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      What Do We Mean by Good Soccer?

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      The best games manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent, but those that clear that bar are rare. And that presents fans with a choice.MANCHESTER, England — Jesse Lingard was streaking away, the ball at his feet, on the right wing. Their legs weary and their hopes dwindling, Arsenal’s defenders heaved and hauled to keep up with him, as if they were running into a stiff wind. And on the other side of the field, Cristiano Ronaldo started to sprint.It was a true sprint, too, a track sprint, a coached sprint: starting in a low crouch, his back straightening as he reached full tilt, head held high, arms pumping. The clock had just ticked past 90 minutes, but there seemed to be a magnet drawing Ronaldo to Arsenal’s penalty area, some elemental force. He had scented a chance from 60 yards, and he just could not resist the aroma.Ronaldo arrived in the penalty area roughly at the same time as Lingard, and the ball, but the chance never came. He came to a sudden halt, stood for a moment, and then doubled over, gulping down the air. It was fitting, really, a breathless end to a breathless game, the sort of evening that leaves the fans as drained as the players.Manchester United had won, 3-2, but the richness was in the detail: Arsenal’s opening goal, scored by Emile Smith-Rowe as David de Gea, the United goalkeeper, lay prone on the goal line, nursing an injury he had sustained by running into his own player; the quick thrust and parry early in the second half, as United took the lead and then offered Arsenal a reprieve almost immediately; the confected, compulsory drama of the referee, Martin Atkinson, walking achingly slowly to the monitor to award the penalty kick that won the game.As entertainment, it was difficult to beat. It was compelling and enthralling and pulsating, a sort of Platonic ideal of a Premier League game, all of the characteristics that English soccer prides itself on, that it sells to the world at a premium, distilled into 90 minutes. It was, by that measure, a good game of soccer.But by another, it was not. Michael Carrick had been in charge of United that night. His successor, Ralf Rangnick, was sitting in the directors’ box. At the end of the game, Carrick told his players that he would not only be stepping down but leaving the club altogether, off in search of fulfillment elsewhere.Ralf Rangnick pondering the scale of the job he has accepted at United. Jon Super/Associated PressUnited played like a team that had internalized that uncertainty. It had the air of a side between managers, one only just beginning to emerge from a month of confidence-sapping crisis. There was no shortage of individual talent, but there was a lack of organization, an undeniable jaggedness to their play. Martin Odegaard appeared wholly unmarked to score Arsenal’s equalizer. Passes went astray. Attacks bubbled and then fizzled out. It was obvious United wanted to win. It was not always so obvious that it knew how.Arsenal might have known precisely who its manager was, but it was no better. Mikel Arteta has crafted a young, game team, but with that youth and that exuberance comes a naïveté. Having taken the lead, it ceded the initiative. It squandered possession. It folded as United attacked. It ran out of ideas. Its most experienced player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, was irrelevant throughout.As a technical exercise, then, the match was hardly conclusive proof of the Premier League’s old boast that it is the best domestic competition in the world. It was mainly striking as an illustration of how far both United and Arsenal have fallen: watching on, Rangnick must have seen all of that haphazard defending, uncertain pressing, that rushed passing and thought that perhaps the Premier League was not so different from the Bundesliga after all.For everyone else, it was difficult to watch either team without being struck by how far both have fallen, to wonder quite what Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger would have thought if you had told them that the roles of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira would one night be taken by Scott McTominay and Mohamed Elneny.Those two definitions of good are not always in tension — the best games, of course, manage to be both compulsive viewing and technically excellent — but, in truth, those that clear that bar are rare beasts. And that presents us, as fans, with a choice, one that strikes at the heart of what it is about sports that makes us want to watch, what we want a sport to be.Mohamed Salah and Liverpool: when a team morphs into one long knee slide.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAnnibale Frossi, the former Inter Milan manager, once declared that the “perfect result to a game of football is 0-0,” because that represents “a balance between the attacks and defenses on the field.” There is truth in that, but it does not sound as if it would offer a particularly gripping spectacle. Entertainment lies, often, in the imperfections: the lapse in concentration that leads to an attack; the mistake that concedes an equalizer; Harry Maguire. Which good do we want?If that sounds an ephemeral, philosophical question, it is not, not at the moment. European soccer’s financial imbalance — between the Premier League and everyone else; between the dozen or so superclubs and their underlings; between the state-backed and the self-sufficient — has allowed a handful of teams to achieve a level of excellence that is more sustainable than ever before.There exists a group of clubs that can carry squads of quite impossible depth, slipping in one $70 million player after another; gobbling up any talent that emerges elsewhere; acquiring the best in sports science and data analysis and youth development.Those teams are capable of playing soccer that touches perfection: Bayern Munich and Manchester City and Liverpool and Chelsea. Entering Friday, the Premier League’s top three had goal differences of +23, +32 and +26. Only two other teams have positive goal differences, and one of those is Manchester United, which is currently on +1. P.S.G. is already 11 points clear at the top in France. Bayern is on course for a 10th straight German championship.Alphonso Davies and Bayern Munich strolled through the Champions League group stage, winning all six games and outscoring their opponents by 22-3.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a pleasure in watching all of them, of course, as there is a pleasure in watching any master at work. The intricacy of City’s movement, the ruthlessness of the attacks of Bayern and Liverpool, Chelsea’s precision-engineered craft. But that is unrelated to whether they produce games that are compelling to watch. Just as Manchester United and Arsenal did not have to be good to conjure a good game, the converse is true. Good teams do not necessarily lead to good entertainment.To Chelsea, Bayern and the rest, that is of no concern: The professional part of professional soccer means that their only duty is to win, as much and as well as possible. It can feel a little dirty, too, to discuss soccer in these terms, gathering it under that great umbrella that encompasses television and cinema and music and all the rest.But, ultimately, that is what soccer is supposed to be: entertainment. It is because it is entertaining that we keep watching. It is, in part, why fans are quicker to turn on coaches who prioritize the dour and the miserly rather than those who speak airily of their visions of the game. Excellence can take the breath away. But it is the flaws that keep us coming back for more.The Not-So-Lovable UnderdogThe Atlético Madrid-Porto Champions League match in one photograph.Luis Vieira/Associated PressIt has been hard not to admire Atlético