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    The Stolen Glory of Spain’s World Cup Champions

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    Players extracted important changes in a bitter battle with their country’s soccer federation. But doing so robbed them of a moment they can’t get back.Wordlessly, their eyes fixed straight ahead, Spain’s players filed in to the Alameda Hotel not far from Madrid’s airport. It had been a month, almost to the day, since they won the World Cup. It should have been a joyful reunion, a welcome and gleeful chance for the women to revel in the greatest glory of their careers. Instead, they looked as if they were heading into battle.In a way, of course, they were. Many of Spain’s players have been locked in open conflict with the country’s soccer federation — its employer, in effect — for more than a year. The disagreement expanded to envelop almost all of them pretty much from the moment the whistle blew to end the World Cup final.Over the last week or so, all of their efforts have — finally — borne fruit. The players have secured something that looks a lot like victory; in the war, at least, even if the peace still has to be won. Concessions have been made, commitments assured, and heads are starting to roll. Three major figures have fallen. More will follow in time.This is what the players have wanted all along. The original protest, the one last year that led 15 members of the squad to temporarily refuse to play for the national team, was rooted in a desire to force the federation to change. The team wanted better facilities, a proper support staff, a professionalized environment, a coach who did not track their every move.Alexia Putellas, center, and her teammates face Sweden on Friday in their first game since the World Cup final.Biel Alino/EPA, via ShutterstockTo persuade some of the rebels to return for the World Cup, the federation had made some accommodations. The team traveled to Australia and New Zealand with a nutritionist and a psychologist. The players were consulted on where they would stay and where they would train. Each squad member was given an allowance that permitted family and friends to join them. An uneasy truce held long enough for Spain to conquer the world.Quite how little had changed, though, became clear even before the players had lifted the trophy. Luis Rubiales, the federation’s president, kissed the forward Jenni Hermoso forcefully on the lips as they celebrated on the podium. It had been consensual, he insisted afterward. When Hermoso made perfectly clear that had not been the case, Rubiales doubled down rather than apologize.The federation did not so much as back him as follow him down the rabbit hole. At one point it adopted the posture that it was prepared to pull out of European competition — its women’s teams, its men’s teams, its club sides — entirely if anyone dared to try to remove Rubiales from his post. His mother locked herself in a church. Hermoso’s reputation was impugned; she was accused of lying. This was not a federation that appeared dedicated to change.It was more than the players could tolerate. Dozens of them released a statement declaring that they would not represent their country while Rubiales remained in place. It became increasingly clear that the coach, Jorge Vilda, was in an untenable position, too. This time, there would be no half-measures, no awkward cease-fire.Eventually, both did go — Rubiales, in particular, through gritted teeth — but still the federation found a way to undermine the prospect of any good will.Spain’s new coach, Montse Tomé, was an assistant to her fired predecessor, Jorge Vilda.Alberto Saiz/Associated PressVilda was replaced by one of his assistants, Montse Tomé, hardly a break with the old regime. When 39 players announced that there had still not been enough meaningful, structural change to persuade them to return to the fold, she called them to camp anyway. If they ignored the summons, they players were threatened, they could be fined and banned even from club competition. That was how they arrived, jaws clenched and against their wishes, at the Alameda Hotel.What happened next is testament not only to their perseverance but to the validity of their cause. In a meeting brokered by the Spanish government, the players finally forced the federation to bend to their will. They requested the departure of three more senior staff members, petitioned for stronger safeguarding measures, demanded changes that should prevent a repeat of all they have been through.They won. It was not an easy victory — the meeting, at a hotel a little south of Valencia, reportedly lasted seven hours, and drew to a close only at 5 a.m. — but it was a victory nonetheless.And yet this is not a triumph for the underdog forces of all that is right and virtuous over their uncaring oppressors. Or, more accurately, that is not how it feels. What Spain’s players have been through over the last year, and particularly in the last month, is too outrageous to be erased by the silhouette of an uplifting outcome. The aftertaste is too strong, and too bitter.Perhaps, in time, they will come to regard the past few weeks as a sacrifice worth making. If the federation follows through on the promises it has made to ensure subsequent generations do not have to fight the same battles, to endure the same indignities, then perhaps the Spanish women who stood for what they believed in will have a legacy cast in both concrete and gold.