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      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

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      The teams drew the first leg of their Champions League semifinal as each tried to prevent the other from playing to its strengths.Erling Haaland had his instructions. His Manchester City teammates were methodically working the ball from the center circle all the way back to Ederson, the goalkeeper, but Haaland was not watching. He knew what was coming. Ederson pitched the ball high into the night sky, an unusually rudimentary opening gambit for a team coached by Pep Guardiola.Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend. He was moving to where it was going to make landfall. He started to gather a little speed. And then, just as the Real Madrid defender David Alaba met the ball — his header sending it back into the sky — Haaland arrived, crashing into him. Not dangerously or recklessly but, with only about 40 seconds elapsed, certainly ominously.Guardiola being Guardiola, of course, the working assumption has to be that this was all preordained, the sort of effort that he has spent time perfecting on the training ground for Tuesday’s match. An understudy would have been drafted to act as Haaland’s crash test dummy. Haaland, the Norwegian striker, would have been lectured on the finer points of clattering technique. No, Erling, don’t barge into him like that; lead with the shoulder just a touch more.In this case, though, perhaps the agency lay elsewhere. Standing behind Alaba, watching the opening skirmish unfold, was Antonio Rüdiger, the German defender. Happenstance had brought him into Real’s lineup — standing in for the suspended Eder Militão — but he is not the sort to back away from a test of strength.Rüdiger has that valuable knack, for a central defender, of ensuring he gets the game he wants. He may as well have been licking his lips at the sight of Haaland’s opening salvo on Alaba. Clearly, this was going to be his sort of evening.This Champions League semifinal was, on a macro level, always going to be cast not just as a tussle between old glory and new money, the establishment and the aspirant, but as a conceptual collision, too. Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid is inherently improvisational and player-centric; Guardiola believes, more than anything, in the power of his collective, his system. It is free jazz against orchestral arrangement. (The score, after the first of two legs, is 1-1; no sweeping conclusions on scant evidence can yet be drawn.)Vinícius Júnior, left, scored Real Madrid’s only goal.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut it was also — and at times, it seemed, mainly — an arm wrestle between Rüdiger and Haaland. That is not to suggest that either player is nothing but brawn, of course. Rüdiger’s job is to ensure that things do not happen; his successes are, often, inherently invisible to those not blessed with his foresight. Likewise, for someone so large, Haaland can make it very difficult to say with any certainty where he is at any given time, right up to the point when he materializes, peeling off an opponent’s shoulder.On this occasion, though, both players willingly indulged what might be described as their more muscular instincts. For an hour and a half, the two of them pulled and pushed and strained and tensed, relishing the atavistic thrill of it, each trying to establish nothing grander than sheer physical dominance over the other.Here was Haaland, dropping deep to pick up the ball, being thrown to the ground by Rüdiger. Here was Rüdiger, for some reason slipping his head through the crook of Haaland’s elbow, effectively giving his consent to be placed in a headlock, grinning in (presumably) accidental homage to Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he did so.Most judges, by the end, would have scored it a split decision: Haaland did not score, a rarity this season, and in truth had only a couple of sights of goal; his presence was central, though, in creating the space that led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equalizer for City, the strike that will make Guardiola’s team the slight favorite when hostilities are resumed next week in England.And that, perhaps, will not displease either coach. For all their philosophical differences, what was striking about this game was just how aware both teams were of the other’s strengths, their capacity to inflict damage. That, more than anything, might have been the enduring lesson of their encounter in a semifinal last season: Madrid conscious of just how good City can be; City conscious that a team can be as good as it likes against Madrid and still lose.Real, on home territory, was at times so passive that it tried its fans’ patience; the Bernabéu is not used, after all, to its visitors having the temerity to keep the ball for long periods of time. There was a point, midway through the first half, when City’s passing started to affront the crowd’s dignity: What had started as whistling turned, slowly but surely, into jeers.For Ancelotti, though, that was a price worth paying: Tactically, strategically, it made sense for Real to dig in, to sit deep, to lie in wait, and then to pick its moments. A few minutes later, his approach bore fruit: Eduardo Camavinga, playing the hybrid fullback/midfielder role that is so de rigueur these days, spotted a gap and levered it open, then found Vinícius Júnior in sufficient space to fizz a shot past Ederson.Even a goal down, though, City did not see the need to adopt a more assertive, more aggressive posture. Guardiola’s insatiable appetite for possession is not a purely offensive maneuver: To some extent, it is a defensive measure, too. More than he would like to admit, perhaps, he hews to his old rival José Mourinho’s adage that “whoever has the ball, has fear.”Kevin De Bruyne, right, scored Manchester City’s equalizer.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressIf Guardiola’s team is in control, he knows the opposition cannot score. In those moments, watching the ball sweep hypnotically between his players, he can feel safe. Against Madrid, a team whose superpower is its ability to score at any moment and effectively without any warning, that is doubly important.It was, both sorts of coaches seemed to have decided, that sort of occasion, one in which the focus was on preventing the opposition from expressing its identity. And so Haaland, the most devastating forward in Europe, a player who has seemed at times in his debut season in England like an inevitable force of nature, was employed — at least in part — as a battering ram.Guardiola and Ancelotti will both take heart that their approach worked, that nothing has yet been lost. Both will know, though, that at some point it will not be enough merely to stop the opposition; to win, someone will have to be themselves. More

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      Osasuna, Facing Real Madrid in Copa del Rey, Is a Model Club