Madrid for the last decade or so. Not only because of what Diego Simeone has achieved — the two league championships, the two Champions League finals — but the circumstances in which he has done it, and the approach he has taken.Atlético has emerged as a consistent power in La Liga and the Champions League on a fraction of the budget enjoyed by its rivals both in Spain and in Europe. It has done so not by copying the stylistic orthodoxy of the elite, but by subverting it. Where others have sought elegance and beauty, Atlético has prized courage and grit and a snarling, street-fighting determination.That has made it a useful corrective in the era of the smooth, glossy superclub: Atlético is a reminder that power and money are not always everything, that there is more than one path to be taken, that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder.Criticizing Atlético always risks sounding prudish. Simeone’s team embodies certain martial values, after all, a vision of soccer that many cherish. Competitive sports is not meant to be gentle. And yet, on its journey through the Champions League, it has felt a little like something at Atlético has curdled. It has become the underdog you want to lose.At Anfield, a few weeks ago, Simeone’s team spent a considerable portion of the game trying to incite Sadio Mané into doing something reckless. Against Porto, on Tuesday, its response to coming under concerted pressure was to spark two full-scale brawls.When Atlético had a player dismissed, it did not grit its teeth and dig in; it set about leveling the field. This time, it worked. The Porto substitute Wendell reacted to Atlético’s provocation. Brushed on the touch line, the Atlético striker Matheus Cunha fell to the ground theatrically, and the referee duly produced a red card.Atlético went on to win the game, and book its place in the last 16. Not long ago, the frenzied scenes of celebration would have been quite uplifting, another demonstration of Simeone’s team’s indomitability. This time, it was not quite so appealing.Atlético no longer seems a team that can indulge in soccer’s dark arts — and there is a place in all sports, for gamesmanship, and it is even possible to marvel at their master practitioners — but a team defined by them. In another time, those brawls might have looked like a deliberate tactic: It is Atlético, after all. But not this time. This time, it looked like a team losing control, letting its demons run.Coming Saturday: M.L.S. CupNew York City F.C. players this week at Providence Park in Portland, Ore., where they will face the host Portland Timbers on Saturday in Major League Soccer’s championship game. N.Y.C.F.C. is making its first appearance in the final. More on them in The Times this weekend.Troy Wayrynen/USA Today SportsWarning SignsThis is a slightly strange week, it has to be said, to issue some grand proclamation about the strength of the Premier League. After all, only one of its four representatives in the Champions League recorded a victory in the final round of group games.Manchester City lost at RB Leipzig. Manchester United drew at home to the Swiss champion, Young Boys. Most damaging, Chelsea conceded a late equalizer against Zenit St. Petersburg that meant it did not win its group, making its task significantly more difficult in the last 16 (unless it draws Lille, the weakest of its potential opponents, on Monday).But the nature of that sole victory felt instructive. Liverpool did not need to beat A.C. Milan. Jürgen Klopp’s team had already won its group with ease, allowing him to change his side considerably. By a conservative estimate, he omitted eight first-team players from the game. Milan, by contrast, had to win to have any chance at all of qualifying for the knockouts.And yet Liverpool, with a team far weaker than it would ever dream of sending into a Premier League game, still strolled to victory. In the context of the week, that means little. But take a step back and it fits a pattern: England has provided both teams for two of the last three Champions League finals. Only one English team — United last year — has failed to make it out of the group stage since Tottenham in 2016.Raheem Sterling’s Manchester City was one of three Premier League teams to win their Champions League group. All four English entries made the last 16.David Klein/ReutersThere is nothing new in one league’s emerging as the best on the planet. Italy held that status in the 1990s. Spain has been able to lay claim to it for stretches of the current century. Perhaps it is just England’s turn again, as it was between 2005 and 2010 (give or take a little blurring at the edges.)The difference this time is the size of the gap. The Premier League’s financial advantage is growing at an alarming rate: its television revenues are increasing at the same time that most of continental Europe’s clubs are trying to claw back money lost to the coronavirus pandemic.Liverpool’s second team can include a $45 million defender like Ibrahima Konaté, and a $50 million midfielder like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. A.C. Milan, on the other hand, had the chance to sign Bernardo Silva from Manchester City this summer but simply could not come close to his $8 million-a-year salary.The nature of the Champions League — the vagaries of the draw, the immediacy of the format, the outsize influence of injury in a knockout competition — means it cannot be guaranteed that a Premier League team will win it this season. But there are, now, only one or two continental sides that might realistically match the English contingent.The financial gulf is now so great that the trend should only grow stronger over the next few years. Of course, continental Europe’s clubs could spend their money more wisely, they could recruit better, and they could play smarter (Italian and Spanish teams, for one, need to adopt a higher tempo to compete). But the imbalance is such, now, that it is hard to see how it is corrected.CorrespondenceThere was, it turns out, a glaring inaccuracy in last week’s newsletter. This is unacceptable, of course, and I will be duly censured for it — though my attempts to secure myself the traditional soccer punishment, a weeklong suspension on full pay, have been unsuccessful — but I think you may understand: apparently, Juventus is not the only club in the world to have its own font.Bea Reiter points to the Kansas City Current, of the N.W.S.L., which boasts a hand-drawn effort to “reflect the power and movement of the brand.” Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew can make the same claim, Harmon Vredeveld informs us: It has a bespoke font, too, called NineSix, a nod to the year of the club’s founding. Every day, as they say, is a school day.Apologies are also owed to Ben Myers and Naomi Farley, who were equally offended that I forgot to add Weston McKennie in my list of young players Juventus might, if it were so minded, try to build a revitalized team around. He warranted a mention, certainly, though I fear he may yet prove a victim of the club’s short-termism.Weston McKennie thanks you for your letters.Peter Cziborra/Action Images Via ReutersLet’s end on a positive note, because Zach Hollander has the kernel of an excellent idea to share. “Don’t you think it would be beneficial to have the Ballon d’Or decided after summer tournaments, but before the next season starts? That way it would take into account one full season, and let players who have an incredible club season not be “forgotten” for having a slow start to the next season.”This is thoroughly sensible, but the solution is far easier: Leave the Ballon d’Or where it is, for reasons of history, but move the other individual award — the FIFA one, rather cumbersomely called The Best — to the end of the season. That way, each award has its own, defined place, rather than sharing space: one for the calendar year, one for the soccer year. More