“We hope that this can be a turning point,” defender Irene Paredes said this week, “where women can raise their voice and say if something has happened.”Björn Larsson Rosvall/TT News Agency, via Associated PressMore potent even than outrage, though, is sadness. Spain’s players had worked for years to win the World Cup. That is true of all athletes, of course, but it is particularly true of women’s soccer players, so consistently overlooked, so reliably underfunded, so frequently deprived of things their men’s counterparts would regard as basic necessities.That Spain’s players achieved their goal — that they reached the apex of any player’s career, delivering to their country the greatest prize imaginable with such verve and panache and dazzling talent — should have been an unyielding source of pride and contentment and joy. The afterglow should have shimmered for years.Thanks to Rubiales and to Vilda and to the rest of the federation power brokers, the ones who refused to listen until the very last moment, the players have been denied all of that. Their World Cup victory is not tarnished — that would be the wrong word — but their memories of it will be, their glory always carrying with it an undercurrent of anguish.That was clear as they trooped into the Hotel Alameda, their faces stern and their shoulders slumped, forced into battle once more. This should have been a moment to relish, the world champions together again. It seemed, instead, one of pure dread. And no matter what happens now, they will never have it back.What’s Entertainment?There is, as there always has been, an existential tension within soccer — in all sports — that it does not especially want to confront. It relates to the purpose of the endeavor. Is it, primarily, a form of entertainment? Or is that more accurately depicted as a byproduct of the activity? Is its actual aim to establish which team is better and which worse, and the fact that people seem to find it compelling just a happy accident?Perhaps it is best framed in less theoretical terms. This season, the all-knowing, all-seeing referees of the Premier League have decided that there is no greater threat to the well-being of the most popular leisure pastime the world has ever known than time-wasting.This is, in part, because they have been instructed to eradicate it: The game’s rule-making body has passed down an edict that time-wasting — dawdling over set pieces, pretending to be injured, strolling off the field after being substituted as if you don’t have a care in the world — is no longer to be tolerated.Are you not entertained?Scott Heppell/ReutersBut it is also the product of the Premier League’s own consultation with “fan groups,” which the league said had revealed the diminishing amount of time taken up with the actual playing of soccer has become something of an issue. “We are seeing a lowering number of effective playing time minutes to a point where people are concerned about that,” Howard Webb, the man in charge of the referees, said earlier this season.And so, this season, referees have shown a blizzard of yellow cards to players deemed guilty of time-wasting. They have even, according to Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, taken to hurrying along goalkeepers they determine to be contemplating the nature of their goal kicks just a little too deeply.This is not a neutral act. The referees have in effect decided that players are entertainers, and therefore have a duty to provide as much entertainment as possible, as if a ticket or a television subscription is a form of covenant with the teams themselves. Not being sufficiently entertaining has now been turned into an offense.The first problem, of course, is that “entertainment” is a subjective judgment. Who gets to decide what is good to watch? Is there not pleasure in the slow burn, in the grind to victory? Is breathlessly, relentlessly fast soccer the only good soccer? Isn’t the whole point that the sport is entertaining because it can take so many forms?And the second problem is where this ends. Are certain styles of play to be outlawed because they are deemed insufficiently aesthetically pleasing? Should we ban players from running the ball into the corner in the dying minutes of a game their team is winning? Such a measure would seem ludicrous, excessive. But the logic, the strict excision of anything that might compromise the show, is exactly the same.CorrespondenceSoccer’s true colors.Maik Dobiey for The New York TimesSeeing as this newsletter, more than anything, is a public service, it seems only right to help out Ilan Kolkowitz. “My partner and I are considering a wide variety of places to go on an upcoming vacation in Europe, and I’d be really interested in catching a soccer match somewhere,” he wrote.“I was wondering if you had recommendations for your favorite places to go? In your recent ‘European Nights’ podcast, you referenced your running ice cream list, and I am certainly open to any factors that may contribute to the overall experience.”If we’re going on the Ice Cream List — capitalization deliberate; it has taken many years of research to construct — then the top choices should be Florence or Lisbon: La Carraia (No. 2) for the former, and Nannarelli (No. 6) for the latter. Both have excellent soccer options, too, whether you see Fiorentina, Benfica or Sporting.Purely on game experience, I would probably have to plump for Napoli, Marseille (try to go when they’re winning) or Rotterdam. If food is the priority, then it’s hard to see past San Sebastián, home to Real Sociedad and as many pintxos as you can eat. Go just up the coast to St. Jean de Luz, in France, and you can get a No. 9-ranked salted caramel, too. More

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      For Sweden, the Right Way to Play Is the One That Wins

