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      With Title Near, Naples Shed Superstition and Starts to Believe

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      For the first time in three decades, Napoli stands on the cusp of an Italian soccer championship. Its city did not want to waste any time celebrating.NAPLES, Italy — The surveillance room at the Vesuvius Observatory, the oldest volcanology institute in the world, is barely a mile from the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona: a few minutes’ walk, or a single stop on the train line from Napoli’s home. It is just far enough, though, that the noise from the stadium does not quite reach it.Inside the observatory, a team of volcanologists, geologists, physicists and chemists continuously monitors a bank of screens, tracking the region’s three active volcanic centers: Vesuvius itself; the island of Ischia; and the largely submerged caldera of the Campi Flegrei, just off the coast.The screens display a continual screed of real-time data and images from a sophisticated network of measuring stations, thermal cameras and video surveillance systems, information that is of vital importance to Naples, a city of two million people. The monitors are never used to watch soccer.The surveillance room, though, does not need to see a game or hear the roar of the crowd to know, almost immediately, when Napoli has scored. “We don’t need to watch,” Francesca Bianco, the observatory’s director, said. “The instruments tell us.”It is not just home games, either. Goals scored hundreds of miles away have a notable effect, too. “If tens of thousands of people jump up to celebrate at the same time, we see it,” Bianco said. Her colleagues know to disregard these bits of data, of course, and she has not noticed anything particularly unusual over the last few months. Seismographically speaking, she said, all goals look the same.The only difference, really, is that they have been more frequent. There is an easy explanation for that. Napoli has scored more goals. It has recorded more wins. It has had more cause to celebrate. Inside the surveillance room, the scientists have noticed. That is what all that data on the screens is for, after all: to tell when something is about to explode.A Tempting FateAt his stall outside the Maradona stadium, Mariano pulls down yet another sky blue scarf and hurriedly, unceremoniously, flings it at a customer. It is emblazoned with the words “Napoli Campioni.” He barks out the price and stretches out his hand, impatiently, to take the bank note.His trade is brisk, and has been for some time. That was one of his last scarves. The banners decorated with the Italian flag and No. 3 have almost gone, too. Fans have gobbled up anything and everything celebrating Napoli’s coming league title, its first Italian championship since 1990 and only the third in its history. The fact that Napoli has not actually won it yet appears to be immaterial.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockAlberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFew expected the club’s — and the city’s — long wait for glory to end this year. It has been less than 12 months, after all, since a group of fans stole Manager Luciano Spalletti’s car and promised to return it only if he agreed to quit his job. Over the summer, Napoli lost its longstanding backbone — defender Kalidou Koulibaly, the homegrown playmaker Lorenzo Insigne and the beloved forward Dries Mertens — in the transfer market. It had the air of a transition season.Instead, Napoli has obliterated its competition. It has occupied the summit of Serie A for much of the year, stretching off into the distance as its theoretical rivals fell by the wayside one by one. A few months ago, its lead had grown to 19 points, the largest advantage the Italian top flight had ever had.In the last few weeks, that has been whittled somewhat. Napoli has faltered just a little, beaten heavily by A.C. Milan in the league and then eliminated by them in the Champions League. Lazio, its last remaining rival in the league, has cut its advantage to 14 points. Still, with only eight games to play, everyone agrees it is too late for Napoli to be reeled in now.As early as January, Roma Manager José Mourinho, was (possibly sarcastically) congratulating the club on winning the league. Stefano Pioli, Mourinho’s counterpart at A.C. Milan, declared that Napoli would win the league title after watching his team thrash it in Naples. “I only have good things to say about them,” he said.Even those inside the club are not worried about tempting fate. Spalletti has described his team as one that is winning the title. Victor Osimhen, the striker whose goals have proved so vital to Napoli’s ambitions, has said that he cannot wait to see the scale of the celebrations when the triumph is official.Perhaps most striking, though, is the fact that the fans share that confidence. Naples is a proudly superstitious city, its streets and its buildings and its people struck through with genuine belief in and respect for scaramanzia: the power of superstition.Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockStriker Victor Osimhen’s mask, once worn for protection, has taken on mystical powers of its own. Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It is in our DNA,” the journalist and author Michelangelo Iossa said. “It is a tradition, a way of connecting us to the story of our city, all the way back to Greek and Roman myth. We have absorbed aspects of a lot of different cultures over the last 2,000 years. It is part of our identity in southern Italy in general, but in Naples in particular.”At some point this season, though, Neapolitans seem to have collectively decided that it was all a load of hokum. Quite when that happened is disputed. “It was a few weeks ago, early in March,” said Michela, another vendor outside the Maradona. (Like Mariano, she declined to offer a surname.) Daniele Bellini, better known as Decibel, Napoli’s stadium announcer, dates it back further. “Everything changed after we beat Juventus, 5-1, in January,” he said. “That scale of victory had not happened since 1990.” That, to his mind, broke the seal.After that, the shibboleths started to melt away. The flags and shirts and scarves celebrating what was to come appeared for sale outside the stadium and across Naples. “We’re all loyal fans,” Michela said. “But now we’re comfortable selling them.”Mariano was a little more blunt. “È già fatto,” he said in Italian. It’s already done.No Time to WasteIn 1987, the year Diego Maradona dragged Napoli to its maiden championship, the celebrations were so frenzied that an iconic piece of graffiti appeared at one of the city’s graveyards. “You don’t know what you’ve missed,” it read. Naples has waited long enough to recapture that spirit. This time, it did not want anyone to die wondering.Naples does not so much have the air of a city waiting for a party to start as one of a place that is several drinks in. Napoli’s colors, sky blue and white, have been splashed not just in Fuorigrotta, the suburb where the stadium sits, but across the tight, winding alleys of the ancient districts that act as Naples’s heart: the Spanish Quarter, the Centro Storico, Rione Sanità.On crumbling buildings, flags hang from balconies and block out windows. Jerseys flutter off clotheslines. Shop windows feature mannequins decked out as Napoli players, regardless of what is for sale. Whole streets have sprouted canopies of banners and bunting.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlessandro Garofalo/LaPresse, via Associated PressThere are staircases painted to resemble the scudetto, the shield that graces the jerseys of Italy’s reigning champion. The No. 3, for the team’s third title, is omnipresent. Naples is no longer a city with a soccer team. It is a soccer team with a city attached.The decorations have become an attraction in themselves. One cafe in the Spanish Quarter has installed life-size cutouts of the team’s players, arranged on the cobbles in the tactical formation they would assume on the field. So many people — fans, locals, tourists — descended to take selfies with them one Sunday morning last month that the cafe ran out of coffee. The owner said they had sold about 3,000 foil-topped cups of espresso by lunchtime.“There are thousands of visitors every week,” said Renato Quaglia, the director of FOQUS, an organization working to improve education and opportunity inside the Spanish Quarter, still one of the city’s most underprivileged neighborhoods. “It is a new form of tourism.”The centerpiece is the top of Via Emanuele de Deo, where a giant mural of Maradona looms above the street. It has been a destination for years, Quaglia said, but its popularity has blossomed since Maradona’s death in 2020. “Great players, as well as film and TV personalities, have come to be seen here,” he said.Now, with Napoli on the edge of glory, the crowds have swelled even more. On the streets of the Spanish Quarter, it feels as if the imminent victory has the potential to change the city. The tourist boom has led to the rise of an impromptu, somewhat unofficial economy: street vendors and stall operators selling whatever they can think of, as long as it is Napoli blue and white.Quaglia does not quite see it that way. “This is a speculative bubble, a phenomenon to be exploited in the moment,” he said. Like all booms, he fears, it is underpinned by an inherent fragility. He hopes there may be some lasting impact: a few overnight businesses that survive and a few more tourists including the city on their itineraries, making their own pilgrimages. But that is not the same as solid, lasting, impactful change. Once the initial rush of jubilation ends, once the championship is won and the party is over, whole swaths of this new economy will disappear.“Winning the league is a priceless moment after 33 years,” he said. “But it is also the illusion of the redemption of a city.”Cesare Abbate/EPA, via ShutterstockThe image of Diego Maradona, the Argentine who delivered Napoli’s only previous championships, is still a fixture in the city.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhole cities do not change, not overnight, and particularly not ones that have stood for thousands of years. Naples may not feel much like a superstitious place, not when the sort of victory that will shake the earth is so close at hand, but that wariness is there, just beneath the surface.Osimhen, so integral to everything Napoli has nearly achieved, has spent the entire season wearing a face mask, the legacy of a collision with an opposing player in November 2021. It is not clear if he still needs it, medically, but it has become something of a talisman, for him and the team.Late in March, while away on international duty with Nigeria, he lost it. Nobody is quite sure what happened. A few days later, he picked up an injury. He missed Napoli’s league game against Milan. Napoli lost. He missed the first leg of the Champions League game against Milan, too. Napoli lost again. The club immediately commissioned a bespoke replacement to be made. Scaramanzia may be finished. The title may already be won. But there is no point in taking chances. More

