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      Overshadowed by PSG, Paris FC Tries to Raise Its Game

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      PARIS — The contrast could not be more stark.On a frigid Saturday evening earlier this year inside the Stade Charléty, a World War II-era stadium tucked alongside a highway, the stands are barely a quarter full. Only about 3,000 fans have turned up to watch Paris F.C., a crowd so small that when the home team goes to salute its support after its victory, the players need only to go to one corner of the stadium. The other sections are not even open, given the paltry demand for tickets.On Sunday, another Paris team takes the field, and fans around the world tune in to ‌watch. This Paris team, the billion-dollar project you know from the Champions League, the one with all the money, all the glamour and all the stars, has traveled to Marseille for another installment of French soccer’s biggest rivalry. There, it ‌takes another step toward its latest championship behind goals from Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi.‌That yawning gulf between the teams is something that the owners of Paris F.C. are eager to close. They argue that the Paris region, with its population of more than 12 million, deserves an elite league rivalry, the kind that courses through European cities like London and Lisbon, Madrid and Milan.The problem, Paris F.C. is finding, is that even with soccer’s deepest pool of talent on its doorstep and backing from its own Gulf royals, closing the gap in a one-team town is extremely hard.Fans are often sparse at the Stade Charléty. Paris F.C. is confident promotion will change that. Second TeamSitting in a brasserie close to his home in an upscale neighborhood that houses the tomb of Napoleon, Pierre Ferracci, the majority owner of Paris F.C., is ruminating on why Paris — one of the world’s great cities and the producer of more soccer talent than just about any other metropolis in the world — has only one top-division team, Paris St.-Germain.Ferracci, 70, lists a group of European capitals before moving on to other large cities to underline the outlier that is Paris. He eventually lands on London, less than a three-hour train ride away, which currently has so many teams playing in the Premier League that Ferracci gives up on naming them all.He explains away the contrast between France and England (and Germany and Spain and Italy) as a type of French exceptionalism. “It’s cultural,” Ferracci says. “We are less hung up on football than other countries.”He knows that devotion to the sport, at least in Paris, does not run deep. “The supporters here come when there is success, when we climb the rungs of the ladder,” he said. “They stop coming when the team descends.”In the stands at the Charléty, the few supporters seem to confirm that view as they offer different motivations for their presence. Zouber Hadj-Larbi, a self-described P.S.G. fan, said he decided to attend his first Paris F.C. game because it was a much cheaper option than a ticket for the team he actually supports.Pierre Ferracci, the president of Paris F.C., has taken on foreign investors even as he tries to maintain his team’s French roots.“It’s also a lot less spectacular,” he said, laughing as the home team struggled to muster a shot on goal. Others in the crowd are tourists; a few say they are taking in the game only because P.S.G. was on the road.Nearby, Laurent Pinet, part of Paris F.C.’s small cohort of regular fans, commiserated with a friend about the team’s struggles to attract a following. “It’s harder to be a football club in Paris than anywhere else,” he said. “You need immediate results to attract the public.”Ferracci, who has been the majority owner of the club for 13 years, is confident fans will turn out in greater numbers if the team is playing in the top division, drawn by both its success and its name. “The opportunity we have,” he said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”He admits his club is unlikely to ever be a true rival to P.S.G., and definitely not as long as its neighbor is bankrolled by Qatar. But careful and deliberate plans have been laid to build a team that could finally give Parisians a second top-flight option.That plan is reliant on tapping a resource Paris has in abundance: talented young soccer players.Buying EarlyFerracci’s ideas for reviving Paris F.C. crystallized after a dinner with the famed French manager Arsène Wenger a couple years after he took control of the club in 2008. Wenger used hard data, anecdotes and a list of professional players who had grown up in greater Paris to make his point. Ferracci now often does the same.By his reckoning, 13 percent of all registered soccer players in France are from Paris or its ring of suburbs, and a staggering 50 percent of the professionals making a living in France’s top two divisions grew up in the capital or its shadow. Those players populate not only France’s national team but several others: Morocco. Senegal. Tunisia. Algeria. At last year’s World Cup, for example, Paris F.C. could track seven of its own alumni among the participants.Just being close to the best players, though, is not enough, said Jean Marc Nobilo. A well-traveled coach, Nobilo was hired two years ago to lead Paris F.C.’s youth development section, and he knows that every big team in Europe now shops for players in Paris.Ferocious competition for that talent means Paris F.C. is required to unearth it before it has been spotted by others. Bidding wars are typically won by richer teams, thanks in part to French soccer rules that allow clubs to pay fees — sometimes as much as $100,000 — to the parents of gifted children.Paris F.C. is struggling along in France’s second division again this season. Promotion will have to wait at least another year.For economic reasons alone, Nobilo said, “we must be on the case before the others.”To ensure that Paris F.C. can do that, Ferracci has enlisted star power and Gulf money of his own. The former arrived in the form of a Paris Saint-Germain legend, the retired Brazilian midfielder Raí, who was hired to be a club ambassador and a connection to soccer’s other great talent basin, São Paulo.The much-needed money arrived as an investment from the rulers of Bahrain, the Gulf emirate that three years ago became a minority owner in Paris F.C.Ceding stakes to foreign partners — in addition to the Bahrainis, there are Americans, an Indian group and also Armenian equity owners of Paris F.C. — has been somewhat bittersweet for Ferracci. The cash has helped finance a multimillion-dollar makeover of the club’s training facilities, located on the edge of Paris close to Orly airport, and has helped the club to invest in new talent and the staff to find more of it.But it has also made Paris F.C. yet another club reliant on foreign capital, a trend that Ferracci laments even as he benefits from it. He says his Gulf royals have been far less munificent than the Emirati owners at Manchester City or the Qataris at P.S.G. — Paris F.C.’s annual revenues of 23 million euros ($25.4 million) are roughly half of what Messi is earning to play across town — and Ferracci is fine with that.“What I don’t like are countries like the Emirates and Qatar investing in football because it sets the bar too high,” he said, before launching into an unironic soliloquy about how Gulf-funded clubs have destabilized the soccer industry, forcing rivals to risk financial ruin to try to keep up.Ferracci is determined to maintain control of his team for as long as he can.“Today I still want the majority of the capital to be in local hands, that the majority stays French and national,” he said. “Why? Because if we continue like this, every club in the top two leagues will be in the hands of foreign investors, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”“The opportunity we have,” Paris F.C.’s president said, “is that we have a good name: Paris F.C.”For the moment, he is focusing on what his investors, and his plan, have allowed him to pursue: a dream of creating the best finishing school in French soccer. New facilities, the chance to play close to home and the ability to offer teenagers an earlier shot at first-team soccer all give Paris F.C. a fighting chance of meeting its aim of filling at least a third of its roster with homegrown talent. Five players in Paris F.C.’s current squad came through its youth ranks. But it needs even more.How it handles those recruits and the others that arrive will determine the success of his project. Paris F.C. is currently bumbling through another year in the middle of the second division standings. That means rubbing shoulders with P.S.G., even as a minor irritant rather than a true rival, will have to wait at least another year.“For now, they are aware of our existence,” said Pinet, one of the team’s regular fans. “We’ll talk about rivalry later.”Tom Nouvian contributed reporting. More