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      The World Cup semifinal between Spain and Sweden will be a battle of styles, of passing versus pragmatism. Opponents discount the latter at their peril.Peter Gerhardsson’s plans for Monday evening sounded blissful. He had set some time aside for a swim. He would have a bite to eat, and then retire to his room at Auckland’s palatial Cordis Hotel to listen to some music.He also wanted to make further inroads into “Resonance,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s examination of how we interact with the world. Gerhardsson is enjoying it enormously; his readiness to discuss it makes that abundantly clear. He figured he could fit all of that in and still be in bed by 9 p.m. He does have a World Cup semifinal to coach on Tuesday, after all.Should that last prospect have been causing Gerhardsson, the manager of Sweden’s women’s soccer team, any sort of stress or strain as he addressed the news media a day before his team plays Spain at Eden Park, he hid it extremely well.He has, after all, been here before: This is his fourth major tournament in charge of his homeland, and it is the fourth time he has made the semifinals. Sweden finished third in the 2019 World Cup, won the silver medal in the 2020 Olympics, and then reached the last four at last summer’s European Championship. By this stage, it is familiar ground.He was relaxed enough, then, not only to discuss his reading material but the philosophical imprint of Johan Cruyff; the art of scrapbooking; and his longstanding — if, being completely honest, slightly dwindling — tradition of calling his mother before games to solicit her advice. (He does not do it quite so often now, he said, because he is “old enough to make my own decisions.” Gerhardsson is 63.)Sweden Coach Peter Gerhardsson bristles at criticism that his team’s mix of set pieces and defense isn’t aesthetically pleasing. “It is good football for me.”Hannah Mckay/ReutersOnly once did he betray even the merest hint of irritation: at the lingering perception that Sweden’s progress to the semifinals past both the United States, the reigning champion, and a widely admired Japan side has come in a fashion that might not be described as aesthetically pleasing.Sweden’s leading goal scorer, for example, is Amanda Ilestedt, a central defender who would not have been regarded before the tournament as an obvious contender to win the World Cup’s Golden Ball. “Nobody was expecting her to do that,” her teammate Fridolina Rolfo said.Ilestedt, though, has now plundered four goals — a tally bettered in the tournament only by Japan’s Hinata Miyazawa — all from set pieces, either at the first or second remove. She has proved particularly adept at emerging victorious when the ball is ricocheting around the penalty area in the aftermath of a corner or free kick. Or, in Gerhardsson’s rather more poetic rendering, “picking up the fruit when it has fallen from the tree.”That, in part, illustrates why Sweden has proved such a magnet for euphemism. Gerhardsson’s team has variously but consistently been described throughout this tournament as “direct,” or “effective,” or “physical.” Jorge Vilda, the Spanish coach, added “strong” to that list.All of these words mean the same thing: Sweden is a set-piece team, a long-ball team, a percentages team. The allegation is unspoken, but it is loud, and it is clear: Sweden might be winning, but it is doing it in a manner that is — on some moral or spiritual or philosophical level — wrong.Somewhere beneath his placid surface, that suggestion clearly irks Gerhardsson. “One of our strengths is set pieces,” he said Monday. “Both in the offense and in the defense.” He became just a little more animated. “It is not just a strength: We have players who are very technically skilled at it. We practice a lot.”It is not all they are, he said, noting, “It is just one way for us to win games.” But even if it was, would that really be such a problem? Gerhardsson wanted to make this point very clearly: Set pieces, he said, “are part of the game.”They are, of course. His logic is impeccable. His job, and that of his players, is to win soccer matches. It is not to win in any particular style. No one type of play that achieves that goal is more virtuous than any other. Besides, aesthetics are subjective: Gerhardsson, for what it is worth, likes Sweden’s mixture of high pressure and dogged, intense marking. “It is good football for me,” he said.Sweden has eliminated two former champions, the United States and Japan, and stands two wins from its first Women’s World Cup title.Scott Barbour/Associated PressThe faint disregard for Sweden, instead, says more about soccer’s fashions than it does about the inherent worth of the team. Unlike its opponent on Tuesday, Spain, Sweden does not claim to espouse or symbolize any particular philosophy. It is concerned less with how the game as a whole should be played and more with how any individual match might be won.If it has an identity, indeed, it is a reactive one. “We are very good at adapting,” the midfielder and captain Kosovare Asllani said. “We have a very good team around the team. They do a lot of work for us to prepare the tactics to face any team in the tournament. We have different ways to face different games. They allow us to be fully prepared for anyone.”That flexibility meant the Swedes could not be physically intimidated by the United States and could not be undone by Japan’s slick, inventive counterpunches. They might have required a penalty shootout, settled only by the narrowest margin imaginable, to overcome the U.S., but against Japan they were in a position to grind their opponent down. Ilestedt opened the scoring from a corner. Filippa Angeldal settled the game with a penalty.It was put to Gerhardsson that Spain might best be thought of as a combination of those two opponents: just as strong, just as imposing as the U.S., but no less technically gifted than Japan. He agreed. Spain is a wonderful team, he said. He has always been a Cruyffian at heart, an admirer of the intricate, technical soccer that Spain has come to represent.He did not sound intimidated. He did not sound troubled at all, in fact. The thrust of the book by Rosa on his night table, as Gerhardsson explains it, is that we — as humans — are not good at accepting that we do not know what is going to happen. To him, that has always been the beauty of soccer: It is unpredictable.An unheralded Sweden team might get past the United States and Japan. It might run into Spain, long hailed as women’s soccer’s coming force, and be expected to be swept aside by its sheer philosophical purity. Or it might turn out differently. “Maybe they are the perfect opponents for us,” Gerhardsson said of Spain. He does not know. He is OK with that. He is, in fact, entirely relaxed about it. More

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      Spain’s Team Went to War. At the World Cup, It Has to Win the Peace.

