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      Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior Says Racism Is ‘Normal’ in Spain After Abuse at Valencia

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      After Valencia fans called the Real Madrid star a monkey, Spain’s top soccer official called racial abuse a stain on the entire country.Vinícius Júnior has had enough.The Real Madrid forward, a magnet for racist chants from the stands in Spanish stadiums for the past two seasons, took to social media after the latest attack against him on Sunday, when he was called a monkey by fans in Valencia. This time, he took aim not only at his abusers but also at Spain itself.“It wasn’t the first time, nor the second, nor the third,” Vinícius Júnior wrote in a post on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the federation does too and the opponents encourage it.” Spain, he said, was becoming known in his native Brazil “as a country of racists.”On Sunday, Vinícius Júnior was met by fans chanting the word “mono” — monkey — before he even stepped off the Real Madrid bus outside the Mestalla stadium in Valencia. The match was briefly halted in the 71st minute as he pointed out some of his abusers to the referee, and an antiracism statement — part of a league protocol for such incidents — was read to the crowd over the stadium loudspeakers. By the end, though, it was Vinícius Júnior who was cast as the villain: He received a red card in the dying minutes of injury time after scuffling with an opponent who had charged at him.The referee Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea trying to calm Vinícius Júnior as he protested that he was being racially abused.Aitor Alcalde/Getty ImagesReal Madrid said it believed the abuse directed at its player qualified as a hate crime under Spanish law, and the club said it had filed a complaint with the relevant authorities demanding an investigation. “We have a serious problem,” the president of Spain’s soccer federation acknowledged Monday, calling racism in the nation’s stadiums an issue “that stains an entire team, an entire fan base and an entire country.”Bouts of racial abuse echoing through the stands in Spanish soccer stadiums are not uncommon or new, but they have become particularly pointed toward Vinícius Júnior, who has emerged as one of the league’s marquee players since the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.In a statement announcing an investigation into the events on Sunday in Valencia, La Liga acknowledged it had reported nine separate incidents of racist abuse against Vinícius Júnior in the past two seasons alone. By then, the player had taken to social media, where he wrote that the attacks on him were tarnishing Spain’s image around the world.“A beautiful nation, which welcomed me and which I love, but which agreed to export the image of a racist country to the world,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for the Spaniards who don’t agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists.”He even suggested a failure to act against racism could drive him from the country.The reaction to what occurred at the Mestalla brought new scrutiny on Spanish soccer’s handling of racism inside stadiums. In a television interview immediately after the match, Real Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelloti, reacted incredulously when he was asked to talk about the game. “I don’t want to talk about football,” he said. “I want to talk about what happened here.”In a news conference that followed, local journalists tried to correct Ancelloti’s assessment that the entire stadium was responsible, telling him he had misheard the chanting. Then officials from Valencia issued denials of widespread racism in the stands, despite videos online appearing to show large sections of the crowd chanting “mono.” Some reporters suggested to Ancelloti that a majority of supporters had actually been chanting “tonto,” a word that means silly in Spanish. “Whether it was ‘mono’ or ‘tonto,’ the referee stopped the game to open the racism protocol,” Ancelotti replied. “He wouldn’t do that if they just chanted ‘tonto.’ Speak to the referee.”Within hours, La Liga’s chief executive, Javier Tebas, was engaged in a back-and-forth exchange with Vinícius Júnior on Twitter. In it, Tebas defended Spain, detailed the efforts the league had made to tackle racist behavior and scolded Vinícius for what Tebas said was a failure to show up to two meetings to discuss the abuse he had received.Tebas’s statement led to a furious response from the player.“Once again, instead of criticizing racists, the president of La Liga appears on social media to attack me,” Vinícius wrote. “As much as you talk and pretend not to read, the image of your championship has been hit by this. See the responses to your posts and you will have a surprise. Omitting yourself only makes you equal to racists.”The incident drew criticism, and messages of support, from around the world.Speaking at a news conference at the close of a G7 summit in Japan, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he wanted to send a message of solidarity to Vinícius, saying it was “unjust” that he “gets insulted at every stadium where he plays.”“It’s not possible, in the middle of the 21st century, to have such strong racial prejudice in so many football stadiums,” Lula said.Current and former players also rallied around Vinícius, taking aim at the authorities in Spain for not doing more to stamp out racism, which some commentators in the country have routinely described as merely an effort to gain an advantage on the field.Kylian Mbappé, who almost moved to Spain last season to join Vinícius in Madrid, posted a message of support on Instagram. He was joined by Neymar, a Brazilian star who also faced racial abuse when he played in Spain for Barcelona.La Liga issued a statement detailing what it said were its efforts to stamp out racism in its stadiums. The league said it was working with the authorities in Valencia to investigate what took place, and it vowed to take legal action if any hate crime was identified. Still, it is limited in the type of penalties it can levy against clubs. Stadium closures, for example, can be sanctioned only by the national soccer federation.The latest incident will mean new scrutiny on the federation, and Spanish soccer, at a time it is looking for global support to secure the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup as part of a joint effort with Portugal and Morocco.“We have a problem of behavior, of education, of racism,” the Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales told a news conference Monday. “And as long as there is one fan or one group of fans making insults based on someone’s sexual orientation or skin color or belief, then we have a serious problem.” More

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      Manchester City’s Premier League Success Leaves Many Cold

