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      The Champions League’s Drama Is Worth Savoring, and Saving

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      The Champions League’s late-stage drama is a feature, not a bug. Let’s hope no one messes that up.The nights happen so often now that the possibility they are a coincidence can be safely discounted. They occur with such startling regularity that they do not really count as rare, not anymore. They still possess the texture and the echo of an exception, but by this stage they are better thought of as part of the rule. They are a feature, not a quirk in the code.There have been 26 games so far in the latter stages of this season’s Champions League. A conservative estimate would suggest that seven of those games — just a little over a quarter, if you prefer your information in fractions — qualify for inclusion in the competition’s ever-growing list of classics.They have not all been identical. Villarreal’s dissection of Juventus was thrilling in a wholly different way than Real Madrid’s stirring comeback against Paris St.-Germain. Benfica’s chaotic, innocent draw with Ajax had little in common with the grit and sinew of Manchester City’s elimination of Atlético Madrid. That they have not followed a pattern, though, does not mean they are not part of one.This is, now, what the knockout stages of the Champions League do. It has been that way for at least five years, if not longer: Barcelona’s 6-1 defeat of P.S.G. in 2017 is as viable a candidate as any for the era’s starting point. After that, the caution and the fear that had characterized this competition for most of the first decade of this century was jettisoned, replaced by an apparently unbreakable commitment to abandon and audacity and ambition. Games that had once been cautious, cagey, cynical were now, instead, reliably conducted in a sort of dopamine-soaked reverie.It has reached the stage where it is possible to wonder at what point the Champions League will run out of ways to top itself, when we all become numb to its wonder. And yet, somehow, it keeps mining new seams, discovering new heights. It was hard to envisage how the tournament might improve on that victory by Real Madrid over Lionel Messi and Neymar and Kylian Mbappé — but sure enough, a month or so later, there were the very same Real players, spread-eagled on the turf of the Bernabéu, trying to process how a game could contain two comebacks, one following in the wake of another.It may be the recency bias talking, but it felt like even that paled in comparison with what the first of the semifinals produced. Real Madrid was involved again — that does not, it is fair to say, appear to be a coincidence — in a frenetic, inchoate, wholly baffling meeting with Manchester City. Real lost the game four times, and might have lost it many more times over, and yet escaped with both its reputation and its hopes of returning to the final for the first time since 2018 somehow, despite it all, enhanced.The drama doesn’t always feel great in the moment.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is worth at least attempting to consider what lies at the root of this shift. This is, after all, probably the first era in the seven decades or so of the European Cup where the latter stages have been regularly defined not by an inherent tautness, an anxiety over what might be lost, but by a euphoric, wild excitement about what there is to win.In part, that must be attributable to the sheer quality of stars on display, the fact that so many of the very best players in the world are now clustered together at just half a dozen or so clubs, the ones that have become accustomed to reaching this stage of the competition. Likewise, it seems obvious that the margins between these teams are now so fine that their encounters are inevitably volatile. The slightest shift in momentum or belief, the smallest error, the most imperceptible tactical switch can have seismic consequences, one way or the other.The format helps, too. UEFA, led as ever by the booming voices of its leading clubs, has been considering the idea of abolishing home-and-home semifinals in favor of a single, weeklong “festival of soccer,” held in one city, leaving the semifinals dispensed with in only 90 minutes. By UEFA’s standards, this is not a particularly bad idea. Single-leg semifinals increase jeopardy. That is, broadly, to be encouraged. Collecting all the later drama in one city offers a chance to create a carnival-style event, a miniature tournament within a tournament, a defining climax to the European campaign. On the most basic level, it is hard to deny that it would be exciting.There are logistical complications, of course. Only a handful of cities in Europe could play host to four teams at the same time. (So much for spreading the big occasions around.) It seems an idea designed to be transported outside of the continent: That is less than ideal, too. It would most likely lead to the gouging of fans, based on the incontrovertible logic that everything leads to the gouging of fans. And it would, most damaging of all, remove at a stroke the biggest game that any club can host on its own territory.Villarreal kept the result close in Liverpool, which might have been its aim.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut the most compelling argument against change is that, of all the things in soccer that could do with a tweak or an upgrade or a wholesale overhaul, the Champions League semifinals are pretty much at the bottom of the list. The knockout stages of the Champions League have consistently caused jaws to drop and breath to be taken for half a decade. The current structure strikes just the right balance between risk and reward, suffering and salvation, and it is all carried out against a succession of fiercely partisan, deliriously raucous backdrops. That is part of its magic, too.Increasingly, though, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that these spectacles represent the natural culmination and sole benefit of the yawning chasm that separates the game’s elite and everyone else. It seems quite likely that they are a product of soccer’s superclub era.In domestic competition, those teams that are staples of the later rounds of the Champions League are so overwhelmingly superior to most of their opponents that whatever threat they face tends to be fleeting and cursory. Teams overmatched for talent and resources pack their defenses and hang on for dear life; that, after all, is all they can do.That is what happens if the power balance is off in the Champions League, too. Consider this week’s other semifinal, Liverpool’s relatively serene defeat of Villarreal. That, certainly, was not a classic. It felt, instead, far more akin to the matches that account for the vast majority of games between the elite and everyone else in Europe’s five major leagues: one team trying to contain and confound, another trying to pick a way through, the only real question being whether the favorite will take its opportunities when they inevitably emerge.But then how could it be anything else, when one of the teams had been constructed on a comparative shoestring? What other choice did Unai Emery, Villarreal’s coach, have? Command his players to try to match Liverpool and watch them lose badly, all in the name of entertainment? To scold Villarreal for failing to deliver a spectacle is to misunderstand what, precisely, the team was there to do, to forget the unbridgeable gap that lies between what we want a game to be and what the players on the field desire. Villarreal had not traveled to Liverpool to make friends.Smile, Étienne Capoue: You and Villarreal aren’t done yet.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is, of course, relatively rare to have a team like Villarreal in the semifinals, or even the quarters. The latest stages are populated more or less exclusively by teams generally used to taking what might be thought of as the active role in games, rather than the reactive. Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and Liverpool and Manchester City and all the rest — right down to Benfica and Ajax, outside the five major leagues — are used to asking questions, not answering them. The only time their mettle is tested is when they encounter a true peer, a fellow oligarch, and the time they do that most often — when it matters, at least — is later on in the Champions League.The fireworks that follow, with gleeful predictability, are a result of those teams being taken — of them taking each other — out of their comfort zones, finding themselves enduring the sort of heat and light they are used to inflicting. That is what fires the spectacle, what has turned these springtime school nights into compulsive viewing, what has made the knockout rounds of the Champions League soccer’s most reliable forge of wonder.Taking FlightNow playing a starring role in Los Angeles: Angel City F.C.Stephen Brashear/USA Today Sports, via ReutersConsidering it has not yet so much as taken to the field for a competitive game, there is a remarkable sense of anticipation surrounding Angel City F.C., one of two expansion teams in the National Women’s Soccer League this year.In part, of course, that is probably connected to the stardust of the club’s ownership consortium, its slick branding, its considerable presence on social media. Few teams have managed to attract so much attention in so little time, the meaning of which is explored in detail in this excellent piece by my colleague Allison McCann.Mostly, though, the success of Angel City’s launch is testament to the appetite for elite women’s soccer in Southern California. Nearly half a million people watched the broadcast of the team’s preseason encounter with the San Diego Wave a few weeks ago. The team already claims six official supporters’ groups. Some 15,000 season tickets have been sold — not bad going for a team that does not yet have a permanent home.It is not to diminish that achievement to say that, from a European perspective, that raises a fascinating question: How do you come to support a team before it exists?It is an article of faith, here, that fandom cannot be instantaneously generated. Fandom is something that is passed down, handed on, somewhere between a religion and a virus: To support a team is to understand its history and its lore, to identify yourself as a member of a longstanding tribe. It is an expression of solidarity with a geographical place, a social demographic, a pre-existing community.Barcelona’s women, relative newcomers at their century-old club, have a built-in base of support.Joan Monfort/Associated PressThat is why, as the women’s game has grown in Europe, the instinct has been to attach women’s clubs to men’s equivalents, partly in the hope that loyalty might be immediately transferred, partly for financial security and brand recognition, and partly because a team called Manchester Spirit, or equivalent, one that played in red and sky-blue stripes, would alienate an entire city before it had even started.And so it is anathema to think that 15,000 people can have such deep-rooted feelings for something that, until March, was entirely theoretical.That is not to doubt the sincerity of that attachment, to assume it is artificial. Rather, the phenomenon calls into question whether fandom works as those of us who live in Europe assume it does. Perhaps it is a more conscious process than we like to tell ourselves. Perhaps it is a choice, rather than a compulsion. After all, more than a century ago, that is precisely what happened here. Teams were conjured into existence, and people went to watch, and to cheer, and to support.(Bumper) CorrespondenceYou may remember, a few weeks ago — back before I skipped a correspondence section in order to have a few days’ unwarranted vacation — we had an email from a reader named Seamus Malin.“I’m curious if he is the former television commentator,” wrote Douglas Goodwin. “The Seamus Malin to whom I refer was the one and only American — albeit with an Irish accent — voice on television my father, my grandfather and I could tolerate. Often we watched games not featuring him with the volume off. Seamus Malin was a gift, and if he is in contact with you, please pass along my heartfelt thanks.”He was not alone in making that inquiry. Not having watched ESPN in my younger days because, well, we did not have ESPN in Britain then, the name did not immediately leap out at me. But it clearly stirred something in many of you, all of whom wanted to pass their thanks along to Seamus. I’m delighted, as ever, to serve as a conduit.Stop us if you’ve seen this photo before.Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters“Your last column was needlessly equivocal about why the Bundesliga is so boring,” S.K. Gupta feels. “There is only one reason and that is the 50+1 rule. By precluding outside investment, no one can challenge the status quo. If the Bundesliga wants to become a genuine sporting competition with some uncertainty about the end result, they must make their clubs attractive to investors who would invest funds to build a competitive team.”There have been times, I will admit, when I have been tempted to come to the same conclusion. The Bundesliga acting as Bayern Munich’s fief is, I think, a problem for German soccer.But I’m not convinced that breaking the bond between team and fans is the solution. I suspect that particular road leads to the Premier League, where, instead of one rich team, you end up with a cartel of four or five or six, monopolizing not only the title but all of the other prizes, too. German fans cherish their culture. Change is necessary, but not at any cost.David Hunter is closer to my way of thinking. “You didn’t mention the obvious solution: a salary cap,” he wrote. “American football has one, and there are rarely routine winners season after season.” This is true, of course, but there is one giant hitch: a salary cap could only work if it was agreed to by clubs in every league in Europe, rather than just one. And that prospect is, unfortunately, an extremely distant one.Finally, let’s go back a couple of weeks. “If we, the fans, decide what matters in football, it’s worth noting that the viewing public and teams’ owners have very different ideas of the concept of risk,” wrote Alex McMillan. “Fans cherish risk: It’s what makes winning anything worth something. The owners of the wealthiest clubs detest it: It threatens their billion-dollar investment.”This is, to me, the crux of the issue over soccer’s future. The game thrives on risk. It is the running of it and the taking of it that makes it appealing. But, yes, that is diametrically opposed to what owners want and — if we are being kind — what sustainable businesses need. Almost every debate about where the game goes, or what it must do, boils down to that tension. How it plays out will define what shape soccer takes. More

