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      When You Can’t Believe What You’re Seeing

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      The story, more than the sport, is what matters.Nobody is quite sure where the term “kayfabe” originated. It may be a bastardized form of pig Latin, something to do with the actual word “fake.” It may have its roots in the culture of wandering 19th-century carnivals, the world inhabited by P.T. Barnum and the confidence men and the salesmen who sold actual snake oil.Its modern usage, though, is sufficiently specific that only a relatively small proportion of people would even have a sense of what it means. Kayfabe is, essentially, the illusory cloak that is doggedly draped over professional wrestling: the maintenance of the pretense that what you see in the ring is unscripted, competitive, what we would consider real.For decades, wrestlers were expected to keep kayfabe even when they were off the clock. The on-screen heroes and villains were not supposed to drive to events together, or to socialize together after them, in case they were seen and the illusion was broken. The omertà had to be upheld at all costs. Breaching it was not just a transgression. It was a betrayal.As Abraham Josephine Riesman delineates in “Ringmaster,” her magisterial biography of Vince McMahon — close personal friend of Donald Trump and longstanding, all-purpose tyrant behind World Wrestling Entertainment — there came a point, sometime around the 1990s, when that all felt just a little anachronistic.For anyone other than perhaps the very young, she posits, by that stage most wrestling fans had long understood the nature of what they were watching. More than that, they had delighted in it. Riesman’s theory is that the fun was not so much in seeing who won, but in trying to decode the why. What did this star’s propulsion mean for behind-the-scenes politics? What did this defeat indicate about the next twist in the never-ending tale?McMahon’s genius — again, in Riesman’s telling — was that he accepted the new reality. Rather than try to cling on to the tradition, to insist on the fantasy, he leaned into the wink and the nudge.Nobody ever said, of course, that the whole thing was a soap opera, a piece of brutal theater. But the sense that the real story could be found in what was happening backstage, that there was a political process behind who rose and who fell — all of that moved front and center. McMahon invented what Riesman calls neokayfabe.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as McMahon was pioneering this new approach, soccer was changing, too. Delegations of executives from Europe’s major teams looked on jealously at the sporting landscape of the United States, where money flowed freely from television, through glamorous, lucrative leagues, and straight into their counterparts’ pockets.It was the N.F.L., with its cheerleaders and its fireworks and its sense of event, that caught their eyes particularly, and they returned home with whatever ideas they could mimic. Dance troupes appeared at midtable Premier League games. Flashy graphics and portentous music splashed across television screens. Stadiums modernized, attracting more families. That allowed ticket prices to increase and corporate sections to flourish.There is absolutely no evidence that anyone within soccer thought to learn anything from professional wrestling. Nobody, most likely, would have even contemplated it. Soccer, after all, belongs to the world of sports. Even McMahon long ago gave up on the idea that wrestling fit neatly under that umbrella. Instead, with typical euphemism, he refers to it as sports entertainment.And yet, behind differences so glaring they are almost existential, it is possible to make the case that modern soccer — the soccer of the Premier League and the Champions League era, the soccer of social media and saturation coverage, of rolling news channels and cultural hegemony — owes more to professional wrestling than it does to any other industry.As in wrestling, it is increasingly difficult to escape the sense that the action itself is secondary to all of the noise that surrounds it — the transfer rumors, the coaching feuds, the undeniable theater that now attends the weekly news conferences, and the declarations of pride and fury and rage that follow every utterance, no matter how banal.Games exist in a pitch of frenzy, but rather than being seen as the purpose of the whole exercise, they serve simply to feed the sport’s insatiable hunger for a story. The overall sweep of each set of 90 minutes is, frequently, lost in a miasma of exaggerated controversy.Tactics and strategy and individual excellence are acknowledged, of course, but drowned out by an unrelenting focus on the failures — both technical and moral — of the referee, or the defeated manager, or whichever of the players is deemed to have let the team down by trying either too hard to win, or not enough.That, in many ways, is the root of the sport’s success, of course. As the cultural commentator Neal Gabler has written, we live in an era of entertainment; in order to survive, in order to thrive, every aspect of life has to turn itself into entertainment. It is just that soccer has done it better than most.Perhaps that is because, more than anything, what soccer has borrowed from wrestling is Riesman’s concept of neokayfabe. Soccer’s global cultural cachet, its status as the most popular pastime that the world has ever known, is both its strength and its weakness.Its stars are subject to the same sort of intense scrutiny that attends Hollywood’s most famous faces. It is squabbled over by the scions of global capitalism, by nation states, by private equity and public investment funds. It has its heroes, and its villains, and both inspire fierce loyalty and deep-seated loathing. It is an analog product trying to adapt to a modern age. It is among the most valuable forms of content that exist, a saffron for the AppleTV+ age.The trick, though, is that the sport has managed to subsume all of that — all of these things that happen to it, these currents beyond its control — into part of the story. Just as in wrestling, soccer has been able to take its inner workings, its politicking and its power struggles and even its scandal, and fold it into the entertainment.That approach applies even when it brings with it the danger that the sport’s integrity — the thing that competitive sports require in the same way as wrestling needs a willing suspension of disbelief, the thing that makes it real — might be compromised.The principle applies no matter the issue. The suspicion that Manchester City has cheated the sport’s financial rules becomes a chance for Pep Guardiola and his team to hit back at their critics; the arrival of the Saudi state at Newcastle is both a new beginning for a proud, beloved team and a test for the strength of the established order. Even the criticism can be leveraged. Newcastle can be the hero or the villain. Either sells, so either is fine.The engulfing of Juventus’s hierarchy in allegations that it has committed actual financial crimes is presented as a challenge for a fallen giant. Barcelona has mortgaged its future because of colossal mismanagement, but what does that mean for Pedri? A small cabal of clubs greedily claiming every trophy and every glimmer of talent for themselves is presented not as a dangerous economic trend but as testament to their innate greatness.The impression — wrong, perhaps, but as previously stated, damaging nonetheless — that the business links between Chelsea’s owners and Saudi Arabia allowed the club to clear the chaff from its squad with surprising ease becomes a controversy, of course, but not one about the sport’s complex relationship with, and its growing vulnerability to, money and power.Instead, the peril of the accusation is lost in claim and counterclaim over the motivation behind the criticism, lost in soccer’s absolute refusal to understand the world as anything less than unremittingly tribal, the belief that serves as the sport’s underlying assumption, its equivalent of wrestling’s illusion.Everything, eventually, becomes part of the story. And the story, more than the sport, is what matters. That is what is sold by the broadcasters and the news outlets and everyone else who does so much to sustain a mutually beneficial ecosystem. It is the magic trick that lies behind modern soccer.It shows you exactly what it is, pulls you behind the curtain, harnesses your outrage and concern and disgust and fear when you see what lurks there, and sells it straight back to you. It is pure, uncut McMahon, a monument of neokayfabe, straight from the sports entertainment playbook, with the emphasis on the entertainment.Living Your ValuesSteven Gerrard, right, on his first day as Al-Ettifaq soccer minister. Er, coach.Ettifaq Media Office/via ReutersJordan Henderson is, of course, quite entitled to do whatever he wants. Should he decide to accept an eye-wateringly lucrative offer from Al-Ettifaq, the Saudi club now managed by his friend and former teammate Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain will stand accused of sacrificing his professional ambitions, and his dignity, for little more than naked greed.The reality is more complex than that. Yes, Henderson has spent more than a decade earning several million dollars a year. (At a rough estimate, his pay, after tax, currently stands at around $6 million.) He is a very rich man. It is true that a soccer player’s career is a short one. But a player of Henderson’s profile does not exactly need to worry about how he will cope.Still, the money reportedly on offer in Saudi Arabia — somewhere north of $30 million a year — can still rightly be described as transformational. Henderson’s primary concern will be his family. If this is his opportunity to provide for them for generations, then it is hardly a sin that he, like several others this summer, might consider it.What makes it unpalatable that Henderson, in particular, might be coaxed to the relentlessly expansionist Saudi Pro League is that he is not just a soccer player. He has, in recent years, emerged as an eloquent advocate for not only his club but for professional players as a whole. More important, he has been a staunch and sincere ally for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.“When you see something that is clearly wrong and makes another human being feel excluded you should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he wrote in 2021. “That’s where my own position on homophobia in football is rooted.“Before I’m a footballer, I’m a parent, a husband, a son, a brother and a friend to the people in my life who matter so much to me. The idea that any of them would feel excluded from playing or attending a football match, simply for being and identifying as who they are, blows my mind.”There is no reason to claim these are not Henderson’s values. He has every right to move to Saudi Arabia, just as Saudi Arabia has every right to want to improve the quality of its domestic league. He has every right to ignore the criticism that he is moving solely for money.There comes a point, though, where if you do not live your values, then it is very difficult to assume they are your values at all. If Henderson decides to effectively endorse the geopolitical power-play of a country where homosexuality remains illegal, then not only will it damage the credibility of soccer players who speak out on social issues, it will make it look a lot as if what he says, and what he does, are very different things.CorrespondenceIt has always been a source of considerable pride that this section of the newsletter can be considered a collaborative learning space. Not in the sense that you, the reader, benefit from my great and beneficent wisdom, but that I get to take all of your ideas and, several months down the line, pass them off as my own.So thanks to all of you who wrote in to explain the origins of the Apertura-Clausura system that prevails in so much of Latin America. “I’d be willing to bet it is an Argentine invention,” Fernando Gama wrote. “The first one in Argentina was 1991-92, whereas Colombia and Mexico were 2002.”His theory on why Argentina adopted the approach is that its teams hoped to “reap a profit if they were available for international friendlies during the European summer.” The benefit, though, may have been different. “It makes sense for each of them to count as a full championship if you take into account how quickly teams get dismantled by the European market. It is very hard to maintain the same base team for an entire year.”Juan Botella, too, believes that Argentina provided the genesis, certainly for Mexico. In the 1990s, “Mexican fútbol’s ruling elite realized they could make more money following Argentina’s approach,” he wrote. “There was much complaint from traditionalists, who prefer a yearlong tournament with no playoffs.”Juan and Gustavo Ortiz are on the same side there. “It delivers short-term satisfaction for team directors who want more national championships in detriment to the climax of one champion at the end of the season,” he wrote. “I prefer the Uruguayan system. They play two championships, Apertura and Clausura. Each has a winner that plays the team with the most points won during both tournaments.”In exchange for educating me, I will endeavor to answer a question from Ken Andrejko. “Do players receive a percentage of the transfer fee when they change clubs?” he asked. No, is the answer, but that’s a bit glib. They do, however, receive a signing-on fee, although that can be both directly and inversely proportional to the size of the transfer fee.And some wonderful — if belatedly published — pedantry from Iain Dunlop. “You referred to the concept of Newcastle pursuing ‘multiclub’ as a noun,” he wrote. “I would argue that Newcastle and others are in fact attempting to multiclub (I multiclub, you multiclub, he/she multiclubs, etc.), and thus it should be classified as a verb.In many ways, Iain, that would be preferable to what is actually happening. The precise quote on Newcastle was that the club is looking into “doing multiclub.” (I do multiclub, you do multiclub, he/she/the Saudi state does multiclub.) Does that make it part of the verb? I’m not enough of a grammarian to know.That’s all for this week. Please keep all of your thoughts coming to askrory@nytimes.com, but do bear in mind that, after next week’s edition, this newsletter will be stepping aside to make room for our World Cup briefing (which you all should sign up for immediately.)Beyond that, unfortunately, there is only shadow and doubt. We’ve had plenty of emails over the last week inquiring about what happens to this newsletter — or the people involved in its production — in light of The Times’s decision to reconsider how it covers sports. Your messages of support and well wishes were much appreciated. I’ll tell you what’s happening to the newsletter as soon as anyone tells me. More