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      City claimed its third straight Premier League title on Saturday. But admiring its excellence is not the same as accepting its methods.As it turned out, Manchester City had already done all it needed to do. On Saturday night, Pep Guardiola’s team’s last remaining rival — a bone-tired, spirit-sapped Arsenal — finally stumbled and fell. For the third time in three seasons, Manchester City was untouchable at the summit of the Premier League.The coronation will come on Sunday, City’s home game with Chelsea transformed into a processional, but it felt somehow fitting that the title should be decided without the league’s undisputed sovereign so much as kicking a ball. This has, after all, been a fait accompli for some time.Quite where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been City’s dismantling of Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in February. Or its humbling of the same opponent at the Etihad Stadium two months later.Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he has said, with an impromptu meeting in the aftermath of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, that his players buckled down, took control, and bent the Premier League to their will.Or, perhaps, none of that is true. Perhaps there is no turning point to identify. There is a very good chance that the season has simply ended the way it was always going to end, the way that Premier League seasons increasingly tend to end. Perhaps the outcome was preordained. Perhaps we all knew, deep down, how this was going to go.Advancing to the Champions League final kept City on track for three trophies.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRegardless, that is another item crossed off Manchester City’s bucket list of inevitabilities. Only a handful of teams — four, to be precise — have ever won three English titles in a row: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United, twice, in the early part of this century.It is an accomplishment that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of only two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed its coach in the middle of its run.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold for greatness, the game’s pearly gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, have now passed through it.In doing so, they have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate, concerted campaign to build a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club side England has ever produced.Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City has gobbled up every record it can find, etching its name at the top of almost every one of the sport’s statistical leader boards. It has the most points any team has ever collected in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign, and had the highest goal difference, and the biggest winning margin.It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. In Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to possessing the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, it may not even need that caveat: Haaland has five games to score 12 goals and pass the all-time high-water mark. If he does not do it this year, he may well do it next.Erling Haaland: goal machine.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIndeed, such is City’s domestic supremacy that the only worlds it has yet to conquer are on more distant shores. See off Manchester United in the F.A. Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would be just the second team in English history to complete the fabled, sanctified treble.After that, its ambitions would have to turn to the faintly fantastical. No team has ever won four English titles in a row. Nobody has ever won seven competitions in a single year, or done a quadruple. No English side since Nottingham Forest has retained the European Cup. Perhaps City could try and become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, or while only using their left feet, or with a lineup comprised solely of people called Neil.It has become a reflex to suggest that this is simply the nature of soccer. There is, as the former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, always an “ogre,” a team that sits at the top of the pile, that towers over the landscape, that sucks up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”There is some truth in that logic, but it is not a whole truth. In its years of plenty, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool was undeniably a rich club: In the years before broadcast revenue and television deals and money-spinning global tours, it had the one advantage available, that of being a big city team in a big city stadium.For Pep Guardiola, every option is a good option.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersBut it was not drastically richer than most of its rivals. Its challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but they were also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The game’s hierarchy was much flatter, its stratification not nearly so ossified.Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the British transfer record, but only for a sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg, and then Ian Rush to Juventus. In that time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City all spent more money on a player than anyone had previously. Liverpool did not break the £1 million barrier until 1987.United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognizable, built on the club’s commercial heft. It is worth parsing, though, one of the phrases that entered the sport’s lexicon during that period: Fergie Time, the idea that referees generally gave United as much time as required in a game to find a way to escape disappointment.That was not true, of course. The reason United developed a reputation for late winning goals was because of the character and resilience of Ferguson’s immensely gifted team. But the idea stuck nonetheless.United was the dominant team of its age. It was possible, though, for opposition fans to trick themselves into believing it was all down to luck, to the grace and favor of the powers that be, and that if only the fight was fair then United would receive its comeuppance.The same cannot be said of Manchester City. All of those records, the monopoly it has started to exert on the game’s history, point to a type of hegemony that English soccer has not previously experienced. City has not just reconfigured what it takes to succeed in the Premier League, but redefined how the game thinks of excellence. Its dominance feels more extreme than anything that went before, largely because it is.And yet the response to it has not been the loathing that was generated by Liverpool and United — an animus so potent that it has been passed down from one generation to the next — but a sort of acquiescence. Guardiola’s style of play is widely admired. The beauty of his team, the ingenuity of his ideas, draws fulsome and fawning praise.Guardiola is most likely one victory from his fifth Premier League title.Molly Darlington/ReutersThe success of the club itself, though, feels somehow cold, clinical, detached. Manchester City has the air of a machine, both in the way the project has been constructed and the manner in which the team plays. It should not be a surprise, then, that it should elicit roughly the same emotional response. This is a state-backed enterprise of bottomless wealth and grandiose vision. It is impossible to resist. But it is also difficult to adore.City’s advantage is not, as is often suggested, that it can spend more than anyone else, though few teams could afford the squad that Guardiola has at its disposal, or indeed the Catalan himself. Manchester United has frittered away hundreds of millions in the transfer market. Chelsea, too. Liverpool commits almost as much in salary to its squad.The edge is in the consistency. City is rarely — if ever — forced to sell a player on anything other than its own terms. That is what separates it, as much as anything, from all of its peers. Plenty of clubs have a plan. City is the only one that has the privilege of seeing it through without being subject to the arbitrary tides of reality.That is not the same, though, as not playing by the same rules. It is a coincidence, doubtless, that the run of form that will end with Guardiola’s team claiming yet another title began after the club was charged with 115 counts of rules breaches — dating back over a decade, the whole span of its dominion — by the Premier League.Those charges retain the capacity to alter, on some fundamental level, all of the mosts and firsts and bests that City has accrued over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records — they are all contingent on that case.Jack Grealish, still the most expensive British player in soccer history.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is just about possible for fans, for the game, to swallow the idea that a club owned and operated for the purpose of furthering the interests of a nation state is acceptable. It is just about possible for the television networks and media outlets that rely on the draw of the sport’s rolling soap opera to wallow in whatever moral gray area they can find.It would be much harder to excuse and explain and — above all — to accept that one team felt that the rules it had signed up to did not really apply, to decide that it did not need to be subject to the same constraints as everyone else.Many of the charges might feel historic, dated, but this has always been a long-term project. What happened 10 years ago led, inexorably, to today, to this, to Manchester City having a third title in three seasons, standing on the verge of a treble, its name scored next to almost every record English soccer can offer.What it has done, over these last few years, is plain for all to see. How it will be remembered is yet to be decided. More

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      North America Got the 2026 World Cup. Now Who Will Get the Final?