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      Manchester City Beats Real Madrid in Champions League Semifinal

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      Manchester City had its way with Real Madrid — sort of. In the game’s aftermath, it was hard to shake the feeling that things had gone the other way.MANCHESTER, England — First thing Wednesday morning, Pep Guardiola’s staff will deliver to the Manchester City manager a meticulously annotated report of his team’s Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid. At roughly the same time, Carlo Ancelotti, his counterpart in the Spanish capital, will receive something very similar.Those dossiers will contain brief snatches of video, each highlighting some key tactical detail. There will be photos, too, offering a snapshot of a scarcely perceptible flaw in a player’s positioning or an expanse of the field left exposed or a darting run left unconsummated. There will, perhaps, be giant arrows in some lurid shade. There will certainly be reams of statistics.Guardiola and Ancelotti will settle down and comb through them, panning for whatever seam of wisdom they might find, mining deep into the detail in the hope of finding some kernel, some insight that might prove the difference when they play again next week. And as they do it, they will know, deep down, that it is all absolutely, fundamentally, unavoidably pointless.There is no hidden explanation, buried deep in a screed of numbers or encoded in high resolution pixels, for how Manchester City managed to beat Real Madrid yet ended the evening feeling like it had lost. Or for how it finished with four goals and the sensation that it should have had half a dozen more, or how it landed a succession of knockout blows only to find its opponent still standing there, smiling, complaining only of the mildest headache.Pep Guardiola had plenty of reason for concern during a win in which his team failed to capitalize on several opportunities.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesThe raw numbers of the game are not a magic eye puzzle; they are barely even a Rorschach test. No matter how long and hard you stare at them, they will not suddenly become an image, clear and sharp, of something that bears analysis and interpretation.They will not tell Guardiola how his team could be so obviously, so vastly superior by every available metric and in every conceivable way — slicker in possession and more inventive and creative and youthful and dynamic — and yet wholly incapable of shaking Madrid from its tail.And they will not enlighten Ancelotti as to how his team, somehow, remains alive and fighting in this semifinal, with a chance over 90 minutes in front of its own fans, baying and roaring, to defy all human logic and make the Champions League final. They will certainly not tell him how Real Madrid manages to keep doing this, over and over again, seeming to draw strength as it comes ever closer to the edge, continually finding the will and the wit to conjure its curious, self-perpetuating magic.Guardiola himself had acknowledged that before the game, half in jest, suggesting that there was not a vast amount of point in conducting the usual, instinctive analysis of Real Madrid because Ancelotti’s team is, by its very nature, so chimerical. He meant it, most likely, as a reflection on the virtuosity of Karim Benzema and Luka Modric, the ability of some of the finest players of their generation to bend a game to their will, but it sounded just a little like he was saying Real Madrid does not make sense.At times it felt like things could be far worse for Thibaut Courtois and Real Madrid, but several close calls ended up missing.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe is, of course, too respectful — even of Real Madrid, the club that stood as his archenemy for the first four decades of his career — to say that out loud, but his experience at the Etihad would not have contradicted him.Real was beaten within 10 minutes: two goals down, ruthlessly exposed, looking suddenly like the expensive collection of gifted but ill-matched individuals that all right-thinking people dismissed them as about four Champions League titles ago. David Alaba, his entire career spent among the elite, appeared to have been replaced by some callow ingénue. Toni Kroos appeared to age several decades with every passing minute.And then, from nowhere, Ferland Mendy slung in a cross, the sort that comes more in hope than expectation, and Benzema planted his foot and shifted his weight and scored, even though it was not immediately clear whether both the human body and the laws of physics are designed to work like that.No matter. City was still slicing Madrid apart at will. Riyad Mahrez hit the post. Phil Foden had one cleared off the line. A beat later, Foden converted an artful, clipped cross to restore City’s cushion, to relieve the tension swaddling the Etihad.The ball had come from the foot of Fernandinho, a creaking central midfielder reborn for the evening — in extenuating circumstances — as a marauding fullback. His rejuvenation lasted two minutes. Guardiola was still celebrating when Vinicius slipped past his makeshift opponent, sprinted half the length of the field, and slipped the ball past Éderson.Bernardo Silva and City had their moments to celebrate on Tuesday, but there were fewer of them than there could have been.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersCity came again, Bernardo Silva dispensing with all nuance and intricacy and simply kicking the ball, as hard as he could, his shot flashing past Thibaut Courtois. Benzema turned away, grinning ruefully, as though he could not quite believe the holes from which he has to retrieve his teammates.On anyone else, it might have looked like an admission of defeat, a final acquiescence to fate. But it is Real Madrid, and it is Benzema, and it is the Champions League, so obviously what happened was that Aymeric Laporte inadvertently — but inarguably — handled the ball in his own penalty area, and Benzema stood up and chipped a shot, languidly and confidently, straight down the middle of Éderson’s goal.Guardiola sat on an icebox in the technical area, his fingers steepling against his forehead, in horrified awe, as if trying to impose some reason on it all. It is a thankless task. This game did not make sense. Its outcome, the one that meant Real Madrid left Manchester with something more concrete than hope, with 90 minutes in front of a baying, willing Bernabeu between Ancelotti’s players and another Champions League final, did not make sense.There is no data point, no vignette, no piece of analysis that will adequately explain how Manchester City could beat Ancelotti’s team so comprehensively and yet leave with the tie poised so delicately. Real Madrid does not make sense, not in the Champions League, and all you can do is allow yourself to be washed away by it. More

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      European Super League Fallout, Now in a New York Court

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      A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.For Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA, the Super League fight never fades away.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockThe implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work. More

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      Real Madrid Edges Chelsea to Reach Champions League Semifinals

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      A curving assist by Luka Modric and an extra-time header by Karim Benzema carried Real Madrid back to the Champions League semifinals.MADRID — The noise rose and swelled with every second that ticked, changing timbre and tone as it did so. It started with whistles, desperate and urgent, only to turn into something closer to a roar, formless and elemental, filled with angst and anticipation, as if the sound itself could ward off any more suffering.By the time the final whistle blew, it was so loud that it seemed to be bubbling up from the ground or rumbling down from the sky. Somehow, though, that proved to be the prelude: The release was still to come, as Real Madrid’s and Chelsea’s players collapsed to the turf, the victors on the day defeated and the beaten triumphant over two legs, and the Bernabeu crackled and shook.This is not the first time a Champions League game has ended like this, of course: The spectacular comeback and the breathtaking twist now rank as this competition’s calling card, a feature so regular that it is remarkable, in a way, that every time it happens it somehow retains its capacity to surprise.It is not even like it is a rarity here. The sight of Real Madrid’s players, spread-eagle on the field in a state of pure, blissful exhaustion, having somehow turned certain defeat into a triumph actually happens with alarming frequency. It happened just a month ago or so, against Paris St.-Germain, for a start.This is just what the Champions League does: produce evenings in which Villarreal, a team bobbing just above mid-table in Spain, can knock out Bayern Munich and still find itself overshadowed. It is just what Real Madrid does: flirts with disappointment, toys with disaster, and then flicks a switch and emerges victorious.Even by those standards, though, Real Madrid’s draining, stirring, thrilling defeat of Chelsea — on aggregate (5-4), if not on the evening itself (a 3-2 loss) — managed to be more draining, more stirring, more thrilling than most.Chelsea’s three goals had briefly given it hope it could reverse its first-leg deficit.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThere was not just one comeback, after all, but two, stitched together in the same marathon game: Chelsea overcame the two-goal lead Real Madrid had established in London last week, seemingly booking its place in the semifinals in the process, and then Real Madrid, beaten and cowed, rose from the ashes to snatch it away.Everything turned on a single pass. For 80 minutes, Real’s fans had done nothing but suffer. They had arrived at the Bernabeu in high spirits, drifting up the Paseo de la Castellana filled with absolute confidence that Carlo Ancelotti’s team could get the job done. It is Real Madrid in the Champions League, after all. That is just how these things work.It lasted all of 15 minutes, pierced in a flash by Mason Mount’s opening goal. The Bernabeu became unsettled, uneasy. Real Madrid seemed to freeze, as if arguably the most experienced, most grizzled team in Europe was not quite sure what the protocol was in this situation. Chelsea smelled blood.Just after halftime, Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger scored — a simple goal, a header from a corner, as if all of this is quite easy — and the tie was level. An oppressive, fretful silence descended, the sound of 61,000 people waking up and remembering that, oh yes, this Real Madrid team is quite old now, isn’t it, and it’s been through a lot, and it’s in need of a refresh.There was a brief flicker of hope when Marcos Alonso’s goal was ruled out for the slightest of handballs, but it proved illusory. A few minutes later, Timo Werner skated and skidded around the edge of the six-yard box and bundled the ball over the line. The jeers rained down, then, just for a moment. A few people headed to the exits. A few people always head to the exits. At this stage, everyone really should know better.Rodrygo’s goal, off a curling pass from Modric, set the stage for yet more drama in extra time.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThat was the mood, then, when Luka Modric got the ball, just inside Chelsea’s half, with 10 minutes to play. There was, to the naked and untrained eye, no option ahead of him; just Rodrygo, the young Brazilian wing, racing off on the other side of the field, dutifully tracked by a defender. Modric had no choice but to turn back, to change the angle of attack, to build again.Or, it turned out, he could sweep a ball with the outside of his right foot just beyond the Chelsea defense and straight onto Rodrygo’s boot, inside the area, timed perfectly for him to steer a shot past Edouard Mendy without breaking stride. The pass did not exist. Modric found it anyway, and in doing so, Real Madrid found its belief.That goal took the game to extra time, giving the home team, the impending Spanish champion, a reprieve. Real Madrid does not waste those.Karim Benzema, scorer of all three of his team’s goals in the first leg, headed Real Madrid into the lead on aggregate with 96 minutes gone. By that stage, all sense of order had fractured, all thought of planning or reason or strategy cast to the winds.Karim Benzema scored four times in two games against Chelsea.Juan Medina/ReutersChelsea threw all of its players forward. Real Madrid’s substitute left back, Marcelo, ended up playing as a forward, for reasons that even he did not really understand. There were frights: a shot from Jorginho, a header from Kai Havertz. The whole evening, the whole campaign, seemed to hang by a thread.All the while, the noise was building, yearning at first and then impatient and finally righteous and demanding. It became a place and a crowd crying to be put out of their misery. Nobody heard the whistle. Nobody could hear the whistle.They knew it was over only when they saw the players on the turf, all the breath drawn from their bodies, their legs suddenly buckling, a conclusion at once impossible and inevitable. They should be used to this by now, really. This is how it always ends, at Real Madrid, after all. It just does not always end like this. More

