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      The Rocketman of Real Sociedad Is Still Breaking News

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      As soon as the ball crosses the line, Juan Iturralde is on his feet. He darts back inside his suite, heading for the door. He pauses only briefly, to snatch two bottle rockets from a plastic bag placed carefully, deliberately, in his path. Its location is strategic: Iturralde is, essentially, in the news business, and every second counts.He bounds — as fast as his knees will allow — down two flights of stairs, clasping the fireworks by their stalks. He sprints out of Gate 18 at the Reale Arena, home of the Spanish soccer team Real Sociedad, and onto the street outside. He checks that the coast is clear, slips the first of his two rockets into his hand-held launcher, and breaks his story across San Sebastián’s night sky.His news, this time, is good. As the first rocket shrieks above his head, Iturralde sets off another, another shower of sparks falling at his feet, another cloud of cordite writhing around his sleeve. Everyone in the city knows how to crack the code. More

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      Inter Milan Is Threatened by Challenges at Suning, Its Chinese Owner

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      The storied Italian soccer club’s Chinese owners spent heavily on big stars, and now the it is winning again. But the bill is coming due, putting the team’s future in doubt.HONG KONG — The new, high-rolling Chinese owner was supposed to return Inter Milan to its glory days. It spent heavily on prolific scorers like Romelu Lukaku and Christian Eriksen. After five years of investment, the storied Milan soccer club is within striking distance of its first Italian league title in a decade.Now the bill has come due — and Inter Milan’s future is suddenly in doubt.Suning, an electronics retailer that is the club’s majority owner, is strapped for cash and trying to sell its stake. The club is bleeding money. Some of its players have agreed to defer payment, according to one person close to the club who requested anonymity because the information isn’t public.Inter Milan has held talks with at least one potential investor, but the parties couldn’t agree on a price, according to others with knowledge of the negotiations.Suning’s soccer aspirations are crumbling at home, too. The company abruptly shut down its domestic team four months after the club won China’s national championship. Some stars, many of whom chose to play there instead of in Chelsea or Liverpool, have said they have gone unpaid.China has failed in its dream of becoming a global player in the world’s most popular sport. Spurred in part by the ambitions of Xi Jinping, China’s top leader and an ardent soccer fan, a new breed of Chinese tycoons plowed billions of dollars into marquee clubs and star players, transforming the economics of the game. Chinese investors spent $1.8 billion acquiring stakes in more than a dozen European teams between 2015 and 2017, and China’s cash-soaked domestic league paid the largest salaries ever bestowed on overseas recruits.But the splurge exposed international soccer to the peculiarities of the Chinese business world. Deep involvement by the Communist Party make companies vulnerable to sharp shifts in the political winds. The free-spending tycoons often lacked international experience or sophistication.Now, talks of defaults, fire sales and hasty exits dominate discussions around boardroom tables. A mining magnate lost control of A.C. Milan amid questions about his business empire. The owner of a soap maker and food additive company gave up his stake in Aston Villa. An energy conglomerate shed its stake in Slavia Prague after its founder disappeared.Suning’s plight reflects “the whole rise and fall of this era of Chinese football,” said Zhe Ji, the director of Red Lantern, a sports marketing company that works in China for top European soccer teams. “When people were talking about Chinese football and all the attention it got in 2016, it came very fast, but it’s gone very fast, too.”Suning paid $306 million in 2016 for a major stake in Inter Milan. Suning is a household name in China, with stores stocked with computers, iPads and rice cookers for the country’s growing middle class. While it has been hurt by China’s e-commerce revolution, it counts Alibaba, the online shopping titan, as a major investor.On a brightly lit stage to announce the Inter Milan deal, Zhang Jindong, Suning’s billionaire founder and chairman, raised a champagne glass and talked about how the famous Italian team — which has won 18 championships since 1910 but none since 2010 — would help his brand internationally and contribute to China’s sports industry.Boasting about Suning’s “abundant resources,” Mr. Zhang promised the club would “return to its glory days and become a stronger property able to attract top stars from across the globe.”Zhang Jindong, right, Suning’s chairman and founder, with his son, Steven Zhang, at a match in Italy in 2017. Suning put Inter Milan’s stars  to work selling air-conditioners and washing machines.Claudio Villa – Inter/FC Internazionale via Getty ImagesUnder the leadership of Mr. Zhang’s son, Steven Zhang, now 29, the club spent more than $300 million on stars like Lukaku, Eriksen and Lautaro Martínez, an Argentine forward nicknamed The Bull for his relentless pursuit of goals.Suning also agreed to pay $700 million to England’s Premier League for the rights to broadcast games in China beginning in 2019, stunning the industry.Suning lavished money on a domestic club that it bought in 2015. It spent $32 million to acquire Ramires, a Brazilian midfielder, from Chelsea, and 50 million euros for Alex Teixeira, a young Brazilian attacker, who chose the Chinese team over Liverpool, one of soccer’s most popular franchises.The recruits were put to work selling air-conditioners and washing machines. In one advertisement, Mr. Teixeira urged viewers to buy a Chinese brand of appliances. “I am Teixeira,” he says in Mandarin, adding, “come to Suning to buy Haier.”The money, said Mubarak Wakaso, a Ghanaian midfielder, helped make China attractive. “The money that I’m going to make in China is far better than La Liga,” he said in a mix of Twi and English in an interview last year, citing the league in Spain where he once played. “I’m not telling lies.”Suning’s soccer bets were badly timed. The Chinese government began to worry that big conglomerates were borrowing too heavily, threatening the country’s financial system. One year after the Inter Milan deal, Chinese state media criticized Suning for its “irrational” acquisition.Then the pandemic hit. Even as Inter Milan won on the field, it lost gate receipts from its San Siro stadium, one of the largest in Europe. Some sponsors walked away because their own financial pressures. The club lost about $120 million last year, one of the biggest losses reported by a European soccer club.Back in China, Suning was slammed by e-commerce as well as the coronavirus. Its troubles accelerated in the autumn when it chose not to demand repayment of a $3 billion investment in Evergrande, a property developer and China’s most indebted company.Suning’s burden is set to get heavier. This year, it must make $1.2 billion in bond payments. The company declined to comment.Suning began to take drastic steps. Last year it abandoned its broadcasting deal with the Premier League.Jiangsu Suning players celebrate winning the Chinese Super League football championship last year. The team was shut down four months after the win.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThen, in February, it shut down its domestic team, Jiangsu Suning, nearly four months after the team won China’s Super League title against an Evergrande-controlled team. At least one of the team’s foreign recruits has hired lawyers to help recoup unpaid salary, according to a person involved in the matter.One former Suning player, Eder, a Brazilian-born star forward, set the soccer world buzzing after media reports quoted him saying Suning had not paid him. On Twitter, Eder said the comments had been taken from a private, online chat without his permission. His agent did not respond to requests for comment.To save itself, Suning took a step that could complicate Inter Milan’s fortunes. On March 1, it sold $2.3 billion worth of its shares to affiliates of the government of the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The deal gave Chinese authorities a say in Inter Milan’s fate.Greater financial pressure looms for Inter Milan. It must pay out a $360 million bond next year. A minority investor in Hong Kong, Lion Rock Capital, which acquired a 31 percent stake in Inter in 2019, could exercise an option that would require Suning to buy its stake for as much as $215 million, according to one of the people close to the club.Inter Milan officials are looking for financing, a new partner or a sale of the team at a valuation of about $1.1 billion, the person said.The club until recently was in exclusive talks with BC Partners, the British private equity firm, but they were unable to agree on price, said people with knowledge of the talks.Without fresh capital, Inter Milan could lose players. If it can’t pay salaries or transfer fees for departing players, European soccer rules say it could be banished from top competitions.“We are concerned but we are not frightened yet about this situation — we are just waiting for the news,” said Manuel Corti, a member of an Inter Milan supporters club based in London.“Being Inter fans,” he said, “we are never sure of anything until the last minute.”Alexandra Stevenson More