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      A decision on which city will host the men’s 2026 World Cup final is expected in the fall. Leaders from the New York area are making their case, with Dallas and Los Angeles also in the running.It has been almost five years since a bid from the United States, Canada and Mexico beat out a proposal from Morocco to host soccer’s 2026 men’s World Cup. Now the competition has turned intramural.The stadiums for the tournament have been chosen, but FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, has not yet said which one will host the final game.Officials from New York City and New Jersey are starting a concerted push to land that final for MetLife Stadium at the Meadowlands, including an event in Times Square on Thursday morning with Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Mayor Eric Adams of New York.“Eric and I believe strongly that we have the most compelling case by far to get the best package, including the final,” Murphy said in a joint interview with Adams on Wednesday morning.At most other World Cups, there is an obvious choice for the final game. Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Paris were always going to be chosen when their countries hosted the tournament. But there are several attractive candidates for the 2026 final, to be played July 19. (Though Mexico and Canada will host some of the tournament’s 104 games, the bidders agreed that the majority of the matches — and everything from the quarterfinals on — would be in the United States.)The only previous time the United States hosted the World Cup, in 1994, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., got the final. This time, SoFi Stadium is the Los Angeles-area site on the list of stadiums for 2026. But that stadium was built primarily for N.F.L. football, and there is concern that the field there is too narrow for soccer, which would require removing some seats, and reducing capacity.Dallas has also emerged as a leading candidate, in part because nearby AT&T Stadium can potentially be expanded to offer over 100,000 seats for soccer.But Adams and Murphy are making their case that the New York City area outshines those places as the best spot for the game.“Yes, L.A. is known for its extravaganza and its appeal of Hollywood,” Adams said. “But I think New York is the largest stage.”Murphy said: “New York is the international capital of the world. With no disrespect to Dallas, we’re taking about New York.”The other contenders are not lying down. “We are making our case to the committee right now that we would be the perfect site for the semifinals and finals,” Dan Hunt, president of Dallas’s bid, told the local NBC affiliate late last year. “We have two great airports, we have the infrastructure, we have the hotels, we have AT&T Stadium. We have what it will take to host what I call ‘the Super Bowl on steroids.’”Kathryn Schloessman, head of the Los Angeles bid, said, “Our region is so fortunate to have a world-class stadium and infrastructure to be in consideration for hosting the final and other prominent matches.”The decision will ultimately be made by top FIFA officials, up to and including President Gianni Infantino, with input from the regional governing body, Concacaf, and U.S. Soccer. It is expected in early fall.Whether the New York region wins the final or not, there are likely to be about eight games at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. “Eight games is like eight Super Bowls in six weeks, so no matter what the games look like it’s going to be a huge success,” Murphy said. “We’ll sell every one of them out; it doesn’t matter who’s playing.”“But clearly to get the final — and we think we’re in the best position to get the final — is the icing on the cake that is almost unparalleled in sports,” he added. “There is both prestige and I’m sure an extra boost to the regional economy.”If a “huge success” is coming either way, why is there such a hunger to land the final? Adams acknowledged another motivation: “I’m extremely competitive, and I want to beat other cities to have the final. We were chosen, now it’s time for us to bring home the Cup.” More

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      With Stakes at Their Highest, Manchester City Rises Higher Still

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      MANCHESTER, England — No matter what happens from here, regardless of whether Manchester City’s campaign in the Champions League ends with medals and parades and the realization of the club’s ultimate, meticulously-planned dream, it felt as if something shifted amid the delirious, crowing tumult of the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night.It is not enough to say that Manchester City defeated Real Madrid to seal a place in the Champions League final for the second time in three years. It is not just that Pep Guardiola’s team demolished the reigning champion, outclassing the club that regards this competition as its own private party by 4-0.It is that City did so with a performance — given the circumstances, given the stakes, given the identity and reputation and talent of the opponent — that surely ranks among the finest, the most dominant, this tournament has seen. This was Manchester City sending a message, making a statement, proving a point. And in the process, it was also Manchester City vanquishing its ghosts.Midfielder Bernardo Silva scored Manchester City’s first two goals.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJulián Álvarez had the fourth, moments after he came on as a substitute.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola’s travails in this tournament are well-known. He is, by common consensus, the finest coach of his generation, and yet he has spent much of the last decade or so finding new and inventive ways not to win the Champions League. He has contrived to lose to Monaco and Lyon, Liverpool and Tottenham. He lost a final to Chelsea because he fiddled with his team. He lost a semifinal to Real Madrid in the blink of an eye.It has become a trope that Guardiola, in his urgency, overcomplicates matters. There is a theory — one that he himself alluded to here — that his background, as a Barcelona fan, has given him what might look in certain lights like a slightly unhealthy fixation with this tournament.He has always scotched it as nonsense, of course, dismissing the idea that there might be a pattern, attributing the repeated disappointments to nothing more complex than the vicissitudes of the game. That has done little to quell the sense, though, that the Champions League had become his — and by extension Manchester City’s — Achilles’ heel, the one world that the club’s bottomless, state-backed wealth and knife-edge precision could not conquer.

