Salah, Mohamed (1992- )

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    How European Soccer Made Peace With Fasting During Ramadan

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    In competitions like the Premier League, Muslim pros who once faced pressure to avoid daily fasts during the monthlong holiday now benefit from custom diets and in-game breaks.Youseff Chippo had a secret.A few months into his life as a soccer pro in Europe, Chippo, a Moroccan midfielder, was pushing to prove himself and didn’t want to do anything that might hurt his chances of success. That included revealing he was fasting for Ramadan, a normal practice for the world’s billion Muslims but not in the locker room of Portugal’s F.C. Porto in the winter of 1997.The team’s double practice sessions — morning and afternoon — were arduous. Taking part while going without food and water from sunup to sundown made things harder. Eventually, after enduring days of dizziness and headaches in silence, Chippo came clean, and the club quickly put together a plan to preserve his energy and his health.For decades, though, other Muslim players found teams to be less accommodating, at least officially. So in a sport where continuous play and a lack of substitutions offer little opportunity for a mid-game trip to the bench, those players have long relied instead on resourcefulness and improvised solutions to break their fasts: teammates who faked or embellished injuries just after sundown to buy a moment for their Muslim colleagues to rush to the sideline; a few dates or a sugary drink slipped into a hand by a staff member at the appointed hour; trainers rushing out to attend to an injured knee carrying a kit curiously well-stocked with bananas.But more recently, soccer, which once saw fasting by Muslim players as something to be discouraged or criticized, is actively changing its ways. In a shift that reflects both the increasing prevalence and the soaring value of soccer’s Muslim stars, some of the world’s richest leagues and teams — with one notable exception — have moved to fully embrace Ramadan fasts.In Europe, that means many Muslim players now benefit from bespoke nutrition plans before and during the monthlong holiday; fast-friendly practice schedules; and even league-approved stoppages in play that let them break their fasts on the field during matches.Tunisia players eating dates during a match against Turkey in 2018. The team’s coach at the time, Nabil Maâloul, center, said he had asked his goalkeeper to simulate an injury to pause the game.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Out of Sight, Out of Mind No More

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      The Africa Cup of Nations and the Asian Cup, once seen as poorly timed intrusions by European soccer, may finally be getting the respect they deserve.At last, we appear to be getting somewhere. Late on New Year’s Day, Mohamed Salah’s beaming face appeared on British television screens. Salah always has the slightly ruffled appearance of a man who has not slept desperately well, but he was in distinctly good cheer.His Liverpool team had just dismantled Newcastle United to move three points clear at the top of the Premier League. He had played wonderfully: scoring two goals, creating one and missing a penalty so as to foster the illusion of drama in what was otherwise a hopelessly one-sided sporting contest.There was, though, a bittersweet tinge to the jubilation. That was the last Liverpool will see of Salah — in the flesh, at least — for several weeks. Immediately after the game, he was scheduled to travel to Egypt’s imaginatively-titled New Administrative Capital, just outside Cairo, to join his national team’s preparations for the Africa Cup of Nations, which begins next weekend. He does not plan to return to Liverpool until the middle of February.It is natural, of course, that the focus in Britain — and for those who follow the Premier League in general and Liverpool in particular — should be on how Salah’s absence might affect an unusually tense title race. (Liverpool will be fine, apparently. “Anyone can play where I play,” Salah said, modestly. “Anyone can do what I am doing,” he added, pushing his luck a bit.)In recent years, though, an awareness has seeped in that this approach might be considered just a little parochial.Achraf Hakimi anchors a Morocco team that reached the 2022 World Cup semifinals.Borja Sanchez-Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockEurope tends to command soccer’s attention, dominating its discourse and setting the parameters of what is considered worthy of attention or praise. Europe, after all, is home to the world’s biggest clubs and the world’s strongest leagues and the world’s best players. Europe is, by pretty much any metric, the main event.The effect of this, of course, is the diminution of anything and everything that does not matter to Europe. The Cup of Nations is not the only example of that phenomenon, but it is likely the best. Every two years or so, it is presented as little more than a hindrance, as though it has been invented purely to test the squad depth of the major teams of the Premier League.There has long been a consistent undercurrent of conversation suggesting that, for the African stars invited to participate, it is somehow optional, in a way that the European Championship and Copa América are most certainly not.Recent years have brought a welcome corrective to that logic. There has, gradually, been a dawning realization that it is not really fair to frame the Cup of Nations purely in relation to its impact on the Premier League. Europeans seem to have accepted that it is not really for them to decide whether players ought to want to play in it, or when it might be held. At times, it has even been possible to believe we are on the cusp of a more profound discovery: that just because something does not matter to you does not mean it does not matter.Guinea forward Serhou Guirassy is the Bundesliga’s second-leading scorer.Thomas Kienzle/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat process has, admittedly, been a slow one. It is, certainly, hard to imagine that a German player might be asked to explain the importance of the European Championship, or a Brazilian invited to expound on the significance of the Copa América in the way that Salah was asked to elucidate why he wanted to bother going to the Ivory Coast this month, but still: slow progress is progress nonetheless.And yet soccer still cannot quite shake its innate Eurocentrism. There is, this year, another tournament running concurrently with the Cup of Nations. This week, 24 national teams from across Asia have gathered in Qatar — where they had some stadiums lying idle, not sure why — for the Asian Cup.This is, it goes without saying, a tournament just as significant as the Cup of Nations, and by extension the Copa América and the European Championship. It is, the South American equivalent aside, the oldest continental competition in soccer, predating the European Championship by a few years. It will attract hundreds of millions of viewers and, with an admittedly unlikely combination of results, might even capture the hearts and minds of the two most populous nations on the planet.And yet, even compared to the Cup of Nations, the Asian Cup is largely ignored. It is not even afforded the backhanded compliment of being presented as a nuisance. It is instead overlooked almost entirely.Don’t tell host Qatar that the Asian Cup is an afterthought.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat might, in part, be down to its relative rarity. Though it is typically played at the same time of year as the Africa Cup of Nations — in January and February, in the middle of the European season — the Asian Cup only happens once every four years. It does not intrude quite so frequently on the European consciousness as the biennial Cup of Nations.The most significant reason, though, is its impact on Europe. Salah is hardly an exception when it comes to players leaving Europe’s major teams and traveling to Africa this month. Of the 24 teams in the Cup of Nations, only five — South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Mauritania and Namibia — have not named any players drawn from Europe’s five major leagues. Many of the major contenders will base their campaigns on familiar faces.The contrast with Asia is stark. Only a couple dozen of the players gathering in Qatar have had to step away from teams in Europe’s most illustrious domestic leagues. Jordan has one, Iran two and South Korea six. Japan alone could name a full team drawn from the game’s highest-profile leagues. (There are larger contingents from the Dutch Eredivisie, the Belgian Pro League and, thanks largely to Celtic, the Scottish Premier League.)Son Heung-min of South Korea is the Asian Cup’s biggest star. But he’s not its only one.Tingshu Wang/ReutersEurope, in other words, is still afforded — or still assumes — the privilege of ordaining what is important and what is not. Perhaps it is not because attitudes have shifted that the Cup of Nations is tolerated; perhaps, instead, it is tolerated because it feels more familiar to Europeans. The teams, after all, are stuffed with players that Europeans recognize, we appreciate, we miss. The tastemakers have not changed to accommodate it. It has changed to better suit the tastemakers.There is, needless to say, a sadness here. There is a wonder in the very unfamiliarity of players and teams, one that has largely been lost in soccer’s digital age. There was a point when heterogeneity was one of the sport’s great pleasures, rather than a tendency that belongs to a distant past.The Asian Cup, with its squads drawn from distant and disparate leagues, has that in abundance. Its difference should be its strength. It would, certainly, be worth watching. CBS Sports has picked up the rights in the United States. In Britain, unfortunately, nobody has deigned to do so.Test of PatienceEddie Howe’s Newcastle has hit a bump in the road.