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      Don’t Reject the Champions League’s Changes Out of Hand

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      The latest proposals to reallocate European soccer’s riches show that there may be sense even in dumb ideas.Say what you like about Andrea Agnelli, but at least he is not afraid of a bad idea. Even by the standards of Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, this has been a fairly spectacular week, a seemingly never-ending stream of free-form thoughts about the future of soccer, each one somehow worse than the last.There was, first, a stout defense of the coming reform of the Champions League, the so-called Swiss Model, which would see 36 teams qualify for the tournament and then play 10 group games, rather than six, all of them against different opponents.That was just Agnelli getting started, though. It is perhaps easiest to think of him as soccer’s equivalent to Stewart Pearson, the policy strategist/vapid marketing guru skewered so perfectly in “The Thick of It,” the British political satire. Legacy places in the Champions League? Banning elite clubs from buying each other’s players? Selling a subscription to the last 15 minutes of games? Yes, and ho (Parental Guidance: R).The reaction to all of these suggestions, of course, was what even Agnelli, presumably, has come to expect: a panoply of derision and disdain, the sort that in a strange sort of way unites soccer’s various warring tribes in hostility to the machinations of a smart, urbane businessman who seems determined to play the role of cartoonish supervillain.That so many of his ideas emerged in a week in which Agnelli’s Juventus was unexpectedly and dramatically eliminated from the Champions League by F.C. Porto simply served to underline his hubris. This, after all, was the sort of drama he wants to negate, inflicted by the sort of team he wants to disenfranchise. He got, in short, what he deserved.But while that reaction is both understandable and largely justified, it is not desperately constructive. Just as with Project Big Picture — the set of ideas tossed around by the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool for reform of the Premier League and leaked late last year — the immediate rush to outrage means that the islands of common sense in Agnelli’s thought torrent are swept away before they can be properly explored.Take, for example, the last of his suggestions. Why would it be bad, precisely, to sell the rights to watch the last 15 minutes of games? Of course the clubs would benefit from the tapping of another revenue stream, but who suffers?Those who wanted to watch the full match could still do so, through whatever subscription package they currently enjoy. But maybe others — those not able to afford it, those without the time to benefit from it, those who do not wish to watch an entire game — could use a cheaper, shorter, more ad hoc alternative.There will have been plenty, for example, who might have wanted to watch the denouement to Juventus’s game with Porto, once it became clear that it might prove more compelling than anticipated. So why not let them?Porto isn’t in a Big Five league, but it deserves nights to celebrate, too.Valerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesThat the idea could be dismissed out of hand is, in part, down to the fact that it was Agnelli who proposed it. He is, after all, not only the chairman of Juventus, but the president of the European Club Association, too, a body that is designed to represent the interests of all of its members but — in the popular imagination — is largely deployed to lobby for the game’s established elite.As such, it is assumed that everything that is in Agnelli’s interests is automatically tinged with not just self-interest, but also greed. The expansion of the Champions League, according to that argument, is designed to enable a handful of clubs to make more money, at the expense of everyone else, furthering the financial chasm that yawns between teams in the major leagues, and between the major leagues and the minor ones.The idea of legacy places — allowing teams with more European pedigree to leapfrog those with less, ensuring that the traditional powers always have access to the Champions League, regardless of where they finish in their domestic leagues — is seen as offering them a backstop, inuring them from the consequences of failure, breaking the contract that sport should be in some way meritocratic, ensuring their money keeps flowing.This is, doubtless, true. Agnelli is not advocating anything that would damage his, his club’s or his collaborators’ interests. But it does not follow that those who stand in his way are acting out of some sort of higher purpose. This week, several clubs — most notably Crystal Palace and Aston Villa — led the resistance to the reform of the Champions League, insisting that it would irrevocably damage domestic competitions.That Andrea Agnelli is largely looking out for the interests of Juventus does not mean every one of his ideas must be rejected out of hand.Denis Balibouse/ReutersAnd they are right, but their motivations are no purer than Agnelli’s. Crystal Palace and Aston Villa benefit very nicely, thank you very much, from the status quo. They have been made immeasurably rich by their mere presence in the Premier League; they will reject any move that endangers their place on that particular gravy train.It is here that the problem becomes broader, more pernicious. There is a reason Agnelli — and John W. Henry, the owner of Liverpool, and Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, and the powers-that-be at Bayern Munich and Juventus and all the rest — keeps having bad ideas, and it is one that cannot be put entirely (though that is relevant) to the big clubs’ greed for trophies and for profit.It is that on some fundamental level, the economics of soccer as they stand do not work, and they did not work even before the coronavirus hit, creating a colossal hole in the accounts of (almost) every club across Europe, rich and poor alike.Ideally, at this juncture, it would be possible to pinpoint just one problem — the spending of Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City, the wealth of the Premier League or the growing gap between haves and have-nots — and then to identify a panacea that would make it all better But that is not how it works. Fairness in top-flight European soccer is a vast and unwieldy and complicated issue, and one without an obvious solution.For the grand houses of continental Europe, the issue is the relentless march of the Premier League. For the big clubs of the Premier League, it is being expected to win an arms race against teams backed by nation states. For those teams, it is trying to crack a cartel that is arranged against them.For all its financial might, P.S.G. is still chasing its first Champions League title with Kylian Mbappé. For all its struggles, Barcelona has won four with Lionel Messi.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor the teams that fill out the five major leagues of Western Europe, it is finding a way to overcome the enormous financial advantages of their opponents. For those leagues that are not considered the major powers, it is identifying a way to compete with the Big Five, and to deal with the deleterious effect on competitive balance of the Champions League itself.And that is before we get further down the pyramid, to the teams struggling to breathe away from the continent’s top divisions. It is this that makes it too hard to sympathize with the plight of Crystal Palace, which currently makes more money than A.C. Milan and Feyenoord and Legia Warsaw and Panathinaikos and all but a couple of dozen other teams in the world. It is this that means it is dangerous to assume that what is good for Crystal Palace is good for soccer as a whole.There are, unfortunately, no easy answers. But that should not dictate that all suggestions for change are shot down, or that the underlying assumption should be that they are all rooted in bad faith, or even that self-interest itself precludes an idea’s having merit.The people who own clubs are within their rights to want steadier, more predictable incomes, or more restricted spending. It is not feasible to demand, as we currently do, that they just throw as much money against the wall as possible in pursuit of short-term success. Fans, above all, should know by now that such an approach rarely ends well.Will an expanded Champions League still have room for past winners like Ajax and Feyenoord?Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say that Agnelli has yet hit upon the answer. Legacy places for historic teams defeat the purpose of sport, though they are not exactly unprecedented: In South America, there have been various experiments — rarely for good reasons — to make relegation a punishment for years of underperformance, not just a single bad season.Expanding the Champions League — though not something that is personally appealing — has more positives, should the extra places go to national champions from lesser leagues, expanding the horizons of the competition, though even that might then have a distorting effect on those domestic tournaments. (Banning transfers between elite clubs makes no sense: How else would Agnelli, for one, have unloaded Miralem Pjanic’s contract?)But none of this should disguise the need both to talk about and institute change. The status quo might work for a handful of teams — the ones, largely, that finish in the top 15 of the Premier League pretty regularly, and possibly Bayern Munich — but it locks out the vast majority; according to a report this week from Football Supporters Europe, fans* are finding it increasingly off-putting.[*This is a subject for another column, but the issue with these sorts of surveys is that they represent a specific cohort of fans, not a broad spectrum.]It is incumbent on everyone, then, to have the courage to have ideas: not objections rooted in tradition, not utopian daydreams, but concrete, considered suggestions. Would cross-border leagues help teams from smaller nations compete? Should elite teams be allowed to sign strategic deals with partner clubs? Is there a way to make the Champions League more compelling? How do you address competitive balance within and between domestic tournaments? (Answers below.)All of them will have drawbacks. All of them will elicit criticism. But it is a conversation we must be prepared to have, not one that should be shut down just because someone, somewhere, finds it does not align with his interests. Partly because that is the only way anything will change. And partly because if we do not, one of Agnelli’s ideas might just stick.a) Yes, it’s obvious; b) yes, so is that; c) you’d start by changing the seeding; and d) squad and spending limits, and a combination of a) and b).A Year OnA packed house and one mask at Anfield in March 11, 2020, hours before sports called time.Phil Noble/ReutersThe news seeped through as Jürgen Klopp was licking his wounds and Diego Simeone was basking in glory. It had been one of those electric Champions League nights: Atlético Madrid had eliminated Liverpool, the reigning champion, last March, storming what was supposed to be fortress Anfield with that distinctively Cholísta mix of strategy and steel.And then, as the managers were picking over the bones of what had happened, as 56,000 people were drifting into the night, the news flickered through from Italy. Daniele Rugani, the Juventus defender, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The club was sending its squad into isolation for 14 days. Its opponent the previous weekend, Inter Milan, quickly did the same.That was March 11, 2020, a year and a day ago. Even in the slightly frantic, vaguely frazzled surroundings of a press box, it was apparent that what had played out in front of us was not the story. It seemed obvious, even then, that the night’s theme was not just Liverpool’s facing up to an immediate future with no European competition.The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. Across the Atlantic, Rudy Gobert had tested positive, bringing the virus into the N.B.A. Sports in the United States was shutting down. Over the next 36 hours, Europe reached the same conclusion. The patchwork solutions that had tried to hold back the tide — games in empty stadiums, games being postponed — gave way.In England, at least, the tipping point was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive. The Premier League, until then content to stick its fingers in its ears and blunder through, called an emergency meeting. A few hours after insisting the show, that weekend, would go on, the league confirmed it would be mothballed. Nobody could be quite sure that it would come back.Two things now stand out about those few days. One is specific to Britain. It is important to remember that, at the time of Arteta’s positive test, the British government was dallying. The country was still almost two weeks from being locked down. Officials were encouraging people to go to work. Some 56,000 people had been allowed to go to Anfield, including some who flew in from Madrid for the privilege. A quarter of a million had been admitted to horse racing’s Cheltenham Festival.Looking back, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that it was the abandonment of the Premier League that concentrated a few minds and forced a few hands. Its elite soccer league is, deep down, one of England’s most high-profile institutions. Its sudden absence denoted, in the most incontrovertible tone, that the pandemic had arrived.The other, broader thing is that for all the criticism, for all the missteps and the arguments and the questionable motives, soccer deserves credit for finding its way back: its players for enduring the schedule; its executives for conjuring solutions; the countless, unheralded staff members at clubs and leagues and broadcasters for making it work. Soccer is not perfect. Sometimes, it is not even good. But in what has been an inordinately difficult year for so many, it has, in some small way, helped.CorrespondenceManchester City and ballet, you say? Set this photo to music.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillLast week’s column on Manchester City — a team that inspires an intellectual response, more than an emotional one, at least in my eyes — prompted many of you to get in touch to set me straight. Matt Noel highlighted not only that Pep Guardiola has been able to “make some tweaks and reunite” his squad, but also the “style in which City plays … is nothing short of miraculous, delicate and ephemeral.”I have no arguments there and, of course, it is not for me to dictate your responses to any team. I was, as the vernacular goes, simply offering you my truth. “I love watching City,” Charlotte Mehrtens wrote. “The skill is such a joy. You claim this football lacks soul? That’s like saying a choreographed ballet lacks soul.”This is a great parallel, because there is something inherently balletic about City, and also I find that ballet leaves me a bit cold, too. I appreciate the art and the skill, but I could do with a bit of talking. The issue here, then, may be that I am a philistine.David Ittah took exception with the idea that Guardiola has invented a new position for João Cancelo. “Marcelo has been playing exactly that role for many years at Real Madrid,” he wrote. He has indeed: Nobody loves Marcelo, pound for pound the greatest signing of all time, more than me. But Cancelo’s role is much more structured, much more part of the tactical blueprint, than the freestyle approach that makes Marcelo a joy.And a wonderful idea from Ian Greig. “Why not try to make a virtue out of the loss by holding games on out-of-the-way unknown pitches in remote places. Pitches without stands, or fans in beautiful places, rural Scotland, Georgia. Years ago I watched a game near Syanky in Poland, a lovely site surrounded by pines. I hold the memory dear.”Consider me on board. Let’s play the Champions League final in Lofoten. Or Qeqertarsuaq. More

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      Fenerbahce vs. beIN Is Turkey's High-Stakes Rivalry