      .css-fg61ac{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;position:relative;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-fg61ac{margin-bottom:0;-webkit-flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);}}.css-1ga3qu9{-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-preferred-size:50%;flex-basis:50%;}.css-rrq38y{margin:1rem auto;max-width:945px;}.css-1wsofa1{margin-top:10px;color:var(–color-content-quaternary,#727272);font-family:nyt-imperial,georgia,’times new roman’,times,Songti TC,simsun,serif;font-weight:400;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1wsofa1{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;}}@media (max-width:600px){.css-1wsofa1{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}.css-1nnraid{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;margin:0 auto;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1nnraid{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;height:auto;gap:8px;}}.css-1yworrz{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row-reverse;-ms-flex-direction:row-reverse;flex-direction:row-reverse;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1yworrz{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);gap:8px;}}The many moods of Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.

      Perhaps, given the nature of the City project, that was always likely to evaporate eventually. This is a club, after all, that has an unavoidable mechanized quality. For all the richness of its style, the gleam of its talent, it is hard not to discern the cold, calculated precision with which it has been constructed.It is a club that feels as if it has been built — to the exact specifications of the best coach in the world, and then equipped with the best of everything that money can buy — rather than one that has grown. At some point, that was always going to tell. At some point, establishing yourself as the Champions League’s dominant force is less a sporting challenge and more an economic formula.That, though, should not be allowed to disguise the style with which City swatted aside Real Madrid. Guardiola had, in the days preceding the game, detected in his players the three ingredients he believed would be required if they were to seal a place in the final against Inter Milan in Istanbul on June 10.There was a sense of “calm,” he said, a lack of panic and anxiety and nerves. There was “tension,” too, the edge, the alertness that is necessary to perform. And, crucially, there was the “pain” of what happened last year, when City fell victim to that peculiar magic that is wielded by Real Madrid and Real Madrid alone. For a year, Guardiola said, his team had been forced to “swallow the poison” of that game. This was the chance to purge it.In the first half, in particular, it felt as if this might come to be remembered as the high-water mark of Guardiola’s project in Manchester, the culmination of the team he has spent the past six years constructing, honing, polishing, perfecting.By halftime, City led by 2-0, thanks to two goals from Bernardo Silva, and it would have had every reason to feel more than a little disappointed. Erling Haaland had missed two glorious opportunities. Kevin De Bruyne had whipped an effort across the face of goal.Real Madrid had spent 45 minutes pinned back not only in its own half but in its own penalty area, apparently powerless to break City’s spell, to escape its stranglehold. Its players, many of them veterans of multiple triumphs in this competition, seemed harried and frantic, suddenly stripped of their poise and their prowess.Toni Kroos and Luka Modric of Real Madrid after Silva’s second goal.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesLuka Modric could not judge the weight of his passes. Toni Kroos kept giving the ball away. Vinícius Júnior, stranded on the left wing, forlornly urged his teammates to step forward. Federico Valverde, overwhelmed in midfield, seemed continually baffled to discover that there was always another light blue jersey behind him.Real Madrid’s reputation is such, of course, that even when wounded most teams would consider it a threat. At no point, though, did City consider shrinking into itself. Guardiola, clearly, had scented something: not just the chance to win a game but to change the story, to shift the emphasis.Riyad Mahrez came on. Phil Foden came on. Whirling, gesticulating, prowling on the touchline, Guardiola urged his players forward. Manuel Akanji made it three. Julián Álvarez, in the dying embers of the game, added a fourth. A victory turned into a triumph, and then morphed into a rout.This was not simply City taking revenge on Real Madrid for last year. It was City exorcising all of those demons it has built up over the years, all of the disappointments it has endured, all of the times the machine that Guardiola has built has stalled at precisely the wrong moment.At the final whistle, as Real Madrid’s players sank to their haunches — bereft at the defeat, relieved the humiliation was at an end — the Etihad Stadium was filled with wild, discordant noise. The club was playing Gala International. The fans were roaring, booming, exulting. The word “Istanbul,” displayed in neon pink, was emblazoned on the giant screens in the corners of the stadium. Guardiola, his energy almost frantic, was hopping and jumping and dancing with his players.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGreatness now rests in Manchester City’s grasp. It should claim the Premier League title this weekend, its third in a row. It has already qualified for the F.A. Cup final, against Manchester United. It will, though Guardiola protested it, be an overwhelming favorite in the Champions League final. It is 270 minutes, no more, from winning a treble. Whatever happens, though, whatever comes next, this victory was not simply a step on the way. It was a destination in itself, the night that Manchester City vanquished its ghosts. More

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      Inter Milan, Finding a Way, Reaches Champions League Final

