for state-sponsored teams in the arms race to acquire the most elite players.Messi’s signing was confirmed by a team official with knowledge of the agreement and in a video posted to the club’s social media account. Messi flew from Barcelona to Paris-Le Bourget airport on Tuesday afternoon, emerging to wave to the fans who had gathered there to welcome him while wearing a shirt with the P.S.G. slogan “Ici C’est Paris.”P.S.G. has called a news conference for Wednesday morning to introduce Messi.Messi’s new contract is for two years plus a third option year, according to the official. It will pay him about $35 million a season, an enormous amount but only a fraction of what he was earning at Barcelona.Almost from the moment F.C. Barcelona announced last week that financial obstacles meant the club and Messi would not be able to continue their trophy-laden, two-decade association, Messi’s destination was in many ways a question of which of two Gulf-royalty-backed teams he would choose.Would it be Manchester City, owned by a brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, one of the few clubs willing and able to spend freely in the era of the coronavirus pandemic? Or would it be P.S.G., the star-laden French champion financed by Qatar, a club that, like City, appears immune from a financial crisis that has shaken the global soccer economy?City tried to sign Messi a year ago, when he first suggested he might leave Barcelona, the only professional team he has played for, but he later recommitted to the Spanish club even as he criticized the way it was being run.A free agent after his contract expired in June, Messi had been unable to close a new deal with Barcelona because of a financial crisis that meant the numbers simply could not add up.To re-sign Messi, the greatest player in club history, Barcelona would have had to shed more than $200 million from its payroll to meet stringent requirements set by the Spanish league. It could not. Certainly not in a way that, according to Barcelona’s new president, Joan Laporta, would not imperil the future of a club mired in debt and expecting losses of almost 500 million euros in the next year.In a news conference on Sunday, Messi broke down in tears as he confirmed what the club had announced last week: that Barcelona’s current financial crisis and the Spanish league’s cost-control rules made it impossible for him to sign a new contract. Yet even as he said goodbye, Messi seemed to be trying to soften the blow of his departure, for fans, for the club and also, it appeared, for himself.“I did everything I could,” Messi said. “From my side, I did everything to stay. That is what I wanted.”Lionel Messi, 34, had been a Barcelona player since joining its academy as a 13-year-old.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut a player reportedly earning about $132 million a year in salary and bonuses cannot move just anywhere.He may be 34, but Messi’s performance levels appear to be undimmed by age. Just this summer, he was the player of the tournament, the top scorer and the assists leader as he led Argentina to the Copa América, its first national team title in almost three decades.P.S.G. will add him to an attack that includes two of the best forwards in the game — Kylian Mbappé, the jet-heeled French star, and Neymar, the Brazilian who was once Messi’s teammate at Barcelona.With Messi in its star-studded ranks — and even if Mbappé is sold, possibly to Real Madrid, to recoup some of the cost — P.S.G. will once again take aim at the Champions League, the biggest prize in club soccer but a tournament that, despite P.S.G.’s billions of dollars in spending, it has failed to win. Messi has won the competition four times with Barcelona.Unlike Barcelona, though, P.S.G. is still trying to write its history. And it is doing that by spending money. A lot of money.It signed Mbappé and Neymar for the highest fees in soccer history and then surrounded them with even more high-priced and high-earning talent lured from rivals around Europe. Messi, for example, is joining a team that this summer added the Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, the Netherlands midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum and the Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos. All three, like Messi, were out of contract.It is unclear just how P.S.G. will justify the addition of those salaries, and Messi’s, under European soccer’s cost-control rules. But like Manchester City, which broke the British transfer record this summer by signing Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish for 100 million pounds ($139 million), the club appears to be free of domestic or regional rules on spending.Both P.S.G. and City have been investigated by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, for breaching financial regulations, but each has managed to avoid significant penalties by successfully appealing cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Its hand strengthened by those successes, P.S.G.’s influence in the corridors of power has only grown.Its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, now sits on UEFA’s board and serves as president of the influential European Club Association, the umbrella body for more than 200 top-division teams across Europe. He is also the most senior official at BeIN Media Group, the Qatar-based broadcast network that is the largest buyer of UEFA broadcast rights.For Barcelona, on the other hand, the sight of Messi’s wearing a different team’s colors — something unthinkable as recently as six weeks ago — will be the bitterest sign of how powerless even Europe’s biggest clubs can be in a marketplace dominated by nation states with deep pockets and big dreams.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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      Georginio Wijnaldum and the Collective Toxic