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      Manchester City Eliminates Bayern Munich in Champions League

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      City dispatched Bayern Munich to reach the Champions League semifinals. But, as usual, getting close won’t be good enough.MUNICH — Suddenly, quietly, improbably inconspicuously, Manchester City finds itself within touching distance once more of the thing it does not like to talk about but is never far from its thoughts, the one prize that has eluded Pep Guardiola at City, the ultimate victory that has long felt like the inevitable conclusion of all that the club has done, all that it has spent, all that it has wanted.It has never been an easy subject to broach with Guardiola, the team’s head coach. How he reacts tends to depend on his mood. Sometimes, it makes him irascible, sometimes weary. There are occasions when he plays it for laughs, and moments when he goes for playful indulgence, like a man talking to a dog, as if the very thought of one of the most expensive and ambitious sports-political projects of all time gobbling up trophies is risible.“Forget it, forget it,” he said last month. “When you start to talk about that, you start to lose competitions and drop competitions.”Familiarity lies at the root of his contempt, of course. He has been asked about the possibility of winning “The Treble” — when spoken, the phrase is always capitalized — in every single one of his seasons at City, with the possible exception of his fact-finding first. For a while, convention dictated it not be mentioned until at least springtime. These days it is broached when, jet-lagged, he first steps off the plane on some far-flung preseason tour.If anything, though, it is a curious and admittedly somewhat contorted form of flattery. The treble — victories in the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League — is held up as an almost mythical achievement in English soccer. It stands as the ultimate seal of greatness: It has, after all, only been achieved once, though Manchester United mentions it rarely, and only when prompted.Pep Guardiola, with Manuel Akanji and Bernado Silva.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockThat it seems to fit so readily in his purview is not just testament to soccer’s rapid-onset ossification into immutable hierarchies and to the irresistible power of money, but to the scale of dominion that Guardiola has established at Manchester City. He has already won the Premier League. He has retained it. Twice. He has broken the division’s points record. He has done a clean sweep of domestic honors. What other worlds are there left to conquer?(He might also like to direct a gentle admonishment in the general direction of his employer. In 2019, when City won the league and both domestic cups, Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, commanded that the team be hailed as the “Fourmidables.” It would, he believed, thus overshadow United’s treble. Guardiola’s staff pointed out that including the Community Shield, an exhibition game taken seriously only by the winner, might be technically correct but had the effect of cheapening the achievement. They were overruled.)This season, though, has brought a minor — but telling — shift. City’s quest to clear that final hurdle has bubbled along in the background, as it always does, but it has hardly been front and center.Partly, that has to do with a deference to logic: It would be a little bit gauche, after all, to discuss one team winning every competition in sight when another is several points clear at the top of the Premier League. And partly it has to do with the distracting presence of Erling Haaland, who has spent much of the year forcing people to wonder if there is a number big enough to capture his eventual goals tally.All of a sudden, though, it is the tail end of April and the stars once more seem to have aligned. If Manchester City wins all of its games, it will claim the Premier League trophy for the third year in a row: another item ticked off Guardiola’s bucket list. It is in the F.A. Cup semifinals, and an overwhelming favorite to reach the final. And here on Wednesday in Munich, City filled in the last administrative duty before taking its place in the final four of the Champions League.Aymeric Laporte bending soccer’s rules, and Bayern’s Kingsley Coman.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressBeating Bayern Munich handsomely eight days earlier had made this game seem like a formality, though in reality it did not always quite feel like that. There were moments, particularly in the first half, when Kingsley Coman or Leroy Sané were tearing at City’s flanks and it was possible, just about, to believe that it might not be over.But then Erling Haaland scored, and it was. Bayern equalized, late on, through a penalty by Joshua Kimmich, but by that stage the Allianz Arena had long since given up hope.Magnanimously, Guardiola suggested that the aggregate score of 4-1 did not reflect the true nature of the home-and-home — probably correctly — but then these games, as he said, are defined by details. And the details, in this case, were that Bayern could not take its chances. City, by contrast, grasped those that came its way with a cold certainty, an unforgiving inevitability.It is a useful trait to have, of course, as the season enters its final, defining stretch. The challenges that remain, the obstacles between the club and the achievement that represents the absolute, unavoidable culmination of Abu Dhabi’s vision for soccer, are hardly trifles.Guardiola’s team still has to play, and beat, Arsenal, the Premier League leader. Manchester United or Brighton might await in the F.A. Cup final. Most ominously, Real Madrid lurks in the semifinals of the Champions League, just as it did last year. Nobody at City will need reminding how that ended. Guardiola regards those sorts of fixtures as a “coin flip.” He knows as well as anyone that nobody calls it better than Real Madrid.With Bayern out of the way, City will line up against Real Madrid in the semifinals.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then City has not so much as dropped a point in the Premier League since February. In March and April, it has so far scored 31 goals and conceded only four. It has the look of a team gathering momentum, a blend of speed and force and purpose. It has the feel of a storm brewing. All of a sudden, almost surreptitiously, City has crept closer to the summit of its own grand ambitions than it has ever been.Quite what that means for soccer as a whole is a subject that will, rightly, come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, as Guardiola steers his side on those last few steps, the most delicate, the most treacherous of all. For him, though, as for his team and for the people who took a club and turned it into something else entirely, spinning it out of whole, golden cloth, this is where the path has always led. All that is left, now, is to get there. More

