Soccer

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Soccer

      Real Madrid Sends Chelsea Out of Champions League

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      The Best Time to Fix Soccer Is Right Now

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

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

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Soccer

      Notts County Rewrites the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Story

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      U.S. Women Win a World Cup Soccer Tuneup but Lose a Top Scorer

      by

      Mallory Swanson was carted off with a knee injury during a 2-0 victory over Ireland. She is considered key to the United States’ hopes of winning a third consecutive World Cup championship.AUSTIN, Texas — The United States defeated Ireland 2-0 on Saturday in a tuneup for the Women’s World Cup but lost its top scorer this year when forward Mallory Swanson went down with what appeared to be a serious injury to her left knee late in the first half.In the 40th minute, Swanson, 24, took a pass on the left wing, turned upfield and was challenged by the Irish defender Aoife Mannion. No foul was called, but Swanson fell, crying in pain and grabbing the back of her left knee. Several teammates consoled her.She was placed on a stretcher with her knee immobilized and made a heart sign with her hands while being carted off the field. She was taken to a hospital, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Soccer Federation.If Swanson does not recover in time for the World Cup tournament, which is slated to be played in Australia and New Zealand from July 20 to Aug. 20, it could deal a heavy blow to the United States’ hopes of winning a third consecutive world championship.“We don’t know the extent of the injury yet,” Coach Vlatko Andonovski said after the match. “I’m hoping for good news in the near future.”As Swanson left the stadium, Andonovski said she told him with a smile, “Coach, I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good.”Andonovski said he replied, “You’re stronger than me.”In the 24th minute, Mannion had nudged Swanson into Ireland’s goalkeeper, and Swanson remained down for several minutes before resuming play. But this time, she did not get up and was replaced by Trinity Rodman.Swanson had already scored seven goals in five games this calendar year, and in six consecutive games overall. She had been ascendant after being left off the United States team for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, an omission she called crushing. She acknowledged that she fell adrift for a time.The Americans historically have been resourceful in replacing injured players. The star forward Abby Wambach broke the tibia and fibula in her left leg before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but the United States won the gold medal without her.The first goal of Saturday’s match was scored in the 37th minute by defender Emily Fox, who drove a low shot inside the left post from outside the penalty area. It was her first goal in 28 appearances for the national team. In the 80th minute, midfielder Lindsey Horan extended the United States’ lead to 2-0 on a penalty kick.Julie Ertz of the United States, left, returned to the field on Saturday after giving birth to a son last August. Eric Gay/Associated PressIn the 68th minute, midfielder Julie Ertz entered the match, making her first appearance for the United States since the Tokyo Olympics after giving birth to a son last August. Four minutes later, she drew a yellow card. If Ertz regains full fitness, she would provide much needed grit in the defensive midfield.The United States and Ireland will play again on Tuesday in St. Louis, the last American match before its 23-player World Cup roster is announced. The United States will face Vietnam, the Netherlands and Portugal in group play in the tournament. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Soccer