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      A Look Back at Megan Rapinoe’s Best Moments

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      The women’s soccer star, who announced on Saturday that she would retire later this year, always seemed to deliver in the biggest games.Megan Rapinoe, who announced on Saturday that she planned to retire from professional soccer later this year, rose to stardom in part because of her outspoken political views and her leadership in her sport beyond the field. But much of that was possible because her career on the field had so many highlight-reel-worthy moments.She is expected to soon reach 200 appearances for the U.S. women’s national team. She has 63 goals in her international career and is one of only seven American women with more than 50 goals and 50 assists in international competition.She was the second pick of the 2009 draft of the defunct Women’s Professional Soccer league, and played the majority of her club career with the Seattle Reign of the National Women’s Soccer League. She won a French title with Lyon, a Ballon d’Or as world player of the year and Olympic medals in two colors.But it has always been the moments and the creativity of her offense, not the volume of goals or assists, that truly set Rapinoe apart. Here’s a look at some of her best touches.Abby Wambach and Rapinoe celebrating after Wambach scored a goal in the 2011 Women’s World Cup quarterfinal match in Dresden, Germany.Martin Rose/Getty Images2011 World CupThe U.S. women’s national team finished third in the 2003 and 2007 World Cups, failing to capitalize on the momentum of its win in 1999. In 2011, it was facing a humbling early exit when it trailed Brazil, 2-1 in overtime, during a quarterfinal match.The game was already in stoppage time when Rapinoe got the ball from Carli Lloyd near midfield. She took one dribble, looked up and sent a long ball toward the far post, where Abby Wambach was waiting.Wambach rose behind Brazil’s goalkeeper and headed the ball into the net, delivering what is considered one of the greatest goals in the history of the women’s game. The Americans went on to win in a penalty-kick shootout, though they later lost an epic final to Japan.2012 OlympicsThe United States faced Canada in the women’s soccer semifinal of the 2012 London Olympics. Down by 1-0 in the second half, Rapinoe made Olympic history by scoring what is known as an “Olimpico” — a goal that finds the net directly off a corner kick. She was the first woman to do it in the Games. Then she repeated the feat during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.2015 World CupIn the first game of the 2015 World Cup, a matchup with Australia, Rapinoe scored twice to lead her team to a 3-1 victory. In the 12th minute, after battling for a contested ball, Rapinoe made a full 360-degree spin at the top of the box before collecting herself with a couple touches and firing a shot from 20 yards. The ball ricocheted off a Canadian defender and found the back of the net.2019 World CupThe United States entered the 2019 World Cup in France looking to become the first women’s team to repeat as World Cup champion under the same coach. Rapinoe put together a career run — winning both the Golden Boot, for most goals (six) and the Golden Ball as the tournament’s outstanding player. But it was her goal against France in front of 45,000 onlookers that sent her on her way.The U.S. Women’s soccer team celebrating after winning the World Cup final match against the Netherlands in 2019.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressA master at set pieces, Rapinoe stepped up to take a free kick in the early minutes of what many expected to be a tense and pivotal match. She sent a streaking ball through the box that wound its way through the legs of multiple teammates and defenders and into the back of the net. Rapinoe celebrated by running to the sideline and spreading her arms wide, a gesture that became her signature celebration, and the lasting memory of a tournament where she was regularly in the right place at the right moment.Tokyo Olympics, 2021Looking to build off two consecutive World Cup victories, the U.S. women’s national team headed to Tokyo in 2021 to play in Olympic Games that had been delayed a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. In the quarterfinals, the United States and the Netherlands squared off in a World Cup finals rematch. The game went to penalties after a 2-2 draw, where it was Rapinoe’s dagger to the upper right corner that sent the United States to the semifinal. More

