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      Timo Werner, Chelsea and Numbers That Lie

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerSometimes the Numbers LieStrikers are paid to score goals. The more the better. But can a lack of them distort the full picture of a player?Is this striker having a bad season? It depends on your view.Credit…John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersFeb. 19, 2021, 12:30 p.m. ETSHEFFIELD, England — This is the story of a struggling striker. He has scored only twice since November: once in a cakewalk of a cup game against an overmatched opponent, and once from the sort of position in which he really could not miss, the ball falling to him a couple of yards out, a goal by accident rather than design.The latter was a welcome fillip — sometimes that is what you need, after all, that jolt of luck — but it did little to gloss over the striker’s troubles. Five goals in 23 league games since joining his new club remains a paltry return. His confidence seems to be shot, as if he has hit “rock bottom,” as one pundit observed.The criticism, over the past few months, has been consistent, from outside and in. His former manager said in public that he was not offering enough, with or without the ball, and wondered in private if he was simply too profligate, even in the protected surroundings of training, just not ruthless enough. It all seems to have taken its toll.And this is the story of a striker finding his feet. Not thriving, perhaps — not yet — but contributing, certainly: creating chances for his teammates, adding considerably to his team’s attacking threat, generating as many opportunities to score as some of the league’s most devastating forwards. His goal total, so far, has been a little disappointing, but all of the evidence suggests that too will come, in time.The two strikers are, of course, one and the same: Timo Werner, the German forward chased by most of Europe’s elite clubs over the last couple of years and, last summer, the centerpiece of Chelsea’s emphatic, lavish refit. Signed for $59 million, he was snatched from under the nose of Liverpool and arrived in England with a reputation as a finisher of rare and surgical precision.By most measures, of course, it has not quite worked out that way. The first version of Werner’s story is the one that has taken hold in the popular imagination. That is no surprise: More than any other stripe of player, strikers are — ultimately and largely legitimately — judged on the number of goals they score.That Timo Werner has only five goals isn’t the full story of his season.Credit…Pool photo by Andy RainDefenders can play well and not keep a clean sheet. Midfield is a broad enough church that players as diverse as Claude Makelele and Xavi Hernández and Andrea Pirlo can all be considered its gods. Some wingers score goals, some create them, and others just pose a sort of general, all-purpose threat, and that can be enough.But strikers are typically defined by one metric, and one metric alone. And on that front, this season, Werner has come up short. He might spend his free time painting masterpieces or planning elaborate heists; he might act as the hinge of every single attacking move Chelsea puts together.But it is goals that Chelsea paid for, and goals have been hard to come by for Werner, and that colors everything else. The proof that he is not playing well, that he is short of confidence, is there in the goals scored column. If he was playing well, he would have scored more goals. More than that, in fact: to play well, a striker has to score more goals than he has mustered. That, after all, is the point of strikers.That version of the story is not wrong. But nor is it complete. Like many of the alumni of the RB Leipzig school from which he emerged, Werner built a reputation not just on how he looked on the field, but on how he looked on the page.There is, now, little left of the culture war that flared briefly and brightly within soccer’s recruitment structures a decade or so ago. Most teams have long since accepted the idea that traditional scouting — going to watch a player — fits hand in glove with a more data-driven approach.It varies a little from club to club, but the data can be used either as a sieve for potential targets — narrowing down the hundreds of possible signings for a few who are of genuine interest — or as a form of due diligence, a way of checking that a better or cheaper or more suitable target is not being overlooked.It is impossible to say for certain, but it seems likely Werner was an example of the former. In the Bundesliga, he was something of a data darling: a player who regularly scored more goals than the chances he had either manufactured or been presented with suggested he should have done. (In the argot, he had outperformed his Expected Goals.)And even amid the travails of Werner’s first season in England, those same metrics tell a slightly different story to the one that has taken hold. For all the criticism, his underlying performance data — an unwieldy phrase that, from here on in, we shall avoid by just saying “the numbers” — has remained, essentially, solid.Teammates like Tammy Abraham have been rewarded by Werner’s efforts.Credit…David Klein/ReutersHis Expected Goals (xG) number — a gauge of the quality of the chances he has created or received — varies a little, depending on which model is used, but according to Stats Perform’s metric, he might have been expected to score seven Premier League goals this season. In those terms, he is performing similarly to Tottenham’s Son Heung-min.There is, of course, one notable — and significant — difference: Son has scored 13 goals this season. No player in England is overperforming his xG more. Werner, by contrast, has scored five times. (It is worth noting that several players are underperforming their xG more than Werner, though none quite as much as Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne, who is not having what anyone would call a difficult campaign.)“This can’t simply be attributed to him being a bad finisher,” said Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at 21st Club, an analytics consultancy. “He exceeded his xG by more than 25 percent last season. He has been wasteful to date, but this streak shouldn’t last too long: We know getting into good positions to score is the best long-term predictor of goal-scoring.”That is not the only source of solace. 21st Club notes that Werner accounts for around a fifth of all of Chelsea’s chances, the sort of mark an average central striker might manage, according to Chaudhuri. “But it’s still impressive, given he’s often been played wide,” Chaudhuri said.He is also playing deeper. “He has had 15 to 20 percent fewer touches and actions in the final third and penalty area,” Chaudhuri said. Despite that, 21st Club’s data suggests that of the Premier League’s strikers, only Roberto Firmino, Anthony Martial and Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins are involved in more sequences that lead to a shot.Werner, in other words, is not playing especially poorly. It is just that he is being judged as a striker despite, for much of the season, not actually playing as a striker. It should not be a shock, then, that he is being granted fewer chances to score.“He is finding opportunities harder to come by than he did in his last few years in the Bundesliga,” said Simon Gleave, the head of sports analysis at Nielsen’s Gracenote, a data provider. “He has had an attempt at goal every 36 minutes at Chelsea. In his three seasons at Leipzig, that was every 27, 25 and 23 minutes, respectively.”Werner is often in the middle of Chelsea attacks, even if he’s not on the end of them.Credit…Pool photo by Julian FinneyNot only are his chances rarer, though, they are also lower quality, according to Gracenote’s analysis. Yet, at the same time, he has seen a slight uptick in the number of chances he is creating: an assist every 331 minutes in England as opposed to one every 340 minutes in the Bundesliga.None of these, of course, amounts to a smoking gun, a single shocking statistic that proves, in one fell swoop, that Timo Werner has been the signing of the season. They do not contradict the idea that he has been sapped of his confidence — though perhaps it is starting to return under Chelsea’s new coach, Thomas Tuchel — or that his first few months in England have been frustrating and arduous.The numbers do not tell the whole story, but they are a reminder that perhaps the immediate judgment of the eye can be flawed, too. A couple of weeks ago, on a bitterly cold night in Sheffield, Werner spent almost the entire game making the same run, again and again.He picked out Chris Basham, the Sheffield United defender, his mark for the evening. He lingered a couple of feet in front of him: close enough to sense, not quite close enough to touch. He waited. He danced in anticipation. And as soon as the ball fell to one of his teammates, he made his move: burning past Basham at an angle, cutting from the left-hand side of the field to the center, bearing down on the penalty area.For a while, it had no tangible impact. There was a cross that did not quite come off, a shot that was cleared from the line. And then, just before halftime, Werner got his reward. Ben Chilwell picked out his run from deep: He knew where he was going to be. Werner skated past Basham, floundering now, to the corner of the penalty area, and crossed, low, for Mason Mount to crash the ball home.It would have been easy to overlook all the work that went into that moment. Much of it may not even have been noted in all but the deepest statistical analysis. But then so much of what constitutes soccer goes unseen: a forward pulling and stretching a back line, softening up a defender, priming them for the coup de grâce. The eye and the spreadsheet sometimes tell different, equally valid, stories. But there are times, too, when neither and both quite capture the whole.No Reason to LeaveThe meeting of Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé in the Champions League this week was not quite Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes at the Super Bowl. Not only was the stage — the first leg of a last 16 tie — not quite so grand, so final, but this time, the younger man won out.In truth, beating Barcelona is not quite what it used to be — this is a club, after all, that loses heavily in the Champions League at least once a year these days; Juventus had already run riot at Camp Nou this season. But it still felt like the end, and the start, of something: the final proof that this iteration of Barcelona is in free fall, and confirmation that Mbappé is the heir apparent to the throne jointly occupied by Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for the last decade or so.Which player would you rather have at your club today?Credit…Albert Gea/ReutersTraditionally, his hat trick would have served only to accelerate Mbappé’s inevitable move to either Barcelona or Real Madrid — the two clubs considered acceptable homes for the world’s very best — but there is reason to believe that this plotline may play out differently.Barcelona, for a start, does not have the money to pry him from Paris St.-Germain. Real Madrid wants you to believe it can pull it off, but quite how the math behind that works is anyone’s guess.But significantly, Real is not quite as enticing a proposition as it might once have been. It is a team in transition, a club unable to shake its reliance on a cadre of players in their mid-30s as it waits for its crop of bright and mainly Brazilian young things to come good. In the short term, Mbappé is more likely to compete for the Champions League trophy in Paris than he would be in Madrid.And that, to a player of his caliber and his horizons, is what matters. How he is regarded in posterity will not depend on which domestic league he plays in, or even on the fact that he won the World Cup before he turned 20, but on how he performs in European competition. It has long been held against Messi’s claim to being the best ever that he never won a World Cup. It would similarly disadvantage Mbappé if he never won the Champions League.It is there, in the modern game, that reputations are forged and greatness bestowed, not in a national competition, and not even, really, at the World Cup. When Mbappé comes to consider his future, that is what he will keep in mind: Which team can best guarantee him a place in the Champions League, and which team can he expect to give him a shot at winning it? For the moment, P.S.G. can make a compelling case that it outstrips the fading Spanish giants on both counts.A Burst BubbleA revised slogan for a rescheduled Euro 2020 in London: It’s coming home.Credit…Action Images/ReutersIf it was not obvious before this week’s resumption of European competition — and the sight of games being rerouted to neutral territory to circumvent travel restrictions — then it should be now: The chances of successfully holding this summer’s European Championships in 12 different cities in 12 different countries are beyond slim.Indeed, even if all the teams are allowed to attend all their games in their scheduled locations, it seems distinctly unlikely that fans will be allowed into the majority of stadiums. Even as