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      All fans should want their teams to be more like Osasuna.It is not quite eight years since Osasuna found itself at what Fran Canal, the team’s chief executive, described as the “worst moment in its history.” The team was a single defeat from the ignominy of relegation to Spanish soccer’s third tier. Bankruptcy loomed. The club, he said, stood at the precipice “socially, economically, in terms of credibility.”On Saturday, Osasuna will face Real Madrid in the final of the Spanish cup, the Copa del Rey. Pamplona, its home city, is decked out in the team’s colors. Tens of thousands of fans are expected to descend on the Plaza del Castillo to watch only the second major final in the club’s history.It is not the case, of course, that the journey between those two points has been straightforward. It has taken considerable amounts of deft, arduous, painstaking work to rebuild and revive Osasuna. Its rise has been of such a speed, and such a scale, that by definition it cannot have been easy.It is striking, then, that Canal and his colleagues make it all seem, well, obvious.One example: Aimar Oroz, a 21-year-old midfielder enjoying a breakthrough season, runs through the list of teammates he has known, essentially, since childhood. Six or seven spring to mind immediately. “The changing room is really important,” he said. “It helps the atmosphere when the people in there are friends.”Another: In January, Osasuna’s coach suddenly found himself devoid of healthy fullbacks. He could have signed a player, or converted a midfielder into the role. Instead, he drafted in a 21-year-old, Diego Moreno, from the team’s academy. Moreno trained with the team for two days, made his debut in the cup, and within the week was in the lineup for a league game. “That is always where we look first,” Braulio Vázquez, the club’s sporting director, said of the academy. “If the type of player that we need exists here, we will not go and sign one.”Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti, left, will call on some of the world’s most expensive players in the final. Jagoba Arrasate’s Osasuna squad was built differently.Alvaro Barrientos/Associated PressSimplicity, in soccer, is a deceptively complex thing. It is easy to proclaim the virtues of common sense. It is quite another to stand by them in the vortex of hope and pressure and expectation.Osasuna’s results, though — on course for a top-half finish in La Liga, finalists in the Copa del Rey, all of it on a budget that is a fraction of most of its rivals — mark the club as such a model of best practices that the most pressing question is in plain sight:Why doesn’t everyone else do it?The Navarra GeneAt first glance, it is the sort of statistical anomaly that warrants further investigation: Navarra, the Spanish province sandwiched between the Basque Country and Aragon and glazed by the Pyrenees, produces more professional soccer players per capita than anywhere else in Spain. A few years ago, a study found that there was one player for every 22,000 people in the region.There is a part of Ángel Alcalde, Osasuna’s director of youth development, that would like to believe that is somehow hereditary. He smiles at the idea that there might be such a thing as what he calls a “Navarra gene”: a random genetic mutation that for some reason makes the 650,000 inhabitants of the province better at soccer than everyone else.Osasuna fans after their club reached the final.Jesus Diges/EPA, via ShutterstockHe knows, though, that the correct answer is likely to be the simplest one. Navarra’s success has its roots in two things that are not mysteries at all: system and structure.“There is a culture of soccer in Navarra,” Alcalde said. “But it is a region with just one club: Osasuna. We work with 150 affiliated youth teams. We have 20,000 players in our orbit. We have a very well-developed scouting network. We look for talent under every rock.”Osasuna does not, of course, have a free run at those players. Part of the reason Navarra as a whole has proved so productive over the years is that the major teams in the neighboring Basque Country — Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad — have long regarded the province’s players as fair game. More recently, Barcelona and Villarreal have identified it as fertile ground, too.Osasuna cannot pay quite as generously as any of those teams. It certainly cannot match the glamour of Barcelona. What it can offer, though, is a sure path from youth soccer to a professional career, from potential to fulfillment. “Our job is to generate a flow of players for the first team, and to make sure they are ready to jump from Disneyland into Jurassic Park,” Alcalde said. “If you want to become a player, then I am certain this is the best place to do it.”He is keenly aware, though, that most of those hopefuls who come under his charge will fall by the wayside. “Becoming a player is complicated,” he said. “There are only very few who make it.” To offset that, the emphasis at Tajonar, Osasuna’s youth academy, is as much on health, psychology and emotional development as it is on soccer. “We want to make sure the sport does not do them any damage,” he said. “We do not want to leave broken eggs on the road.”There will, on Saturday night, be plenty of players on the field whom Alcalde and his staff might point to as validation and vindication, players with, if not a Navarra gene, then certainly what Alcalde calls “Tajonar DNA.”It is telling, though, that he is just as proud of those who will not be there. “We had one boy who suffered two really bad knee injuries,” Alcalde said. “He had a lot of talent, but it cost him his career. He studied data science at university, and now he is invited back to the club to work with our data department. That is important. We want Tajonar to be a mark of prestige for everyone who comes through, not just the people who become players.”Osasuna recruits locally with the promise of a straight line from prospect to professional.Cesar Manso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhere Monday MattersAimar Oroz got the call a few months ago. It comes, eventually, for every member of Osasuna’s first team: a request from the academy staff to spend an afternoon training with the youth team, offering any tips or advice they might have, correcting any mistakes they see.Sometimes, players are sent to train with the youngest members of the club — boys no older than 11 or 12 — but for Oroz and the Croatian striker Ante Budimir, who joined him that afternoon, their charges were a little older: the under-16s and under-18s.Oroz, in truth, did not relish the role of expert. He is shy, by nature, and only just out of the academy himself. He did not feel especially comfortable being drafted as an older head, or issuing commands. Still, it is a tradition at Tajonar. “It is part of the club,” he said. “It’s something we’re glad to do.”The message is clear, and twofold: Those sessions show the younger players that the door is open, and they remind the older ones that, no