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      For Rapinoe, a Final Send-Off Before a Final World Cup

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      One day after announcing her plan to retire this year, Megan Rapinoe began her farewell tour as an unused substitute in her team’s send-off match.Megan Rapinoe began her long goodbye with the equivalent of a homecoming.In the decade and a half since she became a professional soccer player, Rapinoe’s career has taken her to soccer clubs on two continents, to Olympic Games on three and, soon, to a fourth World Cup. On Sunday, a day after she surprised her team and her fans by publicly announcing plans to retire at the end of this year, Rapinoe found herself settling into a seat on the U.S. women’s national team bench a couple hundred miles from her hometown.Rapinoe, 38, grew up in Redding, Calif., about 250 miles north of the site of Sunday’s game, PayPal Park in San Jose. She estimated that about 40 of her family members and friends had made the trip south to see the United States beat Wales, 2-0, in its final game on American soil ahead of the Women’s World Cup that starts later this month in Australia and New Zealand.“This is the closest that I’ll ever get to play to Redding in my career,” Rapinoe had said on Saturday. “It does feel very special. It feels perfect.”During the news conference in which she announced her retirement plans on Saturday, Rapinoe had said that she was at peace with the decision to step away from soccer. Now, she was just enjoying the chance to give a proper goodbye to the sport that made her an international star, as well as a spokeswoman for equal rights, equal pay and social justice issues close to her heart.Rapinoe has played for the national team since 2006. A three-time Olympian and two-time World Cup champion, she has scored 63 goals for the United States and is one of seven players to have accumulated more than 50 goals and 50 assists in her U.S. national team career.Her role is different these days, having evolved from a lineup fixture to a late-game substitute. She is still valued by her coach, Vlatko Andonovski, though; he included her on his World Cup roster because he values her leadership, experience and ability to shape big moments.Whenever and however she plays going forward, she remains a crowd favorite. One fan, Corina Burns, who wore a No. 15 T-shirt with the name “Rapinoe” on the back, said she drove from Southern California with her three daughters to attend Sunday’s game. It wasn’t the family’s first trip to see the national team play: They were in France four years ago when Rapinoe was one of the Americans’ most valuable players in their victory at the 2019 World Cup.“We saw her play and fell in love with her,” Burns said.That World Cup remains, for now, Rapinoe’s crowning achievement. She won both the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as its outstanding player. It is also when she cemented her status as a pop culture icon: She scored six goals in the competition even as she publicly battled with President Donald J. Trump.She remains an outspoken voice, but she is a different player these days. Rapinoe has been hampered by injuries for months, with an ankle injury keeping her out of the start of the National Women’s Soccer League season and a calf injury keeping her out of two national team matches against Ireland in April.In her absence, newer faces — Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman, Alyssa Thompson — have begun to lay claim to the forward position where Rapinoe was once a clear choice. That new generation, the one that will occupy the space vacated by Rapinoe, was on display again against Wales.In the 76th minute on Sunday, Rodman, 21, broke through in a scoreless game by scoring easily off a cross from Smith, 22. Rodman struck again in the 88th minute, powering a shot from 20 yards past the hands of Wales goalkeeper Olivia Clark. Rodman became the youngest American player to score two goals in an international match.Rapinoe still has much to offer, too. Andonovski has made no secret of how much he values the wisdom and institutional knowledge she brings to a team that now features players like the 18-year-old Thompson, who is fresh out of high school; Savannah DeMelo, 25, who received her first cap on Sunday; and the dozen other new faces headed to their first World Cup.That they struggled, until Rodman scored twice off the bench, to break down a resolute Wales team that failed to qualify for the World Cup was perhaps a hopeful sign that Rapinoe might still have an important role to play before she walks away from the team for good.Her chance never arrived on Sunday: Rapinoe did not warm up and Andonovski never called for her to come on. It was another sign that although Rapinoe said her time is almost up, the times may have already changed. More

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      Megan Rapinoe Announces Retirement After World Cup, NWSL Season

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      The women’s national team star made an unexpected retirement announcement ahead of a U.S. friendly against Wales.Megan Rapinoe, the soccer star who has been a fixture of the dominant U.S. women’s national team and one of the most politically outspoken American athletes, said Saturday that she planned to retire at the end of the year, making this upcoming World Cup her last.Rapinoe, 38, has played for the U.S. women’s national team since 2006 and the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand scheduled to begin later this month would be her fourth.“I could have just never imagined where this beautiful game would have taken me,” Rapinoe told reporters during an unexpected appearance at a news conference ahead of a U.S. game against Wales in San Jose, Calif., scheduled for Sunday.“I feel so honored to have represented this country, this federation for so many years,” she said. “It’s truly been the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”Rapinoe, who has had numerous injuries throughout her career, has been dealing with an ankle injury leading up to the National Women’s Soccer League season and missed two national team friendlies against Ireland in April with a calf injury.Rapinoe made perhaps her biggest mark in 2019, when she won the Ballon d’Or as soccer’s women’s player of the year and earned the Golden Boot as the top scorer and the Golden Ball as the top player of the World Cup, with six goals.She was outspoken on numerous issues, including L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and was a frequent antagonist of former President Donald J. Trump. Her leadership of the team also came at a time when it was fighting with its national federation for pay equity, confronting differences between the economics of the men’s and women’s versions of the sport.Rapinoe also played in two women’s professional leagues in the United States, beginning in the Women’s Professional League, which folded in 2011, and in the N.W.S.L. She said she would retire from the N.W.S.L. after this season.Alex Morgan, another top star for the U.S. team, said Rapinoe texted the team’s group chat on Saturday morning to announce her decision. “Well,” Morgan said, “now we have to go win the whole damn thing.” More

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      Andriy Shevchenko and Ukraine Wait for a Tomorrow They Can’t See