coronavirus vaccine programs pick up pace and case rates start to drop, it is hard to envision mass gatherings being allowed in less than four months. Euro 2020/21 has been designed as a pan-continental festival of soccer. The idea doesn’t work if nobody is there to watch it.It is entirely understandable that UEFA is reticent to admit its original plan is no longer viable, but we are reaching the point where some clear thinking — and a clear decision — is necessary. And there is one immediately apparent solution: Take a little inspiration from the N.B.A. and stage the whole thing over a single month, in a single place. And that place should be London.This is not — let’s be clear — a suggestion made in the indefatigable spirit of those British lawmakers and columnists who, as soon as there is even a scintilla of doubt over the viability of any major tournament, immediately demand it be held in England instead. (Human rights abuses in Qatar? Play it in England! Stadiums in Brazil not ready? Play it in England! Russian troll farms destabilizing American democracy? Play it in England!)It is, instead, a suggestion rooted in simple logistics. There are a plenty of cities in Europe with the hotel infrastructure to host 24 teams in secure bubbles. There are a few that could probably muster the necessary training facilities. But only London has the number of stadiums required to stage a major tournament at short notice.Wembley is scheduled to stage the final week of the Euros anyway. The homes of Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea and West Ham would be fitting backdrops for showpiece games; Twickenham, England’s rugby stadium, could be drafted, too. The remainder could be played at Crystal Palace, Fulham, Brentford and Queens Park Rangers, or any of the modern arenas within an hour or so: Reading, Brighton, Southampton.It would not be the tournament that UEFA had hoped to offer, the shimmering beacon of hope for the post-pandemic rebirth of sports. But that idea — admirable though it may be — falls down on one fairly simple fact: We are not, yet, in the post-pandemic phase, and we will not be by the time June rolls around. It is time to accept reality as it is, not as you would wish it to be.CorrespondenceEverton and Liverpool will take the measure of one another again on Saturday at Anfield.Credit…Pool photo by Catherine IvillLet’s start on Merseyside this week — I’m set to be there Saturday to cover Liverpool-Everton — with a couple of emails that I didn’t have space to address last time out. “My friend is an Everton fan,” Peter Duncan wrote. “He claims that the reason Everton are doing well this year is because they have no fans in their stadium: The fans are so negative that if someone is having a bad game, they are on top of him. With no fans, they have no criticism or abuse to deal with.”The same thought had occurred to me, too, Peter — though not specifically about Everton — but I think the effect is more to do with styles of play than particular teams. Managers can now take a more cautious approach, and players can stick to it, without worrying about their fans growing impatient or finding their focus disturbed by the force of a hostile crowd.Across Stanley Park, Justin Sharon believes it should be mentioned in the context of Liverpool’s recent slump that “it is astonishing that Liverpool became champion of England, Europe and the world with a net spend over the last five years that was less than that of Bournemouth. Perhaps now Liverpool’s achievements from 2018 to 2020 will receive the recognition they deserve.”I’m not sure there’s been any lack of recognition, but the overall thrust of the argument is sound: Liverpool has overachieved in the last three years, and a correction was to some extent inevitable, though the scale of it is perhaps greater than might have been expected.On the subjects raised last week, Julio Gomes points out that Mike Dean was not the only referee to receive death threats after a recent game: so did the Portuguese official Luis Godinho, who sent off two players in a cup game between Porto and Braga. “The first was the result of a horrific injury to a player, and even after the second, the final score was 1-1, in the first leg of a semifinal. Perspective, please!”Dan Browning is preaching to the converted on the subject of away goals: “If a two-legged contest goes to extra time in the second game, why do away goals still count more? How is it fair to give one side 90 minutes to score away goals while giving the other side 120 minutes?” There is an easy answer to this, Dan: It isn’t.And a couple of you were in touch to discuss the idea that, perhaps, soccer has been too quick to use data to dismiss the value in low-percentage, long-range shots. “Most N.B.A. teams now try to score from two places: at the rim and on the 3-point line,” wrote Alex von Nordheim.“There are two exceptions to that rule: shots from well beyond the 3-point line and the long 2-pointers, which are the least efficient shots but are often all that is left against a defense determined to prevent easy shots from close up or more valuable shots from beyond the 3-point line.” In this reckoning, Bruno Fernandes is effectively soccer’s Kawhi Leonard.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Inter Milan vs. Inter Miami Is the Trademark Lawyer Derby

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyInter vs. Inter Is the Soccer Rivalry Trademark Lawyers Can LoveA dispute over a team name could have consequences for the increasingly global soccer industry.Quick quiz: How well do you know your Inters? (Answers below.)Credit…From left, Jessica Hill/Associated Press; Tibor Illyes/EPA, via Shutterstock; Diego Vara/Reuters; Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersFeb. 18, 2021, 2:46 p.m. ETFor more than four and a half years, David Beckham’s Major League Soccer franchise in Miami was nameless.As plans for it were made and then regularly remade, the team came to be known as Miami Beckham United — a shorthand that seemed to account for the main points of interest: city, owner, soccer. It wasn’t until the fall of 2018 that Beckham’s team was officially baptized: as Club Internacional de Fútbol Miami, or Inter Miami for short.The decision to trade one common soccer club name, United, for another, Inter, was hardly groundbreaking. North American soccer teams often copy the names of Europe’s legacy clubs in an effort to project credibility in the sport’s culture. In M.L.S., for example — a league that literally has the word “soccer” in its name — there are 14 Football Clubs. There is also a Club de Foot (in Montreal), a Sporting (in Kansas City), a Real (in Salt Lake City) and three Uniteds.Beckham’s choice of name, though, immediately caught the attention of one entity with a particularly keen interest: the Italian powerhouse Internazionale Milano, or Inter Milan for short. The Italian team had laid claim to “Inter” in a filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2014.Almost immediately, the fight for the name was on.Within months, Major League Soccer, which owns and controls Inter Miami as a single entity, filed a notice of opposition to Inter Milan’s trademark registration, which still had not been awarded, with the government’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. The sides are now in a legal battle over who gets to use the stand-alone word “Inter” in the United States.Late last year, a panel of three judges rejected — for a third and final time — M.L.S.’s claim that an Inter Milan trademark would be confusing to the consumer.While there is no danger that the dispute will force Inter Miami to change its name, an Inter Milan victory would complicate the Florida club’s branding, marketing and merchandising for years to come. If it ever used the word Inter as a separate moniker, for example, it could be sued for trademark infringement.Conversely, if M.L.S. prevails, Inter Milan’s ambitions to monetize the North American market — an increasingly appealing set of consumers for a number of top European leagues and clubs — could be frustrated as well.In a statement, Inter Miami said that “Inter” was a “commonly used term” and that the club was “not in jeopardy of changing its trademark-approved name or marks.”Inter Milan had hoped to ward off litigation by talking with M.L.S. about finding a solution to the dispute, according to a person familiar with the team’s side of the case. Those talks have continued and may yield a resolution; one option could be a joint commercial venture in the United States, or even a royalty fee. A spokeswoman for Inter Milan declined to comment on the case.Beyond its particular arguments, the fight over the use of the word “Inter” in the United States presents a complication to the common practice of importing team names. If American teams are not secure in the commercial rights to their own names, it could hamper their business and growth. Soccer’s rapid globalization, which now includes annual barnstorming tours, overseas offices and even attempts by European leagues to take domestic competitions outside their borders, has raised not only the stakes, but also the potential risks for confusion.Credit…David Santiago/Miami Herald, via Associated PressCredit…Daniele Mascolo/ReutersFlags are one thing. Inter Miami’s owner, David Beckham, is a brand all his own.Credit…Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press“The big picture is this sense that the Inter trademark application in the U.S. is kind of the next step in the evolution of the global brand for soccer clubs and the effective invasion of the U.S.,” said Steven Bank, a professor of sports law at U.C.L.A. “If Inter can claim the term ‘Inter,’ and that’s all they’ve asked for, then Real Madrid could claim ‘Real’ and Manchester United, in theory, could claim ‘United.’”That means the implications of Inter vs. Inter could be dizzying. Could one of the English Uniteds lay claim to that name on other continents, arguing that it was the first United or, as it were, the most United? Could Sporting Clube de Portugal challenge Sporting Kansas City? Could Real Madrid sue Real Salt Lake?Would the bigger, older clubs even have a case? In American trademark law, laying claim to a name first carries more weight than the strength of your brand.This could all have been avoided by coming up with new names, of course. And that was what M.L.S. did when it first took the field in the 1990s under more traditional American-style city-nickname conventions. But as the league evolved, nearly every team opted for a European-style label: Atlanta United, F.C. Cincinnati, Los Angeles F.C. In January, the Montreal Impact rebranded as C.F. Montréal.“Neither team has a very distinctive mark,” David Placek, president and founder of Lexicon, a company specializing in naming and trademarking new brands, said of Inter Milan and Inter Miami. “They’re using generic terms. It’s just pure imitation. ‘It sounds kind of European, so let’s have that kind of panache.’”Placek argued teams would be better off, legally and otherwise, by choosing an original name. “Create their own distinctive personality,” he said, “rather than try to imitate another team.”Quiz time: Which Inter is which?[embedded content]The outcome of a ruling in Inter vs. Inter, though, could be messy.As soon as next month, Football Club Internazionale Milano, as the Italian team is officially named, plans to rebrand itself as Inter Milano to pursue new global branding and marketing opportunities. An apparent attempt to modernize the club’s name and look, following the example of its Italian league rival Juventus, it is an expensive undertaking, and one unlikely to be embraced by traditional fans. But it helps explain the club’s insistence on strenuously defending its existing trademark claim.The Italian team claimed the term “Inter” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2014, two years before its current Chinese owners bought control of it. The application covered a wide range of services and products, from staging soccer games to branded pajamas, dog leashes and yo-yos.By 2019, however, the mark still had not been awarded because Inter Milan’s application initially had been deemed confusingly close to the word “Enter,” which was trademarked by a different company. That’s when Major League Soccer challenged the claim with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.M.L.S. has argued that the term “Inter” is merely descriptive, and that trademarking it creates a likelihood of confusion. After all, there are dozens of soccer clubs worldwide named Inter, many of them in the professional ranks and at least two others in the United States: a minor league team in Nashville and a youth club in Atlanta. It is likely that most of those Inters were named as a homage to Inter Milan, a three-time European champion, but that, M.L.S. argues, doesn’t necessarily give Inter Milan the rights to the name.So far, only the likelihood of confusion has been adjudicated. M.L.S., which does not have a prior claim to “Inter” but argues that other U.S.-based entities used the word before Inter Milan attempted to trademark it, has been denied in its claim three times.A trial, which will hinge solely on whether “Inter” is a descriptive term and therefore beyond trademarking, will not happen until 2022 at the earliest. “I think M.L.S. has a very good basis for asserting that the mark is descriptive, at least in connection with the soccer services,” said Laura Franco, a trademark lawyer.If Inter Milan’s claim survives the opposition and it is awarded the trademark, however, it would only then be able to sue Inter Miami for specific infringements. But such claims would rest on proving a likelihood of confusion, which is murky territory. Can an M.L.S. team with pink and black colors be confused with an Italian one that plays in black and blue? Especially when they play in different competitions, and on different continents?“Just because Inter Milan may own the registration for ‘Inter’ and Inter Miami may use ‘Inter Miami’ doesn’t mean that there is going to be consumer confusion,” Franco said.Tariq Panja contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Soccer Isn’t Blameless in Its Culture of Abuse