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      Under the Hollywood Spotlight, a Fading Welsh Town Is Reborn

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      A former industrial hub, Wrexham had long been in decline. Now, it’s reviving as the globally famous star of a reality series about its once forlorn soccer team’s rejuvenation.In the Welsh language, the virtually untranslatable word “hiraeth” (pronounced here-ayeth) describes a blend of nostalgia and longing for a time that can never be recreated.For Wrexham, a working-class town in northern Wales, it was a feeling that came to define a postindustrial malaise that descended in the 1980s as the last remaining coal mines shuttered their rickety gates and, later, the furnaces at the nearby steelworks ran cold.Only the beloved soccer club, Wrexham A.F.C., remained: the oldest team in Wales, a perennial also-ran but still an indomitable source of local pride.“We went through so much as a town,” said Terry Richards, 56, a lifelong fan of the club as he sat at home in the team’s bright scarlet jersey. “Those were difficult times.”Wales has its legends of heroes returning to save the day, but few could have predicted that an unlikely pair of Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, would waltz into town just over two years ago and buy the ailing club. That set off a chain of events that catapulted the town out of the doldrums and into the international spotlight, casting the residents as the main characters in their own Hollywood reality show based around the soccer club, “Welcome to Wrexham.”Few could have predicted that the two famous actors would walk into the town in the first place. But Mr. McElhenney, an American who had binged on sports documentaries during lockdown, conducted an exhaustive search for a down-and-out soccer team with growth potential, landing on Wrexham A.F.C., and persuaded Mr. Reynolds to join him in his pet project.Players from Wrexham A.F.C. practice at the Racecourse Ground while crews from the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” film them.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter paying the bargain sum of around $2.5 million, they moved into town (the Canadian-born Mr. Reynolds even bought a house) and began overhauling the team’s operation. They revitalized the training facilities and upgraded the roster, offering comparatively enormous salaries that attracted established players from the upper levels of English soccer.Last Saturday, that Hollywood story finally got its very own Hollywood ending — the team’s promotion after its winning season into the English Football League, the next tier of England’s multilevel soccer pyramid, after a 15-year absence. As the referee blew the final whistle, generations of teary-eyed supporters leaped from the stands onto the rain flecked field in joyous celebration.In that moment, a town was reborn, and that lingering “hiraeth” was no more. More

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      Harry Kane, Spurs and the End of the Line

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      The Tottenham star has given everything for the club he has supported since childhood. As he nears the end of his contract, he owes it nothing.Presumably, Daniel Levy was going for a more flattering vibe. One day last month, Levy, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, told the students of the Cambridge University Union that he hoped a statue of Harry Kane would stand outside the club’s stadium one day, possibly its greatest-ever striker immortalized in bronze.Levy was, surely, simply trying to illustrate the scale of Kane’s achievements, the esteem in which he is held, the status he has accrued at the club he supported as a child and has frequently carried as an adult. It was merely unfortunate that it came across as just a little bit like emotional blackmail.This is, of course, a pivotal summer for Kane. At the end of June, he will formally enter the final 12 months of the six-year contract he signed at Tottenham on the eve of the World Cup in 2018. A few weeks later, he will turn 30. If he is to leave Spurs, then it is hard to escape the impression that it is now or never.On the surface, that decision should be an easy one. Kane is the England captain. Only Alan Shearer and Wayne Rooney have scored more goals than him in the Premier League, and he is already on Rooney’s shoulder, waiting to breeze past. Kane is the sort of forward who would slot easily into any team. He can play as a focal point, he can act as a poacher, but by inclination he is a playmaker, too. He is, in essence, a false False Nine.There would, then, be no shortage of teams willing to take on his — by the standards of his peers — relatively reasonable salary. Bayern Munich has long admired Kane, in particular. Chelsea might be able to reunite him with Mauricio Pochettino. Manchester United, as things stand, has younger alternatives in mind, but if they were to prove unattainable and Kane was available, it hardly requires a great leap of imagination to suggest that might change.Plenty of clubs would be happy to slot Kane into their plans, and their budget.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAny and all of his suitors could offer him not only a lavish salary but a chance at the glory that has thus far eluded him, too. Bayern, certainly, would be almost a guarantee of trophies and medals in great, heaving piles. Chelsea, like Manchester United, has on several occasions in the recent past won competitions basically by accident. Tottenham, by contrast, can offer him a statue.That, of course, is reductive. Kane’s leaving Spurs would not be a simple thing. Not just for his sincere, deep-rooted attachment to the club, but for more hard-nosed, professional reasons. Staying at Tottenham — or at least in England — would almost certainly allow Kane to surpass Shearer as the Premier League’s career scoring leader, an honor that may mean as much to him as winning a couple of Bundesliga titles. Besides, his yearning for a trophy may well come to an end with England at next year’s European Championship.Increasingly, though, it appears it might be his only viable choice. Back in 2018, when Kane signed his current deal, the club filmed a short video to announce the news to delighted, relieved fans. In it, Kane was depicted in the control room of Tottenham’s new stadium. It had not yet opened. Nobody had played there, scored there, booed their team off there, demanded the chairman’s resignation there.It was easy to see it as a package-fresh vision of Tottenham’s gleaming future, virgin and unsullied, a place of nothing but promise. Kane, having committed the prime of his career to the club — his club — saw only the potential. “I’m just excited to keep on the train,” he said, possibly misunderstanding the theme of the video, “and see where it can go.”Initially, of course, it stayed on track. A year later, Spurs had made the Champions League final; Kane was playing for his childhood club and gracing the grandest stage European soccer can offer. Tottenham felt agonizingly close to becoming