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      Soccer is not a priority in Ukraine, nor should it be. But the country’s greatest player says it still has a vital role to play in his nation’s sense if itself.There are certain things Andriy Shevchenko cannot talk about. The feeling generated by the wailing of an air-raid siren. The dread instilled by learning just how many missiles had been aimed the previous night at you, your loved ones, your home. The sensation of knowing another swarm of drones is on its way, the only hope that each one can be shot from the sky.Shevchenko does not want to repeat all he has heard from the Ukrainian soldiers posted to the battlefield, that rift that runs through places that were once nearby and familiar but are now alien, part of a terrifying front line. He starts and stops, swallowing hard, unable to go on. “I don’t want to speak about what is going on,” he said.One of the stories he cannot quite bring himself to tell comes from Irpin, a city on the northwestern edge of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, that was the scene of some of the bloodiest, most intense fighting in the early days of the war. Its streets were pounded by airstrikes. A mass grave was found in neighboring Bucha.When Ukrainian forces, after a monthlong counteroffensive, reclaimed control of the city, they found it scarred beyond recognition. Some estimates had it that 70 percent of its structures had been destroyed or damaged. Among them was the city’s soccer stadium.A few months later, Shevchenko went to visit. As he walked around the fractured shell of the place — the artificial-turf field pockmarked with the scars of war, the ramshackle stands charred black — he saw a group of children playing soccer, doing their best to stage a game despite the ruin all around them, and at least mildly oblivious to the fact that Shevchenko, the greatest player their country has ever produced, was watching.Dark spots mark bomb damage on a soccer field in Irpin, Ukraine, in 2022.Valentyn Ogirenko/ReutersOne of the strengths Ukrainians in general have discovered during the war, Shevchenko has found, is an ability “to adapt to circumstances, to react to the situation as it is now.” Here it was, being played out in front of him.When he asked the children what it was like having to play here, in a place where a stadium used to be, they replied in that matter-of-fact manner that is the natural tone of the preteen: They might not have a stadium, they said, but that did not mean they did not want to play soccer.As the fighting was escalating in Irpin, Heorhiy Sudakov — a sparkling young midfielder with Shakhtar Donetsk — was, like so many in Ukraine, seeking shelter wherever he could find it. He sent one of his former coaches a photo from an air-raid bunker. In the image, his pregnant wife, Lisa, rested her head on his shoulder.A little more than a year later, Sudakov has spent two weeks announcing himself as one of the brightest talents in European soccer. He helped drive Ukraine’s teams to the semifinals of the European Under-21 Championship in Georgia, scoring three times in five games, including two in the quarterfinal victory against France.The 20-year-old striker Heorhiy Sudakov, right, led Ukraine to the semifinals of the European Under-21 Championship.Robert Ghement/EPA, via ShutterstockThat Ukraine was unceremoniously eliminated in the final four by Spain — which will face England in the final this weekend — would, in normal circumstances, act as a sort of bathetic coda to its tournament. Ukraine’s circumstances, though, are anything but normal. In that light, its performance has been a resounding, uplifting triumph.“What the under-21s have done is an incredible achievement,” Shevchenko said in an interview this week. “Ukraine has always provided great talent — maybe not every year, but every few years, we have a young player who can go up to the senior squad. You need to build that platform. Watching what they have done in this tournament gives hope to us, and to the next generation, for the future.”Nobody in Ukraine knows, of course, what that future looks like. Since the country’s soccer league resumed last August, Ukraine’s clubs have grown used to playing against the eerie backdrop of empty stadiums. Games have been interrupted by those same air-raid sirens that still send a shiver down Shevchenko’s spine. Dozens of foreign players left the country after being given dispensation by FIFA to break their contracts.Several teams, including Shakhtar, temporarily relocated their academy systems abroad — spiriting players and members of their families out of the country — to protect them from the Russian invasion. Some clubs, Shakhtar most prominent among them, still find themselves exiled from their homes, their traditional territories now on the other side of the front line.It is impossible to say when, or if, any of that will change. Like everything else in the country, every person in every aspect of life, Ukrainian soccer has no idea what tomorrow will bring.“We live in the moment,” Shevchenko said. “Everything depends on the war. The situation could change every day. We try to make plans, sometimes short-term, sometimes a little longer. But we have to react every day.“We do the best we can to let the athletes train, to help them be ready to play — that is what all of us, every club, are trying to do. We have the resources to do that at the moment. But we cannot plan anything for the future, because the moment we do, everything could change. That is what we have to do. There is not a different way. We just have to keep living and try to do the best we can.”In light of all that is happening in Ukraine, soccer is not a priority, nor should it be. It is difficult, in many ways, to think that it matters at all. But talking to Shevchenko is to be reminded of Jürgen Klopp’s old aphorism: Perhaps it is the most important of the least important things.Shevchenko playing soccer with children in Irpin, in a photograph from United24, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s fund-raising platform.United24Sports, after all, remain a potent way of reminding people of what Ukraine has been through — is going through. They are a way of keeping the country uppermost in the fickle thoughts of the outside world, a gleaming example of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the “imagined community of millions seeming more real as a team of eleven named people.”Soccer has, by and large, embraced that role. “It has a power to unite people,” Shevchenko said. “To send a message of solidarity.” Stadiums across Europe have been festooned with Ukrainian flags. Messages demanding peace have appeared on television screens and advertising boards — a gesture that is, without question, too small, a coward’s way out from Europe’s ever-compromised soccer authorities, but is a gesture nonetheless.When Shevchenko, with his successor as Ukraine’s national team captain, Oleksandr Zinchenko — both ambassadors for United24, the country’s official fund-raising platform — decided to arrange an exhibition game to help rebuild a school in the village of Chernihiv, support was immediate and enthusiastic. Chelsea, one of Shevchenko’s former clubs, volunteered the use of Stamford Bridge for the match, called the Game4Ukraine, on Aug. 5. DAZN and Sky agreed to broadcast it. A parade of stars quickly agreed to play.“It is a good chance for us to remind people that the war is still going on,” Shevchenko said. “Oleksandr and I have done a lot of interviews, to try to keep it in the news, so that the rest of the world does not forget, so that people keep helping, because we need them to know that we cannot do this without them.”For Ukraine, every event featuring one of its teams is now a rallying point, and a chance to tell its story.Martin Meissner/Associated PressBut soccer matters for another reason. It is telling that the success of Ukraine’s under-21 team — as well as an encouraging start as national team manager for Serhiy Rebrov, Shevchenko’s old strike partner — has not gone unnoticed within Ukraine, that the achievements of Sudakov and his teammates have been celebrated, even as the sirens have sounded.“There is still room for life, still room for sport,” Shevchenko said. “That is why we are fighting: for the right to have a normal life. Even during the war, we try to live as best we can. It has to be day to day.”The conversation he had with the children in Irpin inspired Shevchenko. When he left, he set about raising the money — roughly 600,000 euros, or $650,000 — it would take to ensure that they could both play soccer and have a stadium. He arranged a gala in Milan, the city he long called home. The club where he became a superstar, and possibly the best striker of his generation, A.C. Milan, kicked in €150,000 toward the project.The plan is to begin work on the stadium this summer. It is impossible, of course, to plan for anything with absolute certainty. Ukrainians have, in the course of 18 fearful, defiant, harrowing months, grown used to the idea that things might change at a moment’s notice. They do not know what tomorrow will bring. But they know there will be a tomorrow.CorrespondenceThis week brought a regrettable, but undeniable, turn in the timbre of correspondence. This is, as we all know, a conspiratorial age — the false flags, the deep state, the thing about orcas ganging up and attacking boats — and that paranoia now seems to have filtered through to the last bastion of enlightenment thinking: my inbox.“Writing that Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and Lyon are linked together without mentioning Crystal Palace,” an exasperated Nicholas Armstrong wrote after receiving last week’s newsletter, “is like saying whales, dolphins and porpoises are linked without mentioning any other more familiar mammal.”I am not entirely certain which mammal is missing from that list — sharks, maybe? — but I stand by my entirely deliberate omission: not because I have not yet forgiven Palace for the whole Alan Pardew thing in 1990, but because, unlike that particular set of clubs, Palace is not owned exclusively by John Textor. It is, instead, a partial member of two networks: one belonging to Textor, and one operated by Bolt Football. And that would have been confusing.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPaul Gerald, meanwhile, has been pondering an unexplainable, at least to him, coincidence. “Whenever there is a neutral venue final, each team always attacks the end containing their fans in the second half,” he wrote.He added, “There are three ways this could happen: crazy coincidence; teams just always picking that way, regardless of who wins the coin toss; or prearrangement.” In this scenario, he suggested, “no real coin toss ever happens.”There is, I suspect, a slightly simpler explanation: Both teams go into the coin toss intending to kick toward their own fans in the second half. There is a possibility, though, that there is a degree of confirmation bias at play here, too. My guess would be it happens less often than you believe — you just notice when it does.Victor Gallo, thankfully, wants to return to the world of facts. Last week’s newsletter taught him that the Colombian league is divided into Apertura and Clausura stages. “I thought only Mexico employed that division,” he wrote. “I imagine it is not just Mexico and Colombia. But what’s the reason behind splitting the season up?”That is a great question, and not one I have previously considered. It means you can hand out more trophies? It delivers satisfaction more quickly? It means you can stage a grand final at the end? If anyone can shed any light, it would be enormously helpful.And finally, with a nod to William Ireland, a confession. Last week’s newsletter asserted that nobody — other than Red Bull — had really made the multiclub model work in soccer as yet. “Best practices being shared, discount transfer fees, places to park players all sound good,” he wrote. “None seem to be actually happening in any of the multiclubs, and I’m not sure how they would.”Nor am I, but there was one element that I neglected to mention (and was pointed out to me, anonymously, by an executive at one of the teams involved in a network). Off the field, the advantages are legion. Adding more clubs enables a group to increase the asset value of each — by building infrastructure, improving performance, pooling resources — which helps the value of the whole business grow. It may well be that is the real purpose of the whole exercise. More