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersIn the two years or so since it acquired Newcastle United, Saudi Arabia — sorry, sorry, the Public Investment Fund, which is absolutely not the Saudi state, and you really must not think it is — has been substantially more restrained than might have been expected.Considerable sums of money have gone into transforming the Newcastle squad, but even the harshest critic of the project would struggle to deny it has been spent shrewdly. Newcastle’s backers have resisted the temptation to chase a quick fix. If anything — thanks, in part, to the Premier League’s financial rules — the club’s growth has almost been cautious.That has not been an issue while everything was working, while the club seemed to be ahead of schedule. It becomes more complex when there is a sense that things have stalled. Newcastle has won only three of its last 13 games. Eddie Howe has now overseen three defeats in a row. It is out of the Champions League. And even the club’s injury troubles do not excuse conceding 34 shots to Liverpool on New Year’s Day.Howe’s work this far should, really, insure him against a threat of firing during the first real downturn of his tenure. He has, as the saying goes, credit in the bank. In ordinary circumstances, doubtless that would be the case.But Newcastle’s is not an ordinary circumstance. It is one bound up with whatever image of itself its primary investor wants to project. Until now, its new ownership has been happy to come across as responsible, patient and understanding. That was easy, when times were good. Now they are not, and it is hard to know whether Saudi Arabia really is happy to take the rough with the smooth, whether it is ready to tolerate underachievement, whether it is really prepared to wait.User-Generated ContentThe people’s choice: Jan Oblak.Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThankfully, the results are unanimous. The votes have been cast, the suggestions made, the forms processed, the information tabulated, the data crunched and the conclusions extracted and now we can say with some certainty that, if FIFA were to permit a team drawn from those nations outside the top 48 of its rankings to enter the expanded 2026 World Cup, Jan Oblak would be in goal.Pretty much everyone (and there were several dozen of you) who submitted an entry to the festive challenge set by Joe Rizzotti and Dolores Diaz-Vides — they are not married, Dolores wrote to inform me; their sending of joint emails is purely platonic — decided Oblak, Atlético Madrid’s redoubtable Slovene, should be in goal.Elsewhere, the picture was a little more muddied. Central defense was not a problem: There were nominations for Milan Skriniar (Slovakia), Stefan Savic (Montenegro), Evan Ndicka (Ivory Coast) and Edmond Tapsoba (Burkina Faso), among many others. Central midfield, thanks to the likes of Mohammed Kudus (Ghana), Henrikh Mkhitaryan (Armenia) and Yves Bissouma (Mali), was well stocked, too.In attack, the options are fewer in quantity but possibly higher in quality: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Georgia) and Leon Bailey (Jamaica) on the wings, perhaps, supplying Edin Dzeko (Bosnia and Herzegovina) or Sébastian Haller (Ivory Coast)? Or maybe a more fluid trident of Miguel Almiron (Paraguay), Iñaki Williams (Ghana) and Benjamin Sesko (Slovenia) would be more modern?At fullback, though, there is a hitch. A hitch sufficiently significant that you could feasibly build a whole theory around it: that the mark of an elite soccer nation is, it would seem, its ability to produce left and right backs. Ivory Coast’s Serge Aurier, currently of Nottingham Forest, and Bosnia’s Sead Kolasinac, now with Atalanta, were the best a slim field could offer.But that does not invalidate the purpose of the exercise. International soccer is always about compromise; it is inevitable, with resources limited by borders and birthrates, that teams should have flaws. It is, in many ways, what makes it special. And there is enough strength elsewhere to generate a side that could likely reach the quarterfinals in 2026. Joe and Dolores, consider me converted. Let’s get a world team to North America. More

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      Science and Data Change Soccer’s Definition of Old

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      Top clubs have long looked to shed players once they hit age 30. But those presumptions rely on outdated logic, statistics show.LONDON — The exact location of the threshold has always been contested. At Manchester United, for a time, it lurked close enough to 30 for that to serve as a natural watershed. Once players hit their 30s, Alex Ferguson, the club’s manager at the time, tended to grant them an extra day’s rest after a game, in the hope that the break might soothe their creaking bodies.Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger was a little more nuanced. He had a formula. Once midfielders and forwards reached the grand old age of 32, he was prepared to offer them only one-year contract extensions. “That is the rule here,” he once said. “After 32, you go from year to year.” He made an exception for central defenders; they could sign contracts that carried them to age 34.But while the precise cutoff has always been subjective, the broad and longstanding consensus within soccer is that it lies in there somewhere. At some point early in their 30s, players cross the boundary that distinguishes summer from fall, present from past. And as soon as they do, they can officially be regarded as old.Manchester City spent big, and got younger, in acquiring striker Erling Haaland.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThat delineation has long informed both the player-recruitment and the player-retention strategies of teams across Europe. A vast majority of clubs have, as a rule, adhered for years to a simple principle: buy young and sell old.Tottenham’s acquisition last month of the 33-year-old Croatia midfielder Ivan Perisic, for example, was the first time that the club has signed an outfield player in his 30s since 2017. Liverpool has not done so since 2016. Manchester City has not paid a fee for an outfield player over age 30 for almost a decade. Goalkeepers, widely held to boast greater longevity, are the only players granted an exception.Instead, players approaching the twilight of their careers are generally seen as burdens to be shifted. This summer has been a case in point: Bayern Munich has managed to alienate the almost-34-year-old Robert Lewandowski by (unsuccessfully) trying to anoint Erling Haaland, a decade his junior, as his heir.Liverpool, meanwhile, has started the work of breaking up its vaunted attacking trident by replacing the 30-year-old Sadio Mané with Luis Díaz, 25, and adding the 23-year-old Darwin Nuñez to succeed Roberto Firmino, who turns 31 in October. As it seeks to overhaul its squad, Manchester United released a suite of players — Nemanja Matic, Juan Mata and Edínson Cavani among them — into a market already saturated with veterans, including Gareth Bale and Ángel Di María.The reasoning behind this, of course, is straightforward. “The demands of the game are changing,” said Robin Thorpe, a performance scientist who spent a decade at Manchester United and now works with the Red Bull network of teams. “There is much more emphasis on high-intensity sprinting, acceleration, deceleration.” Younger players are deemed better equipped to handle that load than their elders.Just as important, though, recruiting younger players promises “more return on investment when you’re looking to move them on,” according to Tony Strudwick, a former colleague of Thorpe’s at United who also has worked at Arsenal. Clubs can earn back their outlay — perhaps even make a profit — on a player acquired in his early 20s. Those a decade or so older are, in a strictly economic sense, seen as a rapidly depreciating asset.Those two ideas are, of course, related, and so it is significant that at least one of them may be rooted in outdated logic.Liverpool gave Mo Salah a three-year deal a few weeks after his 30th birthday.Athit Perawongmetha/ReutersAccording to data from the consultancy firm Twenty First Group, players over age 32 are consistently playing more minutes in the Champions League every year. Last season, players over age 34 — practically ancient, by soccer’s traditional thinking — accounted for more minutes in Europe’s big five leagues than in any previous season for which data was available.More significantly, that has not been at any notable cost to their performance.