matter how far they might go, they should always remember where they came from.Osasuna’s stadium is the loudest in Spain.Vincent West/ReutersWhatever happens in the final on Saturday, the experience will broaden Osasuna’s horizons. A victory — the first major honor in the club’s history — would mean a place in Europe next season. Merely reaching the final gives Osasuna access to a spot in Spain’s lucrative Super Cup, staged every January in Saudi Arabia.Playing will compound the impression that this is a club going places. Its stadium, El Sadar, has been renovated and in its new, sleek form has been voted one of the best in Europe; it is, officially, the loudest in Spain. Now, all of a sudden, it is home to a team ensconced in La Liga and competing with Real, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid — likely the other three Super Cup entrants — for honors.That success, though, changes absolutely nothing. It is not that Osasuna lacks ambition; far from it. But the club, Canal said, will not “lose its values,” will not abandon the methods that have worked so well so far. It will continue to do the simple thing, the obvious thing.“We know that means there will be bad moments,” said Vázquez, the sporting director. The success of this season will not necessarily follow again next year. “But that is the policy of the club, and the people understand that,” he said. “We cannot normalize something that is not normal.”And so, whatever happens on Saturday, Osasuna will go on being run as it has been for these past eight years, from the nadir to the zenith. There might be a celebration. There might be a commiseration. The club that emerges on the other side will be exactly the same.“Monday,” Canal said, “will still be Monday.” More

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      The Champions League Ventures Down Memory Lane

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      Real Madrid-Manchester City is the headliner. A.C. Milan-Inter is the classic.The blockbuster matchup, no question, is the one that pits the establishment against the insurgent, the old guard against the new wave, the incomparable past against the inevitable future.Real Madrid against Manchester City has Pep Guardiola, Luka Modric, Erling Haaland, Karim Benzema. It is the team with more European Cups than anyone else against the team that wants a European Cup more than anyone else. It is a sequel, of course, but the Champions League — like Hollywood — loves a sequel. It is pure box office.It might, then, seem both distinctly counterintuitive and obviously pretentious to suggest that the other Champions League semifinal might somehow be more alluring. A.C. Milan against Inter Milan is very much the art-house offering, the feature directed at a niche, self-selecting audience. (Unless you are, of course, Italian.)It will not, make no mistake, have quite the production values of the show on offer at the Bernabéu and the Etihad. The cast list is not quite as glittering. And despite featuring two rivals so local they share a stadium, it does not offer quite such a straightforward, compelling narrative.Real Madrid against Manchester City, at heart, is about revenge and it is about power. It offers an insight into the ever-mutable nature of the Champions League, and by extension European soccer. There are conclusions to be drawn from its outcome.Diego Milito and Inter won the 2010 Champions League final.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter versus Milan, on the other hand, has just kind of happened. It is not to diminish their achievements to suggest that neither team expected, realistically, to be here. Their presence in the final four is not a consequence of rich form or stellar seasons; both have performed modestly in Serie A this season.It cannot even be read in good faith as proof of the resurgence of Italian soccer, which remains mired in debt, hidebound by bureaucracy and hamstrung by grinding conservatism. As the magazine Rivista Undici pointed out this week, nobody seriously believes that Serie A is now the best domestic competition in Europe because it provided three of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists this season. The successes of Inter, Milan and Napoli belong to the clubs themselves, not to the league as a whole.But for all that, the matchup’s appeal is undeniable. First and foremost, of course, it is a derby, one being played out over two of the biggest games of the club season. It is what was described, the last time it happened, as the “longest derby in the world,” a week of worry and stress and hope from which both heroes and villains will emerge.That it is fresh helps, too. No Italian team has reached the semifinals since Roma’s equally unanticipated surge in 2018. Neither Milanese side has made it this far since the last time they won the competition: Inter in 2010, Milan in 2007.Inter is the last Italian team to win the trophy.Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Champions League has long felt like a private club. The two sides of this rivalry, the Derby della Madonnina, make unlikely interlopers. Milan, with seven titles, has won the European Cup more than anyone except Real Madrid; Inter is eighth on the list, with three. Neither would accept the role of underdog either naturally or willingly, even as their presence is an infusion of new blood that the tournament needed.But most of all, for a certain vintage of fan, it has to do with memory. It was 2003, the last time these two teams were drawn together at this stage of this competition. (They would meet again, in the 2005 quarterfinal, a tie that A.C. Milan won with ease.)Back then, it was far closer to a curiosity than a miracle. Serie A, after all, was regarded as the finest league on the planet, and had been for 20 years or so. Milan — or at least the combined geography of Piedmont and Lombardy — was Italian soccer’s capital, and by extension the mistress of the world. That Inter and A.C. Milan might stand in each other’s way was only a matter of time, part of the natural order of things. A.C. Milan scraped through, that time. It beat another Italian team, Juventus, in the final.It is hard to pinpoint, precisely, when that world ended. Eras, in soccer, do not divide as neatly as journalists, historians and the subset of fans who think about these things like to pretend. Italian clubs won the Champions League three times in the first decade of this century: Milan twice, in 2003 and 2007, and Inter in 2010. Juventus made the final in 2003, too, and Milan in 2005.Filippo Inzaghi scored when Milan last won the Champions League, against Liverpool in 2007 in Athens.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd yet, by the time of Inter’s victory, few would have pronounced Serie A the best domestic competition on the planet. That title had passed first to the Premier League, and then, thanks to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, to La Liga.