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      Gerard Piqué’s Kings League Has Seen Soccer’s Future

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      Gerard Piqué has always been an ideas guy. He has, at various times, had ideas about industries as disconnected as isotonic sports drinks and international tennis tournaments. He has invested in the sunglasses business and the cellphone video game industry. He has dabbled in media rights and soccer team ownership and organic burgers.For a long time, Piqué did all of that while also being one of the standout soccer players of his generation, a cornerstone on a series of Barcelona squads that harvested glory in industrial quantities and a key component on a Spanish national team that won a World Cup and a European Championship. Excelling at soccer, though, was never enough.“One of the first things he said to me was that he had finished training by 12,” said Nicolas Julia, the founder of the digital sports platform Sorare. “Some of his teammates liked to play video games. Some were happy hanging out with their families. He loved to go to the office and build something.”He was driven to do so, those who have worked with him say, because he knew that soccer would not last forever. “I think he saw a lot of his teammates retire and have nothing to do,” said Javier Alonso, a former colleague. “They were only 35 but had no real life except eating in nice restaurants and playing padel. He did not want that.”Piqué played his last game for Barcelona in November.Albert Gea/ReutersPiqué was well suited to his side hustle. He is not, by all accounts, much given to sleep. He is a natural networker, a frequent and instinctive schmoozer. His decade-long relationship with the pop singer Shakira gave him a profile outside sports. He has a mind one associate described with the Spanish word “inquieto”: restless, curious, perhaps just a touch easily distracted. He is far more flexible than might be expected of someone so famous, Alonso said, adding, “He is happy to listen to experts.”Indeed, Piqué found his side career so rewarding that late last year he decided to bring it front and center. A couple of weeks before the start of the World Cup, he declared Barcelona’s next game would be his last. Business had “never been an afterthought for him,” Julia said. Now, he wanted to go all in.Rather than fit his work around his training schedule, Piqué now devotes much of his time to Kosmos, the investment vehicle he established in 2018 with the help of capital from Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, a former Barcelona shirt sponsor.He had used it to invest in areas “he understands the most,” as Julia put it, usually at the intersection of sports and technology. There was a production arm, focused largely on sports documentaries, and an athlete management wing. He had set up an e-sports team and taken over the running of F.C. Andorra, a minor league soccer club in Spain.There have been successes: Sorare has grown exponentially since his investment; F.C. Andorra has been promoted to Spain’s second tier for the first time; and Koi, his e-sports franchise, has become a major player.Piqué, center, and the Kosmos chief executive, Oriol Querol, left, drew up the basics of the Kings League over a single lunch appointment.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHis two biggest plays, though, have been wreathed in controversy. In 2020, Kosmos helped arrange a deal to stage the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia. When it emerged that Piqué, then an active player, had reportedly received a $25.9 million commission, both he and the Spanish soccer federation had to insist there was nothing illegal about the arrangement.Then, this year, the International Tennis Federation prematurely ended his most valuable, high-profile project: a $3 billion, 25-year deal with Kosmos, signed in 2018, to turn the Davis Cup into a World Cup-style event. Both sides have subsequently threatened to sue the other.Those setbacks, though, have not discouraged Piqué. As Alonso, a former chief executive of the company, once said of Kosmos: “What we do here is Gerard dreams, and we try to make those dreams a reality.” His latest dream is an ambitious one. Piqué wants to take the game that made him a star, and make it better.Waning AttentionThe future of soccer appeared to Piqué while he was on his way to lunch. Not so much the fine details: the dodgeball-style kickoffs, the secret weapons and the guest stars disguised by lucha libre masks all came later. But by the time he had finished his 15-minute walk from his office in Barcelona to the restaurant, the big picture was clear in his mind.Soccer’s central problem, as Piqué diagnosed it, was this: For an audience raised on a diet of bite-size content and guided by the instant satisfaction algorithms of YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, 90 minutes is actually quite a long time.The traditional soccer game, he decided, contains far too many opportunities for eyes to wander: throw-ins, say, or teams getting their marking schemes right during corners. Younger viewers, Piqué was convinced, would not stand for that. The sport he had always loved would have to adapt.Piqué and his partners reimagined everything from kickoffs to penalty shootouts when they created the Kings League. But they’re open to changing the rules at any time. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHow? He and Oriol Querol, the chief executive of Kosmos, spitballed ideas on their lunchtime stroll. Soccer should be shorter, for one. It had to minimize the natural pauses, or find a way to fill them. It had to copy and adopt the rhythms and features of video games and streaming and reality television to meet the viewers in their natural habitat.By the time Piqué and Querol arrived for lunch, they had the outline of an idea. Within a few months, it would have a form: the Kings League, a seven-a-side competition staged in an indoor arena in Barcelona. Its dozen teams are largely made up of former players, and owned and run by some of the country’s most prominent streamers.By the metrics Piqué, Querol and their colleagues care about, it has been an overwhelming success. It accrued some 238 million views on TikTok in January — more, Querol pointed out, than all of Europe’s traditional leagues combined. More than two million people watched some or all of a single round of games at the end of February on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube.Ronaldinho, the former Brazil and Barcelona forward, was one of several high-profile pros who lent their star power to the Kings League.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockRonaldinho played for Porcinos, the team owned by the streamer Ibai Llanos. His live commentary only brought more attention to the league.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesIts Final Four-style playoffs, held on March 26, took place in the considerably grander surrounds of Camp Nou, the stadium where Piqué spent 14 years as a cornerstone of an all-conquering Barcelona team. The steep stands were packed with 92,000 ticket-buying fans.That popularity has not been universally welcomed. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has been the most prominent, outspoken critic. The Kings League, he has said, is not a serious rival to his competition. It is just a “circus,” he contends, filled with “streamers dressed up like clowns.”Piqué has been unmoved. The traditional “product of soccer is outdated,” he said in response to Tebas. It is in desperate need of “more stimulating rules” to attract and engage a new generation of fans. He knew as he went to lunch that soccer had to change. The Kings League is his attempt to change it.EnigmaAt the turn of the year, a few months after their relationship ended, Shakira released a song that contained a number of extremely thinly veiled critiques of Piqué. The most barbed centered on his apparent infidelity. In one line, the singer accused him of trading “a Ferrari for a Twingo.”A couple of days after the song came out, with his nascent competition still aggravating all the right people, Piqué duly turned up at the league’s headquarters in Barcelona at the wheel of a tiny white Renault Twingo. As he climbed, a little uneasily, out of the car, he grinned at the handful of photographers waiting for him. His smile betrayed a confidence that his joke would land.Players of the 1K Team, which is owned by a former Spain goalkeeper, Iker Casillas.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe move was typical of the marketing strategy he adopted for the first season of the Kings League. He was not necessarily above turning his personal life into a promotional tool if it might generate interest: In reference to another line in the same song, suggesting he had swapped a “Rolex for a Casio,” he would later claim (sarcastically) that the Japanese watchmaker had come on board as a sponsor.He was happy to stoke controversy, too, even if it acted as an open invitation to the league’s critics. In an early round of games, one team featured a mystery player, clad in a mask to hide his identity and registered only as Enigma. The player was, the Kings League let it be known, currently employed by a team in La Liga. (This was not strictly true.) The infamy was worth it for the intrigue.Those confected dramas might seem to bear out Tebas’s assessment of the Kings League as a circus, one that is not so much a pioneering vision of the future as a veterans’ seven-a-side league garlanded by novelties and promoted with gimmicks.Its evident popularity, though, warrants greater reflection. It has, as the sight of the heaving stands of Camp Nou made clear, found an audience. Much of that can be attributed, of course, to the presence not only of Piqué, Sergio Agüero and Iker Casillas, all of whom serve as team presidents, but also the likes of Ibai Llanos, the Spanish streamer, and Gerard Romero, a wildly popular online soccer journalist.“The streamers were the key,” Querol said. “You can make a case that Ibai is the most famous person in Spain now.”The Kings League is as much a media venture as a soccer one; it favors a “total access” approach in which even referee’s conversations are broadcast.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesViewers who have tuned in to see them, though, have at the very least not been deterred by the “more stimulating rules,” drawn from a wide array of sources, that Piqué and his colleagues believe are vital for soccer to continue to flourish.The concept of a player draft comes directly from American sports. Others are more esoteric: Kings League kickoffs, which feature both teams charging en masse for the ball, are drawn from water polo, and it has revived an approach to penalties last seen in Major League Soccer in the 1990s. (It is telling that one feature inherited from old-school soccer is a postseason transfer market: Piqué and Kosmos have identified that nobody is bored of transfer rumors.)“We took some things from e-sports, too,” said Querol, citing not only the decision to stream everything before, during and after games, but also a “total access” approach in which viewers can hear what referees and players are saying.“Then we took things like each team having a secret weapon in each game, something they can use whenever they think it might have the most impact, whether it is a penalty or an extra player, from video games,” Querol added. “But none of it is static. It’s constant reflection. We change whatever we can change.”Kings League matches are designed to hold the attention of viewers accustomed to the constant stimuli of streaming and gaming.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat process continued through the season. When Querol and his team noticed that games tended to drift at the end of the first half, they started cutting the number of players on the field at that precise moment. Anything, in other words, to keep the audience on its toes, to ensure that something was happening, to stop the eye from drifting and the thumb from scrolling.“It is sport,” Querol said. “It wouldn’t work if the soccer was not of a high standard. That is really important.” But that is not the only consideration. In his view, as in Piqué’s, soccer cannot just be soccer anymore. “The priority,” he said, “has to be the spectacle.”That, perhaps, is the point that all those critics who dismissed the Kings League have missed. It may well be a circus. But Piqué might respond that there is nothing wrong with being a circus. Circuses are popular. They draw a crowd, they hold the gaze, because nobody is ever quite sure what is coming next.Iker Casillas with a young fan. His investment in Pique’s venture shows promise: More than 92,000 fans showed up for the Kings League final. Samuel Aranda for The New York Times More