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      Karim Benzema Carries Real Madrid Over Chelsea

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      Three goals confirm what should have been obvious long ago: Benzema is Real Madrid’s brain, and its heart.LONDON — Luka Modric has, by this stage, seen pretty much all there is to see. He has won four Champions League titles. He has played in a World Cup final. He has spent a decade at Real Madrid, embedded among some of the finest players of his generation. He is one of the finest players of his generation. He is, most likely, neither easily impressed nor easily surprised.A little more than 20 minutes into the first leg of Real Madrid’s Champions League quarterfinal against Chelsea on Wednesday, Modric saw something that did both. He was standing on the edge of Chelsea’s penalty area, admiring the flight of the cross he had just delivered. He would have been pleased with it: a deft, clipped number, swirling away from Edouard Mendy’s goal, and toward his teammate Karim Benzema.An eye as keen as Modric’s, though, would have recognized that the trajectory of the ball and the position of the player were not quite in sync. Benzema was a little too far forward, or the cross was a little too far back. It was out by only an inch or so, but few players treasure precision more than Modric; these things matter.Still, all was not lost. Benzema had options. The most obvious one was to try to steer the ball low to Mendy’s right. Or, perhaps, he could try to replicate the header that had opened the scoring a couple of minutes earlier, one of such force that it had flashed past Mendy before he had chance to recognize it. In a pinch, Benzema might even have time to bring the ball down, and play from there.What Modric could not have anticipated was what followed. Benzema, leaning ever so slightly backward, nodded the ball gently, almost softly, back across Mendy’s goal. It hung in the air for what seemed like an age, drifting toward the far post. There was a moment of silence as Mendy, Modric and everyone else inside Stamford Bridge waited to see where it would land.It nestled, at last, inside the post. As Benzema turned away, his smile broad and his palms open, to race toward Real Madrid’s fans, Modric still seemed to be frozen. He waited a beat, maybe two, before jumping, just a little, into the air, his arms aloft, a grin of disbelief on his face. Just occasionally, it turns out, Karim Benzema can even surprise Luka Modric.Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesPeter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersBenzema’s header for Madrid’s second goal looped over and then out of reach of Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Edouard Mendy.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse, via Ikimages/Afp Via Getty ImagesIn that, at least, he is not alone. The arc of Benzema’s career is, in truth, a little misunderstood. It is not quite right to present him as a late bloomer, a flickering talent who waited until the final few years of his career to deliver on his longstanding promise, to learn how to make the most of his gifts.Benzema has always been obviously, lavishly, absurdly talented; he was, after all, only 19 years old when Jean-Pierre Papin — no mean striker himself, in his day — declared that Benzema possessed the dynamism of (the Brazilian) Ronaldo, the imagination of Ronaldinho, the elegance of Thierry Henry and the ruthlessness of David Trézéguet.By the time he was 21, Benzema had come close to signing for Barcelona, and completed a move to Real Madrid. He would spend the first decade of his career in Spain scoring — on average — a goal every couple of games, the traditional watermark for elite strikers, and creating many more. Zinedine Zidane, his coach for a considerable portion of that time, variously described him as “the best” and a “total footballer.”That he was not the star of the show, of course, takes no great explanation: He was playing only a few yards from one of the greatest strikers of all time, a forward who made scoring one in every two look quaint and old-fashioned and actually, when you thought about it, something of a letdown.Benzema was perfectly happy about that. He willingly sacrificed his own strengths, his own ambitions, to help his teammate maximize his. In doing so, he ensured that no player, arguably, more than him suffered quite so much from the redefinition of the possible that marked the era of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.The golden autumn that Benzema has enjoyed, then, since Ronaldo’s departure in 2018, is best thought of as a form of optical illusion: It is not that he shines any brighter than before, but that the blazing torch that for so long drowned every other point of light has departed. It is only now that it is possible to see Benzema in high definition.What has emerged is an uncanny impression of the player that Papin described all those years ago. Benzema has become — has always been, most likely — a complete center forward, an entire attack made flesh, and yet even that undersells him. He is the player who makes this Real Madrid, aging and somewhat patchwork, a complete team.The proof of that is simple. A couple of weeks ago, in his absence, Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid was overwhelmed on home soil by a resurgent Barcelona. That night, as it suffered a 4-0 defeat and the Bernabeu jeered and whistled its heroes, Real Madrid looked like what it was supposed to be: a team in the grip of an awkward and uneasy transition from one era to the next, half comprising a team that had had its day and half comprising a side awaiting its chance.On either side of that disappointment, with Benzema in the team, Real Madrid has overpowered an admittedly complicit Paris St.-Germain and now — more impressively, given the French team’s penchant for self-immolation — beaten Chelsea, the reigning European champion, on its own turf. On both occasions, Benzema has not just scored all three goals, he has been Madrid’s brain and its heart, its focal point and its cutting edge.He is, almost single-handedly, a guarantee of Real Madrid’s continued European relevance. Ancelotti will, now, be confident of helping his team to a second straight semifinal in the Spanish capital next week — though he would doubtless disagree with the assessment of his Chelsea counterpart, Thomas Tuchel, that the tie was over — so long as Benzema is present. He is the one who makes it all work. Maybe that should not be a surprise. Maybe he has always been the one who makes it all work. It is just that we have only started to notice it now. More

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      Real Madrid Rally Leaves P.S.G. Chasing Goals and Ghosts