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      A feud between a top Turkish soccer team and the league’s broadcaster is rooted in taped chants, time stamps and club rivalry. But the fight’s cost could be enormous.The offending chant had been broadcast during Turkish league matches for months before anyone noticed it. The refrain, a variation of which is often heard in stadiums around Turkey, ends with a profanity directed at Fenerbahce, one of the country’s biggest and richest clubs.For months, it had been included in the prerecorded crowd noise that has become the soundtrack to live sports in empty stadiums in the coronavirus era. And for months, no one in Turkey said a thing — until January, when a keen-eared observer noticed the chant in the background of games involving one of the league’s smallest teams.Now, it is the latest flash point in an increasingly bitter dispute pitting Fenerbahce — a Turkish soccer team which has millions of passionate fans and is led by one of Turkey’s richest men — against beIN Media Group, one of the world’s largest buyers of sports rights.Fenerbahce has seized on the revelation about the chants as proof of its long-held belief that the Qatar-based broadcaster, through its beIN Sports Turkey subsidiary, had an agenda against the club. The fight has sabotaged interviews and played out in on-field protests, perceived injustices and, most recently, a lawsuit in a Turkish court. It could have serious financial consequences for the entire league, and the club is showing no sign it will relent.Until a court ruling ordered Fenerbahce to stop, the club sent its players onto the field in shirts critical of beIN Sports.Gokhan Kilincer/Reuters“It would be too naïve to consider all these consecutive incidents as honest human mistakes,” Fenerbahce said in comments it attributed to its secretary general, Burak Caglan Kizilhan. “We believe our arguments are extremely valid and concerning.”The tension between one of Turkey’s biggest clubs and the league’s official broadcaster has come at a sensitive time for Turkish soccer. BeIN Sports, through its local subsidiary, pays about $360 million for the television rights to the league’s matches.Now, with most of Turkey’s biggest teams, including Fenerbahce, heavily in debt, the league is planning a new television rights sale. And beIN is wondering if staying involved in Turkish soccer is worth the trouble.“Why would we deliberately try to disenfranchise one of the biggest clubs in Turkey?” a beIN Media Group spokesman said of Fenerbahce’s accusations. “It doesn’t make any sense, commercially or otherwise.” Like multiple people interviewed for this article, the spokesman asked that his name not be used, to avoid drawing the wrath of Fenerbahce and its fans.Even before the latest skirmish, the situation had driven beIN executives to distraction. Fenerbahce, through its president, Ali Koc, had been making claims about beIN for months. For example, the team has repeatedly accused beIN of selecting television angles and replays on its broadcasts that cast Fenerbahce or decision for and against the club in a negative light or, alternately, to accentuate the positives of its opponents.In response, Fenerbahce has mounted hashtag campaigns — amplified by its millions of followers — on social media, dressed its players in anti-beIN gear and even had them wear shirts with a logo doctored to read “beFAIR” to interviews conducted by the network. When the club signed the former Arsenal star Mesut Özil in January, journalists from beIN Sports Turkey — the official league broadcaster — were barred from his first news conference.The network has tried in vain to lower the temperature. After the chants in the television soundtrack were revealed, beIN officials immediately issued an apology. But rather than dampen the flames, its statement stoked more fury.The apology, according to Fenerbahce, had intentionally been issued at 7:05 p.m. — 19:05, according to the 24-hour clock. The timing was no accident, according to Fenerbahce; 1905 was the founding year of its greatest rival, Galatasaray. To the club, even the apology served as confirmation of the network’s agenda.“Conspiracy and paranoia is part of the culture in Turkey,” said Emre Sarigul, a co-founder of Turkish Football, the largest English website solely devoted to Turkish soccer.Barred from Turkey’s stadiums by the pandemic, many Fenerbahce fans have backed the club’s hashtag campaign on social media. Chris Mcgrath/Getty ImagesSarigul described machinations in the top division as more akin to W.W.E., the popular American wrestling franchise, where actions are frequently choreographed to elicit maximum reaction. “It’s entertainment,” Sarigul said. “You’re often going there for the drama and not for the football on show.”“When something goes wrong,” he added, “you blame ‘them.’ But no one knows who ‘them’ are.”For beIN, a network that has faced challenging situations in its other markets, the experience in Turkey has been bewildering. It conducted an investigation into how the anti-Fenerbache chants had made it onto broadcasts and concluded that human error was to blame.In what appeared to be a conciliatory gesture toward Fenerbahce, it then fired the two staff members directly responsible. But the two employees turned out to be Fenerbahce fans, prompting the club to revive its claims of mistreatment.As a result, beIN is considering walking away from the fight, and the league. The network, bankrolled by the Qatari state, has always absorbed losses from its right deals, but in recent years it has withdrawn from several of them and cut its staff amid a long-running, and costly, piracy dispute. It has allowed deals with the top leagues in Germany and Italy to lapse, and recently withdrew from one with Formula 1.The Turkish dispute has taken a toll on beIN executives. Some of the network’s non-Turkish staff members have been rotated out of the country, and at least one new one, Rashed al-Marri, was brought in from Doha to take charge of operations in Turkey and in particular to handle the relationship with Fenerbahce. But nothing seems to be bringing down the temperature.In late February, the company went to court to prevent Fenerbahce from continuing a weekslong campaign that had targeted the broadcaster at its stadium and on its social media channels by using the colors of the beIN logo but replacing the words with the slogan “beFAIR.”A result was that Turkish subscribers to beIN’s matches were presented with a panoply of protest banners, sideline electronic advertising boards and even the Fenerbahce players themselves covered in beFAIR-branded slogans.The logos forced beIN to change how it broadcast the matches and conducted interviews with Fenerbahce players. Directors were instructed not to display shots of the players in the beFAIR gear during warm-ups or interviews. Keeping the messages out of live-action shots proved more difficult.Asked by The New York Times to explain the essence of its campaign, Fenerbahce took several weeks to reply before providing a multiple-page treatise that went into great detail about how it had been slighted by beIN’s coverage this season.Fenerbahce’s response was laced with the language of conspiracy theory. “If our arguments are considered individually, they would not make much sense,” said Kizilhan, the general secretary, “but seeing them as the parts of a puzzle, it shows the big picture clearly.”Kizilhan acknowledged that some of the nuances of the fight would be difficult to understand for anyone “without having clear understanding and knowledge of local intricacies and ingredients of Turkish football.”One of those intricacies involves Fenerbahce’s rivalry with Galatasaray. The club continues to argue that beIN’s Turkish operation is stocked with individuals sympathetic to its rival, which it accuses of working deliberately to sabotage its season. (Some of the audience for that charge may be internal: Fenerbahce has not won a league title since 2014, and Koc, one of Turkey’s richest men, will stand for another term as club president next year.)Fenerbahce’s president, Ali Koc, has threatened to start a boycott of beIN Sports over his club’s complaints.Associated PressSome beIN executives have been targeted directly, including Hande Sumertas, a former Galatasaray official who is now responsible for media rights at the network. Sumertas has become a lightning rod for fan criticism to such an extent that her name is regularly a trending topic on Twitter in Turkey.Things reached a head earlier this year when a referee turned commentator went on television to insult Sumertas as “brainless.” BeIN issued a strongly worded statement at the time, vowing to use all means at its disposal to defend Sumertas and emphasizing that her role gives her no control over the content of the channel’s broadcasts.But Fenerbahce doubled down, with Kizilhan charging that Sumertas could not work objectively because of her previous work at Galatasaray.“Our concerns and allegations are not over specific individuals but over a systematic approach toward our club,” Kizilhan said, before adding, “BeIN Sports would be wise to re-evaluate their hiring processes and human resources.”Fenerbahce and Galatasaray players before a match in February. Their clubs’ bitter rivalry is another thread in the Fenerbahce-beIN feud.Kenan Asyali/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Turkish soccer federation, which treads a fine line in order not to inflame the huge fan bases of any of its top teams, has been eager to avoid the issue. But in late January, its chairman, Nihat Ozdemir, was asked about the feud. Ozdemir said he did not believe the anti-Fenerbahce chants had been broadcast deliberately, and said the relationship between Turkish soccer and beIN Sports was mutually beneficial. “I don’t think they would want to get out of here,” he said.But while beIN’s new emissary, al-Marri, has spoken with Fenerbahce’s management, the relationship shows no signs of improving.When a court last week ordered Fenerbahce to stop using the beFAIR logo, the team simply changed the language of its protests. On Thursday, in its first home game since the injunction, Fenerbahce’s stadium was festooned with new protest slogans. One message covering the seats at its Sukru Saracoglu stadium implored Fenerbahce fans to “break their games.”Another, darker one was a warning: “Fenerbahce cannot be challenged!” More

