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      Bruno Fernandes, Manchester United and the Long Game

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      Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellOn SoccerBruno Fernandes and the Long GameThe Portuguese midfielder’s circuitous path to Manchester United stardom revealed inefficiencies in soccer’s vast scouting system, and how even a sure thing can almost slip through the cracks.Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 14, 2021MANCHESTER, England — What strikes Martelinho, whenever he watches Bruno Fernandes play, is how little he has changed. Fernandes might now be the best player on the in-form team in the world’s biggest league, but to Martelinho, he is not recognizably different from the teenager he coached in the youth teams of a struggling Portuguese club a decade ago.“The way he is now is the way he always was,” Martelinho said, casting his mind back to the two years he spent working with Fernandes in the academy at Boavista. “He always played with a lot of ambition, always on the front foot, never playing a pass backward, always trying to get into the penalty area. He needed more experience, but everything you see now was there then.”Such is the biography of most of Fernandes’s peers among the world’s finest players, of course. The transcendent gifts, obvious to all, that win a place on soccer’s fast track to greatness. The place at one of the world’s foremost talent factories. A season or two in the first team and then the vindication of a lucrative, headline-grabbing move to England or Spain.But while Fernandes’s starting point and destination fit that pattern, there is no straight line that can be drawn between the Fernandes that Martelinho knew and the one that he, and the rest of the world, sees today, the one that has blossomed — over the last year — into the driving force behind Manchester United’s resurgence.Instead, he has taken a more circuitous path, one that involved a season in Italy’s second division and several more in the less glamorous corners of that country’s top league, years that would leave him essentially “anonymous” — to use Martelinho’s word — in his homeland until he was in his mid-20s.Fernandes’s story could be seen as an uplifting tale of delayed gratification, hard work paying off, perseverance and dedication. Or it could be interpreted as a cautionary tale of a deep-rooted inefficiency in how soccer narrows its search for talent, a reminder that the margins between success and failure are fine, and that destiny can sometimes hinge on something as simple as a bus.Bruno Fernandes has scored 11 goals as a revitalized Manchester United has risen to the top of the Premier League.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillA Calculated GambleAs the chief scout for Novara — an Italian soccer team based in a small town west of Milan and, that season, struggling at the foot of Serie A — Cristiano Giaretta was used to unsolicited calls from agents offering players that might be of interest.When a Portuguese agent named Miguel Pinho got in touch with Giaretta in 2012 to recommend a teenage midfielder at Boavista, he might easily have disregarded it. His job involved tracking hundreds of players across much of Europe. He had never heard of Pinho, and he had never heard of Bruno Fernandes.Nor, really, should he have. Though Boavista is traditionally the second team in Portugal’s second city, Porto, financial turmoil had, at the time, left it struggling in the third division. Its youth system had a good reputation, but by common consensus the cream of the country’s endless supply of young soccer talent was corralled in the academies of its big three clubs: Benfica, Sporting and F.C. Porto.Fernandes had the chance to sign for at least one of them. Born in Maia, not far from Porto, he had been spotted by both Porto and Boavista while playing in a youth tournament. Both offered him a place in their academy. He chose Boavista, apparently, because it volunteered to send a minibus to take him to training, and neither of his parents could drive.It is a version of the story that his former coach Martelinho, for one, disputes. “I think he believed he could get into the first team more easily at Boavista,” he said. “I made the same choice when I was a player, and for the same reason. It is a smaller club, so it is easier to play.”With Fernandes and Marcus Rashford, among others, United heads to Liverpool on Sunday newly confident in its Premier League title chances.Credit…Pool photo by Owen HumphreysWhatever the reason, it may have been the decision that would define Fernandes’s path. Porto’s youth games attract scouts from across Europe, scouring the grass for Portugal’s next great prospect. Boavista’s do not.Had he signed with Porto, Fernandes might have followed the more familiar route to fame and fortune. He might at least have won the attention of the selectors for Portugal’s various age-group teams, another shop window for the next generation of young talent.At Boavista, he was effectively in the shadows. “He was never called up for the national teams,” Martelinho said. “I don’t know why, though there were lots of talented players in his generation.” The vast majority of them, of course, came with the added luster of playing for one of Portugal’s established giants.It was that oversight that gave Giaretta an opening, and took Fernandes down a different route. On the phone, Pinho seemed a “serious” sort of person, Giaretta said, so he did not dismiss the idea as nothing more than an agent’s pitch. He traveled to the north of Portugal to watch the 17-year-old Fernandes in an academy game.“My first impression was good, but not exceptional,” Giaretta said. “You could see the technical quality. His decision-making was better than average. He was light on his feet. But he wasn’t by far the best player on the pitch or anything.” Meeting Fernandes swayed him.“You could see, straightaway, that you were in front of a grown-up,” he said. Giaretta decided to recommend that Novara move to sign the teenager.Giaretta does not know whether Boavista did not hold out much hope for Fernandes’s development, or whether the club was in such a weakened financial state that it simply could not afford to say no, but Novara eventually paid less than $50,000 to sign him. “Every transfer is a risk,” he said. “But yes, this was a calculated gamble. Even the loss of a few thousand euros would have been a blow for the club.”He had decided to spend it on Fernandes, an unheralded 17-year-old, one that nobody else seemed to value especially highly, from a club in Portugal’s third division, one that nobody seemed to bother to watch. Eight years later, Fernandes would cost Manchester United $97 million.Udinese was the second of three stops during Fernandes’s successful, if unsatisfying, foray to Italy. He returned to Portugal in 2017.Credit…Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo and a half years at Sporting revived Fernandes, and reset his price. A year ago, Manchester United paid 80 million euros (about $97 million) for him.Credit…Filipe Amorim/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Lessons of the Long Way AroundFrancesco Guidolin was intrigued. As coach of Udinese, he was used to being presented with talented young players drawn from across the world, promising, polyglot teenagers plucked from relative obscurity by the club’s unrivaled network of scouts. It was rare, though, to find one of them picked up so close to home.Fernandes’s stay at Novara had been brief: only a year, in fact, in which he won a place in the club’s first team, scored four times in 23 games, earned the nickname — the Maradona of Novara — before he was sold, at a vast profit, to Udinese in Serie A. Giaretta was central to that, too; he left Novara for Udinese in 2013, and recommended Fernandes to his new employer.Guidolin had not seen much of Fernandes at Novara. When Fernandes arrived at Udinese, Guidolin was “curious” to see what this teenager with the unusual career path was like. “We went into training camp before the season,” Guidolin said. “Playing in Serie B and playing in Serie A are different things, but straightaway you could see that he was ready.”Indeed, Guidolin felt that, perhaps, Fernandes’s early exposure to senior soccer — even at a lower level — had been in his interest. “A year in Serie B is a more complete experience than arriving straight from the youth system,” he said of players who move to Italy. “You could see that he had more certainty, took more responsibility, than most players his age.”Looking at his trajectory since, it is possible to wonder if, perhaps, taking the long way around has worked in Fernandes’s favor. What stands out now to all of those who worked with him in his early days is his willingness to lead: to carry a team, even one as heavy as Manchester United, on his back.Perhaps he learned that in those years he spent among the game’s lesser lights: one at Novara, three at Udinese, one at Sampdoria. By the summer of 2017, when he returned to Portugal — as the second-most-expensive signing in Sporting’s history — he had still not received a call-up to Portugal’s national team (though he had captained its under-21 side). His arrival was not heralded as a coup. “Most of the big teams had not seen much of him,” Martelinho said.And yet, within just a few months, it was obvious what Portugal had been missing. “The Portuguese league is not as strong as England, Spain or Germany,” Martelinho said. “But it is maybe the fifth- or sixth-best league in Europe. It is not easy. Bruno made it look easy.”His impact in England has been no less swift. It is not yet 12 full months since he arrived at Old Trafford, yet he has already been voted into one Premier League team of the season, and, with his team emerging as contenders to end a seven-year wait for a championship, he would rank among the leading candidates to win this campaign’s player of the year award.And yet if his rise seems rapid, it is anything but. Fernandes has had to wait for this moment. Not through any fault of his own, but through a flaw in soccer’s structure, through its inability to look for talent in unexpected places. This was the player he always was, and always could be. It just took the game a while to notice, and all because he needed to take a bus, all those years ago.