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      Karim Benzema’s second-half hat trick delivered a familiar disappointment to a star-studded French champion.MADRID — Karim Benzema could not have known, not consciously, what he was doing. It all happened too quickly, too chaotically, to be anything other than instinctual. He was standing on the edge of the Paris St.-Germain box. The ball slipped through a thicket of players. It was at his feet. He jabbed out a foot, a flash of movement, a tic, a twitch. And then everything melted around him.Benzema raced off to the corner of the Santiago Bernabéu, its remodeling still a work in progress, where the new is slowly emerging from the old. His Real Madrid teammates sprinted from all directions to join him, to swarm him, to swallow him. David Alaba grabbed a plastic folding chair and brandished it above his head. The stands above writhed and shook, the crowd rendered delirious by witnessing the impossible.Not quite 20 minutes earlier, Real Madrid had been out of the Champions League. As good as gone, anyway. The team that prides itself as the Kings of Europe — as a banner unfurled by the club’s ultras before the game put it — looked old and tired, caught in the megawatt glare of P.S.G.’s star power.It was not just that Kylian Mbappé had scored, extending the French side’s lead to two goals on aggregate; it was that he had seen two more disallowed for offside, one of them the sort of moment only the true greats can conjure, somehow leaving Thibaut Courtois, Real Madrid’s goalkeeper, sprawling on the grass despite not even touching the ball.Mbappé’s every move flickered with menace, fizzed with energy. Éder Militao, the defender tasked with shadowing him, is no slouch, but he had spent much of the evening heaving for air, staring at the Frenchman’s heels. Neymar, too, was starting to drift and to dance, picking holes and pulling strings. For an hour, one team looked like the future, and the other like the past.The Bernabéu sensed it, too. Half the stadium remains scarred by engineering work, but the club had found a way to cram in 61,000 fans, its largest crowd in two years. They had gathered hours beforehand, lighting flares and throwing firecrackers on the streets running from the Paseo de la Castellana, bravado erasing the doubts and the fears.Has Kylian Mbappé played his last Champions League match for P.S.G.?Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey had found it within themselves to applaud Mbappé when his name was announced — they might be seeing more of him, after all — but this was not what they had come to see. Real Madrid is not supposed to be the foil for someone else’s exhibition. The grumbles and the groans, muted at first, grew louder with every P.S.G. pass.And then, from nowhere, everything changed. Gianluigi Donnarumma dawdled on the ball; Benzema shoved him aside. The ball fell to Vinicius Junior, who returned it to Benzema, a few yards from goal. Suddenly, Real Madrid had a glimmer. In this competition, a glimmer is all anyone needs.The knockout stages of the Champions League have, in recent years, made a habit of producing the unthinkable; it happens so frequently now that the only conclusion is that the spectacular is hard-wired into the competition’s underlying code. Through some combination of factors — the high stakes, pressure and critical mass of talent — it has become the most fertile breeding ground imaginable for the spectacular.Nobody is immune. It has happened to Ajax, Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid itself over the years. But whether it is through correlation or causation, it does seem to happen to both Paris St.-Germain, and to Lionel Messi, rather more than might be expected.For P.S.G., that first goal from Benzema carried with it an echo of the failures that have marred its desperate, expensive attempts to win this competition: the ransacking of the Parc des Princes by Manchester United and, most of all, the 6-1 defeat to Barcelona in 2017, the game the club has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to forget.P.S.G., a Champions League finalist in 2020 and a semifinalist last season, will miss out on the trophy it covets most again.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMessi, too, seemed as if he had seen a ghost. He was present, after all, for Barcelona’s collapses in Rome in 2018 and at Anfield in 2019; he was on the field the day the greatest club team in history succumbed, 8-2, to Bayern Munich in 2020. He had been powerless, then, and he seemed powerless now.He had, in truth, been a peripheral figure for much of the game, flickering to life only occasionally, overshadowed even when P.S.G. ran rampant by the vibrancy and the youthfulness of Mbappé. As soon as Real Madrid scored and the Bernabéu roared, though, he seemed to sink from view completely, a callow and diminished figure, the greatest force of agency soccer has ever seen apparently resigned to his fate.When it came, it hit him, and his teammates, like a wave, shifting the ground from beneath their feet in the space of no more than 120 seconds. Luka Modric, a veteran raging more effectively against the dying of the light, fed Benzema, who smuggled the ball past Donnarumma, drawing Madrid level on aggregate.The noise from the celebrations was still rattling around the Bernabéu when the ball broke for Benzema and he jabbed out a foot and he raced away, arms outstretched, into a squirming mass of white. Benzema’s third goal came two minutes after his second.Susana Vera/ReutersThere was, even then, still time for P.S.G., for the most expensive squad in the history of soccer to find a goal against a team that it had pinned against the ropes only a few minutes earlier, but it almost seemed too distressed, too dazed, to believe it.Mbappé, Neymar and Messi, that strike force of the best there was, the best there is and the best there might yet be, prowled the field forlorn. They knew how this ended: with lingering shots of them, heads bowed, eyes haunted, staring at the ground or gazing into the middle distance. By the time the final whistle blew, as Real Madrid’s players collapsed onto their backs and P.S.G.’s crumpled to their knees, Messi was nowhere to be seen. He had slipped from the field without a glance, without a word. It was possible, in the bedlam, to forget he had ever been there at all. More

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      The End of the Transfer Fee