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      Weston McKennie Is Right Where He Belongs at Juventus

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      Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesWeston McKennie Is Right Where He BelongsWhat is most surprising about the American’s path to Juventus is not how far he has come, but how effortless he has made the journey look.Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 8, 2021, 10:30 a.m. ETAs he sat down for lunch, Weston McKennie slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and onto the chair in front of him, hiding it beneath his legs. He was breaking the rules — he and his Schalke teammates were strictly forbidden from taking their phones into the cafeteria — but he was prepared to take the risk. There are some calls you do not want to miss.McKennie found himself glancing down every few seconds, checking his screen as surreptitiously as he could. Midway through his meal, it arrived. His screen lit up and his chair buzzed. McKennie grabbed his phone, stood and walked out of the room. “I was just like: ‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this,’” he said. You do not, after all, keep Andrea Pirlo waiting.The last few months have been full of moments like that for McKennie, instances in which the surreal somehow feels quotidian. His career, and his prospects, have undergone the sort of whirlwind transformation that can be difficult to process: the rise is so dizzyingly rapid and the curve so precipitously steep that after a while, the scale and speed of the journey as a whole is difficult to gauge.Signed to help Juventus in midfield, McKennie has instead become a ball-winning, goal-scoring fixture alongside stars like Cristiano Ronaldo.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is only in fleeting vignettes — little scenes from his last six months — that McKennie can catch a reflection of his new reality. Last summer, he was a 22-year-old midfielder from Little Elm, Texas, who had been a rare ray of sunlight in the otherwise stormy sky looming over Schalke, the troubled Bundesliga team where he had spent all of his professional career.His most recent season had been conflicted. Personally, McKennie had found it satisfying: He had made 28 Bundesliga appearances in a campaign interrupted by the pandemic, and had established himself as a mainstay of the United States national team. Collectively, it had been difficult. Schalke had collapsed in the second half of the season. It did not win a single league game between January and the summer.Even in that context, his performances had been good enough to catch the attention of the likes of Southampton and Newcastle, steady performers from the middle reaches of the Premier League. He was one of the few assets Schalke possessed that it could sell. He most likely knew the club needed money. He most definitely knew that cash was scarce in a pandemic-afflicted market.But then his agent mentioned that another team had inquired about his services. “It didn’t seem super-realistic,” McKennie said. “So I kind of brushed it off.” A couple of weeks later, though, the same suitor returned, the interest more concrete this time. “We have to make it happen,” McKennie instructed his agent, as he prepared to join Schalke’s preseason training camp. He was told to expect a call from Juventus, the grand old lady of Italian soccer, coached by Pirlo and home of Cristiano Ronaldo. Precisely, in other words, the sort of call you do not want to miss.McKennie made a name for himself in Europe at Schalke in the Bundesliga. But when the club fell on hard times financially, it cashed in on McKennie by loaning him to Juventus.Credit…Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conversation went well. Pirlo outlined why he wanted McKennie: There would be lots of games this season, plenty of chances for an energetic, dynamic, ball-hungry player to shine. McKennie did not need a hard sell. “It was more a case of me selling myself to him,” he said. “If that’s what he wanted, then that’s what I’d do.”And so McKennie finds himself where he is now: still a 22-year-old from Little Elm, Texas, but one that has made such an impression in the midfield of the biggest club in Italy — one not battling relegation but competing to win Serie A and the Champions League — that last week it exercised its option to turn his initial one-season loan into a permanent deal, paying $21.5 million for the privilege.It is the final seal of “approval” of his coach, Pirlo, who just so happens to be one of the finest exponents of the midfield art in recent history. “A legend,” McKennie calls him.Sometimes, he said, he overhears one of his teammates expressing disbelief at finding themselves playing in such rarefied air, competing with the heroes of their childhood. “They can’t believe how far they’ve come, that they’re playing in the Champions League,” he said. “And I think that, when I was a kid, I had never even heard of the Champions League.” McKennie is not fulfilling his dreams: Somehow, it is bigger than that, as if he is stretching the bounds of reality.McKennie has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of seven in the Champions League.Credit…Massimo Pinca/ReutersIt is in those little moments that he can glimpse it. Sometimes, it is something grand that triggers it. When he was younger, he and his family, then living in Germany, where his father’s Air Force career had taken them, went to Camp Nou while on vacation. They explored a lot, he said, during the years they lived near Kaiserslautern, where they moved when McKennie was 6.“The stadium was closed that day,” he remembered. “But we persuaded the security guard to let us in. The team was training: all of those players, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho.” They stood and watched for a while. When a loose ball flew into the stands, McKennie scurried down to retrieve it and throw it back. That was their cue to leave.He had not been back to Barcelona until December. “It was strange that it was empty, just the players on the field, when I first went, and it was empty again now,” he said. This time, McKennie did not have to plead with security to let him in. He belonged not only in the stadium, but on the field. He scored that night.Sometimes, though, the realizations come in more intimate, more private settings. Those are the ones that catch McKennie by surprise. “I was sitting with Alvaro Morata after training the other day,” he said. “We were just watching Cristiano practicing his free kicks. And we turned to each other and said what a privilege it is, just to be able to do that: to watch him take free kick after free kick.”But while McKennie feels fortunate to find himself where he is, that should not be mistaken for luck. He is no mere tourist at Juventus, passing through, savoring these snapshots of life in the elite, an American on some sort of year abroad in Serie A.The perception, when he joined, was that he was destined to be an option of first reserve: that he would spend much of his time riding the bench, and when he was not, he would be a “hard six,” there to win the ball back and give it to someone with, well, more talent.Juventus made its acquisition of McKennie permanent last week. He may be there a while.Credit…Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse, via Associated PressIn reality, even McKennie is a little “surprised” at how important he has become. He has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of its seven — so far — in the Champions League. He has emerged, too, as a creative, offensive force: He has scored at Camp Nou, in that rout of Barcelona, and at San Siro, in a win against A.C. Milan. He is comfortable enough in his surroundings to joke that Ronaldo, Aaron Ramsey and Dejan Kulusevski take turns acting as his translator (though his Italian is now good enough, he said, to understand most of what is going on.)At first, he said, he worried about living up to expectations, wondering “why they chose me.” It has taken only a few months for those anxieties to dissipate entirely, quietly shed as his rise gathered speed and height, as McKennie has proved that he belongs.That is what makes his transformation difficult to parse: that it has felt so smooth, so natural, that the line between remarkable and quotidian has blurred quite so readily, that it seems so obvious now not only why McKennie picked up, but why Pirlo called in the first place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      F.C. Barcelona Elects Joan Laporta as President