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      PSG Says Kylian Mbappé Must Sign New Deal or Leave

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      Nasser al-Khelaifi, the president of Paris St.-Germain, was introducing the team’s new coach when he turned to tough talk on the future of his team’s biggest star.It was at the unveiling of yet another new coach that Paris St.-Germain’s president made his first public statement on the future of his team’s best player. He did not equivocate and left little room for compromise.Kylian Mbappé, the marquee player for P.S.G. and France, must sign a new contract this summer or leave, Nasser al-Khelaifi told reporters, who were ostensibly gathered to hear the first pronouncements from the new coach, the Spaniard Luis Enrique, but eager to hear what the club planned to do about the uncertainty created by Mbappé after his public declaration last month that he wished to move on after next season.Such a scenario would leave the club in the unenviable situation of losing, without compensation, a player in whom it has invested more than $500 million in transfer fees, bonuses and wages. That is something al-Khelaifi said would not be allowed to happen.“We do not want him to leave for free in 2024,” al-Khelaifi said.“Our position is clear,” he continued. “If Kylian wants to stay, we want him to stay. But he needs to sign a new contract.“We don’t want to lose the best player in the world for free. It’s impossible.”And that was that. Al-Khelaifi, as he stood to leave the raised platform he had shared with Enrique, told the assembled members of the news media that he expected they had gotten what they came for. The new coach, for his part, declined to say whether he expected Mbappé to be in Paris when the new season gets underway this summer.What is clear is that for a second straight summer, the fate of where Mbappé plays is going to overshadow P.S.G.’s efforts to prove that it is now a serious contender for soccer’s biggest prize rather than once again the central stage for the sport’s biggest intrigues.A news conference on Wednesday was intended to introduce Luis Enrique, left, as P.S.G.’s new coach, but that was overshadowed when Nasser al-Khelaifi, right, addressed Mbappé’s future.Aurelien Morissard/Associated PressEnrique, who most recently coached Spain’s national team, arrived on Wednesday and is charged with bringing order to a club that has been characterized by disorder in recent seasons. Just this week, his predecessor, Christophe Galtier, who arrived just last summer, became the latest P.S.G. coach to be shown the door before completing his contract.No club in soccer has spent more money on talent since Qatar Sports Investments acquired P.S.G. about a decade ago. Few top clubs have cycled through as many coaches, and fewer still have wasted as much time and money trying to find an identity and a style underpinning all that largess.Last summer, P.S.G. persuaded Mbappé to sign a new contract rather than sign with Real Madrid, the Spanish super club he has long dreamed of playing for. P.S.G. had wanted to build a new model, with Mbappé as the central star in a constellation of mostly young, mostly French talent. Without him, that master plan would once again require reimagining.Later on, al-Khelaifi was even more strident. Sitting down with members of the domestic news media, he said Mbappé had a “maximum” of two weeks to decide whether to sign a new contract. The club, he said, would not allow such a valuable asset to leave for nothing in 12 months. Mbappé could, it was pointed out to al-Khelaifi, just decide to stay, making it impossible for the club to dictate his fate.Al-Khelaifi said that would be unthinkable — that Mbappé would be breaking an unwritten convention of some sort, by doing something that the world’s best players simply do not do. He did not mention that P.S.G. had done that very thing two summers ago, signing the Argentine great Lionel Messi as a free agent when Barcelona, the team Messi had played on for his entire career, could no longer afford to keep him.“If he doesn’t want to sign,” al-Khelaifi said, “the door is open.”Privately, the club has been exchanging letters with Mbappé’s management team, which is led by his mother, Fayza Lamari. This week, the latest missive, running to three pages, expressed disappointment with the position Mbappé had taken and reminded the player and his family how much P.S.G. had invested in the forward since his teenage years.In signing his contract, Mbappé was allowed a rare level of influence over the club’s activities, including a say over recruitment of the players who would line up alongside him. The club’s letter, which expressed a demand for an urgent meeting, said as much, acknowledging that while the club had not been able to fulfill all his requirements for reinforcements, it had done as much as it could given the constraints placed upon it by European soccer rules on spending.P.S.G. resumes practice on July 10, but Mbappé, along with others who played for their national teams in June, will return on July 17. By then, the club hopes to have clarity on whether he will accede to its demand to sign a new contract. It hopes he will, even though his doing so would not reduce the possibility that he would leave next summer. A new contract dated beyond the end of next season would allow P.S.G. to recoup a fee. Shortly after signing his current deal last summer, Mbappé told The New York Times in an interview that it would not have felt correct to leave the club via free agency.In the rarefied world Mbappé inhabits, for both his talent and his earning potential, the pool of clubs he could sign with is a shallow one and may actually be limited to one: Real Madrid.That club is searching for a marquee forward, having lost the veteran striker Karim Benzema to Saudi Arabia’s soccer land grab, and Mbappé has spoken of playing there one day. For the stars to align, the club would have to be convinced to make P.S.G. an offer for a player it knows it could bring in without a fee next year. So far, it has remained tight-lipped about its plans.In her time representing her son, Lamari has become an experienced hand in securing the best possible deal. Last summer, with a deal with Real Madrid in hand, and the suggestion that the Premier League club Liverpool, an unlikely suitor, also had a firm interest, she managed to secure a huge new contract. It guaranteed a bonus of more than $100 million just as a re-signing fee even before his stratospheric new salary was included.P.S.G. announced that the deal would run through 2025, and it even had Mbappé wear a jersey emblazoned with the year on his back. Only later did it transpire that the third year was an option that only the player could exercise.Lamari will once again take center stage as face-to-face talks with club executives take place over the next few days. Only then will it become clear whether, as al-Khelaifi told reporters, “No one player is bigger than the club.”​​ More

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      P.S.G. Attack, Still a Mystery, Ended Two Women’s World Cup Dreams

