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      Karim Benzema, French Soccer Star, Is Convicted in Sex Tape Scandal

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      The Real Madrid striker was found guilty of being part of an attempt to blackmail a fellow player, charges that had led to his being dropped from his national team for more than five years.PARIS — Karim Benzema, a star striker for Real Madrid, was found guilty by a French court on Wednesday on charges that he was part of an attempt to blackmail a fellow player in a case involving a sex tape, a scandal that saw Benzema excluded from France’s national soccer team for more than five years.Benzema, 33, was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 75,000 euros, or about $84,000.He had been accused of helping four other men blackmail Mathieu Valbuena, a teammate in the France squad, over an intimate video that had been taken from Valbuena’s mobile phone.Benzema has always denied the accusations, and his lawyers quickly announced that he would appeal the verdict. He was preparing for Real Madrid’s Champions League match later on Wednesday against Sheriff Tiraspol and did not attend court for the decision.It was unclear how the verdict would affect Benzema’s standing on the national team. France dropped Benzema from the squad in 2015 because of the case, an exile that continued through the team’s World Cup victory in 2018. But Didier Deschamps, the French coach, surprisingly recalled him this year for the European Championship.Noël Le Graët, the president of the French soccer federation, had said this month that Benzema would not be automatically kicked off the team if found guilty, and on Wednesday he told RMC Sport that he had spoken with Deschamps and that both agreed that Benzema would not be “punished,” suggesting he would not be dropped from the team. “The manager has the right to pick whoever he wants,” Le Graët said.Since his return to the national team, Benzema has been a key player, despite France’s early exit from the Euros. Two of his most recent goals — in a match against Kazakhstan that qualified France for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar — moved him among the top five highest scorers for his country.Benzema has won three Spanish league titles and four Champions Leagues with Real Madrid. This week he was shortlisted by FIFA for its annual best player awards, and he is also seen as a contender for the Ballon d’Or, soccer’s biggest individual prize for players, which will be announced on Monday.Four other defendants were tried on the charges of attempted blackmail, including Karim Zenati, one of Benzema’s childhood friends, and three men who acted as murky intermediaries and occasional fixers behind the scenes of soccer’s cash-infused world. They were also found guilty.Zenati was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Of the others, two were given jail terms, of two and of two and a half years, and one received an 18-month suspended sentence.On top of criminal fines, the defendants were also ordered to pay €250,000, or about $281,000, in damages to Valbuena. They are jointly responsible for €150,000 of that total, with Benzema ordered to pay another €80,000 individually and the other defendants a further €5,000 each.The court in Versailles, southwest of Paris, heard at trial last month how Valbuena was first alerted in 2015 by another France teammate to the existence of an intimate video of him, believed to have been stolen from Valbuena’s mobile phone.In June of that year, Valbuena received several phone calls from men threatening to publish the video if he did not pay them tens of thousands of euros. Valbuena refused and instead filed a criminal complaint.After several unsuccessful attempts, the blackmailers were suspected of having contacted Zenati, in hopes that he would push Benzema to speak with Valbuena and encourage him to pay, the court was told.In October 2015, in a conversation with Valbuena at the French squad’s training facilities in Clairefontaine, near Paris, Benzema said that he could help his teammate by putting him in touch with someone who could fix the problem, the court heard.Benzema, who did not attend the trial, has acknowledged that he acted as an intermediary but has always maintained that he was merely offering Valbuena friendly advice on how to handle the blackmailing attempt, not taking part in it.But Valbuena said that he had interpreted Benzema’s role differently. “I felt like Karim Benzema wanted to scare me,” Valbuena testified at trial, according to French news reports.After the conversation between the players, Benzema spoke crudely and mockingly about his teammate in a phone call with Zenati that was tapped by the police and later leaked to news media.On the call, which was played at trial, Benzema told Zenati that Valbuena “isn’t taking us seriously” and that Benzema had told Valbuena, “If you want the video to be destroyed, my friend comes up to see you in Lyon and you sort it out face to face with him.”Benzema’s lawyers argued that deriding a teammate over the phone was not a crime and that the charges against Benzema rested solely on Valbuena’s interpretation of the conversation, in which money was not mentioned.Antoine Vey, one of Benzema’s lawyers, told reporters in Versailles on Wednesday that the court itself had acknowledged that Benzema did not know about the full extent of the blackmailing plot.“How, without being informed of the backdrop to this affair, could he have been an accomplice to the project?” Vey said, adding that Benzema would testify on appeal.But the court found that Benzema had gotten “personally” and “insistently” involved in the blackmail efforts and had used “ruses and lies” to convince Valbuena — warning him about the consequences if the video was published, portraying the blackmailers as more hardened criminals than they really were and advising him not to contact the police.Benzema “deliberately brought his aid and assistance” to the blackmailers, and the tapped phone call with Zenati showed that the striker harbored “no benevolence at all” toward his fellow player, the court said in a summary of its ruling.The case made Benzema the focus of intense criticism in France, especially on the political right, and it created a rift between him and the French squad. In 2016, Benzema, who is of Algerian descent, told a Spanish newspaper that Deschamps had “bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France” by agreeing to leave him off the national team.But the men appeared to have reconciled before this year’s Euros, when Deschamps said he had held a long discussion with the player before recalling him.“Everyone has the right to make mistakes,” Deschamps said in May. More

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      Barcelona, Real Madrid and Transfer Rumors From Another Age