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      Lautaro Martínez scored late in the second half to give Inter a date with Real Madrid or Manchester City in next month’s final in Istanbul.Simone Inzaghi has spent most of his season on the brink. His Inter Milan team had been sufficiently erratic that the club appeared of the mind to end Inzaghi’s tenure as manager if he failed to make it past the last 16 of the Champions League. He survived that. Most assumed it was simply delaying the inevitable. The ax would fall if — maybe when — Inter fell in the quarterfinals.A month or so later, the shadow that has trailed Inzaghi for so long has disappeared, and there is nothing left but light. Over the course of two legs — both held at San Siro — his Inter team swept past its neighbor, rival and housemate, A.C. Milan, to reach its first Champions League final for 13 years. Its berth in the final — sealed with a 1-0 victory on Tuesday, and a 3-0 triumph on aggregate — marks not only the finest achievement of his career, but one of the most improbable adventures the competition has seen.LuLau with the dagger. 🥶 pic.twitter.com/fsynbEohaK— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) May 16, 2023
      Inter will, of course, be seen as little more than cannon fodder for either Manchester City or Real Madrid, two very modern powerhouses, in the final. But even that underdog status does not quite capture the sheer improbability of the club’s presence in the biggest annual game in world soccer.For years, Inter has been facing mounting financial problems. Its debts reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Its owner, the Chinese businessman Steven Zhang, has been seeking to sell the club for several seasons, even before the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Inter’s accounts.Quite how desperate the situation has become was neatly illustrated by the club’s blank jerseys for both semifinals against Milan. Inter does not currently have a primary sponsor; the cryptocurrency firm that had occupied that prestigious advertising real estate having failed to make its payments earlier this year.Inter’s Edin Dzeko, who scored a vital goal in the first leg. Isabella Bonotto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe straitened finances are manifested in the club’s squad, which lacks the star power of most Champions League finalists. Other than its captain, Lautaro Martínez, and the midfielder Nicolò Barella, Inter does not possess a slew of assets the rest of Europe’s giants would covet. Inzaghi, instead, has had to work with a selection of veterans, castoffs, hopefuls and journeymen.And yet, against Milan, it produced a performance of remarkable poise and control. Edin Dzeko and Henrikh Mkhitaryan had effectively settled the tie last week, scoring two goals inside the first 11 minutes inside the same stadium, and Milan rarely threatened to mount a comeback in the return. Inter may lack glamour and flash, but few teams in Europe have quite so much grit and grizzle.Martínez’s goal, late on, sparked wild celebrations among Inter’s fans, but in truth they might have started booking their flights to Istanbul long before it went in. None of them would have expected this to be how their season ended: a team seen as a makeweight, at least in Europe, thrust onto the greatest stage of all. Inzaghi, though, has taken them to the brink. More

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      When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone

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      Shakhtar Donetsk’s foreign stars fled Ukraine when Russia invaded. Now some are returning or signing up, proof that the lure of opportunity can trump fear.By the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.When Shakhtar returned to practice after a monthslong hiatus abroad, the cosmopolitan air of the club had vanished. A roster that had been dotted with almost a dozen Brazilians just over a year ago now contains only one. Clubs elsewhere in Europe, shopping for bargains amid broken contracts, skimmed off other talent. Even Roberto de Zerbi, Shakhtar’s highly rated Italian coach, had moved on.Traoré, like all the others, could have gone, too. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, issued an edict shortly after the start of the war that allowed foreigners, whatever their contractual status, to unilaterally quit Ukrainian teams and sign elsewhere.Traoré was vacationing in Barcelona on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. He could only follow from afar as Shakhtar’s foreign stars — crammed in a hotel conference room with their families — pleaded for help as war planes circled the skies above Kyiv. Within a few days, they had left the country. Those who escaped did not return.Traoré returned to Amsterdam, where he had previously played for the Dutch club Ajax, to wait out the early months of the war. While the rest of Shakhtar’s armada of foreign talent found new clubs — some back home in Brazil, others in Europe — Traoré took his time. Slowly, the thought of returning to Shakhtar started to look like not only a viable option but the right thing to do.“I had many options,” he said after a recent practice in Kyiv, where the team has been based for the last few weeks. “The club knows. I know. And we discussed it. But I decided to stay.”For him, he said, “it’s in my culture that when they give you something, you have to give something back. For me, it was time to give back the love they gave me before.”Traoré said that he understood why many of his teammates decided not to return. He admitted that he had some difficult conversations with his wife and parents before agreeing to do so. (His wife is now living with his parents at their home in Paris.)For most of the season the team lived in a hotel complex in the western city of Lviv, but it has recently moved to Kyiv, closer to its training ground. A return to Donetsk, in the east, is out of the question; Russian forces have controlled the city since last year, joining separatists that forced Shakhtar into exile as long ago as 2014.The club Traoré has rejoined is a shadow of the powerhouse it once was. The squad and its finances have been gutted; Shakhtar estimates that it has lost at least $40 million worth of talent for nothing as a result of FIFA’s decision to let players walk away from their contracts.Shakhtar and rivals like Dynamo Kyiv play their league matches in empty stadiums. Shakhtar remains on course for a return to the Champions League next season.Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters“We have no money,” the club’s chief executive, Sergei Palkin, said on a recent visit to London. The Ukrainian league’s return, as much a symbol of the country’s resolve as a sporting competition, is played out in front of empty stands and to the sound of occasional air raid sirens forcing players from the field. The league’s television contract has collapsed. Sponsors have all but disappeared.“We have no income from Ukraine,” Palkin said. “Zero.”What money there is has come from Shakhtar’s presence in the Champions League and the Europa League, European soccer’s second-tier competition, and from the record transfer fee the club received by selling its star Ukrainian forward Mykhailo Mudruyk to Chelsea in England.New money cannot come soon enough. While FIFA allowed foreign players to leave Shakhtar without a fee, it insisted the club pay any debts to the clubs it signed those foreign players from, including a handful that did not play a single minute for the club because of the war, according to Palkin.Traoré’s decision to return, then, came as a pleasant surprise. He had cost the club $10 million in a transfer fee when he joined from Ajax in 2021. A forward who was not considered a mainstay before the war, he is suddenly a pivotal figure, and not just for what he is doing on the field.His continued presence, Traoré and the club hope, is a sign to potential recruits that soccer in Ukraine remains a viable career option. It is an option that proved alluring to players with European dreams like Kevin Kelsy, an 18-year-old striker from Venezuela.The 18-year-old Venezuelan striker Kevin Kelsy said his family was worried about his move to Shakhtar. “When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockNot so long ago Kelsy would not have been a target for Shakhtar, which for years used the wealth of its oligarch owner to shop at a higher price bracket. But now, in its more straitened state, Shakhtar has turned to eager young players like Kelsy and recruits from Georgia and Tajikistan.Kelsy said signing a five-year contract with a club in a country at war was a surprisingly easy decision. The prospect of fulfilling a dream of making it to Europe trumped everything else, he said — even the persistent threat from Russian missiles and planes, the regular drone of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant explosions. His family, though, had questions.“When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” he said in an interview in Spanish. “They knew everything that happened, and there was a little bit of nervousness and a little of fear. But I spoke to them about this theme, that it’s very important for me to go to play football in Europe, in a big team like Shakhtar, and in the end they understood.”Kelsy, like the scores of South Americans who have signed for Ukrainian clubs in the past, views the club as a steppingstone on a journey that he hopes might one day propel him to the club of his dreams, A.C. Milan. Games in elite competitions like the Champions League, he knows, offer an elite stage to show he belongs. (Shakhtar, which led the Ukrainian league entering the weekend, is on track to return to the competition next season.)Having lost so many players, Palkin, the Shakhtar chief executive, now insists that any new recruits sign contracts that include clauses that would prevent them from taking advantage of any FIFA regulations that would allow them to suddenly leave. Any player who signs on now, he said, surely understands the commitment they are making.So strong is the pull of making it as a professional in Europe, though, that Kelsy said not even war could stop him from coming. “I try not to think about it,” he said, “and focus on what matters now.”As a new recruit, Kelsy knows no other reality as a Shakhtar player. That is not the case for Traoré, who recalls far more luxurious times. In those days, jet travel and big crowds were the norm, not the long, arduous bus journeys that are now required to fulfill fixtures in empty stadiums.“It’s not normal life like we used to have: no home, you can’t see family, and also you have to always be careful, sirens on all the time,” he said. “But you get used to it.” More