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      A failed rebellion against Coach Jorge Vilda ended with a dozen players dropped for the Women’s World Cup. Those who remain might be good enough to win it.A couple of days before Spain’s first genuine test of this World Cup — an encounter with Japan in Wellington, New Zealand — team officials became aware of an issue. The players, it turned out, were bored. Their families and friends, who had traveled halfway around the globe to watch their games, were bored. Some of the squad had young children in tow. They were bored, too.Spain had chosen the town of Palmerston North as its base for the tournament. It made perfect sense. The team was guaranteed to play all of its games until the semifinal on New Zealand’s North Island. Palmerston, a university town a couple of hours north of Wellington, and a short flight from Auckland, fit the bill.But three weeks into their stay — Spain arrived in New Zealand well in advance of its first game, hoping to draw the sting from the jet lag — the place had started to pall. New Zealand’s second-largest noncoastal city boasted precious little to do, particularly in the evenings. The players, and their families, wanted to move.Even with the game with Japan looming, the Spanish federation acceded to the players’ request. Officials began the laborious task of moving an entire elite sports team — 23 players, 31 coaches and support staff, piles of equipment and mounds of accouterments — to the James Cook Hotel in Wellington in the middle of a tournament.And as if that was not enough, the federation did what it could to help the dozens of family members who formed the team’s traveling caravan with their arrangements, too. Logistically, it was a considerable heave. The kind that is hardly ideal from a sporting perspective. In Spain’s case, though, it was worth it, just to keep the peace.Alexia Putellas, the two-time Ballon d’Or winner, racing upfield against Japan.Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFew teams arrived in Australia and New Zealand with more pedigree than Spain. Jorge Vilda’s team, after all, boasts not only Alexia Putellas, the two-time Ballon d’Or winner, but also Aitana Bonmati, the midfielder regarded as her heir apparent. They are two of nine members of the squad drawn from Barcelona, European club soccer’s unquestioned powerhouse.No team, though, landed in quite such a fragile state. Last September, in the aftermath of Spain’s elimination from the European Championship a month or so earlier, 15 players sent the country’s federation a boilerplate email withdrawing themselves from consideration for the national team.The signatories included not just Bonmati, but Patri Guijarro, Mariona Caldentey and Mapi León, central figures in the great Barcelona side, as well as Ona Batlle, Laia Aleixandri and Leila Ouahabi, some of the country’s most high-profile exports. Three players — Putellas, the forward Jenni Hermoso and Irene Paredes, then the national team’s captain — did not send the email but were seen as giving it their tacit support.Spain had, in an instant, lost the core of its golden generation.The precise nature of the grievances that had forced the players’ hand remained oblique in public — the email referred only to “the latest events that have occurred in the national team, and the situation they have created” — but, privately, the list of complaints was both long and, in the context of women’s soccer, distinctly familiar.The players, now ensconced in professional environments at their clubs, felt the national team program was outmoded, not up to the standard they had come to expect. The facilities the federation provided for them were subpar, the players believed. They traveled to some games by bus, rather than plane, as many of their rivals did, or as they would at club level.Vilda with Luis Rubiales, center, the federation president, in Wellington on Monday.Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesVilda, the coach, was said to have fostered an oppressive workplace environment, one in which the players’ every move was monitored by his staff. Nobody ever confirmed as much, but it was widely assumed that his removal would be required if the players were to contemplate returning.The federation, though, decided on a less conciliatory approach. Vilda was, in the words of Luis Rubiales, the federation president, “untouchable.” If the group of “15 plus three,” as it had come to be seen, did not want to play for Spain, that was fine: Spain would go and find some people who did. Vilda called up a scratch squad, and immediately embarked on a run of 16 games in which his team drew once, lost once, and won the rest. Among the teams it defeated was the mighty United States, but also Japan, Jamaica and Norway.As the World Cup drew closer, though, the hard-line stance started to soften. Hermoso and Paredes, only informally associated with the strike, were called back into the team, forging a path for the others. The Spanish players’ union volunteered to mediate a meeting between the holdouts and Ana Álvarez, the federation’s director of women’s soccer.Ana Álvarez, the federation’s director of women’s soccer.Luis Millan/EPA, via ShutterstockThe federation refused, but made an alternative suggestion: Álvarez would meet with every player individually, giving them an opportunity to lodge their complaints. Through May and June, she held more than a dozen meetings with the disaffected players, inviting some to Madrid and traveling to Barcelona to see others.Each meeting lasted two or three hours, according to people in soccer with direct knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private, and personal, discussions. Álvarez sought to understand the roots of their discontent, to gather feedback, to ask how each player would like things to change in the future. Most of the meetings were cordial, and constructive.At the end, though, there was an awkward coda. The players had removed themselves from international contention by email. They had to make themselves available again in the same way. The federation would not risk calling up anyone who might reject the olive branch.Conscious of not only their own professional ambitions but various commercial agreements, the majority of the players acquiesced. Guijarro and León were among the handful who refused. “Some things have to change, and if they don’t, then it