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      New Zealand’s Soccer Team to Wear Dark Shorts, Citing Period Concerns

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      The women’s soccer team said its players would not wear white shorts at the World Cup this summer, acknowledging the anxiety that some players had expressed about period leaks.For the first time, New Zealand’s women’s soccer team will not have a uniform that includes white shorts, the country’s soccer association announced on Monday, acknowledging concerns that some players have expressed about periods.White shorts have been a persistent concern for athletes who are anxious about period leaks, prompting teams and competitions to review their uniform policies in recent years. The change by New Zealand was made as women’s national soccer teams were preparing for the World Cup, which New Zealand is hosting with Australia this summer.Nike unveiled new team uniforms on Monday for the 13 women’s national teams it partners with, including New Zealand, the United States and England, whose players had asked Nike last year to swap the white shorts from their uniform. The new uniforms for England and most of the other countries Nike partners with do not have white shorts.New Zealand’s women’s national team, the Ford Football Ferns, will instead wear a white shirt with teal shorts as its main uniform and an all-black colorway with a silver fern pattern as its secondary uniform, New Zealand Football said on Monday.The new uniforms will first be used in competition for the team’s exhibition matches against Iceland and Nigeria this month.Hannah Wilkinson, a striker, said in a statement included with the federation’s announcement that the change from white shorts was “fantastic for women with any kind of period anxiety.”“In the end it just helps us focus more on performance and shows a recognition and appreciation of women’s health,” she said.England’s Football Association did not say why it swapped out white shorts for blue ones, but its players had publicly campaigned for a change.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesTeams and competitions, responding to a push by athletes, have increasingly recognized that players want more practical uniforms. White shorts can show period leaks and also are frequently see-through when wet.The All England Club, which hosts the Wimbledon tennis tournament, said in November that it would allow women to wear dark undershorts, a departure from its traditional all-white dress code.In March, Ireland’s women’s rugby team said that its players would wear navy shorts instead of white shorts at the Six Nations Championship, a major international competition.In February, the Orlando Pride of the National Women’s Soccer League said that it was switching from white shorts to black ones for its secondary uniforms so players would be “more comfortable and confident” when playing. The team’s main uniform is purple.“We must remove the stigma involved in discussing the health issues impacting women and menstruating nonbinary and trans athletes if we want to maximize performance and increase accessibility to sport,” the team’s general manager, Haley Carter, said in a statement at the time.Ahead of the World Cup, which runs from July 20 to Aug. 20, this push for change seemed to be reflected in the uniforms Nike unveiled on Monday for its partnering national teams: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, South Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal and the United States.With the exception of Brazil, which retains white shorts for its secondary uniforms, the teams will play in colored shorts. Players on each team also have the option to play in shorts that include a liner designed by Nike to protect against period leaks.The United States women’s team played in all-white uniforms when it won the 2019 World Cup in France. The team has used both dark and white shorts for its home and away uniforms.The team’s two most recent uniforms have had dark shorts for both home and away games because of “Nike’s conscientious efforts,” Aaron Heifetz, a spokesman for the United States women’s national team, said in an email.England’s Football Association did not say why it swapped out white shorts for blue ones, but its players had publicly campaigned for a change.The association said in a statement that it wanted its players “to feel our continued support on this matter” and that their feedback would be taken into consideration.“We have appealed to international tournament organizers to keep this subject in consideration and allow for greater flexibility on kit color combinations,” the association said.During the women’s European Championship last July, the England forward Beth Mead said that the team had asked Nike to change the white shorts.“It is very nice to have an all-white kit,” she said, “but sometimes it’s not practical when it’s the time of the month.” More