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      Real Madrid Sends Chelsea Out of Champions League

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      Real Madrid advanced to the semifinals at the expense of a Chelsea team long on cash and talk but short, it seems, on ideas of how to succeed.LONDON — Todd Boehly was supposed to be the smartest man in the room. That was the pitch, anyway, when he first descended on Chelsea, on the Premier League and on European soccer almost a year ago. He was the guy who spoke to a hushed audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference. He was onstage at the SALT forum. Other people described him as a “thought leader.”His ideas, he knew, might be received by traditionalists as a little provocative. He suggested a Premier League all-star game — and a relegation playoff. He told soccer it could learn something from American sports, a longstanding euphemism for finding new ways to extricate more cash from fans. He evangelized the idea of buying a whole network of teams. It was 2022, so at some point he talked — rather more than hindsight would suggest was wise — about NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.Boehly did not seem to mind the criticism, the resistance. He was likely expecting it, the price to be paid for daring to disrupt an industry as fearful and staid and conservative as, um, English soccer. He had a “modern, data-driven approach.” He sought “structural advantages.” He had worked out that paying players for longer somehow made them cheaper. He was the cutting edge. And it would not be the cutting edge if it was comfortable.A quick status update on where Chelsea stands now, a year into the ownership tenure of Boehly and his less visible colleagues: 11th in the Premier League, having won only two of its last 12 games; employing its third manager of the campaign, and simultaneously searching for his replacement; $600 million poorer after embarking on the largest single-season transfer spending spree in history; and, as of Tuesday night, out of the Champions League, its last, distant shot at glory gone.Todd Boehly and Chelsea may not see the Champions League again for a while.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is, at least, no particular shame in that. In the end, this was as straightforward a quarterfinal as Real Madrid could have hoped for: a 2-0 win at home last week, and another 2-0 victory on Tuesday in London, a low bar confidently cleared. But Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s interim manager, was not clutching at straws when he suggested his team had “caused Real a lot of problems” for the first hour or so at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday.Chelsea had chivied and harried and unnerved Real Madrid, the reigning European champion. In patches, anyway. With better finishing, as Lampard observed, things might have been different. A portion of the credit for that should go to him: It was his deployment of N’Golo Kanté in a more advanced role that caused Real Madrid to “suffer” so much, as Carlo Ancelotti, Real’s coach, admitted. Chelsea went down, as it was always going to, but it did so with pride intact.That has not always been the case in the first year of what is probably best described as the Boehly experience. Chelsea has long nursed something of a soap opera streak, one that has provided a curiously accurate reflection of the shifting nature of the part of London it calls home.In the 1960s, the club was home to the Kings of the King’s Road, chic, hip and cool. In the 1970s, the freewheeling mavericks arrived, the club nursing a sort of alternative, pre-punk energy. By the 1990s, it was home to a set of impossibly stylish European imports. And then, from 2003 onward, Roman Abramovich turned it into a sort of gaudy monument to the power of the vast wells of new money pouring into the capital from across the globe, Russia in particular.Frank Lampard, still winless in his latest stint at Chelsea.Clive Rose/Getty ImagesThere have been various points, in all of those incarnations, when Chelsea has veered perilously close to lapsing into self-parody. Abramovich, in particular, appeared to have absolutely no interest in running a sensible, steady sort of a soccer team. He may or may not have been a Kremlin apparatchik, but he was most certainly thirsty for drama.He fired coaches for not winning titles. He fired coaches for not winning the right titles. He fired coaches when they had won titles. He appointed at least one manager whom the fans hated. He appointed another because he was his friend. There was one season when the players effectively ran the show. There was infighting and politicking and dark talk of plots, and all of that was just a quiet Tuesday for José Mourinho.Chelsea, in other words, has a relatively high tolerance for the unusual and even, at times, the absurd. But even by those standards, Boehly and his consortium have pushed it to the limit.Signing so many players that the locker room at the club’s training facility is not quite big enough to accommodate them all is not indicative of judicious planning. Likewise spending so much money that the club, in the absence of Champions League soccer and the income it brings, will not only have to indulge in a fire sale of players this summer but quite possibly breach the Premier League’s financial rules next season.Abramovich was not averse to dropping in on the players — sometimes literally: His helicopter regularly used to land at the Cobham training ground if the fancy took him — in order to inspire or encourage or perhaps just glare menacingly at them. But there are no known instances of him, as Boehly reportedly did, telling one of his expensively acquired stars that his performances had been “embarrassing.”There is a chance, of course, that all of these are just teething problems, a form of culture shock, the inevitable growing pains that come with some very rich, very clever — though it is worth noting that those two things are not as synonymous as is often assumed — people dipping their toes into an industry to which they are not native.It may well be, as Lampard loyally and hopefully suggested, that Chelsea is “back” sooner rather than later: guided by one of the half-dozen managerial candidates being considered by the four sporting directors, or equivalent, it employs, boasting a trimmed-down squad full of bright young things, the fat excised to make way for the lean.As Boehly himself said last year, the Premier League is designed in such a way as to give the “big brands” — oh, Todd — a number of his beloved structural advantages. One of those is the privilege of having money to solve problems. Another is a limit to how much it is possible to fail.From this vantage point, though, the ultimate vindication of Boehly and his group seems almost impossibly distant. Chelsea is out of the Champions League. It will not be back next season. Still, there is hope. It is up to Boehly to plot its way back, and he is, by all accounts, the smartest man in the room.Rodrygo, right, scored both goals as Real Madrid cruised into the semifinals, where it will face the Manchester City-Bayern Munich winner.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press More

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      FIFA Silenced One World Cup Protest but May Face More This Year