the final member of the Premier League’s dominant triumvirate, alongside Manchester City and Liverpool.That was not quite what happened.Kane has never won a trophy with Tottenham, the club he has supported since childhood.Scott Heppell/ReutersIn the summer when Kane signed his new contract, as Pochettino encouraged Levy to “be brave and take risks,” Tottenham did not sign a single new player. Eventually, that lack of reinforcements proved telling. Spurs’ form dipped. Pochettino was fired, a few months after leading it in the biggest game in the club’s history.José Mourinho replaced him. Results briefly got better, then got worse again. He was fired a few days before a cup final. The club spent months without a manager, and then appointed Nuno Espirito Santo out of, well, desperation, really. It was not a success. He left, too.Antonio Conte stepped in, complained long and loud about so many subjects that it became obvious his real gripe was with the indignity of coaching Spurs. In March, he finally talked himself out of a job. His former assistant was appointed the caretaker replacement. The man in charge of finding his long-term replacement was banned from soccer. Spurs duly conceded five goals in 20 minutes at Newcastle.All that time, the club’s playing squad — the one that had brought Spurs to such prominence that the club was invited to be part of the European Super League, an insult that it seemed to regard as a compliment — has been decaying. Tottenham’s reputational stock, its appeal to potential recruits, has been tumbling.It had taken years of painstaking work, not least from Levy, to turn Spurs into a meaningful force in England and Europe. It took about two seasons for it all to unravel completely.Antonio Conte, one in a string of managers who couldn’t get Kane where he desperately wants to go.David Klein/ReutersOnce more, there will be a new manager this summer. The current front-runner, Julian Nagelsmann, seems perfectly tailored to what the club needs: still nauseatingly young, but possessed of considerable experience; keen to rehabilitate his image, so unlikely to feel Tottenham is lucky to have him; a purveyor of bright, attractive soccer; the owner of at least one skateboard.Levy would doubtless hope that Nagelsmann’s appointment would be enough to convince Kane of the club’s seriousness, its ambition, its attractiveness. To believe that, though, the striker would have to ignore everything else he has seen in the five years since he signed his contract. All of the disappointments. All of the missed opportunities. All of the glaring strategic errors. Spurs might get the right manager. There is no evidence to suggest it will provide him with the players or the time or the environment he needs to succeed.Kane’s statue outside the stadium that was supposed to represent the club’s transformation should not be dependent on whether he remains at Tottenham in perpetuity. He has already given the club more than enough to make the case for a monument in his honor. He has fulfilled his side of the bargain. He has lived up to his promise.The same cannot be said for Spurs. Kane knows where this train is going; or, more pertinently, he knows where it is not. It will hardly fill him with glee, but he will know, without doubt, that this is his stop.Your Happiness Is Not GuaranteedTottenham fans contemplating the long journey home from Newcastle.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersTottenham’s players volunteering to reimburse those fans who had made the long journey to Newcastle — only to see their hapless, witless team fall 5-0 behind after 21 minutes — for the price of their tickets is a gesture rooted in the very finest of intentions. It is humble, generous, considerate. It speaks extremely well of them. It is, without question, A Nice Thing To Do.Sadly, it is also completely wrongheaded. Newcastle is a long way from London, certainly by British standards. Depending on your preferred unit of measurement, it is 280 miles; three hours (at best) and your life savings by train; or two and a half weeks on the country’s traffic-clogged, potholed and pit-scarred roads by car.Throw in the price of the ticket, and those Spurs fans would have committed a couple of hundred pounds and many hours of their lives to attend the game. That the players then turned in what must rank as one of the most inept performances of any club in the Premier League era must be galling to the point of offensive. That some of those fans should have gone public with a demand for refunds is an understandable reflex.Unfortunately, that is not how sport is meant to work. A ticket to a sporting event is not a guarantee of satisfaction. There is a chance, when you go to see your team or your favorite athlete play, that they will lose. There is a slim chance, too, that they will be humiliated.That is the risk that you take. The ticket gets you access to a sporting event, one in which the outcome and the nature of it is uncertain by definition. To expect or to demand a minimum standard of performance or your money back is, on one level, to miss the point of the entire exercise.Fan, we are told frequently, should not be a synonym for customer. The entrenched loyalty of the supporter should not be taken for granted, should not monetized, should not be milked for revenue. But that precious bond, between fan and team, works both ways. You buy a ticket for a game to support your team regardless of what happens. It is an act of hope, not expectation.That interpretation has withered, at least in part, because of the attitude of the clubs themselves; it should be no surprise that fans should start to behave as customers when they are treated as such. Customers demand a refund when their hopes are dashed. In any sport, though, that is just part of the deal.Refreshing ChangeArsenal has at last succumbed to cold, harsh economic reality. The Premier League, really, should make sure to send a note of thanks and a bouquet of flowers to Mikel Arteta and his players at the end of this season’s campaign. It is only because of their sudden, heartening rise that English soccer has even had a veneer of competitiveness for the last 10 months.The season, though, will end as recent seasons routinely do: with Manchester City being crowned champion. Doing anything other than wildly celebrating City’s success will be met, as ever, with accusations of bitterness and jealousy, of course, but then that has always been the flaw in Abu Dhabi’s master plan for the sporting arm of its foreign policy. As a rule, you can either win, or you can be loved. Rarely, if ever, do the two go together.Elsewhere in Europe, though, things are a little more uplifting. This newsletter makes no bones about the fact that it is desperate to see Napoli win Serie A — perhaps as soon as this weekend — if only to answer, once and for all, the question of whether the city itself will survive the celebrations.Dortmund, on track to dethrone Bayern Munich, will be one of a handful of surprise champions this season.Martin Meissner/Associated PressBut Luciano Spalletti’s team may not be the continent’s only unexpected champion. Feyenoord is eight points clear at the top of the Dutch Eredivisie, with only four games left. Ajax, at this rate, might not qualify for the Champions League. Either Panathinaikos or AEK Athens will win the Greek Super League, dethroning Olympiacos.And, of course, Bayern Munich has kindly decided to self-detonate at just the right time to give Borussia Dortmund the chance to end Bayern’s run of 10 straight domestic championships. Dortmund is a point ahead with five games left, but three of those matches are at home, and none of them against especially daunting opponents. Its young team will never have a better chance, if it can hold its nerve.Quite why this is happening is open to question: the World Cup, doubtless, has something to do with it. It may be, to some extent, because the financial might of the Premier League has had the effect of diminishing the great and the good of other domestic leagues. Whatever it is, though, it is to be welcomed, and not just by those who stand to benefit directly.CorrespondenceAn intriguing question from Tony Walsh to start this week. “Does Italy not qualifying for the World Cup explain the country having three teams in the Champions League quarterfinals?” he asks, omitting (as I did, last week) that it also has two Europa League semifinalists and one representative still standing in the illustrious Europa Conference League.My answer here is a resounding possibly. It might even be a probably. As with the sudden changes at the summit of the Bundesliga and the Eredivisie, the likelihood is that there are a rich variety of factors at play, but it seems rational to suggest that the added midseason rest for the vast majority of Napoli, Inter and A.C. Milan players has not been a hindrance.Italy’s new slogan: Forza everybody.