“Age has its pros and cons,” the former Barcelona right back Dani Alves, now 39 and determined to continue his career, told The Guardian this month. “I have an experience today that I didn’t have 20 years ago. When there’s a big game, 20-year-olds get nervous and worried. I don’t.”Twenty First Group’s data bears Alves out. Though players in their 20s do press more than those in their 30s do — 14.5 pressing actions per 90 minutes, as opposed to 12.8 — that reduction is offset in other ways.In both the Champions League and Europe’s major domestic competitions, older players win more aerial duels, complete more dribbles, pass with greater accuracy — if they are central midfielders — and score more goals. More than twice as many players over age 30 now rank in Twenty First Group’s modeling of the best 150 players in the world than appeared in the same list a decade ago.The data suggests, very clearly, that 30 is not as old as it used to be.Luka Modric, who will turn 37 in September, joked recently that he might play until he’s 50.Frank Augstein/Associated PressFrom a sports-science perspective, that is hardly surprising. The idea of 30 as an immutable aging threshold predates soccer’s interest in conditioning: The current generation of players in their 30s, Strudwick pointed out, may be the first to “have been exposed to hard-core sports science from the start of their careers.”There is no reason to assume they would age at the same rate, or the same time, as their forebears. “Look at the condition that players are in when they retire,” Strudwick said. “They haven’t let their bodies go. They might need to be pushed a little less in preseason, and their recovery may take longer, but from a physical and a performance point of view, there is no reason they can’t add value into their late 30s.”That longevity can only be increased, Thorpe said, by improvements in nutrition and recovery techniques.When he was at Manchester United, he said, “the rule of thumb was always that players over the age of 30 got a second day’s rest after games. It felt intuitively like the right thing to do.” The truth, though, was that it wasn’t always the older players who needed the break.“When we researched it, when we looked at the data,” Thorpe said, “we found that it was way more individual. Some of the older players could train, and some of the younger players needed more rest.”As those sorts of insights have become more embedded in the sport, he argued, it follows that “more players should be able to do more later on in their careers.” Luka Modric might have been joking when he told an interviewer, before the Champions League final in May, that he intended to play on “until 50, like that Japanese guy, [Kazuyoshi] Miura,” but it is no longer quite as absurd as it might have once sounded.That the clubs do not appear to have noticed — that players over age 30, with rare exceptions, still seem to be regarded as a burden rather than a blessing — is, as far as Strudwick can see, now almost exclusively an economic issue.“A player’s life cycle is an inverted U shape,” he said. “But salary expectations are linear.”A more scientific approach might have flattened the downward curve of a player’s performance graph, or even delayed its onset, but it cannot eliminate it completely. At some point a player will enter what Strudwick called the “roll-down phase.” The one thing that no club wants — that no club can afford — is to be paying a player a premium salary when that moment arrives. That is what motivates clubs, still, to believe that a threshold arrives at 30: not what players can contribute, but what they cost. More

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      A Day of World Cup Drama Goes Down to the Last Kick

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      In Algeria, a berth in Qatar changed hands in an instant. In Senegal, a shootout settled another long night. And in Portugal, Cristiano Ronaldo set up one final hurrah.Algeria’s players were strewn on the turf, their faces covered, their chests heaving. Their coach, Djamel Belmadi, seemed frozen by shock. Tears streamed from his eyes. The moment they had been waiting for, the goal that would send them to the World Cup, took 118 minutes to arrive. They had their last-minute winner. And then, in an instant, so did Cameroon.Across three continents, it was that kind of evening: one of frayed nerves and quickened pulses, of fine margins and small details, of exquisite suffering and perfect joy. Nowhere was that encapsulated better than in Blida, a city a little south of Algiers, where Algeria and Cameroon took turns breaking each other’s hearts.The Qatar World Cup has been 12 years, dozens of arrests and one F.B.I. investigation in the making. Its qualification process has been one of interruptions and complications and delays, the result first of the coronavirus pandemic and then of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even now, scarcely eight months out from the tournament’s opening match, the field is not yet complete, not fully.Tuesday, though, was the day when much of what was left took shape. In the space of six hours, there were seven slots to be filled in Europe and Africa, each of them decided in the straight shootout of a head-to-head playoff. For 14 countries — and a few more in South America battling for the last hope of an intercontinental playoff spot — this was the culmination of the past two years and more. This was the moment of no return.A couple nations, in the end, made it through relatively comfortably. Morocco swept past the Democratic Republic of Congo. Poland — handed a bye to the final playoff round after refusing to play Russia — stirred itself to see off Sweden.Portugal toiled for a while against North Macedonia, but seized on the first opportunity it was granted: a single loose pass, punished ruthlessly by Bruno Fernandes, seemed to sap the strength of the team that had conquered Italy only a few days ago. Fernandes scored again, in the second half, as Portuguese flags fluttered serenely around him, Cristiano Ronaldo safely delivered to his fifth World Cup.Bruno Fernandes scored the goals that sent Cristiano Ronaldo, left, and Portugal to the World Cup.Jose Coelho/EPA, via ShutterstockFor the rest, though, there was nothing but tension and anxiety and dread. Ghana edged Nigeria thanks to a goalkeeping slip and the fact that Africa, for now, remains wedded to the away-goals rule. Tunisia held on for a goal-less draw against Mali, its slender victory in the first leg last week enough to end Mali’s dream of qualifying for its first World Cup.In Senegal, the pressure seemed to be at its most suffocating. Africa’s qualification process is uniquely cruel: a long, winding series of group stages followed by a set of winner-take-all playoffs, drawn at random, without anything as manipulative as a seeding system.A Guide to the 2022 World CupThe 32-team tournament kicks off in Qatar on Nov. 21.F.A.Q.: When will the games take place? Who are the favorites? Will Lionel Messi be there? Our primer answers your questions.The Matchups: The group assignments are set. Here’s a breakdown of the draw and a look at how each country qualified.U.S. Returns: Five years after a calamitous night cost the U.S. a World Cup bid, a new generation claimed a berth in the 2022 tournament.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it always expected for hosting the World Cup.That allowed Senegal and Egypt, then, to face each other: the two teams who are, arguably, the continent’s strongest — they contested the final of the Africa Cup of Nations in February, after all — and which, most likely, are home to its two finest players: Sadio Mané and his club teammate turned international opponent, Mohamed Salah.Egypt had won the first leg, narrowly, but saw its lead wiped out within a few minutes of the start of the second. From that point on, the Egyptians almost seemed to be playing for penalties, as if driven by a desire to exact the most fitting revenge for the way they lost that Cup of Nations final.The luck of the draw, or lack of it, meant that at least one Liverpool star, Mohamed Salah or Sadio Mané, would miss the World Cup.Stefan Kleinowitz/Associated PressWhat few opportunities there were fell to Senegal; all of them were wasted. The home fans did what they could to tilt the balance, directing a fusillade of laser pointers onto each and every Egyptian player, but it made no difference. The clock ticked inexorably on, the game locked in a stalemate.When penalty kicks arrived, they underlined how exacting the stress had become. Kalidou Koulibaly, the Senegal captain, hit the crossbar with his attempt. For the first time all evening, Senegal’s new national stadium fell silent. Salah — denied the chance to take one in February — stepped up for Egypt, a sure thing, only to blaze his shot over the bar. He turned away, tearing at his jersey.Senegal had a reprieve, and immediately blew it: Mohamed El Shenawy, the Egypt goalkeeper, saving a shot from Saliou Ciss. No matter: Zizo, Egypt’s second selection, confidently sent his effort wide.Senegal did not prove so forgiving a second time around. Ismaila Sarr and Bamba Dieng scored, meaning that everything hung, once more, on Mané. He had scored the decisive penalty in the Cup of Nations final; he knew, now, that if he did so again, Senegal would go to the World Cup.A moment later, he was tearing off to the side of the field, smoke billowing around him, fans trying to push past security onto the field. Once again, Mané had delivered the coup de grâce.But while that was the heavyweight clash, it was in Algeria that the denouement was most frenzied. Cameroon had canceled out Algeria’s lead from the first leg, forcing the game to extra time, withstanding anything and everything its host could muster.Thanks largely to the determination of its goalkeeper, Andre Onana, it seemed to have done enough to force penalties, only for Ahmed Touba to break its resistance in the 119th minute. Algeria had its late winner. Now, at the last, it stood on the brink. It needed only to hold out for a couple of minutes to make it to Qatar.It could not. Cameroon launched one final free kick into the penalty area, and Karl Toko Ekambi, the Lyon striker, forced the ball home. There were 124 minutes on the clock. It was, effectively, the last kick of the game, the last kick of the last two years.Algeria’s players sank to the grass, disbelieving, disconsolate. Everything they had worked for, everything they thought they had achieved, had disappeared in a flash. They had arrived at the end, and there had still been more. It had, across three continents, been that type of evening.Algeria’s coach, Djamel Belmadi, was inconsolable after his team’s loss to Cameroon.Ryad Kramdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      World Cup Hangs in Balance for U.S., Mexico and Cristiano Ronaldo