(It would return to the Premier League, by common consensus, no later than 2016. But again: In that time, English sides have won the Champions League twice. Real Madrid has delivered four more trophies for Spain. These things are unhelpfully messy.)Likewise, there is no single explanation for why or how it happened. Serie A lost its primacy in the same way that Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The stadiums started to look a little outdated, and then the style of play did as well. The debts piled up. The television product grew stale, the revenues dwarfed by those on offer in the Premier League.The players, as players do, gravitated to where the money was, and the money was in England and in parts of Spain. Violence flared with ever greater frequency in the stands. Attendances started to fall. Patches of empty seats appeared on screens.And against that backdrop came Calciopoli, the great referee-influencing scandal of 2006, dripping poison and doubt into Italian soccer’s bloodstream. Juventus was disgraced. Others were stained. Everyone suffered. Serie A was faded and diminished and now it was tarnished, too. It has never really recovered.That there is a Milan derby in the semifinals of the Champions League — that, for the first time since 2017, there will be an Italian team in the final in Istanbul — is not a remedy for that decline.Only Real Madrid (14) has more Champions League titles than A.C. Milan (7).Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Serie A that has emerged from the ashes of its past has plenty of attractive qualities. It is on course for a fourth winner in four years. It has a competitive balance that few of its peers can match. It is home to bold, intelligent coaches, giving rise to an enticing heterogeneity of style, and it has more than a few owners seeking to introduce a degree of innovation.But it is not on the cusp of reclaiming its place at the summit of world soccer; that crown is awarded not by artistic merit or even by popular acclamation but by brute economic power. Serie A was not king in the 1990s or 2000s because of the weather, or the food, or some innate cultural supremacy. It just paid more. Now the deepest pockets are in the Premier League, and that is not going to change anytime soon.It is there, though, that lies the appeal of Milan against Inter, twice in six days, for a place in the biggest game of the year. It is a break from the present, a chance to drift just a little in a past that has disappeared. There was no notice issued when Serie A slipped — or stepped off — its pedestal. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. Now, two decades later, there is an unexpected reminder of how the world used to be, before things moved and shifted and changed forever, when the light in Italy just seemed a little brighter than anywhere else.Details, DetailsAt Bayern Munich, it’s back to the drawing board.Leonhard Simon/ReutersBayern Munich will not take this well. It is less than a month since the club fired Julian Nagelsmann, a manager it had paid more than $25 million to hire, at least in part because he went skiing at a time deemed inappropriate. The club is unlikely to shrug its shoulders at being eliminated from not only the Champions League but the German cup, too, in the space of a few days.Thomas Tuchel, freshly installed as Nagelsmann’s replacement, should be safe for now, but all around him will be a blur of change. Oliver Kahn, the iconic goalkeeper turned chief executive, is under scrutiny. Hasan Salihamidzic, another former player and now Bayern’s sporting director, will not be resting easy. Herbert Hainer, the club’s president, already has hinted that there will be churn in the squad, too.Whether any of this will have the desired effect is a different matter. There was a sense, watching Manchester City hold Bayern at bay on Wednesday evening, of two clubs moving in opposite directions. An era that belongs to City, and to its fellow avatars of the new soccer, is doubtless beginning. The one dominated by Bayern and its ilk is slipping into the past.And yet the whole picture is much more complex, and substantially simpler, than that.No, Bayern cannot compete with City, not in the long term: The combined forces of Bavarian corporate culture are no match for that particular blend of Premier League wealth and nation-state resources. The days when Bayern could function essentially as a Bundesliga All-Star team — plucking the finest players from its rivals to perpetuate its domestic dominance and its European relevance — are over. Like Juventus and Barcelona before it, Bayern Munich will at some point bow to, or be bowed by, England’s economic primacy.But decade-spanning macroeconomic trends are not easily distilled into roughly two hours of soccer. Even in a game that seemed to define the direction of the whole sport, the margins were impossibly fine. In this case, it came down to the fact that City has a fearsome goal scorer — Erling Haaland, you may have heard him mentioned — and Bayern, essentially, does not. Tuchel’s team created half a dozen good chances before Haaland scored in Munich. It just did not take any of them.And, frustrating though that might be, it is also a significantly easier problem to solve than the imbalance in financial prowess between the European continent and the acquisitive, swashbuckling utopia that sits shimmering just off its shores. (The Premier League, that is. Other adjectives are available for the current state of Britain.)Should Bayern secure the services of Victor Osimhen or Randal Kolo Muani this summer — or even, the club’s ultimate dream, Harry Kane — it will certainly be back in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next season, and there is a better than even chance the outcome will be different. Long term, big picture, Bayern cannot keep up with the wealth of the Premier League in general, and Manchester City in particular. But then it does not need to, not really. It just needs to be able to overcome it for 90 minutes at a time.Correspondence: Your Ideas, RatedThe good news: Many, many of you have been in touch to pitch ideas for how soccer might follow baseball’s example and tweak its rules to make the game more engaging for idle teenagers. Not quite as many as got in touch to tell me about why banning the shift in baseball is a good thing, but still, a lot.The bad news: None of you got the correct answer, which was Extra Time Sudden Death Multi-Ball, so nobody wins the special prize of an afternoon of blue-sky thinking with Gerard Piqué.There were, alas, too many emails to address every suggestion, so here is a fairly representative selection, each condensed into a pearl of wisdom and then assessed by an expert panel — me, talking to my dog — who considers the suggestion’s merit and then makes a slightly condescending remark about its viability.Paul Kassel: “Shrink the field. It would compel tighter passing, fewer over-the-top balls that go nowhere, a bit more chaos. It would speed up the game, and likely increase scoring.”I like the theory, but if anything I’d go the other way: Teams are too well-organized now, so let’s space them out a bit. Grade: B.Charles