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerSoccer Isn’t Blameless in Its Culture of AbuseLeagues and teams have urged Twitter and Facebook to address the unfiltered hatred spewed on their platforms. But the game indulges, and sometimes even directs, that same outrage.Mike Dean, Anthony Martial, Yan Dhanda and Lauren James have all endured abuse from fans this season. Just not for the same reasons.Credit…Jon Super, Peter Powell, AP, AMA/Getty ImagesFeb. 12, 2021, 1:45 p.m. ETThis time, it was Yan Dhanda. A few days ago, it was Axel Tuanzebe and Anthony Martial. Before that, it had been Alex Jankewitz and Romaine Sawyers. It happened to Lauren James, and to her brother, Reece, too. So pernicious, so constant is soccer’s problem with racist abuse that it is, at times, hard to keep up.Almost all of these cases echo what Dhanda experienced on Wednesday night: The names and the details can be changed, but the themes are the same.That evening, the 22-year-old Dhanda played for his team, Swansea City, in an F.A. Cup match against Manchester City. Swansea lost, 3-1. After the game, Dhanda checked his Instagram account. And there, waiting for him, was a racist, abusive private message.The incident was reported to the South Wales police. Both Swansea and Manchester City condemned the abuse, and pledged to aid the investigation. Various voices from within soccer offered their sympathy and support for Dhanda, one of only a handful of players of South Asian descent at the highest level of the game.This is what happens, every single time. Sometimes, the target of the abuse is sufficiently high profile that it catches the public’s attention. Sometimes, the player is not. Sometimes the news media calls for action. Sometimes, it does not. Sometimes, the culprit is charged or punished. Sometimes, they are not.That these incidents keep coming — there will be another this weekend, and the weekend after that, and on and on, the sport sinking ever lower but somehow never finding the bottom — is abundant proof that following the same playbook is no longer enough. All of the club statements and official condemnations and well-meaning hashtags do nothing whatsoever to stanch the flow of abuse.“They always get away with it,” Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger said last year after his claim that he was racially abused in a Premier League game yielded no punishments.Credit…Eddie Keogh/ReutersA sense of soccer’s powerlessness is, slowly, dawning on the sport. The game’s authorities in England — and across Europe — have launched and relaunched various campaigns in recent months, an attempt to demonstrate, particularly in the aftermath of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, that this is an issue they are taking seriously.This week, they went a step further. In a letter signed by representatives of the Premier League, the Football League, the Football Association, the bodies representing players, coaches and referees, as well as the anti-discrimination charity Kick It Out, and sent to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the chief executives of Facebook and Twitter, soccer’s power brokers called on the social media giants to “take responsibility” for the hatred published on their platforms.They were right to do so. Soccer is not the first, or by any means the most important, field of human endeavor that has found social media companies troublingly slow, if not downright unwilling, to take on both the promulgation of hate speech and some liability for the toxic content their forums enable.Twitter and Facebook — the owner of Instagram — are not merely the stages on which this battle is being fought; they are, inadvertently or not, helping to arm one side. What they could do is, perhaps, more complex than it might first appear; abandoning the right to anonymity, for example, could prove disastrous for those who rely on it to express opposition to oppressive regimes around the globe. But the companies have the capacity to block accounts, to filter content, to more readily share the data of offenders with the police. It is not too ambitious to ask them to do something.And yet there is an irony in soccer’s appeal to Silicon Valley. Social media has, for years, abdicated its responsibility for policing even the most discriminatory content by claiming — effectively — that it is the conduit, not the source. Racism, in that line of thinking, is not a social media problem; it is a societal one. It is precisely the same comforting logic that soccer has used for so long to excuse its own inaction.West Brom reported the racial abuse of Romaine Sawyers to the police. Within days, they had made an arrest.Credit…Rui Vieira/Associated PressRacism is, of course, not just a problem in soccer, just as it is not merely a problem on social media. There is not something unique in soccer fans that makes them more prone to racism. Soccer fans are just people — same as people who like gardening or “Star Trek” or cats — and as long as some people are racist, some soccer fans will be.The same is true of social media users, and yet in neither case does that quite tell the whole story. In the case of social media, it is not just that the anonymity of the screen gives free rein to users who wish to spread their sincere and repulsive hatred, but that its timbre incentivizes the breaking of taboos: edgelords seeking clout by saying the unsayable.It is the same for-the-lulz culture that gave the internet message board 4Chan such an outsize influence on our political and cultural lives; it created the sense, as Amanda Mull put it in The Atlantic — in a piece, oddly, about viral videos of disgusting foods — that “everything on the internet is a joke until it’s not anymore.”In the case of soccer, it is not that the sport itself is a magnet for racists. It is that it provides rich soil in which all sorts of weeds can grow.Its inherent tribalism can generate passion, loyalty and love, but it also gives root to hatred, anger and despair. At a time when Britain has a prime minister whose past use of racist language did not prevent his rise to the nation’s highest office, when the country has spent five long years in a culture war stoked by anti-immigrant sentiment, and when the population has spent months locked indoors, growing frustrated and afraid, it is perhaps a sad inevitability that soccer should be the vent for people’s darkest, angriest thoughts.But if that sounds as if it is absolving soccer of blame — a reiteration of the idea that racism is a societal problem, not a sporting one — it is not. Soccer might not be able to solve racism, but it can certainly address the more general culture of abuse it has not just allowed to fester, but also been actively complicit in cultivating, for decades.Mike Dean, one of England’s most experienced — and therefore least popular — referees, will not take charge of a game this weekend. He has asked to be excused from Premier League duty after his family received death threats on their private social media accounts after his decision to send off West Ham’s Tomas Soucek in the dying minutes of a draw with Fulham last week. (Those threats, too, have been reported to the police.)There is a connection here to the racism experienced by Dhanda, Sawyers, James and the countless others, just as there is to the sexist abuse directed at the former England international Karen Carney by Leeds United fans for daring to venture an opinion with which they happened to disagree.The link is that soccer indulges and, at times, even directs abuse. It can be obvious — the official Leeds Twitter account, and then the club’s owner, drew its fans’ attention to Carney’s comments in what was a fairly brazen attempt to gather the pitchforks — or it can be more subtle.Mike Dean’s decision to send off West Ham’s Tomas Soucek in a game against Fulham led to death threats against the referee’s family members.Credit…Pool photo by Clive RoseAll those times managers pin the blame for defeat on a referee’s marginal call. All those times fans single out a player as solely responsible for disappointment. All those times the news media declares a club that has lost a couple of games to be in crisis, all those clickbait headlines and opinions designed specifically to provoke, all those hate-reads: They are not death threats, and they are not racist abuse, but they help to sustain the environment in which such threats thrive.It is here that soccer is responsible, here that soccer — and the industry that surrounds it, of which, yes, we as journalists and consumers are a part — has some agency. It is right for soccer to contact the social media giants. It is right for it to redouble its efforts to convey a lack of tolerance for racism, sexism or death threats against referees.But to give it all the best chance of working, the sport must also seek to lower its own internal temperature a little, to be conscious of the roads it allows itself to be drawn down, to ask if it is necessary to treat defeat as disaster, if it could do a little more to inculcate a healthier environment, if it must continue to accept abuse as the dark consequence of passion.Worth a ShotRobin Olsen probably thought Bruno Fernandes, far right, couldn’t beat him from there. Olsen was wrong.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReganIt is barely a movement. It is not a feint, not really: just the slightest hint of one. A quick, hardly perceptible twitch of Bruno Fernandes’s body was enough to make Tom Davies shift, an inch or two, no more, to his right. A beat before, Everton’s defense had blocked off all of the paths, all of the channels. And now, all of a sudden, Fernandes had all the space in the world.No player in the Premier League has an attacking output quite so impressive as Fernandes, Manchester United’s slow-burn talisman: Combine goals and assists and chances created and key passes played, and Fernandes is the most effective creative player in England. His team, it should be no surprise, has scored more goals than any other in the top division, too.His wonderful goal in last weekend’s 3-3 draw with Everton offered, perhaps, a clear example of the relationship between those two things. It is not just the fact that Fernandes is sufficiently talented that he could try it — his execution was brilliant, the artful curve and dip of his shot, carrying it up and over and past Robin Olsen, the Everton goalkeeper — but the fact that he did try it.There is a dogma in modern soccer that actively discourages shooting from range. It is, in the current, data-suffused thinking, deeply inefficient. Players are encouraged to work the ball relentlessly into the most promising areas: If no gap for a killer pass appears, it is better to turn around, go backward, choose another angle of attack. Patience is pre-eminent. Trying your luck from distance is seen as the final resort, a last refuge for the damned.None of that is wrong, but it does ignore one simple — but crucial — truth of the game. Against a well-organized defense (which is, these days, most of them), a team cannot always wait to find gaps; it has to create them, too. They appear when a defensive line is drawn from its shape. And, at the risk of oversimplifying, the traditional way of doing that is to coax a player into breaking ranks to close someone down.A refusal to shoot from range, then, creates a checkmate. The defending team has no reason to break its shape, because it knows the attacking team does not want to shoot from distance. The attacking team does not want to shoot from distance, so finds that gaps tend not to appear.Fernandes — and to some extent his teammate, Paul Pogba — proves that it is worth indulging the inefficiency. Not simply because they are talented enough to make those shots count, but because the very prospect of those shots forces opponents into action. Davies had to close down Fernandes to stop him from shooting. And in that moment, the line broke, and all of a sudden, Fernandes had all the space in the world.Traveling From ReasonAtlético Bucharest? Luis Suárez and his teammates will play Chelsea in Romania.Credit…Jose Breton/Associated PressIt is hard to pick the best example to encapsulate the absurdity of it all. It feels, at the moment, as if it is probably the fact that Atlético Madrid will travel farther for its “home” leg of its Champions League round-of-16 match against