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      A week of high-stakes games will fill out the field for the winter’s World Cup. Not everyone gets to go.This is the week of final chances. The World Cup in Qatar is not quite eight months away, and more than half of the 32 places at the tournament have been taken. That number will increase over the course of the next seven days, as teams from Tunisia to Tahiti compete to join the 15 countries who have already qualified.By the time the draw for the group stage of the finals takes place in Doha on April 1, the picture will still not be complete. Delays to qualifying caused by the pandemic, as well as the compassionate break given to Ukraine after the Russian invasion, mean that the field will only be filled once the last phase of European qualifying, and the two intercontinental playoffs, are completed in June.But for the vast majority of teams, this is the week that will make or break their hopes, that will determine whether the stresses and strains of the last two years have been worthwhile.Canada stands on the verge of ending a 36-year wait to return to the tournament. The Democratic Republic of Congo is 180 minutes away from qualifying for the first time since 1974. And at least one major power, Portugal or Italy, faces the ignominy of missing out. Here’s what is at stake around the world.EuropeCristiano Ronaldo and Portugal will face Turkey on Thursday.Patricia De Melo Moreira/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAll but three of Europe’s places in Qatar have already been filled, and the vast majority of the continent’s teams likely to be in consideration to win the World Cup — the reigning champion, France, as well as Spain, Germany, Belgium and England — have long since known that they would be in the field.The exceptions are Portugal and Italy, both of whom failed to win their groups and must, therefore, endure two anxiety-inducing playoffs to join the party. Italy takes on North Macedonia and Portugal meets Turkey this week. Should both get through those games, they will play each other for a spot in Qatar, in a game that could be Cristiano Ronaldo’s final international engagement.The other two European playoff groups have been unaffected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s (belated) ban from global sport means Poland will face either Sweden or the Czech Republic in its playoff on Tuesday; all three had refused to play Russia if FIFA and UEFA did not act.Ukraine’s game with Scotland, meanwhile, has been pushed back until June, meaning Europe’s final qualifier will not be known until the summer. The winner of that game will meet either Wales or Austria.North AmericaCanada can qualify for its first World Cup since 1986 by beating Costa Rica on Thursday.Kamil Krzaczynski/Associated PressThe specter of 2017 is starting to loom large once more for the United States, with the Estadio Nacional in San José standing in for the Ato Boldon Stadium in Couva, Trinidad, and Costa Rica playing the role of Trinidad and Tobago. Gregg Berhalter’s team will have to confront the ghosts of a previous generation if it is to vanquish them.If that seems a little exaggerated — given that the U.S. sits in second place, needing to win only two of its three games to qualify for the World Cup — it is because it is easy to see Berhalter and his young squad having to wait until the very last minute next week to be sure of qualification.The same is not true of Canada, which needs only one win to be sure of a first return to World Cup since 1986, and has the relative comfort blanket of the knowledge that a single point might just about do it. Nor is it the case for Mexico, which also needs two wins, but has a far kinder schedule over the next week than the Americans.The Americans’ problem is that they face three teams — Mexico and Costa Rica on the road, with a home meeting with Panama sandwiched in between — who all harbor their own ambitions of being in Qatar next winter. The U.S. failed, five years ago, when the situation was no less finely poised. A young, promising team must find a way to ensure things turn out different this time.South AmericaEcuador needs a single victory to book its place in Qatar.Martin Mejia/Associated PressOther than the sight of officials from the Brazilian health ministry striding onto the field to extract a handful of quarantine-busting Argentine players last summer, there has been precious little drama for either of South America’s great rivals. Neither Brazil nor Argentina has lost a game; both qualified for Qatar with months to spare.Beneath them, though, the tension is bubbling. Ecuador needs a single win from its remaining two games — either away at Paraguay or home to Argentina — to qualify for its fourth World Cup this century. The continent’s fourth definite slot at the finals, however, is very much still up for grabs.Uruguay is the team currently in possession of the final spot, but it has to face two direct rivals over the next week: fifth-place Peru in Montevideo, followed by a trip to sixth-place Chile. Either of those teams could usurp Diego Alonso’s Uruguay at the last hurdle. Automatic qualification may be just out of reach, but do not rule out Colombia — currently in a disappointing seventh place — staging a late surge for fifth place, and a chance at a side door to Qatar through an intercontinental playoff in June.AfricaSenegal beat Egypt to win the Africa Cup of Nations in February. Now the teams will meet again for a World Cup place.Sunday Alamba/Associated PressJürgen Klopp’s team selection offered a clear illustration of where Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané’s priorities lie. The Liverpool manager left both players out of his team’s F.A. Cup win against Nottingham Forest last weekend; it was the only way, he said, of making sure he did not inadvertently find himself embroiled in an international scandal.Africa’s final round of qualifying is always unforgiving — five home-and-away knockout ties, with the winner going to the World Cup and the loser left with no recourse and no safety net. But fate, this time, has been almost cruel: Salah’s Egypt has been drawn to face Mané’s Senegal, a replay of February’s Cup of Nations final. One of Liverpool’s forward line is having the winter off.That is not the only appetizing tie. Two of the continent’s traditional heavyweights, Ghana and Nigeria, will face one another, as will Cameroon and Algeria, regarded as the strongest of the African sides before its disappointing display in the Cup of Nations. Morocco will be expected to make it past the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Mali must beat Tunisia to qualify for its first World Cup.AsiaJapan and Saudi Arabia have eyes on two of the final places from Asia.Eugene Hoshiko/Associated PressWith two games to play, both Iran and South Korea have already booked their spots in next week’s World Cup draw, alongside Qatar, which qualified automatically as the host nation. Saudi Arabia and Japan are best-placed to join them, with each realistically needing only one more win to seal its place at the finals.Australia still has a slender hope of overhauling one or the other, but it will need to beat Japan in Sydney on Thursday and the Saudis in Jeddah next week to avoid a playoff, most likely against the United Arab Emirates, for the right to take part in another playoff, against the fifth-place team from South America, this summer.OceaniaQatar’s big moment is still months away, but it is hosting a series of qualifiers for teams from regions like Oceania this week.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockEighteen months after it was supposed to start, Oceania’s qualifying process finally got underway in Qatar last week. New Zealand, as expected, promptly secured a place in the semifinals. Papua New Guinea and Fiji will face off on Thursday to decide who joins the All Whites in the final four.Quite who they will play in the knockout rounds remains a mystery. Both Vanuatu and the Cook Islands returned a number of positive Covid tests after arriving in Qatar and have subsequently withdrawn from the tournament. That has left the Solomon Islands and Tahiti as semifinalists by default, left to play a single match to decide their seeding for the next stage.The eventual winner of the most drawn-out qualification process on the planet will still, though, not be sure of a place in the World Cup; it will have to navigate an intercontinental playoff against whoever finishes fourth in North America to get into the field for the finals. More