Kelly: “The most obvious way to restore any modicum of sanity to the offside and handball rules is to restore their enforcement to the judgment of the referee. Accept that such calls are a judgment. Will some judgments be wrong? Of course. That’s the nature of judgment, and reasonable people know and accept that.”Thoroughly sensible, certainly for offside. Handball would be better served if there had to be deliberate motion toward the ball, as was the case at some point, I think. All of this falls down on relying on people to be “reasonable,” obviously. Grade: A for idea, F for execution.The referee will hear your complaints in order. Please take a number.Azael Rodriguez/Getty ImagesKirk Farmer: “I would change the offside rule so that a player is onside if any part of his/her body is even with the defender.”Wouldn’t we all, Kirk? Well, you, me and Arsène Wenger, which is not a bad group to be in, unless you’re Wenger. Grade: ASteve Elliott: “Some league somewhere should stop awarding points just for showing up, and say to get points in the table, you need to score goals on the field. No points for a goal-less draw.”Hard pass, I’m afraid, Steve, but there is the kernel of an idea here. Could an away draw earn more points than a home draw? Could scoring three goals or more earn a bonus point? Grade: C for you, D for me.Gregory Crouch: “Punish time-wasting by adding all those extra minutes like they did at the World Cup. Punish intentional tactical fouling more harshly.”Yes to both. But you lose points for the third suggestion, omitted here, of making refereeing more consistent. Too vague. Grade: BLaura Goldin: “How about enforcing the six-second rule that is supposed to be how long the keeper can handle the ball?”This was the rule for at least a decade, and as far as I know, still is. We just seem to have stopped enforcing it. Grade: A, with an asterisk because it already exists.Fred D’Ambrosi: “The solution to soccer’s problems is the salary cap. It will never happen, but leveling the playing field solves many more problems than cutting the game time by 30 minutes.”A salary cap or some other alternative that bridges the massive, yawning rift between the rich and everyone else and that we have, for some reason, all decided is actually great? If anything, this idea is insufficiently outrageous. Grade: A More

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      Real Madrid Sends Chelsea Out of Champions League

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      Real Madrid advanced to the semifinals at the expense of a Chelsea team long on cash and talk but short, it seems, on ideas of how to succeed.LONDON — Todd Boehly was supposed to be the smartest man in the room. That was the pitch, anyway, when he first descended on Chelsea, on the Premier League and on European soccer almost a year ago. He was the guy who spoke to a hushed audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference. He was onstage at the SALT forum. Other people described him as a “thought leader.”His ideas, he knew, might be received by traditionalists as a little provocative. He suggested a Premier League all-star game — and a relegation playoff. He told soccer it could learn something from American sports, a longstanding euphemism for finding new ways to extricate more cash from fans. He evangelized the idea of buying a whole network of teams. It was 2022, so at some point he talked — rather more than hindsight would suggest was wise — about NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.Boehly did not seem to mind the criticism, the resistance. He was likely expecting it, the price to be paid for daring to disrupt an industry as fearful and staid and conservative as, um, English soccer. He had a “modern, data-driven approach.” He sought “structural advantages.” He had worked out that paying players for longer somehow made them cheaper. He was the cutting edge. And it would not be the cutting edge if it was comfortable.A quick status update on where Chelsea stands now, a year into the ownership tenure of Boehly and his less visible colleagues: 11th in the Premier League, having won only two of its last 12 games; employing its third manager of the campaign, and simultaneously searching for his replacement; $600 million poorer after embarking on the largest single-season transfer spending spree in history; and, as of Tuesday night, out of the Champions League, its last, distant shot at glory gone.Todd Boehly and Chelsea may not see the Champions League again for a while.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is, at least, no particular shame in that. In the end, this was as straightforward a quarterfinal as Real Madrid could have hoped for: a 2-0 win at home last week, and another 2-0 victory on Tuesday in London, a low bar confidently cleared. But Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s interim manager, was not clutching at straws when he suggested his team had “caused Real a lot of problems” for the first hour or so at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday.Chelsea had chivied and harried and unnerved Real Madrid, the reigning European champion. In patches, anyway. With better finishing, as Lampard observed, things might have been different. A portion of the credit for that should go to him: It was his deployment of N’Golo Kanté in a more advanced role that caused Real Madrid to “suffer” so much, as Carlo Ancelotti, Real’s coach, admitted. Chelsea went down, as it was always going to, but it did so with pride intact.That has not always been the case in the first year of what is probably best described as the Boehly experience. Chelsea has long nursed something of a soap opera streak, one that has provided a curiously accurate reflection of the shifting nature of the part of London it calls home.In the 1960s, the club was home to the Kings of the King’s Road, chic, hip and cool. In the 1970s, the freewheeling mavericks arrived, the club nursing a sort of alternative, pre-punk energy. By the 1990s, it was home to a set of impossibly stylish European imports. And then, from 2003 onward, Roman Abramovich turned it into a sort of gaudy monument to the power of the vast wells of new money pouring into the capital from across the globe, Russia in particular.Frank Lampard, still winless in his latest stint at Chelsea.Clive Rose/Getty ImagesThere have been various points, in all of those incarnations, when Chelsea has veered perilously close to lapsing into self-parody. Abramovich, in particular, appeared to have absolutely no interest in running a sensible, steady sort of a soccer team. He may or may not have been a Kremlin apparatchik, but he was most certainly thirsty for drama.He fired coaches for not winning titles. He fired coaches for not winning the right titles. He fired coaches when they had won titles. He appointed at least one manager whom the fans hated. He appointed another because he was his friend. There was one season when the players effectively ran the show. There was infighting and politicking and dark talk of plots, and all