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe issue of how soccer might change rumbles on, too. Several of you, including Matt Kauffman, would tweak the offside rule so that it was judged only on foot position — this seems reasonable to me — while Brent Hewitt prefers using a player’s “center of mass,” though I would suggest the length of his email might undermine his idea’s viability.Jim O’Mahony, on the other hand, offered at least one immortal sentence. “To hell with pleasing restless, bored teenagers,” he wrote, which is a sentiment I think anyone who has ever met a teenager can get behind. “The sport’s popularity is growing. There is no need to change. Stop worrying, and spend more time with your dog.”My dog is very much on board with that idea, Jim: I’ve been trying to get him into games for a while by explaining that I am his emotional support human, but nobody seems to be buying it.And thanks to Chloe Zeller, enjoying the last days of summer in Buenos Aires, for directing me to a mural of Lionel Messi — clad in his beloved bisht, and clutching the World Cup — in the city’s upscale Palermo district. It is, she notes, recorded on Google Maps as a “place of worship.” This seems entirely fitting.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      Fortuna Düsseldorf Will Offer Free Tickets to Its Soccer Games

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      Fortuna Düsseldorf will allow fans to attend a handful of matches for free next season. It hopes to eventually extend the offer to all games.Fortuna Düsseldorf, a middleweight sort of a club based in Germany’s richest city and currently treading water in the country’s second division, does not make a likely crucible for a revolution.It is, though, about to embark on an experiment that could have profound consequences not just for the rest of soccer, but also for sports as a whole: Starting next season, Fortuna will set out to give away tickets for several games at its 54,600-seat Merkur-Spiel Arena for nothing.Not cheap tickets. Not reduced-price. Free, for both home and away fans.“We think it is completely new,” Alexander Jobst, the club’s chief executive, said in an interview on Thursday. “We were trying to think about how we could do the soccer business completely different from before.”The solution he and his colleagues happened upon, he admitted, might seem just a touch “disruptive,” to use his word. Long before television and sponsorships, ticketing was the original pillar of the sports industry.It also represents a considerable portion of Fortuna Düsseldorf’s income. The club makes as much as 8 million euros ($8.8 million) from gate receipts every season it is in the second division, Jobst said in a conference call on Thursday. The figure, he said, was higher when the team last played in the Bundesliga, in 2020. That revenue accounts for around a fifth of the club’s total income.Under its “new strategic vision,” Jobst said, Fortuna would try to replace that with commercial revenue, as well as increased income from merchandise and concessions generated by attendances better than the 29,000 or so it currently attracts.It has already signed agreements with three partners — worth around $45 million over five years — with the aim of introducing free tickets for three games next season. If the club can find more partners, Jobst said, it hopes ultimately to be able to expand the plan to include every home game. “We are convinced we will have the chance to do so,” he said.The program is unique in a German league system famous for its fan-centered club ownership rules, its low ticket prices and even its ticketing gimmicks. In Berlin a few years ago, for example, one club offered a fan a lifetime season ticket if he had its computer code tattooed onto his arm.As he weighed options to attract bigger crowds, Jobst said Fortuna had considered the more obvious option of simply reducing its ticket prices before concluding such a move would be dismissed as merely “trying to fill the stadium.” It had also taken into account the risk that fans would fail to turn up for games if their tickets were, in a strictly economic sense, worthless. But the idea of throwing open the doors to everyone — “Football for all,” Jobst called it — won out.“We want to open Fortuna Düsseldorf to our fans even more than before,” he said. “We want to give something back, to open it to fans regardless of what their personal price barrier is. Let’s open it and see what is going to happen.”He is aware that his club’s precedent might inspire, or force, other teams to do the same, and he accepts that such an idea is rather easier to adopt in Düsseldorf — a hub for some of Germany’s largest corporations — than it might be elsewhere. That, he said, is why the club believes it will work.“It fits for Düsseldorf,” he said, “and it fits for Fortuna.” More

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      Manchester City Thumps Arsenal to Close on Premier League Title

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      Reeling in the league leaders after a season-long chase, City won Wednesday and, with less than 10 games left, positioned itself to claim its third straight Premier League title.MANCHESTER, England — Quite when Arsenal knew, for certain, that it was all over is difficult to pinpoint absolutely. There was still faith, presumably, after Manchester City’s first goal, which arrived roughly 370 seconds into a game that had been billed — for weeks — as the Premier League’s great championship showdown.Some small sliver of optimism might even have endured after John Stones scored the second, delivered on a satellite delay after a video review not long before halftime. The last couple months of a season are a time for intellectual gymnastics and leaps of faith, after all, for the ifs and buts and maybes that soccer grandly calls “permutations.” Maybe a draw would do. Maybe a draw would keep the hope alive.The third goal, though, was different. After the third, Arsenal’s Rob Holding stood with his hands on his hips, staring off into the middle distance. Gabriel Magalhaes sunk to his haunches, as if contemplating the nature of grass. Thomas Partey started to clap, softly, his reflexes telling him to encourage his teammates. He managed two, lost heart, and stopped.Converted by Kevin De Bruyne, the third goal had taken whatever wisps of hope that remained for Arsenal and not only extinguished them, but razed their memory from the Earth, and then salted the ground so that they might never arise again. By the time Erling Haaland, hair flowing behind him, made it 4-1, it was hard to believe any hope had ever existed.Erling Haaland delivered the exclamation point in City’s 4-1 victory.Phil Noble/ReutersArsenal remains atop the Premier League, of course, 2 points ahead of Manchester City, but having played two more games. The team’s coach, Mikel Arteta, is not prepared to cede anything just yet — “I have been in this country for 22 years,” he said, “and I have seen how quickly things shift” — but that lead now seems like a technicality, the consequence of a fractured timeline, a quirk of scheduling.There are no guarantees in sports. But common sense and recent experience would suggest that 2 points is not nearly enough to be sustained through the end of the season in late May. Arteta and Arsenal did not just lose to Manchester City on Wednesday night. They were deprived of more than just hope. The wild reverie that this might all end with a first Premier League title in almost 20 years was exposed as an illusion.The tendency both inside and outside Arsenal will, naturally, be to suggest that Arteta and his team brought this all upon themselves. It would have been different, after all, had they not spent the last three weeks allowing the lead they had accrued over the course of the season to be eroded.Arsenal led by two goals at Liverpool, and drew. It led by two goals at West Ham, and drew. It gave Southampton, a candidate for relegation, a two-goal head start at the Emirates, mounted a stirring comeback, and drew. At the time in the season when the pressure mounts and the great separate themselves from the merely good, the logic runs, Arsenal was found wanting.Arsenal, the league leader most of the season, and still despite Wednesday’s loss, looked as if it knew its title challenge was over.