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      Talk about stars headed to Barcelona and Real Madrid conveniently leaves out an important fact: Neither club can afford them at the moment.Everything starts with the interviews. Mohamed Salah granted the first, to the Spanish newspaper AS, last December. He talked about his career, his ambitions for the season. He demurred when asked if he would finish his career with Liverpool. He offered a couple of placatory bromides about the continuing virility of Real Madrid and Barcelona.A few months later, not long before Liverpool faced Real Madrid in the Champions League, he did the same with Marca. The interview had a copy-paste quality: Salah talked about his career, his ambitions for the season. He demurred when asked whether he would finish his career with Liverpool. He offered a couple of placatory bromides about the continuing virility of Real Madrid. (Marca did not ask about Barcelona.)The interviews were not, it is fair to say, significant because Salah said nothing especially revelatory or surprising or explosive. Their meaning lay entirely in their existence. The fact that Salah, not typically given to inviting newspapers into his home, had broken the trend for Real Madrid’s twin courtiers said all that needed to be said.Appearing in the pages of AS and Marca, after all, is part of a long-established ritual, the first step in a familiar dance. It is — or has been, for a long time — a way for a player to flutter their eyelashes in the direction of either of Spain’s giants (though Real Madrid, most often). It is a sign that they would be interested, should an offer for their services arrive. In general, it is also a signal that Real Madrid, in particular, reciprocates the affection. And it is a whispered warning to that player’s current club that only a new contract, an improved salary, might stave off the inevitable.It is no surprise, then, that the last few months have seen a steady drip-feed of thinly-sourced transfer rumors suggesting that this might be Salah’s final season at Liverpool, that one or the other of Spain’s repelling poles might be at his shoulder, in his ear, coaxing him away.Currently, the favorite is Barcelona. Quite how that has happened is not entirely clear. In the English-speaking news media, the story has been credited to El Nacional, a Catalan newspaper that is, currently, of the view that Liverpool is about to sell not only Salah but also, apparently, its captain, Jordan Henderson, and its record signing, Virgil van Dijk.Players like Dani Alves, 38, now feel like a better fit for Barcelona’s budget.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockBut El Nacional does not claim to be the original source: It attributes the rumor to a website called Fichajes. That is, of course, responsible journalism — always credit your sources, kids — but it does not clear anything up, because Fichajes’ original claim was that Real Madrid wanted to sign Salah. Its first mention of Barcelona came three weeks after El Nacional ran the story.Quite what prompted the change is anyone’s guess. Much has been made of a quote from Xavi Hernández, the club’s new coach, a couple of years ago describing Salah as a “top” player. That he said it in a sentence that also referred to Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino is not mentioned. Nor is the fact that it is hardly a staggering admission. Salah is a top player. That is objectively true.What is omitted entirely from this wildfire of speculation, of course, is that Barcelona does not have anything like the money needed to sign Mohamed Salah. This is a club, remember, that has racked up $1 billion or so in debt. It is operating under strict salary controls instigated by La Liga. It has, by a generous estimate, about $10 million to spend on its squad in January.It is projecting yet another loss in this financial year. Its debt restructuring deal with Goldman Sachs means it has to cut back its operating costs drastically by 2025 or grant its lenders control of the television revenue that acts as the club’s primary source of funding. “A sword of Damocles,” as the International Finance Review described it. Barcelona also has a new stadium to build.It cannot afford to pay Liverpool the nine-figure fee it would demand for Salah. It might struggle to meet the $400,000-a-week in salary the player would want, even on a free transfer in 18 months’ time. (It also absolutely should not be thinking about deals like that for aging players: that is, after all, what got Barcelona into this mess in the first place.)Real Madrid’s financial situation is better — though it, too, has an expensive stadium refurbishment to consider, as well as the biting impact of the coronavirus pandemic — but it is significant that when it tried to sign Kylian Mbappé last summer, his current club, Paris St.-Germain, believed it to be nothing more than posturing; Real Madrid could not, the French team concluded, genuinely afford to pay any club $200 million for a single player.There is a reason that Real Madrid waited until the contract of David Alaba, the versatile Austrian master-of-all-trades, expired before signing him from Bayern Munich. There is a reason it is hoping Mbappé’s deal in Paris will be allowed to run out. There is a reason it is considering the likes of Antonio Rüdiger, the Chelsea defender, and Paul Pogba, the Manchester United midfielder, to revamp its team.Real Madrid knows it does not possess the financial heft to persuade Premier League teams to sell these players if they do not want to, because English soccer’s television revenues mean those teams almost certainly never need to sell. It knows, too, that paying a transfer fee and the stellar salaries top players command is beyond its reach. It has to cut its costs, and cloth, accordingly.Real Madrid’s transfer budget may take a back seat to its construction budget.Susana Vera/ReutersThis is a stark shift in soccer’s landscape. For decades, the working assumption has been that Real Madrid and Barcelona represent the apex of the sport’s hierarchy: They were its alphas, its final destinations, its mega-predators. That no longer holds true. Real Madrid and Barcelona, for now and for some time to come, no longer sit at the top of the food chain.That soccer’s whirling rumor industry has not noticed this does not matter, particularly. It is, by its very nature, slightly fantastical. That is part of the fun. Should a whisper ricocheting between click-hungry websites across Europe prove to be grounded in nothing but smoke and air then it does not, really, do any harm*. There may be disappointment at the end — when you expect Mohamed Salah but get Luuk de Jong — but in the meantime, readers enjoy the flight of fancy. The advertisers get eyeballs. The websites get paid.[*Other than to further undermine trust in the news ecosystem in general, and therefore permit the rise of the deliberately, cynically unreliable and the perniciously fake.]What is significant, though, is that players — or, more accurately, agents — do not yet seem to have caught on to that fact. The game’s altered tectonics mean that, for a player like Salah, flirting with Marca and AS is no longer much of a bargaining chip. Real Madrid is not an immediate threat to Liverpool, not any more.That is an important change, and not necessarily a positive one. Players at the Premier League’s top six teams — more or less — are effectively trapped. They will not sell to each other, not easily, as Tottenham proved in refusing Manchester City’s advances for Harry Kane last summer. The only club that can afford to extricate them is, most likely, P.S.G.Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United, in particular, are no longer proving grounds for Real Madrid and Barcelona. In those interviews, Salah twice said that his future was in his club’s hands. It was taken, at the time, as a challenge to Liverpool: to offer him a contract that fulfilled his true value, or else.But perhaps it was simply a recognition of the truth. Liverpool, like the rest of the Premier League’s elite, is in control of what happens to its star players, of how long the dance lasts, of when the song ends.Getting the Numbers RightPortrait of a mismatch.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAt roughly the same time as England was running in its 10th goal of the evening against San Marino, Italy was running out of ideas. The Italians, the European champions, had a relatively simple task in their final qualifying game, a road trip to Belfast to face a Northern Ireland team with nothing at stake but pride: Italy had to win to seal its place in Qatar next winter, and hope that Switzerland, its rival, did not rout Bulgaria at the same time.With 10 minutes to go, though, it was getting desperate. The score was mounting in Lucerne — two-nil, three-nil, four — but remained unmoving at Windsor Park. Italy could not pick its way through Northern Ireland. It could not play around Northern Ireland. And so, eventually, desperately, it tried to go over, launching a series of hopeful, hopeless, long balls into the penalty area. It did not work. The final whistle blew. The crowd roared.And so, not quite six months after it conquered a continent, Italy faces the prospect of navigating a hazardous playoff round simply to make it to Qatar. The idea brings back unhappy memories: It is only four years, after all, since Italy lost at the same stage to Sweden — a potential opponent, this time around — and missed out on Russia 2018 altogether.Those two results are worth considering in tandem. England’s 10-0 demolition of the tiny city-state prompted a reprise of the old, loaded discussion about whether UEFA needs to introduce prequalifying to weed out some of the weaker teams in its field. Italy’s 0-0 stalemate convinced Derek Rae, the respected ESPN commentator, to suggest that perhaps Europe merited more spaces at the World Cup.Italy’s week: no goals, but one lifeline.Peter Morrison/Associated PressNeither of these ideas is quite as charged as they seem to be (warning: there is no fulmination about to happen). Only two federations — Europe and South America — do not filter the pool of teams before the final stage of qualifying. It happens in Africa, Asia and North America. It is not anti-competitive. It is not the equivalent of the European Super League. It is simply changing the structure of how teams qualify for the World Cup.Likewise, the concept of expanding Europe’s footprint is not without merit. The presence of not only Italy but Portugal — the last two European champions — in the playoff round indicates Europe’s strength in depth.There is a good chance that 50 percent of all the teams in South America will be in Qatar, as opposed to a quarter of Europe’s, and just 10 percent of Africa’s. Africa, certainly, is underrepresented. But that is not to say that Europe is overrepresented: According to the (flawed) FIFA rankings, 18 of the best 32 teams in the world are in Europe. It has 13 slots for the World Cup.At the heart of both of these arguments is what you think the World Cup should do, and should be. If it is there to gather the world’s best teams, then Europe should have more slots and there should, probably, be prequalifying. If it has another mission, to function as an inclusive carnival, to help countries around the world aspire to something, then it should not.Of course, at least one of these arguments has been rendered moot by FIFA: This will, after all, be the last 32-team World Cup. Starting in 2026, 16 European teams will qualify (and nine from Africa), but the competition’s aspirational quality will not have been diminished. It is easy to rail against the expansion of the World Cup. In some lights, though, it has the faintest glow of logic behind it.Yes, Yes, Canada, We KnowJason Franson/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressAs many of you will have noticed, Canada now sits proudly atop the Octagon that will determine North and Central America’s entrants for next year’s World Cup, thanks in no small part to an impressive 2-1 win against a stalling Mexico in what appeared to be the actual North Pole.We receive reasonably regular correspondence demanding we cover — in this newsletter, for some reason, rather than anywhere else — Canada’s sudden emergence as a global superpower. And we will (because it’s a fascinating story, not because of mob rule), as qualification draws closer. But for now, please make do with this video of a man jumping into a snowdrift in celebration.Cashing In on MaradonaThe majority of speculative emails that I receive, these days, are related to soccer’s nascent romance with the world of NFTs. It is, after all, a natural fit: a nihilistic, self-regarding world where value has been completely detached from inherent worth and, well, cryptocurrency.It is a subject that makes me feel deeply uneasy. Soccer is only just starting to reckon with its unhealthy relationship with gambling, and it seems to be using NFTs — which, as far as I can tell, follow much the same dynamic — to plug the gap. The sport should, I feel, be a little more careful about where it takes its money, and precisely what its partners do. The sport does not feel the same way.But the sheer volume of those emails is, all of a sudden, being challenged by an upstart: correspondence alerting me to some project or other about Diego Maradona. There is an Amazon Prime series about his life, one which seems to borrow its dramatic aesthetic from a telenovela and its soccer scenes from When Saturday Comes. There is a reissue of Jimmy Burns’s biography. There is a Spotify podcast about his final few days, hosted by the renowned investigative journalist Thierry Henry.Napoli’s most recent tribute to Diego Maradona was sartorial.Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersThis is all harmless, of course: much more harmless, potentially, than NFTs. And yet there is a faint feeling of exploitation here, too, that Maradona’s story has already been packaged as content, his legacy used as script fodder, his myth portioned into rights and sold off. It is only a year since his death. It feels too soon, somehow, to start setting in stone how we should think about his life.CorrespondencePlenty of feedback on alternative cards this week. “The punishment has to be extremely unpalatable to both the players themselves and the managers, while not destroying the contest,” wrote Timothy Ogden. He suggests that the player receiving an orange card would still have to serve a subsequent, one-game suspension, and that a team must have a designated replacement, a player who cannot be used as a regular substitute.Alex McMillan and Carson Stanwood are both in favor of simple sin bins for tactical foulers: 5 or 10 minutes out of the game, with no further punishment. But there was a bit of outside-the-box — literally, as you will see — thinking from David Simpson, too. For a tactical foul, he wrote, “the offended team should be allowed to place the ball anywhere outside the penalty area for a direct free kick.” That’s a really good idea. More