“The way he is now,” a former coach of Fernandes says, “is the way he always was.”Credit…Pool photo by Peter PowellAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      From Marcus Rashford to Megan Rapinoe: What Our Stars Say About Us

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerWhat Our Stars Say About UsOnly a handful of soccer players attain what might be best described as mainstream cultural relevance. That kind of fame now comes with responsibility.Marcus Rashford’s charity work has raised his profile in ways that even his immense talents could not.Credit…Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJan. 9, 2021, 7:30 a.m. ETThere are almost eight years between the photographs, but they seem to come not so much from different eras as from different worlds.The first is from the summer of 1990. Paul Gascoigne is beaming against a bright blue sky. He, plus the rest of the England team that had reached the semifinals of the World Cup, has just touched down to a heroes’ welcome. Gascoigne, the breakout star of the tournament, has decided to greet his public wearing a pair of plastic novelty breasts.The second image is from the summer of 1998, before a World Cup this time, rather than after one. David Beckham holds hands with his fiancée, the singer Victoria Adams, on a night out. Neither looks especially happy with the fact that a throng of photographers has chosen to accompany them for the evening. Over a pair of combat trousers, Beckham is wearing a sarong.David Beckham’s comfort zone was always much bigger than the soccer field.Credit…Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOnly a handful of soccer players ever attain what might be best described as mainstream fame. Anyone who follows the game even at a casual remove would know the name of Kevin De Bruyne, of course: He is, after all, one of the most gifted players of this generation, probably the outstanding star of the most popular league in the world.For all his talent, though, for all his medals and other achievements, De Bruyne remains famous only in a soccer sense. That is no mean feat, of course: Hundreds of millions of people across the globe will know his strengths and weaknesses, his highs and his lows. They will have fiercely held opinions on his most recent performances for Manchester City.But countless more will not. It is not a perfect parallel, but it is perhaps the difference between Broadway fame and Hollywood fame. Modern soccer is, as the journalist David Goldblatt has written, perhaps the most pervasive cultural phenomenon of all time, but even that comes with a limited power, a niche appeal. The vast majority of the global population does not follow it, not even a little, and so the name Kevin De Bruyne will mean little, or nothing, to them.Kevin De Bruyne is unquestionably a star. An icon? That’s different.Credit…Pool photo by Clive BrunskillThat is true of all but a select few. Often, the exceptions make the leap through virtue of sheer ability. Ballet is hardly an international passion, but for a while, Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most famous people on the planet. It is by the same osmosis that Pelé, Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo found a fame that extends beyond the sporting silo in which it was forged. (For the record, in terms of sheer numbers, Ronaldo is surely substantially more famous than Nureyev ever was, but then Nureyev didn’t have Instagram.)Others, though, attain that fame not just through their sporting prowess but through their cultural relevance. Beckham is, perhaps, the clearest example. He was, of course, an outstanding player — far better than he was given credit for at the time — but it took something more for him to become as much a cultural figure as a soccer one.Beckham would have had an abundance of crossover appeal at any time, of course — the looks, the fashion, the Spice Girl romance — but the level of fame he achieved can be attributed to the precise time he emerged, too.It was with the Beckham wedding that the BBC opened a four-part documentary series last month on the nature of 21st century celebrity. The Beckhams did not herald the dawn of the celebrity era, of course — their engagement was announced a year after the death of Princess Diana — but they did represent an apogee, an acceleration of it: Crowds of fans lined the streets on their wedding day, and a glossy magazine paid a frankly unthinkable — in the social media age — 1 million pounds for exclusive pictures of the ceremony.We knew, at the time, that this was the era of Cool Britannia and Britpop and Danny Boyle. What we did not know, perhaps, was that it would soon be the era of Heat magazine, Britain’s equivalent to Us Weekly, and Paris and Nicole and Perez Hilton and “Big Brother.” Beckham cut through because he was not only a player, but because he also encapsulated a celebrity culture that was just starting to flower.Paul Gascoigne’s tears endeared him to fans watching the 1990 World Cup.Credit…Roberto Pfeil/Associated PressGascoigne, eight years earlier, had done the same, albeit in a very different culture. He is often credited with softening soccer’s image in Britain, his tears on the field during England’s defeat in the 1990 World Cup semifinals washing away the stains of hooliganism and Heysel and The Sunday Times’s damning verdict that soccer was “a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people.” After Gascoigne came “Fever Pitch” and Pete Davies and the Premier League, the agents of soccer’s gentrification.There is some truth in that, but Gascoigne was also very much a figure of his age, too. The drinking and the pranks, the novelty songs and the novelty breasts were all the accouterments of what would eventually be called “lad culture,” the unreconstructed, beery era of the early 1990s that bequeathed the world a suite of soft-core men’s magazines, a range of sugary alcopops and, to some extent, Oasis.It is difficult to analyze with any certainty the mechanics of Gascoigne’s or Beckham’s fame. Did they rise beyond their sport because they reflected an emerging culture neither they nor we quite grasped? Were they figures of sufficient influence that they shaped the culture in their own image? Or were they understood through the lens of the dominant culture of the time, and we turned them into what we wanted them to be?However it worked, both became emblems of their eras, soccer’s emissaries to the mainstream, individuals through which it is possible to parse the cultures that formed and distorted them. But they were not the first. George Best, regarded as the fifth Beatle, and Johan Cruyff, a symbol of the counterculture, had been through the same process in the 1960s and ’70s. (In England, at least, the 1980s are best understood through a cricketer, Ian Botham.)It is striking, then, that the two players of the current generation most firmly set on that path are Marcus Rashford and Megan Rapinoe. Neither is the best player of this era — though Rapinoe is closer than Rashford — but both, at the start of 2021, have the sort of mainstream fame that few of their peers will ever muster.Like a handful of stars before her, Megan Rapinoe has the kind of fame that transcends soccer.Credit…Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesAnd as with Beckham and Gascoigne, their fame offers a window into our culture, affirming not just that this is an era in which the traditional gatekeepers of fame have been replaced by something more direct — and, possibly, more egalitarian, thanks to social media — or that athlete activism is encouraged rather than merely tolerated.The rise of first Rapinoe and then Rashford is a sign that fame now comes with responsibility, that we have moved beyond the Beckham phase of celebrity culture (pictures of famous people being famous) and the Perez Hilton phase (pictures of famous people sweating) and into an era in which fame is bestowed for standing for something, whether it is equal pay or equal rights or feeding hungry children. In