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      Chelsea’s Graham Potter Paid Price for Owners’ Spending Spree

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      American owners spent billions to buy the Premier League club and then millions more on players. But as Chelsea sinks in the standings, is the worst still ahead?LONDON — Every week, it seemed, Chelsea officials worked their phones to quiet the whispers that Graham Potter was about to be fired. And every week the news media quickly relayed those reassurances to Chelsea’s fans, even as the defeats mounted, the grumbling grew louder and the team’s plunge down the Premier League table showed little sign of slowing.This Chelsea, its new American owners said in their own private briefings to reporters, was going to be different from the one previously controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch famous for his habit of churning through managers. Now, fans were told, the changes and the investments were for the long term.That was until Sunday. This time, the whispers were true: Potter was out.His exit, after only six months in charge and after the club spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new players for him to coach, was jarring. But it was also just the latest head-spinning announcement from Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the two American financiers who have thrust themselves forward as the frontmen for a soccer project that shows little sign of any overarching plan.And the cost just keeps rising.First, Boehly, Eghbali and their American-led consortium paid a record 2.5 billion pounds (roughly $3.1 billion) to acquire Chelsea, a club that lost about $1 million a week during the nearly two decades it was owned by Abramovich, and committed to spending another $2 billion on the team over the next decade. That shook up the soccer industry overnight, changing the valuations teams set for themselves. Within months, the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool had put their clubs on the market.Then came the new players, first in an initial group of acquisitions last summer and then in another big-ticket wave in January. They arrived in London at a cost of more than 600 million pounds (about $750 million), an extreme outlay that had no previous precedent, and which puzzled — and frustrated — even Chelsea’s most free-spending rivals, since it drove up the asking price for talent around the world and simultaneously made it harder for Premier League clubs to offload players they no longer wanted.But players weren’t the only costs. In between the shopping sprees, and within their first 100 days, the new owners had also dispensed with Thomas Tuchel, the German coach they had inherited, and who brought the club the Champions League title just over a year earlier. To replace him, Chelsea lured not only Potter but also half a dozen members of the coaching staff at his former team Brighton. The cost? About $25 million in buyouts, plus long-term contracts for all involved.Todd Boehly became a fixture at Chelsea as the face of its American-led ownership group.David Cliff/Associated PressIt seemed, in the moment, a shrewd (if pricey) bit of business. At Brighton, Potter, 47, had slowly and deliberately turned a provincial club, a relative newcomer to the Premier League, into a team that now has realistic aspirations to regularly finish in the top half of the table.Yet at Chelsea, the environment has appeared to be anything but deliberate. Now, with Potter gone, no one seems to know the plan for a collection of players — team feels too strong a word — cobbled together with what appears to be little coherence.There’s Marc Cucurella, the wing back brought in from Brighton at great expense but deployed, curiously, as a center back on Saturday; and forward Mykhailo Mudryk, whose experience did not seem to match his nine-figure price; and the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández. There are so many new faces at Chelsea, in fact, that at times the strategy has appeared to be nothing more than a simplistic desire to gather as much of the world’s best young talent as possible, whatever the cost, and find places for them to play later.Even as Chelsea was firing Potter, for example, multiple news media outlets reported that Chelsea was working to sign a 15-year-old prospect from Ecuador, reports the club did not deny.Maybe Potter knows what to do with all the disparate parts? That would at least explain the curious line in the statement about his firing that noted he had “agreed to collaborate with the club” on the transition to whatever comes after him.Graham Potter, whose service and staff cost Chelsea a small fortune, didn’t last a full season.Tony Obrien/ReutersBruno Saltor, one of the coaches who arrived with Potter from Brighton, will get the unenviable task of holding things together temporarily, starting with Tuesday’s visit by Liverpool. It is unclear how long his tenure will be, though, with Chelsea now starting a search for its third coach since the American takeover in May.News media reports have already linked the club with high-profile out-of-work coaches like Julian Nagelsmann, recently fired by Bayern Munich, and Mauricio Pochettino, an Argentine who coached both Southampton and Tottenham. That Boehly and Eghbali will make the right decision, though, is questionable.Chelsea, despite its deep pockets, looks to be a monumental repair job. It was beaten at home by Aston Villa on Saturday in Potter’s last game in charge, a performance that highlighted the effects of the curious squad-building undertaken in the last months. While it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring forwards, none of that cash was dispensed on a recognized scorer. Saturday’s 2-0 defeat — a game in which Chelsea took more than 30 shots yet rarely looked like it could recover from its early deficit — was the fifth goal-less performance by the club since the start of February.Chelsea stands 11th in the Premier League table. A date with Real Madrid looms in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next week. Winning the competition is now Chelsea’s its only realistic chance of playing in it again next season, but that remote possibility suddenly seems vital.Chelsea’s finances, already in disarray because of the cost of the takeover, the new coaches and the new players, could soon come under more serious strain. Failure to qualify for next season’s Champions League would mean the loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That could put the club in violation of the Premier League’s cost control rules, raising the possibility of sanctions — or hurried player sales in a market that will know the team needs to sell quickly to balance its books.Sunday was a dark day for Chelsea’s owners. What’s ahead could be much, much worse. More

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      At Liverpool, Man City Means a Red Alert