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      The Premier League Crucible Produces Something New: Ideas

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      England has long relied on imported players, imported coaches, imported best practices. Now it’s trying something new for a change.Manchester City had been in possession of the ball for a minute, no more, but to the denizens of the Santiago Bernabéu, it felt like an hour or more. Pep Guardiola’s team moved it backward and forward and then backward again. It switched it from side to side, sometimes via the scenic route, stopping off to admire the view from midfield, and sometimes taking the express.Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned about this state of affairs. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semifinal that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around. The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerized by the swirling patterns.The crowd, though, did not like it one bit. The modern Real Madrid might be something of a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing itself as the game’s greatest statesman and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries its fans are not willing to cross.The idea that a visitor, no matter how talented, should come to the Bernabéu and look as comfortable as Manchester City did, in that spell on Tuesday night, was clearly one of them. Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that it might as well have had its feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.And so, as if to make its displeasure known, the crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to take a more aggressive stance, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.Real Madrid is not used to being bullied on its home field.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was hard, in that moment, not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is now horribly outdated. The idea that English soccer lacks refinement when compared with its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger viewers might struggle to believe it ever existed at all.The Premier League’s emissaries have, between them, conquered all of the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabéu. A couple of years later, Arsène Wenger’s team did the same thing to A.C. Milan at San Siro. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City itself have all won at Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they have been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might even have been just a little bit lucky.Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness that their opponents cannot match. England has not had any reason to be ashamed for some time.City’s display in Madrid might not have led to a victory — not yet, anyway — but the scale of its superiority was nevertheless noteworthy. In part, of course, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and molding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of its ideas.Pep Guardiola, imported innovator.Borja Sanchez Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockThere should be nothing especially controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, is not identifiably English, not in any real sense. It bears about as much relation to the century of English soccer culture that preceded it, in fact, as the modern Manchester City does to the club that occupied the stadium on Maine Road for all those years.The colors are the same, of course. Something about the atmosphere, too, is native, idiosyncratic, even if it is all a little quieter these days. Perhaps it is possible to discern a little Englishness in the tempo of the game, in how crowds celebrate corners, in the ongoing appreciation for a thundering tackle.But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well. The training methods, the organizational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.That, it should be stressed, is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped to transform what was once a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet. The transformation in England’s soccer culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.But while the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory. The soccer its teams play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers. Every tweak, every trend, every notion has washed up on these shores eventually (and, sometimes, a little reluctantly). It is a showcase of soccer’s contemporary thought.Rarely, though, have any of those ideas actually emerged in England. Perhaps a degree of skepticism is an enduring streak of Englishness, or perhaps it is a function of the league’s wealth: Why experiment when you can, in effect, pay someone else to take those risks for you?All of the innovations that have changed English soccer have been developed elsewhere, in the start-up cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time and Claude Makelele and his eponymous role all the way to the high press preached by Jürgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.It is, then, entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing, at Barcelona, or an ancillary midfielder, at Bayern Munich. Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.At the Bernabéu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control. It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the center of the field that meant Real Madrid had to be so passive that it risked the wrath of its home crowd.John Stones, the central defender unbound.Jose Breton/Associated PressNothing in soccer is ever truly new, of course. All of these positional switches are, as the journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted, simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played essentially as orthodoxy in the 1930s.Many of them have fluttered around elsewhere, too, occasionally popping up in the least likely of places. Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example, a team that regularly allowed its defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as soccer’s cutting edge.That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval, turns it automatically into best practice. Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England.Fitting FinaleMr. Messi will inform you of his decision when he is good and ready.Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNothing, Jorge Messi would like you to know, is decided yet. His adult son, Lionel, will not be making any decision on the identity of his future employer until the end of the French season. And with good reason. The Ligue 1 title race sure is a nail-biter, and Messi would not want any of the Paris St.-Germain fans who are so devoted to him to think his focus might have drifted elsewhere.That does not stop the speculation, of course. So far this week, there have been reports that Messi’s “priority” is to remain in Europe; that he has agreed to a deal to sign with a club in Saudi Arabia; that he is talking to a club in Saudi Arabia but has not yet signed on the dotted line; that he is waiting for the green light from La Liga before completing a move back to Barcelona.Needless to say, not all of these things can be true. It is hard to tell if any of them are. There is never any paperwork produced to support any of the claims. There are never any on-the-record quotes from people actively involved in the negotiations. Everything is hazy, indistinct, disguised behind what is, in this case, the coward’s or the liar’s veil of deep background.As previously noted, the most romantic conclusion to all of this is that Messi returns to Newell’s Old Boys, or failing that Barcelona. In many ways, though, it feels increasingly fitting that he should draw the curtain on his career in Saudi Arabia.What could better encapsulate this era of soccer, after all, than the sight of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two men who define the modern game, who crystallized everything that it is, eking out the final drops of their talent in a country that has sought to co-opt them, and their phenomenon, for its own purposes, effectively weaponizing their star power? Perhaps, in a way, that is where Messi should be. Perhaps Saudi Arabia was your destiny all along.Every End Has a StartFor Victor Osimhen and Napoli, it’s celebrations today and consequences later.Andrea Staccioli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmong soccer’s very worst traits is its restless, obsessive desire to know what comes next. Managers who pull off unexpected successes must, always, be encouraged to move to different clubs, bigger clubs, to see what they might do next. Players enjoying breakthrough seasons must immediately be photoshopped into the jerseys of their many and varied suitors. No achievement is allowed to exist merely for and of itself. Meaning is only bestowed when it is clear where glory might lead.It feels a little reductive, then, to ask what might come next for Napoli. It is hard to think of a less appropriate question. Napoli has waited 33 years to win Serie A for the third time. The city is still caught in a wave of euphoria. This is no time to think about the future. Worrying about all the chores you have to do tomorrow does have a habit of ruining the perfect today.It is intriguing to consider, though, whether those celebrations might become a rather more familiar sight, as Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, has intimated. As the author Tobias Jones has pointed out, Napoli’s title was not a stereotypically Neapolitan triumph: It had its roots not in the magical or the mystical but in the comparatively mundane details of intelligent recruitment and adroit coaching. Those are the sorts of things, of course, that can be repeated.They will have to be. It is not just fans or the news media that have a habit of assuming that all success is a steppingstone. Europe’s apex predators do, too. Manchester United, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are all casting covetous glances at Victor Osimhen, the Nigerian forward who did so much to carry Napoli over the line. Others are watching the Korean defender, Kim Min-jae, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the edge-of-the-seat Georgian winger.Napoli’s plan, as things stand, is to lose no more than one (most likely Osimhen), and then use the fee it receives — $150 million or so — not only to find his replacement but to add further ballast to its squad. If the club can invest as judiciously this summer as it did last, then it may be that the party in Naples is just getting started.CorrespondenceRoyale Union St.-Gilloise after reading last week’s newsletter.Yves Herman/ReutersExciting times for this newsletter, which treads virgin ground this week by issuing an apology to a whole nation. Well, a bit of one, anyway. “A small correction from a fan of Union Saint-Gilloise,” Flor Van der Eycken wrote. “The club is not Wallonian, but from Brussels.”My lawyers, of course, would point out that this subject was raised in a direct quote from a reader, and thus morally I am in the clear, but trying to apportion blame here feels churlish. It happened on my watch, and so it is my fault. I apologize, unreservedly, to any Belgians who feel let down.Tony Walsh, meanwhile, is evidently on a very similar page to me. One aspect of Napoli’s stirring victory in Serie A that has intrigued me — and probably warrants further investigation — is how those long-serving players who left the club last summer feel about it. Lorenzo Insigne, a Neapolitan to his core, and Dries Mertens, an adopted son of the city, are the best examples, but Tony wonders about someone else. “A penny for the thoughts of Kalidou Koulibaly,” he wrote. “Eight years in Naples, and then when they win the title he is amid the chaos at Chelsea.”And Carolyn Janus Moacdieh noticed a somewhat surprising parallel in last week’s note on Leeds, a club where fans have been taught that process is no less significant than outcome. “I will not defend the show ‘Ted Lasso,’” she wrote (unnecessarily: This newsletter is pro Lasso and the causes of Lasso.) “But Marcelo Bielsa’s philosophy at Leeds sounds a lot like the idea which the creators have integrated into the show: What you do is not as important as how you do it.”And another week, another suggested career path for my dog. “I think he can learn from Pretinha, a dog that supports my team, Fluminense, and celebrates each time the team scores,” Fernando Secco suggests. “Since Fernando Diniz became coach, the dog has been celebrating a lot.” I would suggest we are reaching a tipping point as we accumulate evidence that dogs improve soccer. Maybe the solution to how to make the game more engaging to teenagers was in front of our faces, tongue lolling and tail wagging, this whole time. More