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      At Elite Teams, a Shrinking Vision of What a Coach Looks Like

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      Barcelona is looking for a new manager, and Manchester United may need one soon. But the pool of coaches elite clubs hire from is getting smaller every year, and that’s a problem.Marcelo Gallardo has the sort of managerial résumé that should make him irresistible to most, if not all, of Europe’s elite clubs.He has been in his current post for seven years, long enough to prove he is no mercenary, flickering brightly and briefly before moving on elsewhere. He has demonstrated that he can cope with the deepest pressure and the loftiest expectations. He has shown that he can ride the political currents that swirl around any major club. He has learned to work on a (relative) budget.Most of all, he has won. He has won over and over again. At River Plate, Gallardo has collected a dozen major trophies as a manager. He has won two continental championships, and come within two minutes of a third. One of his predecessors at the Buenos Aires club, Ramon Díaz, has described him as the greatest coach in the team’s history.It is not hard to understand, then, why Gallardo’s name is frequently linked with Europe’s great houses — most recently with the vacancy created by Barcelona’s decision to end Ronald Koeman’s loveless 14-month tenure. That the speculation never seems to coalesce into anything, that there always seems to be a preferred candidate that is not him, requires a little further explanation.Gallardo has won a dozen trophies, and two continental titles, at River Plate.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesSeveral of Europe’s most illustrious teams have, in recent years, appointed managers who made — by traditional metrics — little or no sense. Some of them have been successful: Zinedine Zidane, for example, won three Champions League titles in three years at Real Madrid, despite finding himself in his first coaching job.And some of them have, well, turned out a little differently. Andrea Pirlo was appointed Juventus manager around three weeks after being given his first coaching role, in charge of the club’s under-23 side. He had never taken charge of an official game. He was dismissed after a single season. Frank Lampard lasted a little longer at Chelsea. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is still clinging on, somehow, at Manchester United.A variety of factors have gone into that trend. One, of course, is the desire — shared by almost every major team — to find and nurture its own version of Pep Guardiola. Those searches are rooted in the widespread delusion that, at every club, there is some revolutionary genius lurking somewhere in the shadows, waiting for the chance to transform the game as we know it.There is, too, a cynical calculation at play. Iconic former players have always been fast-tracked into management, aided by a belief, one that can withstand even a flood of evidence, that their talent can be passed on, and also abetted by a knowledge among executives that appointing a club legend generates instant good will and — more precious still — patience among fans.Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s popularity and pedigree as a player may be extending his run at Manchester United.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut perhaps the biggest shift is in what the superclubs regard as relevant prior experience. A track record of success in management is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary. Or, rather, a particular stripe of success is no longer regarded as valid, because what constitutes success is so difficult to measure.Instead, much more important is a knowledge of how these giant, sprawling temples of self-importance work, a sense of being comfortable within them, a feeling of belonging. It is that change that has deprived Gallardo, and many coaches like him, of a chance. And it has given the superclubs something of a problem.There was, at some point in the dim and distant past, a distinct ladder for a manager to climb. A coach would start at some lower rung on the ladder — either as an assistant or at a smaller team — and slowly prove their worth. They might win promotion to the top division, take a smaller team on a European run, turn a contender into a champion.Then, and only then, would the superclubs strike. It is the approach that took Jürgen Klopp from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund and then on to Liverpool. It is how Carlo Ancelotti went from Reggiana to Parma to Juventus and on to almost every other major team in Europe. It is how Mauricio Pochettino made it from Espanyol to Southampton to Tottenham and then, after a brief break, to Paris St.-Germain. All of them took one club to another level, and were rewarded with a step up themselves.Mauricio Pochettino’s track record with Tottenham’s stars earned him a star-studded second act at Paris St.-Germain.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is the mechanism that should, now, promote Gallardo. He is ready for it. He has more than proved his worth on one rung. But there is an overriding sensation that it does not quite work like that anymore, that the rules of the game have changed, and that, all of a sudden, everything he has done does not count. And it does not count because of where he has done it.All of Gallardo’s success, so far, has come in South America. He won a league championship with Nacional in Uruguay and was rewarded with a post at River Plate, one of the biggest clubs in the world by anyone’s standards, an environment as impatient and demanding and expectant as anywhere. There, he has twice delivered the Copa Libertadores.But while Europe’s major clubs have no problem appointing Argentines — several of Gallardo’s countrymen work in high-profile posts in European soccer, including Pochettino and Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone — they have long felt that success does not easily translate to the Old World.Occasionally, that fear has been well-placed: Carlos Bianchi turned first Vélez Sarsfield and then Boca Juniors into the finest teams in Latin America, but struggled to make an impact at Roma and then, a decade later, at Atlético. Others, like Marcelo Bielsa, have made the leap a little more easily.That skepticism, though, no longer applies just to South Americans. Europe’s superclubs increasingly see an ocean all around them. Gallardo is not the only coach who might, by now, have expected to receive the call from one of the game’s giants. He is not the only one who has built a body of work that should make him a compelling candidate.There is Erik ten Hag, the Ajax coach, who has turned his club into a powerhouse in the Netherlands and is on the verge of his second deep run in the Champions League. There is Rúben Amorim, a decade or so younger, who has already ended Sporting Lisbon’s two-decade wait for a Portuguese title. There is Marco Rose, who has risen from Red Bull Salzburg to Borussia Mönchengladbach and then Dortmund.These are the coaches Barcelona or Manchester United should be looking to appoint now. They are the coaches Real Madrid or Juventus might have approached in the summer. They are, most likely, the next big things.Instead, Barcelona is hopeful of replacing Koeman with Xavi Hernández, less for his stint at Al Sadd in the Qatar Stars League than for his emotional connection with the club. Manchester United has vowed to stand by Solskjaer; if and when it changes its mind, it is expected to go for Antonio Conte or Pochettino, persuaded by their proven success.At Barcelona, the big job is not for everyone.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBoth Barcelona and United are, at least, exhibiting more imagination than either Real Madrid or Juventus: When their positions came up a few months ago, both handed them back to managers they had already fired. Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid — taking over from Zidane, himself on his second stint — and, two years after the club declared itself ready to move on from him, Massimiliano Allegri was restored at Juventus.This is not just a lack of foresight; it is a self-inflicted inability to read meaning into a manager’s achievement. The elite clubs have believed — rightly or wrongly, but certainly logically — for some time that the only reliable guide to a manager’s suitability is previous experience at that level.That is why, for example, Eddie Howe’s success with Bournemouth was not deemed enough to get him a job at Liverpool or Arsenal. He might have proved his ability in the Premier League, but that was of secondary relevance to demonstrating an aptitude at Borussia Dortmund or Sevilla, teams that compete in the Champions League and have budgets and pressures to match.The issue is that the game has become so stratified, so quickly, that the pool of clubs deemed suitable hunting grounds has withered to almost nothing. The elite are now so vast, so powerful, that only a few teams can serve as a reasonable approximation.Dortmund’s Marco Rose is following what used to be the path to a big club. That might not be true anymore.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCertainly, there is nowhere outside Europe’s major leagues, which counts against Ten Hag, Amorim and Gallardo, and within those competitions there are only a handful: the Milan clubs, perhaps; probably Dortmund; possibly Lyon and Marseille.And even then, it is not entirely clear what a manager would have to do to stand out. Klopp’s star rose when he led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title in successive campaigns. Rafa Benítez shot to prominence by making Valencia champion of Spain. José Mourinho captured the imagination by winning the Champions League with F.C. Porto.The game, in 2021, has been shaped to mitigate against repeats of all of those achievements. If Rose takes Dortmund to second place behind Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, is that success, or is it simply meeting expectations? What does it mean if Ajax wins the Eredivisie, again? Is it failure if Amorim’s Sporting is eliminated in the group phase of the Champions League, or is all of this nothing more than economic determinism? How can any of this be parsed?It leaves the elite teams in a peculiar Catch-22: They want to employ managers with the right sort of experience, but the only way those managers can get that experience is by being employed. Still, it is hard to feel too much pity for the superclubs: They are the ones, after all, who have done so much to distort soccer’s reality in their favor.Far more deserving of sympathy are the coaches, like Gallardo, who find themselves trapped by a game whose rules have shifted underneath them. He, like the others, has done all he can. He has twice conquered a continent. He has built an irresistible résumé, only to be told that he has done it all in the wrong place.Right Idea, Wrong TeamsDiego Maradona’s memory has never faded in Naples.Yara Nardi/ReutersThere could, in many ways, have been no more fitting tribute. A year after the death of Diego Maradona, two of his former clubs have announced plans to face each other for a cup in his honor. The game, between Boca Juniors and Barcelona, will be played in January. It will be staged in Riyadh.We could probably just leave it there, but to be clear: Maradona spent two seasons at Barcelona, one of them interrupted by injury, and often traced many of the demons that haunted him to his time there. He may be indelibly associated with Boca, and his love for the club is not in question — after retirement, he maintained a private box at the Bombonera — but he enjoyed only a single campaign there in his prime. By the time he returned in 1995, he was a shadow of what he had been.It is a shame that both of these teams, then, should be trying to lay claim to his legacy. Far more fitting would be a two-legged tie between the teams where he spent the bulk of his career, staged at the stadiums that now bear his name: the home of Argentinos Juniors, where he started his career, and that of Napoli, where he sealed his legend.The brands of Barcelona and Boca Juniors are much more potent than either of those clubs, of course. They are far more glamorous targets for Saudi cash in that country’s attempts to dress itself up as a sporting powerhouse rather than, you know, a repressive autocracy. But they should not be allowed to contort history to suit their own ends, to weight Maradona’s story in their favor, to erase those places where he wrote the majority of it from the record.CorrespondenceEvents, ultimately, have a habit of making fools of us all. Scarcely 48 hours after a finely crafted newsletter appeared in your inboxes, explaining how Manchester United had perfected the art of soccer-as-content, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer let his team lose by 5-0 to Liverpool, raising the possibility that the club might actually do something to get out of its content sweet spot, with the devastating consequence that last week’s column might have seemed wrongheaded.Liverpool 5, Manchester United 0. Ronaldo? Still the star of United’s drama.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, let’s look for silver linings: Manchester United remains trapped by self-doubt, and so has not (yet) fired Solskjaer; defeat has proved, once again, that what is bad for Manchester United the team can be good for the exposure of Manchester United the brand; and Jim O’Mahony has paid me the compliment of thinking I am too young to remember the 1990s.“You are too young to have witnessed United’s heroic efforts saving themselves from defeat in the final minutes of a game during the 1990s,” he wrote. (I’m not.) “United of the 1990s would often play badly in the first half and then change momentum, often with a heroic substitute, and win the game. The name of one key substitute for United from that era was Solskjaer.”This is all true, of course: Manchester United long ago had a taste for the dramatic comeback. I’m not sure it happened quite as much as we think it did, though. I’m also not sure it’s something that should serve as an aspiration. Much better to have games won nice and early.George Weissman is not a man who seems to respect my need to fill a word count. “Your column boils down the incontrovertible fact that the whole should always exceed the sum of its parts, and that is rarely the case since the retirement of Alex Ferguson,” he wrote. That basically sums up Manchester United, yes. But it does not fill a newsletter.We’ll end on a more philosophical question from David DeKock, channeling his inner Charles Hughes. “On every throw-in from the penalty area sideline, teams should heave it into the danger area and see what happens,” he wrote. “Why do teams not do this every single time? Have there been studies on percentages?”For a long time, the answer to this would have been stylistic: A long throw-in was seen as unsophisticated, a little agricultural, the sort of thing that Stoke City did. Now, though, I do sense that it is changing: Brentford and Midtjylland, two of the more forward-thinking teams, treat throw-ins as David would advocate. So, too, does Liverpool, which employs a specialist throw-in coach. All three are analytically driven, which leads me to believe that they have numbers to explain their choice, though they have not (as far as I know) chosen to share them. More