won’t go away,” León told the Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo earlier this year. “Missing the World Cup will bother me a lot, but I have values and beliefs.” Her Barcelona teammate, Guijarro, cited “consistency” as her explanation.Patri Guijarro, left, and Mapi León, second left, during a Barcelona match in March. They are missing the World Cup.Albert Gea/ReutersWhen Vilda named his World Cup squad, though, only three of the players to have signed the original email — Bonmati, Batlle and Caldentey — were included. The others had all been omitted. The coach had decided, instead, to prioritize those players who had helped Spain prepare for the tournament.Still, the situation was febrile. The 23 players under Vilda’s aegis might all have “wanted to be here,” as Paredes put it, but that unity of purpose veiled deep schisms. His squad now contained both mutineers and their replacements.He had done what he could to ease the tensions, not only visiting a Barcelona training session in the spring but, according to those players who had remained in the national team squad throughout, relaxing his approach. “It has been a tough, special season,” Vilda said on the eve of the World Cup. “But it has given us chance to learn. The federation has always been open to dialogue, and to solve things.”The decision to listen to the players’ requests to move their base midway through the tournament, then, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of that détente, but it is not the only one. Spain now boasts a vastly expanded coaching staff, including for the first time both a nutritionist and a podiatrist in the traveling party. The standard of accommodation and transport has improved, too.The players were encouraged to expand that further, too, by inviting family and friends along at the federation’s expense: Each member of the World Cup squad was granted an allowance of $16,000 to pay for the travel and lodging.A training session in Wellington. Spain moved its team to a new training base after players complained of being bored. Amanda Perobelli/ReutersThe newspaper El País has reported that dozens of parents, siblings and children are in New Zealand, sitting behind the dugouts at Spain’s games, arranging their activities on a WhatsApp group titled “Free Tours.”The players have been allowed to spend considerable amounts of down time with them. Even after the game with Japan ended in a deflating 4-0 loss, they were given a morning off to see their loved ones. The atmosphere, according to those on the squad, is much more relaxed and “flexible” than it has been at previous tournaments.There has been a concerted attempt among the players, too, to defuse any lingering tensions. They have veered toward the traditional: long sessions playing two card games, Virus and Brandy, and a renewed focus on forfeits — singing or dancing in front of their peers — for those players who lose games in training.“Things are not forgotten,” Paredes said in an interview with El País. “But we must put them aside knowing that we have a common goal and that we are going for it.”The sense of purpose is such that Bonmati, one of the signatories of the original email, even cast the defeat to Japan as a bonding experience. “This is going to unite us more than ever,” she said.Whether that is how it plays out, of course, remains to be seen. Should Spain lose to Switzerland on Saturday in round of 16, it is not difficult to imagine the uneasy truce breaking.Spain’s preparation for this World Cup, one it genuinely believed it could win, has been fraught and tense and, at times, toxic. It has had enough drama.What it needs, from this point on, is for everything to be as boring as possible. More

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      Women’s World Cup Contenders

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      The Women’s World Cup, which opens this week, is the biggest in its 32-year history, but it may also be the most open field the tournament has seen.While plenty of the 32 teams descending on Australia and New Zealand probably have modest ambitions for the next month, it is not a stretch to say that almost half of the field might regard themselves as serious title contenders. (Some more accurately than others.) These 10 countries are the most likely to stick around all the way until the end.United StatesForward Trinity Rodman is one of 14 U.S. players headed to their first World Cup.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressTwo things can be true at once. By common consensus, Vlatko Andonovski’s team arrived in New Zealand as the favorite to win the tournament. It has the aura of experience, the dazzling jolt of youth and the deep bedrock of talent to lift a third straight World Cup. It has a psychological edge, too: It has been the game’s superpower for so long that respect can manifest as awe.At the same time, the undisputed primacy the United States has enjoyed for more than a decade has never been more fragile. There is a risk that this squad will fail the Goldilocks test: Some players are too old, some are too young, and so perhaps none are just right. Europe’s major nations have closed the gap. In the space of a month last year, the Americans lost to England, Spain and Germany. The United States has the squad to emerge as champion. But for the first time in some time, it is not alone in that.EnglandRachel Daly started at left back in the Euros last summer. Now she is England’s most potent striker.David Rogers/Getty ImagesExpectation hangs heavy on Sarina Wiegman’s England. The Lionesses won the European Championship on home soil last summer, the team’s first major honor, and followed that with a victory in the Finalissima — a game between the European and South American champions — earlier this year. Winning the World Cup would be the natural conclusion to a trajectory that has been on a steep upward curve for 10 years.Fate, though, has intervened. Wiegman has lost her captain, Leah Williamson; her most creative player, Fran Kirby; and her most potent attacking threat, Beth Mead, to injury. Millie Bright made the squad but is still, strictly speaking, recovering from knee surgery. Wiegman is an astute enough coach — and she has enough talent at her disposal — to disguise those losses. But she will be doing so on the fly.AustraliaSam Kerr will shoulder the hopes of one of the host nations.