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      An assault case that rattled one of France’s best soccer teams remains unresolved despite a series of arrests. Its main characters have paid a heavy price.Aminata Diallo was being escorted from her foul-smelling holding cell to an interview room inside the Hôtel de Police in Versailles the first time she heard the name Tonya Harding.Harding’s name is infamous in sports, of course. A decorated American figure skater, she was a central figure in the notorious case involving the assault of her biggest rival only weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics. The scandal — a sudden and violent attack by a mystery man; accusations and denials; tabloid headlines — led to worldwide attention and, years later, a feature-length movie about Harding. But to Diallo, a 28-year-old French soccer player being led up a police station stairwell, the mention of her name — “Have you heard of Tonya Harding?” — produced only a blank stare.Diallo would quickly learn, however, that the police had reason to ask.Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, had been attacked by a man who beat her on the legs in an attempt to keep her from competing. Now, in France, a generation later, the police suspected a similar motive in an attack on Kheira Hamraoui, Diallo’s teammate at the French club Paris St.-Germain. Hamraoui had been dragged out of Diallo’s car on a cold November night in 2021 and, like Kerrigan, beaten on her legs in a clear attempt to injure her.It would take almost a year, and another spell in detention for Diallo, before the police officer’s offhand question became a formal accusation. Prosecutors last September charged Diallo with aggravated assault in the attack on Hamraoui. Documents in the case and leaks to the French news media have accused Diallo of masterminding a premeditated attack. The goal, that theory goes, was to eliminate a rival of Diallo’s for a spot in the lineup at P.S.G., one of the best teams in women’s soccer, and on the roster of the French national team, which will be among the favorites at the Women’s World Cup, which begins July 20.“Lots of people would like it to be me, but that’s not the reality,” Diallo said in an interview in Spain, where she had been trying to resurrect her career. “Tonya Harding, she did it. I didn’t.”Doubts, and QuestionsWith its parallels to a decades-old scandal; its themes of race and professional rivalry; and its unlikely cast of elite women’s athletes and shadowy characters, it is no surprise that the case continues to draw interest, or that it has spawned competing documentary projects.Diallo’s guilt or innocence is no clearer today than it was that morning in the police station in Versailles. A trial date is yet to be announced. But the consequences continue to ripple outward.The central police station in Versailles, where Diallo was brought for questioning.James Hill for The New York TimesFriendships have ended, as has at least one marriage. Two locker rooms were divided. Diallo was exiled from Paris. Hamraoui, too, became an exile in her own way, ostracized by some of her teammates and eventually forced out of her club.The police’s case apparently rests on text messages sent by Diallo, some suspicious web searches and a claim by at least one of the men charged in the assault that he had been acting on behalf of Diallo, even though he admitted the order had not come directly from her.Diallo and her legal team insist the charges are the actions of a desperate police force looking to secure convictions in a high-profile case, of a case built on flimsy connections and untrustworthy sources.Diallo said she views the documentary offers as a sort of compensation for everything that she has lost, like the privacy and anonymity she once enjoyed as a stalwart, if unspectacular, soccer professional, but, more materially, for the new contract with P.S.G. that she insists was all but certain before the attack changed the direction of her career and life.“I think for them it’s interesting whether I am guilty or not,” Diallo said of the filmmakers who have approached her.The charges she faces — three counts of aggravated assault and criminal assault — came after her second stay in custody and were accompanied by an order not to enter Paris or engage with her former teammates on P.S.G. That was how she found herself in Spain this spring, nibbling patatas bravas and garlic shrimp at a beachside restaurant in Valencia, her career saved only by a short-term deal to play for Levante, which has now ended.Hamraoui has left P.S.G., too; she was released at the end of the season after not being offered a new deal. Her departure was not a quiet one: On her way out, she accused the club of ostracizing her by treating her differently from her teammates, of victimizing her again.“In addition to the trauma I suffered that night, I would face this indifference, this cruelty, not to say a form of abuse toward me,” Hamraoui wrote in a book published recently that has been serialized in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.“The squad no longer speaks to me, and P.S.G. has only one objective: that I leave as quickly as possible,” Hamraoui said. “They treat me like a plague victim.”Kheira Hamraoui training with the Paris St.-Germain women’s team in September 2022.Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockIn Spain, Diallo’s life became a stripped-down version of what went before. Apart from training sessions, she spent most of her time alone at a rented apartment. (Qatar-owned P.S.G. had provided a home and a car, the one involved in the attack.) She was not a standout for her new team, and was often deployed as a substitute, a role she was grateful for, and accepted.“I’ve found it difficult to find the top, top level,” she said as the now finished season meandered toward its conclusion. “I’ve lost the pleasure to play. I’m playing with injustice.”Diallo contends that she has been wronged, that she is also a victim in the Hamraoui affair. Investigators in France contend she is at the heart of the conspiracy.Details of their case, leaked to the French news media, paint Diallo as the driving force of the attack on Hamraoui. The men who have been charged with the assault itself are said to have told the police that they believed they were acting on behalf of Diallo, who was driving the car when it was stopped and when Hamraoui was yanked out and beaten on her legs with an iron bar. Text messages from Diallo disparaging Hamraoui were discovered after the police seized her cellphone and computer, as were online searches for phrases like “breaking a kneecap” and “deadly cocktail of drugs.”In an interview last November at the offices of her lawyers in Paris, shortly after she was formally charged, Diallo offered explanations. The police had ignored all the positive comments about Hamraoui she had made to friends and associates, she said. The online searches were not unusual, she contended, for an athlete concerned with injuries and health.But she also contends that her race and background — she is a Black woman from a working-class neighborhood in Grenoble — had not only led the police to jump to conclusions about her, but others as well.“In France, when there’s a case like that, the media are quick to assume that you’re guilty,” she said. “They are going to bring up where you’re from right away, which is an argument to show that you are capable of doing that.”Now, in Valencia, Diallo produced her phone and brandished a screenshot of a diagram published by the French daily Le Parisien that used arrows and boxes to purportedly show links between the men involved in the attack, Diallo and unknown intermediaries. The fact that after all the investigations, the phone taps and the listening devices placed in Diallo’s home, the police still had not found any direct link between her and the arrested men highlighted the weakness of the case against her, Diallo said. She has, she added, “more hate” toward the investigators than Hamraoui, who fell out with Diallo and other teammates after they suggested she, and others at P.S.G., could have been involved in the attack.“It’s not her trying to find a case against me,” Diallo said of Hamraoui. “I don’t give a damn about her.”Choosing SidesAmong her protestations of innocence, Diallo pointed to messages sent by her former agent, Sonia Souid, who also represents Hamraoui. Diallo argued that those messages undermine the police’s belief that she orchestrated the attack out of professional jealousy.In one, a voice note sent about two weeks before the attack and played for a New York Times reporter, Souid told Diallo that she had met with P.S.G.’s sporting director. The club was pleased with Diallo’s performances, Souid reported, and was eager to make an offer to extend her contract, which was about to expire, for two seasons.Souid, who is one of the most influential agents in women’s soccer in France, said in an interview that while negotiations had not started, the club had made its intentions clear.Diallo playing for P.S.G. in 2021. She is now barred from contacting her former teammates.Aurelien Meunier/PSG, via Getty ImagesBut weeks after the November 2021 attack, Souid’s relationship with Diallo ended in a tearful meeting. The player informed the agent that she could no longer be represented by her because of her ties to Hamraoui. In March 2022, Souid said she met with police investigators. She declined to reveal what she was asked, but said the meeting had left her shaken.“The questions they asked me made me think something very wrong has happened,” Souid said.She suggested the police had covertly listened not only to Diallo’s conversations but also hers and those of others in the course of their investigation. “They knew everything,” Souid said. “They knew the exact moment calls were made and what was being said, and not just by me.”Souid said she had always found Diallo to be polite, respectful and serious in their interactions. But as details of the case filtered out, and as she processed the questions she had been asked by the police, she said she began to wonder whether Diallo had “another side.”Left OutAs the investigation continues, and as Diallo and Hamraoui — now both out of contract — await the next developments, the soccer world rumbles on toward what will be the biggest event in women’s soccer this year, the Women’s World Cup.Diallo will not be there; she had been a fringe player on France’s national team at the time of the attack, and the notoriety of her case and her long layoff — not to mention the court orders to stay away from her former P.S.G. teammates — effectively ended her international career.Hamraoui, who appeared for France as recently as February, had held out hope of playing her way onto the French team headed to Australia and New Zealand, even though her presence on the squad would not be universally welcomed by some, including a group of P.S.G. players close to Diallo and still furious at Hamraoui’s early insinuations that other players from the club might have been involved in her assault.Souid, Hamraoui’s agent, had harbored similar optimism. “The Americans are several times World Cup champions and all the players don’t like each other,” she said this spring.Hamraoui challenging Denmark’s Kathrine Moller Kuhl in February. She was left off France’s roster for the Women’s World Cup.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut when France’s new coach, Hervé Renard, announced his preliminary roster for the tournament, Hamraoui’s name was not on it. The decision prompted one French newspaper to run a poll asking whether the decision to omit her was “really a sporting choice.” Hamraoui suggested in a radio interview with France Inter soon after the announcement that it was not: She called her omission “an injustice.”The story, though, is not over. That is why, Souid said, filmmakers were interested in telling Hamraoui’s side of it. “It’s not easy to understand what happened to her,” she said.Diallo, adrift and impatient, might say the same.For now, both players wait for clarity on who bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on that dark night in the narrow street, for the end of their association with the case, and with Tonya Harding. Until then, Hamraoui will continue to pursue her soccer career. And Diallo will continue to defend her name.“I’m not hiding,” Diallo said before departing for another evening in her silent apartment, alone with her thoughts, and her furies.Tom Nouvian contributed reporting in Paris. More