of that was just a quiet Tuesday for José Mourinho.Chelsea, in other words, has a relatively high tolerance for the unusual and even, at times, the absurd. But even by those standards, Boehly and his consortium have pushed it to the limit.Signing so many players that the locker room at the club’s training facility is not quite big enough to accommodate them all is not indicative of judicious planning. Likewise spending so much money that the club, in the absence of Champions League soccer and the income it brings, will not only have to indulge in a fire sale of players this summer but quite possibly breach the Premier League’s financial rules next season.Abramovich was not averse to dropping in on the players — sometimes literally: His helicopter regularly used to land at the Cobham training ground if the fancy took him — in order to inspire or encourage or perhaps just glare menacingly at them. But there are no known instances of him, as Boehly reportedly did, telling one of his expensively acquired stars that his performances had been “embarrassing.”There is a chance, of course, that all of these are just teething problems, a form of culture shock, the inevitable growing pains that come with some very rich, very clever — though it is worth noting that those two things are not as synonymous as is often assumed — people dipping their toes into an industry to which they are not native.It may well be, as Lampard loyally and hopefully suggested, that Chelsea is “back” sooner rather than later: guided by one of the half-dozen managerial candidates being considered by the four sporting directors, or equivalent, it employs, boasting a trimmed-down squad full of bright young things, the fat excised to make way for the lean.As Boehly himself said last year, the Premier League is designed in such a way as to give the “big brands” — oh, Todd — a number of his beloved structural advantages. One of those is the privilege of having money to solve problems. Another is a limit to how much it is possible to fail.From this vantage point, though, the ultimate vindication of Boehly and his group seems almost impossibly distant. Chelsea is out of the Champions League. It will not be back next season. Still, there is hope. It is up to Boehly to plot its way back, and he is, by all accounts, the smartest man in the room.Rodrygo, right, scored both goals as Real Madrid cruised into the semifinals, where it will face the Manchester City-Bayern Munich winner.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press More

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      Liverpool Fans Will Get Refunds for Champions League Final Tickets

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      European soccer’s governing body will return millions of dollars to fans affected by dangerous overcrowding that its own investigation said could have turned deadly.European soccer’s governing body said Tuesday that it would refund the tickets of thousands of Liverpool fans who attended last season’s Champions League final outside Paris, the latest effort by the organization to make amends for policing and security failures that nearly saw its showcase game take a deadly turn.The governing body, UEFA, said it would offer refunds to the fans “most affected” by scenes of dangerous overcrowding outside the gates of the Stade de France last May 28. The affected tickets include the entire ticket allocation provided to Liverpool for sale to its fans — a block of nearly 20,000 tickets — as well as any fans with tickets to specific gates where the worst of the crushes took place.Last year’s final, the showpiece game of the European soccer season, matched two of the most popular and best-supported teams in the game, Liverpool and Real Madrid. But planning failures led to dangerous scenes in which large crowds of Liverpool fans were herded into narrow areas where, with kickoff approaching and fears in the crowds rising, some were sprayed with tear gas by the French riot police.The tickets eligible for refunds, UEFA said, included Liverpool’s entire allotment of 19,618, but potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of others held by fans affected by the problems at the match.A French Senate investigation last year faulted the authorities for the chaos, calling it a “fiasco” and raising concerns about French policing before this year’s Rugby World Cup and next summer’s Paris Olympic Games. An investigation by UEFA, released last month, was even more direct: Its harshly critical report concluded it was only “a matter of chance” that no fans had died. That report laid the principal blame on UEFA.UEFA officials, and French sports officials, have offered previous apologies to Liverpool and its fans for the overcrowding after initially shifting blame for the problems on “late-arriving” fans. (It also first said people who arrived with fake tickets were to blame, though those claims were later debunked by a check of computer ticketing records.) Liverpool and its fans have taken great offense to those comments; at a recent Champions League game against Real Madrid, the teams’ first meeting on the field since last year’s final, Liverpool fans raised banners that were critical of UEFA and denounced France’s sports minister and interior minister as liars.The UEFA statement announcing the ticket refunds, a tangible and multimillion-dollar effort perhaps aimed at defusing some of those hard feelings, was notable in that it included neither a new apology nor any comment from the organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin. Instead, one of Ceferin’s top deputies thanked Liverpool fans for their input and said the refund plan was an effort “to recognize the negative experiences of those supporters on the day.”It is unclear how many Liverpool fans will accept UEFA’s offer. Hundreds had threatened to sue for compensation last month, and one of the law firms representing a large group of supporters wrote on Twitter that the offer “is welcome but does not go far enough.”UEFA said refunds would be made available to all fans with tickets for six specific gates of the Stade de France, but also to all fans who ticketing controls showed did not enter the stadium before the scheduled 9 p.m. kickoff, and to any others who were not able to — or chose not to — enter the stadium at all. Liverpool has agreed to handle refunds for fans who bought tickets through the club, an accommodation UEFA said was done for privacy reasons. More

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      Real Madrid 5, Liverpool 2: Champions League Laugher at Anfield