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      A rough stretch, starting with Saturday’s game against Manchester City, will define Liverpool’s season. The harder work comes after that.Every year, in December, the BBC devotes an evening of programming to one of Britain’s longest-running broadcasting traditions. The Sports Personality of the Year Award was first presented in 1954; almost seven decades later, it is still going strong, a fixture in the country’s sporting consciousness.In an era when votes are no longer sent by postcard, it is possible to feel there is something a little quaint about the award. The criteria are pleasingly opaque: Last year, England striker Beth Mead beat out the cricket superstar Ben Stokes and Eve Muirhead, the skip of Britain’s Olympic curling team. Quite how their achievements should be compared is unclear.Still, the award’s existence is harmless, even kind of sweet. It is a chance, after all, to give athletes who devote years to their craft a celebration they deserve. More of a problem is the cultural gravity it exerts: In the months before the ceremony, there is a tendency to present any sporting success solely in the light of how it might affect the award’s destination.Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula 1 world championship, or Emma Raducanu the U.S. Open, or a British cyclist the Tour de France: Does this mean they are the favorite to be sports personality of the year? The actual sports themselves are reduced to nothing more than qualifiers.There have been times this season when the race to sign Jude Bellingham has taken on a similar air. The campaigns of the soccer clubs with designs on Bellingham, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, have frequently been treated not as attempts to win trophies or to qualify for the Champions League, but instead as auditions to serve as the 19-year-old’s new home.A few months ago, there would have been little to choose among the three prime contenders. Real Madrid offers glamour, Luka Modric and an enviable supply of Champions League trophies. Manchester City has unrivaled wealth, Pep Guardiola and four Premier League titles in five years. Liverpool had Jürgen Klopp and the memory of Steven Gerrard and had picked up every major honor available since 2019.Jürgen Klopp’s wry smile is easier to spot in the stands than on his face these days.Carl Recine/ReutersThis season, though, has changed the terms of the equation considerably. Real Madrid and Man City have continued to sail as smoothly as ever, of course, but Liverpool has collapsed. Klopp’s team has lost more Premier League games this season than in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22 combined. It has won only three times away from home.It left the Champions League with a whimper against Real Madrid, and its hopes of returning to the competition at all are diminishing. Liverpool currently sits sixth, seven points adrift of Tottenham in the final qualifying slot. The good news is that the next week brings three games to try to reduce that gap. The bad news? They are against City, Chelsea and Arsenal.A variety of factors have been identified as contributing to Liverpool’s rapid, unforeseen decline — fatigue, injury, predictability, the remorseless march of time — but the way it has manifested defies simple diagnosis.It has made a good sound bite to point the finger at the defense, or the midfield, or for some reason just at Trent Alexander-Arnold, but the truth is that the system that led Liverpool to three Champions League finals in five years, as well as its first Premier League crown in three decades, was complex, interwoven.When one aspect of the team sneezes, the rest of it catches cold: Liverpool’s defense looks vulnerable because its midfield has stopped functioning. But its midfield is suffering because the attack is not pressing as effectively. Just as it once worked in flowing concert, Klopp’s team has ground to a halt in unison, and whatever he has tried in an attempt to jump-start it has failed.The difference-maker: Jude Bellingham.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe solution, to many, is apparent. Liverpool has spent much of the season being told that it needs to overhaul its squad. Most urgently, it needs to reinforce its aging midfield. To that end, it is monitoring Mason Mount’s contract talks with Chelsea. The club also has a longstanding interest in Matheus Nunes, the Wolves and Portugal player.Universally, though, it is common consensus that the key is Bellingham. Liverpool’s need to win the race for his transfer, likely to cost in excess of $130 million, has increased in inverse proportion to its chances of doing so.This is, in truth, an oversimplification. Partly, that is because the idea that teams can be “rebuilt” in short order is a myth. Neither Alex Ferguson nor Arsène Wenger, the only two coaches in recent English history to be credited with fashioning more than one great team, changed everything overnight. They committed to evolution, not revolution. Whatever form the new Liverpool takes, Klopp’s repurposed team will most likely include seven or eight players who are already at Anfield.But more significant is that just as Liverpool’s entropy cannot be traced to a single isolated factor, nor can it be addressed by signing one player or strengthening one area of the squad.Under Klopp’s aegis, the club has been able to outmuscle the bulk of its rivals — including those, like Chelsea and Manchester United, blessed with greater financial resources — and keep pace with Manchester City because of an accumulation of edges.Liverpool fans no longer recognize the team Klopp built into a champion.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockLiverpool had a smarter data department. It spent money, particularly on salaries, but it made every dollar count. It thought more about nutrition, throw-ins and the psychology of penalty shootouts. It combined them all under a coach who had a clear sense of how he wanted to play, who knew what sort of players he needed, and what he needed them to be able to do.Slowly, then suddenly, those edges have been dulled. Liverpool’s rivals, domestic and international, have sought to nullify every marginal gain the club made. In some areas, it is doubtless still a market leader, but the composite advantage is much smaller. Plenty of teams have sharpened their recruitment strategies, or invested in data, or started to take more care over the minute details of the game. (And where they have not, in certain cases money has made up the difference.)At the same time, Liverpool’s sense of clarity has become muddied. The image of Klopp as a “heavy metal” coach — a phrase he must, surely, now regret — has been outdated for some time. He has sought to turn Liverpool into a more controlled, more assured, sort of a team. The result, at times, has been a team caught between two stools, determined to move on from what it was but not yet sure of what it is supposed to become.As talented as Bellingham is, he cannot address those issues, not on his own. What made Liverpool competitive was not just the talent within its team; it was the way the club had put that squad together, how it asked it to play, the cumulative impact of all those imperceptible steps it had taken to provide the best platform for them to succeed.Given the competition, a parade of all that it has achieved under Klopp, all that it has already done, would not be enough to make Liverpool more appealing to Bellingham than Manchester City or Real Madrid. If it is to secure the player around which it intends to build its future, it needs to persuade him that it knows what comes next.The Demise of the MachinesThere is always something heartening about seeing a player enjoying a sudden flourish, granted belated recognition after a career spent toiling away from the spotlight. It acts as a reminder that talent is not always a gift. It can be a reward, too.Joselu, certainly, fits that particular bill. He is 33 now, having spent the last decade or so as an industrious, faintly unspectacular forward for a variety of teams that might fairly be described as “midtable.” Last week, though, long after he might have abandoned hope of representing his country, he was called up to Spain’s national team.On form, his appearances against Norway and Scotland in the first round of qualifiers should not have been controversial: Joselu has scored 12 goals in 22 games for a struggling Espanyol team this season. He got his chance with Spain not because of an unexpected romantic streak in Luis de la Fuente, the country’s newly installed coach. He has done enough to deserve it.Joselu made his debut for Spain last week, days before he turned 33.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThat does not necessarily mean it is a feel-good story for Spanish soccer, though. The team de la Fuente selected against Scotland — a game that resulted in just Spain’s third defeat in a qualifier in nearly two decades — also included David García, an equally unheralded 29-year-old defender. A 35-year-old, Iago Aspas, came off the bench. It is not to diminish Scotland’s achievement to suggest this was not a vintage Spain squad.The same could be said of Germany — its attack led by another late bloomer, Niclas Füllkrug, and duly beaten at home by Belgium — and Italy, which has had to scour Argentina to find its latest striker, the 23-year-old Tigre forward Mateo Retegui. Three of Europe’s great powers, all of a sudden, have found that their player pools are a little thin.In Italy’s case, that is nothing new: The country has long struggled to produce young players, largely because Serie A’s teams tend to believe that anyone who has not seen his 30th birthday is still an infant.It is not long, though, since Spain and Germany seemed to have established smooth, reliable production lines of talent. Both countries were praised, effectively, for having industrialized youth production. Now both find themselves increasingly stocking their squads — if not their first teams — with players like Joselu, Aspas and Füllkrug: the kind of journeymen they were supposed to have moved beyond.There is no immediate explanation for why that might be. Perhaps there is a roadblock on giving young players a chance. Perhaps their domestic leagues are too reliant on imports. Perhaps their lauded academies churn out identikit players, leaving gaps elsewhere. (The likelihood is that, combined with a bit of random chance, it is a blend of all three.)The consequences are a little clearer. Three of the continent’s traditional powers are not quite what they used to be. That has an impact not only on their traditional peers — England and France, in particular — but on smaller nations, like Scotland, that might suddenly find a little room to breathe now that the shadows of the giants have receded just a little.The Greatest AdventureHervé Renard: the right man for France’s Women’s World Cup moment?Molly Darlington/ReutersHervé Renard is one of those figures only the less conspicuous corners of international soccer can produce. He wears his shirts perfectly pressed, bright white, and often slashed almost to the waist. His hair is long, his face tan, and he has a tendency to pop up in unexpected places: Zambia, Ivory Coast, Saudi Arabia. He is essentially the adjective “swashbuckling” in human form.He is also, as it happens, good at what he does. He turned first Zambia and then Ivory Coast into champions of Africa. He guided Morocco to the 2018 World Cup. He was last seen steering a dynamic, enthralling Saudi side to a victory against Argentina that ranks as one of the most eye-catching results in men’s World Cup history.His newest job is of a different order. Renard this week was confirmed as the successor to the perennially unpopular Corinne Diacre as coach of France’s women’s national team. On the surface, his task is an onerous one. First, he must persuade the swath of players alienated by his predecessor to return to the international fold. Then he has to craft a side coherent enough to challenge the best teams in the world. He has three and a half months, give or take, to do it.The potential prize, though, is worth it. France is home to two of the finest women’s club teams in the world. In Grace Geyoro, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani — not to mention Amandine Henry, Wendie Renard and the twins Delphine and Estelle Cascarino — he now has, at least in theory, some of the best players on the planet at his disposal.If Renard, the coach, can repair the country’s shattered team spirit, if he can forge all of that talent into a cogent unit, if he can succeed where Diacre consistently failed and provide a platform for his players to fulfill their potential, then there is nothing to stop France’s rivaling England and the United States and Germany as genuine contenders for the World Cup. Renard has spent his career traversing the globe in search of a challenge. He may have found the adventure that might seal his legacy at home. More