Chelsea — to be held in Bucharest, Romania — than it will for the “away” leg, currently scheduled for London.But that could be superseded in the next few days, according to The Times of London, by RB Leipzig’s meeting Liverpool in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, for its home leg and then, three weeks later, playing the return leg in … the Hungarian capital, Budapest.It was inevitable, really, that at some point the coronavirus-related travel restrictions that entangle Europe would catch up with soccer’s pan-continental competitions. In a way, it is encouraging that at this point it is only the games involving English teams that are affected. (Arsenal’s trip to Benfica has been rerouted to Rome, Manchester United’s visit to Real Sociedad is now a journey to Turin, and Manchester City will play Borussia Monchengladbach in Budapest, at least once.)This raises several pertinent questions. First, how can you justifiably apply the away goals rule if nobody is really at home? Second, does this not impact the integrity of the competition? And third — a recurring theme, where soccer’s response to the pandemic is concerned — did nobody stop and think about this stuff before it happened?It is too late, not to mention too expensive, to consider an alternative format for both the Champions League and the Europa League, similar to the one-and-done tournaments in Portugal and Germany last summer, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that would have been the sensible approach to take in the circumstances.Both competitions will endure, rolling with the punches as best they can, testament to soccer’s indefatigable determination just to keep on going. But the more complex they become, the more Byzantine and contorted the measures required to keep them on the road have to be, the more you wonder if it is worth it.CorrespondenceThe issue of identity — and the idea of a soccer club standing for something — seems to have touched a nerve. Benjamin Livingston cited the extremely pertinent example of West Ham, a club with a proud tradition of playing in a certain way but currently enjoying its best season in years thanks, in part, to a style that deviates (a little) from that.“It’s not that I think they’re playing bad football,” he wrote, “but it’s funny how no one seems to talk about the ‘West Ham Way’ when they’re doing well. I think most fans just want to win games.”That is true, of course: Victory masks quite a lot of sins (not that West Ham is guilty of sinning). But not always, and not forever, as Fernando Gama neatly encapsulated. “A single loss can wreak havoc if there’s no playing style,” he wrote, citing an example that in no way exposes anyone to one of the fiercest, most deep-rooted enmities in sports.“Boca Juniors has won the two [Argentine] national tournaments in 2020. River Plate has won none. Yet Boca has been constantly facing upheaval, divisiveness and infighting. The fans are always discontent, and the ex-players in charge of the football section of the club at war with the players. There are many reasons for that, but I believe most of it is down to the lack of a clear philosophy.”At clubs like Boca Juniors, the only style that matters is the one that produces trophies.Credit…Pool photo by Andres Larrovere“Not even winning championships can stabilize a club without one,” he continued. “A single game can completely destroy the club. Having an identity seems to be not only a good thing to cushion defeats, but has become also important enough to be on equal terms (at least) to winning championships.”This is the point I wanted to make last week, but could not quite reach. As a consequence, I believe I now have to hand control of this newsletter over to Fernando. It’s been a good run.Andrew Russell, meanwhile, raises an important question. “Even after watching the Amazon series on Leeds and Manchester City, it is not clear to me how anyone would explain the respective philosophies of Marcelo Bielsa and Pep Guardiola. How is an ordinary fan to know which philosophies are effective, or even profound, and which are hand-waving and hot air?”It is, admittedly, hard to tell. I wonder if, to some extent, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: Does the team have an identifiable, characteristic style? But maybe, in a way, it doesn’t matter too much. The key thing with a philosophy is that the fans can believe in it, in a way that they can’t with, say, José Mourinho’s approach — he has a “distinct” philosophy, too, as Sam Clark mentioned, but one that fans do not appreciate.That is, in part, because of its inherent caution, but also — to refer back to Fernando — because it is innately utilitarian: Mourinho’s style looks to results for validation, and therefore is exposed as soon as results turn.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Lionel Messi, Barcelona and the Crippling Cost of Success

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      Credit…Associated PressThe Great ReadBarcelona and the Crippling Cost of SuccessThe world’s richest soccer club is facing a financial crisis. Executives blame the pandemic, but many of its biggest problems, including its enormous debt to Lionel Messi, are its own fault.Credit…Associated PressSupported byContinue reading the main storyTariq Panja and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 9:53 a.m. ETThe careful plan hatched by Barcelona, the richest soccer club in the world, fell apart almost as soon as its negotiators entered the room.On a sweltering late summer afternoon, Barcelona’s executives had come to one of Monte Carlo’s most exclusive hotels to strike a deal with the German club Borussia Dortmund for one of the most exciting young prospects in Europe: the French forward Ousmane Dembélé.Barcelona had decided on its strategy, and its price: Dembélé, in Barcelona’s eyes, was worth $96 million, and not a cent more. No matter how hard Dortmund pressed for a higher fee, the men from Barcelona would hold firm. The two executives steeled themselves as they headed to the suite the Germans had booked. They embraced before knocking on the door. And then they stepped inside, only to find that Dortmund’s executives had decided on a strategy, too.The Germans told their guests that they had a plane to catch. They had no time to exchange small talk, and they were not here to negotiate. If Barcelona wanted Dembélé, it would have to pay roughly double the Spaniards’ valuation: $193 million. The price would make the 20-year-old Frenchman the second-most expensive soccer player in history.Barcelona’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, was stunned. But he did not walk away. He quickly agreed to pay almost the entire amount, settling at a fee of $127 million up front, with a further $50 million in easily-achieved performance bonuses. For all his intentions of playing hardball, he felt he did not have a choice.Only a few weeks earlier, Barcelona had seen one of its own crown jewels, Neymar, plucked by Paris St.-Germain. Bartomeu could not risk disappointing a fan base still reeling from that blow by returning home empty-handed. He needed a marquee signing, a trophy, a trinket. He had to pay the price.The Billion Dollar ClubFans at Camp Nou in 2019, the year Barcelona surpassed $1 billion in revenue. The club’s structure gives members a strong say in team affairs but also makes executives eager to please them.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesF.C. Barcelona has, for much of the last decade, had the look of a sporting and commercial colossus. This century, its on-field success and its off-field wealth have made it the envy of even its most bitter rivals.It is the first (and only) team to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue. It employs arguably the finest player in history, Lionel Messi. On matchdays, the cavernous, iconic stadium it calls home fills with almost 100,000 card-carrying, dues-paying club members.But Barcelona has been living on the edge for much of its recent history, a consequence of years of impulsive management, rash decisions and imprudent contracts. For years, soaring revenues helped paper over its worst mistakes, but the coronavirus has now changed the math.One former board member believes the pandemic will eventually cost the team more than half a billion dollars in revenue. Its salary bill is the highest in Europe. It has already broken debt covenants it agreed to with its creditors, which will almost certainly mean higher interest costs in the future.The result is that the club that brings in more money than any other in world soccer now faces a crisis: not only a crushing financial squeeze, but a contentious presidential election and potentially even the loss of its crown jewel, Messi. Its hurried pursuit of Dembélé, among others, is only one part of how it got here.Even as Bartomeu finalized that deal, in August 2017, Barcelona knew it had been stung. The club had banked $222 million from the sale of Neymar weeks earlier and now needed a flashy signing to change the conversation. Every seller in Europe, though, knew Barcelona was cash-rich and time-poor. “You have a weaker negotiating position,” said Jordi Moix, Bartomeu’s former vice president for economic affairs. “They’re waiting for you.”If any club could afford to overpay, though, it was Barcelona. Over the previous decade, it had been transformed into not only the best team in the world — the winner of three Champions League titles in seven years — but also its greatest moneymaking machine.Its revenues were then inching ever closer to the target of one billion euros set by Bartomeu in 2015. It hit the mark — in dollars, at least — in 2019, two years ahead of schedule. Plans for a sleek entertainment and leisure district around the team’s stadium and the launch of the Barcelona Innovation Hub would keep the river of money flowing.At the same time, though, the club was walking an increasingly delicate financial tightrope. There is another billion-dollar watermark it has passed: its total debt, including the amount owed to banks, tax authorities, rival teams and its own players, has ballooned to more than 1.1 billion euros.More than 60 percent of that is considered short-term debt — more than any team in Europe — but that did not stop the lavish spending in the transfer market: not only the price paid for Dembélé but, a few months later, the $145 million committed for the capture of Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool — another negotiation in which Barcelona folded, and agreed to a price it could not afford to pay.The burden of paying the players already on the club’s books, too, has continued to grow. According to Carles Tusquets, its interim president since Bartomeu was deposed last year, Barcelona’s annual salary bill of $771 million now eats up 74 percent of the club’s annual income, a much larger slice than its contemporaries, many of whom aim to keep that percentage no higher than 60. “It is an awful lot,” Tusquets said.The pandemic slashed Barcelona’s revenue, but not its expenses.Credit…F.C. BarcelonaIn some ways, Barcelona was a victim of its own success. The more its players won, the greater the figures they could command in salary negotiations. The fact that so much of its squad — the likes of Messi but also Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba — were seen as the spiritual soul of the club, visible proof of the road from the club’s La Masia academy to the first team, gave the players, not the club, leverage.“Clearly a lack of leadership, the leadership of the board being afraid to say no, is one of the key things that needs to be avoided going forward,” said Víctor Font, one of the candidates to become the club’s next president when elections are held in March. “Wages had gone too high.”But when the club could rely on revenues tipping $1 billion every year, paying out almost $700 million in salaries was “a stress, but affordable,” Moix said, adding: “It did not give us much room for savings, but they were the backbone of the team. If we did not make the agreements, they would have gone.”Moix admitted that Bartomeu and his board made mistakes, but he is convinced that it was an event outside of their control that finally tipped the club off its high-wire. “As time goes by things will be put in perspective,” he said. “How much is due to management, how much to Covid? It’s a subjective discussion.”Barcelona’s 99,000-seat stadium, Camp Nou, has been shuttered for nearly a year. A club official expects the pandemic to cost the team about $600 million in lost revenue.Credit…Joan Monfort/Associated PressEither way, the scale of the damage is vast. In its most recent financial reports, Barcelona announced a loss for the year of $117 million. It estimates that it already has lost $246 million as a result of the pandemic. Moix suggested the total hit eventually will top $600 million.At the same time, its debt to financial institutions and other clubs has risen by $327 million. Barcelona executives believe that figure — despite drastic efforts to cut costs — will climb further in 2021. Both its stadium and museum, two of Spain’s most popular tourist destinations, are likely to remain shut to visitors for at least the rest of this season.With its forecast revenues for the next year revised down by $250 million, its players’ salaries may soon account for as much as eighty cents of every dollar brought into the club. The same squad that brought Barcelona such glory in the recent past seems, now, to foreshadow toil in the immediate future.And there is no clearer example of that than the player who — above all — has come to symbolize this Barcelona, the player on whose shoulders its rise to global pre-eminence rested and whose salary, now, represents its single greatest financial commitment: Lionel Messi.PharaohBarcelona’s former president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, and Messi on the day the star signed his current contract. The four-year deal will pay him almost $675 million.