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      Cherish the Feel-Good Stories. They Won’t Last.

      by

      Enjoy the underdogs now, because money will restore Europe’s usual order soon enough.By Wednesday night, the humiliation was complete. In the space of 24 hours, the two teams that had for so long regarded themselves as the pinnacle of modern soccer — the greatest clubs in the world, the inevitable destinations of the game’s best and brightest, the rightful possessors of its biggest trophies — had been humbled, one after the other.First, Real Madrid had not only lost at home, it had lost at home to a team making its first appearance in the group stages of the Champions League, a team from the poorest country in Europe, a team from a place that does not, in many ways, actually exist. Carlo Ancelotti’s team now sits second in its group, three points behind Sheriff Tiraspol.They might have laughed at that in Barcelona, welcoming the chance to take a little respite from their own troubles by delighting in the demise of their rival. The schadenfreude would not have lasted long.The next night, Ronald Koeman’s team fell behind within three minutes against Benfica — the sort of team that Barcelona, in the days of its pomp and glory, would have swatted aside without appearing to break sweat — and went on to lose, 3-0. Barcelona’s record in the Champions League, a competition the club traditionally hopes to win, now reads played two, lost two, scored none, conceded six.This is as low as Real Madrid and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the clásico, have been in a generation. Between them, they have won 7 of the last 13 editions of the Champions League. Now, there is a growing possibility that at least one of them will not even survive to the knockout stages of the tournament in the spring.Koeman’s job hangs by a thread. La Liga has, in effect, placed Barcelona in financial handcuffs. Real Madrid’s debts are colossal, too, a thunderstorm rolling in from the horizon. Both clubs have lost touch already with the teams they once regarded as subordinates — the Premier League’s elite, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain — disappearing into the distance. Their auras have been shattered and their ambitions winnowed. Their era, by almost every available metric, should be over.Yet Real Madrid is currently top of La Liga. And Barcelona, diminished and dispirited, buffeted by crisis at every turn, has a game in hand. If it wins it, it will be only two points behind its old rival. The team that has twice been embarrassed in Europe has not lost a domestic game this season.The early weeks of a campaign are the time for the willing suspension of disbelief. The conditions, after all, are right. The sample size is still small. The vagaries of the schedule wield an outsize influence. Injury and fatigue have not yet started to have an impact on resources. It is in the opening bars of autumn that the game’s chorus line gets its chance to shine.Neil Maupay and Brighton narrowly missed a chance to move into first place in the Premier League.Matt Dunham/Associated PressThere are, at first glance, plenty of those stories around Europe at the moment. Last Monday, before thoughts turned to the week’s Champions League engagements, Brighton had the opportunity to go top of England’s top flight for the first time in the club’s history. It missed out, but a 95th-minute equalizer from its striker, Neal Maupay, meant that Graham Potter’s team has taken 13 points from its opening six games, as many as Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United.An unheralded Lens, improbably, lies second in the nascent table in France. Real Sociedad is second in Spain, and has not lost a game since the opening day of the season. Mainz and Freiburg are (for now) in contention for European spots in the Bundesliga; so is F.C. Köln, usually little more than a synonym for chaos.In Scotland, both Edinburgh teams, Hibernian and newly-promoted Hearts, are keeping pace with a stuttering Rangers at the top of the table. Celtic is struggling so badly that it is below even Dundee United. In the Netherlands, Willem II, from the provincial city of Tilburg, beat PSV Eindhoven last weekend to move into second place.In the Women’s Super League, both Tottenham and Aston Villa have started encouragingly. In Spain, Real Sociedad’s women have matched Atlético Madrid and Barcelona point for point so far.Tottenham’s women are, for the moment, above more pedigreed rivals in the Women’s Super League table.Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersNone of these dreams will last, of course. As the season wears on, the decisive factor is — more often than not — the depth of a team’s resources rather than the heights of its ability. In the year that Leicester City won the Premier League, the great exception that proves the rule, it was notable how little Claudio Ranieri, the coach, needed to change his lineup.Most weeks, almost uniformly, the core of his team was available. A story that, in hindsight, looks like destiny might have had a very different ending had Jamie Vardy pulled a hamstring, or N’Golo Kanté been the unfortunate victim of a mistimed tackle.Most teams, of course, have to endure those injuries, and when they do so, their ambitions suddenly shrink. It is the elite, the teams made fat by years of Champions League revenues and lavish commercial sponsorships, that can afford to carry squads capable of absorbing those blows without any noticeable dip in performance. As winter sets in, cold economic reality bites.That moment seems to come earlier every season. All of the uplifting stories of unexpected, early success warrant a second look. Willem II, for example, might be second in the Eredivisie, but it is probably significant that the team at the summit, Ajax, has scored 30 goals and conceded one in its first seven games. Willem II is second, but it is second by quite a long way.Real Sociedad’s men’s and women’s teams are both punching above their weight so far.Vincent West/ReutersThe same is true in France, where P.S.G. already has a healthy lead over Lens — nine points after eight games, and that after two months in which Lionel Messi has barely featured domestically — and in Germany, where Bayern has scored almost three times as many goals as third-place Wolfsburg. Barcelona’s women’s team, the reigning European champion, has scored 26 goals in four games. It has conceded none.The top four spots in the Premier League, too, have been occupied almost since the start of the campaign by the four teams expected to finish there in May. Juventus started the Serie A season abysmally, failing to win any of its first four games; Napoli, by contrast, has clicked almost immediately.And yet the most compelling parallel has not been last season, when Juventus limped to fourth, but a few campaigns prior, when the club started almost as poorly, and then won 26 out of 28 games to collect yet another title convincingly.Most troubling of all, of course, is Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona have diminished at startling, alarming speed, and yet remain out of the reach of all but two — Atlético Madrid and, at a pinch, Sevilla — of their supposed peers.There is a reason for that. Even with its finances ravaged, Barcelona can afford to maintain a squad that few others could countenance, the upshot of decades of unequal distribution of the country’s television revenue. This is the ultimate vindication of a risible, self-interested approach: between them, Barcelona and Real Madrid have stifled La Liga of competitive integrity so effectively that their floor is still above almost everyone else’s ceiling.Barcelona may have its problems, but it also has players like Ansu Fati.