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      Fabrizio Romano: Soccer's Prophet of the Deal

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      Fabrizio Romano has turned rumors into an industry. But is he an observer of soccer’s multibillion-dollar transfer market, or a participant in it?The quickest way to capture the extent of the influence wielded by Fabrizio Romano, a 28-year-old Italian journalist with a five o’clock shadow and an overworked iPhone, is to boil it down into a list of easily digested numbers.Currently, Romano has 6.5 million followers on Twitter, two and a half times as many as, say, Inter Milan, the team that featured in Romano’s breakthrough moment, or Bruno Fernandes, the Manchester United star who inadvertently made Romano a global phenomenon.He has 5.6 million more on Instagram, and a further 4.5 million devotees on Facebook. There are also 692,000 subscribers on YouTube and 450,000 on Twitch, the video streaming platform.Or there are at the moment, anyway. Chances are that in the gap between the writing of that paragraph and your reading it, Romano’s figures will have ticked inexorably skyward. It is January, after all, one of the biannual boom times for a journalist covering soccer’s frenetic, multibillion-dollar transfer market. Every day, Romano’s accounts will draw another few hundred fans, another few thousand even, all desperately seeking news of the players their team is or is not signing.Yet even as these social media metrics provide an immediately comprehensible, faintly intimidating snapshot of the breadth of Romano’s popularity — self-professed insiders covering the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. could make similar claims — they do not tell us much about quite how deep his impact runs.Last month, the Spanish forward Ferran Torres posted a video of himself on Twitter doing light physical work at the training facility of his hometown club, Valencia. Torres had spent Christmas in a gentle form of limbo, waiting for his former club, Manchester City, to agree to sell him to Barcelona.By Dec. 26, things had moved sufficiently that Torres wanted to let his followers know a move was imminent. “Getting ready at home … Valencia,” he wrote in a message posted alongside the video. And then, on a new line, a single phrase: “Here We Go!”Those three words were intended as the digital transfer market’s equivalent to white smoke billowing from a chimney. They have come to mean that a deal is not just close, but completed. And they are indisputably Romano’s: They are his seal of approval, his calling card, what he refers to with just a hint of regret as his catchphrase.That, more than the numbers of followers Romano has accrued, is the best gauge of his influence. Increasingly, to players, as well as fans, a transfer has not happened until it bears Romano’s imprimatur. (“Here We Go” is, in some cases, now used as a noun: Correspondents now regularly ask Romano if he is in a position to “give the here we go.”)Romano in his home office in Milan, where he records some of his TV and podcast appearances.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesHis power is now so great that he has, not entirely intentionally, made the leap from being merely a reporter covering soccer’s transfer market to something closer to a force within it. And in doing so, he has blurred the line between journalist and influencer, observer and participant.The ScoopThe call that made Romano’s career, in his telling, came entirely out of the blue. He had started writing about soccer as a teenager in his hometown, Naples, composing stories and firing them off, free of charge, to a variety of fairly niche Italian soccer websites in the hope they might publish them.He does not quite know how an aspiring Italian agent in Barcelona got hold of his name, or his phone number. “He was working at La Masia” — the famed Barcelona academy — “and he wanted to become an agent,” Romano said in an interview last month. “He was hoping to convince two young players to let him represent them, and he asked me if I would write a profile of them.” The players were Gerard Deulofeu, a young Spanish wing, and a prodigious teenage striker named Mauro Icardi.Romano wrote the profile, the agent got the clients, and the two stayed in touch. In the summer of 2011, Romano broke the story that Icardi was leaving Barcelona for Sampdoria. He refers to it proudly as his “first news,” but its impact was limited: Icardi was an 18-year-old youth team player, after all. His arrival at a team then struggling in Italy’s second division was hardly earth-shattering.But in November 2013 the agent called again. “He said I had helped him at the start of his career, and now it was his turn to help me,” Romano said. Icardi, his source told him, had agreed to move to Inter Milan the next summer. Six months before the deal was officially announced, Romano published the news on an Inter Milan fan site.Mauro Icardi, the player who helped make Romano’s career, at Inter Milan in 2013.Luca Bruno/Associated Press“That was the time everything changed,” he said. He left Naples for Milan, and the hardscrabble world of freelance journalism for a job at Sky Sport Italia. The first story he was sent to cover was, as it happens, Icardi’s physical at Inter. “That story was part of my life.”Soccer, in general, has long had an insatiable appetite for gossip and rumors and tittle-tattle from the transfer market: In England, the nuggets of news appear in old copies of long-defunct sports newspapers dating to 1930. Nowhere is the obsession quite so deep-rooted, though, as in Italy.“You have to remember that, for a long time, we had four daily newspapers devoted to sport,” said Enrico Mentana, a television presenter, director and producer who started his career at one of them, Gazzetta dello Sport. His father, Franco, worked there; he had been a celebrated correspondent, specializing in transfers.For those newspapers, Mentana said, transfer stories were “the only way to sell copies in the summer, when there were not any games.” They were aided and abetted in turning player trading into “a spectacle” by the presidents of the country’s biggest clubs. “The owners were great industrialists, scions of great families,” he said. “For them, attracting a big star from South America, say, was a chance to show their greatness, their power, to give a gift to the people.”By the time Romano had made it to Sky Sport Italia, the doyen of the genre was Gianluca Di Marzio, the channel’s star reporter, the host of the nightly — and unexpectedly cerebral — show it broadcasts during soccer’s two transfer windows.Romano helped Di Marzio build, and fill, his personal website. In return, he learned the finer points of his craft, particularly the value of the traditional shoe-leather journalism that had long been deployed to harvest those precious hints and whispers. “For years and years, I would go every day around the city,” Romano said. “Restaurants, hotels, anywhere football people would meet.”But while the methods had endured, Romano had some intuitive sense that the landscape was changing. He quickly grasped not only that social media could serve as both an outlet and a source, but that he had an innate eye for which sort of content worked on which kind of platforms.“For example, I used Instagram initially as a personal thing,” he said. “I would post a picture of a nice sunset, a good dinner. But all the time, in the replies, people would ask me about transfers. Nobody was interested in my life. I’m not a star. I am a journalist, and a journalist is an intermediary.”His most significant insight, though, was that there was no reason to be hidebound by borders. With his replies swelled by interest from fans around the world, asking for updates on teams in England, France and Spain, as well as Italy, he started to seek stories away from home.To Romano, the great leap into the global soccer conversation came in 2020. Fernandes, a talented Portuguese midfielder, had spent most of the previous summer being linked with a move to Manchester United; Romano consistently played it down. A few months later, though, the club made its move, and when Romano bestowed his customary “here we go” on the deal, the reaction was “huge.”He does not claim to have had that story first: It had, after all, been bubbling for months, and had been extensively reported in the weeks before it was completed. In his eyes, though, speed is not where true value lies in a social media world, and particularly in that portion of it devoted to soccer’s chaotic, contradictory and often chimerical transfer market.What followers want more than anything, he said, is to know that what they are reading is true. That is what he tries to provide. “I do not have a deadline to meet or a paper to sell,” he said. “I write things when they are ready.”Two players in Romano’s rumor mill this month: Fiorentina striker Dusan Vlahovic ….Massimo Paolone/LaPresse, via Associated Press… and Mohamed Salah, whose future at Liverpool is suddenly anything but clear.