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarcelona Elects a President, and Hands Him a CrisisJoan Laporta won easily in a vote of Barcelona’s membership. But the new president will face thorny issues on and off the field almost immediately.Joan Laporta’s previous term as Barcelona’s president set the stage for a dominant era on the field for the club.Credit…Alejandro Garcia/EPA, via ShutterstockMarch 7, 2021Updated 6:10 p.m. ETSix days after a police raid on its offices led to the seizure of files and the arrests of four club officials, F.C. Barcelona elected Joan Laporta as its new president on Sunday.Laporta, a lawyer who previously served as Barcelona’s president more than a decade ago, defeated two rivals in what he labeled “the most important elections in the history” of Barcelona, one of Europe’s most decorated soccer clubs.He received more than 50 percent of the vote, defeating his closest rival, 54.2 percent to 29.9 percent. In video broadcast on the club’s television network, the two challengers, the runner-up Victor Font and Toni Freixa, congratulated Laporta in a show of unity, and Laporta enjoyed a champagne toast with his supporters. But Laporta’s reward — a billion-dollar organization facing tough decisions about some of its most popular players and a looming financial crisis made worse by the coronavirus pandemic — hardly seems like a prize.The most immediate challenges he faces are navigating the biggest debt crisis in European soccer, currently more than $1.3 billion; lowering the team’s salary bill, at the moment the highest in Europe; and avoiding the loss — perhaps as soon as this summer — of Lionel Messi, the club’s greatest player.Perhaps an even more important task, however, will be uniting a club once revered for elevating modern soccer into high art out of an era of infighting, dirty tricks and red ink. The series of unfolding crises have turned Barcelona from a model of commercial and sporting success into, at times, the punchline of a bad joke.Laporta’s predecessor, Josep Maria Bartomeu, resigned in October, just ahead of a vote to remove him. By then, more than 20,000 of Barcelona’s 140,000 members had turned in hand-signed forms seeking his ouster, and last week he was detained by the police as part of its investigation of the team’s internal affairs.But on Sunday, Bartomeu still lined up — along with everyday fans, team executives, former players and coaches, and even a handful of members of the current first team, including Messi — to cast his presidential vote. Even amid the team’s turmoil, the turnout represented the kind of quaint, one-fan-one-vote ethos on which Barcelona prides itself.The Barcelona star Lionel Messi was among the tens of thousands of club members who voted in Sunday’s election.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe election had been delayed by the ongoing repercussions of the pandemic. Restrictions on mass gatherings required Barcelona to change its voting process by spreading polling stations across Catalonia, and by allowing mail-in ballots for the first time in its history. But thousands of the club’s members still turned up in person to cast their votes during the 12 hours allotted for the balloting on Sunday.The club said more than 55,000 votes were cast by members who chose not only a new president but also board members who will serve until 2026. Even before the final ballots were counted, Font and Freixa conceded.“I want to congratulate Laporta for this victory, which does not allow for any discussion,” Freixa said. “We must now support our president.”Toni Freixa said the vote totals “legitimized” Laporta’s victory.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVictor Font with a fan after he arrived to cast his vote at Camp Nou.Credit…Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockIn picking Laporta, Barcelona members appeared to have opted for a candidate who many remember fondly from his previous term. As Barcelona’s president from 2003 to 2010, he ushered in the start of a golden decade of success for the century-old club.His signature decision, elevating the untested Pep Guardiola from his role as coach of Barcelona’s B team to take charge of the first-team squad in 2008, proved to be a masterstroke. Guardiola rebuilt Barcelona around homegrown talents, including Messi, and combined them with established stars to produce a brand of soccer that captivated audiences around the world. The club collected more than a dozen trophies under Guardiola, including three Spanish titles and two victories in the Champions League, European’s soccer richest and most prized club competition.With the current team viewed as aging and below the club’s standard, Laporta will be expected to guide a similar revival. But this time, the outlook is bleaker than ever.More recently, Barcelona has become synonymous with negativity, with the bad news arriving in waves. Since June, the team has had to contend with the outsized impact the coronavirus has had on its finances; a scandal involving a club-financed social-media campaign that targeted Bartomeu’s rivals, including several popular players; a humiliating Champions League exit; a public falling out between Messi and Bartomeu that almost led to Messi’s departure before the season; and then, most recently, last week’s raid on Barcelona’s offices that resulted in the arrests of four team officials.Barcelona had to adapt its voting procedures because of the coronavirus, but many members still turned up at the club’s Camp Nou stadium to cast their ballots in person.Credit…Albert Gea/ReutersWith Barcelona facing the most urgent short-term debt crisis in European soccer, the new president immediately faces the twin challenges of keeping the club afloat while also following through on promises to keep it competitive with not only domestic rivals like Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid but also deep-pocketed foreign challengers like Manchester City, Paris St.-Germain, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United, many of them bankrolled by Gulf nation states, Russian oligarchs or American billionaires.As a member-supported club, Barcelona does not have that luxury. Laporta will have to decide whether or not to forge ahead with a plan put together by the club’s executive team and Goldman Sachs to raise 250 million euros (almost $300 million) by selling a basket of club-owned assets to external investors. The move would be unusual and likely contentious — and it would require the backing of a membership fractured by the recent crisis.The new board also will need to recalibrate supporter expectations, and reverse course from a management style — including by Laporta during his previous tenure — that has drawn criticism for prioritizing short-term rewards, in the form of lavish spending and popular (and expensive) signings, over long-term financial stability.He will also have to restore the club’s battered reputation. At a sports business conference hosted by the Financial Times last month, Christian Seifert, the chief executive of Germany’s Bundesliga, took aim at Barcelona and its rival Real Madrid for their spending habits. “These so-called superclubs are in fact poorly managed, cash-burning machines that were not able, in a decade of incredible growth, to come close to a somehow sustainable business model,” Seifert said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Manchester United Stops Manchester City but Not Its Destiny

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerManchester United Slows City’s March, but Only for a DayA rivalry victory may only prove a speed bump in the Premier League title. But European rivals will see hope in a blow to City’s rhythm.Manchester United’s celebrations started early on Sunday. City’s, presumably, are still to come.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellMarch 7, 2021Updated 3:28 p.m. ETMANCHESTER, England — Manchester United will recognize this feeling, the evanescent satisfaction of a battle won far too late in the day to have any hope of turning the tide of the war, the curious and complex pride that comes from celebrating a victory that highlights only how far you have fallen.It is only three years, after all, since United experienced pretty much the same thing, in pretty much the same place, if not quite in the same circumstances. Manchester City was supposed to claim the Premier League title that afternoon — the first of Pep Guardiola’s reign — at home against its rival, neighbor and longtime persecutor in the spring of 2018.The Etihad Stadium was packed and boisterous, relishing the prospect of the perfect scenario for clinching the championship, with United invited to play the part first of sacrificial victim, and then unwilling observer. What better way, after all, could there be to illustrate the power shift in Manchester, in England, and in Europe, than for City to win the league as United was forced to watch?United, that day, proved recalcitrant guests. Guardiola’s team raced into a two-goal lead, and then hesitated, a brief flash of the old City, the one practiced in the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, bubbling up to infect the new. United took advantage, surged back and won.It was clear and obvious at the time that this was a mere postponement of City’s celebrations — even José Mourinho, the United manager, congratulated Guardiola on his looming title win after the game — rather than a threatened cancellation. All concerned knew that City would be proclaimed champion, with ease, sooner rather than later. But for United, victory was a tonic, a solace, a shot across the bow, something to hold on to in the long night of the blue moon.Sunday was not quite a carbon copy. The details were a little different, for a start. It is much earlier in the season, for one, and City remains some way from having the championship mathematically sealed. The Etihad did not need to be silenced: Like every other stadium across Europe, it has been quiet for a year now, the noise and emotion of the fans an increasingly distant and sorrowful memory.United grabbed an early lead and then its best to keep Kevin de Bruyne and his teammates off balance.