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe same is true of P.S.G. and the Premier League’s Big Four and Bayern Munich, and it is true of Ajax in the Netherlands and Club Brugge in Belgium and countless other teams in countless other leagues. Only in the rarest circumstances would any of the unexpected contenders, currently sitting in positions of unaccustomed prominence, actually be able to turn their early heat into genuine light. But that is not the point.Whether Real Sociedad, in the end, wins the league this season is secondary to the idea that Real Sociedad — and by extension every other team outside the established elite — can believe that, in certain circumstances, it could win the league.That hope, naïve and unrequited as it might be, is crucial, particularly in an era of such yawning financial disparity. It is vital that teams believe in possibility, in the chance that the elite might stumble, that they might be able to profit, that the stars might align. That it is no longer possible, not really, to sustain that delusion suggests something important has been lost, and it may not come back.Courage and CowardiceSinead Farrelly came forward twice, at least. In 2015, she reported the inappropriate behavior — and that, given the scale and the nature of the allegations, is putting it lightly — of her coach, Paul Riley, to her team, the Portland Thorns. Earlier this year, an email chain made public by Alex Morgan on Thursday made clear, she made the same complaint direct to the National Women’s Soccer League’s leadership.And twice, nobody seemed particularly interested in hearing what Farrelly had to say.That this week she then came forward again, along with a former teammate, Mana Shim, demonstrated her conviction, her perseverance, her fury. That she did so publicly underlines her courage.That she had no other choice but to do so, though, reflects appallingly on the cowardice of the authorities whose job it is to the protect the players who stock their teams, who grace their league, who generate their product.Riley left the Thorns after that initial investigation, but had another job in the N.W.S.L. a few months later. Thanks to Morgan, we know that Lisa Baird, the league’s commissioner, effectively dismissed Farrelly’s second complaint, made in April, without indicating she would be investigating further.Only when the league’s hand was forced, when Farrelly and Shim had held it to account by telling their stories to The Athletic, was any action taken. Within hours, Riley was fired from his post coaching the North Carolina Courage. It was the second such dismissal in the N.W.S.L. in a matter of days, and the third for misconduct in a matter of weeks.There are two stories here. One is, although rooted in darkness, inherently uplifting: that the bravery of these women might make the N.W.S.L. a safer place for their colleagues and successors.The other has a very different moral: that the league itself, so conscious of its own fragility — perhaps overly — chose to sweep all those red flags under the carpet rather than look after its players’ well-being.“They say we should keep quiet because there might not be a league,” Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg wrote after the allegations surfaced Thursday. “We should take low pay, otherwise there’s no league. Don’t talk about the crappy hotels, the bus fires, the unsafe fields, the substandard medical care.”The players of the N.W.S.L. — as all professional athletes do — make considerable sacrifices to play the sport they love. Doubtless, they make more than most, in order to help the women’s game to grow, and to thrive. But these sacrifices, let alone what Farrelly and Shim endured, are too high a price to pay. Talking about these issues is not what places the league in jeopardy. The danger lies in permitting them to exist in the first place.Sorry, Not SorryBruno Fernandes apologized for missing a penalty. But did he need to be sorry?Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockBruno Fernandes’s penalty was, it goes without saying, really quite a bad one. Impressively bad, almost, particularly for a player who has always seemed so unruffled by the stress and the strain of taking a penalty.For once, though, it appeared to get to him. Perhaps it was the circumstance — a chance to avert a chastening home defeat to Aston Villa — or perhaps it was the context: The presence of Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United these days means Fernandes has no room for error. As soon as he missed one penalty, he would have known he would not get the next one.Whatever the reason, though, and however bad the penalty, there was absolutely no reason for him to feel compelled to issue a lengthy apology to his fans and teammates a few hours later, just as there had been no reason whatsoever for Jesse Lingard to plead for clemency in public after his error condemned United to defeat against Young Boys of Bern a couple of weeks ago.Players do not have to apologize for making mistakes. They do not even have to apologize for playing badly. That is not the covenant between fan and athlete. All we can rightfully expect is that they try, that they commit, that they do their best. We have no right to demand that they succeed. It is the point of sport that sometimes, effort goes unrewarded.The question that arises from the fact that both Lingard and Fernandes felt compelled to do so is not — as it was represented, in some quarters — whether players have become too reliant on agencies to run their social media accounts. It is, instead, why those advisers might suggest a pre-emptive apology is necessary.The answer to that, of course, is the same as the explanation for why players engage agencies to handle Twitter and Instagram in the first place: Fernandes and Lingard, and the people curating their online presences, will have known that their missteps would be a vector for untold, untrammeled abuse. They apologized to try to staunch the flow. The problem there is not the apology itself, it is the abuse that necessitates it. That is the issue soccer has to address: not that players are apologizing, but that they feel the need to do so.CorrespondenceIniquities or inequities? Sometimes it’s hard to say.Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEagle-eyed as ever, there were several of you — not least Thomas Alpert and Brendan Greer — who wondered whether the mention of modern soccer’s “iniquities” was a typo; perhaps, those of little faith asked, I meant “inequities,” instead?It’s healthy for us all to admit to mistakes, sometimes. Was it a typo? No. I meant to type iniquities. Did I realize iniquities and inequities were different words? Also no. Still, now that I have been educated, I can say with some confidence that they both probably apply to 21st century soccer.Alex McMillan noted another lapse: “You did seem to get sidetracked in answering the question about whether any country, other than the U.K., fields multiple national teams.” Fortunately, Alex is a little more focused. As well as the People’s Republic of China, two of the country’s Special Administrative Regions — Hong Kong and Macau — field teams, as does the Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, but competing under the name Chinese Taipei.“Practically speaking,” Alex wrote, “in this case you have one country with four identities in and of itself.”Aaron Stern and Darren Wood, meanwhile, queried the decision to focus last week’s column on Marcos Alonso. “The admissions about Alonso’s conduct made it difficult to return to the piece about his technical ability and role at Chelsea with the same amount of interest,” Darren wrote.“What I found odd, unsettling, was the way your piece made concessions to conduct that some might judge as sufficient to exclude Alonso from analysis, then returned to its prior analysis of his sporting ability. Is the premise that players’ conduct and character might not exclude them from the efforts and attentions of both writer and reader, if their athletic skill merits it? How egregious must their conduct and character become before we exclude them from any type of analysis?”This is not a question that has a simple answer, and it would be an insult to your intelligence to present one. All I can do, I think, is to walk you through my thought process, while making no claim that my thought process is objectively correct, or that there is such a thing, in these instances, as objectively correct.The logic of last week’s column was that Alonso is an interesting case study as a player: not just a curiously exact specialist, but a player whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed quite dramatically, depending on the identity and the attitude of his coach. Given that Chelsea’s meeting with Manchester City was the most significant game of last weekend, it felt a fitting time to explore the nuances of his situation.It would, I agree, be irresponsible not to mention the broader context, both in light of his conviction in 2011 and his more recent decision not to take the knee. Doing that while maintaining a coherent thread is a difficult balancing act — and it is entirely possible that I did not pull it off — but I would hope, at least, that it made clear the piece was not attempting to cast Alonso as a straightforward, sympathetic hero.The broader issue, of course, is whether Alonso should be considered worthy of coverage at all. That is a judgment call — and as such, you are free to disagree with it — but my conclusion was that, as long as a distinct line is drawn between the individual and the athlete, objective coverage is both possible and reasonable. Singling Alonso out for praise on some sort of moral level would be one thing; assessing him as a player is another. That may not be the right answer — there may not be a right answer — but I hope it, at least, answers the question. More