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      FIFA threatened to suspend men’s captains if they took part in a social justice campaign in Qatar. Will the same rules apply at the Women’s World Cup?LONDON — Barely four months after it allowed a public fight over rainbow-colored armbands to overshadow the start of the World Cup in Qatar, world soccer’s governing body is facing similar questions about whether players will be allowed to express support for gay rights at this year’s Women’s World Cup.It is a fight that everyone involved agreed should not have happened again.Stung by fierce public and internal backlash in November, when soccer’s leaders silenced a plan to wear armbands promoting a social justice campaign by threatening to suspend players who took part, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, said in March that lessons had been learned from the events in Qatar. Seeking to head off a new fight with some of the world’s top women’s players at their own championship, Infantino promised a solution would be in place before the Women’s World Cup opens in Australia and New Zealand on July 20.Yet even as he was offering those assurances, FIFA had already found a new way of angering both its players and its partners.It had, without consulting organizers in either Australia or New Zealand, all but agreed to a sponsorship deal that would have made Saudi Arabia, via its Visit Saudi tourism brand, a marquee sponsor of the women’s tournament. The collaboration would have seen dozens of gay players take the field for matches in stadiums advertising travel to a country that does not recognize same-sex relationships, and where homosexuality remains a criminal offense.It was only after weeks of silence, behind-the-scenes crisis talks and public rebukes from officials in both host nations that FIFA confirmed the deal was dead. Infantino dismissed the entire controversy over it as “a storm in a teacup.” To others, it was far more than that.“In leadership, you’ve got to take a stand on issues that you feel strongly about,” said James Johnson, the chief executive of Football Australia, the sport’s governing body in the country.“This is one that caught us by surprise. It was one that we spoke with our players about, our governments, our partners. And we also had a good sense of the general feel around the Australian community that this deal was not in line with how we saw the tournament playing out. So we decided, together with New Zealand, that we would put our foot down on this occasion.”Australia’s players were particularly frustrated with the proposed Saudi sponsorship, Johnson said, so much so that the situation has strengthened attitudes on the team that the tournament should be used as a platform to promote the values they stand for. At least one Australian player said FIFA’s decision to bring the World Cup to Qatar, and its willingness to bow to local attitudes, had been instructive.“I think the last World Cup, the men’s World Cup, was a great example of just what’s going on in the world, and how much is still wrong,” said Emily Gielnik, a forward who has been a member of Australia’s women’s team for more than a decade.“And I think there were some teams that were trying to represent that and obviously, playing the World Cup in that country was very controversial, for a lot of reasons. And hopefully, we can embody and resemble that, and be proud of who we are as people.”James Johnson, the chief executive of Australia’s soccer federation, said a proposed Saudi tourism sponsorship for the Women’s World Cup “allowed us to get into what I think is more productive conversations around the players during this competition being able to express themselves and express themselves on issues that are important to them.”Bernadett Szabo/ReutersSeveral federations bringing teams to the tournament, including those from England and Netherlands, two of the countries that had clashed most strongly with FIFA over armbands in Qatar, but also prominent powers like the United States and Germany, have a history of supporting their players and the causes most important to them.While no plans for similar protests have been made public, women’s players also may be less likely than their men’s counterparts to take a step back should FIFA attempt to squelch their messaging as it did in Qatar. The teams coming to Australia and New Zealand feature some of the most prominent female athletes in the world, many of whom are comfortable speaking their minds on Saudi Arabia or anything else, and who have been emboldened by recent successes in fights as diverse as equal pay and uniform design.The women’s game, Gielnik said, was further ahead than the men’s game when it came to speaking freely about social issues, and she predicted teams and players would not shy away from taking advantage of the platform offered by the World Cup.“I think some things will be controversial,” said Gielnik, one of several gay players on the Matildas team. “It depends what path we take and what path other countries take.”For FIFA, backing away from the Visit Saudi agreement was not easy. Saudi officials were frustrated about losing the deal, part of a suite of sponsorships that Saudi Arabia had agreed to with FIFA to promote the kingdom. Visit Saudi had quietly been added to the roster of sponsors at the Qatar World Cup last year and then at the Club World Cup in January in Morocco.Clearly frustrated by having to change plans and disappoint Saudi Arabia, which has proved a key backer of his own interests, Infantino chided FIFA’s critics over the pressure to cancel the Visit Saudi deal for its marquee women’s championship. Australia, he pointed out, retains ongoing economic links with the kingdom.“There is a double standard which I really do not understand,” Infantino said. “There is no issue. There is no contract. But of course we want to see how we can involve Saudi sponsors, and those from Qatar, in women’s football generally.”Johnson, the Australian soccer executive, and others responded that attitudes in the Gulf about homosexuality were only part of the problem. At a recent event hosted by the Australian High Commission in London to mark 100 days until the start of the World Cup, officials spoke about how the tournament would also act as a showcase to promote tourism to both host countries, underlining another reason FIFA’s planned agreement to highlight Saudi tourism had caused so much distress.“It could have been Visit Finland and it still would have been a problem,” Johnson said. More

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      The Best Time to Fix Soccer Is Right Now