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      Soccer’s Next Big Thing Is Buying in Bulk

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      Networks of clubs help top teams streamline their scouting, methods and player acquisition. But who do they really serve?On Wednesday evening, the Colombian club Atlético Huila decided to treat its players and its coaching staff to what could be best thought of as an office night out. Huila has had a rough season. It finished at the bottom of the Apertura, the first half of the Colombian campaign. It won only five of its 20 games. A field trip was more a restorative than a reward.It was a good night, too. Huila’s squad has spent the last week in Sangolqui, a suburb of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, finishing off its preparations for the second half of the season as guests of Independiente del Valle. The host duly offered Huila an invitation to watch its Copa Libertadores game against Argentinos Juniors at its compact, modern stadium.What Huila’s players saw was, first and foremost, rousing entertainment. Thanks to a last-ditch goal from Kevin Rodríguez, Independiente won, 3-2, securing the top spot in its group in the process. More important, as they posed for a group photograph against the empty stands of the Estadio Banco Guayaquil after the final whistle, Huila’s players will have known they had seen a glimpse of their — or at least their club’s — future.Back in March, speaking at the Financial Times Business of Football summit, the Newcastle United minority owner Amanda Staveley confirmed that the English club was exploring the idea of establishing a worldwide network of teams.That, in itself, was no great surprise. Over the last few years, the concept of building a stable of clubs has become de rigueur in soccer. Red Bull pioneered the model, in Salzburg and Leipzig, New York and São Paulo. Manchester City, through City Football Group, industrialized it; its portfolio now encompasses more than a dozen clubs, spread as far afield as Uruguay and India.Since then, anyone who is anyone has followed suit. Indeed, that is what was most striking about Staveley’s announcement: not what she said, but how she said it. Newcastle, she told the conference, was pursuing “multiclub.” Not “a multiclub model.” Just “multiclub.” Owning multiple teams across disparate leagues has become so commonplace that it is now a noun.Dozens of teams have now been subsumed into these models. Genoa, Standard Liège, Hertha Berlin and Sevilla are all part of the same group. Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and Lyon are linked through another. Brighton has a connection to Union Saint-Gilloise (everyone has a club in Belgium). This week, Chelsea’s ever-disruptive owners bought a majority share in the French team Strasbourg.Manchester City has built an extensive network of clubs around the world.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesCity’s teams, which include New York City F.C., have had varying degrees of success.Vincent Carchietta/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConThe rationale, on paper, is this: Owning a network of teams should allow owners to share best practices more easily while reducing risk and increasing efficiency in the transfer market. A network should, if constructed correctly, function as a two-way talent pipeline: The best players rise to the top of the pyramid, while those who fall by the wayside have landing spots farther down, meaning there is far less waste.That is the theory. The practice is a little different. Leipzig and Salzburg apart, it is not clear if anyone has managed to make the idea work, at least at scale. Players do not move from Montevideo City Torque to Girona to Manchester City. The portfolio approach to soccer, for now, remains very much in beta.There is a reason people keep trying it, though. For the clubs that form the networks — especially for those teams outside the wealthy enclaves of England’s Premier League and Europe’s elite — collective safety offers a degree of economic stability. It may even, at some point, give them access to a higher caliber of player than they’d otherwise get.And yet, in another light, the trend represents something significantly more troubling: not so much an inevitable conclusion to the sport’s flirtation with high finance but something far closer to an existential threat.Often, that is framed as an issue of competitive integrity: What will happen, for example, if two teams from the same group encounter each other in European competition? But perhaps more pressing is whether being part of a larger group fundamentally changes the purpose of a club. Does it alter the meaning of a team when it is no longer an entity trying to succeed on its own terms but is instead either a proving ground for talent or a parking lot for castoffs?These are questions UEFA, at least, does not seem in a hurry to answer. The organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has performed a significant about face on the subject, going from immediate, reflexive objection to hinting that the body will change its rules to accommodate the new reality. The conclusion, as always, is that soccer is happy to grant forgiveness, even if you do not ask permission.Still, there is sufficient organic skepticism that — as a rule — these deals are announced as gently as possible. Freshly minted member clubs are offered soothing reassurances about their autonomy. The connections are, to some extent, downplayed. The precise purpose is always oblique. There are, it is fair to say, not many cases where one team poses happily for a photo in the stadium of its new stablemate.Last month, Atlético Huila was acquired by Grupo Independiente, an investment consortium headed by Michel Deller, an Ecuadorean real estate magnate. His wealth, though, was not the main source of the group’s appeal.Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was instead the success he and his partners have had with Independiente del Valle, the club they bought 15 years ago and turned, at blistering speed, into what may be the most forward-thinking team in Latin America.As Juan Carlos Patarroyo, the outgoing president of Huila, said, Independiente now stands as the “guru” of South American soccer, a “pioneer in training, creating, producing and marketing professional players.”The sophistication of its youth system is the envy of the continent: the regional training bases placed deliberately in the most fertile areas of the country, the in-house tournaments that attract scouts from across the world. Independiente has produced not just Ecuador’s current golden boy, Moisés Caicedo, but also Kendry Paéz, his heir apparent. It is not bad going, given that Paéz, at 16, is older than the current iteration of the club.No less impressive have been the results. Independiente is not just a finishing school. Deller, thanks to considerable investment and a sharp eye for coaching talent, has turned his project into a genuine continental force. Independiente was a Libertadores finalist in 2016, and it won the Copa Sudamericana in 2019 and 2022.Most significant, though, has been its broader impact on soccer in Ecuador. At the World Cup last year, 10 of the 26 players on Ecuador’s squad bore Independiente’s imprimatur: They had spent some, or all, of their careers in Sangolqui. Led by Paéz, Ecuador finished as runners-up in this year’s South American under-17 championship, ahead of Argentina, to earn a place in the under-17 World Cup.And now, through Huila, Deller has set himself the target of doing exactly the same in Colombia. The conditions, he believes, are similar: an abundance of young talent, much of it currently lost through carelessness, to be harnessed; a club more than willing to adopt his methods and apply his knowledge.