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      With the vast majority of teams no longer able to pay stratospheric transfer fees, elite players are recalculating risk and reward on their terms.The two transfers that drew all the oxygen from the summer of 2021 were both monuments to the past.Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have dominated their sport for a generation. That they are both, now, approaching their autumns did not matter; as soon as the chance to to sign them arose, neither Paris St.-Germain nor Manchester United paused for thought. Any doubt at all about what they might do, how they might fit, was assuaged by what they had done.Amid all of the noise generated by those two moves — and two of the greatest players of all time changing clubs in the space of a few weeks will generate a lot of noise — another transfer, one that might come to be seen, in time, as a harbinger, rather faded into the background.That David Alaba had always wanted to play in Spain had long been an open secret. He had, over the course of 12 years at Bayern Munich, won everything there was to win: a couple of Champions Leagues, fistfuls of German titles, a Club World Cup or two. He was part of a Bayern team that won the domestic and international treble. Twice.It was at Bayern where Alaba became, for a time, the best left back on the planet. And when that was not enough, it was at Bayern where he became one of the world’s best central defenders, too. He was appointed captain of Austria’s national team. And, throughout, he was paid beyond handsomely to do it all, by a club that prides itself on the bond it establishes with its players.But Alaba harbored a desire, at some point in his career, to test himself at one of Spain’s twin titans, Real Madrid or Barcelona. Though it is slightly awkward to acknowledge it, now, it was never entirely clear if he had strong feelings on which he would prefer. By late 2020, though, it had become obvious he felt the time was right.Alaba and his representatives had been trying to agree to a new contract with Bayern for some time; his last deal in Bavaria was set to expire in the summer of 2021 — when he would be 29 — and the club wanted to tie him down for the remainder of his peak years. Negotiations, though, were achingly slow. Bayern felt Alaba’s salary demands were too high. They started to suspect there was a reason for that. In October, the club unilaterally withdrew from the talks. Alaba, one of Bayern’s crown jewels, would walk for nothing.In April 2021, he did just that. Despite interest from at least three Premier League teams, Alaba signed a five-year contract with Real Madrid. Reports in Germany at the time suggested it would be worth far more than Bayern had been willing to pay him: $75 million in total, by some estimates. He also stood to earn somewhere in the region of $25 million as a golden handshake.David Alaba: Madrid on his mind.Susana Vera/ReutersWhat Alaba had done, in an American context, was not especially unusual. He had, in effect, used free agency as a way of maximizing the value of what would be, in all likelihood, the most lucrative contract of his career. It was what LeBron James did first to join the Miami Heat, and then to sign for the Los Angeles Lakers. Kevin Durant did it. Albert Pujols did it. Everyone does it.In soccer, though, a star of Alaba’s caliber running a contract down has always been — if not quite a unicorn — the exception, rather than the rule.Quite why that pattern has held is open to interpretation. Players tend to sign long-term contracts, and clubs tend to want them to do so. It gives both sides security, after all. The player knows that their earning power is not dependent on a poorly-timed, lightning-strike injury. The club does not have to worry, every couple of years, about being held over a barrel by an agent.But that is not the only reason. Contract negotiations are rarely, despite appearances, about money; or, rather, they are always about money, just not about money as an end in itself. They are, invariably, about status. A player’s salary is a measure of how much they are appreciated by their club in relation to their teammates, and their peers. The same logic can be applied to the length of their contract. The longer the team will pay you, the more you must mean to it.The corollary to all of that is, of course, that teams tend not to want players to reach the end of their contracts. As a rule, should a valuable player enter the last 18 months — or two years, in some cases — of a deal and prove reluctant to commit to a new contract, the club will seek to sell. Put crudely, allowing a player to run down their contract is, in effect, ceding the economic initiative to the asset, rather than the investor.And yet, increasingly, across European soccer, that is precisely what is happening. Alaba, it seems, may have opened the floodgates. At P.S.G., Kylian Mbappé, the standard-bearer for the sport’s first post-Messi, post-Ronaldo generation, has made it so clear that he wants to leave for Real Madrid on a free transfer in six months that he has even written a comic book on the subject. Reports flutter around Europe every few weeks that a deal has even been agreed.Kylian Mbappé has made no secret of his desire to run out his P.S.G. contract and move to Real Madrid.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Chelsea, both Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen are out of contract soon and both have delayed signing new deals; Real Madrid has been mentioned as a suitor for the former, too.The saga over Paul Pogba’s contract at Manchester United seems to have been dragging on for so long that it might as well be mentioned in the cave paintings of Lascaux. His deal, finally — for the good of humanity — expires in the summer, too. It is perhaps less surprising that there does not seem to be any great rush to alter that particular situation.Mohamed Salah, meanwhile, has a little longer to run on his deal at Liverpool. Like Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino, Salah is committed to Anfield until 2023. But talks over a new contract have reached an impasse. He does not seem especially fazed by that fact. It is almost as if he knows that if a new contract does not materialize, he will be able to name his price to take his talents elsewhere.It is tempting to assume that the shift can be attributed, solely, to money, too. All of these players — even Christensen, the youngest of all of those mentioned — have earned enough during their careers to make sure their grandchildren never have to worry about income.They have sufficient financial security to tolerate the small risk that they will pick up an injury before they can land their windfall. The reward is worth it, after all: As Alaba found, a club that has not had to pay a transfer fee can be much more generous with its welcome package.That is not, though, the only factor. The financial landscape of European soccer has changed markedly over the last two years, a consequence not only of the coronavirus pandemic, but of the chronic mismanagement of the game’s elite teams during the wild, hedonistic years that preceded it.The vast majority of Europe’s major teams can no longer afford to pay stratospheric transfer fees, not if they can avoid it.It was telling that, Liverpool’s capture of Luis Díaz apart, the January trading period was characterized by clubs desperately trying to trim their expenses: Barcelona jettisoned Philippe Coutinho and tried to shift Ousmane Dembélé elsewhere; Arsenal offloaded its erstwhile captain, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, to Barcelona on a vastly reduced salary; even Juventus, which signed Dusan Vlahovic from Fiorentina, freed up space by handing off two players to Tottenham and, remarkably, Aaron Ramsey to the Scottish champion, Rangers.