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      The game’s authorities, its teams and its fans all agree alterations could help. The problem is that many of them are focused on the wrong things.The consensus, over the last few years, has become perfectly clear. FIFA thinks it. So do UEFA, its great rival, and the architects of the proposed European Super League and most of the major teams in most of the game’s major leagues. Even Gerard Piqué is sure of it. They cannot agree on much, but they all agree that soccer has to change.Their motivations tend to center on roughly the same theory, one perhaps best encapsulated by Piqué, the former Barcelona defender. The foundational belief of his Kings League is that soccer matches are just too long. Teenagers, he is convinced, cannot pay attention to anything that long these days, which he has decided is definitely a new thing that has never happened before.Piqué is not alone, though. Andrea Agnelli, the now disgraced former chairman of Juventus, regularly said that soccer had to do something to win the hearts and minds of the TikTok generation. The Real Madrid president Florentino Peréz, a wholly convincing spokesman for today’s youth, made it a central part of his pitch for the Super League.Their solutions, though, vary wildly. The Super League’s guiding principle was that what people really want is more meetings between the same, elite teams. UEFA, which took such great exception to that idea, basically thinks the same thing, if its redesign of the Champions League is any indication.FIFA agrees wholeheartedly, but with the important distinction that all of those games should be in competitions for which it sells the broadcasting rights. The clubs, on the other hand, feel that more money might sort the problem out. Piqué, to his credit, has at least thought outside the box a little. He has gone down the lucha libre mask and secret weapon route, ideas considerably more original than an expanded Club World Cup.For all the divergence of opinion on the means to achieve the aim, though, the basic theme is now so widely shared and so frequently repeated that it is essentially accepted as fact. Soccer has to change, somehow. And yet, fundamentally, this is very odd, because soccer — elite soccer, 21st-century soccer, Champions League and English Premier League soccer — has spent the last two decades attaining a sort of sociocultural critical mass. It now has the sort of reach, impact and engagement that actual religions crave. It is, by pretty much any measure, the most popular pastime ever.That is not to say that it should not be open to the idea of change. Baseball, a sport no less laden with tradition and with just as much reason to be convinced of its own enduring popularity as soccer, had the humility to amend its rules this season in the hope of providing a more appealing experience to its fans. The majors have introduced a pitch clock, limited pickoff attempts, and banned certain defensive shifts.(This last one is most curious to non-baseball-native eyes: Surely making it easier to score devalues the excitement caused by scoring? And is stopping an opponent from scoring not as valid and valuable a part of the game as the act of scoring itself? Why not make the pitchers throw underhand while you’re at it?)The inspiration for those alterations, of course, was not merely the mounting — and correct — concern that three hours and change was too long for a sporting event, but the impact of the sport’s analytical revolution: Data had rewritten on some genetic level how baseball was played, and as a consequence diminished it as a spectacle. Or, more accurately, it had diminished it as the spectacle that its fans had been conditioned over generations to expect.VAR: the soccer drama no one asked for.Thilo Schmuelgen/ReutersThat particular problem is not what soccer is facing. It, too, has undergone a data revolution over the last two decades — a case can be made, in fact, that it was experimenting with data before Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s had so much as muttered the word “quant” — but its impact has been more subtle.There are fewer shots from long distance now. Crossing is a little rarer. Everyone laughs at possession percentage statistics. (Heading is likely to diminish in the coming years, though as a result of greater research into its links to dementia, rather than any particular stylistic or philosophical development.)That does not mean the product could not be improved, though what is striking is how many of its greatest shortcomings are of the sport’s own making. The introduction of the video assistant referee has proved almost universally unpopular, and so too the hard-line interpretation of offside it has spawned. It remains an item of absolute conviction in this newsletter that nobody has the slightest clue what counts as handball anymore.All of these are within the wit of the game’s authorities to solve. V.A.R. should be invoked only for outrageous errors. Offside laws should be liberalized to give greater advantage to the attacker. Handball should be reserved for players swatting the ball away, like Luis Suárez at a World Cup, not a gentle, caressing brush with the fingers. Soccer has found itself in the curious position of trying to thrill young, fickle audiences by entangling itself in Byzantine regulation.There are other changes, too, that might be considered. There is, certainly, a strong argument for an equivalent of a pitch clock: Rather than playing a game over 90 minutes, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that it should be an hour, with the clock paused every time the ball goes out of play.Should soccer learn from baseball’s new hurry-up rules?Elsa/Getty ImagesStrangely, though, for all who hold the consensus that soccer has to change, none of those parties who are so convinced of its imminent anachronism seem to want to consider any of those alterations. They just do not come up.Nor, for that matter, do any of the other tweaks that might serve to make the sport more immediately appealing: mechanisms to ensure more equal talent distribution, so as to reduce competitive imbalance, or greater revenue sharing, or a limit on the amount of players a team can acquire.In years of discussing how to attract more young people to the sport, meanwhile, nobody appears to have mentioned the idea of reducing the paywall that surrounds it, both on television and in the flesh. Piqué’s Kings League is not especially likely to be the future of soccer, but it proved popular at least in part because it was free to watch on Twitch.And yet for all the discussion of the sport’s looming irrelevance, the end of its golden era, few of those evangelizing for radicalism seem willing to tread down those paths.FIFA is happy to launch as many new competitions as exist in the depths of President Gianni Infantino’s galaxy brain. UEFA will willingly redesign the Champions League, and its rivals will gamely try to tear it down. Piqué will joyfully tweak the way kickoffs work and hand out penalties at random and name a player “Enigma.”But none of them, no matter how convinced they are that the future has to be different, will pause to wonder whether the solution has been present all along, whether the clues to the ways soccer needs to change can be found by simply looking at what made it popular in the first place. It is almost as if none of them really want change unless it just so happens to benefit them.Chanting for the AutocratsBayern Munich fans took their protest straight to Manchester City.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA little more than an hour into Bayern Munich’s visit to Manchester City in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, just before a defeat turned into a humbling, the German club’s fans unfurled a banner: “Glazers, Sheikh Mansour, Autocrats Out.” Then, on a second canvas: “Football Belongs To The People.”It was, though it was probably not designed to be, quite a clever gambit. It put Manchester City’s fans in an awkward position. The name of their club’s benefactor was, very clearly, being besmirched. They quite like Sheikh Mansour at the Etihad Stadium. (They probably also quite like the Glazers, though for different reasons.)And so they did what was to be expected: They chanted his name, almost until the point that Bernardo Silva headed home City’s second goal of the evening, and everyone’s minds returned to rather more pressing matters. There is nothing remarkable about any of that. But it did rather make it look like Manchester City’s fans do not agree with the statement that “football belongs to the people,” which is quite an odd position to put oneself in.It goes without saying, of course, that is not how those fans would see it. There exists an unbridgeable cultural divide between English and German soccer: a single people divided by a common game (and vastly different ownership regulations).German soccer resolutely believes that clubs should be owned by, or at least accountable to, their fans. English soccer does not mind who owns its teams, as long as they spend a lot of money.That has been made abundantly clear by the drama over the ownership of Manchester United. Both of the groups to have made public their interest in making a deal with the Glazers have also been sure to point out that, alongside their commitment to refurbish the stadium and reconnect with the fans, they would make money available for transfers. People want to hear blandishments about engagement and infrastructure. But what they really care about is getting Victor Osimhen.Fans of English teams, not just City, have been conditioned to believe that it is an owner’s job to spend money. At roughly the same time as the banner was being unfurled, and City was doubling its lead, news was emerging from Liverpool that the club did not intend to pursue the signature of Jude Bellingham, the England and Borussia Dortmund midfielder, this summer.That makes sense. Liverpool knew, of course, that acquiring Bellingham would be expensive — current estimates have the total cost of the deal at around $220 million, including fees and salary — but it did not know, a year ago, that its team was about to age several decades simultaneously.Jude Bellingham may wind up in the Premier League, but it won’t be at Liverpool.Stuart Franklin/Getty ImagesThe club can, then, no longer justify committing so much of its budget to any one player, not when it may need as many as five new recruits to refashion its team. Liverpool does not come out of this well; its decline this season speaks to a colossal failure in squad planning. But, economically, the decision Manager Jürgen Klopp and his executives have reached is the sensible one.Needless to say, that is not how the news was received by (the online section, at least, of) the fan base. Liverpool’s owners are, by the definition of Bayern’s fans, autocrats, but they share the fundamental belief that clubs should live within their means, and that owners’ primary function is not simply to lavish money on their teams in a quixotic pursuit of success.It is not an extreme position. It is, deep down, quite hard to criticize. But it is not what English soccer has come to expect, not what it has been told over and over again is the aim of the exercise, and so it was deemed a sign of cowardice, of parsimony, of the willing acceptance of mediocrity, proof to many that what you really need, now, is an autocrat to cheer.Up Down UnderCan a co-host be a sleeper? Asking for Australia, which knocked off the European champion this week.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesAustralia’s last experience at the Women’s World Cup was underwhelming. The country entered the 2019 tournament in France with high hopes, a growing reputation and the best striker in the world. Sam Kerr did her part, scoring five goals in four games. The rest was an anticlimax. Australia departed in the round of 16, beaten on penalties by Norway.Perhaps that has tempered expectations for this year’s edition, looming ever larger on the horizon. Australia has the advantage of being a co-host, alongside New Zealand, but its name has been conspicuously absent whenever favorites are discussed. The United States? Of course. England? The coming thing. Spain, France, Germany? Noteworthy all. But the Australians: distinctly low-key.On Tuesday night, though, Tony Gustavsson’s Australia offered a little reminder that it plans to do rather more than host a party this summer/Antipodean winter.England had not lost in 30 games, it had won the European Championship and then, last week, the historic and deeply prestigious finalissima, against Brazil, which is precisely the sort of event England takes seriously in victory only. England will be a force at the World Cup. And Australia dispatched Sarina Wiegman’s team with poise and precision.Kerr remains, of course, the spearhead: If anything, the Chelsea striker is a more fearsome prospect now than she was four years ago. But there is a noteworthy supporting cast, too, a clinical streak, and what Wiegman herself admitted was an admirable discipline. Add the intangibles — the fervor of the local support, a sense of a disappointment four years ago to address — and Australia should be taken seriously.CorrespondenceLionel Messi, spoiled for choice.Eric Gaillard/ReutersLionel Messi’s forthcoming dilemma elicited a considerable array of responses, but one reaction was conspicuous by its absence: sympathy.“I can’t buy the narrative of ‘Poor Messi,’” wrote Pete Mumola. “He has to decide whether or not to take a $400 million salary, an equity stake in a Major League Soccer club or try to make an underperforming side of superstars achieve a European title. This is beyond first-world problems.”Ken Roy was similarly matter-of-fact. “He is rich beyond the wildest dreams of his many fans,” he pointed out. If Messi was so devastated at leaving Barcelona in the first place, “he could have easily taken a token payment. Does he, his father, or any rational human being think that $400 million-a-year would in any way improve his life?”I am not entirely sure this last charge is correct, as it happens: Barcelona’s mistake was letting his contract run down in the first place. When it came to re-sign, my understanding is that he could not have been registered regardless of the amount he was being paid. (That changed later in the summer.) The point, though, is valid. Messi does not have to limit his options to who can meet his salary demands.Which brings us to a note from Paulo Coelho, who we are presuming is not that one. “You could also mention one (unlikely) option,” he wrote. “The return to his boyhood club, Newell’s Old Boys. But as you say, this is for business, not love.” Going back to Newell’s has always, I will confess, been my preferred coda to Messi’s career. I remain hopeful it will happen. It may just not be yet.On another subject, Ben Myers wonders if the general chaos in the Premier League — managers dropping like flies, relegation-threatened Aston Villa now sixth, and so forth — ought to be traced to Qatar. “I think the turmoil comes from the World Cup,” he wrote. “The Premier League has been impacted more than other leagues simply because it had so many World Cup participants.”It has not really been remarked upon enough how strange the Premier League table has been for much of the season. It is not normal to have eight teams embroiled in the fight against relegation. It is not usual to see three of the traditional Big Six™ locked in such enduring mediocrity, and it is not common to see their would-be usurpers last so long into the campaign. The fall World Cup must be a part of that. The dismissals, though, are probably just a corrective: Things have been relatively calm for managers for a year or so. That tends to be followed by a storm. More