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      No one can compare themselves to Simone Biles, but Wijnaldum’s exit from Liverpool carried many of the same themes.This is not a comparison, because there is no comparison. Nobody, really, can understand what it is like to be Simone Biles. There have, of course, been athletes burdened with the same sort of level of superhuman expectation, their personhood erased in the transcendence to icon, turned into the face of a sport or an avatar for a generation or a standard-bearer for a nation, but they number barely a handful.And none of them have been in Biles’s precise circumstances. None of them — not Michael Phelps or Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi or whoever — know what it is like to be Simone Biles, at her age, in her mind, with her talent, at her level, in her sport, with her background, in this moment and this culture, with all of those things combined.Nobody else has been through what she has been through. Nobody else is qualified to tell her what path to take, because nobody has ever taken that path. Her experience has been unique; it is hers and hers alone. There is a glory in that, but there is also, perhaps, a shadow of bleakness.Georginio Wijnaldum cannot be (and, remember, is not being) compared to Biles. He is an elite athlete, too, of course. He will know — certainly more than most of us — a little of the sacrifices she has had to make and the demands she has had to meet and the devotion she has had to show to reach the pinnacle of her sport.But there is, of course, no comparison at all. Wijnaldum is a fine midfielder, a Premier League and Champions League winner and a sometime captain of his country, but it would be a bit of a stretch to suggest he has redefined soccer itself, or conjured a whole new vision of the sport from his own imagination, or redrawn the boundaries of what we think is possible.He has never had to endure the pressure of competing in an individual sport, or one that is entirely reliant on his own individual performance. If Wijnaldum made a mistake, a teammate might be there to bail him out, or he might get a chance to rectify it a few minutes later, or make up for it the following week.Biles has none of those safety nets. Even the slightest misstep might mean the difference between gold and silver, gold and nowhere, for her and her teammates. There is no second half, no return fixture, no long slog of a league season. There is only, every four years, perfection or failure, here and now.Biles and Wijnaldum are not alike. There is no comparison. But, for one fleeting moment, it may be worth considering their stories in conjunction.This week, as you will have noticed, Biles withdrew (as of this writing) from two of her Olympic finals. She did so, she said, to prioritize her mental health. She had been feeling, as she had alluded to on Instagram, as though she had “the weight of the world on her shoulders” at times.“This Olympic Games I wanted it to be for myself but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people,” she said. “It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people.”“This Olympic Games I wanted it to be for myself but I came in and I felt like I was still doing it for other people,” Simone Biles said after she pulled out of the competition. Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn the general tumult of the Olympics, it would have been easy to miss Wijnaldum’s intervention. This summer, he left Liverpool for Paris St.-Germain. His contract had expired; conversations with the club’s ownership had foundered for several months, the two parties unable to find common ground over how much, and for how long, a player of his age should be paid. His last appearance for his former team, at Anfield in May, was very clearly a goodbye: there was a guard of honor, and a special presentation.This week, Wijnaldum attempted to provide a little bit of context as to why he had left a team he had said publicly he would have been happy to remain at for years to come. He seemed to suggest that ownership did not “love” or “appreciate” him as much as it might have done. But he also mentioned the role played by social media.