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s transfer fee suited Barcelona’s budget perfectly: zero.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNone of these clubs can afford to hand out the sort of sums that it would take to pry a player from the few of their peers that have weathered the storm well: the likes of P.S.G., Bayern and the vast majority of teams in the cash-soaked, bulletproof Premier League.Real Madrid, for example, might be able to pay Rüdiger $60 million over four years, plus a handsome arrival bonus (not least because that cost is absorbed over the length of his contract when it is entered onto the club’s books). It could not, though, pay him $60 million over four years, a handsome arrival bonus and give Chelsea $60 million, too.Even if it could, though, there is no reason to believe Chelsea would accept such an offer. The European champions are bankrolled by a Russian oligarch. There is no price point at which economic logic kicks in, because — like Manchester City and P.S.G. — Chelsea, for all that it attempts to be self-sufficient, does so out of inclination, not out of necessity. It does not have to be subject to economic logic if it does not want to be.For a player at any of those clubs that has emerged unscathed from the last couple of years to have access to a full suite of options on the market is, then, to reach the end of their contract, or near enough for their current team to blink. Their employers cannot be pushed, so they have to jump.This is, perhaps, the conclusion soccer has been waiting a quarter of a century to see. Twenty-five years ago, the Bosman ruling turned the sport on its head, enshrining in European law for the first time the idea that a player, when their contract was up, was in complete control of their destiny.That has been the case for more than a generation, but it is only now that the first few players seem to be breaking from tradition, exploring the full range of possibilities unleashed by that case.For the overwhelming majority of the rest, of course, that will not be possible: The young, the hopeful, the unsettled and the unwanted will all still have a price, just as they have always done. Some teams will have to sell. Others will be happy to buy.For the elite few, though, what was once the security of a long-term contract might soon come to be seen as restriction. Rocco Commisso, the outspoken owner of Fiorentina, had it right when he reflected on his club’s being forced to sell Vlahovic, its prize possession, to Juventus, its loathed rival: The player and his agents, Commisso said, had it in their minds from the start to run down the player’s contract, and to keep all the rewards for themselves.The age of free agency may now be upon us. It might, in time, come to be named the Alaba Model, in honor of the quiet transfer in the noisy summer of 2021 that started it all, the deal that offered a glimpse of the future while everyone was dawdling in the past.Cutting Out the Middle TierDele Alli, who might get to do more than warm up once he joins Everton.Peter Powell/ReutersJanuary had been a month of slumber, right until those last couple of days. It was only when Europe’s transfer deadline loomed that everyone suddenly sprang into action. Everton did the most Everton thing imaginable, signing two good players — Dele Alli and Donny van de Beek — who play in much the same position, therefore condemning at least one of them to failure.Tottenham, too, conformed to type, shipping out Tanguy Ndombélé and Giovani Lo Celso, as well as Alli, only to replace them with Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur, leaving Antonio Conte with a squad roughly exactly as good as the one he had before all that whirlwind activity, only $50 million lighter.Much more uplifting, of course, was the news of Christian Eriksen’s signing with Brentford. Eriksen, who will turn 30 on Feb. 14, has not played in seven months, not since he collapsed to the turf and went into cardiac arrest while playing for Denmark at the Euros last summer. His return, then, was different from the money-driven moves and hard-feelings exits as friends, rivals, former clubs and fans lined up to wish him well.But it is worth pausing on another deal, too, one that attracted a little less hullabaloo: Manchester City’s acquisition of Julian Alvárez, a 22-year-old forward, from the Argentine club River Plate. Quite what City expects from Alvárez is not entirely clear: Some within the club’s hierarchy see him as a potential replacement for Sergio Agüero; others, it seems, feel he may spend time at City’s network of clubs before arriving in England.Either way, his arrival — as well as that of the 17-year-old wing Zalan Vancsa — illustrates the next phase in City’s attempts to reshape soccer’s established order in its favor. The transfer market, ordinarily, functions as a pyramid. Players move up the tiers at ever increasing cost; those at the top pay a premium to avoid risk.Is Julián Álvarez Manchester City’s next big thing?Natacha Pisarenko/Associated PressIn the ordinary run of things, then, Alvárez might have moved from River Plate to — say — Benfica. Benfica would pay $20 million: a large bet, of course, but not an astronomical one. If he succeeded, then perhaps he would move to Atlético Madrid for $50 million, the price having risen because Atlético could be more certain that he would be a success.Only after he had passed that step would a team of City’s profile — one expecting to win the Premier League, and hoping to lift the Champions League, too — step in and pay $80 million or more for a player it could almost guarantee had the quality to contribute.It is, of course, in City’s interests to short-circuit that process, to have a scouting process so refined and so sophisticated that it can tell who will succeed and who will not without being forced to pay Roma and Atlético and all the other denizens of soccer’s (financial) second tier to find out. It is to the club’s credit if that is the case.Whether it is in the game’s interests is less clear. Money trickling down through the transfer market is the closest thing soccer has to a solidarity mechanism. Flipping players has long allowed countless clubs — Lyon and Porto and Sevilla and Borussia Dortmund among them — to compete despite massive financial disparities.Clearly, there is a sense among the elite that such an approach does not work for them (and, let’s be clear: it doesn’t). In their eyes, the risk is now worth the potential reward. True, City may not have a use, in the long run, for either Alvárez or Vancsa. In that case, they will be sold. And the profit — and there will, in all likelihood, be a profit — will not be banked by a club in desperate need of it, but by one of the richest teams on the planet. More