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      The Shadow of an Abuse Scandal Looms Over a World Cup Soccer Team

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      Vera Pauw was accused of body-shaming players while coaching in the National Women’s Soccer League. Sinead Farrelly helped expose abuse in that league. The two are now working together on Team Ireland.AUSTIN, Texas — As Ireland prepares for its first Women’s World Cup, its coach and a newly included midfielder find themselves on opposite sides of an abuse scandal that has roiled soccer in the United States. But their separate conflicts have fused into a tentative and pragmatic alliance.Vera Pauw, 60, Ireland’s national coach and a former coach of the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League, was accused late last year of body-shaming players and of being a “power freak” who sought to control their lives when she coached the Dash in 2018. At a news conference in Austin on Friday, Pauw labeled the accusations, contained in a blistering report organized by the league and its players’ union, “absolutely ridiculous and false.”Sinead Farrelly, 33, a native of suburban Philadelphia who has dual citizenship with Ireland, was a brave and vital whistle-blower who helped lift the league’s veil of indifference toward coaching misconduct. Farrelly and other players made accusations of sexual, verbal and emotional abuse that led to four N.W.S.L. coaches’ being barred permanently from the league early this year.Pauw was not accused of sexual impropriety, did not coach Farrelly in the league and was not among those barred for life. To return to the N.W.S.L., however, she has been told that she must accept responsibility for her actions. That restriction does not apply to international soccer.For the next few months at least, Pauw, who is Dutch, and Farrelly, who ended her seven-year absence from soccer last month in returning to the N.W.S.L. and made her debut for Ireland on Saturday, are expected to collaborate as Ireland approaches the World Cup this summer in Australia and New Zealand.The United States, a four-time world champion, and Ireland will play a second tuneup match on Tuesday in St. Louis. In a 2-0 defeat to the Americans on Saturday in Austin, Farrelly sought to bring a calming presence while starting in Ireland’s midfield after only two training sessions. Pauw said that she had spoken to Farrelly before she joined the Irish team and had tried to make her feel comfortable. They share a desire to perform on soccer’s grandest stage but also a horrible commonality. Last year, Pauw said that she had been raped by a Dutch soccer official when she was a player and that she had also been sexually assaulted by two other men.For 35 years, she kept the abuse private, Pauw said in a statement last July, allowing the memories “to control my life, to fill me with daily pain and anguish.”In a broad sense, the Pauw-Farrelly union can be viewed as a dispiriting sign of how widespread accusations of impropriety are in women’s soccer.On a personal level, Pauw is trying to restore her reputation, which she believes was unfairly tarnished. And Farrelly is attempting to restart a career, once blooming with promise but prematurely shriveled by what she has described as sexual coercion, emotional manipulation and the shattering of her self-confidence by a former coach, Paul Riley.In September 2021, Farrelly told The Athletic that Riley, one of the top coaches in women’s soccer, had coerced her into a yearslong sexual relationship and once manipulated her into kissing a teammate with the Portland Thorns in front of him in exchange for a less strenuous team practice. The teammate, Mana Shim, confirmed Farrelly’s account and made other similar allegations of misconduct against Riley. He has denied having sex with any players.The revelations pulled back the curtain on systemic abuse in women’s soccer and led to wide-ranging fallout across the N.W.S.L. An investigation headed by Sally Q. Yates, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, described Riley’s misbehavior over the years as an “open secret.”Farrelly said on Saturday that her comeback would not have been possible without the catharsis of telling her story publicly. “That healing and liberation from that had to occur before I could ever play again,” she said.She has described her return to soccer as one day at a time. Farrelly said she has been asking well-wishers, “Will you still love me if I totally mess this up?”“Because that’s my biggest fear,” she told a small group of reporters. “I don’t want to go out there and fail and make mistakes. That’s just how my brain works.”Instead, she said, she was “really trying to take people’s support and not twist it into pressure.” She wants to be grateful for the experience of attempting to make a World Cup team. “I play my best when I’m having fun. I just need to bring it back to that every time.”Farrelly playing against the United States on Saturday.Dustin Safranek/USA Today Sports Via Reuters ConFarrelly announced her retirement in 2016, the result of injuries both psychic and physical, including those sustained in a 2015 car accident. But she returned to the N.W.S.L last month and signed with Gotham F.C., saying in a statement that she wanted to be a dependable player while “also having grace and compassion with myself” and hoped to “inspire others to follow their dreams, no matter how far out of reach they may seem.”Pauw’s return to the N.W.S.L. remains uncertain. Last December, in the report organized by the league and its players’ union, Pauw was accused of shaming Houston players in 2018 about their weight and attempting to “exert excessive control over their eating habits,” including discouraging the eating of fruit because of its sugar content, “with no apparent correlation to performance or health.”She was also accused of exerting control over players’ personal lives while living in the same apartment complex. The accusations included knocking on a player’s door at night and inviting herself inside; favoring some players by inviting them over for coffee and biscuits; restricting players from using the pool during the afternoon; and discouraging them from lifting weights in the belief that it would make them too “bulky.”Pauw vigorously defended herself at Friday’s news conference.“If there’s one thing that I don’t do, it is body shaming,” she said. “There is no scale in my dressing room, there’s no fat percentages taken.”“What is the standard?” Pauw said plaintively. “Can you not educate players in getting the best out of themselves with something that is technically just coaching?”No one would have complained if she were a male coach, Pauw said.“As a female coach, you’re not safe in your coaching,” she said. “You’re not safe to do your job. There’s double standards here.”The World Cup begins in three months. Farrelly and Pauw are looking ahead, seeking repair and renewal.Pauw said that Farrelly “trusts me; she trusts the truth.”Farrelly appears more wary. She said she was cautious about playing for a coach accused of abuse, even if it was not sexual wrongdoing.“I think it’s just going to be time for us to build trust and stuff like that,” Farrelly said. She took a risk, a leap of faith, she said, hoping the Irish national team would be a healthy environment for her. “It’s an ongoing thing, I think.” More