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn part, his expanding influence — he has added five million social media followers in the past 18 months alone — can be attributed to his work ethic. When Romano is not submitting transfer stories to The Guardian or Sky Sport, he is uploading them to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or he is talking about them on his podcast or his Twitch channel or in his latest role, accepted last year, with CBS Sports. He discusses them with one of the suite of club-specific podcasts he finds time to grace with his presence as a guest, or replies to his followers directly on social media. There is talk of a book, too. During transfer windows, he said, he regularly does not go to bed until 5 a.m.Whether it is dedication to his trade or dedication to his brand, or neither — Romano has a puppyish delight in talking about his passion — it has worked. Often, now, the reach of the clubs and the player actually involved in any given transfer is dwarfed by that of the person reporting it.The Fine LineLast summer, as the Spanish team Valencia closed in on a deal to sign Marcos André, a Brazilian striker who had spent the previous season playing for its La Liga rival Real Valladolid, the club’s marketing and communications arm, VCF Media, was commissioned with finding an unexpected, impactful way to announce it.A transfer, after all, is a chance for a club to attract attention, to win a few eyeballs and perhaps gain a few new fans in what is now a global battle for engagement. Valencia is not just competing with domestic rivals like Villarreal or Sevilla for that audience, but teams from Italy and Germany and England, too.The problem, as far as the club could tell, was that there was nothing new about the club’s interest in signing Marcos André. There had been a run of stories hinting at the move for weeks. To reach the broadest audience possible with its confirmation, VCF Media decided to do something a little different.Once the paperwork on the deal had been completed, and the player had successfully passed his physical, the club contacted Romano and, with the blessing of Borja Couce, Marcos André’s agent, asked if he might like to be a part of the announcement. He agreed, and filmed a short video to tease the deal. It concluded, of course, with his catchphrase.The logic, for Valencia, was simple. Romano has 6.5 million Twitter followers. The club has 1.3 million. In VCF Media’s eyes, he was a “tremendous influencer in the world of football, a shortcut to a global audience,” as a club representative put it. Romano was the point at which “sport and entertainment” converged.Since then, others have followed suit. Romano, a confessed fan of Watford, the on-again, off-again Premier League team, featured alongside a host of players in the video to launch the club’s new jersey last summer.This month, Romano has featured in videos for both Germany’s Augsburg and Major League Soccer’s Toronto F.C., announcing the signings of Ricardo Pepi, the U.S. forward, and the Italian playmaker Lorenzo Insigne. Sportfive, the marketing agency based in New York that arranged the Augsburg announcement, did not respond to a request for comment as to whether Romano had been paid.Those appearances are testament to Romano’s hybrid status. Ordinarily, European clubs prefer to keep journalists of all stripes at arm’s length; the locker-room access traditionally offered by America’s major leagues is anathema. They guard their transfer plans with particular secrecy, fearing that a mistimed leak could jeopardize a deal months in the making.Romano with the jersey of the one club that he, perhaps surprisingly, places above the rest: Watford. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesRomano, though, has been embraced by every player in the market. Official club social media accounts reference his catchphrase. He enjoys regular interactions with owners and agents — a few days ago, Mohamed Salah’s agent, Ramy Abbas, told Romano, unprompted, that he was “a little bored these days,” an apparent reference to the stalemate over the Liverpool forward’s new contract — and even players themselves.That renown is professionally useful, of course. Romano’s fame has opened doors. “I remember a sporting director called me last January,” Romano said. “I had always talked about him a lot, and just like that, he called. He said he wanted to know the boy who seemed to know everything.” Romano was, briefly, just a little star-struck.But those relationships come with a risk, too. The same influence that makes Romano valuable to clubs looking to gain access to his followers also makes him vulnerable to those looking to exploit his reputation for reliability.The global transfer market is a $6 billion industry. Deals can be worth millions in commissions alone, but they are fragile, unpredictable things. And one word, from someone like Romano, can make or break them.There is a danger, he knows, in people giving him “their vision of the truth.”“But then I do not have a show that needs to be filled or a headline that has to be written,” he said. He can wait until “the right moment” for all concerned. “A journalist does not need to be the enemy,” as he put it.That is how he sees himself, even now, even with all of that impact and all of that reach. He rejects the term “influencer,” but he crossed that particular Rubicon some time ago. It is a fine line, though, the one that runs between observer and participant, between inside and out. He has now crossed it. Even he will not be able to say, not with any certainty, where he goes from here. More

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      For Africa Cup of Nations, Embrace the Unknown

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      The Africa Cup of Nations probably will be decided by players who earn their livings in Europe. But the best of the tournament lies in its surprises.It was the No. 8 who first caught the eye. He was tall, languid, just on the border between rangy and ungainly. It was not the way he moved, so much, but the way he did not. In the middle of all the bustle and hurry, he was unusually still. He did not sprint. He did not dash. He did not even run, not really. He strolled. He meandered. He moseyed.He was playing in midfield, but he did not look much like a central midfielder. There are, in modern soccer, precisely three acceptable profiles of central midfielder: slight and inventive; dynamic and industrious; physically imposing.The No. 8 was none of them. He towered over almost everyone who drew close, but he was slender, almost fragile. In another world, he might have been a mercurial playmaker who refused to leave his local team — Robin Friday or Tomás Carlovich — but, while his technique was flawless, his energy was not especially chaotic, particularly magical.But the No. 8 was, in theory, the team’s defensive linchpin. And yet he did not throw himself into tackles or busily chase down opponents. He played simple, unwaveringly accurate passes, and then he stood all but still, waiting for the game to come back his way.To an eye raised on watching European soccer, with its blend of tactical influences and its faintly South American inflection, the initial assumption was that he was not following instructions. But he was. Or, at least, he seemed to be. He was there to occupy space, to act as a fixed point, an anchor. He did it well. It worked, too.His name was Asrat Megersa, and he was, in 2013, a 25-year-old playing in midfield for Ethiopia in its first Africa Cup of Nations in three decades. The team’s first game was a match with the reigning champion, Zambia, in the South African city of Mbombela.Ethiopia midfielder Asrat Megersa, right, against Zambia in 2013.Manus van Dyk/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesOn the surface, Ethiopia stood little chance. Zambia could call on a sprinkling of players with experience in Europe. It had a coach, Hervé Renard, of international repute. Ethiopia did not. All but three members of its squad played in their homeland, for teams like Dedebit and Saint George and Ethiopian Coffee.And yet that was not how the game played out. In the bright summer sun, Zambia found Ethiopia entirely confounding. Megersa and his teammates did unexpected, unorthodox things. Their style was not recognizable, and often, neither were their intentions. They made choices they were not supposed to make.It seemed to unsettle the Zambians. An uncertainty, a doubt crept into their play. Zambia took a delicate lead. Megersa kept standing still, kept passing the ball, kept occupying space. Ethiopia struck back, then held on for a draw. In the stands, the fans who had made the long journey from Johannesburg on packed buses, out to the fringes of the Kruger National Park, blew happily, incessantly on their vuvuzelas.Ethiopia’s fortunes changed swiftly after that. A few days later, Burkina Faso held its nerve, and beat Megersa and his team, 4-0. Defeat to Nigeria in the final group game in Rustenberg meant Ethiopia was eliminated. But that day against Zambia left a lasting impression; eight years on, I can still remember the name of Asrat Megersa.It endures, I think, because it is so rare, in modern soccer, to see something truly different. Special happens all the time; Lionel Messi is beamed into our homes every week. But different is precious. Good ideas travel quickly in elite soccer. Best practice spreads rapidly. Some small advancement made in Argentina one week will have made landfall in Europe the next.The result is not homogeneity, not exactly, but a narrow spectrum of variety. Players fit specific, familiar molds. Teams pass or teams press. They play deep or they play high. There are those who absorb pressure and those who apply it and those who do a little of both. Some do it well and some do it badly, but they are all trying to do the same things.Mohamed Salah is among the dozens of European stars called in to bolster African teams.