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      China’s Soccer Experiment Flopped. Now It May Be Over.

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      China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.It takes only a glance at the news coverage from those days less than a decade ago, when China’s soccer success seemed only a matter of determination and money, to remember how quickly and how deeply the country embraced the world’s most popular sport as a national project.At home and abroad, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was pictured kicking soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curriculums, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional teams, both at home and abroad, then stocked them with imported players — whatever the cost.There was talk of bringing the World Cup to China. In Beijing, there was audacious talk of winning it.Now, though, China’s great soccer dream appears to be over.The expensive recruits have gone. Top teams have disappeared with alarming regularity. The national team shows little sign of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials charged with leading China’s soccer revolution have been detained amid allegations of corruption.“The hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the school of economics and management at the Shanghai University of Sport. “And that is also why the disappointment is so big.”“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had declared in 2015.Pool photo by Michael SohnWhat derailed China’s soccer plan, when earlier state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and piles of medals? A global pandemic and an economic downturn didn’t help. Nor did the lack of truly world-class talents. Then there were the bad deals, the whispers of corruption and the nagging national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese soccer is a major reversal from the momentum that accompanied the release in 2015 of China’s 50-point plan for the sport.That program was packed with concrete targets and lofty goals. Perhaps the most eye-catching was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum — introducing it to tens of millions of children in a single stroke — and to set up 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or perhaps just as eager to take advantage of a loosening of restrictions on the purchase of foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly opened a fire hose of money on the game.Riding the RocketBillions of dollars went to acquiring whole or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and shirts of well-known clubs. At home, some of China’s richest people and companies invested in teams with an abandon that transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who once would never have considered a career in China were suddenly racing there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees that their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.That sudden burst of spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed restraints on the industry to try to stop it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and by the time the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020, and China retreated inside its borders, spectacular failures were common.Jiangsu Suning F.C., a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, only months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou F.C. suffered the indignity of relegation after its big-spending owner, the property developer Evergrande, tumbled into its own financial crisis. Top players, complaining of unpaid salaries and broken promises, packed their bags, ended their contracts and headed home.An academy at Jiangsu Suning F.C. in 2021, weeks after the club, the reigning league champion, suddenly shut down.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“From the perspective of each team, if you look at cost and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.But China was in retreat on the international stage, too.Dashed HopesIf there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and supreme disappointment, of China’s soccer dream it might be its perpetually underachieving men’s national team, which currently sits below the likes of Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in FIFA’s global rankings, firmly entrenched among the mediocre and the afterthoughts.The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it held when the panel chaired by Xi passed China’s heralded soccer reform plan eight years ago, and its most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was merely another humbling failure. China finished fifth out of six teams in its qualifying pool for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a defeat to Vietnam on Chinese New Year the nadir to a journey marked by repeated humiliations.Traditionally, China has enjoyed far more success in women’s soccer. It was an early pioneer in the women’s game, hosted FIFA’s first women’s world championship in 1991 and reached the final eight years later. But while China will make its third straight trip to the Women’s World Cup this year, it has not advanced past the quarterfinals since 1999 and will not be a pick of most experts to contend for the trophy.The men’s team’s future looks even less bright. “If anything, they’re only going to get worse the way things are right now,” said Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sporting superpower.China’s men’s team has never won a game or even scored a goal at the World Cup.Elias Rodriguez/Photosport, via Associated PressThe news is no better off the field. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of an expanded World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, unveiled at a triumphant news conference in Shanghai, will now be held in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.Last year, the Asian soccer federation scrapped a multibillion-dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it failed to fulfill its agreements. The Premier League did the same in 2020, tearing up a deal that was its most lucrative overseas contract, and has now signed one worth considerably less.The money that flowed from Chinese companies to foreign entities in the early years of the boom, and which quickly made China a major source of sponsorship income for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.At a recent meeting of Asian soccer’s governing body, the Chinese candidate running for a seat on FIFA’s governing council finished last in the voting.Uncertain FutureAmong the many successes China once promised are some claims that cannot be verified. The official in charge of the schools project, for example, once claimed that 30,000 such academies had been opened, and that more than 55 million students were now playing soccer.“While most of the world celebrates a project once it is completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people accept that as given,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following the Chinese soccer industry.China invested in soccer schools and soccer fields but never created a pipeline of players.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesIt is unclear how many of the schools are actually functioning, and getting an answer may be all but impossible: The education ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, was arrested in February.His detention was not the first, or the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, was arrested over unspecified “serious violations of law” while attending a coaching seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s antigraft watchdog issued a curt statement in which it said Chen Xuyuan, the president of the national soccer federation, was facing similar accusations.After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a nationalist and retired chief editor of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on Chinese social media. Chinese soccer had burned copious amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.Even before a series of government announcements noting that even more high-ranking soccer officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core.”His post went viral, with many commenters calling desperately for a complete overhaul of Chinese soccer. Whether the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort is unclear.A previous anticorruption drive that included the jailing of soccer administrators and officials presaged the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, might be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.Chen Xuyuan, the president of China’s soccer federation, in 2019. He is facing accusations of corruption.SNTV, via Associated PressThe former national team coach Li Tie faces similar accusations: “serious violations of law.”Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, appeared to suggest just that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer was conspicuous by its absence at a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “deeply reflecting on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and declared that his agency would redouble its efforts at building competitive leagues and promoting young talent.What that will look like remains unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a reduced number of teams. Among the casualties was Hebei, which not so long ago had lured Argentine stars like Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football.”A downsized league will signal yet another rollback of Chinese grand ambitions, whenever it eventually begins. When will that be? No one is certain. An official announcement of the league format has yet to be made.Chang Che More

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      Indonesia Stripped of Under-20 World Cup After Israel Protests

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      FIFA stripped Indonesia of this year’s Under-20 World Cup after government officials and protesters called for the exclusion of Israel’s team.Indonesia was stripped of a world championship soccer tournament on Wednesday amid protests over the participation of Israel’s team.Indonesia had been scheduled to host the Under-20 World Cup, an event for the best young players in the world, from May 20 to June 11. Israel has qualified for the tournament for the first time, but that result proved to be fraught in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel.Some government officials and protesters had called on the Israeli team to be excluded, leading to the cancellation of the tournament’s draw, which had been set for Friday. On Monday, conservative Muslim protesters marched in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, carrying signs and chanting slogans objecting to Israel’s presence in the event.After a meeting between the leaders of soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, and the Indonesian soccer federation on Wednesday in Qatar failed to resolve the dispute, FIFA said in a statement that Indonesia would not host the event “due to the current circumstances.”FIFA said the dates of the tournament would remain unchanged and that it would announce a new host “as soon as possible.” Indonesia could face further penalties, including a possible ban from qualifying for the 2026 World Cup.Twenty-four countries are set to participate in the under-20 championship, including the United States. The tournament is an important steppingstone for stars of the future; Lionel Messi was named the most valuable player of the 2005 event, matching the 1979 award won by Diego Maradona.The tournament had been planned for six stadiums in Indonesia, and Israel was expected to play in Bali. But Bali’s governor, Wayan Koster, wrote to the nation’s sports ministry asking it to bar Israel from playing in his region.That led to the postponement of the tournament’s draw, which had been scheduled to be held in Bali.The under-20 championships, last held in 2019, is normally played every two years. But the 2021 event — also set to be held in Indonesia — was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic and rescheduled for this year. More

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      Hervé Renard Set to Coach France at Women’s World Cup

