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      John Motson, BBC’s Voice of Soccer for Five Decades, Dies at 77

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      The broadcaster announced English soccer’s biggest moments, including 10 World Cups.John Motson, the soccer commentator whose animated voice was inseparable from many of the sport’s biggest moments over his 50 years at the BBC, died on Thursday. He was 77.The BBC confirmed his death, citing a statement from his family. The family did not specify a cause but said he “died peacefully in his sleep.”The network turned to Mr. Motson, who retired in 2018, for its top matches, including 10 World Cups, 10 European Championships and 29 F.A. Cup finals. He also offered analysis on “Match of the Day,” the BBC’s weekly highlights show.“John Motson was the voice of a footballing generation,” the BBC director-general, Tim Davie, said in a statement, adding that “like all the greats behind the mic, John had the right words, at the right time, for all the big moments.”Mr. Motson, often known by his nickname, “Motty,” was born on July 10, 1945, in Salford, England. He dreamed of becoming a print reporter, starting his career when he left school at 16 at the weekly Barnet Press and the daily Sheffield Morning Telegraph, according to a 2008 profile in The Independent.He was selected to participate in a local radio station’s experiment that relied on print reporters. An editor, after hearing his work on the radio, told him: “John, on the evidence of this copy, I really think you should try the world of the voice,” he told The Independent.He thrived on local radio, and joined the BBC in 1968 before starting on “Match of the Day” in 1971. He went on to become the station’s leading voice, calling nearly 2,500 games in his career, including more than 200 involving England’s national team.He was also in Hillsborough Stadium in 1989, when policing mistakes and overcrowding led the deaths of 97 fans of Liverpool’s team. The tragedy, which also saw more than 700 fans injured, has remained in the news decades later.For many soccer fans in Britain, the news of his death inspired remembrances of their favorite calls, many of which were attached to beloved games as they grew to love the sport. Gary Lineker, the current host for “Match of the Day,” was among those paying tribute, saying on Twitter that Mr. Motson was a “quite brilliant commentator and the voice of football in this country for generations.”Mr. Motson is survived by his wife, Anne, and son, Frederick, according to the BBC. More

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      Real Madrid 5, Liverpool 2: Champions League Laugher at Anfield

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      That Real Madrid delivered another memorable Champions League victory was no surprise. It was the manner of Liverpool’s defeat that spoke volumes.LIVERPOOL, England — It took a while for the frustration, the anger and the hurt to bubble to the surface. For about an hour on Tuesday night, Liverpool’s fans had watched with grim forbearance as their team was expertly dismantled by Real Madrid.They urged on Jürgen Klopp’s players after they threw away a two-goal lead in the first half. They stood by them as Real Madrid made it 3-2 and then 4-2 and finally 5-2, a loss turning into a rout. They remained stoic as they witnessed the collapse of their season, as they endured the most chastening evening in Anfield’s illustrious European history.But then there was the passing: The passing was the final straw. As the game wound down, as the crowd started to thin out just a little, Real Madrid decided to indulge in a little game of keepaway. They slipped passes between, beside and around their bedraggled opponents. They offered them a glimpse of the ball and then spirited it away at the last moment.They maintained it for a minute or two, Liverpool’s players lolling and lagging as they dashed around in hopeless pursuit. It was an indignity too far. It is one thing being beaten — particularly by Real Madrid — and it is quite another being taunted. The crowd started to whistle, and then to jeer: at Real Madrid, at its own players, chasing at shadows, at this whole long, damned, miserable season.Andy Robertson and Liverpool won’t play their second leg in Madrid until March, but their Champions League is effectively over after Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Real Madrid won at Anfield does not count as a surprise of any sort. This is Real Madrid, after all, and this is the Champions League. A stirring Real Madrid recovery is part of the deal. To a large extent it is increasingly odd that anyone else bothers entering the competition.Carlo Ancelotti’s team has mastered the comeback, turned it into an art form, boiled it down to its very essence. En route to European glory last season, Real Madrid generally required the full span of a two-legged tie, up to and including extra time in the second leg, to stage the miraculous recovery that has become its calling card.The only change this season — on this evidence — is that it has streamlined the process to such an extent that it now takes no more than half an hour, with a break in the middle for a quick bite to eat.Far more striking than the fact of Liverpool’s defeat on Tuesday, then, was the manner of it. Somewhere deep inside this Liverpool team is the muscle memory of what it once was, and not all that long ago. It is only nine months, after all, since it played its third Champions League final in five years, Klopp sufficiently confident that the halcyon days would keep rolling that he advised his team’s fans — even in defeat — to book their hotel rooms for this year’s showpiece.For 15 minutes, it was possible to wonder if this stage, and this opponent, might be enough to stir those ghosts to life. Liverpool surged to an early lead, thanks to an inventive, audacious flick from Darwin Nuñez, and then doubled it when Thibaut Courtois forgot how to work his legs and presented the ball to Mohamed Salah. In between, Salah had wasted two more chances. Here, at last, were the flickers that Liverpool’s fans had been waiting months to see.Darwin Núñez’s goal after four minutes had the Anfield crowd on its feet.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd then the reverie suddenly evaporated and reality descended. Vinícius Júnior scored one goal, wonderfully, and then had a second presented to him by the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson. It had the effect of breaking the spell. The clock struck midnight. Éder Militão made it three. Karim Benzema had a shot deflected into the goal for four, and then danced through, his shoes soft and his touch sure, to make it five.Liverpool, suddenly, looked to be what it has been for much of the season: a mid-table Premier League team caught in the throes of an awkward, jarring transition. The difference, this time, was that it was being forced to play the European champion.Quite how Liverpool’s collapse has happened remains, even now, something of a mystery. Thousands of words have been dedicated in recent months in an attempt to understand how a team that was so painstakingly constructed, put together with such thought and expertise and precision, could come apart at the seams so quickly and so easily. How something so good could prove so ultimately fragile.There are concrete factors that certainly seem to have contributed. Injuries have not helped, of course, compounding a failure to upgrade the midfield. The effects of last season, in which Liverpool became the first English team to play every game in every competition for which it was eligible — winning two trophies, but neither of the prizes it most wanted — have lingered, both physically and psychologically.But then there are the intangible factors, the theoretical and the emotional strands, the charges that can only ever take the form of questions: Has Liverpool been too loyal to the core of Klopp’s team? Has upheaval behind the scenes, the departure of several key members of the staff, disrupted the harmony the club had worked so hard to foster? If so, has that had any effect on performances?Karim Benzema finished off Liverpool with goals 12 minutes apart.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhatever the causes, the effects were all there, on the field, against a team that less than a year ago Liverpool could — largely rightly — consider its equal. When Klopp, upon reviewing last year’s final for the first time this week, commented that it was a game his team could have won, he was not simply presenting a brave face.Now, though, the gulf is wide. The temptation is to focus on the major mistakes — Alisson’s misjudgment for the second goal, the stationary marking for the third, Joe Gomez’s body shape for the fourth — but more telling are the little things.It is the speed with which Liverpool passes the ball, just a touch slower than before. It is the spaces between its players, a little too large, and the cohesion between its lines, now ever so slightly ragged. It is in the intensity of its press, somehow diluted and dimmed.Each element feeds on the others, eroding confidence and sapping purpose, until the whole system seems fractured beyond repair. And it was at that point that Real Madrid, with that air of total self-assurance, started to pass the ball around, Liverpool’s players powerless to stop them, their fall from the rarefied heights they once shared with these opponents complete. More