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      Juventus, Chasing Style, Forgets the Substance

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      Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next.Perhaps the best measure of how concerned Juventus is by image — of how central to the club’s identity is the way that identity is projected and perceived — is that it may well be the only team in world soccer to have its own, custom-designed font.It was commissioned in 2017, presumably after a raft of meetings that featured intense, sincere discussions about what typeface best conveyed the team’s values and mission. The font appears in all of the club’s marketing campaigns. It is deployed on all its social media pronouncements. It adorns the Juventus offices in Turin and Milan.Using the font is important to Juventus executives: uniformity of iconography, they believe, is crucial in helping build the club’s brand, in expressing to current fans and prospective ones and, where none can be found, putative customers, quite what Juventus stands for. Everything the club publishes has to have that distinctive, recognizable Juventus look. Image comes first.All of which makes the events of the last few months — perhaps longer — difficult to understand. First, there is the ongoing and now faintly masochistic devotion of Andrea Agnelli, the club’s president, to a Super League project that has not only cost him friendships and positions of power, but that has been met with pretty much universal opprobrium from fans. Continued commitment to it is not, as they say, a good look.And then, more serious still, there is the investigation by Italy’s financial authorities into six current and former executives — including Agnelli and Pavel Nedved, the club’s vice president — into Juventus’s transfer dealings. The authorities are said to be considering various charges of false accounting and reporting. The police have already raided the club’s training facility and its offices. That is not great for the image, either.It would be easy, then, to see more than a little hubris in Juventus’s on-field travails this season. There is a scene in the first episode of the club’s edition of the “All Or Nothing” documentary series — which started airing on Amazon Prime late last month, and over which the team’s executives hung like hawks, every step of the way — in which Agnelli gathers the members of the playing squad and lets them know, in no uncertain terms, the expectations.With an expletive or two thrown in, he tells the players that the previous season was not up to scratch. The year in question was the one before last, the one in which Maurizio Sarri led Juventus to a ninth straight Serie A title. The coach, an unlikely appointment who turned into an unpopular incumbent, had gone; Agnelli would not, he said, tolerate a repeat.The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli, right, and vice president Pavel Nedved are said be to be under investigation for the club’s transfer dealings.Massimo Rana/EPA, via ShutterstockIn comparison, of course, that year under Sarri would come to be seen as the last chapter of the golden era. Under his replacement, the novice Andrea Pirlo, Juventus barely scraped into the Champions League — relying on Napoli’s stumbling at home on the final day to make it — and then, over the course of the summer, discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo, the player it had brought in to turn domestic hegemony into continental success, no longer wanted to stick around.If that seemed like the nadir, it was not. After the failed experiments with Sarri and Pirlo, Juventus restored Massimiliano Allegri as coach this summer. His task was to prioritize “results,” as he has put it, over the pursuit of style that had captivated the club when it decided, a couple of years ago, that it had outgrown Sarri. Juventus had realized, it seemed, that the fact of winning was more central to its identity than the nature of it.Things are not, though, quite so simple. Allegri’s team has lost five games in Serie A already this season. Relative minnows, like Sassuolo, and actual minnows, like Empoli, have returned from Juventus’s Allianz Stadium with victories. Last weekend, Atalanta won in Turin for the first time in more than 30 years.Juventus sits seventh in Serie A, 12 points behind Napoli, the early leader. Allegri has already stated his belief that finishing fourth, and securing yet another season in the Champions League, may be the limit of this team’s ambitions. Even that relatively meager target is by no means guaranteed.Juventus fans are not used to watching a seventh-place team.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe cause of that decline can be traced to the same root as the demise in Juventus’s image. There is a tendency, in soccer, to believe nobody is capable of doing two things at once: A player taking an interest in off-field activities — whether that is being on TikTok, running a fashion label, feeding hungry children — will, at some point, invariably be told to concentrate on their performances; a club that takes care of its brand identity will be told to focus, instead, on signing players.It is a false dichotomy, of course. Players can run a business, campaign or social media account and still remember how to mark opponents on corners. Clubs employ hundreds of people, not all of whom are devoted to tactics, nutrition or being a right back.Where the two threads of Juventus’s struggles entwine is in the rationale behind them. Agnelli favors a Super League because it solves his club’s immediate financial problems. The plusvalenza system that the team’s executives are accused of manipulating offers the same, short-term hit: It makes sure this year’s books look good, with little or no thought to what happens later.Manager Massimiliano Allegri is already setting limits on what his team can achieve this season.Ciro De Luca/ReutersThat is precisely how Juventus has been run, too. In 2017, after a second defeat in the Champions League final in three years, Agnelli became obsessed with winning instantly. The painstaking, intelligent work that had returned the club to the pinnacle in both Italy and Europe was out; signing players to triumph immediately became the order of the day. A year later, the approach reached its apogee when Ronaldo arrived in Turin.Now Juventus is paying for that impatience. Ronaldo may be gone, but there are countless others — all on hefty contracts, all eating up the club’s pandemic-ravaged finances, all too costly to be easily offloaded — who remain: Aaron Ramsey and Alex Sandro and Adrien Rabiot.Allegri has at his disposal the sketch outline of a young, competitive team: Matthijs de Ligt, Rodrigo Bentancur, Manuel Locatelli, Dejan Kulusevski and Federico Chiesa. The club’s decision to establish an under-23 team in Italy’s third tier was made with the future in mind, too.But none of it can come to fruition while the squad, and the balance sheet, is filled by the underperforming and the overpaid. Juventus has thought for too long about the now, and too little about what comes next. And it is that, ultimately, which will do the damage to its image, to how it is perceived, and how it perceives itself. What matters, after all, is the story a club tells, not how it is written.Not Such a Walk in the ParcLionel Messi’s brilliance has not translated directly into French quite yet.Thibault Camus/Associated PressThere have been years when it has felt at least a little like either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or by default, that they were awarded the most prestigious individual prize in soccer not so much for what they had achieved recently but because it seemed inconceivable to suggest one of the two of them was not the finest player in the world.This year was not one of them. Of course, Robert Lewandowski offered a compelling alternative case. Even discounting the emotional appeal of honoring a player who so richly deserved the award 12 months ago, Lewandowski, the Bayern Munich striker, had done enough — more than enough — to win it based on his 2021 alone. It is not every season, after all, that a player breaks a 50-year-old goal-scoring record.But it hardly requires some great suspension of disbelief to understand why, eventually, France Football’s jurors chose Messi: It was this year, after all, that he finally ended his — and his country’s — long wait for an international trophy. The Copa América was Argentina’s first senior triumph since 1993. Delivering international glory was the one hole on Messi’s résumé. Now he has filled it. That was, as it should have been, enough.The complication is that Messi won his seventh Ballon d’Or as his domestic form is — how to put this delicately? — stuttering. His final season at Barcelona brought 38 goals in 47 games, even in a bitterly disappointing campaign, but he has struggled to find that form at Paris St.-Germain.He has three goals in the Champions League — including a wonderful strike against Manchester City — but only one in Ligue 1. A delayed start to the season, a couple of interruptions from minor injuries and being part of a somewhat inchoate team have not helped, but he has certainly not found France’s top flight as easy as anticipated.That will change, obviously, as P.S.G. hits its stride and as Messi adapts to a league he has acknowledged is more physical to the one to which he was accustomed. He recorded three assists against Saint-Etienne last weekend.But for now it serves as a reminder, perhaps, that Ligue 1 — widely derided as the weakest of Europe’s major domestic tournaments — is not quite the cakewalk many believe it to be, that any player at all can find a new environment challenging, and that nothing is easy, not really, even for the greats.Twenty’s PlentyIt is hard to tell which is the more startling statistic: that England scored 20 goals — 20, two zero — in a single game on Tuesday, or that in the process, Sarina Wiegman’s team racked up 64 shots. That works out, math fans, to roughly one every 90 seconds.The victory, in a World Cup qualifier against Latvia, ranks as the biggest-ever win by an England team. It also represented a European record for a competitive women’s game, though there should be just a small asterisk there: the previous mark was set only a few days earlier, when Belgium beat Armenia, 19-0.The issue of what to do with overmatched teams is not exclusive to the women’s game, of course — the debate flares up pretty reliably in men’s qualifying, too — but, because of the rapid development of the game across Europe, the scale of the imbalance and the urgency with which it must be addressed feel much greater.Ellen White and Beth Mead each scored three goals against Latvia this week. Their teammate Lauren Hemp had four.Tim Goode/Press Association, via Associated PressIt is, certainly, no time to indulge the two nonsensical orthodoxies that infect this debate in the men’s game: that playing the very best helps the smaller nations to improve — even Wiegman quite rightly dispatched that idea — and that changing the format of qualifying, in some way, prevents everyone from having an even chance to reach a tournament.A two- or even three-tier qualifying system for major competitions exists in North America, Africa and Asia. It does not exist in South America, but only because the likes of Suriname and French Guiana compete (for reasons that are not strictly geographical) in Concacaf. There is absolutely no reason Europe could not do the same.As Wiegman said, Latvia learned nothing from losing, 20-0, to England, in a game in which it had 14 percent possession and no shots on goal. England, likewise, learned nothing. Streamlining qualification is not a mark of disrespect to developing nations. It is not depriving them of a chance to get better. If anything, the exact opposite is true.CorrespondenceTo be honest, I could just copy and paste Nitin Bajaj’s email and leave it there for correspondence this week: “I read the bit on managers’ captivation with condiments with a great deal of … er … relish,” he wrote, clearly very pleased with himself.Gary Brown, meanwhile, thinks there is some sort of ketchup-based conspiracy at play. “What’s the evidence that Dean Smith had ever allowed ketchup at Villa before his sacking?” he asked. “Steven Gerrard announced that he’d banned it before he’d even seen it on the table at his new club. On the other hand, a suspicious mind might follow Dean Smith to his quick appointment at Norwich, whose majority owner is Delia Smith, cookery writer and TV legend, who is on record as saying she and her husband have ‘Big Mac picnics in the car-park’ at evening games, with fries and loads of ketchup’.”A clutch of you, meanwhile — James Patch, Martin Maudal and Jim Yoder — all got in touch to suggest the perfect example of how much difference a manager can make: Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea. This is absolutely correct, of course, but once again: I cannot produce a newsletter that just runs to four words.Thomas Tuchel, the exception that proves the rule.Frank Augstein/Associated PressAnd Thabo Caves sends an email that leads me to another thought. “A team has 11 players on the pitch most of the time,” he wrote. “If one player has roughly the same impact as another, then each player would have roughly a 9 percent influence on their team’s performance. Bringing in a new manager could then be considered as almost as influential as signing a new player in the middle of the season. Single players are consistently lauded for having transformative effects on teams, so why can’t a manager?”Why not indeed, Thabo, which leaves me to wonder: Should we not limit when teams can change their managers — perhaps to two windows, one before and one during the season — as we do with players? Why the reason for the difference? More