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe contract Messi signed with Barcelona — in the fall of 2017, in the aftermath of Neymar’s departure — runs to 30 pages, according to a Spanish newspaper that was leaked a copy of the document. It contains a screed of eye-watering figures: a signing bonus of $139 million. A “loyalty” bonus of $93 million. A total value, if Messi meets every clause and every condition, of almost $675 million.Last month, the newspaper that revealed its contents, El Mundo, described it as “Pharaonic,” a deal that was “ruining Barcelona.” That Messi was the world’s best-paid player was not a surprise: It had been reported at the time the contract was agreed that he would earn an annual salary of around $132 million.To those outside Barcelona, it was seeing the sheer scale of the deal in black and white that was most striking. To those inside the club, though, the problem was not the figures but that they had been revealed to the public. Ronald Koeman, Barcelona’s coach, called for anyone found responsible for leaking the contract to be excommunicated. The club threatened to take legal action. Messi, too, was furious at what he perceived as an attempt to sabotage his standing at the club.Messi’s relationship with Barcelona has been strained for some time. But last summer, after a third consecutive season of disappointment and a historic 8-2 humbling in the Champions League, his frustration boiled over and he gave the club formal notice that he intended to end his contract and leave.Bartomeu refused even to countenance the idea. If any suitor wanted to sign Messi, he declared, it would have to pay a fee. Though Messi saw that as the breaking of not just a promise but a contractual obligation, he eventually backed down, unwilling to take the club he has represented since he was 13 to court in order to force his exit.Six months later, his future is no more certain. His deal expires in June. Since Jan. 1, he has been free to agree to a move this summer to any club outside Spain. In a television interview last month, he said he would “wait until the season ends” before making any decision. “If I do leave,” he said, “I want to leave in the best way possible.”Letting Messi walk away this summer would ease Barcelona’s cash crisis, but it is a solution both fans and executives consider unthinkable.Credit…Marcelo Del Pozo/ReutersThough it is taboo for it to be said in public — and though nobody would welcome it — there are those inside Barcelona who believe Messi’s departure may be a necessary evil. Last summer, a few whispered that it made sense to cash in on Messi while the club still could, and not just because the transfer fee and the savings on his nine-figure salary could add more $250 million to the team’s bottom line.Given his status, and his impact, few believe Messi himself is overpaid, but some members of the previous board wondered if he had an inflationary effect on the squad as a whole. Barcelona was paying out salaries worth hundreds of thousands of euros a week to fringe players. Messi’s earnings had raised the wage ceiling so high that the salaries of his teammates — especially the senior, home-reared ones — were rising quickly alongside it.Moix, for his part, did not share that logic. “We can’t negotiate with an asset like this,” he said. Nor could Barcelona, really, negotiate at all; there are only a few clubs in the world capable of meeting Messi’s salary and his ambition, and none were eager to pay a premium for a player they might be able to get for free this summer.Regardless, according to Moix, fixing a price for Messi proved irrelevant. “It is a theoretical question whether we would have sold him for 100 million euros,” he said. “Nobody made an offer.”Fire SaleThe former Barcelona president Joan Laporta is running to regain his old post. Credit…Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs the club’s presidential election draws closer, each candidate is trying to position himself as the only man — and they are all men — with a solution to the financial crisis.But Barcelona’s charm, in a sense, is also its curse: Every move the club makes has to be made not only with the support of whoever wins the election on March 7, but with the backing of its 140,000-strong membership.“It makes it a bit more difficult to manage,” Moix said. “But that fact is also one of the differences we use to try to attract sponsors and business. The members are the real owners.”In the past, that has contributed to the club’s largess: Bartomeu might not have been so desperate to land Dembélé, whatever the cost, had he not feared a fan revolt if he failed. Font, one of his potential successors, is convinced the lack of professional experience among previous boards has led to some of the poor decision-making.Joan Laporta, a former president now running for his old post, last year labeled Barcelona “the club of three billion: one billion in income, one billion in expenses and one billion in debt.” He, like his rivals, has vowed to repair the team’s financial fortunes.“It’s not your money but you can’t just do what you want,” Font said. “It has nothing to do with ownership structure, it has to do with poor governance, people who are not equipped to make decisions. For them it’s fun. It’s like a fun toy, I play with it, and I make decisions I believe make sense. That’s why you need people that understand playing with a toy in the wrong way can be dangerous.”Now, though, it leaves the three remaining candidates for president with the toughest of electoral sells: promising cutbacks while continuing to meet the fans’ expectations. Most accept that the club’s salary commitments will have to be reduced, though that is rather easier said than done.Just as Borussia Dortmund realized that Barcelona, in 2017, was in no position to haggle, European soccer — ravaged by the pandemic — is well aware that it is now, in effect, a distressed seller. Its players are unlikely to command premium prices, if buyers in a position to pay distorted salaries for aging stars can be found in the first place.That has forced executives to examine other measures to try to alleviate the financial strain. Some of the costs — like an annual payment of five million euros to Atlético Madrid, a putative rival, for first refusal on any of its players — make little sense. Others, like seven-figure payments for past signings, are already baked in.Víctor Font, a business executive, and Toni Freixa, a lawyer, will face Laporta in next month’s election. To win, each must balance hard truths and fan expectations.Credit…Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockFor now, the club has been scrambling to renegotiate some of what it owes with its creditors, but it is likely that any attempt will mean doing so on worse terms.It is exploring whether it can be granted an advance on future television income — worth around $190 million per season — or strike an innovative deal, designed by Goldman Sachs, to raise $240 million by selling a stake in a basket of Barcelona’s nonsporting assets — including its content creation business and its merchandising operation. The response, according to people familiar with the offer, has been positive.Font said officials had pitched details of the money-raising plans to him, but he remains unconvinced. “We have a saying in Spanish: bread for today, hunger for tomorrow,” he said.Goldman Sachs also has agreed on a proposal with the club to arrange financing for a $988 million refit of the Camp Nou, a stadium that does not have a single sky box and is mostly uncovered. The project — which requires member approval — also includes for the creation of other properties, including a smaller, secondary stadium.There is, of course, one other option. Allowing Messi to leave might solve many of the problems on the balance sheet in one fell swoop, and buy the club some breathing space. But while all of the candidates talk of the need to restore financial sanity, that is a road nobody is willing to take.“The best player in the history of such a sport generates a lot of commercial value,” Font said. He is so determined to ensure that Messi stays that he would offer him a lifetime contract, one that would bond the player to the club even after he has retired. It would be fitting reward, after all, for the player who — more than any other — brought Barcelona here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Manchester City Routs Liverpool, Confirming the Obvious

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerCity’s Revival, Liverpool’s Fade and the Flaw in Overthinking ThemManchester City’s rout at Anfield provided some clarity in the Premier League title race. But the factors that led to it have been plain to see for months.Ilkay Gundogan missed a penalty but still scored twice in Manchester City’s 4-1 rout of Liverpool on Sunday.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperFeb. 8, 2021, 9:36 a.m. ETSometimes, the easy explanation tells the whole story. Or near enough, anyway. Why Liverpool’s crown as reigning Premier League champion has slipped before the first blooms of spring is no great mystery. There is little need to sift through performances, searching for some failure of character or imagination or ability, to understand how it came to this.Virgil van Dijktore a knee ligament on October 17, in the early minutes of the Merseyside derby. Not quite four weeks later, on November 11, his regular defensive partner Joe Gomez blew out a tendon while away on international duty with England. And that, to a large extent, was that. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that point, had to be downgraded.Soccer has a dispiriting tendency to scorn mitigating circumstances — in the lexicon of sports, explanation is too often seen as a synonym of excuse — as Roy Keane, the hard-boiled former Manchester United captain, rather neatly encapsulated in the aftermath of Liverpool’s humiliation by Manchester City on Sunday. “They’ve been bad champions,” Keane said. To be a “big club,” he said, is to cope with whatever setbacks are thrown your way.There is truth in that, but it carries with it an air of brutal, gleeful oversimplification. Liverpool cannot, of course, escape blame for the collapse of its title defense. The club chose not to add a central defender to its squad last summer, recruiting instead a reserve left back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the dying minutes on Sunday. That seemed a risk even without the benefit of hindsight.At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s manager, has cut an increasingly waspish figure as the season has unfurled. He also must shoulder some responsibility, though. He has leaned too heavily on a handful of players, rather than sharing the burden more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically drained as it looks.More important, Klopp has overseen a team that has become grinding and predictable, reliant on the methods that brought a Champions League triumph in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even as Liverpool’s high-energy, high-intensity press has tuned down and his raiding fullbacks have found their edge dulled.Liverpool’s opponents have learned — both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield in recent weeks, shutting down the champion using essentially the same playbook — but Klopp’s team has not, the manager apparently insistent on doing the same things over and over again in the desperate, vain hope that the outcome might be different next time.Goalkeeping errors by Alisson Becker led directly to two City goals.