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersThat will be true of this year’s Cup of Nations, too. Most of the 24 teams gathered in Cameroon for this year’s tournament, which opens with two games on Sunday, will know that their hopes rest, to no small extent, on how the stars they have called back from Europe perform over the next month.If Algeria is to retain its title, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez will be a central part of it. Egypt will invest much of its faith in Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah. The backbone of Nigeria’s team plays in the Premier League. Morocco will lean heavily on Youssef En-Nesyri of Sevilla. Senegal, the paper favorite, can call on Edouard Mendy and Kalidou Koulibaly and Idrissa Gueye and Sadio Mané.But they are just the headline acts. Their supporting casts have largely been drawn from Europe, too. Every member of Senegal’s squad plays in Europe. Cameroon has called up 22 players who do. It is not limited to the continent’s traditional powerhouses, either. Guinea has 22 players from European teams. Cape Verde has 21. Burkina Faso can call on 18.That is testament, of course, both to soccer’s rampant and to some extent rapacious global reach and to the development of the sport in Africa; the talent has never been spread quite so broadly across the continent as it is now. There are 10 teams, perhaps, who have arrived in Cameroon with a realistic hope of emerging victorious.Algeria won the Cup of Nations in 2019.Suhaib Salem/ReutersBut that intercontinental connection brings with it, too, a risk of losing something valuable. Soccer has long been a common language, the game the world plays, but as it has grown more global it has started to lose its accents. Style and taste no longer shift across borders; everything is subsumed by the Platonic ideal of soccer as preached by the Champions League and the Premier League. An orthodoxy has taken hold: Soccer has become the game the world plays the same way.The Cup of Nations, though, retains just a couple of pockets of resistance. That was what made Megersa, and Ethiopia, special. This was his interpretation, their interpretation, of the game, the game as they wanted to play, not the game as they had been told it was played.Perhaps the same will be true, this year, of Sudan — with only two players drawn from abroad — or Malawi, with just two squad members called up from Europe. Or perhaps it will be true, once more, of Ethiopia. None of its players have come from Europe this time around, either. That diminishes the team’s chances of winning the tournament, of course, but it also makes it a much more enticing prospect.The only sadness is that Megersa is not in the squad. He is 34, now, still playing in his homeland, the place where he played the game as Ethiopia played it, a uniquely bright and joyous memory.Ignorance Is BlissThe first drips of poison came on Tuesday morning, as Manchester United was still absorbing the previous night’s defeat to Wolves into its bloodstream. Apparently, the club’s players were unimpressed by Ralf Rangnick, the bespectacled 63-year-old German coach who replaced Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a couple of months ago.By Wednesday, it was emerging that one or two of the players had not even heard of Rangnick before he was appointed; despite being professional athletes with many cars and houses, they had been forced to Google him to find out who he was, had been required to spend time on Wikipedia with the general public to work out his background. Drip, drip.By Thursday, it was a flood. Chris Armas, the former New York Red Bulls coach hired as Rangnick’s assistant, had yet to teach United’s coterie of international stars how to — and there is a little paraphrasing here, but not too much — play soccer while in possession of the ball, and they were troubled that perhaps he did not know how to do it.There’s still trouble at United? Everyone blame the new guys.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRangnick, meanwhile, was reported to be aloof and cold and also making them train at night, or at least in the dark — it is winter in the north of England; it is never anything but dark — and they did not like that at all. He lacked charisma, the whispers went. He lacked authority. He had fallen out with leading figures in the changing room. He had not impressed them in training. Drip, drip, drip.Whether any and all of these complaints — all of them let slip to various journalists on condition of anonymity — are true is, unfortunately, of secondary importance. What matters far more is the fact of their existence, the sad reality that at least a portion of United’s players are already doing what they can to ensure that the finger of blame for any future failure is pointed squarely at the coach who has been there for a few weeks, and not the players who have been there for several years.Those drips are what happens when something in a club — any club, not just Manchester United — has turned, when the atmosphere is toxic, when the strands of accountability and mutual support and collective responsibility that in ordinary times bind a squad and a staff together have snapped. That is always the rule: It is not the content of these pernicious leaks that matter, but the fact of them.Quite how United will proceed from this point is not entirely clear. Ed Woodward, the executive vice chairman, announced on Friday that he is leaving at the end of the month. He will be replaced by Richard Arnold, the club’s managing director. Rangnick has six more months before moving on to become a consultant. There will be a new manager, a new regime. The damage done by those drips, though, suggests that may only be the start of the upheaval.Learning LessonsJoan Laporta knows the safest position at Barcelona: right next to the club’s newest signing.Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is, strangely, an answer to how Barcelona — in debt just a few months ago to the tune of $1 billion, as you may remember, and so concerned by the scale of their financial breakdown that they wanted to join a European Super League — could afford, right at the start of the month, to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.It is not an especially satisfactory answer, admittedly, encompassing as it does a loan from Goldman Sachs, some creative accounting, the sale of some players who have not yet actually been sold, and an odd loophole in Spanish soccer’s financial regulations that nobody had mentioned until Barcelona decided it wanted to pay Manchester City $60 million or so to sign Ferran Torres.But, still, it is an answer. Far more mystifying was the reaction of the Barcelona president Joan Laporta, a man who has spent much of the last year delivering tremulous warnings about the club’s dire finances, to the completion of the deal. “Everyone else should prepare themselves because we are back,” he said. “We continue to be a reference in the market.”This is a man, it should not need pointing out, who said those words at a time when his club could not officially register its new signing because of its ongoing financial difficulties.That Laporta should be feeling a little bullish is understandable: Torres is an astute signing at what is, by modern standards, a startlingly low fee. Laporta is in an elected position, too, and it is never too early to start campaigning.Indeed, in one sense, it is to be hoped that it is little more than hot air, that his refusal to dismiss the idea of signing Erling Haaland in the summer is little more than pride and defiance.The alternative, after all, is much more troubling: that rather than rebuild the team organically around the richly-talented cadre of teenagers it has produced over the last 12 months, Laporta is prepared to mortgage the club’s future once more, all in some quixotic pursuit of immediate success in a game now dominated by teams backed by nation states.Barcelona has been down that road before, and not long ago. It has only been a few months since it stood on the very edge of complete financial meltdown, after all. It is still only just starting to deal with the consequences. Barcelona does not need to be back, not in that sense, not for some time.CorrespondenceThis is the problem with having a little time off. You unwind, you relax, you allow your mind to drift, and then all of a sudden you’re back at work and none of it makes any sense at all. For example, why is Manuel Buchwald emailing me about the shape of the penalty area?