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      Italy and Portugal Drawn in Same Group for World Cup Playoff

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      The draw for Europe’s final three qualifying places ensured that either Italy, the European champion, or Portugal, with Cristiano Ronaldo, would miss the finals in Qatar.Italy and Portugal were drawn into the same World Cup qualifying bracket on Friday, ensuring that either the reigning European champion (Italy) or one of soccer’s biggest stars (Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo) will be absent from next year’s tournament in Qatar.Italy will face North Macedonia at home in a semifinal in March, and the winner will travel to play the winner of the bracket’s other semifinal — either Portugal or Turkey — for one of the last three European places in the World Cup. The Portugal-Turkey winner would host that game five days later.🥁 The semi-finals are set for the European play-offs!🎫 One team from each of the 3 paths will reach the #WorldCup 🏆 pic.twitter.com/cvkFwdzQoX— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) November 26, 2021
      The potential for such a high-stakes showdown also raised the possibility that Italy would miss the World Cup for the second cycle in a row. Italy lost a playoff for a place in the last World Cup, in Russia in 2018 — a defeat that one newspaper declared a “national shame.”“It could have been a little better, for sure,” Italy Coach Roberto Mancini told the Italian broadcaster RAI2 after Friday’s playoff draw. “As we would have gladly avoided them,” he added, “probably they too would have avoided us.”The possible showdown was the most intriguing of several high-stakes matchups for Europe’s last three spots in Qatar, and the first test of a new qualifying format. In the past, the European playoffs have taken the form of two-legged, head-to-head matchups.Instead, this year, the 12 teams — 10 of which finished as runners-up in their qualifying groups — were split into three four-team paths, each with its own semifinals and final. Only the winning team from each path qualifies for the World Cup.In the other brackets, Scotland will face Ukraine, with the winner meeting Wales or Austria, and Russia will host Poland for the right to face Sweden or the Czech Republic.Wales, which made its only World Cup appearance in 1958, was drawn into the same bracket as Scotland, which has not qualified since 1998.Ten European teams — led by Germany, France, Belgium and England — have already qualified, as have the two South American favorites, Brazil and Argentina.Friday’s draw also set up second-chance routes to the World Cup for countries from four other regional confederations. In those games, the fourth-place team from Concacaf, the region comprising North and Central America and the Caribbean, would play the Oceania champion, and the fifth-place team from South America would play the fifth-place team from Asia.Those games will be played as single-leg matches in Qatar next June 13 and 14 — more than two months after the World Cup draw sorts the 32-team field on April 1. More

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      Lionel Messi Wins Record Seventh Ballon d’Or