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is difficult not to see the co-host less as “Australia” and more as “Sam Kerr and Guests.” At 30, Kerr, the Chelsea striker, may well be the finest player in the world. She is a totem for her country. She is the face of the tournament, the person expected to deliver what she has referred to as a “Cathy Freeman moment.” She is the star on which Australia’s hopes hang.That assessment is not quite true. Tony Gustavsson’s squad is drawn largely from the major leagues of Europe and the N.W.S.L. In Caitlin Foord, Hayley Raso and Alanna Kennedy, the supporting cast is a strong one. Its momentum, too, is considerable: Australia has won eight of its last nine games, including a milestone victory against England. Kerr will have to deliver, of course, but she is far from alone.The NetherlandsThe Netherlands lost to the United States in the World Cup final in 2019. Its path runs through the Americans again.Rob Engelaar/EPA, via ShutterstockIn 2019, the Dutch emerged as the standard-bearer for Europe’s coming force, an advertisement for the game’s shifting power base. They fell agonizingly short, losing to the United States in the final. Progress since then has been patchy, as they have lost Wiegman, who left to coach England, before falling in the quarterfinals of the European Championship last summer.The core of the team that made the final four years ago — Danielle van de Donk, Jackie Groenen, Jill Roord, Lieke Martens — remains, and the Dutch have the talent to make a deep run once more. Two things stand in their way: the absence of striker Vivianne Miedema through injury and an unfortunate draw for the group stage. The Dutch face the Americans early; defeat in that game will most likely mean a tougher route for the remainder of their stay.CanadaChristine Sinclair has played 323 games for Canada.LM Otero/Associated PressThe Canadians have made precious little impact on the latter rounds of the World Cup in the last two decades, extending their stay beyond the first knockout round only once. Yet even that, on home soil in 2015, lasted only until the quarterfinals.In many ways, it is hard to see that changing this time around. Christine Sinclair is 40; Janine Beckie is out, another victim of women’s soccer’s A.C.L. epidemic; Canada has won only one of its last five games and has been drawn in the same group as Australia. But there is a resilience to this team that should not be underappreciated: It is only two years, after all, since Canada — completely overlooked then as now — won gold at the Tokyo Olympics.BrazilMarta is headed to her sixth World Cup with Brazil.Ueslei Marcelino/ReutersOn some level, Brazil’s stay in this World Cup will be seen as Marta’s valedictory tour: a sixth and (presumably) final tournament turned into a lap of honor for a 37-year-old player regarded by some as the best of all time.It is hard, certainly, to believe that it will end with Marta’s repeating Lionel Messi’s trick and finally winning the honor that would mean more to her than any other. Brazil’s squad is not as strong as previous editions, and none of them were strong enough to overcome the superpowers of North America and Europe, either. Still, in Pia Sundhage, Brazil has a canny, adroit coach, and the likes of Debinha, Kerolin and Geyse mean Marta may not have to bear the load alone.SpainAlexia Putellas of Spain is the reigning world player of the year.Steve Luciano/Associated PressMore than anyone — even England — Spain should be the biggest threat to the United States’ crown this summer. Its national team is, after all, based largely on the Barcelona team that has become the dominant force in European club soccer. Alexia Putellas, while most likely not fully recovered from the knee injury that kept her out of the Euros last year, is the reigning world player of the year. Spain has lost just once in a year.The problem is that Spain has been engulfed by civil war between the players and the country’s soccer federation since last summer. Though an uneasy truce has been called — allowing some of the 15 players who had demanded the dismissal of the coach, Jorge Vilda, to return — the effects are still being felt. A dozen players are still missing, and Vilda must find a way to instill a team spirit in a squad consisting of both rebels and their replacements.FranceWendie Renard, center, and Kadidiatou Diani had threatened not to play for France under its former coach.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Spanish might have had the least ideal preparation for a major tournament, but kudos to the French for giving them a run for their money. Corinne Diacre, the longstanding coach who had lost the faith of a considerable number of her players, was finally ousted in March. She was replaced by Hervé Renard, a globe-trotting coach of some renown but absolutely no experience in the women’s game.He has, at least, restored some familiar faces to the squad: Wendie Renard and Kadidiatou Diani, both of whom had refused to play under Diacre, are back. Amandine Henry, the vastly experienced midfielder, had been recalled, too, only to suffer a calf injury that will keep her out of the tournament. France’s hopes, now, rest on the new coach’s being able to get the best out of a team he has only just encountered.GermanyLena Oberdorf and Germany will enter the World Cup off a run of puzzling results.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf anything at all is certain about this tournament, it is that the Germans will reach the quarterfinals. In eight attempts, they have never failed to do so, and given a kindly group draw — Morocco, Colombia and South Korea — there is little reason to believe they will not make the last eight again.Whether Coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg can steer her team any further, though, is open to question. Germany has a well-balanced squad — two outstanding goalkeepers, the emerging star power of Lena Oberdorf, the creativity of Lina Magull, the goals of Svenja Huth and Alexandra Popp — and finished as runner-up in last summer’s European Championship. But its form is sputtering: It has lost to Brazil and Zambia in the last couple of months and just squeezed past Vietnam in a warm-up match last month.SwedenKosovare Asllani and Sweden finished third at the 2019 World Cup and second at the Tokyo Olympics.Kimmo Brandt/EPA, via ShutterstockNobody ever thinks about Sweden. Sweden might have one silver and three bronze medals to show for its eight previous World Cups, and it might be a reliable force in the European Championship, but the operating assumption is always that Sweden is not a genuine contender.It is worth pointing out, then, that Sweden not only has the likes of Fridolina Rolfo, Stina Blackstenius and Hanna Bennison to call on, but that it made the semifinals of the Euros last year, and it swatted aside the United States on the way to the Olympic final two years ago. Sweden is a threat. But nobody ever thinks about Sweden. More