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      A World Cup Every Two Years? Why?

      by

      Soccer is in love with the Big Idea. But a focus on fundamentally changing the game’s calendar leaves no room for a necessary debate about fixing it.This is soccer’s age of the Big Idea. There is an incessant, unrelenting flow of Big Ideas, ones of such scale and scope that they have to be capitalized, from all corners of the game: from individuals and groups, from clubs and from leagues, from the back of cigarette packets and from all manner of crumpled napkins.The Video Assistant Referee system was a Big Idea. Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams was a Big Idea. Project Big Picture, the plan to redraw how the Premier League worked, was a Big Idea. The Super League was the Biggest Idea of them all — perhaps, in hindsight, it was, in fact, too Big an Idea — an Idea so Big that it could generate, in the brief idealism of its backlash, more Big Ideas still, as the death of a star sends matter hurtling all across the galaxy.And now, thanks to Arsène Wenger and a curiously obedient coterie of former players, we have another. This latest Big Idea is, at heart, a very simple thought, rooted in the noted Alan Partridge dictum about detective TV shows: People like them, so let’s make more of them. If the World Cup can grow in size, why not have it grow in time, too? Instead of playing it every four years, why not just play it biennially?Arsène Wenger, the man sent out to sell soccer’s latest Big Idea.Valeriano Di Domenico/Pool Via ReutersThe reaction, well, everyone could have guessed the reaction. As fans, our relationship with soccer is an intensely personal one. It is bound up in affection and mythology and nostalgia, and though it is one of the great collective experiences, every member of the crowd perceives it entirely independently.One might believe it to be a tactical endeavor; another might feel it is rooted in industry, heart and desire. It might bond me to a place, but it might tie you to your family. Above all, soccer links us all back to the most personal memory of all, our childhood, to a pure and unadulterated love, an unquestioning and unquestioned pleasure. Our devotion is to once again capturing the feeling we knew then.It is no wonder, then, that fans are coded to resist change. No matter what form it takes — V.A.R. or penalties being taken in the wrong order or the expansion of the World Cup — change is necessarily external. It is proof of someone else, someone other, tampering with the way our game works, taking it further away from its truest and highest form, the one that it just so happened to take when we were young.Wenger’s plan, then, was not met with rapturous applause. It has been condemned, pretty widely, not only by fans but by all but two of the groups that we now routinely describe as soccer’s stakeholders. Clubs, leagues, players: They are all against it. They all fear it congests the calendar yet further, that it strips the World Cup of some, or much, of its prestige. Its value, they say, lies in its rarity.FIFA’s Gianni Infantino, who has yet to hear a billion-dollar idea he wouldn’t at least entertain.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe two exceptions, of course, are the phalanx of so-called legends — John Terry and Michael Owen and Peter Schmeichel and the rest — consulted by Wenger, in his capacity as FIFA’s chief of global football development, ahead of, say, fan groups or the Bundesliga or UEFA; and the vast majority of FIFA’s 211 member nations, many of whom stand to benefit in some way from the expansion and are, not coincidentally, in favor of it.This is just the first of quite a long list of problems with Wenger’s idea: Why should a decision that impacts the game at the club level as much as internationally, one that has ramifications for anyone who plays or watches professional soccer, be decided by such a narrow interest group?What right — and apologies, here, if this comes across as Eurocentric — does the national federation of Oman or Uzbekistan or Canada, for that matter, have to vote on a proposal that would radically alter the way that European and South American club soccer, the great engines of the game, work? Particularly when they are not mere observers, judiciously selecting the best option for the game they love, but active beneficiaries of the plan?That is just the start of it, though. The other issues are many and varied. Wenger’s system would see a World Cup staged every two years; in the intervening summers, the six major confederations would hold their continental championships.Where, precisely, does this leave the women’s game? Would the Women’s World Cup have to compete with the men’s European Championship in odd years? What happens to the expanded Club World Cup that Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, has spent years conceiving and crafting and flogging?If the World Cup can retain its prestige despite doubling in frequency, can the same be said of the continental tournaments? Is the best way to grow African or Asian soccer to make those continents compete for eyeballs and interest with the European Championship? The answer, to both, is no. There have been four iterations of the Copa América in the last seven years, and each one has meant just a little less than the last; this summer, running concurrently with the Euros, the Copa was largely an afterthought outside South America.Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA want no part of a biennial World Cup.Catherine Ivill/Pool Via ReutersThat Wenger and FIFA have not yet been able to provide a convincing riposte to those issues — beyond pointing out that more countries would be able to qualify for the World Cup, which is the sort of thing that may well prove to be untrue in practice, no matter how much sense it makes in theory — is a shame, because his proposal is not without value. The Big Idea may be riddled with flaws, but the small ideas that support it are worth considering.Wenger wants to reduce player fatigue and soccer’s carbon imprint, as well as impose order on soccer’s archaic calendar, by streamlining the qualification process: Rather than a series of brief international windows, he would prefer either one, or two, longer ones per season. (When they would fall is not decided, but safe to say that taking a month off in October, just after Europe’s season has started, should really be an opening gambit at best). That is a Good Idea, one that merits capitalizing.So, too, the thought of a secondary global competition — a sort of Europa League World Cup — to run alongside the main tournament, offering smaller nations a viable target, is not without merit. Soccer fans are naturally conservative, but it would be self-defeating to spurn any notion of change whatsoever.Sadly, though, the potential benefits most likely will be lost, either because the whole plan is vetoed — UEFA, its nose tweaked by the sense that FIFA is simply bulldozing its vision through, has already vowed to fight it — or because they represent small victories in a resounding, overall defeat.There is a sadness in that, because there are plenty of ways that soccer’s format might be changed for the better, and this is the chance to do it. There is a reason that all of these Big Ideas keep emerging: In 2024, the game’s calendar effectively resets and, until it does, every option is effectively in play. This is an opportunity for change, the progressive and positive sort, if only all of the interested parties could resist the temptation to claim territory and investigate nurturing fertile ground instead.It should not be beyond the wit of soccer, for example, to keep Wenger’s ideas for a condensed qualification process and (more or less) contemporaneous continental tournaments, but abandon a biennial World Cup, with all its drawbacks.Christian Pulisic, among many others, surely supports fewer qualifying games, not more, after he was injured in one in Honduras on Wednesday.Moises Castillo/Associated PressInstead, everything would remain on a four-year cycle; one of the intervening summers would be given over to an expanded Club World Cup (again: a Big Idea that makes sense) and another would be left strictly fallow, to allow all men’s players a chance to rest and offer the Women’s World Cup an uninterrupted window on the global stage. (Women’s continental tournaments could run in the same years as the men’s, though not simultaneously).Why stop there? Qualification is long and arduous and, in South America, where almost everyone will qualify, will largely be pointless after 2022. Instead, guarantee the teams that make the last 16 of the Qatar World Cup a place in the group stage in 2026, setting a pattern that