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      Milan Divided by Partisanship, United in Voice

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      The Champions League semifinal matchup between A.C. Milan and Inter may be less refined than its counterpart, but it does not lack for atmosphere and fervor.MILAN — Smoke wreathed and coiled around the Curva Sud, billowing in clouds thick and dark enough to obscure the top two tiers of the stadium stand almost entirely. Flags swooped and fluttered. Flares burned lurid red. Firecrackers, as loud as thunder, exploded. And all the time, the noise rose, echoed and gathered enough strength to rattle San Siro’s ancient concrete.A.C. Milan trailed by two goals at that point Wednesday, and had been for some time. Its nightmare prospect was starting to materialize: not just losing a Champions League semifinal, its first trip there in 16 years, but doing so at the hands of Inter, its rival and housemate. Stefano Pioli’s team stood on the verge of a defeat it will never be allowed to forget.It made little difference. At the front of the Curva, home to Milan’s most ardent fans, a group of men — clad wholly in black — urged their choir, tens of thousands strong, to increase the volume. The response was instant, earsplitting. “Hell is empty,” a banner unfurled by Milan’s fans had read before kickoff. “All of the devils are here.”A close examination, of course, would doubtless conclude that this Champions League semifinal matchup was not quite as refined, glossy or accomplished as the previous day’s meeting between Real Madrid and Manchester City: an encounter between a team that already belongs to history and one constructed for the express purpose of making it.This Champions League semifinal has divided Milan into red and blue.Luca Bruno/Associated PressClaudia Greco/ReutersThe power dynamics — read: who has the most money — of European soccer dictate that was always going to be the case. For all their rich histories, Milan and Inter belong firmly in the second category of European powers these days. They are not paupers, not by any means. Neither one makes an especially convincing underdog. One is owned by an American investment fund. The other is backed by a Chinese private enterprise vehicle.But they, and the league in which they play, have undeniably been diminished by the wealth that has flooded into England, especially in the last two decades. They do not have the benefit of the state-backed resources that have been poured into City. They have not ridden the turbulent waves of the game’s economics quite as well as Real or Bayern Munich.Milan had so many ticket requests for this game that it could have sold out San Siro — which hosted more than 75,000 Wednesday — no fewer than 13 times. These are clubs of renown, of widespread and fervent and deep-rooted support, not just in Italy but across the world. They are not small, even if the distorted lens of modern soccer can, from the outside, make it feel that way.Inter, for example, does not currently have a jersey sponsor. The firm that occupied that cherished real estate across players’ chests had been acquired during soccer’s brief and intensely regrettable cryptocurrency boom, the club lunging hungrily for the easy money on offer. The firm has, it will surprise absolutely nobody, subsequently failed to make some of its payments.Milan, meanwhile, has roughly 11 million followers on TikTok. Real has almost three times as many. Their players are, of course, among the best in the world, prodigiously gifted, high-specification athletes, but they can be broadly sorted into two categories: those already deemed surplus to requirements by the new elite, and those who dream one day of making it there. Few, if any, would be regarded as global stars at the peak of their fame. These are teams that have, by the standards of the superclubs, been thrown together by compromise and cost control.For all the intrigue naturally generated by this pairing — a derby played out over 180 minutes spread across six days, creating a city anxious and alert, divided by red and blue — it was understandable that it was seen, by many, as a formality of a semifinal with the teams competing for the right to be beaten in the final next month.And, in many ways, that was true. The passes were not quite as crisp. The control was a little less sure. Some of the decisions were rash. One or two of the ideas were muddled. Everything was somehow more deliberate, a fraction slower. The players of Milan and Inter might require two touches where City’s Kevin De Bruyne or Real’s Luka Modric might need only one.Sandro Tonali tried desperately, to no avail, to narrow the margin for A.C. Milan heading into the second leg.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesLikewise, when looked at in the finest possible detail, the soccer was neither as perfectly executed nor as cutting edge as it had been at the Bernabéu. At no point, for example, did either Milan or Inter invert a full back — no, not even a single one — in order to create an overload in one of the central half-spaces.That was all true, but none of it seemed especially relevant, or to contain even the slightest real significance, because inside San Siro it was extremely difficult to think at all. The stadium, the one both clubs are so desperate to leave behind, was so noisy, so animated, so vivid and so vibrant that it bordered on a form of sensory overload.The game itself was no less compelling. It might have been a little jagged, kind of rough around the edges in comparison to what went before, but that did not seem to matter in comparison to the bustling passion of Nicolò Barella, the daring play of Federico Dimarco, the faintly desperate determination of Sandro Tonali to rescue something — anything — from Milan’s harrowing start in the first leg of the tie.If it was not, then, quite the apex of soccer as a sport, but it lacked absolutely nothing as a spectacle, right from the moment the Champions League anthem began and the Curva, in an instant, was turned into a sneering devil’s face. That is not something that should be taken lightly and presented with a pat of the head and a condescending smile as an unwanted consolation prize.There is something stirring about soccer played to a pitch of perfection, when a team transforms itself into something approaching art. That is why those who can affect that transformation are so revered, and so richly rewarded. But it does not need to reach those heights to be absorbing, engaging, thrilling. All it has to be is a contest, an occasion, an event.That, after all, has a far broader, far more visceral appeal. Some games exist to be watched, to be admired, to be appreciated. Others are there to be heard, to be sensed, to be felt. The slender technical deficiencies — of both teams — will not be remembered. In the white heat, they may not even have been noticed. The noise, though, washing down from the Curva Sud even as the thing Milan had dreaded most of all slowly came into being, will echo for some time. More