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThe effect, though, was much the same. United won a penalty inside 38 seconds, Bruno Fernandes converted it within two minutes, and then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s team set about holding City at arm’s length. Early in the second half, Luke Shaw doubled United’s lead. Anthony Martial might have made it three, but the damage was done. For the day, at least.The extent of the damage will not, in all likelihood, extend beyond that. The 21-game winning run that preceded this result, City’s first defeat since November, makes the Premier League title a foregone conclusion. Guardiola’s team still holds an 11-point lead at the top of the table, with 10 games to play.This loss would need to presage a collapse that is all but unimaginable to prevent Guardiola’s claiming a third championship in four years. United can, once again, claim parochial primacy, but it is not enough to change the map of English soccer’s broader landscape.A few days earlier, United had been flat and uninspired — and a little fortunate — to take a goalless draw at Crystal Palace. Solskjaer’s players had won only twice in the Premier League since January, their stuttering form masked by the stuttering form of, well, everyone else, and in particular the apparently bottomless incompetence of Liverpool. This is not likely to be a corner turned. For United, victory in the derby was a welcome outcome, but nothing more, not really.Bruno Fernandes staked United to its lead with a second-minute penalty kick, but his team still trails City by 11 points with 10 games to go.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsBut that does not mean this was a game devoid of significance. For City, certainly, it would be worth pausing to reflect not only on the fact of defeat, but the nature of it. Its loss in this fixture in 2018 was sandwiched by two losses to Liverpool in the Champions League, one comprehensive, one narrow and unfortunate, but both enough to end the club’s hopes of winning its first European crown.With the league title all but in hand now, that is where Guardiola’s focus will shift in the coming weeks. There are two domestic cups to be won, too, but it is that Champions League trophy that Guardiola — and much of City’s hierarchy — craves more than any other, that trophy which they believe will complete the club’s transformation into true European aristocracy.It has been hard, over the last couple of months, to see who might realistically stop City. Real Madrid and Barcelona are shadows of what they once were. Atlético Madrid is tiring, fast. The reigning champion, Bayern Munich, has developed a curious habit of giving almost all of its opponents a two-goal head start. Paris St.-Germain is undermined by inconsistency. No club has been quite so imperious this season as City; it is hardly bold to claim that this is, currently, and defeat notwithstanding, the best team in Europe.All of those teams, then, will have welcomed United’s victory as proof that City is not invincible. They will have seen glimpses that, for all the resources that Guardiola has access to and for all that he has managed them expertly through this compact, condensed campaign, City’s players are not immune to fatigue. Kevin de Bruyne, in particular, seemed unable to influence this game as he would have wished.Raheem Sterling and City will try their rhythm back on Wednesday against Southampton.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellRivals will have taken heart from the first 20 minutes or so, when City repeatedly played its way into trouble, unable to find its rhythm, or to piece together United’s plan. And, most of all, they will have noted how Solskjaer — an underrated tactician in games of this ilk — neutralized João Cancelo, the fullback who becomes a midfield playmaker and, in doing so, makes this iteration of City tick.Solskjaer’s antidote was a simple but nerveless one. He instructed Marcus Rashford to play high and wide on United’s left, forcing Cancelo into a choice: either come into midfield and leave space to exploit, or stay in his lane, and defang his own team’s attack. He chose both, and neither: It was no surprise that both of United’s goals originated on his side.Cancelo has been one of City’s great strengths this season. His role has been the innovation that has re-energized Guardiola’s system. On Sunday at the Etihad, Solskjaer turned him into what City has seemed to lack for weeks and for months: a weakness. It will make not the slightest difference to the destiny of the Premier League title race, of course. Most teams will lack the personnel or the inclination to be able to repeat the trick.But for those sides across Europe who stand in the way of Manchester City and a clean sweep of all four trophies, it will be something more than a solace, more than a tonic. For Guardiola, and for City, it is a reminder and a warning, that so high are their sights that one battle lost can cost the entire war.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Perfection, Art and Pep Guardiola's Manchester City

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerPerfection, Art and Manchester CityPep Guardiola’s team has won 15 straight Premier League games and hasn’t lost to anyone since November. But can clinical still qualify as cool?Pep Guardiola has rebuilt Manchester City into a team that meets even his high standards.Credit…Jason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersMarch 5, 2021, 10:15 a.m. ETThe Equitable Building was supposed to be the last of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. When it opened in 1915, it cast — in a very real sense — everything around it into shadow: a 555-foot neoclassical cliff rising sheer from the street between Pine and Cedar, looming over Broadway, condemning a swath of the Financial District to a life of permanent shadow.Its construction spurred New York’s authorities into action. A year later, the city introduced its first zoning law, decreeing that any future skyscrapers would have to taper away from the street, so as to allow light and air to permeate to ground level. “No more would skyscrapers rise sheer and monotonous, stealing sunshine from the city,” Ben Wilson wrote in Metropolis, his global history of cities.But rather than herald the end of the skyscraper era, the zoning law started a boom. Architects scurried to design buildings that complied with the new regulations, capitalist monoliths with a human face. The results — the Chrysler, the Empire State and the rest — stand still as the jewels of Manhattan’s skyline, the beauty that makes them compelling a direct consequence of an obstacle overcome.That truth holds away from architecture: Often, the complications addressed and compromises reached, the workarounds explored and imperfections masked do not diminish that sense of wonder, but increase it. Necessity is not only the mother of invention, but of admiration and affection, too.The iteration of Manchester City that Pep Guardiola has crafted this season is, without question, a marvel of engineering: fine-tuned and slick and working in almost flawless, mechanical synchronicity.City celebrating one of its Premier League-leading 56 goals.Credit…Peter Powell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Premier League has been unable to resist: City has won 15 league games in a row, conceding only five goals in the process and building an unassailable 14-point lead over its nearest challenger, and this weekend’s opponent/victim, Manchester United. Guardiola’s team has one foot in the Champions League quarterfinals. It has already reached the same stage of the F.A. Cup, and the final of the Carabao Cup. If it beats United on Sunday at the Etihad, it will have won 22 games in a row. An unprecedented clean sweep of