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      Renard has vast experience in Africa and led Saudi Arabia at last year’s World Cup. But he has never coached a women’s team.PARIS — Hervé Renard, a French coach with vast experience in international soccer but none leading a women’s team, was set to be hired to lead a France squad that will be among the favorites at the Women’s World Cup in July.France is expected to announce Renard’s hiring by the end of the week, just over two weeks after the country’s soccer federation fired its longtime women’s coach, Corinne Diacre, in the face of player revolt.Renard, 54, most recently coached Saudi Arabia’s men’s team but announced his departure on Tuesday, hours after the Saudi soccer federation said it had agreed to a French federation request to end his contract immediately.The French soccer federation made no announcement that it had hired Renard, but the Saudi federation’s president, Yasser Al-Misehal, essentially confirmed a deal was in the works when he told a Saudi sports channel on Tuesday night that Renard had been offered the France post and that the coach “expressed his desire to take this opportunity.”Renard’s arrival could be a welcome breath of fresh air for Les Bleues, as the French women’s team is known, but also for the embattled French federation, which will be eager for a fresh start after a leadership change as well as a series of internal conflicts that were threatening to tear apart its star-studded and trophy-chasing women’s team.Time is short: France’s players will have only a matter of months, and a handful of exhibition games, to adapt to Renard before they run out for their Women’s World Cup opener against Jamaica on July 23 in Sydney, Australia.But Renard also will have only a short window to persuade his players that he can adapt his style to them, and to the women’s game. While he has decades of coaching experience in multiple countries, he has not previously coached women at the professional or international level. At least one prominent player agent said that would not be a problem.“As someone who’s known for leading men, I’m sure he’ll have no problem leading women,” Sonia Souid, an agent who represents several players on the French women’s team, said in an interview last week. Souid suggested that Renard’s transition could be seamless as long as he can make the players believe they can succeed.“The real challenge is that Renard will be expected to have immediate results,” she said. “That’s difficult for any coach.”Renard’s most immediate task will be to heal the wounds of a “fractured” group, as the federation called its women’s team in the communiqué that announced Diacre’s departure. Fissures between Diacre and some of her best players broke for good in February, when several top players, including the team captain Wendie Renard and the Paris-St.-Germain star Marie-Antoinette Katoto, announced that they would leave the team and refuse future calls to international duty amid disagreements with the management of Diacre, which they denounced as “nowhere near top-level requirements.”Wendie Renard announced on social media that she had chosen to prioritize her “mental health” by quitting the French team. Two weeks later, Diacre was fired.Hervé Renard has a reputation as an itinerant leader who extracts results from his players and then moves on. He has never stayed more than four years on the same coaching bench in a career that has taken him to Africa, the Middle East, England’s fourth division, France’s Ligue 1 and to local teams in the Algerian and Vietnamese championships.Sharp-jawed and favoring crisp white dress shirts on the sideline, Renard attracted attention and headlines during last year’s World Cup in Qatar, where he led an unheralded Saudi Arabia team stocked with domestic-based players to a stunning group-stage victory over Argentina.A video of an impassioned speech he delivered to his players at halftime of that game racked up millions of views on social media, but also offered a glimpse into both his methods, his passion and his no-nonsense coaching style.His first look at his new team could come within days: France will gather for a training camp next week ahead of a set of friendly matches against Colombia and Canada in early April.As he prepares for the World Cup, Renard will have to work quickly to merge a new generation of talents like Katoto with an older group of players whose international careers came to an abrupt end under Diacre. That latter group includes not only Renard and goalkeeper Sarah Bouhaddi but also midfielder Amandine Henry, who remains a mainstay of the French powerhouse Olympique Lyonnais Féminin at the age of 33. Henry has not played for France in more than two years, and was left off the national team’s roster by Diacre for last summer’s European Championship in England.That tournament, like so many others, ended in disappointment and frustration for France. Despite its talent, it has never reached the final of a major championship like the World Cup or the Euros or claimed an Olympic medal in its 50 years of existence.Tariq Panja contributed reporting. More

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      The Superteam That May Be Selling Itself Short