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      The Paris St.-Germain star capped a year in which he led Argentina to the Copa América title by edging Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski.Some of the most illustrious names in soccer’s long history only managed to win the Ballon d’Or, the sport’s most prestigious individual prize, once. George Best, Zinedine Zidane and Eúsebio all have just a single award to their names. Ronaldo, the great Brazilian striker, won two. Johan Cruyff, arguably the finest European player in history, has three.After Monday night, Lionel Messi has seven.Messi, 34, effectively retained the trophy he last won in 2019 — controversially, the award was not handed out by France Football last year because of the coronavirus pandemic — after a year in which he ended his long wait for an international honor, winning the Copa América with Argentina, and left Barcelona, the club where he had spent all of his career, for Paris St.-Germain.When your dad wins an other Ballon d’Or 🙌#ballondor pic.twitter.com/UWKir71mX5— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) November 29, 2021
      “It’s incredible to be here again,” Messi said. “Two years ago I thought it was the last time. Winning the Copa América was the key.”“I don’t know how many years I have left,” he added, “but I hope many more.”Messi finished with 613 points in the voting, only 33 more than the runner-up, Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski. In 2019, the last time the trophy was awarded, Messi beat Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk by only seven points.Barcelona may have lost Messi this year, but it still took home some hardware on Monday: Alexia Putellas, a star midfielder on its treble-winning women’s team, became the third winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or, and the teenager Pedri, a rising talent who is already a fixture for Barcelona and Spain’s national team, was honored as the world’s best player under 21.Messi, who had arrived at the gala at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in a shimmering tuxedo, a look matched by his three young sons, was typically soft-spoken in accepting his award. He praised his former teammates at Barcelona and his countrymen with Argentina, and vowed to fight for new trophies with his new club, P.S.G.Messi defeated Lewandowski in voting by 176 journalists and conducted by France Football, which awards the Ballon d’Or (almost) every year. Many experts argued Lewandowski deserved the honor in 2020, when it was not handed out because, organizers said, disruptions to the soccer calendar had made it impossible to judge. Messi said he agreed with that position.“I think you deserved to win the award last year,” Messi told Lewandowski from the stage, calling it “an honor” to stand against him for top honors in 2021.Jorginho, the Brazil-born Italy midfielder, was third in the balloting, reward for a season in which his club team, Chelsea, won the Champions League and Italy won the European Championship. Real Madrid and France striker Karim Benzema was fourth, and Jorginho’s Chelsea midfield partner, N’Golo Kanté, was fifth.Ronaldo, who finished sixth in the voting, was absent from Monday’s ceremony, but his rivalry with Messi was not. On his Instagram account, Ronaldo angrily took issue with a comment made recently by France Football’s editor in chief, Pascal Ferré, in an interview with The New York Times about the award’s prestige.“Ronaldo has only one ambition, and that is to retire with more Ballons d’Or than Messi,” Ferré said, “and I know that because he has told me.”Ronaldo — despite suggesting as much in other interviews — denied he had made the comment, saying, “Ferré lied, used my name to promote himself and to promote the publication he works for.”“It is unacceptable,” he added, “that the person responsible for awarding such a prestigious prize could lie in this way, in absolute disrespect for someone who has always respected France Football and the Ballon d’Or.”Though 2021 has hardly been a vintage year by Messi’s standards — Barcelona was beaten to the Spanish title by Atlético Madrid and eliminated from last season’s Champions League in the round of 16 — his achievement with Argentina, as well as the attention drawn by his move to France after winning six Ballons d’Or at Barcelona, was enough to convince the award’s jurors.That Messi had never won an international trophy with his national team had always been held against him in the debate over whether he warrants the status as soccer’s greatest ever player. His rivals, after all, had triumphed with their countries as well as their clubs: Pelé led Brazil to three World Cups, Diego Maradona inspired Argentina to one and Cristiano Ronaldo helped Portugal claim the European Championship in 2016.Messi finally put that idea to rest in this summer’s Copa América, breaking down in tears on the field after Ángel Di María’s goal had given Argentina its first international trophy since 1993, beating Brazil, the host, in the final.His tally of seven Ballons d’Or now puts him two clear of Ronaldo, his great rival: The Portuguese forward remains on five, but he has not won the prize since 2017, and at age 36 he is more than two years older than Messi.Putellas, the 27-year-old midfielder who is captain of Barcelona’s all-conquering women’s team, won the women’s Ballon d’Or. Her victory completed a clean sweep of last season’s prizes, after she led her Barcelona side to the Champions League title and a league and cup double in Spain, and then was honored as Europe’s player of the year.Her main rivals for the Ballon d’Or were mostly familiar faces: Barcelona had become the first women’s team to register five nominees in a single year, and two of Putellas’s teammates — Jennifer Hermoso, who was second, and Lieke Martens, who was fifth — finished in the top five in the voting.“Honestly it’s a bit emotional, and very special,” Putellas said. “It’s great to be here with all of my teammates, since we have lived and experienced so much together, especially in the past year.”“This is an individual prize,” she added, “but football is a team sport.” More

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      Manchester United Picks Ralf Rangnick as Interim Manager

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      Rangnick, an architect of the Red Bull soccer empire, will take over as United’s manager while the club pursues a permanent replacement for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.Ralf Rangnick, the architect of the rise of RB Leipzig and the man widely regarded as the forebear of much of modern German soccer, has landed the most high-profile post of his career, albeit on a temporary basis: the 63-year-old Rangnick is expected to be named Manchester United manager, perhaps as soon as today.After three tumultuous, emotional years, United finally parted with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on Sunday, less than 24 hours after his team endured a humbling 4-1 defeat at Watford. That loss came only a few weeks after Solskjaer’s team, reinforced over the summer with the likes of Jadon Sancho and Cristiano Ronaldo, was humiliated in quick succession, at home, by both Liverpool and Manchester City.Michael Carrick, a member of Solskjaer’s coaching staff and like him a decorated player during a decade-long playing career at the club, took charge for United’s victory in the Champions League at Villarreal on Tuesday, but the team’s executives had made it clear that his appointment would be a brief one.In the aftermath of Solskjaer’s dismissal, United had determined that the best course of action was to appoint an experienced interim manager — to take the club through to the end of the season — while it considered a long-term replacement for Solskjaer. The club appeared to be working on the logic that there would be a fuller field of candidates for the permanent post available in the summer.While the likes of Ajax’s Erik ten Hag and Mauricio Pochettino are the most convincing contenders for the full-time role, United considered a variety of immediately available coaches for the caretaker position that has gone to Rangnick. Lucien Favre, formerly of Borussia Dortmund, and Rudi Garcia, a French champion with Lille, both were considered.It was Rangnick, though, who quickly emerged as the front-runner. He has spent much of the last decade establishing and fine-tuning the Red Bull network of clubs, taking posts at both Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig. He helped turn the former into regulars in the Champions League and the latter into one of the most consistent clubs in Germany.He came to prominence, though, by guiding Hoffenheim — a team with little or no history, based in the village of Sinsheim — from the lower reaches of German soccer into the Bundesliga, and by teaching and playing an intense, fast-paced style of soccer that formed the theoretical basis for the likes of Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel. To many, Rangnick is the godfather of the German pressing game that now permeates most top-level European soccer.He left the Red Bull group last summer, and established his own consultancy firm, together with his longtime friend and confidante Lars Kornetka. The company had taken on a handful of clients — including Lokomotiv Moscow — hoping to tap in to Rangnick’s experience and his club-building expertise.Those teams have accepted that Rangnick will place those projects on hold while he takes charge at United. His managerial role will last only until the end of the season. He will then move into a consultant’s role at United once a new manager is in place. More