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      Liverpool, Napoli and the Problem With Systems

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      As system clubs start to falter, the future seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible.There is no such thing as a 4-3-3. The same goes for all those pithy threads of numbers that are hard-wired into soccer’s vernacular, the communal, universal drop-down list of legitimate patterns in which a team might be arrayed: 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 and even the fabled, fading 4-4-2. They are familiar, reflexive. But none of them exist. Not really.The way a team lines up to start a game, for example, most likely will bear very little relation to what it looks like during it as players whirl around the field, engaged in what anyone who has not watched a lot of mid-table Premier League soccer might describe as a complex, instinctive ballet.Most teams will adopt one shape when blessed with the ball, and another without it. Increasingly, many will shift their approaches in the course of the game, responding to the lunges, the parries and the ripostes of their opponents.A team presented in a 4-3-3 on a graphic before kickoff might be playing a 3-5-2 while that image is still fresh in the memory. A coach might choose to drop a midfielder between the central defenders to control possession, or push the fullbacks daringly high, or draw a forward a little deeper. The nominal 4-3-3 might, if it all comes off, be more accurately denoted as a 3-1-4-1-1. Sort of. Maybe.And besides, every manager will have a different sense of what each of those formations means. As Thiago Motta, the Bologna coach, has said: a 3-5-2 can be a front-foot, adventurous sort of a system, and a 4-3-3 a cautious, defensive one. How the players are arranged does not, in his view, say very much at all about their intentions.Luciano Spalleti’s aversion to a system is working just fine at Napoli.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockNone of that is to say that formations are completely meaningless. As a rule, managers tend to scoff at the very mention of them. They assume that hearing any value ascribed to the idea of “formation” is a surefire sign that they are in the helpless company of a slow-witted civilian, or perhaps a child.They are, though, useful shorthands: broad-brush, big-picture guidelines that fans and opponents can use to try to find a pattern in what can look — at first — like unfettered chaos. They are a way of establishing what you think a team might look like once it takes the field, what it might be trying to do, how it might be attempting to win.Or, at least, that is what formations have always been. It may not last. There is a chance, now, that soccer’s great leap forward will render all of those old, comfortable ideas almost entirely moribund.The three decades on either side of the Millennium — the period, in soccer terms, that starts with Arrigo Sacchi’s A.C. Milan and ends with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City — will, in time, be remembered as the sport’s age of the system, the first time its most coveted talents, its defining figures, have been not players but coaches.On the surface, there may be scant similarity between the tiki-taka that turned Barcelona into the finest club in history and the sturm-und-drang of the energy-drink infused, heavy-metal inflected German pressing game.Underneath, though, they share two crucial characteristics. They are both precisely, almost militaristically choreographed, players moving by rote and by edict in preordained patterns learned and honed in training. And they both rely, essentially, on a conception of soccer as a game defined less by the position of the ball and more by the occupation and creation of space.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, rejects the idea of rigid positions.Sergio Moraes/ReutersSoccer’s history, though, is a process of call and response, of action and reaction. One innovation holds sway for a while — the process happens increasingly quickly — before the competition decodes it and either counteracts or adopts it. Both have the same, blunting effect.And there are, now, the first glimmers of what might follow on the horizon. Across Europe, the system teams are starting to falter. The most obvious case is Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, struggling not just with a physical and mental fatigue but a philosophical one, too. Its rivals and peers are now inoculated to its dangers.But there are others: Jesse Marsch’s travails as the manager at Leeds United can be traced in some way to his refusal to bend from what might broadly, and only moderately pompously, be called the “Red Bull School.” Barcelona, its characteristic style now widely copied across the continent, is scratching around with limited success for some new edge. Even Manchester City, where suffering is always relative, seems less imperious than once it did.The future, instead, seems to belong to the teams and coaches who are willing to be a little more flexible and see their role as providing a platform on which their players might extemporize.Real Madrid, of course, has always had that approach, choosing to control specific moments in games rather than the game itself, but it has done so with the rather significant advantage of possessing many of the finest players on earth.Pep Guardiola has some thoughts.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockThat others, in less rarefied climes, have started to follow that model is much more instructive. Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli, the most captivating team in Europe, is barreling toward the Serie A title thanks to a free-form, virtuosic style that does not deploy the likes of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen as puppets but encourages them to think, to interpret, for themselves.Fernando Diniz, the coach of the Brazilian side Fluminense, has even given it a name: the “apositional style,” placing it in direct (but perhaps not intentional) conflict with the “positional play” that Guardiola and his teams have perfected.Diniz, like Spalletti, does not believe in assigning his players specific positions or roles, but in allowing them to interchange at will, to respond to the exigencies of the game. He is not concerned with the control of specific areas of the field. The only zone that matters to him, and to his team, is the one near the ball.In his eyes, soccer is not a game defined by the occupation of space. It is centered, instead, on the ball: As long as his players are close to it, what theoretical position they play does not matter in the slightest. They do not need to cleave to a specific formation, to a string of numbers coded into their heads.Instead, they are free to go where they wish, where their judgment tells them. If it makes it all but impossible to present a shorthand of how the team plays, then so much the better. After all, systems are designed by coaches with the express purpose of stripping the game of as much spontaneity as possible. Managers want, understandably, to control what a player does in any given circumstance. They crave predictability. They yearn for it.In that environment, it is only natural that unpredictability becomes an edge.Split VoteAlexia Putellas, world player of (some of) the year.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlexia Putellas’s year effectively ended last July 5, the day she felt a click in one of her knees during a small-sided training game. A few hours later, she was in the King Edward VII hospital in London, attempting to absorb the news that she had ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament with the European Championship only days away. She would miss the tournament, and at that stage her participation in this summer’s Women’s World Cup was in doubt, too.Putellas is, thankfully, making excellent progress. Her recuperation has gone sufficiently well that she is not only running again, but engaging in what everyone in soccer refers to as “ball work”: the delicate process of ensuring that the repaired connections in her knee can handle the sudden, jarring twists and turns that games will likely demand. Barring any major setbacks, Putellas will feature for Spain at the World Cup that opens in July, and the tournament will be all the better for it.It was hard, though, not to be struck by her election as the best female player on the planet at FIFA’s flashy awards show Monday night in Paris. It would be unfair to suggest that Putellas was an undeserving winner. She is an outstanding player, after all. But at the same time, she had played only half the year. She did not feature in the Euros, the year’s pre-eminent women’s tournament. Her club team, Barcelona, lost the final of the Champions League.The immediate suspicion, where any FIFA award is concerned, is that her victory is a testament to the power of reputation. Both the men’s and the women’s prizes, after all, have had a habit of reverting to the default: The national team coaches and captains, and the international media representatives, generally favor whoever is the most famous, the most high-profile, the safest choice.In the case of Putellas, though, it is likely to be something else. The European champions, England, did not have a single standout player, though a case could be made for Beth Mead, the leading scorer, or Leah Williamson, the captain. Keira Walsh of England was the tournament’s best player, but she is a defensive midfielder, and defensive midfielders do not win awards.Likewise, Lyon’s run to the Champions League title was not inspired by a single individual, as it had been when the goals of Ada Hegerberg powered it to glory in 2019.This year’s field, in other words, was both broad and deep. In that context, both what Putellas achieved — Spanish champion, leading scorer in the Champions League — and what she could not played in her favor: The perception that Spain’s bid for the European Championship fell apart in her absence was supporting evidence for her legitimacy.More Like David AlibiThere comes a point, really, where everyone involved should take a look at their behavior and feel their cheeks flush with shame. There is a level of pettiness that is unavoidable in a rivalry as virulent and intractable as the one shared by Real Madrid and Barcelona. But then there is the controversy that engulfed David Alaba this week, which makes all concerned look like children.Alaba, the Real Madrid defender, is also the captain of the Austrian men’s national team. As such, he was eligible to cast a vote for The Best Men’s Player at FIFA’s sparkling celebration of self-importance. He picked, not unreasonably, Lionel Messi, as did an overwhelming majority of the appointed electorate. (A note, here, for the captain of Gabon and the coach of Botswana, who watched Messi inspire Argentina to the World Cup title and both declared Julián Álvarez the real star of the show.)Only Alaba, though, subsequently had to explain his decision. A Real Madrid player not selecting Karim Benzema, you see, was considered unacceptable not only by Madrid fans on social media but by several Madrid-based news outlets. That he would instead throw his weight behind Messi, so indelibly linked with Barcelona, was beyond the pale.Alaba, to his credit, indulged the nonsense, explaining that the Austrian team voted as a collective and that the majority of the players’ council had favored Messi. He wanted to make it plain that he considered Benzema the “best forward in the world.” Most impressively, he did this all without once mentioning how stupid the whole debate was, or noting that encouraging players to vote politically renders the concept of the award itself completely meaningless.Alaba was perfectly entitled to vote for Messi, whether in consultation with his teammates or not. Benzema would have understood that instantly. He would have been no more offended by Alaba’s selection than he would have been at the sight of France’s captain, Hugo Lloris, and coach, Didier Deschamps, not voting for him either. He is, after all, a grown-up. It is a shame that so many of those commenting appear not to be. More