      Lionel Messi, Barcelona and Limited Options

      by

      The chase for a transcendent star in the twilight of his career requires a new term: GOATwashing.The choices facing Lionel Messi are these. He can sign on for another year, maybe two, locked in what seems to be a loveless but lucrative marriage of convenience with Paris St.-Germain. The downside is that he must endure the occasional indignity of hearing his name whistled and jeered and taken in vain. The upside is the chance to continue to play in — but if we are honest, not win — the Champions League.Option two: He could take the easy route, the smooth and seamless path that leads straight to the golden sunset. Al Hilal would very much like to pay him an eye-watering sum of money to turn the Saudi Premier League, in effect, into his and Cristiano Ronaldo’s very own Las Vegas residency. Cons: He would have to bid farewell to the (European) Champions League. Pros: $400 million a year.A third path, to Major League Soccer — and more specifically, Inter Miami — can provide all of the same drawbacks and none of the same benefits. He would not earn nearly so much. He would still be absent from the club tournament he cherishes the most. He would have to be coached by Phil Neville. The pull of Miami, the lure of the United States and the prospect of the 2026 World Cup are appealing, but they may not be appealing enough.All of which, of course, leaves the road down which Messi’s heart would surely guide him. He never really wanted to leave Barcelona. He certainly did not want to leave the way he did, rushed out of the door by stark economic reality. Messi had spent his career deciding his own fate, only to have the nature of the end of it decided for him.Lionel Messi in 2021, on the day he left Barcelona.Andreu Dalmau/EPA, via ShutterstockThe sense of unfinished business is mutual. “I have a thorn in my side that Leo could not stay at our club,” Rafa Yuste, Barcelona’s vice president, said last week. He wished, he said, that “all of the conditions could come together so that this mutual love story ends with Messi at Barça. When you are in love and you separate from someone, you always want to stay in love.”As overblown as that might sound, it would be churlish to dispute Yuste’s sincerity. Barcelona almost certainly sees some sort of sporting logic in bringing back Messi, of course. Correctly or not, the club genuinely believes that success is more likely with him than without: both directly, as a result of his performances, and indirectly, thanks to the boost to the brand that his presence would provide.But that does not mean the romantic impulse is not genuine. Barcelona has come to see Messi as a Platonic ideal of its principles, the ones he was reared in from his days as a shy, homesick teenager at La Masia. Through its own colossal mismanagement, the club to which he devoted his career was not able to give Messi the goodbye it wanted or he deserved. It feels a duty to right the wrong.It would be naïve, though, to believe that is the only motivation. Barcelona’s apparent fixation on the return of its king is powered by a swirl of emotions. Affection might be one of them, but so too is nostalgia, in its purest sense, an attachment not to who Messi is but to what he represents.Everything about the modern Barcelona screams that it has become a place obsessed by and addicted to reclaiming a past that still feels achingly real, overwhelmingly present. It is a club that could convincingly claim to be the biggest in the world barely a moment ago, the home of the finest side in history, and it is a club that continues to rage against its loss of status.So much of what Barcelona has done in recent years has been inspired by a refusal to acknowledge the ticking of the clock, the changing of the seasons. The pursuit of the European Super League, the appointment of Xavi Hernández as manager, the mortgaging of its own future for immediate glory: This is the desperate, thrashing reflex of a club that assumed its primacy was the natural order of things, and does not understand why the world has been allowed to change. Restoring Messi to azulgrana would offer the opioid comfort of a step back in time.Barcelona’s image of itself as a great club never wavers.Nacho Doce/ReutersAnd then, rather more tangibly, there is political necessity, the projection of power. Barcelona is not owned by an individual; it is a members’ organization, one that functions, at least in theory, as a democracy. Joan Laporta, the club’s current president, will soon enough have to seek another mandate from the team’s 143,000 socios.Currently, he would have to stand for re-election as the president who lost Messi. He would much prefer, one would think, to be able to claim to be the man who returned him to where he belonged.After all, possessing Messi is more than having arguably the greatest player of all time in your ranks. His move to P.S.G., two years ago, proved that he is as much symbol as star. Messi represents relevance and importance, glamour and appeal. He would be a sign that the lean days had come to an end, of Barcelona’s resurgent virility.Most urgent of all, though, is the reputational benefit, not to Laporta as a president but to Barcelona as a club. Once as pristine a sporting brand as could be imagined, the sort of team that considered its jerseys so sacrosanct that it refused to despoil them with a sponsor, Barcelona has been wracked by scandal for years.The Super League was — and is, given its ongoing refusal to abandon the project — a bad look. The allegations that the club’s former administration hired a public relations company to boost its own reputation and to tarnish a number of players, executives and critics were not much better.Neither, though, was nearly as damaging as the charge, currently under investigation by both the Spanish judicial authorities and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, that the club paid a former vice president of Spain’s refereeing committee some $7.6 million over the course of 17 years.Rival fans now regularly shower Barcelona with fake money bearing the image of the club’s president, Joan Laporta.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressBarcelona, of course, has insisted it has done nothing wrong: The club has suggested the stipend it is accused of paying the official, José María Enriquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018 was for perfectly ordinary “technical reports into refereeing.” It is, the club has intimated, the sort of thing everybody does. There is, we have been told, nothing to see here.That line has not been universally accepted. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has described the allegations as the “worst reputational crisis” Spanish soccer has ever seen. (Barcelona responded by calling on Tebas to resign.) Aleksander Ceferin, the president of UEFA, has called it “one of the most serious situations” he has seen in soccer. Regardless of any potential sporting penalty, the reputational blowback — should Barcelona’s staunch defense not hold — would be indelible.It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence that Barcelona’s pursuit of Messi has become extremely public in that context. It is not just nation states, after all, that are in the business of using the game’s brightest stars to rehabilitate their reputations, to draw the eyes of the audience, to cast the unpalatable and the unpleasant firmly in deep shadow. Mere soccer teams can do it, too.Barcelona’s love for Messi is deep and it is sincere. But its need for him — as a symbol of power, as a reminder of what it once was, as a source of quick and easy dopamine, as a way of drawing the eye away from what it would rather you did not see — is greater still.He has four choices in front of him. They are, at heart, all the same. Barcelona wants to use him to clean its image just as surely as P.S.G. wants to use him to prove its primacy and Al Hilal wants to use him to burnish a nation’s reputation and Inter Miami wants to use him to grow a league. There is no romance at the heart of any them, none at all. It is business, just business, and nothing more.Cold, Brutal and Entirely IrresistibleAntonio Conte talked himself out of a job at Tottenham.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersGary O’Neil’s career as a Premier League manager began, unexpectedly, late last August. His predecessor at Bournemouth, Scott Parker, had talked himself out of a job a few days earlier, using the occasion of a 9-0 defeat at Liverpool to explain, in great detail, exactly how little chance the club had of avoiding relegation.O’Neil was supposed to be what is now, by convention, called not a caretaker or a place-holder manager but an “interim,” a coach who will be replaced by a safer pair of hands as soon as one could be identified. But he did well, avoiding defeat in his first six games and slowly helping the team acclimatize to the Premier League. Quietly, perhaps a little reluctantly, Bournemouth made his appointment permanent during the World Cup.Gary O’Neil is now the 10th longest-serving manager in the Premier League.There was a point, not so long ago, when it seemed English soccer had finally learned the benefits of patience. Clubs seemed to have internalized the idea that reflexively firing a coach at the first sign of trouble was not ideal from a long-term planning perspective. Just as significant, they were putting more thought into their appointments in the first place.That particular dam broke in the last two weeks of March. Crystal Palace firing Patrick Vieira, on the back of almost three months without a win, proved the decisive fissure. Between then and now, three more managers have gone. Leicester, now at grave risk of relegation, fired Brendan Rodgers. Antonio Conte committed dismissal-by-press-conference to get himself out of Tottenham. And, of course, Graham Potter met his inevitable, if accelerated, demise at Chelsea.None of those decisions were especially flagrant examples of the caprice of Premier League owners, of course, but the failures of both Conte and Potter probably say more about the people who appointed them than they do about the coaches themselves.Conte was handed a squad in need of a rebuild and tasked with winning immediately. Potter was placed in charge of a squad so large that the changing room at the training ground reportedly could not accommodate it — several players had to change on chairs brought in from elsewhere — and told to fashion a cogent team in only a few months.The ability to choose the right job, of course, is an invaluable part of the armory of any elite coach; Potter, still in the early stages of his career, will doubtless heed that lesson when he selects his next opportunity. But his failure at Chelsea, like that of Conte at Tottenham, is not solely his fault. He should not be allowed to become a scapegoat for those who made it impossible for him to succeed in the first place.After all, they are still in place. They are in charge, in fact, of choosing a replacement, with precious little evidence so far that they should be trusted to make the right selection.It’s HomeAndy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockEngland got a boost of confidence in its biggest game before this year’s World Cup by beating Brazil, 4-2 on penalties after a 1-1 tie, on Thursday in a meeting of the European and South American champions at Wembley. The victory, like England’s triumph in last year’s European Championship final in the same stadium, was delivered off the foot of Chloe Kelly.CorrespondenceA lingering sense of guilt has been gnawing at me for the best part of a week. On Sunday, you see, I arrived in Naples, eagerly anticipating seeing Napoli — you will have noted my enthusiasm for Napoli over the past few months — take another step toward a first Serie A title in more than 30 years by coolly dispatching A.C. Milan on home turf.It did not quite work out like that. Milan picked Napoli apart, strolling to a 4-0 win against a team that, for the first time this season, looked bereft of both purpose and poise. And, on some level, it felt as if it were my fault. This is a superstitious place, after all. Maybe I had tempted fate. Maybe I had invoked hubris.At times like these, it is important to remember that correlation is not causation. Which brings us, rather neatly, to Deborah Chuk’s email. Last week’s analysis of Liverpool’s assorted problems, she felt, missed out arguably the most significant. “Why does nobody mention the sale of Sadio Mané?” she wrote. “This was the glue that held the team together. They needed him badly.”This argument — that the star of the show was Mané, not Mohamed Salah, all along — is not an uncommon one, nor is it unreasonable. Mané was, for years, a stellar performer for Liverpool. He did not, at times, get the credit he deserved. His departure and Liverpool’s demise do, without question, overlap perfectly.And yet I’m not convinced. Mané’s form in his last couple of years in England had been patchy: spells in which he was as devastating as ever, and stretches in which he seemed a little faded. It felt like the right time to move him on. More relevant, I suspect, is that none of the players signed to replace him have had anything like his impact.James Spink, too, wanted to discuss something of a leitmotif. “Chelsea’s women’s side is coached by a remarkably gifted manager who knows the game, is articulate and honest and a great ‘man manager.’ Wouldn’t it be interesting if an owner had the guts to hire Emma Hayes to shatter that glass ceiling?”This one has a short answer: yes. It would, in fact, not just be interesting but wholly warranted. It won’t happen, though. Not when there are candidates with the glowing résumés of … Frank Lampard who can be hired instead. More