the 2020s, fame and values are interlinked.Just as with Beckham and Gascoigne, it is not possible to say for sure whether Rapinoe and Rashford created that era, or whether the era created them. Either way, though, their prominence says as much about us as it does about them. Their fame, to some extent, shows us who we are.Italian Soccer, but Not as You Know ItWeston McKennie added another goal to his highlight reel on Wednesday.Credit…Antonio Calanni/Associated PressWeston McKennie was not, it is fair to say, particularly known for his goal scoring during his time with Schalke, but he has developed something of a taste for it with Juventus. He scored, spectacularly, at Camp Nou against Barcelona late in 2020, and his 2021 started with a celebration in another of European soccer’s great cathedrals, San Siro, on Wednesday night.McKennie’s goal sealed a vital 3-1 win for Juventus against A.C. Milan, one that keeps Andrea Pirlo’s team in touching distance of Milan, and Inter, at the summit of Serie A, and preserves, for now, the dream of a 10th straight title.Pirlo’s first few months as a coach have been — as is to be expected, really — a little mixed: His Juventus beat Barcelona and lost by 3-0 at home to Fiorentina in the space of a couple of weeks in December. There are moments when his vision of an ultramodern, swift, ruthless side comes into focus, and moments when that seems distant as a dream.But what stood out most of all, on Wednesday, was how atypical the game felt, given both its stakes — an old rivalry, two title contenders, the last unbeaten team in any of Europe’s major leagues against a side that would have effectively surrendered its title with defeat — and its location.It is strange, really, how powerful the idea of Italian soccer as inherently defensive has proved to be. Serie A has not been like that for some time, not for a decade, perhaps longer. Teams like Atalanta and Sassuolo are as attack-minded as anyone in Europe; Serie A games, on average, had more goals last season than the Premier League.Wednesday at San Siro fit that new image of Italian soccer perfectly: a rapid-fire exchange of punches, a startling absence of caution, a breathless, faintly frenzied tempo. Even at two goals down, with the game as good as finished, Milan kept pouring forward. The stereotype has been outdated for a while. It may be time to dispense with it for good.The Half-Empty CupThe F.A. Cup is viewed by some more as a relic than as a prize.Credit…Toby Melville/ReutersSouthampton’s game against Shrewsbury is already off. At the time of writing, Liverpool’s trip to Aston Villa looked sure to follow. Lowly Chorley will have its moment against the comparative might of Derby County in name only: Derby, missing its entire first team, will be forced to field a squad of teenage hopefuls.The third round of the F.A. Cup — the point in soccer’s most venerable competition when the elite joins in — remains, even now, the most evocative date on English soccer’s calendar, a weekend of tradition and romance and occasional wonder that encapsulates so much of what England likes to believe is good about its game.The luster of the competition has faded in the last two decades, of course. It is no longer just coaches of the Premier League’s superpowers who resent its intrusion — most teams from most leagues now field their reserves, saving their stars for more important battles ahead — but the power of what it represents has, if anything, grown, the last glimmer of egalitarianism in an increasingly stratified world.But the F.A. Cup has long occupied a fragile place in soccer’s changing ecosystem. It is more than 20 years, now, since Manchester United was encouraged not to take part in the 2000 edition of the competition, traveling instead to Brazil for a forerunner of the Club World Cup, a move the English authorities themselves felt would be good diplomacy while the country was bidding for the actual men’s World Cup.At the time, many felt that move proved the F.A. Cup no longer truly mattered; in the years that have passed, it has come to be seen as a watershed in the competition’s history. It certainly has never felt as if it mattered quite so much since then, though the forces behind that are far more complex than the absence of one team for one season.It is easy, then, to see why the F.A. would not have wanted to cancel this year’s competition (quite apart from the value of its own television deals, and the lifeline F.A. Cup funds provide to smaller clubs). Skipping a year would have been confirmation that the tournament was some kind of optional afterthought.And yet plowing on may prove no less damaging. This weekend’s matches will be played in empty stadiums as the second — or possibly third, it’s hard to say for sure — wave of the coronavirus pandemic bites. The teams that do play will be even weaker than normal, as coaches try to manage the fearsome workload placed on their players; the ones that do not may be given free passes into the fourth round, or have to catch up at a later date, turning the competition into chaos.It is hard not to wonder if it might all just feel a little pointless, a tradition being maintained for its own sake in circumstances that are really not conducive to it. It is, equally, hard not to think that perhaps, in hindsight, this might be the point at which whatever remains of the tournament’s mystique evaporates for good.CorrespondenceFor Tom Davies, left, and Jack Grealish, one reader noticed, every day is leg day.Credit…Dave Thompson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesI think I know where James Armstrong might fall on that question. “I think it is insane to be playing sports in a pandemic,” he wrote. “Is the risk of long-term Covid worth it for a football match? Or a basketball game?”It is a valid question and an understandable view, though it’s not one I share. In Europe — I cannot speak for elsewhere in the world — there is no evidence that I’m aware of to suggest that players have contracted the virus because they are playing soccer. The rise in cases we have seen in recent weeks seems, almost entirely, to be related to mixing away from the field.As a rule, the bubbles the leagues and their teams have instituted have held. And, speaking from the perspective of a country now in a third lockdown, it does not feel too naïve or self-aggrandizing to suggest that sports’ playing on gives at least a portion of the population some link to normality and some source of distraction at a time when both are badly needed.Carl Lennertz, meanwhile, is fixated on Tom Davies’s and Jack Grealish’s socks. “It’s so oddly unprofessional yet delightful to watch these two in their gym socks,” he wrote. “It’s like watching a rugby player come out in sandals or a pro golfer in flip flops. Why take the risk of exposing one’s shins that way? I’m sure they are in line with some sort of precise measurement, but it’s still not cool despite its individualistic look.”I see your point, Carl, but I’m afraid I have to invoke the Rui Costa rule: If he did it, then it is not only OK, but it is the very height of cool.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Schalke, Tasmania and the Race to the Bundesliga's Bottom

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerA Year Without a Win Is About to Get WorseSchalke can match the Bundesliga record for futility this weekend, to the dismay of the team that has held the mark for generations. But the club’s darkest days lie ahead.Schalke can match Tasmania Berlin’s record of 31 consecutive games without a win on Saturday.Credit…Matthias Schrader/Associated PressJan. 8, 2021, 11:37 a.m. ETBy his own admission, Almir Numic is quite enjoying the media circus. Over the last couple of months, television crews have beaten an increasingly frequent path to Neukölln, the district of Berlin that is home to Tasmania, the soccer team he runs. Sky Sports was there early in December. Germany’s Sport1 has been down twice.There have been countless requests for interviews — Suddeutsche Zeitung, Kicker, Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle, and then ESPN and El País (and The New York Times) — and prime-time radio spots, too. His quotes have reached parts of the world most fifth-division amateur teams do not reach: picked up in China and Australia, cited by the BBC and France24.All of them have asked to hear Numic’s view on the curiously cheering story that has Tasmania at its heart. For more than half a century, the club’s claim to fame has been that it is the worst team ever to have competed in the Bundesliga. In its only campaign in Germany’s top division, in 1965 and 1966, it failed to win for 31 games in a row. No team before or since has ever performed quite so badly.Now, though, its record is under threat. Schalke — a club of a vastly different order of magnitude to Tasmania — has not won a Bundesliga game since January 17 last year, and with ominous inexorability it has been ticking toward Tasmania’s high (or low) watermark ever since.Conceding a late equalizer at Augsburg on Dec. 13 made it 27 matches without a win for Schalke. Nos. 28 and 29 came before Christmas, with home defeats to Arminia Bielefeld and S.C. Freiburg. In Berlin