trophies shimmers on the horizon.But while it is impossible not to admire what Guardiola has built — one of the finest teams to grace English soccer, roughly two years after constructing what is possibly the greatest one the country has seen — it can be difficult to establish a deeper, more emotional connection with it. The way City plays fires the brain. It does not follow that it must therefore stir the soul.The club’s fans, of course, would put that down to nothing more than bitterness and envy. Its detractors might, in turn, ask what broader purpose establishing Manchester City among soccer’s elite had for its ultimate backer, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Emirati royal and deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, whose investment in City is most definitely nothing to do with a nation state.More significant — at least in this case — than either argument, though, may be the absence of complication and compromise from Manchester City’s story. It has the best coach in the world, one of the most expensive rosters in the world, the best facilities, the most advanced data, the finest youth system. As Arsène Wenger once put it, it has petrol, and it has ideas.Raheem Sterling and his teammates are, once again, headed toward a celebratory spring.Credit…Pool photo by Dave ThompsonThere were, true, a few teething problems in the early years of the Abu Dhabi project. But for some time now, City’s ascent to the summit of soccer has been remorseless, smooth and, perhaps, for neutrals, a little cold, a gleaming edifice rising sheer from the ground.The architectural term for what makes the Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s so iconic is, as it happens, setbacks. They are what lends those buildings their charm. Manchester City, in recent years, does not seem to have experienced many. Instead, its success has the air of a formula being cracked, an equation being solved. It is impressive, no question, but it is not compelling. Inevitabilities rarely are. The interest, though, is to be found in the blemishes hidden, and the challenges met.There is no point arguing that City’s resources have contributed to the club’s success, both in the long term and, more immediately, in a season in which fatigue and injury are having an outsized influence. All of the Premier League elite can spend fortunes on playing talent, but none of them can run a squad quite as deep in quality as Guardiola’s.He regularly leaves somewhere in the region of $350 million worth of talent on his substitutes’ bench. Even allowing for injury, he has been able to manage his players’ workload far better than most of his rivals. In February, he rotated in at least four players every game, and sometimes as many as seven. It never felt as if he had fielded a weakened team. Although City remains alive in four competitions, none of its players has yet played 3,000 minutes this season. Four of United’s, by contrast, have already passed that mark.Guardiola does not seek to deny that reality. “We have a lot of money to buy incredible players,” he said after victory in the Champions League over Borussia Mönchengladbach, remarks that were for some reason interpreted as a joke, but are, well, true. “Without good quality players,” he said, “we cannot do it.”But while it is the cost of the playing staff that attracts all of the attention, the envy and the criticism, the true impact of City’s resource advantage is a little less obvious. It is in the state-of-the-art training facilities, in the youth academy, in the network of clubs around the globe, in the astrophysicist hired to help the team’s data analysis, in a club that has been built, essentially, to provide the perfect working environment for Guardiola.It feels, at times, like Pep F.C., as one observer put it. And that, perhaps, explains the contrast between this City and Guardiola’s Barcelona: both dominant, era-defining teams, but one that captured the imagination and another that feels too surgical to do so.The difference is not necessarily in the moral relativism of the two clubs’ ownership, or even in their respective historical clout, but in their nature. Barcelona is a big, unwieldy, faintly chaotic institution, one that had been in turmoil before Guardiola arrived. Shaping it in his own image meant dealing with complications. City, on the other hand, was built for him, impeccable and flawless.That reading, though, misses one important aspect. Guardiola might have the best squad and a handpicked coaching staff and a raft of allies in the executive suites, and he may be able to access resources far deeper than any of his rivals can sustain, but his primary task — as it is for any manager — is still to handle people. And his ability to do that lies at the root of City’s imminent glory this spring.Guardiola with Phil Foden. He had to win back his players before they set about winning back their Premier League title.Credit…Pool photo by Andy RainIt would be a stretch to suggest there was a sense of mutiny around City last season. Guardiola’s power is too absolute, and his reputation too lofty, for rebellion to take hold. But there were, as Liverpool strolled away with the Premier League title, mutterings.There was a fiery exchange in the changing room after a defeat to Tottenham, several of his senior players complaining that he was too inconsistent with his team selection, complaints that ran beyond the background chuntering of the substitutes and the fringe players.It intensified in the summer, when City was outfoxed by Lyon in the Champions League. As the inquests played out in the news media, it emerged that there were some in the squad who were starting to waver in their loyalty to their coach, who felt he had shot himself in the foot in the competition he craves more than any other one time too many.Guardiola seemed to recognize it. He has always said, after all, that after four years either the players have to change, or the manager does. He hoped for the former, asking City to bring in four new signings. In the end, only three arrived: The club stepped away from a deal to sign Ben Chilwell from Leicester, and the left back Guardiola had requested never materialized.It did not, immediately, seem to solve the problem. City lost at home to Leicester, tied Leeds, West Ham and Liverpool, and then lost away at Spurs. That proved the final straw for Fernandinho, the club’s influential captain, who gathered the squad together — “only the players, I tried to show them our responsibility, what the club expects, what the fans expect” — for a few hard truths.Guardiola himself waited a couple more weeks. After a dispiriting draw at home to relegation-threatened West Bromwich Albion in December, he held a conclave with his key associates: Juanma Lillo, his assistant; Rodolfo Borrell, his first-team coach; Txiki Begiristain, City’s director of football; and Manel Estiarte, Guardiola’s all-purpose consigliere.For the first time, he had found himself watching his City team with distaste. “I didn’t like it,” he said later. Influenced by Lillo, in particular, the decision was made to revert to what Guardiola called his “ABC” principles. “To stay in position, and let the ball run, not you,” Guardiola said.His reputation as a visionary, of course, dictates that the switch has been interpreted as a tactical innovation: Guardiola had instructed his team to run less, or pass the ball more, or turned João Cancelo into the first fullback-stroke-No. 10, a position that will hopefully one day be known as a “false two.”João Cancelo is a perfectly Guardiola innovation: the playmaking defender.Credit…Shaun Botterill/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut just as significant was the psychological impact: It represented a return to the ideas Guardiola had evangelized when he first arrived, the ones that some had felt were being lost. It was, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgment that he had diverged a little too much from the path that had brought City two Premier League titles.Gabriel Jesus, the Brazilian striker, was asked last week how Guardiola had changed this season. He could not be sure, he said, but the main difference was that Guardiola “doesn’t talk so much.” “There is less video now,” Jesus said.That, it turned out, was exactly what City needed: a slightly more stripped-down, simplified approach — not quite laissez-faire, not with Guardiola involved, but as close as he can feasibly muster.City does, to an extent, rise sheer and monotonous above the landscape of European soccer. Its polish is, perhaps, a little too gleaming, its finish a little too smooth, to have the sort of character that comes from blemishes.But it takes work to get that sort of sheen, no matter how costly, how plentiful and how fine the materials available, and that work is, ultimately, worthy of appreciation and admiration. Even the Equitable Building, after all, is now a National Historic Landmark.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More