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      Manchester United and the Perils of Living in the Past

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      Years of success under Alex Ferguson changed the way United viewed itself. But the glory days are gone, and the sooner the club admits that, the better.Old Trafford’s gangways were still packed with Liverpool fans, basking in the sight of their team’s sacking of the Theatre of Dreams last month, when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, representing himself, made the case for the defense.What he had just witnessed, he admitted, represented the “darkest day” of his three years in charge of Manchester United. But, he said, he would not — could not — countenance the idea of stepping down, of walking away. “We have come too far as a group and we are too close to give up now,” he said.Leaving Old Trafford that day, the idea that Solskjaer might emerge unscathed seemed fanciful. He had become something worse than an object of pity: He had become a punchline. That night, United’s executives met to discuss how to react. Somehow, they came to the same conclusion as the man they had appointed: Now was not the time to turn back. Solskjaer survived.There are several ways to explain Manchester United’s reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious, the mulish refusal of the self-styled biggest club in the world to recognize that its manager was way in over his head until it had not only been humiliated at home by Liverpool, but swatted aside with disdain by Manchester City and then humbled, plaintive and pathetic, by modest Watford.One explanation — the easiest one, the Occam’s razor one — is cool, uncaring cynicism: United’s hierarchy appointed Solskjaer, initially temporarily and then on a series of ever-extending permanent contracts, and demurred from taking a decision that would effectively be an admission of error, and the club’s owners did not mind who was in charge as long as the money kept rolling in.Another, far kinder version, would point to the curious sentimentality that seems to infect Manchester United: For an organization that behaves in almost every other sphere of its existence as a faceless corporate monolith, carving up and selling off its history to whoever will pay for a slice, United thinks with its heart, rather than its head, more often than might be expected.That sentimentality was there in the rush to award Solskjaer a permanent contract after the uplift of his early caretaker months in 2018 and 2019, and again when the club extended his deal last summer after finishing a distant second to Manchester City in the Premier League.Solskjaer is a former player — a club legend, as the fawning statement that announced his departure put it — and the romance that it might be him who restored the team to its place at the pinnacle seemed to be irresistible to those who employed him. Solskjaer was even permitted an exit interview, a chance to say goodbye on his own terms, with tears in his eyes.Perhaps that should be standard practice: Managers, even ones who have lost heavily at Watford, are human, and should be treated as such. Certainly, the affection for Solskjaer among United fans made the interview entirely understandable. It is not, though, the move that most hard-nosed, unapologetically ruthless businesses would make.But then United is not quite as hard-nosed as it might be, not all of the time. There will have been plenty within the club rubbing their hands with glee at the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return last summer: his vast Instagram following, his army of devotees, his huge commercial profile.It was not any of that, though, that persuaded Rio Ferdinand and Alex Ferguson and Patrice Evra to intercede when it looked as if Ronaldo might be about to join Manchester City. They helped make the case to Ed Woodward, the club’s central power broker, to intervene. Ronaldo’s talent played its part of course, as did the status he had acquired in all his years away, but so too did the allure of bringing home a prodigal son, the feeling that he was back where he belonged.United sent stars to Solskjaer’s rescue when what the club seemed to need was a strategy.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis is not, of course, the “best in class” behavior that United would like to think is its hallmark. It did not take any great depth of knowledge, even in advance, to wonder if this little jaunt down memory lane might come at the cost of United’s balance, that Ronaldo might relegate the club’s future — Mason Greenwood and Jadon Sancho, in particular — to the shadows.It did not require any sort of tactical qualification to work out that Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba, as well as the rest of United’s glittering array of attacking talent, cannot be easily subsumed into a cogent system. No searing insight was required to see that the money might have been rather better spent on a defensive midfielder. After all, even Solskjaer knew that.But then that is the grand irony of the modern Manchester United, the one that sits at the heart of the third, and perhaps most compelling, explanation for how the Solskjaer experiment lasted this long — through the loss to City and the collapse against Liverpool and the defeat in last season’s Europa League final and the 6-1 loss at home to Tottenham and the 4-0 mauling by Everton and all of the other bright, burning red flags.This is a club that, for 20 years, did nothing but win. There is a banner at Old Trafford that sets out just how central ultimate victory is to this club: images in silhouette of every trophy available to an English soccer team surrounding the slogan “We’ve Won It All.” Most of them were accrued between 1991 and 2013, when Ferguson turned Old Trafford into a monument to his own greatness.That is the standard that Manchester United’s current and future iterations must match; that is the measure by which they have failed, again and again, in the eight years since Ferguson stood on the field at Old Trafford, an emperor believing the sun would never set, and assured the fans that the good times would never end.Manchester United embraces glory days, even as they move further away every year.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersAnd yet, for all that winning, there is precious little indication that anyone at Old Trafford understands quite how it happened. Solskjaer spoke often about restoring United’s traditions, but what they were was never made especially clear.In that, he joins a long and not especially proud list of Ferguson’s alumni to have tried to follow in their mentor’s footsteps and have failed. United had plenty of players during Ferguson’s tenure who looked cut out for management: the calm authority of Steve Bruce, the inspiring anger of Roy Keane, the fierce intelligence of Gary Neville, his brother Phil.None has lived up to the billing. Ferguson’s former assistants have fared a little better — Steve McClaren and Carlos Queiroz, in particular — but there is little evidence of a Ferguson school.It is not a unique phenomenon — Liverpool’s dynasty of the 1970s and ’80s did not produce a string of managerial titans, either — but it is, in the context of United’s failures since its totemic figure departed, noteworthy.In retirement, Ferguson has built a lucrative cottage industry in books on management and leadership. It is not to disparage his genius or his legacy to suggest that he did not pass those lessons on to those around him contemporaneously. Few of his former players absorbed them effectively, and, according to all available evidence, none of his theoretical superiors did. Ferguson does not seem to have left behind anyone at Old Trafford who truly understood the inner workings of his winning machine, who could reverse engineer his brilliance.Solskjaer in 2019, when United only saw sunshine ahead.Rui Vieira/Associated PressIt is easy to drift into meaningless jargon when listing all of the things required for success in modern soccer: a clear vision, a defined philosophy, a coherent structure. At times, their importance is overblown; Real Madrid won three Champions League titles in a row because it had the best players, after all. But whether they come by accident or design, most elite teams possess them. Manchester United does not.Perhaps that is why the club’s executives could believe Solskjaer when he said that, in the face of all that had happened against Liverpool, the club was “too close to give up now.” It was not clear what United was supposed to be close to, a few minutes after the yawning chasm between Solskjaer’s team and its greatest rival had been laid brutally and surgically bare.But how were the people charged with deciding whether he kept his job or not to know if he was right? They know that Manchester United ought to be great, because it was great under Ferguson, but they do not know how Ferguson made that greatness happen, so they have no way of measuring the club’s current proximity to it.Instead, they fell back on the solitary lesson that the club does seem to have learned from Ferguson: that success lies in the gift of a single great individual, and that all it needs to do to be restored to its perch is to find that person. They hoped, with all of their hearts, that might be Solskjaer. It was not. And so now they will set out on their search again, hoping to get close once more, even as they drift further and further away. More