“We are going to contribute a lot with know-how and experience,” Santiago Morales, Independiente’s general manager, said after the takeover was completed. “We will give new ideas and initiatives, but above all we have a commitment to train players. Soon, we will have Colombia playing in youth tournaments in South America and the world.”That is the plan, anyway. Given all Independiente has accomplished, it is easy to believe they will be able to meet their lofty promises. In doing so, they would not only lift Atlético Huila, but Colombia as a whole. And more than that, they may even prove that there is a way to make soccer’s latest theory work in practice, too.Common Sense RevolutionManchester City and Manchester United are two of the biggest spenders in women’s soccer, too.Molly Darlington/ReutersFrancesca Whitfield is not exactly a household name. As the head of group planning at Manchester United, she probably would not expect to be. Her background is in the corporate sector; United recruited her, initially, as a financial analyst. Still, this week she did two things so rare, and so unexpected, that they deserve to be celebrated.It is impressive enough that, while speaking at the inaugural Women’s Football Summit — the European Clubs’ Association had not thought to organize one before 2023, which is pretty telling, really — Whitfield suggested that women’s soccer should seek to “adopt financial regulation much earlier in the women’s game than we did in the men’s.”This is, of course, so sensible that it almost borders on obvious, but Whitfield’s belief — that women’s soccer should not seek to “emulate or replicate” the men’s game — remains surprisingly revolutionary. Curiously few people in women’s soccer seem to be aware that they do not have to be hidebound by a set of flawed conventions designed for a bygone age.More striking still, though, was the context for Whitfield’s comments. She works for one of the game’s apex predators, and yet she was publicly pushing for financial controls — either an “anchoring system” or “even something akin to a hard salary cap” — that might enable smaller clubs to compete.“The wage inflation we are seeing is contributing to the gap between the larger and the smaller clubs,” she said, pointing out that while teams backed by major men’s clubs can cope, those run on tighter budgets are effectively being railroaded into irrelevance. “They can’t possibly ever be competitive with how things are.” She would like, she said, to see the issue addressed not by the leagues themselves, but “on a European level.”Quite what form that financial control should take — a salary cap, a designated player system or even introducing a draft for out-of-contract players — is open to debate.The sentiment, though, is worth heeding, not solely for women’s soccer, but the game as a whole. Everyone should be thinking about how to make the sport more competitive: between clubs, between leagues, between continents. Everyone, in other words, should be thinking a little more like Francesca Whitfield.AfterthoughtAlex Christian, right, and Haiti stunned Qatar at the Gold Cup, 2-1, on Sunday.Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the end, nobody felt the need to remember the start. It seemed too long ago, so much crammed into the month that had elapsed that it felt distant, as if it had happened in another era, or on another planet. Lionel Messi, rather reluctantly wearing a bisht, had lifted the World Cup trophy after a final that will likely go down as the greatest of them all. Qatar had the story it wanted, the tournament it wanted, the stage it wanted all along.In the rush to unpack precisely what that meant — for soccer, for politics, for the Qatar’s human rights record and for the migrant workers who had died so that all of it might happen — it was easy to forget that it had begun with a humiliation.Three minutes into the tournament’s opening game, Qatar’s national team had conceded a goal to Ecuador. It was — very narrowly — ruled out for offside, but it set the tone. Inside 16 minutes, Qatar was behind. The host lost that game. Then it lost to Senegal, ensuring it would not reach the knockout stage. A final defeat, to the Netherlands, marked Qatar as the worst-performing host of all time.Given the cost and the scale and the sheer controversy involved in staging the tournament, it is easy to assume that the Qatari authorities never really cared about the soccer part of it. That is not quite true: The country had spent years trying to hone a team to fly its flag.It built the Aspire Academy, ensuring its young players had the finest facilities in the world, and explored using it to develop talent from across the planet. It invested in Eupen, a minor Belgian team, to expose its hot-housed prodigies to European soccer. It hired expert — and able — coaches to oversee their progress.And it all failed. Qatar was not humiliated during the World Cup, but it is fair to assume that three games, and three defeats, was not quite the return it had anticipated. The results have not improved since then. In its opening game at the Gold Cup, Qatar’s national team — now under the aegis of the grizzled, irascible Carlos Queiroz — lost to Haiti.There is a romance there, of course: Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth, embattled in so many ways, sticking one in the eye of one of the richest countries. But it is a reminder, too, that while Qatar will look back on the World Cup as a resounding success, there was one aspect of the whole endeavor — the sporting one — that remained entirely beyond its grasp.CorrespondenceThis newsletter likes to regard itself as a safe space. It’s best, perhaps, to think of it as a thought workshop: a place to challenge conventional thinking, to gaze upon the blue sky, to move so far outside the box that you realize the box itself is a circle. No idea is a bad idea: That’s the credo. Except for this one, from Shawn Donnelly.“I just thought of a way to make soccer more exciting,” Shawn wrote, in what I can only assume was the very small hours of the morning. “Take a page out of the N.B.A.’s book and add three-pointers: three points for shots from outside the 18-yard box, two for shots from inside, and one for penalties.”You’ll have spotted the problem here: What Shawn has done is not so much as take a page from the N.B.A.’s book as copy-and-paste it, verbatim.Let’s think this through, though. Is the idea that teams who score more goals than others not something that should be incentivized? Could there not be a bonus point, as there is in rugby, for sides that score — say — four or more? Or would that simply give the elite teams even more of a structural advantage? Probably, but it is worth considering. This is why we should always workshop every idea, even if the raw material is, um, lacking. All goals should count equally. That is not a part of soccer we need to adjust.U.S. striker Jesus Ferreira scored three goals in a 6-0 win over St. Kitts and Nevis in the Concacaf Gold Cup on Wednesday. The Americans close the group stage against Trinidad and Tobago on Monday.Jeff Curry/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConWalid Neaz, on the other hand, has an idea that needs very little tweaking. “Why are the continental champions not awarded a spot in the World Cup?” he asked. “If it’s the showcase tournament, then it would stand to reason the champions for each continent have earned a spot?”Yes, absolutely. This makes perfect sense. The reigning champions of each confederation should, of course, earn a bye straight into the World Cup. It would, as Walid points out, help to alleviate fixture congestion, just a little. It would reward long-term planning. And it may even increase the prestige of a couple of the continental tournaments.Sadly, Walid already knows why it won’t happen. “More games means more eyeballs and more revenue to be sold for FIFA,” he pointed out in the coda to his email. (I’d add that it would mean the individual confederations’ accepting that their tournaments are upstream of the World Cup, which is not something their pride would allow.) More