will reduce the number of teams for whom qualification is more of a chore than a chance. (This newsletter has previously advocated for this idea to be introduced for the Euros, too.) That increases the number of meaningful games, and allows elite players more rest.While we are at it: The Nations League concept has been successful, but should be abandoned; the Champions League should revert to its current 32-team format, rather than the new model brought in under the now rather passé threats of Europe’s old elite; strict rules should be introduced on how many players over age 23 any club can have on loan, as well as a system allowing players not regularly representing their clubs the right to cancel their contracts and enter a draft; the viability of cross-border leagues should be explored to reduce economic imbalance; solidarity payments from the Champions League should be drastically increased; a Club World Cup for women’s soccer should be instituted immediately.Soccer has an inbuilt, reflexive aversion to change, but that the sport is thinking about what shape it might take in the future should not be discouraged. Perhaps, in fact, that would be the biggest shame of all: not just if the sport’s age of the Big Idea resulted in the sort of change that leads to regret, in super leagues and saturation, but if it led to no change at all.Talk? No Thanks. Let’s Argue Instead.Brazil played several World Cup qualifiers shorthanded. Now the missing stars may have to sit out the weekend, too.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt would be nice, of course, if soccer’s various competing interests — its leagues and its clubs, its national federations and its tournament organizers and its players’ unions — could all get around a table and thrash out a future that worked for everyone, rather than hurriedly scrabbling to grab whatever little piece of land they can.To know that such a prospect is a distant one, sadly, all you have to do is look at the simmering dispute between the Brazilian national federation and several Premier League clubs that may well strip a handful of England’s biggest teams of some of their most important players this weekend.Just before the international break, the teams of the Premier League decreed that they would not release players for South America’s World Cup qualifiers — though a couple, Aston Villa and Tottenham, later backtracked, to absolutely no consequence whatsoever — because Britain’s quarantine rules would mean any players who traveled would not be able to play for two weeks after their return. They did so with the backing of the game’s various authorities.At the end of the international break, Brazil demanded that FIFA invoke a rule preventing players who were denied the chance to play for their country from playing for their clubs for five days, meaning dozens must sit out this weekend’s Premier League schedule (and, in one case, a Champions League game on Tuesday). They did so with the support of a whole different set of authorities.It is not worth lingering on who is in the right here (it’s the clubs, in case you are wondering, at least partly because Brazil has not asked that the ban be applied to Richarlison, the Everton striker, seemingly for no better reason than that Brazil quite likes Everton), or even if the ban will hold up (at the time of writing, talks were ongoing, as they say).Far more significant is just how broken the lines of communication between the club game and its international counterpart appear to be. Would it have been too much to ask for the clubs to open a dialogue with Brazil before announcing their intentions? Did Brazil need to take such a drastic step? Is it really sensible to be throwing oil-soaked rags at the group of people weighing up the benefits of lighting a match?That is the environment soccer has fostered. That is the culture and the climate in which anyone and everyone is trying to make change. It is broken, at some fundamental level, because all sides not only prioritize their own interests, but seem somehow unaware that theirs are not the only interests in play. Until that ends, no change that comes will be positive. It is not immediately clear how it can be.The Rise of SpainReal Madrid eliminated Manchester City from the Champions League on Wednesday.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThere were, in Manchester City’s defense, mitigating circumstances. Half of its team was missing through injury; its preparation for the season has been disrupted, more than many, if not quite most, by the loss of players to the Olympics; it was, put simply, a draw sufficiently tough to be regarded as unfortunate.Still, City’s elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Real Madrid on Wednesday should not be dismissed as a one-off event. The context of Manchester City’s defeat is important, but so, too, is the context of Real Madrid’s victory: It is yet another piece in the mounting body of evidence that the emerging power in the women’s game is Spain.The United States may be the world champion. Canada may be the Olympic champion. England’s Women’s Super League may be the strongest domestic competition on the planet. France’s Lyon and Paris St.-Germain may remain prized scalps, era-defining supersquads.But it is a Spanish club, Barcelona, that finally dethroned Lyon as European champion last season. It is a Spanish player, Alexia Putellas, who was anointed player of the year by UEFA last month. And it is in Spain where Real Madrid — latecomers to the women’s game, having only officially fielded a team last year — has now joined its neighbor Atlético Madrid as a genuine counterweight to Barcelona.How Real fares in its debut season in the Champions League remains to be seen, though knocking out City, a team assembled at no little cost and with considerable pedigree on this stage, augurs well. But the presence of those three teams at the summit of the women’s game in Spain suggests that its rise is only just beginning, that the sport’s axis may be shifting not only east, to Europe, but south, to Madrid and Barcelona, too.Barcelona’s Alexia Putellas lifted the Champions League trophy in May. David Lidstrom/Getty ImagesCorrespondenceNo shortage of responses to last week’s column on whether clubs loaning out players on an industrial scale was morally troublesome. “How much do all these loan moves benefit and improve the player?” asked Ben Myers, rhetorically. “Answer: not at all. This is unfortunate because a player’s career becomes subservient to the financial needs of a club, and players watch their careers dry up.”Mendel Litzmann, though, begs to differ. “There are successful players from this academy loan system, pioneered by [Chelsea’s] Marina Granovskaia: Romelu Lukaku, Mohammed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne, Jamal Musiala. There is an irony that Lukaku was brought back to Chelsea, after being part of the loan system.”I’d probably fall somewhere in the middle on this. I don’t think there is an issue with clubs loaning players out for experience, as Chelsea did with Lukaku (before selling him, just as all the others were sent out and then sold on, for profit, raising the question as to whether Chelsea needed them in the first place, or whether they might have been better left elsewhere). Sometimes, a loan spell is exactly what a player needs. The problem arises when the players are loaned out, again and again, when it is abundantly clear the club has no intention of ever recalling them.Is it possible for a club to employ too many players?Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJay Radecki, meanwhile, looked at it from the players’ perspective. “The market for athletes in soccer is full, on the margin, of players who could make it. Accordingly, players seek their maximum compensation at any free moment but also, maybe more important, the security of a longer-term contract. This desire for certainty in both wages and employment are the counterpoints that allow clubs to control the loan market.” This, perhaps, is the main benefit for the players locked in the loan cycle: They are protected a little, for a while, from the vicissitudes of the game.And Connor Murphy volunteered the point of view of the clubs. “Gambling on prospects, like Marlos Moreno, is a risky business. Nobody wants to be left holding the bag after an expensive player flops. You want variance to work in your favor, not against you, so you sign a lot of players. You send them out and bide your time. Some players are stars, some are flops, and some are just OK. You keep the stars, eat the losses on the flops, and farm out or sell the ‘just OK.’” This logic is absolutely right, of course. Whether that logic is right in a whole other sense is the big question. More