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      The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?

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      The World Cup Is a Year Away. Who’s In?Rory SmithReporting on global soccer ⚽️Michel Euler/Associated PressWith Qatar 2022, arguably the most controversial World Cup in modern soccer history, now a year away, the field is starting to take shape.This is where things stand so far → More

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      For Qatar, the World Cup’s Glamour Is the Payoff

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      As the 2022 field starts to take shape, there is a sense that the host nation, after a decade of scrutiny and criticism, will at last get the return it expected.There have been times, over the last 11 years, over a decade of acrimony and accusation and controversy and scandal, when it has felt entirely reasonable to ask whether, deep down, in private moments and surreptitious whispers, some of those involved in winning the 2022 World Cup for Qatar might have wondered whether it has all been worth it.The cost of the project, the stadiums summoned from dust, the cities imagined out of nothing, the thousands of acres of grass and trees grown in desert sand, was all anticipated, built into the proposal. But those hundreds of billions are not the only price that has been paid.That one decision changed soccer on some fundamental, irrevocable level. This week, when the Premier League revealed its calendar for next season, it proudly claimed that it had hit upon a way to “limit” the impact of World Cup 2022 to a single campaign. In one sense, that is true. In another, the impact of the tournament is such that it has shot through the very fabric of the sport.Awarding the tournament to Qatar brought down an entire court of grasping, grifting princelings at FIFA. It led to sweeping anticorruption investigations and dawn raids on luxury hotels. It landed more than a few people on wanted lists and in jail. It ended the career of Michel Platini. Ultimately, it toppled Sepp Blatter.More than that, it undermined trust — perhaps fatally — in the body that is supposed to represent the best interests of the game. It violently ruptured the relationships between FIFA and all of the organizations that feed into it: the confederations, leagues, clubs, unions and fans.The Al Thumama stadium, which was christened last month, is one of eight constructed or refurbished for use at next year’s World Cup.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe vote for Qatar in 2010 is not quite soccer’s original sin: The antipathy and mistrust that characterizes the sport predates the moment Blatter, to an audible gasp, revealed that Qatar would stage the biggest — second-biggest, for readers in the United States — sporting event in the world. But it is difficult not to believe that, from that day on, those divisions became more pronounced, more concrete, more bilious, and that the game has never recovered.Those involved in the vote, those targeted by the investigations, those hounded out of office or raised from their beds by the Swiss police would, most likely, be of the view that perhaps it might have been better if Australia had won.So, too, of course, would those migrant workers who have died during Qatar’s unprecedented building spree in the years since it won hosting rights. Estimates of how many have lost their lives for a nation’s quixotic ambition vary: 38, apparently, according to the event’s organizing committee; 6,500 from five South Asian nations alone, according to a less invested investigation. Tragically, the latter report is likely to be the more accurate. Either number is too high.But if next year’s tournament has not been worth it for soccer, and has not been worth it for those whose lives were lost — or the many tens of thousands more whose safety has been put at risk — it has also been hard to make a case that Qatar has emerged well from the project.In one light, after all, these last 11 years have brought nothing but scrutiny: on the system of indentured labor that compelled all those migrant workers to go to work in searing heat on projects of triumphal scale and Midean hubris, and prevented them from leaving the country, from going home, without their employer’s permission; on Qatar’s abysmal human rights record; on its intolerance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.This was not, it is likely, the reaction that Qatar expected when it won the vote, when the streets of Doha filled with a delirious populace, when it seemed to take top billing on the world stage. Its aims may have been more subtle, more complex than just one blast of good P.R., but it is safe to assume the feedback has not quite been as the bid’s masterminds would have hoped.And yet, it is now that they might start to feel that — for all the trouble, for all the fury, for all the glaring spotlight — they will, somehow, still, get the return they wanted. There is a glamour to a World Cup: a dazzling, bewitching quality, so strong that even now, a year out, it is possible to sense its first glimmers.This is the week, after all, that the tournament’s field will finally start to take shape. Only four teams have qualified so far — the host, Germany, Denmark and, after a win on Thursday, Brazil — but by next Wednesday, more than half of the European contingent will have been decided. Spain and England, surely; most likely France, the defending champion, and Belgium; possibly Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands.Brazil, which hasn’t lost a game in qualifying, booked its place in the World Cup with a 1-0 victory over Colombia on Thursday.Sebastiao Moreira/EPA, via ShutterstockNow that Brazil is in, Argentina should be following in its rival’s wake. Mexico should be in a strong position. Iran and South Korea are almost there. Saudi Arabia may well have joined them.The draw remains months away, of course, but that is not the World Cup’s only appeal. This will be the last time either Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi graces soccer’s biggest stage; it will be the final chance for both to cement their legacies. It may be the moment England’s golden generation blossoms. It might prove the stage for South America, for the first time since 2002, to wrest the crown from Europe.It is impossible not to be intrigued by all of those possibilities, to feel the slightest judder of anticipation at what is to come. There is an atavistic thrill to the World Cup: its appeal lies in what it makes you remember, where it takes you back, to your first encounter with its great carnival spirit, the first moment you clapped eyes on this great, global festival.But there is a danger there, too, because that is why Qatar went to such trouble to claim the tournament, why it endured all of the criticism, why it placed all of those workers’ lives in jeopardy: because the World Cup’s power is to make you remember, and in doing so, to make you forget.That is what Qatar has spent $138 billion to acquire: that feeling, that giddy excitement, that irresistible smile. For that, it determined there was no price too high. And that means it is more important now than ever, as the soccer itself begins to work its amnesiac magic, that we do not lose sight of what this tournament has cost.No Next Step on the Ladder (Reprise)Is Steven Gerrard’s latest move just a way station in his career?Francisco Seco/Associated PressThere was something telling about the way Steven Gerrard’s appointment as Aston Villa’s manager was framed. A promising young manager’s