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      That Real Madrid delivered another memorable Champions League victory was no surprise. It was the manner of Liverpool’s defeat that spoke volumes.LIVERPOOL, England — It took a while for the frustration, the anger and the hurt to bubble to the surface. For about an hour on Tuesday night, Liverpool’s fans had watched with grim forbearance as their team was expertly dismantled by Real Madrid.They urged on Jürgen Klopp’s players after they threw away a two-goal lead in the first half. They stood by them as Real Madrid made it 3-2 and then 4-2 and finally 5-2, a loss turning into a rout. They remained stoic as they witnessed the collapse of their season, as they endured the most chastening evening in Anfield’s illustrious European history.But then there was the passing: The passing was the final straw. As the game wound down, as the crowd started to thin out just a little, Real Madrid decided to indulge in a little game of keepaway. They slipped passes between, beside and around their bedraggled opponents. They offered them a glimpse of the ball and then spirited it away at the last moment.They maintained it for a minute or two, Liverpool’s players lolling and lagging as they dashed around in hopeless pursuit. It was an indignity too far. It is one thing being beaten — particularly by Real Madrid — and it is quite another being taunted. The crowd started to whistle, and then to jeer: at Real Madrid, at its own players, chasing at shadows, at this whole long, damned, miserable season.Andy Robertson and Liverpool won’t play their second leg in Madrid until March, but their Champions League is effectively over after Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Real Madrid won at Anfield does not count as a surprise of any sort. This is Real Madrid, after all, and this is the Champions League. A stirring Real Madrid recovery is part of the deal. To a large extent it is increasingly odd that anyone else bothers entering the competition.Carlo Ancelotti’s team has mastered the comeback, turned it into an art form, boiled it down to its very essence. En route to European glory last season, Real Madrid generally required the full span of a two-legged tie, up to and including extra time in the second leg, to stage the miraculous recovery that has become its calling card.The only change this season — on this evidence — is that it has streamlined the process to such an extent that it now takes no more than half an hour, with a break in the middle for a quick bite to eat.Far more striking than the fact of Liverpool’s defeat on Tuesday, then, was the manner of it. Somewhere deep inside this Liverpool team is the muscle memory of what it once was, and not all that long ago. It is only nine months, after all, since it played its third Champions League final in five years, Klopp sufficiently confident that the halcyon days would keep rolling that he advised his team’s fans — even in defeat — to book their hotel rooms for this year’s showpiece.For 15 minutes, it was possible to wonder if this stage, and this opponent, might be enough to stir those ghosts to life. Liverpool surged to an early lead, thanks to an inventive, audacious flick from Darwin Nuñez, and then doubled it when Thibaut Courtois forgot how to work his legs and presented the ball to Mohamed Salah. In between, Salah had wasted two more chances. Here, at last, were the flickers that Liverpool’s fans had been waiting months to see.Darwin Núñez’s goal after four minutes had the Anfield crowd on its feet.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd then the reverie suddenly evaporated and reality descended. Vinícius Júnior scored one goal, wonderfully, and then had a second presented to him by the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson. It had the effect of breaking the spell. The clock struck midnight. Éder Militão made it three. Karim Benzema had a shot deflected into the goal for four, and then danced through, his shoes soft and his touch sure, to make it five.Liverpool, suddenly, looked to be what it has been for much of the season: a mid-table Premier League team caught in the throes of an awkward, jarring transition. The difference, this time, was that it was being forced to play the European champion.Quite how Liverpool’s collapse has happened remains, even now, something of a mystery. Thousands of words have been dedicated in recent months in an attempt to understand how a team that was so painstakingly constructed, put together with such thought and expertise and precision, could come apart at the seams so quickly and so easily. How something so good could prove so ultimately fragile.There are concrete factors that certainly seem to have contributed. Injuries have not helped, of course, compounding a failure to upgrade the midfield. The effects of last season, in which Liverpool became the first English team to play every game in every competition for which it was eligible — winning two trophies, but neither of the prizes it most wanted — have lingered, both physically and psychologically.But then there are the intangible factors, the theoretical and the emotional strands, the charges that can only ever take the form of questions: Has Liverpool been too loyal to the core of Klopp’s team? Has upheaval behind the scenes, the departure of several key members of the staff, disrupted the harmony the club had worked so hard to foster? If so, has that had any effect on performances?Karim Benzema finished off Liverpool with goals 12 minutes apart.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhatever the causes, the effects were all there, on the field, against a team that less than a year ago Liverpool could — largely rightly — consider its equal. When Klopp, upon reviewing last year’s final for the first time this week, commented that it was a game his team could have won, he was not simply presenting a brave face.Now, though, the gulf is wide. The temptation is to focus on the major mistakes — Alisson’s misjudgment for the second goal, the stationary marking for the third, Joe Gomez’s body shape for the fourth — but more telling are the little things.It is the speed with which Liverpool passes the ball, just a touch slower than before. It is the spaces between its players, a little too large, and the cohesion between its lines, now ever so slightly ragged. It is in the intensity of its press, somehow diluted and dimmed.Each element feeds on the others, eroding confidence and sapping purpose, until the whole system seems fractured beyond repair. And it was at that point that Real Madrid, with that air of total self-assurance, started to pass the ball around, Liverpool’s players powerless to stop them, their fall from the rarefied heights they once shared with these opponents complete. More

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      Champions League Overcrowding Was a ‘Near Miss’ for UEFA