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      Mourinho, Benítez and the Endless Pursuit of the Past

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      Why do two elite managers persist with a trophy-less, and seemingly joyless, slog toward a past they probably will never reclaim?In the sudden flood of spare time he had after departing Manchester United, José Mourinho filmed a commercial for a bookmaker. A couple of years and a couple of jobs on, it is still running on British television. It still works, after all. Mourinho is still a household name in Britain. The ad’s central concept holds up.Mourinho’s acting might be just a little hammy — as you might expect — but it is quite deft, too. Looking as tanned and healthy and relaxed as we all did in 2019, he earnestly walks viewers through what it takes to be “special.” The joke is that he should know: He is the Special One, after all. Get it?He plays it all, though, with a wink and a smirk. The tone is entirely self-deprecating. Mourinho variously pokes fun at his vanity, his boastfulness, his penchant for chicanery. He willingly, happily satirizes the cartoonish villainy that has, for 20 years, made him possibly the most compelling manager of his generation.It is worth noting, though, quite how dated so many of the references are. One of the gags is about him getting into a laundry cart, a nod to an incident that happened before the invention of the iPhone. There is another involving a piece of topiary shaped to look like three raised fingers, a gesture he first adopted before “Game of Thrones” had aired on television.Indeed, the commercial’s prime conceit, the idea of Mourinho as the Special One, predates the existence of YouTube by almost a year. That particular schtick comes from a time when it was still called The Facebook, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental company, and DVDs were things that people wanted. It is a struggle to describe it as current.That all of the jokes still landed, that they were all immediately comprehensible to their intended audience, is testament both to Mourinho’s enduring relevance and to the spell he has long cast over English soccer, which has long been and possibly always will be hopelessly in love with him. England has never really been able to move on from him.And nor, it would seem, has Mourinho. He is, increasingly, a manager in the same way the Rolling Stones are a live band. They have become, in some way, a tribute act to themselves. Nobody has any real interest in hearing their new material. The only appeal, now, lies in playing the hits.Mourinho’s identity was always as a winner. Then he stopped winning.Alberto Lingria/ReutersMourinho, for his part, keeps on doing just that. A couple of weeks ago, as he chewed over his Roma’s team’s engrossing defeat to Juventus — squandering a 3-1 lead to lose by a single goal — he claimed, variously, that his players were too nice, too weak, too afflicted by some sort of deep-seated psychological complex that he simply could not solve. Everyone, it turned out, was to blame except him.It was not the first time he had delved into his back catalog in his six months in Rome. After a humiliating 6-1 defeat to Bodo/Glimt, he claimed that the Norwegian champion had “better players” than Roma, despite operating on a fraction of the budget. He has squabbled with referees. He has highlighted the shortcomings of his squad after almost every defeat.And defeat has come more regularly than he would like. Mourinho’s tenure has not quite been a failure by the club’s standards: Roma sits seventh in Serie A, still at least theoretically in the race for a Champions League slot, roughly where it might have been expected to be. By Mourinho’s standard, though, it has been beyond deflating.Winning is not just central to Mourinho’s reputation, it is the cornerstone of his identity. For two decades, he has earned some of the most illustrious posts in soccer — Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Manchester United — not for the way in which his teams play but for the way his games end. Mourinho is a winner. He might be an acquired taste, but he gets results.It is tempting to wonder if, perhaps, the reason he has seemed so much more fractious in recent years, that the warming charm that always used to balance out the lurking snarl has all but disappeared from view, is because he has lost that sense of himself. He is a winner who no longer wins.Mourinho’s Roma is clinging to hopes of a Champions League place next season.Andrew Medichini/Associated PressHis last few seasons have served as a case study in decline. First, he celebrated finishing second with Manchester United, something a younger, more bellicose Mourinho would never have done. Then he took on the job of rebuilding Tottenham, but seemed to lack the patience and indulgence and gentle touch such a project required. It turned sour, fast. Choosing outcome over process, it turned out, is not a viable approach when that outcome is not predicated by economics.And now he finds himself at Roma, a fine and historic and weighty club, but hardly in a position to meet his ambitions. Roma, after all, is not Real Madrid. It is not capable of winning every game, of delivering the trophies and the glory that Mourinho craves, the ones that affirm his status and burnish his legend.The question that lingers, then, is why? What does Mourinho get out of this? He does not seem to elicit any joy from it: He looks far happier in that three-year-old ad than he has in his day job for some time. Is it greed, then? Perhaps, but then elite managers are paid handsomely to win, and then paid off equally handsomely if they do not. Mourinho has earned enough, in salary and in compensation, to buy all the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs he could ever want and never need.It may, then, be the status: not that of a winner, but that of a manager. Roma, like Tottenham, may be a second-tier post, but it remains prestigious and powerful and high profile. It means Mourinho can still command a crowd, a stadium, a room; it means, most importantly, that he is still what he has always been: a manager.Mourinho with Rafael Benítez in better days, which for both men is the past.Nigel Roddis/EPA, via ShutterstockPerhaps he, like his old nemesis, Rafael Benítez, simply cannot countenance the idea of not working. Certainly, it is hard to understand why else Benítez would have chosen, last summer, to sacrifice the lingering affection in which Liverpool’s fans held him to take charge of Everton, his former team’s bitter city rival.It cannot have been because Everton had an upwardly mobile air: The club has employed five managers in as many years, possesses the disjointed squad to prove it, and was turned down by at least one contender for the post last summer because the club looked so chaotic from the outside.It was operating under severe strictures in the transfer market after years of wild spending. Its expectations far outstripped its opportunities. Benítez’s background, meanwhile, made it obvious that the atmosphere would turn toxic at the first hint of trouble, and he would be fired. In many ways, it was remarkable that the inevitable denouement to an unhappy marriage of convenience did not come until last week.Benítez will have known all of that, and yet he took the job anyway, and for precisely the same reasons that convinced Mourinho to sign on at Roma and at Tottenham. It is not just a need to manage — their work long since having fused with their identity — but the pursuit of the one victory they now, truly, cherish: vindication.Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, was always an odd pick across town at Everton.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImageThey are driven on by a furious refusal to relinquish their primacy, by an avowed belief that they will be proved right in the end, by a conviction that they will have the last laugh. The game may change — the tactics and the training methods and the tools used, the data and the nutrition and the sports science — but it is striking how managers do not.Benítez remains wedded to the core approach that brought him his halcyon days at Liverpool and, before that, Valencia. Mourinho has seen how damaging it can be to hang his players out to dry in public, at United and Tottenham and Roma, but he keeps on doing it anyway, because that is what worked back before YouTube.As they age, managers become avatars for the systems they once merely adopted. They become one and the same as the approach they are seen to represent. They become set in their ways in a literal sense: They want not only to win, but to win in the way that they once did, as if to demonstrate that they were right all along, that the game has not moved on from them. It has happened to Benítez and to Mourinho, just as it once happened to Arsène Wenger.And so they keep moving, keep trying, keep working, taking jobs that bring them no joy in the vain hope that, one day, the innate superiority of who they are, of what they stand for, will be clear once again. And in doing so, they grow ever more calcified in their own ideas, their own pasts, unable to accept or admit that all those things that made them special were quite a long time ago.Narrow HorizonsThomas Tuchel, who led Chelsea to the Champions League title, won FIFA’s coach of the year award on Monday. Like every winner before him, he coaches a big European club.Harold Cunningham/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesNot once, in more than 30 years, has a player based outside Europe won FIFA’s men’s world player of the year award, no matter which guise it has taken at the time. None has, in fact, even come close.Martín Palermo did not make the top three after inspiring Boca Juniors to both the Copa Libertadores and a club world championship in 2000. Nor did Neymar, despite his youthful brilliance sweeping Santos to South American glory in 2011. By 2019, when Gabriel Barbosa won that year’s edition of the tournament for Flamengo by scoring twice in the dying minutes, nobody would even have considered voting for him.And, as unfortunate as it is, there is a logic to that. It is hard to dispute that, for at least 20 of those 30 years, the best players in the world have been in Europe. They have not all been Europeans, of course — Brazilians have won the FIFA award five times, and Lionel Messi has a collection of them — but they have all played in one of Europe’s major leagues. That, after all, is where the strongest teams are. It is where a player’s talent is tested most exhaustively.(The geography of the women’s award has been more varied: It has been won by players based in the United States, Australia, Japan and, for a stretch a little more than a decade ago, basically wherever Marta happened to be playing. That the last couple of years have been dominated by Europe perhaps says something about the shifting balance of power in the women’s game.)What is less simple to understand is why that same Eurocentrism should be applied to managers, both in the men’s and women’s categories. No manager of a men’s team outside Europe has finished in the top three since FIFA started handing out the prize in 2016. (Jill Ellis, the former coach of the United States’ women’s team, and her former counterpart with Japan, Asako Takakura, have both taken a podium place in the women’s voting.)This year, the omissions were especially egregious. FIFA’s own rules state that the prize should be judged on a coach’s performance between October 2020 and October 2021. In that time, Pitso Mosimane, Al Ahly’s South African coach, won the African Champions League. Twice. Abel Ferreira of Brazil’s Palmeiras won one Copa Libertadores and was well on the way to picking up a second in the same calendar year. Neither was even nominated.The logic that can be applied to the players’ awards does not hold with managers. It does not automatically follow that the manager who has won the biggest trophy has performed better than all of their peers. Management, after all, is about making the most of the resources available to you. It is about exceeding expectations in your own personal context.It is why, for example, it is possible to make a case that David Moyes’s taking West Ham into the Champions League would be a more impressive achievement than Pep Guardiola’s winning the title with Manchester City. Or why Chris Wilder leading Sheffield United to seventh in the Premier League was a better feat of management than Jürgen Klopp’s making Liverpool the league’s champion.And it is why there is no reason that neither Mosimane nor Ferreira were officially recognized for their remarkable success over the last 12 months or so. They were overlooked, instead, because soccer, on some structural level, has bought into the bright lights and the ostentatious self-importance of Europe. And in doing so, it sells itself short.CorrespondenceJosé Luis Chilavert. omitted last week but never forgotten.Matthias Schrader/Picture-Alliance/DPA via AP ImagesThe easiest way to handle the main theme of my inbox this week is to list all the people — Mark Brill, Bob Shay, Christopher Dum, Alex McMillan — who sent emails that contained the words “José Luis Chilavert” and “Rogério Ceni” in response to last week’s newsletter on Manchester City’s flirtation with having Éderson take its penalties.The readers are quite right, too: There have been a handful of famous penalty- and free-kick-taking goalkeepers, particularly in South America. As Christoph von Teichman mentioned, it has happened in Europe, too. “Hans Jörg Butt, a Bundesliga goalkeeper, scored 26 goals from the spot for three different teams (Hamburg, Bayer Leverkusen and Bayern), as well as one for each of these teams in Champions League games, curiously all against Juventus,” he wrote.As a man who considers himself an insufferable know-it-all, the fact that none of them were mentioned is a heavy blow to my self-esteem. Still, I think, the point holds: Pep Guardiola has wrought a drastic shift in English soccer’s conception of what is acceptable if we are open to an idea that always used to seem like something of a carnival trick.Firmer ground was provided by Will Allen, who asked a deceptively tricky question. “Why is an odd number of substitutions sacrosanct,” he asked. He’s right, too: The debate is either for a return to three or an increase to five. “How about everyone has four?” I don’t know, is the short answer. I mean, yes. Obviously. They should just have four. That’s a fair compromise, isn’t it? It is. So why does it seem morally and spiritually wrong? More