last Saturday, under its fourth manager of the season, Schalke lost to Hertha B.S.C., 3-0. Failure to beat Hoffenheim at home on Saturday means one of Germany’s proudest clubs will equal Tasmania’s dismal record.What has made Numic — and Tasmania — such a draw for the news media, though, is that rather than welcoming this as a chance to shed its unwanted place in history, the club is instead desperate to keep it. “We are so proud of our record,” Numic said. “Of course, for the players at the time it would not have been a happy experience, but now we can step back and laugh about it. It is part of our identity.”Unlike Schalke, Tasmania Berlin embraces its record for futility.Credit…Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is, Numic said, a degree of irony in the club’s celebration of its ignominy, as the T-shirts for sale on its Facebook page indicate: They carry Tasmania’s crest, accompanied by the phrase “Rekordmeister” on the front and a list of the “achievements” from the 1965-66 season on the back.The club has, though, found that many of its fans take sincere pride in Tasmania’s record. Before the Bundesliga game at Hertha last week, a group of them even traveled to Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to offer Schalke their support. “The fans feel that the negative record provides the club a certain cult status,” Numic said. “We do speak with them about it, and it would be a shame to lose it.”It is hard to imagine that, even as time softens the pain, their peers at Schalke would ever take the same attitude. Unlike Tasmania — which was only admitted to the Bundesliga for that one fateful season after Hertha failed to meet the league’s financial requirements, and the German authorities decided that having a team in Berlin would be good public relations — Schalke is one of the country’s grandees, a club owned by some 160,000 members, the proprietor of a stadium that holds 62,000 people, a team that considers itself a peer of Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.It is less than a decade since Schalke, its team then featuring the Spanish forward Raúl González and the young goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, appeared in the semifinals of the Champions League. It is not quite three since the club, under its bright young coach Domenico Tedesco, finished as runner-up to Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. It still regularly ranks as one of the world’s wealthiest clubs: According to the financial analysts Deloitte, it had the 15th-highest revenues in soccer in 2019.Manuel Neuer was Schalke’s captain when it lost to Manchester United in the 2011 Champions League semifinals.Credit…Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe speed and scale of its decline, from that perspective, is shocking. Only 18 months or so separated its last appearance in the Champions League’s lucrative knockout rounds in March 2019 and the day in November when the forward Mark Uth described the team’s performances as “helpless” and admitted that he “felt like going into the locker room and crying.”From another perspective, though, it feels as if Schalke’s demise has been brewing for some time. Its collapse is a financial failure — the club’s debts stood, even before the pandemic, at around $240 million, a consequence of years of living beyond its means — but it is perhaps most easily understood as a sporting one.At the start of last season, Schalke promoted its young goalkeeper Alexander Nübel to the club’s captaincy. He was the latest in a long line of youth products in which the club took immense pride — it has a particular ability to nurture goalkeepers, and has a reputation as the “Harvard” of that particular art — and, at 23, he was seen as Schalke’s future.Six months later, with his contract set to run out, Nübel signed an agreement with Bayern Munich. Six months after that, he left the club that had developed him, and it did not receive so much as a cent in compensation. If that had been a one-time affair, an exception to the rule, then it might have been understandable: All clubs, after all, sometimes lose out in negotiations, or find themselves backed into a corner.Empty stands have only deepened the financial crisis at Schalke, which was tens of millions of dollars in debt long before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus.Credit…Leon Kuegeler/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut it was not. Not long before the Nübel standoff, Schalke was described as “the club that refuses to play Moneyball” in an article in The Ringer that asked if the team’s apparent willingness to let stars run down their contracts was a deliberate and potentially beneficial policy. Schalke had done it, after all, with Joel Matip and Leon Goretzka and Sead Kolasinac and Max Meyer and, most notably of all, with the man Nübel is now being groomed to replace at Bayern: Neuer.In hindsight, such an interpretation of Schalke’s approach goes beyond kind and looks, instead, close to delusional. The failure to tether the club’s best players to contracts, or at least to sell them while they retained some market value, was proof not of planning but of rampant dysfunction. According to a number of people familiar with the workings of the club, the departures highlight a chronic and yearslong dearth of foresight, knowledge, connections and leadership in Schalke’s hierarchy.The consequences are plain to see. Even a conservative estimate of those players’ values would top $100 million; instead, Schalke received nothing. Deprived of that income, the quality of player the club was able to attract steadily declined until the first team was staffed entirely by overpromoted hopefuls and underpowered journeymen.This summer, facing more than a year without matchday income and a mountain of debt, the club was unable to reinvest any of the money it received for the loan of Weston McKennie to Juventus. Despite losing one of his best players on the eve of the new season, Schalke’s coach at the time, David Wagner, was not permitted to pay for a single permanent signing to reinforce his squad.The United States midfielder Weston McKennie cut his professional teeth at Schalke before leaving on loan.Credit…Pool photo by Martin MeissnerWhen he joined Juventus this summer, Schalke put the money toward its debt instead of a replacement.Credit…Alberto Estevez/EPA, via ShutterstockAt least one loan deal collapsed because Schalke, the 15th-richest club in the world, could not pay the player’s relatively reasonable salary. Wagner was forced to start the season relying on a host of players who had previously been sent out on loan, their time at Schalke apparently at an end. He was fired after two games.That was no surprise, either. Since its appearance in the Champions League semifinal, Schalke has cycled through 12 managers, few of them given more than a season to fix a broken team. It has turned back to Huub Stevens no fewer than three times.At the same time, the club has found relations with its fans increasingly strained, as an institution revered for its working-class values and its traditionalism signed a sponsorship deal with the Russian energy giant Gazprom and several of its executives encouraged the permitting private investment into the team.Its longstanding chairman, Clemens Tönnies — one of Germany’s richest but least popular men, and for years the apparent guarantor for Schalke’s spending habit — was forced to step down, first temporarily after making a series of racially-charged remarks and then permanently, after a coronavirus outbreak at one of his meat-processing plants. To some, Tonnies’ return is the only way out of Schalke’s financial mess. To others, he is the one ultimately responsible for overseeing the decline. It is possible that he is both.Schalke has allowed 39 goals this season and scored only 8. Relegation could mean ruin.Credit…Pool photo by Wolfgang RattayWhatever happens this weekend and next — whether Schalke equals and then surpasses Tasmania’s record, or avoids it at the last hurdle — is, for Schalke, something of a sideshow. This is not the nadir: That may not even come with relegation, which now seems inevitable, but with the attempt to manage the club’s debts, and find a way back, when it is deprived of the income it is guaranteed just by being in the Bundesliga. The record, in reality, is only one milestone on a long and perilous journey.For Numic and Tasmania, by contrast, their role in the story is drawing to a close. Perhaps Schalke will take their record. Perhaps it will not. Either way, the media circus will depart. Numic is sanguine about that. It will be of little solace to Schalke, but at Tasmania, there is a confidence that, on some level, it will always be the worst at something.“We have other negative records that we hold,” Numic said, cheerily. “So there are other occasions when people speak about us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      With Man City Positives, Premier League's Coronavirus Outbreak Widens