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      Benfica, Enzo Fernández and a Champions League Question: What If?

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      The Portuguese giant knew selling Enzo Fernández would make it harder to win Europe’s richest prize. But cashing out early is a story the club knows well.On the night Enzo Fernández left Benfica, nobody mentioned his name. As they gathered in the changing room before their game on the last day of January, his soon-to-be-former teammates would have known roughly what was happening. The club was settling the finer points of Fernández’s $130 million transfer to Chelsea. The player was awaiting permission to fly to London.The silence, though, was not rooted in discomfort. Fernández’s absence did not weigh especially heavy on Benfica’s squad. They were not fretting about how they would cope without him, or lamenting the loss of a core part of their team and a starlet regarded as one of the finest midfield prospects of his generation.Their coach, Roger Schmidt, did not feel the need to take his players aside to discuss it with them, or to address it in his pregame talk. The 56-year-old Schmidt has always hewed to the legendary German coach Sepp Herberger’s rather gnomic adage: Der ball ist rund.Schmidt does not worry about what might lurk behind a silver lining. A crisis is just an opportunity in disguise. One player goes, another takes their place. The ball keeps rolling.Benfica’s players, of course, are used to it by now. No club has mastered the buy low, sell high dynamics of soccer’s transfer market quite like Benfica. Increasingly, in recent years, it has been held up as a paradigm of how a club outside the opulent halls of the game’s cash-soaked elite ought to be run.Across the Tagus River from Lisbon at Seixal, the club has built an academy that is the envy of Europe. On the sprawling, modern campus, Benfica has tapped an apparently bottomless seam of prodigies: Renato Sanches, Bernardo Silva, João Cancelo, Rúben Dias and João Félix all trace their rise to their early days at this cradle of greatness.And what the club cannot grow, it has shown a remarkable aptitude for obtaining. Benfica has established itself as a first port of call in Europe for players emerging from South America, in particular, serving as a showroom and a springboard for the likes of Ángel Di María, David Luiz, Éderson, Darwin Núñez and, of course, Fernández himself.Each has been plucked from comparative obscurity at competitive prices and later sent on their way to superstardom for a king’s ransom. Since the turn of the century, Benfica has made somewhere in the region of $1.5 billion from player sales. Since 2019 alone, the year it sold not just Félix but also the Mexican striker Raúl Jiménez and the Serbian forward Luka Jovic, it has brought in $575 million.That is a source of considerable pride inside the club. As a sports team, Benfica cherishes each of those alumni, especially those who started out at Seixal, basking just a little in their reflected glory. As a business, the club has set its target on ranking as “the first club in terms of total revenue outside of the big five leagues,” Benfica’s chief executive, Domingos Soares de Oliveira, said.Carl Recine/ReutersPeter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockFormer Benfica players in the Champions League this season include Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson, top left, Liverpool striker Darwin Núñez, above right, and Chelsea’s Enzo Fernández and João Félix.Hannah Mckay/ReutersAll of its achievements, though, are tinged with just a little regret.“Of course we do not like to do it,” Soares de Oliveira said. “The main purpose of a club is to win. Everything we do is to win, to meet the expectations of our members. If we had kept Dias, Cancelo, Félix, Enzo — we could have an ambition to win anything on an international level.”It is not that Benfica has not won, either, even as it has transformed itself into European soccer’s most prolific and most profitable trading post. The last decade alone has brought five more Portuguese titles — more than F.C. Porto and Sporting Lisbon, the club’s two greatest domestic rivals — and it has long been a fixture of the group stages of the Champions League. More recently, it has started to make inroads into the knockout phase.It is just that, if the economics of the game were less brutal, Benfica might have won so much more. This season provides a case in point. With Barcelona, Liverpool and Paris St.-Germain eliminated, there is a freshness to the Champions League for the first time in years.Benfica, once again, has made the quarterfinals. This time, though, it can see a comparatively clear path to glory. It faces Inter Milan over the next two weeks. Survive that and another Italian side — Napoli or A.C. Milan — will be all that separates Benfica from an eighth European Cup final, its first since 1990.That prospect would seem significantly closer if Schmidt was still able to call upon Fernández, a player plucked from the Argentine club River Plate for an initial $12 million last summer. Fernández had only made 29 appearances for the Portuguese team when he left for the World Cup in November. He came back from Qatar as one of the most coveted players on the planet.Benfica said it had little choice but to let Fernández walk away after his star turn at the World Cup sent his price soaring past $100 million.Bernadett Szabo/ReutersBenfica did not want to sell him in January. It did not “need” to sell him, either, according to Soares de Oliveira. The money from the sale of Nuñez to Liverpool last summer had bought Benfica some time. “I told Chelsea that,” he said. The club had hoped to hold on to Fernández for another six months, at least.At that point, though, the “will of the player is relevant,” Soares de Oliveira said. And Fernández wanted the move.“The Premier League generates so much money,” he said. “The salaries are several times higher. It makes it very difficult to retain a player.” Benfica, he said, has no interest in keeping hold of those who no longer wish to represent the club.The scale of the deal provided something of a solace, of course. Though Benfica had to pay a considerable fee to River Plate, thanks to a sell-on clause inserted into Fernández’s original contract, it still made something in the region of $70 million in profit in the Chelsea deal. It is yet another feather in the club’s cap. But that is not, really, the metric by which Benfica wants to be judged.“It is not about trading players or profit,” Soares de Oliveira said. “We would prefer to have the player six months later than have to sell him. But we cannot say no.”All it can do, instead, is chart a steady course through the churn. Schmidt has tried to be as phlegmatic as he can about the whole thing. He encouraged some players to use Fernández’s departure as a launchpad: The deal came too late in January for Benfica to source a replacement, so someone had to step up and take his place.So far, that honor has fallen to Chiquinho, a 27-year-old who has spent the last year or so out on loan. He was part of the team that helped Benfica navigate smoothly past Club Bruges in the round of 16 of the Champions League. He will, most likely, be present as it attempts to pick its way past Inter, and into the semifinals, to the foothills of the improbable.That is how it has to be, at Benfica. The ball keeps rolling. The club is used to players leaving. It tries not to let departures sidetrack them from all that it wants to achieve. But occasionally, Benfica wonders, too, if it might be a little better if it did not have to be this way.Tariq Panja contributed reporting from London. More