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperAnd yet all of that is inseparable from the fact that Liverpool has been playing for months without its first-choice central defense, and that its first reserve, Joel Matip, managed to start only nine Premier League games before his season, too, was ended by injury.To cope, Klopp has deconstructed his midfield, drafting first Fabinho and then Jordan Henderson into the back line. The team has lost its rhythm. A swarm of other injuries — Thiago Alcantara and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missing the first third of the season, Diogo Jota and Naby Keita the middle third, the usual wear-and-tear of a long, hard campaign — has left him with little choice but to play those members of his squad who were left standing.In those circumstances, trying to inculcate a new style of play is hardly realistic. Liverpool does need to evolve; with its resources, it should not be in a position where it is fretting about whether it can fend off West Ham, Everton and, possibly most pertinently, a surging Chelsea to finish in the top four. But in terms of retaining the title, it did not so much meet a setback as run into a roadblock.There is a useful contrast, here, with its most recent conqueror and its heir apparent. So entwined have been the fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City over the last three years that there is now a temptation to see them as being somehow inextricably linked, the success of one taken as a direct indictment of the other’s failure.This season only seems to reinforce the parallel. Liverpool’s struggles this year do not perfectly match those City faced in the last one: Where City was volatile, scoring great rafts of goals only to freeze completely every few weeks, Liverpool’s fade has been a slow-burn demise, set in motion even before the title was won, the team sputtering through the autumn and only stalling completely at Christmas.But at first glance, the cause and the effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt to be paid after two seasons at the most rarefied heights, the sense of a wall being hit, all of it coalescing as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, the pendulum swinging irrevocably back toward Pep Guardiola’s team.There is an easy explanation for that, too. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers knew their team needed more steel. City had lost nine games the previous season, its efforts to win a third straight title undone not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness but by its own glass jaw.So as much of European soccer fretted about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went and spent $140 million on two defenders: Ruben Días and Nathan Aké. And that, to a large extent, was that. Días has, in the months since, emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious, indomitable version of City, one that is now set to reclaim the championship.In this case, though, the easy explanation only scratches the surface. Guardiola has not simply slotted a new central defender into his team and pressed play. He has, instead, retuned his approach. His team has been a touch less expansive, a touch more controlled, built on a more conservative midfield. He has overseen this shift in the space of a few months, on the back of a summer in which he did not have a preseason, during a campaign in which there is scarcely any time for training.City’s ability, and willingness, to rest its stars has set it up to reclaim the Premier League title.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperPartly, Guardiola has hinted, he took that risk — and it was, ultimately, a risk — to suit the realities of this most congested season. But partly, too, it was driven by the same impulse that made him recruit Días and Aké: an awareness that City needed to evolve once more if it was to outwit opponents who knew what to expect.What has enabled him to do that is the one element that has eluded Klopp. City has not been free of injury this season — Sergio Agüero has barely played, and both Gabriel Jesus and Kevin de Bruyne have missed considerable stretches — but its burden has been undeniably lighter than Liverpool’s.Nine of Klopp’s players have started 17 of Liverpool’s 23 Premier League games. Nine have already racked up 1,500 minutes in the league. At City, by contrast, only four players have reached those figures. Or, to put it another way, 13 of Guardiola’s players have started 10 games or more.It is to his credit that he has rotated that heavily. Guardiola has more readily understood the contingencies of this season than almost all of his peers; he spoke, around Christmas, of urging his team to run less, not more, in the early weeks of the campaign.But it does not immediately follow that it is to Klopp’s detriment that he has not had the same realization, that he has not altered Liverpool’s approach sufficiently to enable his players to cope with the test in front of them. It may be tempting to see Liverpool and City as counterweights — the rise of one a comment on the fall of the other — but the circumstances and the contexts are different. Klopp might have followed Guardiola’s lead, had he had the opportunity. Or not. It is impossible to know. Sometimes the easy explanation tells the whole story. And sometimes it does not.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Newcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … Something

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerNewcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … SomethingWandering about without a plan inspires neither affection nor success. So why do so many clubs still do it?Newcastle has won only one of its last 11 Premier League games.Credit…Pool photo by Stu ForsterFeb. 6, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETNEWCASTLE, England — The sound system at St James’s Park crackled into life just as the whistle blew and the players took the knee, as they have done for every Premier League game since the spring. The announcement was brief and sweet, an unexpected relic of days past: “Enjoy the game.”In the silence, it was not quite clear who the announcer was addressing. There are only 300 people inside the stadium: the players on the field, the two coaching staffs, a handful of executives, a smattering of stewards and security and journalists. Everyone was there for work, rather than pleasure.And besides, even if the announcer’s words were meant for those in exile at home, the people who would ordinarily pack the empty stands, this is Newcastle United. Few, if any, of the fans would suggest they have enjoyed anything to do with this club for some time.Newcastle is — and has been for a long time — a club in the grip of endemic drift. Its owner, Mike Ashley, wants to sell, so much so that he has sought legal recourse against the Premier League for blocking a potential sale to a Saudi-led consortium last year.The fans, tired of Ashley’s absentee management and his lack of investment, either emotional or financial, want him gone so desperately that they appear ready to embrace any would-be savior, no matter how many concerns there might be about charges of content piracy or human rights abuses.If the loathing for Ashley is universal, the contempt for Steve Bruce — the manager installed by the owner last season — is getting there. It is not just that Bruce used to manage Sunderland, Newcastle’s fierce rival. It is not just that Bruce replaced Rafael Benítez, an object of adoration among the fans. It is not just that Bruce was appointed by Ashley and so — in a way that never applied to Benítez — is perceived as an emissary of a hated regime.Newcastle’s fans are confident they have identified the club’s problem.Credit…Eddie Keogh/ReutersIt is that Bruce, like Ashley, seems to have so little ambition for the club. He has articulated no grand vision of what Newcastle could be. His aspiration seems to stretch no further than stasis, the bare minimum required to maintain the club’s Premier League status. He has no vision beyond the literal wording of his job description: manager.In the middle of another difficult winter at Newcastle, Bruce spoke of addressing a slump in form by doing things “his way.” It was not entirely clear, then, whose way he had been following up to that point: He has been in charge for a season and a half. Quite what his way might be, too, remained a mystery.Those who have worked with him say that Bruce is a good coach, thorough and diligent and likable, if perhaps a little staid, a little cautious. But he espouses no distinct philosophy. He does not have a tightly-defined idea of how the game should be played, or what a squad should look like, or what a team should do. He does not seem to believe in anything in particular. He does not represent anything. He does not stand for anything.Steve Bruce’s Newcastle may be saved from relegation only because three teams are playing worse.Credit…Pool photo by Lee SmithHis counterpart last week, crouching on the touchline a few yards away, is the opposite. Before the game kicked off, Newcastle and Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United were not having vastly different seasons. Both were skirting the edges of the relegation battle: Leeds had 23 points and Newcastle 19, despite having played one extra game.The coverage of the teams — and the mood around them — could not, though, have been more different. Newcastle, as always, was a morass of discontent and bubbling crisis. Leeds, on the other hand, had taken the Premier League by storm, hailed by fans and neutral observers for their courage, their style, their adventure.Bielsa’s team had spent the season as a source of fascination and praise and, lately, a little resentment: No other team could lose by 6-2 to Manchester United, for example, and come out of it not just without criticism but with credit. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to the fact that Leeds, unlike Newcastle, was newly promoted, playing the Premier League for the first time in 16 years. Oscillations in form were to be expected, tolerated.But much of it is down to Bielsa. The Leeds that he has created is, innately, fun: fun to watch, and, though demanding and energy-sapping, apparently fun to be. His players give the impression they are enjoying themselves. Luke Ayling, the right back, charges out of defense like a toddler doped up on sugar. Jack Harrison scurries around like an eager Labrador. Stuart Dallas, in his first season in England’s top flight, has developed a taste for pinging cross-field passes. They put together wonderful, exuberant moves. They score intricate, breathtaking goals.More important, Bielsa’s dogmatism, his fundamentalism, his refusal to compromise his beliefs — all the things that, previously in his career, have been held against him — are now strengths. Leeds stands for something: a way of playing, a series of assumptions about how the game should be, a theory, a creed, an ideal.Leeds Manager Marcelo Bielsa has defenders, and critics. But his players know exactly what he expects.Credit…Andy Rain/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, soccer has slowly, grudgingly accepted the idea that managers who adhere to a philosophy, a certain set of ideas, are not selling snake oil. It is understood, on some level, that possessing a clear sense of what you want your team to be offers a competitive edge: It helps recruit the right players, it makes coaching them more effective, it offers a barometer of success and purpose that is not reliant on individual results. At an executive level, it can even, at times, ease the transition between one manager and the next.But the benefits of a cogent philosophy are not purely sporting. It has been striking, in Leeds’s low moments under Bielsa, how little discord there has been about his methods. Most fans, if not all, are happy to absorb the lows as an unfortunate, but necessary, recompense for the highs.Subscribing to Bielsa’s philosophy gives them something to take pride and solace in, even when the score line offers no succor. It affords the club, and by extension the fans, an identity. They stand for something that does not depend on results. Newcastle is the opposite. A few days after losing to Leeds, Bruce’s team won at Everton. His side produced a smart, disciplined performance, and the victory alleviated mounting concerns over relegation. It did absolutely nothing to dispel the enduring unhappiness.That contrast, between Leeds and Newcastle, holds outside England’s two great one-club cities. Fans, increasingly, no longer see a manager talking about a philosophy and a vision as marketing jargon or corporate bunk. It is, instead, something to cling to and believe in, a reason to be proud.For much of this season, criticism has swirled around Graham Potter and Brighton. The team has lingered in the lower reaches of the table, its neat, attractive, flexible style of play winning plaudits but few games. He did not flinch when he was told he had to deviate from his methods to get results. More impressively, few of the club’s fans did, either. They understood, and appreciated, his plan. In the space of four days this week, Brighton beat Tottenham and Liverpool.The opposite is true at Chelsea. The dismissal of Frank Lampard and his replacement by Thomas Tuchel, vastly more qualified for the role, was made in order to win trophies; that, after all, is Chelsea’s modern, corporate identity. But it left fans feeling rootless: What mattered to them is not just the outcome, but feeling that the route taken has some deeper meaning.Newcastle has big-club resources. What it does not appear to have is a plan.