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerThe Premier League Has a Schedule. It Really Needs a Plan.As the coronavirus invades locker rooms and postpones matches, soccer needs to face up to a potential worst-case scenario.Manchester City played without fans for months. On Monday, it couldn’t play at all.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/ReutersJan. 1, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETOn the face of it, the Premier League’s decision was an easy and an obvious one. Manchester City and Manchester United had finished last season late, thanks to their commitments in the summer’s European competitions.To ensure that both teams would have a similar break between campaigns as all of their rivals, the Premier League decreed that they would start the new season a week later than everyone else. The league’s omnipotent fixture computer had drawn City against Aston Villa and United against Burnley for that first weekend of the season; those two games would have to be postponed.All of this, so far, makes sense. What happens next does not.Knowing that its teams were facing a compacted schedule anyway, the Premier League could have decided that Burnley and Villa might as well play one another on opening weekend. That may have raised some logistical challenges — policing, scheduling — but hardly insurmountable ones, particularly with fans still locked out of stadiums. The benefit, of having only one game, rather than two, to slot in later in a busy year, far outweighed the cost.That is not how soccer works, though, not even in a pandemic. Burnley did not play Aston Villa. The two games from the first weekend of the season have not been made up. It took until Thursday for the Premier League to find a window: They now will be played in the middle of January, five months late.That may seem a trivial issue, little more than a minor misstep, one that can doubtless be explained by the myriad complexities of scheduling a sporting season and will be easily resolved once the field in the domestic cup competitions is thinned a little. And, in some senses, that is all it is.Soccer has made the best of bad situations for months.Credit…Pool photo by Martin MeissnerBut it is also an instructive example of how the Premier League — and elite soccer as a whole — thinks, how pervasive is its belief in its own relentlessness, how delicate and vulnerable this season remains. The simple fact that Burnley did not play Aston Villa on opening day encapsulates soccer’s myopia, and its hubris.The Premier League lost two more games this week. First, Manchester City requested the postponement of its trip to Everton after five of its players tested positive for coronavirus. Fearing a more widespread outbreak — and much to Everton’s surprisingly public chagrin — the Premier League acquiesced. (Pep Guardiola revealed Friday that City will be missing five players who had tested positive when it plays Chelsea on Sunday.)About 48 hours later, Fulham had to make the same request, canceling its match with Tottenham on only a few hours notice; it, too, had recorded a spate of positive test results, and in the interest of public health, it was determined the game should be delayed, despite the unhappiness of noted Instagram influencer José Mourinho.City and Fulham were not the first clubs to be hit by the virus. In November, Newcastle had to close its training facility and skip a game against Aston Villa after an outbreak that has left at least two players with the kind of persistent and debilitating symptoms doctors refer to as Long Covid. Those clubs will, it is safe to assume, not be the last. Sheffield United played its game against Burnley this week despite reporting a number of positive tests at the club.The situation in the Football League, which governs the second, third and fourth tiers of soccer in England, is even worse. In League One, seven of the 12 games scheduled to be played on Tuesday had to be postponed because of coronavirus outbreaks. Five had been missed on Boxing Day, too. There have been calls from some medical departments for a two-week “circuit-breaker” pause to the season to avoid players’ being overloaded by a backlog of matches in the spring.It does not feel as if any of this was especially difficult to foresee. Soccer cannot be blamed, of course, for failing to anticipate the scale of the second wave of the pandemic in Britain (or anyplace else), or for the appearance of a particularly virulent mutation of the virus in the southeast part of England.Fans have adapted to new realities. Leagues should, too.Credit…Pool photo by Paul ChildsBut it should not have required the clarity of hindsight to project that cases might rise in the winter, that the long-anticipated second wave might have some impact on soccer, that the bubbles the sport was relying on to play through might not prove entirely impermeable, that some sort of contingency plan might be needed.And yet soccer seems woefully underprepared for something that should have been wholly predictable. It is not just that there is little room in the calendar set aside to play postponed matches: just three weekends in the English season set aside for teams to make up games they have missed, but only if they are eliminated from the domestic cups first.It is that — as the Premier League confirmed in a statement this week — the subject of what happens if the season is paused, or worse, canceled entirely, has not even been discussed.(It is striking, though perhaps not vastly surprising, that two of the most ardent voices calling for cancellation on moral grounds in the spring, Aston Villa and West Ham, have been quiet this time. It’s almost as if they are keener to play now that they are fifth and 10th in the table, respectively.)To be clear, at this point, there is no reason to believe the season should be curtailed: Soccer has proved, over the last nine months, that it is able to play on. It has not increased the burden on the country’s medical services, or deprived the general population of tests, or been responsible for a more widespread outbreak of the virus. Its protocols, for the most part, have worked.But it is hardly outlandish to suggest that the Premier League — and most of its peers around Europe — might have looked at what happened in the spring and wondered if perhaps they needed to have a plan in place should the worst-case scenario unfold.Fans at Brighton. European stadiums that opened recently may soon close again.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat need not have meant an immediate end to any season; other, more creative solutions were available. Something along the lines of the bubble tournament staged by the N.B.A., for example, or a shortened season — along the lines of what is already standard in Scotland and Belgium — might have served as an adequate break-glass course of action. Only if those workarounds were not possible would a nonsporting conclusion come into force.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Data, Diet and Better Set Pieces: Seeking Soccer’s Future

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNumbers, Knowledge and Better Set Pieces: a View Into Soccer’s FutureF.C. Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. The problem is pretty soon everyone else has them, too.The world’s best clubs are already getting a competitive edge through psychology, data and nutrition. The next frontier? Better set pieces.Credit…Clockwise from top left, EPA, via Shutterstock; Steven Paston, via AP; pool photo by Laurence Griffiths; The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020, 1:00 a.m. ETEverything that happens at F.C. Midtjylland is quantified. Well, almost everything. Every game played by every one of the Danish soccer club’s teams produces data points in the thousands. Each training session, from the first team to the preteens in the academy, is recorded and codified and analyzed.The only exception is a game that happens on Fridays at lunchtime, pitting two teams of staff members — coaches and analysts and communications officers and sports scientists — against each other. It is a chance for everyone to let off steam at the end of the week, a reminder of the importance of having fun, said Soren Berg, Midtjylland’s head of analysis.“We joke about doing video and data analysis on it,” he said, though perhaps it is best left unexamined. “The players probably do not need to see it,” he joked as he watched the game earlier this month. “You know, we tell them a lot about press intensity. And I do not see a lot of press intensity out there.”Midtjylland has numbers on everything else. The club knows how much its players have run and what they have done in the gym and what they have eaten and where they shoot from and how well they have slept. It is attempting to know even the most intimate parts of their minds: how they think, how they feel, how they learn.Midtjylland’s analysts collect data on every player from every match, every training session, every workout.Credit…Ritzau Scanpix Denmark/via ReutersMidtjylland, founded in 1999, has what its sporting director, Svend Graversen, regards as a “growth mind-set.”