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      Notts County Rewrites the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Story

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      Notts County is having one of the most remarkable seasons in its long history. It might even win the league. But you don’t get to star in someone else’s drama.NOTTINGHAM, England — The irony of it all, really, is that Notts County would make a terrific subject for a documentary.The elevator pitch is simple. After more than a decade of financial strife and rolling existential crises — featuring both a convicted fraudster and fictional Gulf investment — the oldest professional soccer club in the world puts together a record-shattering campaign, one that promises to restore the team to something close to its former glory.The casting is rich and compelling. There is a fallen Premier League prodigy searching for a home, a virtuoso Portuguese playmaker who has never seen an opponent he cannot nutmeg, and a 26-year-old striker experiencing such an absurd hot streak that he was, at one point, being compared to Erling Haaland. Tasked with shaping them into a team is a manager whose adventurous, accomplished approach is still just a little unorthodox in the mud-spattered lower reaches of English professional soccer. But the results are spectacular.In a division that is competitive to the point of arbitrary, the team loses only twice all season. It has scored more than 100 goals, and it’s on course to break the league’s points record with four games left. It might yet win the title. Plenty of shows have been commissioned on less.That is the story of Notts County’s season, but that does not mean it is the story that will be told. Millions of viewers will, in all likelihood, come to think of the club as an antagonist: an obstacle to be overcome, a threat to be parried, a challenge to be met. And that means one of the most remarkable campaigns in Notts County’s long and occasionally illustrious history will be relegated to a supporting role in someone else’s story.Notts County will enter Monday’s game tied with Wrexham on points. But only one of them can win the league.Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo Teams, One NarrativeA few weeks ago, the producers of “Welcome to Wrexham” — the FX documentary following the takeover and attempted revival of the Welsh town’s forlorn soccer team by the actors and entrepreneurs Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — made contact with executives at Notts County. Out of courtesy, they said, they wanted to establish how much the club wanted to feature in the show’s second season.It is hard to see how Notts County will not play a prominent role. For months, it and Wrexham have been locked in a breathless race to escape the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer. There is only one automatic promotion slot available — bringing with it a guaranteed return to the ranks of the Football League — and neither side has blinked in its pursuit of it.The pace has been eye-watering. Both are expected to end the season with more points than the division has ever seen. Their nearest rival is 25 points adrift. Each has fed off the other’s refusal to wilt. “We’ve been pushing each other,” said Connell Rawlinson, the Notts County captain. (He was born in Wrexham, and still lives close by: add that to the list of subplots.) “If Wrexham didn’t have us and we didn’t have them, would either of us be as good as we are?”Strictly speaking, Wrexham has long had the edge. Its squad is deeper, and more expensive. It has an extra game to play, as well as the home-field advantage when it meets Notts County on Monday evening, a match with the air of a ready-made season finale.In public, Notts County’s manager, Luke Williams, has done what he can to prepare the club — the fans, the executives, his players — for disappointment. “It’s not that we’re not clear,” he said after watching his side pick apart yet another opponent in late March. “It’s that we’re not even close. We need a two-loss swing.” One of those defeats duly arrived on Friday — Wrexham lost at Halifax — but it still held that crucial game in hand.In private, Williams acknowledges that the prospect of being forced to go through the National League’s somewhat arcane and distinctly treacherous playoff system in search of a second chance at promotion “haunts” him. “I haven’t slept since Christmas,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNotts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional soccer club in the world. Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe players have reacted slightly differently. “I’d rather be part of doing something like this, having that pressure and that stress, than sitting in mid-table with nothing to compete for,” Rawlinson said. “I’m sure the Wrexham team and the fans are enjoying it, too.” He paused, at that point, and thought about the truth of that statement. “Well, maybe not the fans, so much.”That graciousness is fairly typical of relations between the clubs. Given the intensity of their title race — and the stakes involved — it might be expected for a sporting rivalry to metastasize into an outright hostility, particularly given the advantages at Wrexham’s disposal.It is the Welsh club, after all, that can call on TikTok and Expedia as sponsors, and McElhenney, Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, as regular guests. Notts County’s stardust extends no further than the singer Jake Bugg, born in Nottingham, who sponsors the club’s away jerseys.That financial primacy has a real-world impact. When Wrexham was short of a goalkeeper, it coaxed Ben Foster, a former England international, out of retirement. Notts County had to recall a 19-year-old from a loan at a club two divisions below.For the most part, though, there is no sense of outrage or oppression. Instead, Rawlinson, said, there is a recognition that both teams are “steeped in history, and that neither club should be where they are.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” he said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”There will be far more, though, who encounter them not as contemporaneous sporting events but as something else: a small part of a broader narrative, one that is packaged and polished and consumed on a delay of several months, once the conclusion is known.“I was coming out of a game a few weeks ago, when we’d just got to 97 points,” said Tom Wagstaff, a founder of the Notts County Talk YouTube channel. “As annoying as it is that we’re not clear at the top, it is incredible to be involved in something like this. I genuinely think it’s the best title race the league has ever seen. But I don’t know if that is how it will be perceived.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” Notts County’s captain said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesEnd GameThe framing, after all, is not in Notts County’s hands. The act of making television, after all, involves not simply telling a story but choosing which aspects of that story should be accentuated. Documentaries necessarily have a perspective. And that perspective changes the way a story is not only told, but understood.Nobody in Nottingham is particularly worried that “Welcome to Wrexham” will cast Notts County as the bad guys, the villains of the story of this season. Nobody at the club seems especially offended at the idea that the show might present the team backed by Hollywood money as in some way “plucky.”But they know that, however the season ends, far more people will watch the documentary than follow the National League in real time. For those viewers, Notts County’s story will not be a stand-alone achievement, a thing that happened in its own right and with its own meaning, but rather something that exists solely as it pertains to its effect on Wrexham. Its meaning will be contorted and confused and to some extent lost. It will not be consumed as sport at all, not really. It will just be part of the plot.In that, perhaps, there is a solace. “Really, we’ve done them a favor,” said George Vizard, Wagstaff’s co-presenter on YouTube. “If it wasn’t for us, they’d have won it weeks ago. And for the show, it must be better to win it like this than it would be if they had won it at a canter.” The story will, in the end, be about Wrexham. But it will be thanks to Notts County that there is now a much better story to tell. More