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      The Problem When Soccer Clubs See Athletes as Assets

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

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      Mbappé, Ronaldo and the South Beach Moment

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

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      Spain Waits, Impatiently, for the Goals to Arrive

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      Spain is still wonderful at passing the ball. It is far less effective, at least lately, and especially at Euro 2020, at putting it in the net.Elías Bendodo has the long and unwieldy job title of a man with too much on his plate. For the last three years, he has served as minister of the presidency, public administration and interior for the Spanish region of Andalusia. On the side, he acts as the local government’s spokesman, all while serving as president of the Málaga branch of the Spanish political organization Partido Popular.He is, in other words, busy. In the last few weeks alone, Bendodo has had to organize regional elections, handle the expansion of the area’s coronavirus vaccination program and intervene in a dispute between rivals for the post of mayor in the city of Granada.He has also spent a surprising amount of time talking about the best way to mow grass.It started after Spain’s opening game of Euro 2020 last week against Sweden, a scoreless draw at La Cartuja, a vast, soulless and unloved stadium on the outskirts of Seville. The turf, Spain’s players and staff members said, was too short, too dry, too rough. “The field of play hurt us,” said Luis Enrique, the team’s coach.Things had not improved by the time Spain returned to the stadium for its second game, against Poland on Saturday. “The field does not help,” said Rodri, the Manchester City midfielder. “It’s in very bad condition. It does not suit the fluidity of our game.” That match ended in a draw, too, leaving Spain needing to win its final game, against Slovakia on Wednesday, to be sure of qualification for the tournament’s knockout rounds.By that stage, a controversy was brewing. El País reported that Spain’s coaching staff had asked the stadium’s grounds crew to cut the grass short, perhaps too short, for the Sweden game. Luis Enrique demanded the situation be remedied. In the searing heat of an Andalusian summer, the grounds crew worked overnight to make the grass grow.It was at this point that Bendodo could not help but be drawn in. Suddenly, the most pressing issue in his bulging agenda was not the vaccination program or the lifting of the rules on wearing masks, but whether some stadium grass was a little on the short side.“Any situation relating to the lawn that can be improved will be improved,” he vowed with the kind of purpose and sincerity traditionally reserved for a condemnation of a failing school or a crackdown on crime.And yet even Bendodo recognized the inherent absurdity of the situation, that this subject should have gone all the way to the top, that one of the most senior politicians in one of Spain’s most populous regions should have to weigh in on the subject of a lawn.“We would not be talking about this,” he said, “if we had scored a goal.”That, far more than the grass at La Cartuja, is Spain’s problem, and it has been Spain’s problem for some time. It was an issue before the tournament — Luis Enrique was pressed on it after his team lost in Ukraine last year, despite registering 21 shots on goal — and it was an issue in its tuneup games before Euro 2020. The search for “the goal” has become an overpowering theme. “The goal,” Rodri said, “is everything.”Though there have been exceptions, most notably a 6-0 win against Germany at La Cartuja in November, the pattern has been clear for some time. Spain dominates almost every game it plays. It all but monopolizes the ball. But it cannot score goals, not in any great numbers. It has, as the journalist Ladislao Molina put it, become “the king of inconsequential possession,” capable of playing 917 passes against Sweden but fashioning barely a handful of chances. Spain has created a monument to what the manager Arsène Wenger used to call “sterile domination.”If the players have chosen to point the finger of blame downward, at the turf at La Cartuja, at least a portion of fans have identified another culprit: Álvaro Morata, Spain’s top forward. Morata was jeered by the crowd during a friendly against Portugal before the tournament, and Luis Enrique has come under intense pressure to drop him from the team.In public, Morata has been adamant that the criticism does not affect him. Even his most illustrious predecessors, he has said, were targeted for abuse while playing for the national side. “If Fernando Torres has been criticized in Spain, imagine the intellectual level of many people,” he said in an interview with the sports daily AS.In private, he may be more vulnerable. It was notable that after Morata struggled against Sweden, the team’s psychologist, Joaquín Valdés, sat next to him on the bench, talking intently with a player who has acknowledged in the past that he dwells on the goals that do not go in and who was once advised by his former club teammate Gianluigi Buffon not to let anyone see him cry.He can, though, at least count on the unstinting support of his manager. A few days after the draw with Sweden, Luis Enrique declared that his team against Poland would be “Morata and 10 others.” He was rewarded by Morata’s scoring Spain’s only goal of the tournament so far; the forward celebrated by rushing to his coach, embracing him.Álvaro Morata celebrating his goal on Saturday — Spain’s only one at the Euros — with Luis Enrique.Pool photo by David RamosThat is the message that has emanated consistently not only from Luis Enrique and his staff, but the players, too: The goals will come. After that defeat to Ukraine last October, the manager insisted that if 21 shots were not enough to score a goal, then the solution was to take more shots. Pedri, his teenage midfielder, espoused the same logic after the first game at the Euros. “We have to do the same,” he said. “If we create many opportunities, the goal will go in.”It is that orthodoxy, though, that may well lie at the root of Spain’s problem, beyond the shortcomings of both the turf and Morata. The overwhelming majority of Luis Enrique’s squad came through the ranks at one of Spain’s elite academies, largely those of Real or Atlético Madrid and Barcelona, at a time when the country was home to arguably the greatest international team of all time.They were all raised not only in the shadow of the Spain team that won back-to-back European Championships — as well as the country’s first World Cup — but in the style of that team, too, forged and polished into bright, inventive, technically accomplished players designed to perpetuate the same school of thought that had brought the generation before such glory.And yet that approach is destined to fall short, to get close to the goal but never quite reach it. It was another great truism of Wenger’s that soccer was heading for a dearth of central defenders and center forwards, the positions where players needed a particular edge, one that was dulled by institutionalization.He could have predicted no better example than Spain. The team that swept all before it might have been constructed around Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, but they had the grizzled determination of Carles Puyol at their back and the incision of David Villa and Torres in front. This team, by contrast, lacks both qualities.Morata has shouldered much of the public’s blame for Spain’s scoring struggles.Pool photo by Marcel Del PozoIn defense, that is self-inflicted — Luis Enrique elected not to call up a half-fit Sergio Ramos for the tournament — but in attack, it is endemic. If Morata seems to embody the type of forward raised by an elite academy, elegant and sophisticated but lacking ruthlessness, then his putative rivals for a place support the theory.Gerard Moreno, the only other specialist striker in Spain’s squad, was playing third-division soccer at age 16, and did not make his debut in La Liga until he was 22. He bloomed late, winning his first cap for Spain at 27.It is a career trajectory that is startlingly similar to quite a few of the most productive Spanish forwards of recent years: Iago Aspas, now 33, who has only ever shone at Celta Vigo; José Luis Morales, the same age, who rose from obscurity to captain of Levante in La Liga; Kike García, a little younger at 31, coming off the back of a fine personal season for relegated Eibar.That it is these players — the ones who cut their teeth and sharpened their instincts away from the elite — who are the only viable candidates to replace Morata encapsulates the problem. Spain’s academies churn out midfielders and fullbacks with startling regularity, but they have struggled to produce the caliber of striker the national team needs if it is to scale the heights it touched a decade ago.Spain will plow on, of course. A win against Slovakia will see it through to the knockout rounds. Another draw may yet be enough to sneak through, too. From there, Luis Enrique has sufficient talent at his disposal to run deep into the tournament. Spain will, in other words, do the same thing it has always done, the only thing it now knows how to do: pass and pass and pass again, kicking the real cause of its ills into the long grass. More