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesThis is not a uniquely English phenomenon. In Europe, fans “no longer recognize themselves in their clubs,” as Le Monde wrote of Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille this week, three teams with no apparent broader purpose or identity. [A hat-tip to reader Manuel Buchwald for pointing me in the direction of that piece.]For years, fans have endured a growing sense of dislocation from their clubs, feeling unmoored as teams have morphed into superstores and retail brands and content farms and their players into millionaire entrepreneurs. That feeling will, of course, have only been exacerbated by the physical distance enforced by the pandemic.In that environment, clubs now effectively have to stand for something, anything: a reliance on youth, a certain style of play — expansive or exciting or muscular or intense, whatever it may be — or a distinct, bespoke approach. Those who do, like Leeds, earn not only patience from but also the admiration of their fans.Those who do not, like Newcastle, find that when there is no reason to enjoy the game — not the result, not the journey — the fire of fury and regret can quickly curdle into something much more dangerous for a business reliant on the unyielding affection of its public: apathy. That is the lesson Ashley, and Bruce, can teach the rest of soccer, that those who stand for nothing risk dwindling away into it.Maybe We Were Just Early in the Season?Why are these men smiling again? Take a look at the Premier League table.Credit…Pool photo by Nick PottsThis has been, you will have heard, the most unpredictable Premier League season in history. Well, since Leicester City won it, anyway. It has definitely been the most unpredictable season since that one, five years ago.The reality is slightly different. Yes, pretty much the whole top half of the Premier League might still nurse an ambition to qualify for European soccer next season. But the three teams at the foot of the table seem cut adrift, and by the close of play on Sunday, the title race might have swung fairly dramatically toward Manchester City.If City can beat an exhausted, uninspired and injury-ravaged Liverpool at Anfield, Pep Guardiola’s team most likely will have killed off the reigning champion’s dwindling hopes, and gone at least three points clear of its nearest rival — a vastly improved, but still unfinished Manchester United — with a game in hand. City has won 13 games in a row. It has not conceded a goal since the Franco-Prussian War. In a season of twists and turns, it has found a straight road.There is a strong possibility that, the race for the top four aside, a season that was meant to be marked by the unpredictable will end up with the most predictable outcome imaginable. And, though the circumstances of this year have been unusual, it feels as if this is a sensation we have had before.The table is always tight, chaotic, fluid for the first half of any season. The gaps between teams are smaller, because they have played fewer games, and so it takes a while to settle. In the opening few months, every season has an air of uncertainty.It is only now, as we turn the corner into the home straight, that order emerges. That has happened later, chronologically, this season — because the start was delayed by two months — but at the same time as it always does, in terms of games played. The effect has been more pronounced, thanks to the compacted schedule, the empty stadiums and the greater impact of injury and fatigue, but it is not unique. This is what always happens. It is just that we always forget.CorrespondenceThis Danny Ings goal was ruled offside. Yeah, we don’t know why either.Credit…Pool photo by Michael SteeleSadly, Laurence Dandurant has far too much clarity in his thinking to be consulted on how soccer can extricate itself from the nonsense — as any Southampton fan would describe it — it has made of its own offside rule. “Why don’t they change the offside rule to just a player’s boots? This would end the maddening shoulders and armpits debate.”Personally, I’m an advocate of the daylight rule — if any part of the player’s body is onside, the player is onside — but this works just as well.As I was expecting, last week’s column on the Old Firm inspired quite a bit of feedback, though (amazingly) none of it was especially angry. That must be a first. You raised quite a few points I’d like to address, so bear with me.“I completely agree with the sentiment of the Old Firm buying older players hampering their development on a European stage but think the greatest impact has been on the Scotland national team,” Benjamin Livingston wrote. “The Old Firm and the league as a whole are signing journeymen players from down south, rather than giving their own youth a chance.” This is a really important point: the future for Scotland, like (say) Belgium, is in having a much younger league.Catherine Pereira, meanwhile, pointed out that while Scotland’s men’s team has not been to a major tournament for two decades, its women’s team was at the World Cup in 2019, and performed credibly. “The team is ranked 21 in the world by FIFA,” she wrote. “It’s not great, considering Scotland’s history, but it’s not quite as disappointing as the men’s.” Quite right, too, though much of the praise for that should go to a Glasgow team that is not in the Old Firm.Glasgow City played a Champions League knockout-round match last year. Neither Rangers nor Celtic can say that.Credit…Alvaro Barrientos/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWilliam Bradley noted, quite correctly, that last week’s piece ignored the sectarian roots of the Old Firm animosity. “Your story did not touch on or even mention [that], which I must say from your story’s journalistic quality.” That was deliberate. Everyone involved believes sectarianism to be a stain on Scottish soccer that should be left in the past. In a column addressing the future, I decided to take the same approach.And thanks to Ian Stewart, who has touched on something that is, I think, really important. “There seems to be a strain of thinking that prizes turning clubs into machines of player development, churning out young stars to be sold off to fund the next round of stars-in-development,” he wrote. “This is a front-office mind-set, not a fan’s. As a fan, I simply want to see the best team possible being fielded as often as possible.”This is a tension that a host of teams — right up to the likes of Borussia Dortmund — have to navigate: Soccer would lose a lot of its richness if everyone apart from the established financial elite decided their role was simply to feed the insatiable appetite of the powerful. There is a logical counterargument, though: The process of development-and-sale, if done well, can not only help you win today, but enable you to win more in future, as those funds are reinvested in better-quality players. Perhaps, in this case, a front-office mind-set is healthy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Valencia Welcomed Peter Lim. Now It Wants Him Out.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThey Hailed the New Owner as a Savior. Then They Got to Know Him.Deep pockets, new management and a Cup trophy seemed to herald better days at Valencia. It hasn’t worked out that way.Valencia fans once filled the streets to welcome Peter Lim. Now they do the same, chanting for him to go.Credit…Ana Escobar/EPA, via ShutterstockFeb. 5, 2021, 8:35 a.m. ETValencia fans had waited 11 years for this kind of celebration.A generation earlier, their soccer team, Valencia C.F., had been one of the best clubs in Spain, a two-time Champions League finalist and a domestic champion. That was before financial crises and mismanagement had sent it into a yearslong tailspin.Now, in the spring of 2019, the fans could start to believe again. Victory in the Copa del Rey, Spain’s domestic cup competition, had ended a decade-long trophy drought. A deep-pocketed billionaire with powerful soccer connections now owned the club. The trophy, and the money, would herald the start of a journey back to the top, back to relevance in La Liga, back to closing the gap with the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid.So as thousands of fans lined the streets to salute the team’s conquering heroes, Valencia’s beaming chief executive, Anil Murthy, spoke excitedly as he surveyed the scene from the deck of an open-top bus.“I have never seen anything like this in my life: It’s incredible,” Murthy told a live television interviewer as players took turns with the trophy. “Practically the entire city is in the streets supporting this great club.”It did not take long for the mood to sour. Within months, the coach and the sporting director who had built Valencia’s cup-winning team had both been fired. Within a year, the team was offloading players to save money during the pandemic. Fans shut out from attending games because of coronavirus restrictions now protest the club’s ownership from outside it. Board members are heckled in the street.Valencia has won only two league games since November, and currently sits 14th in the 20-team table.Credit…Jose Jordan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLess than two years after Valencia paraded a trophy through its city, its new dawn has been replaced by disillusion, anger and cynicism.“This is Valencia’s worst time,” said Gaspard Romero, who was born into a Valencia-obsessed family and whose grandfather once served as the club’s accountant. “My nightmare will be to see Valencia in this state for a long period of time, with no purpose, like a zombie club.”Valencia’s new reality is a hollowed-out roster, weakened by the sale of top players in the off-season, and a team that struggles to win even once or twice a month. After a positive start to the new season last fall, which included a 4-1 destruction of Real Madrid, Valencia has cratered, tumbling down the table. That has put a renewed focus on the club’s one-time savior, the Singapore billionaire Peter Lim, a reclusive figure who prefers to stay out of the spotlight but — in Valencia, at least — can no longer avoid it.It was not always this way. Romero, 32, recalled how when he was a boy, the team was one of the most feared squads in Europe. How fans in the steep-banked stands at its Mestalla stadium roared as talented players brought joy and pride to the city. There were consecutive trips to the Champions League final in 2000 and 2001 and a league title in 2004, when Valencia’s team brushed aside Barcelona and Real Madrid teams containing the likes of Ronaldinho and Zinedine Zidane.By the time Lim entered the scene in 2014, though, a financial crisis had engulfed the club. Top talents like David Silva, David Villa and Juan Mata had been sold off to make ends meet, and a combination of bad management and mounting had only made things worse.Lim’s interest in soccer predated his investment in Valencia. Earlier in his career as an investor, he had parlayed his love of the English club Manchester United into a business operating United-themed cafes and restaurants across Asia. That allowed Lim, now 67, to build relationships with a generation of United’s stars, players like Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and David Beckham. Those relationships spawned joint business ventures in the hospitality sector and, since 2014, a co-ownership of Salford City, a team that plays in English soccer’s fourth tier.Lim’s affection for Valencia, the fallen Spanish giant, did not run nearly as deep.“He planned to buy a football club and the opportunity of Valencia came along,” Murthy said. Lim provided the money to acquire the team; loyal lieutenants like Murthy and others were installed to run it.To many Valencia fans, Lim’s management style has been part of the problem. They noticed, for example, that he spent the 2019 cup final in a private box with his friend Beckham but did not visit the locker room to congratulate the team.Though they once chanted his name in the streets, believing him to be their club’s rescuer, many now believe he never understood what the team represents in its city.