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      Vfl Wolfsburg casts itself as an underdog in Germany and in the Champions League. That doesn’t reflect reality.The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. It has made five finals, and won two of them.Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering; Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player; the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.By any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich — Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title — had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”Svenja Huth is one of the handful of Germany stars on Wolfsburg’s roster.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersIt is not quite clear why anyone — let alone Popp, fully aware of the quality of player lining up alongside her on the field — should believe that to be the case. The most obvious rationale is that the Bayern’s reputation, particularly in Germany, is such that it exerts a kind of reflexive gravity: It has sufficient weight that it is capable of bending light, and logic, around it.As soon as Bayern started to invest heavily in its women’s side, as it did around a decade ago, the natural assumption was that it would win. That is what Bayern does, after all: It wins. It is the club’s calling card, an inevitability threaded into its DNA. And to an extent, that is true. Bayern has picked up three Bundesliga titles since 2015. It has been as good as its word. It has won. It has just not won as much as Wolfsburg.And yet, somehow, the success of Popp and her teammates has still been overshadowed by the rise of Bayern. In truth, it is hard to shake the sense that Wolfsburg’s location — and what might best be described as its nature — has not worked in the team’s favor.Wolfsburg is a factory town, its identity bound up with Volkswagen, the city’s major employer and greatest claim to fame. Both the men’s and women’s divisions of VfL Wolfsburg are even now regarded, on some subconscious level, as factory teams.When the women’s side lifted its last Bundesliga title, Ralf Brandstätter, the chief executive of the car manufacturer, described the players as “personable and successful ambassadors for the club, for Wolfsburg and of course for Volkswagen.” There is not, it does not need to be said, anything especially glamorous about being seen as ambassadors for Volkswagen.And European women’s soccer is undeniably drawn — at this stage — to glamour (a charge that can just as easily be laid at the men’s game). The Champions League has, for some time, been the private fief of Lyon, a team whose recruitment strategy has long copied that of the Harlem Globetrotters: Its approach has been no more sophisticated than identifying the best players on the planet and working out how much it would take to persuade them to move to the banks of the Rhone.Bayern Munich and Barcelona collided in this season’s Champions League group stage.Andreas Gebert/ReutersThat model has bled down, not just to Lyon’s great domestic rival, Paris St.-Germain, but to the moneyed plains of England’s Women’s Super League, where Manchester City, Chelsea and, more recently, Manchester United have used their uncontested financial advantages to attract enviable collections of the best players in the world. Bayern has followed much the same blueprint.Even Barcelona, which prided itself on its homespun approach to success, its idiosyncratic, characteristic style and its inviolable principles, has been unable to resist the pull of women’s soccer’s increasingly frenzied transfer market. Last summer, it made the English midfielder Kiera Walsh the most expensive player on the planet.In that context, a team like Wolfsburg — largely German, devoid of genuine star names (Popp and potentially Oberdorf apart) and based not in one of Europe’s grand metropoles but in a city frequently caricatured as little more than a production line surrounded by houses — is always likely to struggle for the spotlight.Increasingly, though, Wolfsburg is becoming difficult to ignore. Tommy Stroot’s side is on course for another Bundesliga title. If it can avoid defeat at Bayern this weekend and it would enter the home straight with a two-point lead at the top of the table. A second straight European semifinal is on the cards, too, after a 1-0 win at P.S.G. this week.A quiet confidence is taking root among Stroot’s squad that they have nothing to fear, even in the Champions League. “The only thing that can stop Wolfsburg winning it is ourselves,” Popp told FIFA.com earlier this month.Its victory in Paris, in front of a fervid, boisterous crowd, settled a few of the ghosts of last season, when Stroot’s team froze in front of more than 91,000 fans at Camp Nou, losing to Barcelona, 5-1, in the first leg of their semifinal.“We experienced the same noise from the crowd at Barcelona last season,” said Dominique Janssen, the Dutch midfielder. “You try to take that experience away with you, and know that it gets easier the more it happens.”The club might not have lifted the Champions League trophy since 2014, but neither Lyon nor Barcelona looks quite as imposing this time around as they have in seasons past. Like Bayern, Chelsea and Arsenal, there is a sense at Wolfsburg that the field is leveling just a little. It might think of itself as an underdog, but the superteam that everyone has forgotten, in the place that nobody bothers to look, has no reason to feel inferior.Doing Business in PublicThe general rule of thumb, when it comes to prospective takeovers of major soccer teams, is that there is an inverse correlation between heat and light. The more public a suitor, the less likely they are to succeed. Among executives regularly involved in these transactions, the dictum runs that the serious bidders are also the quietest.All of which, of course, has been upended by the ongoing process to find a new owner for Manchester United. As should have been expected, any interested party was made to sign a “strict” and “binding” nondisclosure agreement before being offered access to the club’s detailed financial accounts. (There is a tautology here, obviously: Nondisclosure agreements are rarely described as “loose” or “really more of a guideline.”)Still, it might be worth checking the wording. It is not just that the identities of the two leading contenders tussling for the club — Jim Ratcliffe, a petrochemical billionaire, and Sheikh Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the son of a former Qatari prime minister and ABSOLUTELY NOT linked to the Qatari state — have become public. It is that everything else has, too.It has been possible, in fact, to follow this multibillion dollar transaction in surprisingly forensic detail. There were statements to accompany the submission of their bids, as well as ballpark figures of their valuations of the club. There have been details about when and where they have held further talks with United’s current hierarchy ahead of a very public — and completely artificial — deadline for offers. Ratcliffe was even photographed at Old Trafford along with his negotiating team.