“The logical alternative to the rectangular penalty box is the semicircular one, as is used in most other sports,” he wrote. “Field hockey, handball, lacrosse, basketball and ice hockey. In the latter case it’s the area protecting the goalie.” That is a valid point and would work at least as a basis for a new shape of penalty area in soccer, but why tell me?Not all penalties are equal.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersThe fact that Will Clark-Shim has also been in touch to complain about the “increased frequency of penalties in the game” jogs a memory. We were talking about something to do with penalties, weren’t we? “The game thrives on open and active play, honest industry, and clever coordination,” he wrote. “Increased penalties seem the result of incidental handballs, manufactured contact, and tedious reviews. They result in unexciting goals.”That’s a good point, too: Not all goals are created equal, and getting more goals through having more penalties is not necessarily a unilaterally positive thing. There is definitely a theme developing, because Bob Rogers has mentioned penalties, too. He is a (self-professed) “low-level referee,” and he would like to confess to calling fouls as outside the box even if they have occurred inside it, “when that is the fair value of the foul.”Ah, yes, that was it. We were discussing whether there are now too many penalties, and whether there might, perhaps, be a way of better distinguishing between fouls that warrant that level of punishment and fouls that just happen to take place in a fairly arbitrary area of the field. It always takes me a while to get up to speed, that’s all. 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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      Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Is Target of Taunts but Not Alone in Blame

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      A thrashing by Liverpool showed that problems with Manchester United extend well beyond Solskjaer, the team’s manager.MANCHESTER, England — Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s name was still ringing around Old Trafford. It was not, though, coming from the corner of the Stretford End, which contains Manchester United’s most fervent, most vocal fans. Those fans stood silent, fuming, as their nightmare unfurled in front of them.Instead, it was the Liverpool fans, corralled at the other end of the stadium, the afternoon’s events taking them from delight to ecstasy and then all the way to something approaching delirium, offering the hymns in his praise on Sunday. Humiliation on the field is one thing. It is the mockery off it that may prove too much for Manchester United to endure.Until now, Solskjaer has always commanded the loyalty of United’s fans. No matter how many false dawns his team has endured over the last three years, no matter how frustrating it has been to watch a side that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble veer between triumph and disaster, often in the same game, no matter how unclear his vision for the club has been, they have stood by him.Manchester United’s manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was mocked by Liverpool’s delighted fans during and after the rout.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockHe was, after all, a hero for the club as a player; his love for Manchester United has never been in question. His reverence for United’s traditions might, at times, come across as a touch sentimental, but it is doubtless sincere. After the mercenary years of José Mourinho and Louis van Gaal, when the well-being of the club came a distant second to the burnishing of their legacies, he has been a welcome palliative.But there is, necessarily, a limit to sentimentality. There is no reason, in particular, to believe that Sunday’s 5-0 thrashing by Liverpool will prove a watershed for the club’s hierarchy: Solskjaer’s iteration of Manchester United has ricocheted almost constantly between hope and despair, and the club has never shown anything but blind faith in him.5th minute Naby Keita’s opening goal was the perfect start for Liverpool on Sunday.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images13th minute Diogo Jota doubles the lead, stunning the Old Trafford crowd into silence.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesThe fans, too, did not aim their fire in his direction. There were no chants demanding his ouster, no public manifestations of dissent. Equally significantly, though, there were no defiant expressions of support, as there have been in previous low moments. This, perhaps, might have been the day that something significant shifted.It would be difficult to overstate the scale of United’s collapse. How best to express it? That Liverpool did not play particularly well in the first half, giving the ball away cheaply in midfield and inviting pressure reasonably frequently, but still made it to the break with a four-goal lead?Or that midway through the second half the streets outside the stadium were full of fans seeking sanctuary from what was unfolding inside, more and more bolting for the exits as the game wore on and the suffering worsened? Or that Jürgen Klopp’s team was so dominant that it spent the last half-hour, after Mohamed Salah had scored his third goal, and his team’s fifth, toying with United, its rival and peer, playing with all the intensity of a warm-down training session?38th minute Mohamed Salah’s first goal was just a sign of things to come.Phil Noble/Reuters45th minute + 5 Salah’s second, Liverpool’s fourth, came just before halftime.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesOr, perhaps, it would be the fury and the frustration that should have seen Cristiano Ronaldo sent off for lashing out at Liverpool’s Curtis Jones at the end of the first half, and eventually did see Paul Pogba — only a few minutes after his introduction as a substitute — dismissed for a wild, reckless challenge on Naby Keita.Both were, as much as anything, an expression of United’s absolute impotence, an abdication of control rooted in the embarrassment being inflicted on Solskjaer’s players. They were powerless to match Liverpool. They were unable to stop Keita, Salah and Roberto Firmino, in particular, cutting through them at will. They had lost the game, and so they lost their cool.It was Solskjaer who had to bear the brunt of that, of course. It was Solskjaer who had to stand there, on the touchline, his head ever so slightly bowed, as Liverpool’s fans crowed and taunted and, with a cruel and obvious irony, invoked his name.It was Solskjaer who had to answer the questions at the end, who had to conjure whatever explanation he could, who had to give an instant, taped deposition for what will be, largely, an inquest into his own continued viability. And it is Solskjaer who will be dismissed, in some quarters, as nothing but a frontman for the great Manchester United tribute act, a sort of glorified mascot for a club whose business model is based on milking former glories.That is the way it is, the way it has always been, but it should not disguise the fact that he is not solely to blame. The core difference between United and Liverpool is not just in the quality of their coaches — Solskjaer, granted his job on the basis of his playing career, and Klopp, who earned his because of what he had achieved as a coach — but in the coherence of their structures.50th minute Thousands of United fans were already on their way out when Salah scored his third.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images60th minute United’s day managed to get worse when Paul Pogba was sent off for a two-footed tackle on Keita.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesPogba started on the bench here because there is, in effect, no system available to Solskjaer that enables him to get the best out of the galaxy of stars at his disposal. Playing a way that suits Pogba means negating Bruno Fernandes or dropping Marcus Rashford or sidelining Mason Greenwood.The club signed Cristiano Ronaldo this summer — get the band back together for the last, ever, world tour — partly out of romance, partly out of cynicism, partly because it was worried he was going to join Manchester City and partly, of course, because he is one of the greatest of all time. But it did so with no real idea of how he would fit into the team, with no regard for the fact that it meant effectively stalling Jadon Sancho’s Manchester United career before it had begun.These are not things Liverpool does. They are not, for that matter, things that Manchester City or Chelsea do. It is Solskjaer’s fault that he cannot get the best out of these players, that he sent out a team so woefully overmatched against Liverpool, but it is not his fault that his resources are so uneven, their shapes just not quite dovetailing with each other.That was of little or no solace as he stood on the touchline, the scoreboard emblazoned with the proof of his humiliation, Liverpool’s fans singing his praises. It was hard, in fact, not to feel sorry for Solskjaer at that moment, and that may be the most worrying thing of all. It is one thing to be beaten, to be criticized. It is quite another to be where he is now, the butt of the joke. A manager can recover from many things. Being a punchline is not one of them.Michael Regan/Getty Images More