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      Independent investigators concluded it was only a “matter of chance” that the dangerous scenes at last year’s Liverpool-Real Madrid final did not lead to deaths.A monthslong independent investigation into the dangerous overcrowding that jeopardized the safety of thousands of fans at last year’s Champions League final in Paris has placed the blame squarely on European soccer’s governing body, which organized the game. That no lives were lost in the crushes outside the stadium gates, the investigators’ harshly critical report concluded, was only “a matter of chance.”The investigation, which included dozens of interviews and the review of hours of video shot by fans, concluded that senior officials of the governing body, UEFA, made numerous mistakes in preparations for the showcase final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, creating a situation in which planning flaws were neither detected nor quickly addressed, and then tried to shift responsibility onto fans for the congestion that had put their safety — and potentially their lives — at risk.While the report, which runs to more than 200 pages, assigned part of the responsibility for the chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France to various other bodies, including the French police and the French soccer federation, it said the event’s owner, UEFA, “bears primary responsibility for failures which almost led to disaster.”Liverpool fans bore the brunt of the danger as poor organization, in addition to local transport strikes, led to dangerous crushes in which thousands of fans were left penned inside fencing and with nowhere to go. The report said the danger was exacerbated by the indiscriminate and widespread use of tear gas by police officers before the game, the first Champions League final featuring full crowds after two years of pandemic restrictions.And the report left little doubt that the day could have turned deadly, drawing a direct comparison to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which policing mistakes produced a crush inside an English stadium that eventually led to the deaths of 97 people.“In the judgment of the panel,” the investigators wrote in comparing the two incidents, “the different outcomes were a matter of chance.”Yet, even as the scenes outside the Stade de France were still unfolding, investigators said, efforts were made to blame supporters for the chaos. Aware of the troubling scenes outside, UEFA announced the start of the game would be delayed because of the “late” arrival of supporters. “This claim was objectively untrue,” the report said.Later, French officials, including the interior minister Gérald Darmanin, blamed English fans for what Darmanin said was a “massive, industrial and organized fraud of fake tickets.” The report, commissioned by UEFA, found there was little evidence to back up the claim.UEFA and its most senior officials, notably Martin Kallen, the head of events, were singled out for overall responsibility for what one of the report’s main authors described as a “near miss.”UEFA blamed late-arriving fans when it delayed the kickoff of the final, a claim that the report found was “objectively untrue.”Getty Images“There was contributory fault from other stakeholders, but UEFA were at the wheel,” the report said.The publication of the final report came several months after it was anticipated; UEFA officials had first suggested it would be completed by September. The investigation involved hundreds of interviews and the analysis of footage, including many hours of video shot by supporters caught up in the crushes as they tried to enter the stadium. Dangerous bottlenecks, packed entrances and ramps, and tear gas employed by the police — sometimes sprayed indiscriminately at groups of supporters that included children and disabled fans — added to the chaos.“Unfortunately, the enthusiasm around the game rapidly turned into a real ‘near miss’ which was harmful to a significant number of fans from both clubs,” the report said. “This should never have happened at such an important sporting event, and it is unacceptable that it took place at the heart of the European continent.”The use of the term “near miss,” the panel said, was deliberate and agreed upon by all stakeholders interviewed to mean “an event almost turns into a mass-fatality catastrophe.”The report raised new concerns about security preparations for next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris, with its authors describing events around the Champions League final as a “wake-up call” for Olympic organizers. The panel said evidence collected from Michel Cadot, the French government official responsible for major sporting events, suggested there remained “a misconception about what actually happened and a complacency regarding what needs to change.”An earlier investigation into the Champions League final by two French parliamentary committees had also assigned blame to the authorities, labeling the dangerous overcrowding a “fiasco” caused by a combination of faulty coordination, bad planning and errors by the authorities responsible for organization and safety.The new report offers a fuller view of how the day unfolded, painting a picture of organizational chaos, with decisions taken by individuals without adequate knowledge of what was happening in real time. It said UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, was asked to make a call on delaying the kickoff even though he had not been in the match control room or in contact with security officials; he had been in a meeting with the King of Spain in a V.I.P. area.French policing came under scrutiny after the final. Paris will host next year’s Summer Olympics. Christophe Ena/Associated PressTaken in its totality, the report attempts to show how UEFA delegated or removed itself from any oversight of the security operation at the stadium to such an extent that it “marginalized” its own safety and security unit, headed by Zeljko Pavlica, a confidant of Ceferin’s.Fans arriving at the stadium were greeted by battalions of French riot police, dressed in protective clothing and with supplies that included batons, shields and pepper spray.“The police, unchallenged and accepted without question by other stakeholders, adopted a model aimed at a nonexistent threat from football hooligans,” the panel wrote, adding, “Ultimately the failures of this approach culminated in a policing operation that deployed tear gas and pepper spray: weaponry which has no place at a festival of football.”UEFA had faced criticism about the composition of its panel, with concerns raised about its neutrality after the appointment of a former education and sports minister in Portugal, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, as chairman. Brandão had previously worked closely with Tiago Craveiro, who was hired last year as a senior adviser to Ceferin.To counter those claims, UEFA added more members to its panel, including its former security head, Kenny Scott, and fan representatives, including Amanda Jacks, an official at the Britain-based Football Supporters Federation. Jacks informed Brandão on Monday that she had accepted an unspecified position at Liverpool and would be starting her new role in March.The report will make uncomfortable reading for UEFA, with some of its top officials now under scrutiny for their actions both on the day and in the planning for the biggest game on the European soccer calendar.“Senior officials at the top of UEFA allowed this to happen, even though the shortcomings of its model were widely known at senior management level,” the report said. More