“We are a new club,” he explained. “We are not dragged down by history because we don’t have any. So we have to make our own.” It is willing to try new things, to seek competitive edges wherever it can find them.The approach has worked. This young, ambitious club from Herning — a quiet city in the middle of Jutland, “a long way from Copenhagen,” according to Rasmus Ankersen, the team’s chairman — now sits not only at the pinnacle of Danish soccer, a three-time national champion and a regular in continental competitions, but at the very cutting edge of the sport.Midtjylland’s search for competitive advantage has made it a place where ideas emerge. It was the first team in Denmark to make its young prospects train every day. It was one of the first teams to embrace the use of data in recruitment, training and playing style. It employed a full-time coach just for throw-ins.Now, of course, all those ideas have been adopted at clubs of far greater scale, of far richer history. Where Midtjylland has gone, Europe has generally followed. Danish academies train every day. The vast majority of teams across Europe are committing vast resources to building teams of analysts and statisticians and physicists. Thomas Gronnemark, the throw-in coach, now works for Liverpool.That is the fate of the pioneer, of course: Once the trail has been blazed, everyone and anyone is free to follow it. Ideas forged in Herning have been adopted and adapted and occasionally lifted wholesale. All Midtjylland can do is what it has always done: try, once again, to see what the future looks like, so that everyone else might, once again, follow.Low-Hanging FruitIn the days after the death of Diego Maradona, Ankersen found himself — like so many others — trawling through grainy footage of the maestro at work. He would not have been alone in noticing that Maradona seemed to be a Technicolor player in a black-and-white world. “In those clips from the ’80s and ’90s, the game seems so slow,” he said.What is important, though, is that it did not seem that way at the time. “The coaches would have said that they could not train more, that they could not make the players get thinner or more athletic,” he said. It is a reminder, to him, of a kind of end-of-history illusion: how easily the current version of something — soccer, in this case — is assumed to be final, complete.Awareness of that illusion is baked into everything Midtjylland does. “The first thing you have to remember is that success now does not mean success in the future,” said Berg, the head of analysis. “We try to be innovative, but it is fundamental that you have to stay curious.”Not all of soccer’s innovations make sense in the test phase.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperLooking back, Ankersen regards the first few edges his club found to be “simple” ones: coaching academy players every day, rather than three times a week, was an easy win. But while he accepts that the search is now a little more complex, he does not believe soccer has yet cleared away all of the low-hanging fruit.“There are a lot of areas on the physical side,” he said, improvements that can be made in conditioning and strength and, particularly, in the individualization of training programs, understanding what types of fitness are required by players in specific positions. Soccer’s interest in fields like nutrition, recovery and sleep, too, is still young.He is eager to explore whether structured coaching from earlier ages might help the technical development of young players — “the next edge is starting earlier” — and turn generating talent into less of an exercise in panning for gold. “At the moment, it is a little like investing in a start-up,” he said of player development. “The upside is potentially great, but there is a lot of risk, because most of the investments will not work out.”And Ankersen is convinced that even Midtjylland, the great data evangelist, has only scratched the surface in terms of what analytics can do. “The quality and collection of data is still poor,” he said. “Most of it is event data, but most of football happens without the ball.” Artificial intelligence, he believes, will help to improve that considerable blind spot, as tracking data grows more sophisticated.Those technologies, of course, will eventually be available to everyone, just as performance data is sold now. The next great battleground will not, then, be which teams use data and which do not. It will not be who has the most data or, to some extent, who has the best data. Soccer’s next leap forward hinges on who uses that data best.F.C. Midtjylland’s soccer laboratory is in Herning, Denmark.Credit…Bo Amstrup/EPA, via ShutterstockSpeaking FootballThere is one area in which there is clearly no competitive edge for Midtjylland: telling journalists, in depth, about its work. Graversen, Berg and Ankersen are all amiable, thoughtful, helpful sorts, happy to talk about principles and philosophies and approaches. As is often the case when writing about the use of data in soccer, precise examples are thin on the ground. Knowledge is power, after all, but it is also proprietary.A single question, though, underpins much of what analysts do, of what they ask their data to show: How can the game be played more effectively?Midtjylland, for example, is better at set pieces than any team in Europe. “Over the last five years, we have scored more goals than anyone else that way,” Ankersen said. “The gap between us and the team in second is the same as the gap between the team in second and the team in 73rd.”That is no accident. Ralf Rangnick, the German coach, technical director and all-purpose visionary, is confident that soccer as a whole will place greater emphasis on set pieces in the years to come. Teams will develop specialized routines and updated training methods to maximize what is, across the world, a reliable source of goals.Midtjylland is there already. The club maintains an extensive set-piece playbook, continually updated with new routines and ideas. “A quarter of all goals come from set pieces,” Graversen said. “But the culture in football is defined, and it is very hard to shift.”Some coaches contend set pieces, which can be practiced, are ripe for exploitation as an offensive weapon.Credit…Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images for F.C. MidtjyllandThere is a measure of preoccupation, too, with shot location. Over the last decade, the N.B.A. has undergone a seismic shift in where and how its teams score their points. To the minds of those at Midtjylland, the same effect may be felt in soccer by discouraging players from taking shots from low-percentage positions, and encouraging them instead to work the ball into higher probability areas.“And if shot locations are changing, then why not optimal passes?” Ankersen said. “You can model the right decision to make in each moment because football is a controlled environment: You have data going back 50 years, when the game was still inherently the same, to feed into it.”The challenge, Berg said, is not finding out this information. It is conveying it to players, incorporating it into the way a team plays, taking it off the screen and onto the field. “Doing it on Excel is one thing,” he said. “What matters is, who can deliver that data in a way that suits the style of play?”Ankersen puts it another way: To get the most out of the information at their fingertips, clubs need to be able to get through to their players. “You have to make it relevant,” he said. “You have to speak football.” It is why this club that can turn everything into numbers now thinks, more than anything, about people.Bodo/Glimt set a host of records on its way to its first Norwegian title.Credit…Fredrik Varfjell/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Person Behind the PlayerOften, Bjorn Mannsverk’s sessions get deeply, intensely personal. He encourages the players who meet in his office every few weeks to share their innermost thoughts with him, and with their teammates. They talk not only about their professional worries, but their domestic ones. Sometimes, there are tears.Mannsverk, a former fighter pilot in the Norwegian air force, now serves — in a part-time capacity — as the team psychologist to Bodo/Glimt, the team from the Far North of the country that in November claimed its first national championship, breaking a host of records along the way.To Bodo’s players, Mannsverk and the environment he has created — one that focuses on performance, not results — has been vital to their success. He has, in the words of the team captain Ulrik Saltnes, emboldened them to play the “kamikaze” style that allows them to confront their fears.It is no surprise that Ankersen, at Midtjylland, is fascinated by Bodo’s story. Midtjylland, too, has a psychologist with a military background: B.S. Christiansen, a former member of the Danish huntsmen corps. Midtjylland, too, spends as much time thinking about the personalities of its players as their technical abilities.