taking a considerable step up — in terms of quality of opponent, at least, if not necessarily scale of club — accounted for a portion of the coverage.So, too, did a historic, ambitious — and expensively assembled — team appointing a relative neophyte at a delicate stage of its season, at least partly because of his illustrious playing career (this is a plan that never, absolutely never goes wrong, of course). But more than anything, Aston Villa’s union with Gerrard was presented as a story about another club entirely.It is no secret that Gerrard wishes, one day, to manage Liverpool, the team he supported as a child, and the team he gave the best years of his career. It does not require any great detective work to establish that, in his mind, leaving Rangers — the club to which he delivered the Scottish championship last summer — for Aston Villa is a step on that journey.But it is not a sign of an especially healthy culture that a major decision at a team of Villa’s scale and scope should be seen through the lens of what it might mean for Liverpool. That is a sign that England’s current elite, perhaps, occupy rather too much conceptual space in soccer’s never-ending discourse.That Gerrard sees Villa as a springboard, the logic goes, is good for the club: If he succeeds Jürgen Klopp at Anfield when Klopp’s contract expires in 2024 — the point when Klopp has made plain he intends to leave England — it will be because he had lifted Villa from its current station into a better one.That is not quite the whole story. There is, of course, a risk for Villa in the appointment: It is possible Gerrard will not be able to succeed in England as he did in Scotland. But the greatest risk is for Gerrard, for two reasons. First, it is not entirely clear what Villa regards as success: Is it finishing in the top 10? Is it qualifying for Europe? Is it winning a cup?And second, even more opaque is what form of success he would need to enjoy at Villa to convince Liverpool that he is ready not only to do the job on which he has his heart set, but that he can do it well. Would taking Villa to seventh make him a more compelling candidate than — say — a coach who has won a Bundesliga title, or thrived in the Champions League, or managed a phalanx of superstars? Probably not.It is tempting to believe that, for Gerrard, it may not matter. His bond with Liverpool may be strong enough that anything other than abject failure is the only proof his alma mater requires. But Fenway Sports Group, the club’s owner, is not the sort to be distracted by sentiment, or dazzled by stardust. It will want Gerrard to show he is up to the task. The problem is working out whether it is possible.Just Getting StartedMarta Torrejón and Barcelona thumped Hoffenheim, 4-0, in the Champions League on Wednesday.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesMarta Torrejón does not betray even the slightest hint of envy. She is only 31, but she knows that is old enough, in women’s soccer, effectively to belong to a previous generation. When her career started, she was not fully professional; nor was the game she played, not in Spain. She did not have access to state-of-the-art training facilities until her mid-20s.She has still built an impressive career: she has represented her country — 90 times, no less, before retiring after the 2019 World Cup — and she has been, for eight years, a cornerstone of the Barcelona team that has risen inexorably to become the pre-eminent power in the women’s game.She knows, though, that those who follow in her footsteps may well cast her into shade. What was most striking, talking to those involved with Barcelona Femení last month for an article The Times published this week, was their conviction that they have barely scratched the surface of their potential.“There are girls here who have been in a professional environment since the age of 12,” Markel Zubizarreta, the club’s sporting director, said. “The talent is the same, but when they turn professional, they will be much better prepared.”Torrejón has seen that firsthand, as the first products of Barcelona’s investment in youth start to drip feed into the club’s first team. “The players who are 15, 18, 20 have had a physical training that will help them compete at the professional level,” she said.The same process, of course, is playing out at dozens of clubs across Europe, where the first generation to have been given access to the sort of resources their male equivalents have enjoyed for decades are only just emerging. And that raises a compelling question: What if the boom in women’s soccer — in Europe, at least — is not actually the boom at all? What if this is just the prelude?CorrespondenceIt might seem an exaggeration, but this newsletter may have finally reached its zenith, thanks to a single sentence from Shane Thomas. I have an overwhelming sensation of despair, because I am self-aware enough to recognize that I will never write a sentence more compelling than this: “The biggest criticism of Batman is that he uses all his wealth to fight crime, but comparatively little of it to tackle crime’s underlying causes.”It would spoil it, just a little, if I told you how that sentence came up — it was in a thoughtful, cogent email related to last week’s column on the problems caused, and solved, by the presence of outsize individuals in the context of a team — so I will not. Better, I think, to use the time wondering what more Batman could be doing.Leon Joffe, on the other hand, leapt to the defense of a different superhero, though one who, if we are all being honest, also did very little to combat the underlying causes of crime.“I have a different recollection of Roy of the Rovers than the one you describe,” he wrote. “Goals were not only scored by Roy, but always a team effort, with one of the teammates usually passing expertly to the goal scorer. Blaming a young soccer captain’s playing style, years later, on the comic book, is quite weird.”Lana Harrigan, meanwhile, pointed out that Ronaldo can hardly be blamed for Manchester United’s defense. “I’m no tactician,” Lana wrote, “but the defense looks pitiful at times.” Gary Brown went one step further, arguing that “the argument that Ronaldo and the pressing game don’t mix would be stronger if United had routinely played a pressing came before his return. Which we didn’t. Perhaps CR7 makes it difficult to improve that part of the game, but I don’t think he’s single-handedly turned off something that in truth was scarcely ever turned on.”Do Manchester United’s issues run deeper than Cristiano Ronaldo? Hmmm ….Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd we’ll finish, in finest newsletter style, with one of the blue-sky ideas that — until we got into the business of critiquing Batman’s methods — has long been this missive’s strong suit.“I am bothered by the intentional use of fouls to benefit a team,” wrote Paul Sumpter. “It is a real detriment to the excitement of the game, but issuing red cards risks ruining the contest, as it did during the Liverpool-Atlético Madrid game. The hope would be that the threat of a red card would largely stop players committing professional fouls. I am not so sure. So, I would like to see an experiment whereby the offending player is sent off but the team can replace them with a substitute, if they have not already used all their allowed substitutes.”This is an idea worth exploring — as is an orange card, where a player guilty of a tactical foul is taken out of the game for 10 minutes, say — but my immediate worry would be that this basically guarantees three significant tactical fouls per team, per game. More