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersKinder observers would point out the various mitigating circumstances: Arsenal’s squad is among the youngest in the league, and is ahead of its anticipated development. The team has sorely missed William Saliba, the cherubic linchpin of its defense, who fell to injury at the point of the season when he was needed the most. His absence has proved that Arteta does not have the resources, just yet, to stay the course.All of that, though, is to buy into the illusion, to fall into the trap of believing that there was any other conclusion to the one that will spool out over the next few weeks, to indulge the fantasy that Arsenal — that anyone — could realistically ever have done enough to see off Manchester City.As it proved rather neatly against the team that it identified as its key rival from the earliest days of the season, Manchester City is not just the best team in the Premier League; it is the best in the Premier League by a gap so wide and so clear and so deep that it cannot, to all intents and purposes, be bridged.There are, essentially, three schools of thought as to how that has been achieved. One has it that City’s supremacy is rooted in the undoubted brilliance of Pep Guardiola’s coaching, combined with the club’s almost flawless recruitment.Another, less kind, would suggest that it has been constructed largely through spending a billion dollars, give or take, on some of the finest players in the world, building a squad that is no deeper than its rivals but of such a high grade that none of them can compete. (City signed Kalvin Phillips, then a mainstay of the English national team, last summer. You may have forgotten.)The third, the most damning of all, would point out that the club is currently under investigation by the Premier League for 115 breaches of the competition’s financial rules, all of which are strenuously and repeatedly denied by City but may yet place a stain on every one of its achievements in the last decade.Jack Grealish, left, with Kevin De Bruyne, after the latter scored City’s third goal. He also scored its first.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesGrealish later had a less cordial interaction with Thomas Partey after a foul in midfield.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersWhatever the cause, though, the outcome is apparent. Guardiola’s team is now on course for a fifth Premier League title in six years, and a third in a row. Only one other team has done that: Manchester United. Only one other English side has won the hallowed treble of the league, F.A. Cup and Champions League, too: also Manchester United. City could do both in one season.It is, without question, the pre-eminent force of its era. Its blend of wealth, power and intelligence — what Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal manager, once characterized as “petrol and ideas” — has swept all opponents aside. Manchester United has been through three managers and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep up, to no avail. Tottenham and Chelsea have imploded. Liverpool stayed the course for five years, and then crumpled.More than that, though, City’s dominance has changed the Premier League’s algorithm. Even when United was at its peak, the league always presented itself as more open, more democratic than Germany’s Bundesliga, say, or France’s Ligue 1, those personal fiefs of the high and mighty. Manchester City has exposed that as a fantasy. The Premier League is now no longer a competition a team wins. It is one that Manchester City loses.The idea that Arsenal, callow and naïve, might have stood in the way of that was — it turns out — nothing but an illusion. Arteta’s team has, as he was at pains to stress, led the league for “nine and a half months,” matching an “excellent side” stride for stride and, for a while, even outpacing it.There was always going to come a point, though, when it hit the wall, when Arsenal stumbled and City did not. It is the fate that has befallen everyone else. There was no reason to believe Arsenal would be an exception. In many ways, it is to the credit of Arteta and his players that the fantasy took so long, until the end of April, to break.But break it did, cold reality dawning under the lights of the Etihad. The game, the title challenge, the dream: They are all over now. By the time Haaland scored the fourth goal, it would not even have hurt anymore. It simply was, just as it was always going to be. More

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      Wrexham Wins Promotion for Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney

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      The soccer club bankrolled by the actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds won its league over the weekend. Here’s what comes next.The players thrust their fists in the air, then immediately disappeared, swallowed up by the thousands of fans pouring onto the field. Flares sent smoke into the dark Welsh sky. The team’s owners, up in their private box, shared a hug and then wiped aside tears.The made-for-TV tale of Wrexham A.F.C. finally had its happy ending.WE ARE CHAMPIONS! AFTER 15 YEARS, WE ARE BACK IN THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE!🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC pic.twitter.com/8crPfDlwqs— Wrexham AFC (@Wrexham_AFC) April 22, 2023
      Wrexham’s story is hardly a secret by now: a proud Welsh soccer team acquired by the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who brought in Hollywood money and Hollywood storytelling and cast the club, a fixture of English soccer’s lower leagues, as the hero of its own FX documentary, “Welcome to Wrexham.”The journey that the actors, their team and their city have been on for two years reached its apex Saturday night, when a Wrexham victory on its home field clinched the National League championship and promotion to the next tier of England’s soccer pyramid.One need not have watched the FX documentary series or even seen a Wrexham match to understand the emotional value of that story line. But now that Wrexham’s narrative of chasing promotion has reached its goal, here’s a quick catch-up on what the team has achieved and the lowdown on what lies ahead.Wrexham fans who have filled the Racecourse Ground all season held a party on it Saturday night. Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat happened over the weekend?Wrexham, which has spent most of the season at the top of the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer, clinched the title on Saturday with a 3-1 victory against visiting Boreham Wood.As champion, Wrexham will be promoted to the English Football League — League Two, to be specific — for next season. The team has not played that high up in the English soccer system since 2008.Wrexham was stalked and chased and pushed all the way this season by Notts County, another storied and century-and-a-half-old British team. With one game to play, Wrexham has 110 points, Notts County 106 and third-place Chesterfield only 81.Wrexham and Notts County are the first teams in England’s top five divisions to reach 100 points since Manchester City in the Premier League 2017-18. Notts County still has a shot at promotion, too, but to earn it the club will have to survive the promotion playoffs.What a great underdog story.Well, it’s not a pure up-by-the-bootstraps tale. In addition to the Hollywood star power in its owners’ box — another actor, Paul Rudd, was a guest of Reynolds and McElhenney’s on Saturday night — and the A-list sponsors that glamour brought on board, Wrexham benefited from a budget far larger than many of the teams in its league. That allowed it to sign players and staff members who were out of reach for many of its National League rivals.Wrexham goalkeeper Ben Foster, for example, once played for England. The team’s star striker, Paul Mullin, was the National League player of the season the year before he signed with Wrexham. Manager Phil Parkinson recently led Sunderland in the third tier.What happens next?Season 2 of “Welcome to Wrexham” most likely writes itself now. Much like the “Rocky” or “Bad News Bears” franchises, agonizing failure in Season 1 will be washed away with triumph in Season 2. Look for the first episodes to be released in August or September.Season 3’s story line, however, is very much up in the air. In League Two, Wrexham will be playing bigger, better financed teams than it has the last two seasons.But recent history favors Wrexham. Over the last five seasons, none of the 10 promoted teams from the National League have been relegated straight back down the next season. One, Tranmere in 2018-19, was promoted to the third tier in its first season in League Two. (Stockport could repeat that feat this season.)And while the costs of doing business will undoubtedly rise in League Two, the higher tier may not be as much of a financial stretch for Wrexham as it might be for other teams. Wrexham has averaged just short of 10,000 fans a game this season. That is tops in the National League and would put it in the top three in attendance in League Two. Plus, there’s plenty of money behind the club and a chance that victory will bring in even more.So the success story will just continue?That’s not a lock. Many newly promoted teams wind up in midtable in League Two while they make the adjustment financially and competitively. Whether a .500 season makes for good TV remains to be seen.Wrexham’s champions, brought to you by FX and TikTok.Jan Kruger/Getty ImagesWhat is the ultimate goal?While Reynolds and McElhenney have made many reasonable statements about growing their team organically, they also have bigger goals.“We say this all the time, but we want to be in the Premier League, as crazy as that sounds to some people,” Reynolds told ESPN in January. (To most soccer people, it does in fact sound crazy; Wrexham remains a small Welsh club, and the Premier League is one of the richest domestic competitions on earth.) Yet he and his partner remain undaunted.“If it is theoretically possible to go from the fifth tier in professional football all the way to the Premier League, why wouldn’t we do that?” Reynolds said. “Why wouldn’t we use our last drop of blood to get there?”So can Wrexham succeed at even higher levels?There is a looong way to go, and there are enormous hurdles ahead.Although ownership has been improving the Racecourse Ground, it still holds only 10,000 people. The biggest Premier League stadiums hold more than 70,000. Wrexham itself is a city of 60,000, and a long way — in every way — from London, Liverpool and Manchester.Reynolds and McElhenney believe that their celebrity and the documentary will help. There has been far more interest in Wrexham over the last two seasons in the United States. Metrics like online page views and social media followers have produced Premier League-like numbers, but those are not simple to translate into pounds — or dollars. Someone who enjoys a documentary and has a warm feeling for a team thousands of miles away is not as valuable an asset as a fan who resides nearby and buys a season ticket and a new jersey every year. Wrexham has those fans, for sure; it just has a limited number of them.McElhenney has joked that he has “TV money,” while Reynolds has “movie money.” Most Premier League clubs are owned by people with the kind of cash that makes “movie money” look like a pittance. At least two, Manchester City and Newcastle, now boast nation-state money.A better point of comparison for Wrexham might be a team like A.F.C. Wimbledon, which was founded by fans when Wimbledon F.C. moved away. With a built-in fan base, A.F.C. Wimbledon quickly climbed up the leagues, crushing outmanned and outfinanced rivals and eventually reaching the third tier. But it was relegated last season and now seems to have found its upper limit.Reynolds and McElhenney are dreaming big, and why not? Their success is undisputed, and now official. But the realities of soccer most likely mean that their dream of Premier League glory remains a long shot. More

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      Ceuta F.C.: A European Team That Calls Africa Home

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      CEUTA, Spain — From the top of Alfonso Murube Stadium, you can see the peninsula of Ceuta stretching out into the Mediterranean Sea. Out on the water, ferries shuttle back and forth across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar to the coastline of southern Spain, just 30 short minutes away. Walk half an hour in the opposite direction and you get a very different view: two 20-foot fences topped with razor wire that mark the border with Morocco.Ceuta, a sliver of land seven square miles in size, hangs on to the edge of Africa, as thin as a toenail. But it is not part of Africa, not officially. This is Spanish soil. Ceuta and the nearby city of Melilla are the only two cities on the African mainland that are officially part of Europe, a quirk of political geography that also makes them the only land borders between Africa and the European Union. That status is why, every year, thousands of migrants approach Ceuta’s walls and wire fences, and try to scale them or swim around them, in hopes of getting one step closer to Europe itself. Hundreds have died trying.Ceuta’s location, though, is not the only feature that sets it apart. It is a rarity for Spain, too, as a city where the Muslim and Christian populations are of similar size. It has significant Jewish and Hindu minorities. Darija, an Arabic dialect, is widely spoken among its 85,000 residents, and depending on the time of day both the call to prayer and church bells can be heard in the quiet, narrow streets around Murube Stadium.Fences mark the border between Ceuta — and Europe — and Morocco.A.D. Ceuta, the club, has its roots in what is now a Moroccan city, Tétouan.The stands at A.D. Ceuta reflect the diversity of the place the club represents.Except on match days, that is, when those sounds give way to the clamor of the drums, songs and chants of the fans of Agrupación Deportiva Ceuta F.C.A.D. Ceuta is one of only two European soccer teams based in Africa, a distinction that is both a point of civic pride and a unifying force in this complex cultural intersection. “Ceuta is a city where four cultures coexist,” said Adrian Suarez, a leader of Ceuta’s loudest ultra group, Grada Sur. His group includes an equal number of Christians and Muslims, he said before a recent match in Spain’s third tier against Fuenlabrada, from Madrid. But in the bleachers, “No one is more than anyone else, nor anyone less than anyone else.”Ceuta’s team embraces that diversity, playing in jerseys bearing a small row of religious symbols on the chest: the Christian cross, the Islamic crescent, Hinduism’s Om symbol and the Star of David.