“We have to take care of the person behind the player,” Graversen said. “We have to be his or her family.”That paternal approach applies, he said, to all employees, whether they are on the field or not. But it is also another attempt to find a competitive advantage. By making the players feel more valued, the club feels it is better placed to draw out their best performances.Understanding the psychology and the personality of players is still fresh ground for soccer, but Midtjylland — as the success of Mannsverk and Bodo suggests — sees it not as uncharted territory but as a frontier to be claimed.The club is currently running one study, alongside one of Denmark’s largest data firms, to identify which traits are shared by players who have thrived there in the past. At the same time, they are working with educational consultants to work out how players absorb information, how they think, how they learn. In an era when soccer is saturated by data, Graversen sees that knowledge as crucial.“The next key thing is getting data into the playing style,” he said. “By finding out the way they learn, we can accelerate getting those principles into the way we play. We can design virtual reality tools to help them train. We can give them more useful feedback. In the next few years, the team that accelerates that process as much as possible will have the edge.”That, ultimately, is what Midtjylland has always done: search for an edge, wherever one might be found. And where it has blazed the trail, the rest of European soccer has followed. If Midtjylland, the game’s great laboratory, is thinking not just about what players do with their feet but what they do with their minds, then it is reasonable to assume, sooner or later, everyone else will, too.Midtjylland won Monday and will enjoy Christmas, and its winter break, from the top of the table.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Petr Cech Is Still Saving Chelsea, This Time in New Role

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerPetr Cech Is in His Comfort Zone: In the Middle of EverythingFor the recently retired goalkeeper, a role as Chelsea’s technical director is appealing because of how different it is from playing.Petr Cech’s role as technical director at Chelsea calls on every bit of what he learned in the game.Credit…John Sibley/Action Images, via ReutersDec. 24, 2020, 3:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Petr Cech does not watch a lot of television. Switching his brain off, by his own admission, does not come easily to him. He has always preferred, he said, to fill every minute of his day, not just with work and family but with a moderately intimidating litany of pastimes and projects. Settling down on the sofa counts, to his mind, as time wasted.This year, though, Cech and his wife, Martina, have started getting into “The Crown.” Even then, though, he is not the sort to allow himself to be washed away by the lavish Netflix melodrama. Each episode — he is somewhere in the middle of the second season — prompts him to go away and fill in the gaps in both his knowledge and the series’ contested historical authenticity.“Obviously it’s not completely accurate,” he said. “But there are lots of interesting things. You start Googling those parts of British history, and you realize there are lots of things you didn’t know.” That, just about, encapsulates Cech: He is inclined to see an hour or two of fairly mindless television in his rare downtime not as a chance to relax, but as a learning opportunity.That Cech has time to disappear down a rabbit hole about the Suez crisis — or anything else — is faintly remarkable. Spooling through all of the things he does, it is hard not to assume he is handcuffed by having a mere 24 hours in his day. He is studying for an M.B.A. He plays the drums well enough that last year he released a charity single with Roger Taylor of Queen.He is fluent in five languages — his native Czech, English, German, Spanish and French — but speaks seven. He admits, as if confessing to some great flaw, that he cannot write quite as well as he might like in Italian and Portuguese. He has started running, too; every so often he will knock out a quick 10K on a weekend morning.All of this, he said, means that his “time management has to be right.” These are extracurricular activities, after all. He also has a job to think about. Strictly speaking, in fact, he has two.Cech spent the bulk of his career at Chelsea, but finished it at its London rival Arsenal.Credit…Kerim Okten/European Pressphoto AgencyCech retired as a player in 2019 — after a decorated career spent at Rennes, Chelsea and, in his twilight, Arsenal. He made the decision before it was made for him; within a few months, he found that his “mind started to clear, that I had a new motivation, a new happiness.”He went back to the gym, reveling in the fact that his body — without “a big ball being fired at me at 60 miles an hour” hundreds of times every day — was recovering from the wear and tear it had endured. As far as he was concerned, his life as a player was over. He had plenty of job offers. The one that appealed the most was a post as technical director at Chelsea.He had been doing that for almost a year when the pandemic struck. Suddenly, he found himself dragged back to a life he thought he had left behind. “We were lucky to be able to finish the season,” he said. “But nobody knew how many players would get the virus, and we had really strict numbers and restrictions. Normally, if a player gets injured, you would take someone from the academy, but because we had to be in bubbles, that was not possible.“At one point, we were short a goalkeeper, so the solution was either I stepped in, or a goalkeeping coach did. I was fit, so I said OK.” It was intended as a precaution, a form of emergency cover, but Cech was still more than good enough to be a viable option. He was briefly registered on Chelsea’s squad list for the Champions League this season.His primary focus, though, what all of his other interests must swirl around, is his new role. Cech is — by English soccer’s standards — something of a rarity. In certain parts of continental Europe, and especially Germany, it is not unusual for high-profile players to eschew coaching and move into front-office roles immediately after retirement: Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Sar at Ajax; Leonardo at Paris St.-Germain; almost the entire off-field hierarchy at Bayern Munich.England is only now catching up. For the most part, where Premier League clubs employ a technical director, it is seen as a position for a recruitment specialist, someone who can navigate the choppy, unpredictable waters of soccer’s transfer market. Edu Gaspar, at Arsenal, and Cech, at Chelsea — both appointed last year, both with vast experience as top players — are exceptions.For Cech, the appeal of the job lies in how different it is from playing. He had thought in great depth about what he would do after he retired. He had, he said, realized after fracturing his skull in 2006 that “it took only a split second for everything to be finished.” He knew he had to be prepared.He studied for his coaching licenses while still playing — on international duty with the Czech Republic, he said, “there was always time” — but it occurred to him that coaches, essentially, live the same life as a player: “You spend time training, traveling, at games, in hotels. The routine is the same.”A front office role, by contrast, “allows me to be close to the game, but to organize things in a different way.” The challenge was that soccer the game and soccer the industry are distinct entities; a life in one does not wholly prepare you for a life in the other. Cech was, effectively, “starting from zero.”To some extent, what he has seen since has been eye-opening. Cech chose his agents at the age of 17; they still represent him now. He always made a point of knowing not only exactly what they were doing, but how they were doing it. He can see now, of course, that not every player is quite so thorough, and not every agent quite so transparent. “Lots of players leave things with the agent and carry on,” he said. “There are parts of football on this side that are very surprising, in a negative way.”For all that surprise, the early results suggest Cech is well suited to his new role. His playing career, as it turned out, was not entirely irrelevant. As a player, he was always involved with the various liaison committees that express the squad’s feelings to the club’s representatives. He feels, still, that he knows instinctively how players would react to certain suggestions.The luster his playing career carries can be an advantage, too. At one point this summer, he flew to Germany to meet with Kai Havertz, the playmaker Chelsea would eventually sign for $81 million.Cech’s contributions helped deliver the German forwards Timo Werner and Kai Havertz to the team coached by Frank Lampard, Cech’s former Chelsea teammate.Credit…Donall Farmer/Press Association, via Associated PressCech impressed Havertz’s family not only with the depth of his analysis but his human touch: He spent as much time discussing raising children in London and his own memories of moving to England as a young player as he did the 21-year-old Havertz’s role on the team. His mere presence, though, helped persuade Havertz: He was impressed that the player he had seen winning the Champions League in 2012 would come to see him in person.His other skills have proved useful, too. Earlier this year, Chelsea was trying to figure out how to make headway with the signing of the German forward Timo Werner. Liverpool was circling, and Frank Lampard, the Chelsea manager, and the club’s recruitment department, led by Scott McLachlan, were eager to find an edge in the chase.Over lunch at the club’s training facility one day, Cech pointed out that he spoke German. What if he called Werner directly? Those involved with the deal point to it as the decisive moment.But there is something broader, too, that has smoothed Cech’s transition. The position of technical director varies from club to club and country to country. In Chelsea’s case, Cech is there to tie together the various strands of the club’s sporting vision, the linchpin between the first team, the academy and the recruitment department. The business side is handled by Marina Granovskaia, Chelsea’s director and its de facto chief executive.It is, in other words, the sort of job that requires someone used to balancing a whole host of different demands and needs and priorities. Someone given to thinking in four dimensions to make sure their many and varied commitments can all be met. Someone, like Cech, who does not, as he put it, “like to waste time.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      European Soccer Learns a New Virtue: Patience