“It is our essence, what we have loved for so long, what our parents told us about,” Romero said. “It’s like they stole our memories, our traditions, our history, our pride.”Midfielder Dani Parejo lifted the trophy after the 2019 Copa del Rey victory over Barcelona.Credit…Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParejo’s move to rival Villarreal in August sparked new anger at the owner Peter Lim.Credit…Domenech Castello/EPA, via ShutterstockLim’s critics also point to the clout of another figure in his soccer network, Jorge Mendes, the soccer agent considered to be among the most influential power brokers in soccer.Even before he bought Valencia, Lim, with Mendes acting as an adviser, had been an active player in soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading market.By placing speculative bets on players just as he had once invested in small companies, Lim had hoped to profit from their future sales. The practice was banned by soccer’s governing body FIFA in 2015, a year after Lim bought his majority stake in Valencia. But a feature of Lim’s tenure has been the revolving door of talent, with Mendes often pulling the strings.For desperate Valencia fans, though, whatever their concerns, Lim still offered a chance of salvation. The 2007 financial crisis had left the club in a bind, caught with two stadiums — its longtime home, the Mestalla, and the half-built shell of a new one that could only be completed with the proceeds from selling the old arena to property developers. Fear of bankruptcy felt real.Excited by the prospect of restoring the team’s fortunes and completing the Nou Mestalla, fans picketed for the team to be sold to Lim. When his purchase was approved, fans greeted his arrival with the kind of reception usually reserved for a prized signing.The flurry of bold promises and predictions made by the officials he installed to run the club, though, failed to materialize. Fans now bemoan not only the state of the first-team squad but also the seemingly whimsical decision-making that has seen a succession of players, coaches and sporting directors come and go, some replaced by questionable appointments seemingly guided by Lim’s personal relationships with Mendes or his connections to the former Manchester United cohort.Lim appointed Phil Neville as a coach at Valencia in 2015, for example, and then hired his brother, Gary, who had never led a professional team and did not speak Spanish, as the team’s manager. The experiment lasted less than four months, with the team winning only three of Neville’s 16 Liga games.Front-office appointments were just as curious. Figures with longstanding ties to the team and the city were replaced by executives close to Lim. Newcomers sometimes had little or no prior experience in European soccer.Lim has at times seemed more interested in his projects with former Manchester United stars like David Beckham than with repairing problems at Valencia.Credit…Peter Cziborra/Reuters“If you want to remove the coach and sports director, sign another coach and sports director to build a project,” Gaizka Mendieta, who captained the team in both of its Champions League final appearances, told the Valencia newspaper Las Provincias in December. “But no, what Peter Lim has done is take a step back and return to the model of the beginning, when they arrived.”Few are predicting a bright future. Valencia still plays at the Mestalla, and its new stadium is no closer to completion. When the team’s leadership sold or released some of the club’s most established talent last summer — including Dani Parejo, the popular captain who had lifted the Copa del Rey only a year earlier — Valencia’s coach, Javi Gracia, threatened to quit.Murthy said the player sales — more than 70 million euros (about $85 million) came in — were needed to rebalance the club’s books after revenues had been halved by the pandemic. The team remains mired in debt, even after the sales, with more than 400 million euros (nearly $500 million) owed to creditors. And the team’s transfer market dealings under Lim are drawing new scrutiny.Valencia remains in its longtime home, the famed Mestalla stadium, because it cannot finish construction on its new one.Credit…Manuel Bruque/EPA, via ShutterstockMurthy, the former Singaporean diplomat installed by Lim as chief executive in 2017, recently told journalists that there was now a new plan, one focused on producing a stream of players from the club’s youth academy who will instill a Valencian core in the squad and return it to greatness.Murthy predicted a championship within 10 years, a lofty ideal but, to most Valencia fans, an unrealistic one under Lim’s continued ownership. The team, they know, is currently far closer to relegation from La Liga — and another brush with financial ruin — than to its next trophy celebration.Six years after thousands of fans chanted Peter Lim’s name in the streets, many now clamor just as loudly for his exit.“The feeling among fans is Peter Lim doesn’t understand where he is,” said Paco Polit, a journalist and contributor to a book about Lim’s stewardship of Valencia. “He never understood how big Valencia was before he came, and now it feels he has left Valencia to die.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Europe Mines an Emerging Market for Soccer Talent: the U.S.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerEurope Is Mining an Emerging Talent Market: the U.S.All the big clubs know Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie and Gio Reyna. More recently, the callers have asked about Bryan Reynolds, Brenden Aaronson and others like them.Bryan Reynolds wasn’t a household name in American soccer circles, but Roma and Juventus knew him well.Credit…Orlin Wagner/Associated PressFeb. 4, 2021, 2:11 p.m. ETOver the last few months, André Zanotta has taken calls from teams in France, Belgium and Germany. Little in the transfer market eludes the gimlet eye of Sevilla, so the Spanish side was in touch, too. And then there were the Italians. It seemed to Zanotta that he has spoken to every major club in Serie A.Zanotta is used to this kind of frenzy. A decade ago, he was a vice president at Santos, in his native Brazil, when a teenage Neymar was coming through. A few years later, he was at Grêmio when Arthur Melo emerged as one of South America’s brightest prospects. (Both players were eventually sold to Barcelona.)That has long been how it works in Brazil, soccer’s great hothouse of talent, of course: Europe’s major clubs lie permanently in wait, ready to pounce when a scout or an agent or a contact alerts them to even the slightest flicker of promise. The difference, this time, was that Zanotta was taking those calls not in São Paulo or Pôrto Alegre, but Dallas.All of the clubs contacting Zanotta — the technical director at F.C. Dallas — were doing so to ask him about the teenage right back Bryan Reynolds. At that stage, Reynolds had played only a couple of dozen games in Major League Soccer, but that had been enough to pique their curiosity.“They loved his technical ability, his athleticism,” Zanotta said of the European suitors who called to ask about Reynolds. “They could see in his profile that he could adapt to any of the top leagues in Europe.” Eventually, two made a firm bid: Juventus and Roma. Persuaded by Roma’s coach, Paulo Fonseca, that he could offer a quicker route to first-team soccer, Reynolds chose to move to the Italian capital. Roma could eventually pay as much as $11 million for the privilege of signing him.He is not the only young American player to have made that journey during Europe’s winter transfer window. In the past month, the Philadelphia Union sold the defender Mark McKenzie to K.R.C. Genk, in Belgium, and the midfielder Brenden Aaronson to Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg. New York City F.C.’s Joe Scally completed his long-anticipated move to Borussia Mönchengladbach, and two more, slightly older, players — Jordan Morris and Paul Arriola — joined Swansea City, in England’s second tier, too. They may collide there one day with Orlando City striker Daryl Dike; the 20-year-old agreed to a loan move to Barnsley on Monday.Brenden Aaronson’s breakout season with the Philadelphia Union resulted in a move to Red Bull Salzburg, where he will play for another M.L.S. expatriate, Jesse Marsch.Credit…Barbara Gindl/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTheir path is, increasingly, a well-trod one: All join an American contingent in Europe that already includes Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie, Christian Pulisic, Josh Sargent and Giovanni Reyna.“Major League Soccer used to sell players to Europe episodically,” said Dimitrios Efstathiou, M.L.S.’s senior vice president for player relations. “It would be as a result of an existing relationship between two coaches, or on the back of a good performance at the World Cup.”Now, that has changed. “It is four, five or six every window,” said Fred Lipka, technical director of the M.L.S. Next youth development program. “And that validates the process.”The relatively sudden transformation — of the United States in general, and M.L.S. in particular — from an afterthought in the minds of European teams into prime hunting territory has twin explanations, one from each side of the Atlantic.From an M.L.S. perspective, it is a result of what Lipka calls “the process, a complete shift in the way players are developed” in the league over the last 14 years. In 2007, M.L.S. made a decision to invest more in its academies: not just in the facilities clubs could offer for developing players, but the type of training they received there.“We invested in coaching education, in academy directors, in trying to ensure there was more exchange with Europe and South America, and to import best practice,” Lipka said. “There is more emphasis on technical and tactical training, not just on athletic development. To build a plane, you need to have engineers who know how to build a plane.”In 2018, Tyler Adams was a teenage starter for the Red Bulls in M.L.S. But suitors were already circling.Credit…Vincent Carchietta/USA Today Sports, via ReutersLast summer, Adams scored against Atlético Madrid as RB Leipzig advanced to the Champions League semifinals.Credit…Pool photo by Lluis GeneReynolds, Aaronson and many — but not all — of the rest are the fruit of that labor, their flourishing helped not only by the commitment of their clubs to allowing homegrown players to flourish — “It is in our D.N.A. to allow young players to reach the top level,” Zanotta said of F.C. Dallas, where McKennie honed his game as an academy player — but by the rising standards of the league as a whole.“The owners have been investing more money in better signings,” Zanotta said. “So the quality of player in the league is growing, and that helps the development of the American players.” His counterpart in Philadelphia, Ernst Tanner, said the level of play in the league was only part of it; the prevalence of a “high-press, high-risk, more dynamic” style of play in M.L.S. helps, too, since teams in Europe need players who are comfortable playing precisely that way.The European version of the story is not at odds with that, but its emphasis falls elsewhere. “I think when Christian Pulisic came over and established himself at a high level, that opened the door to other teams scouting young players in the U.S.,” said Jesse Marsch, the American coach of Red Bull Salzburg, Aaronson’s new club.“You had Christian, Weston McKennie, Josh Sargent, Tyler Adams all having success in professional environments, and that encouraged others to go and scout earlier and earlier in America, and that meant more and more opportunities for players, especially in Germany.”Weston McKennie’s success in Germany, and now with Juventus in Italy, has helped to change the perceptions of American prospects in both leagues.Credit…Alberto Estevez/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is not, in other words, necessarily the case that European teams suddenly noticed a change in what was on offer in the American market. It is that Pulisic’s breakthrough — initially at Borussia Dortmund, and then at Chelsea — encouraged more teams to look at the market, seriously, for the first time.Zanotta does not contest that interpretation; the transfer market, in his experience, has always been slightly inclined to follow fashion. “We have seen it here, too,” he said. “You have times when there are a lot of Argentineans doing well, or Brazilians, and that drives clubs to pay more attention to a specific market.”The closer European teams have looked, too, the more they have found M.L.S. an easy place to do business. Rather than try to resist the predators circling its brightest prospects — or leaving its clubs to navigate the murky corners of the transfer market alone — the league has an entire department, run by Efstathiou, dedicated to helping facilitate deals.His dozen liaison officers are in daily contact with all of M.L.S.’s 27 clubs, “keeping tabs on potential transactions, both in and out.” The league monitors and assists with deals every step of the way, both in its legal capacity as the ultimate employer of every player, and in an advisory role, offering guidance on the realities of “the wider marketplace.”If that seems counterintuitive — that a league should be smoothing the passage of some of its brightest talents to its theoretical competitors — to Tanner, for one, it is the natural conclusion of the process. “For now, if we develop a high-level player, it is only right that we sell them to allow them to reach their full potential,” he said.To Efstathiou, it is not only unavoidable, but beneficial. “To improve the quality on the field, we have to be full participants in the market,” he said. “That means buying, as well as selling.”His team is not likely to see any quiet any time soon. In Philadelphia, Tanner hears “daily” from representatives of European teams, eager not to miss out on the successor to McKenzie and Aaronson. Zanotta has already fielded inquiries about players at F.C. Dallas who might replace Reynolds — or his predecessor, Reggie Cannon, now with the Portuguese club Boavista — in Texas. He is not the only one. European clubs are monitoring the likes of Julian Araujo, a 19-year-old fullback with the Los Angeles Galaxy, and the young Real Salt Lake goalkeeper David Ochoa. Both will, most likely, be the subject of interest when the transfer market reopens this summer.Lipka takes that as a considerable compliment, and a testament to the work M.L.S. has done in the past decade and more. He remembers a point — not so long ago — when the few American players who made it to Europe were treated with suspicion, assumed to be hard-running and hard-working but technically limited, and when the old world’s biggest clubs would not even consider the United States as a market worth tapping.“It used to be a burden to be a young American player,” Lipka said. “Now, I think it is quite a good time.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More