“On social media, if we lost, I was the one who got the blame,” he said. He felt it was heightened during his contract standoff — “when it went bad, I was the player they blamed, that I wanted to leave” — and never spread to fans in the stadium, but he acknowledged that its roots were deeper. “Basically in the last two seasons I had it a few times,” he said.The reaction was, broadly, dismissive: it was assumed that Wijnaldum was either making excuses, or engaging in a little light, perfectly healthy whataboutery to make a decision that was, likely, far more practical (he wanted a longer contract than Liverpool was prepared to offer, and therefore he left) seem more palatable.And yet, in the context of Biles, it is worth taking Wijnaldum at his word. For all the differences between their situations, their worlds, though, their stories echo — however dimly — each other.Athletes of all stripes exist and perform under pressure: from themselves, from their coaches, from their teams and their teammates, from their fans, from their sponsors. That has always been the case; they become adept, far more so than most of us could countenance, at both functioning and thriving in that environment.What has changed, now, is the scale of that pressure: not just its height, but its breadth. Biles came into Tokyo as the designated “face of the Games,” the star of the United States team, the greatest gymnast in history. NBC’s promotional material for the Olympics ran that, to her, “certain laws do not apply, like gravity.”It would be easy — and not inaccurate — to point the finger of blame at the news media for indulging in that sort of hype, for placing that much expectation on a 24-year-old woman, for exposing her to an intolerable level of pressure. It would be no less valid to suggest that the news media had a role to play in turning Wijnaldum’s contract dispute into a source of consternation among some sections of Liverpool’s support.Wijnaldum, who played his final game for Liverpool in May, noted a stark contrast between how he was treated online versus how he was treated in person. Phil Noble/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesBut to do so would be to ignore a change in the media landscape that, in almost every other context, has been determined to be wholesale and revolutionary. Wijnaldum was keen to stress that there was a difference between how he was treated online and in person; the former turned on him far more quickly, far more vociferously, than the latter ever did.Wijnaldum is not an athlete on the same level as Biles. His journey is not parallel to hers, in a million different ways. Their experiences are wildly different. But like her, his career is played out on social media: his every performance scrutinized and dissected, his every shortcoming highlighted, his every failure pounced upon. He is told what is expected, and he is told, rightly or wrongly, when he does not live up to it.It is easy, when discussing an athlete on social media, to assume that they do not hear: that their feeds are managed by agencies — “post something like” — or to believe, in some way, that the spoils of their success, either the money or the fame, inure them to basic human emotion.But they do hear, and they do see, and they do feel. Those insults cut through. Those demands are noticed. Those expectations — not of the sponsors or the coaches or the journalists alone, but of all of us — have a weight. How much that played a role in Biles’ need to take some time and space only she will know, and she is under no compunction to share, but the swirling maelstrom in which she is expected to live her life does not exert some influence. If Wijnaldum is aware of it, it is hard to believe Biles is not.There has, in the days that followed Biles’ initial decision to withdraw, been what she has described as an “outpouring” of support. Her example will, hopefully, make it easier not only for athletes to discuss their mental well-being, but to know where to draw their own lines.But they are not the only ones who need to heed her lesson. They are not the only ones who need to think about the mental health of the stars we have made, the icons we have cast. It is for all of us, too, to remember that pressure does not just come from within. It is exerted, too, all those thousands of comments building their own gravity, their own force, one that is felt by the good and the great alike.Trading UpDavid Alaba showed he can do it all for Austria’s national team and for Bayern Munich. With Real Madrid, he may be asked to do it all, all by himself. Pool photo by Justin Setterfield/EPA, via ShutterstockDavid Alaba can do pretty much everything. He has, for some time, been one of the world’s finest left backs. In his last couple of seasons at Bayern Munich, he has emerged as one of the best central defenders on the planet, too. That’s some going, given that he would also get a game in midfield for pretty much every team in Europe.All of which will come in useful at Real Madrid, where the current plan appears to be to ask the 29-year-old to play in all three positions simultaneously.That is not quite fair. Real has two left backs, in Ferland Mendy and Marcelo, though the latter is in the (late) autumn of his (illustrious) career. It has a midfield — Casemiro, Luka Modric, Toni Kroos — that is not so much settled as petrified. Alaba would be helpful in both roles, but it is in central defense that the need is greatest, so it is in central defense that he must play.It is a crisis of Real’s own making. First, it forgot to tell Sergio Ramos its contract offer had a best-before date, resulting in him joining Paris St.