“Oh, what a surprise to see photographers here for my secret talks. Maybe I can hide in front of this crest.”Phil Noble/ReutersNews organizations tend not to rail against transparency. The more people want to talk, the better, particularly when it pertains to a club that commands as much interest as United. In this case, though, it might be worth pausing to ask who benefits, exactly, from what would ordinarily be a faintly clandestine process playing out in the open.For the contenders, it presents a chance to win hearts and minds, and perhaps that is no bad thing. For the Glazer family, the current owners, it is a way to smoke out as much interest as possible, and that is entirely their prerogative. For Raine, the bank that has been tasked with overseeing the deal, it is a chance to drive up the price, and by coincidence its commission.Everyone involved, in other words, is using United — a club that regards itself, not without cause, as the biggest sporting institution in the world — for their own ends. United is reduced to a mere asset, a trinket to be haggled over and horse-traded, a passive participant in the proxy wars of billionaires. And that, when it comes down to it, is about as good a definition of modern soccer as you will find.“Failure”Julian Nagelsmann, now out of the hot seat at Bayern Munich.Michaela Rehle/ReutersJulian Nagelsmann always wanted to be Bayern Munich manager. It was the job he coveted more than any other during his meteoric rise, back when he was European soccer’s coming force, its baby-faced managerial prodigy, an outsider who was overturning conventional wisdom of what a coach should look like, what steps they needed to take, how old they really ought to be.When he left his first job, at the equally neophyte Hoffenheim, for RB Leipzig, it was with the express purpose of positioning himself to take charge at Bayern. Leipzig was his designated intermediate step, the place where he would go to get from here to there, to where he always wanted to be.And though the move worked, he never felt quite like a natural fit with Bayern Munich. The images, early on in his tenure, of him scooting around Bayern’s training facility at Sabenerstrasse on a hoverboard felt somehow jarring, a Silicon Valley tech bro on vacation at Neuschwanstein. There always seemed to be just a hint of unease in the air: a hunt for a mole here, an unwarranted, unedifying outburst there.If the timing of his demise is curious — he was set to be fired on Friday, with his team in second place in the Bundesliga, a point behind its next opponent, and with a Champions League quarterfinal on the horizon — then the fact of it was not. Bayern places great stock in having a coach whose face fits. It is a shifting, vague criterion, but one that condemned him in the end. Nagelsmann never felt right, not quite.His solace, of course, is not simply the Bundesliga title he picked up in his first and only full season in Munich — proof that nobody fails at Bayern, not in any meaningful sense of the word — but the fact that he will be able to parlay that experience into something else soon enough.Bayern, it turns out, will not be his final destination. Nagelsmann will now be a contender for any of the handful of elite jobs that becomes available. Once a manager has broken through that ceiling, after all, it quickly transforms into a floor. The best evidence for that is the man who is reportedly replacing him: Thomas Tuchel, fired by Paris St.-Germain and fired by Chelsea, but hired in an instant by Bayern. For Nagelsmann, Munich will be just another step along the way.CorrespondenceWe are moving away from the many and varied failings of penalties and onto socks this week, courtesy of Shawn Donnelly. “What’s the deal with these Premier League players’ socks?” he asked, in the tone (I am assuming) of Jerry Seinfeld. “Half of them seemed to be ripped up in the back. Is this a new style, or can the sportswear brands not produce a sock strong enough for the rigors of the Premier League?”This is a good question, and in a rare stroke of good fortune, it is one I can actually answer. It is to do with reducing pressure on the calf muscles. Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender, seems to have been the pioneer in this particular realm of what we may as well, for want of a better word, call science, and now it is almost de rigueur.Free the calf.Phil Noble/ReutersMoshe Arenstein, meanwhile, makes a perfectly coherent point of logic. “As we enjoy this great part of the year with amazing Champions and Europa League games, why on earth would the final game be just one game? Isn’t the best part of this tournament the home and away? Do we not deserve a final that has two games as well?”That, of course, was exactly how one European tournament functioned until relatively recently: the UEFA Cup, the forerunner of the Europa League, only switched to a single, showpiece final in 1998. (The Intercontinental Cup, the predecessor of the Club World Cup, ran as a home-and-away affair until 1980.)This newsletter is not above a dash of misty-eyed nostalgia, of course, but on this one I err on the side of modernity: there is an appeal to a two-legged final, but there is no drama greater than a one-and-done, surely?And Tom Gantz, rightly, takes issue with my description of dead-rubber group stage games in the expanded men’s World Cup as being “pointless soccer.”“Pointless to whom, exactly?” Tom asks. “The chance to watch the best soccer players once every four years is something I won’t pass up even if the outcome of every game doesn’t actually affect progression in the tournament.”I will cede that point as graciously as possible: No soccer match is truly pointless, is it? And I say that as a man who once attended a group stage game in a minor cup competition in which both teams had already been eliminated, and yet it ended in a penalty shootout anyway. More