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEuropean Soccer Learns a New Virtue: PatienceWhy have so few managers been fired this year? Pandemic economics play a role, but there are bigger forces at work, too.Some forces are immune to the pandemic: Sam Allardyce was hired last week by West Brom, his eighth Premier League club.Credit…Pool photo by Lindsey ParnabyDec. 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Enrico Preziosi could hardly have held Thiago Motta in higher esteem. As a player, Motta spent only a single season at Genoa, the Italian soccer team Preziosi owns, but he made such an impression that, a decade later, his old boss cited him as his ideal professional. “A smart and empathetic man,” Preziosi said. “He taught me many things.”Not long after that ringing endorsement, the men were reunited. At the end of his playing career, Motta had moved into coaching and was developing a glowing reputation in Paris St.-Germain’s youth system. Genoa, as is its default setting, was struggling. And so in October last year, Preziosi turned to Motta, the “player of his soul,” to arrest the slide.And then, two months later, he fired him. Motta, that smart and empathetic man, had lasted all of nine games.It was vintage Preziosi. This, after all, is what he does: He fires coaches. In the 17 years since he bought Genoa — Italy’s oldest club — he has changed his coach 27 times. He quite often churns through three in a single season. He once fired Alberto Malesani twice in the same campaign. He has fired one coach, Ivan Juric, three times. Italian soccer has a word — mangiallenatore — for owners like him: coach eater.The Genoa chairman Enrico Preziosi has a short leash with his managers.Credit…Simone Arveda/EPA, via ShutterstockPreziosi fired another manager this week, dispensing with Rolando Maran, whom he had appointed in August but who had not won a match since September. If all of that felt reassuringly familiar, though, the circumstances were unusual. This year, many of Preziosi’s peers in Europe’s top five leagues have discovered a virtue hitherto rarely associated with owners of soccer clubs: patience.More than a third of the way through the season, only one other Serie A team, Fiorentina, has fired its coach. In La Liga, only Celta de Vigo has changed managers. In the Premier League, Sam Allardyce had to wait until last week to be parachuted into West Bromwich Albion. His appointment was only the second time a Premier League team had fired a manager in 2020.In France and Germany, things are a little more familiar. Four managers — at Metz, Dijon, Nice and Nantes — have been fired in Ligue 1 so far this season. Four have also been dismissed in the Bundesliga, though the continuing implosion of Schalke accounts for two of them.Even there, though, most owners waited as long as they could before deciding on change. David Wagner, the first of the two Schalke coaches to be fired this season, lost his job after failing to win for 18 games; the club had been determined to give him a chance to turn the situation around. And of the eight dismissals in France and Germany this season, half happened this month.Much of this newfound restraint can, of course, be explained by the coronavirus pandemic. Clubs across Europe are facing immediate shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost ticket revenue, as well as an uncertain commercial landscape in the coming years. In France, that has been compounded by the collapse of a television rights deal that would have provided the backbone of most teams’ budgets.Slaven Bilic was the first Premier League manager fired this season. He made it to December.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFiring a coach, meanwhile, is expensive. At the elite level, that can mean several million dollars to pay out the contracts of an incumbent and his staff, and the commitment of millions more to appoint a suite of replacements.Fiorentina, for example, fired Giuseppe Iachini at the start of November, replacing him with Cesare Prandelli. The club is now paying the salaries of three coaches: Prandelli and Iachini as well as Vincenzo Montella, who was fired last year but is still officially under contract — paid, essentially, not to work. The club has the means and appetite to do that — the cost is borne by its owner, Rocco Commisso, the billionaire chairman of Mediacom — but most teams do not.“The mentality of team owners is just to get through this period,” said Stewart King, the global head of performance at Nolan Partners, an executive search and recruitment consultancy that works with a host of clubs across Europe to fill technical positions. “Teams that might want to be in the top 10 of their league are thinking that as long as they’re not bottom, what matters for now is that they survive and see what the world looks like on the other side.”As well as the cost, though, there is a unique practical consideration this season. Allardyce, after his appointment at West Brom, admitted that it “might take longer than normal” for his methods to have an impact because training time is so limited in a compacted, congested calendar. With so little breathing space between games this year, most teams are restricted to recovery and recuperation; a new coach simply does not have time to introduce a new tactical approach.But it is possible, too, that the pandemic — as it has in so many other spheres of life — has simply accelerated a change that was starting to occur naturally. “Most clubs now have a much more professional process when they hire a coach than they did 10 years ago,” said Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the analytics consultancy 21st Club.Whereas typically owners in need of a new manager would scan the market for the latest flavor of the month, or use a network of agents to identify available and willing candidates, now many clubs conduct a much more extensive form of due diligence.Though Nolan Partners, for example, does much of its work identifying and recommending sporting directors, it is often brought in to source references and run the interview process for teams looking for a new manager. 21st Club is one of a number of firms that provide data and performance analysis not only on incumbents, but on their potential replacements.“Even when an owner or a chief executive has an idea of who they might want, they have to demonstrate a process,” King said. “It is much more sophisticated than it was.”David Wagner was the first manager fired by Schalke this season. It’s now on its third.Credit…Martin Meissner/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Chaudhuri’s experience, that sophistication in hiring coaches has made owners less impulsive in firing them. “Clubs are much more invested in their appointments,” he said. “Executives increasingly look at the underlying numbers, and often are reassured by what they see, even if results aren’t great at the moment. They have put the work into finding the right guy, and they want it to succeed.”King said at least a part of that shift is because of the increasing number of American investors — who tend, he said, to arrive with a “medium- to long-term mind-set,” and run their clubs along the general manager model common in American sports. “A sporting director lends a bit of air cover to the manager,” King said. “The days of the sporting director criticizing the manager because he wants the job are gone.”The patience demonstrated in the straitened times of the pandemic, then, may be rooted as much in inclination as it is in necessity. But for all that soccer is starting to change — to grow more sophisticated, more thoughtful, less impulsive — some things stay the same.Preziosi fired Maran on Monday, and replaced him with Davide Ballardini. The new man, at least, goes into the job with his eyes open: It is the fourth time Preziosi has hired him. There are no prizes for guessing how the other three turned out.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More