-Germain on a free transfer. And then this week, it agreed to sell Raphael Varane to Manchester United for $60 million. That pair has been Madrid’s bedrock for a decade. In their absence, Alaba is going to have his work cut out.Quite what lies behind Real’s thinking is difficult to parse — though the only cogent logic is that it is financial — but, either way, it is hard to make the case that the team will be stronger this season than it was last. Barcelona is only in slightly better shape, and that is presuming that Lionel Messi does, in fact, sign a new contract, and the club finds some way to register its four new signings without contravening La Liga’s rules.All of which suggests that, for the first time since the turn of the century, there is a genuine power vacuum at the top of La Liga. Atlético Madrid, the reigning champion, should have a chance to retain its title. And Sevilla, for so long the best of Spain’s rest, may finally scent a once-in-a-generation opportunity.It has had to trade this summer, too, as it does every year: selling the winger Bryan Gil to Tottenham and — though the deal is not yet complete — the defender Jules Koundé to Chelsea. Koundé, in particular, would be a loss: a player of prodigious talent and stratospheric ceiling.But that is more than offset by what Sevilla has been able to wrangle in return. From Spurs, the club elicited not only $24 million, but the playmaker Erik Lamela. Chelsea is, reportedly, prepared to offer cash and the France defender Kurt Zouma to get its hands on Koundé.Neither will be mourned, particularly, by fans of their previous teams. Both have long since faded in English eyes. But to Sevilla, they represent a class of player the club cannot usually attract. Lamela, plagued by injury, managed 35 games for Spurs last season; Zouma featured 36 times for Chelsea.These are not high-risk, high-reward gambles. They are not hidden gems being asked to step up a level. They are seasoned professionals, able to command regular game-time at one of Europe’s biggest teams — and Spurs — and who can be expected to slot straight in to Julen Lopetegui’s side.They will join a squad that already contains Diego Carlos, Papu Gómez, Lucas Ocampos and Ivan Rakitic. For years, victory for Sevilla has been reinventing itself every summer, searching for the next big thing to sell. Now, for the first time in a long time, its team has a very different profile: one built, it would seem, not with an eye on tomorrow but with all of its focus on today.CorrespondenceGood news for those readers who feel this newsletter does not scratch their Major League Soccer itch: you are not alone. Far from it, in fact.William Ireland goes out to bat for Liga MX — “the best North American League, and one of the ten or twelve best leagues in the world” — while Steve Iskra nominates Australia’s A-League. “This is the league that produced the young players that beat Argentina in Tokyo,” he wrote.Joe Klonowski would like to see more on the N.W.S.L., while Ian Roberts completes the acronym soup by throwing the U.S.L. into the mix. “A league of passion among the players and fans, instead of a league bringing in players who are well past their sell by date,” he wrote. And Fernando Gama brings up the Copa Libertadores, now bubbling up nicely as it reaches the quarterfinal stage.I would like to thank all of you for your suggestions, and assure you that they have been taken on board. Bear with me, though. I don’t think The Times will allow me to hire staff to help spread the burden.Fernando’s email provided especially good value this week, because he touched on the issue of (men’s) soccer at the Olympics, too. “The games are typically played in August, when the season is starting, so nobody wants to release their players,” he wrote. “And FIFA does not control the Olympics, and cannot profit from it, so doesn’t feel compelled to enter into a rift with clubs over it.”These are both salient points, highlighted by the reminder from Peter Zwickl that Germany only sent 18 players to Tokyo. “Several players or clubs, of a list of 100 candidates, rejected the invitation by the German coach,” he wrote, which just about encapsulates Olympic soccer’s problem.But let’s leave on a more upbeat note from Rey Mashayekhi. “Five years ago, at the Rio Games, Brazil’s defeat of Germany in the Gold Medal match was a hugely significant, cathartic experience for all invested in the Seleçao, coming as it did two years after the horrors of Belo Horizonte in the 2014 World Cup semifinal.“When Neymar converted Brazil’s fifth and decisive penalty, sunk to his knees and looked to the heavens as the stadium exploded in pandemonium around him, it struck me as a truly great moment with all the emotional release of any triumph in the sport.” There’s a reminder here about one of those easily-forgotten truths in soccer, and in any sport: all of it matters as much as we decide that it matters.That’s all for this week. If you would like to vouch for why I should cover Lithuanian soccer or games in Kyrgyzstan (or anything else, for that matter): askrory@nytimes.com. Twitter might work, too. And if it doesn’t become a newsletter, there’s half a chance it will end up as a Set Piece Menu episode. There is, after all, only so much content.Have a great weekend,Rory More