“Our city only appears in the news for bad things,” said Javier Moreno, a lawyer for the club. “For us to be here is not only football. This club belongs to the people of Ceuta, and is also the image of Ceuta in Spain.”A Legacy ClubAt the start of the 20th century Spain held a long slice of North Africa’s coastline, known then as the Spanish protectorate of Morocco. The territory included Ceuta, known as Sebtah in Arabic, but also Tétouan, a larger port city to its south, and Melilla.When Morocco declared independence from France in 1956, Spain relinquished its protectorate. But it kept Ceuta and Melilla, withdrawing into two, tiny toeholds on the continent. The Spanish administrators of the protectorate’s most successful soccer club decided to hold on to that, too.That team, Atlético de Tetuán, remains the only team from mainland Africa to play in La Liga, Spain’s top division. But in 1956 its officials took much of its history and archive to Ceuta, where the team merged with a local club. A.D. Ceuta F.C. is what remains after years of financial crises, mergers and name changes. For the fans and the city it remains Atlético de Tetuán’s historical heir, even if the Spanish authorities consider it an entirely new club.Boys wearing the uniforms of Moghreb Athlétic de Tétouan, the Moroccan club that arose when Spanish administrators moved the team that became A.D. Ceuta to Spanish territory. More

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      The Champions League Ventures Down Memory Lane

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      Real Madrid-Manchester City is the headliner. A.C. Milan-Inter is the classic.The blockbuster matchup, no question, is the one that pits the establishment against the insurgent, the old guard against the new wave, the incomparable past against the inevitable future.Real Madrid against Manchester City has Pep Guardiola, Luka Modric, Erling Haaland, Karim Benzema. It is the team with more European Cups than anyone else against the team that wants a European Cup more than anyone else. It is a sequel, of course, but the Champions League — like Hollywood — loves a sequel. It is pure box office.It might, then, seem both distinctly counterintuitive and obviously pretentious to suggest that the other Champions League semifinal might somehow be more alluring. A.C. Milan against Inter Milan is very much the art-house offering, the feature directed at a niche, self-selecting audience. (Unless you are, of course, Italian.)It will not, make no mistake, have quite the production values of the show on offer at the Bernabéu and the Etihad. The cast list is not quite as glittering. And despite featuring two rivals so local they share a stadium, it does not offer quite such a straightforward, compelling narrative.Real Madrid against Manchester City, at heart, is about revenge and it is about power. It offers an insight into the ever-mutable nature of the Champions League, and by extension European soccer. There are conclusions to be drawn from its outcome.Diego Milito and Inter won the 2010 Champions League final.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter versus Milan, on the other hand, has just kind of happened. It is not to diminish their achievements to suggest that neither team expected, realistically, to be here. Their presence in the final four is not a consequence of rich form or stellar seasons; both have performed modestly in Serie A this season.It cannot even be read in good faith as proof of the resurgence of Italian soccer, which remains mired in debt, hidebound by bureaucracy and hamstrung by grinding conservatism. As the magazine Rivista Undici pointed out this week, nobody seriously believes that Serie A is now the best domestic competition in Europe because it provided three of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists this season. The successes of Inter, Milan and Napoli belong to the clubs themselves, not to the league as a whole.But for all that, the matchup’s appeal is undeniable. First and foremost, of course, it is a derby, one being played out over two of the biggest games of the club season. It is what was described, the last time it happened, as the “longest derby in the world,” a week of worry and stress and hope from which both heroes and villains will emerge.That it is fresh helps, too. No Italian team has reached the semifinals since Roma’s equally unanticipated surge in 2018. Neither Milanese side has made it this far since the last time they won the competition: Inter in 2010, Milan in 2007.Inter is the last Italian team to win the trophy.Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Champions League has long felt like a private club. The two sides of this rivalry, the Derby della Madonnina, make unlikely interlopers. Milan, with seven titles, has won the European Cup more than anyone except Real Madrid; Inter is eighth on the list, with three. Neither would accept the role of underdog either naturally or willingly, even as their presence is an infusion of new blood that the tournament needed.But most of all, for a certain vintage of fan, it has to do with memory. It was 2003, the last time these two teams were drawn together at this stage of this competition. (They would meet again, in the 2005 quarterfinal, a tie that A.C. Milan won with ease.)Back then, it was far closer to a curiosity than a miracle. Serie A, after all, was regarded as the finest league on the planet, and had been for 20 years or so. Milan — or at least the combined geography of Piedmont and Lombardy — was Italian soccer’s capital, and by extension the mistress of the world. That Inter and A.C. Milan might stand in each other’s way was only a matter of time, part of the natural order of things. A.C. Milan scraped through, that time. It beat another Italian team, Juventus, in the final.It is hard to pinpoint, precisely, when that world ended. Eras, in soccer, do not divide as neatly as journalists, historians and the subset of fans who think about these things like to pretend. Italian clubs won the Champions League three times in the first decade of this century: Milan twice, in 2003 and 2007, and Inter in 2010. Juventus made the final in 2003, too, and Milan in 2005.Filippo Inzaghi scored when Milan last won the Champions League, against Liverpool in 2007 in Athens.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd yet, by the time of Inter’s victory, few would have pronounced Serie A the best domestic competition on the planet. That title had passed first to the Premier League, and then, thanks to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, to La Liga.(It would return to the Premier League, by common consensus, no later than 2016. But again: In that time, English sides have won the Champions League twice. Real Madrid has delivered four more trophies for Spain. These things are unhelpfully messy.)Likewise, there is no single explanation for why or how it happened. Serie A lost its primacy in the same way that Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The stadiums started to look a little outdated, and then the style of play did as well. The debts piled up. The television product grew stale, the revenues dwarfed by those on offer in the Premier League.The players, as players do, gravitated to where the money was, and the money was in England and in parts of Spain. Violence flared with ever greater frequency in the stands. Attendances started to fall. Patches of empty seats appeared on screens.And against that backdrop came Calciopoli, the great referee-influencing scandal of 2006, dripping poison and doubt into Italian soccer’s bloodstream. Juventus was disgraced. Others were stained. Everyone suffered. Serie A was faded and diminished and now it was tarnished, too. It has never really recovered.That there is a Milan derby in the semifinals of the Champions League — that, for the first time since 2017, there will be an Italian team in the final in Istanbul — is not a remedy for that decline.Only Real Madrid (14) has more Champions League titles than A.C. Milan (7).Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Serie A that has emerged from the ashes of its past has plenty of attractive qualities. It is on course for a fourth winner in four years. It has a competitive balance that few of its peers can match. It is home to bold, intelligent coaches, giving rise to an enticing heterogeneity of style, and it has more than a few owners seeking to introduce a degree of innovation.But it is not on the cusp of reclaiming its place at the summit of world soccer; that crown is awarded not by artistic merit or even by popular acclamation but by brute economic power. Serie A was not king in the 1990s or 2000s because of the weather, or the food, or some innate cultural supremacy. It just paid more. Now the deepest pockets are in the Premier League, and that is not going to change anytime soon.It is there, though, that lies the appeal of Milan against Inter, twice in six days, for a place in the biggest game of the year. It is a break from the present, a chance to drift just a little in a past that has disappeared. There was no notice issued when Serie A slipped — or stepped off — its pedestal. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. Now, two decades later, there is an unexpected reminder of how the world used to be, before things moved and shifted and changed forever, when the light in Italy just seemed a little brighter than anywhere else.Details, DetailsAt Bayern Munich, it’s back to the drawing board.Leonhard Simon/ReutersBayern Munich will not take this well. It is less than a month since the club fired Julian Nagelsmann, a manager it had paid more than $25 million to hire, at least in part because he went skiing at a time deemed inappropriate. The club is unlikely to shrug its shoulders at being eliminated from not only the Champions League but the German cup, too, in the space of a few days.Thomas Tuchel, freshly installed as Nagelsmann’s replacement, should be safe for now, but all around him will be a blur of change. Oliver Kahn, the iconic goalkeeper turned chief executive, is under scrutiny. Hasan Salihamidzic, another former player and now Bayern’s sporting director, will not be resting easy. Herbert Hainer, the club’s president, already has hinted that there will be churn in the squad, too.Whether any of this will have the desired effect is a different matter. There was a sense, watching Manchester City hold Bayern at bay on Wednesday evening, of two clubs moving in opposite directions. An era that belongs to City, and to its fellow avatars of the new soccer, is doubtless beginning. The one dominated by Bayern and its ilk is slipping into the past.And yet the whole picture is much more complex, and substantially simpler, than that.No, Bayern cannot compete with City, not in the long term: The combined forces of Bavarian corporate culture are no match for that particular blend of Premier League wealth and nation-state resources. The days when Bayern could function essentially as a Bundesliga All-Star team — plucking the finest players from its rivals to perpetuate its domestic dominance and its European relevance — are over. Like Juventus and Barcelona before it, Bayern Munich will at some point bow to, or be bowed by, England’s economic primacy.But decade-spanning macroeconomic trends are not easily distilled into roughly two hours of soccer. Even in a game that seemed to define the direction of the whole sport, the margins were impossibly fine. In this case, it came down to the fact that City has a fearsome goal scorer — Erling Haaland, you may have heard him mentioned — and Bayern, essentially, does not. Tuchel’s team created half a dozen good chances before Haaland scored in Munich. It just did not take any of them.And, frustrating though that might be, it is also a significantly easier problem to solve than the imbalance in financial prowess between the European continent and the acquisitive, swashbuckling utopia that sits shimmering just off its shores. (The Premier League, that is. Other adjectives are available for the current state of Britain.)Should Bayern secure the services of Victor Osimhen or Randal Kolo Muani this summer — or even, the club’s ultimate dream, Harry Kane — it will certainly be back in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next season, and there is a better than even chance the outcome will be different. Long term, big picture, Bayern cannot keep up with the wealth of the Premier League in general, and Manchester City in particular. But then it does not need to, not really. It just needs to be able to overcome it for 90 minutes at a time.Correspondence: Your Ideas, RatedThe good news: Many, many of you have been in touch to pitch ideas for how soccer might follow baseball’s example and tweak its rules to make the game more engaging for idle teenagers. Not quite as many as got in touch to tell me about why banning the shift in baseball is a good thing, but still, a lot.The bad news: None of you got the correct answer, which was Extra Time Sudden Death Multi-Ball, so nobody wins the special prize of an afternoon of blue-sky thinking with Gerard Piqué.There were, alas, too many emails to address every suggestion, so here is a fairly representative selection, each condensed into a pearl of wisdom and then assessed by an expert panel — me, talking to my dog — who considers the suggestion’s merit and then makes a slightly condescending remark about its viability.Paul Kassel: “Shrink the field. It would compel tighter passing, fewer over-the-top balls that go nowhere, a bit more chaos. It would speed up the game, and likely increase scoring.”I like the theory, but if anything I’d go the other way: Teams are too well-organized now, so let’s space them out a bit. Grade: B.Charles Kelly: “The most obvious way to restore any modicum of sanity to the offside and handball rules is to restore their enforcement to the judgment of the referee. Accept that such calls are a judgment. Will some judgments be wrong? Of course. That’s the nature of judgment, and reasonable people know and accept that.”Thoroughly sensible, certainly for offside. Handball would be better served if there had to be deliberate motion toward the ball, as was the case at some point, I think. All of this falls down on relying on people to be “reasonable,” obviously. Grade: A for idea, F for execution.The referee will hear your complaints in order. Please take a number.Azael Rodriguez/Getty ImagesKirk Farmer: “I would change the offside rule so that a player is onside if any part of his/her body is even with the defender.”Wouldn’t we all, Kirk? Well, you, me and Arsène Wenger, which is not a bad group to be in, unless you’re Wenger. Grade: ASteve Elliott: “Some league somewhere should stop awarding points just for showing up, and say to get points in the table, you need to score goals on the field. No points for a goal-less draw.”Hard pass, I’m afraid, Steve, but there is the kernel of an idea here. Could an away draw earn more points than a home draw? Could scoring three goals or more earn a bonus point? Grade: C for you, D for me.Gregory Crouch: “Punish time-wasting by adding all those extra minutes like they did at the World Cup. Punish intentional tactical fouling more harshly.”Yes to both. But you lose points for the third suggestion, omitted here, of making refereeing more consistent. Too vague. Grade: BLaura Goldin: “How about enforcing the six-second rule that is supposed to be how long the keeper can handle the ball?”This was the rule for at least a decade, and as far as I know, still is. We just seem to have stopped enforcing it. Grade: A, with an asterisk because it already exists.Fred D’Ambrosi: “The solution to soccer’s problems is the salary cap. It will never happen, but leveling the playing field solves many more problems than cutting the game time by 30 minutes.”A salary cap or some other alternative that bridges the massive, yawning rift between the rich and everyone else and that we have, for some reason, all decided is actually great? If anything, this idea is insufficiently outrageous. Grade: A More