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      Manchester United Bidding War Already Has a Winner: The Sellers

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      A Qatari royal and a British billionaire have designs on the Premier League giant. But the Glazer family still gets to set the price.The World Cup in Qatar was in its third day when Manchester United’s press office announced that its American owners were exploring an end game they had long refused to even consider: a potential sale of the famed English soccer club.Every day since that November morning, the swirl of speculation about who might buy United, one of the world’s most popular and most valuable sports teams, has gathered pace.A British billionaire quickly confirmed that he planned to bid. An American hedge fund kicked the tires. Reports of a Saudi Arabian offer sent the club’s stock price surging.But it was from Qatar, rumored for weeks to have investors interested in adding United to the country’s expanding sports portfolio, where details of the first official bid appeared. And just like that, the fight for the club’s future, a battle of differing visions for what kind of Manchester United would emerge from the auction, was on.The official word of concrete Qatari interest arrived in a statement on Friday night: an all-cash offer — reportedly worth as much as $6 billion — by Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, a little-known royal whose power may lie more in his post as the chairman of a major Qatari bank and in the influence of his father, a former prime minister who helped put their small nation on the international map.Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the son of one of Qatar’s most powerful royals, was the first Manchester United suitor to confirm his bid.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSheikh Jassim’s statement offered populism, or at least what sounded like a Gulf billionaire’s vision of it. Pledging to invest in United’s stadium and its teams without adding a dollar to its debts, his five-paragraph statement read like a box-ticking exercise in proposals designed to win the support of anyone eager to see the back of the Glazers, the family that has controlled the Premier League giant for nearly two decades.But Sheikh Jassim’s suggestion of a “debt-free” takeover also did nothing to hide the financial muscle behind the offer that would make United, in an instant, the most high-profile Qatari-owned property on earth.His public pitch took other bidders by surprise. Raine, the investment bank handling the sale for United’s board and the Glazer family, had asked prospective buyers to limit any public pronouncements, perhaps to entice as many offers as possible, or at the very least to avoid scaring off any suitors.The Qatari offer changed that, and quickly led another bidder, Jim Ratcliffe, a British petrochemical billionaire based in Monte Carlo, to first privately and then publicly confirm that he had made an offer for 69 percent of United, the amount of the club owned by the Glazers.Ratcliffe pointedly offered United fans an English alternative to the prospect of Gulf ownership. Manchester born and a lifelong United fan, Ratcliffe promised to put “the Manchester back into Manchester United,” to revive a club anchored not to foreign interests but to “its proud history and roots in the northwest of England.”The British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is bidding for United only a year after losing out on Chelsea.Eric Gaillard/ReutersThe competing offers immediately split the United fan base, with many overseas supporters openly pining on social media for a sale that they hoped would see Qatar’s deep pockets do for Manchester United what billions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates have done for its neighbor Manchester City. That sentiment did not appear to be shared by much of the club’s matchgoing supporters, with concerns raised by fan groups in England about everything from human rights to sporting integrity.The latter may prove to be the more formidable obstacle, because Sheikh Jassim and Ratcliffe can expect to face scrutiny under rules set by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, that prohibit teams with the same owner from playing in top continental competitions like the Champions League.Ratcliffe already owns OGC Nice, which plays in France’s top league and has drawn some of his fortune to finance its push toward European qualification.Sheikh Jassim will face the challenge of convincing soccer regulators that his interests are different from those of the Qatari ownership group that runs the perennial Champions League contender Paris St.-Germain. Sheikh Jassim’s father was, with the country’s former emir, one of the architects of Qatar’s vision of itself as a player on the global stage, and one of the driving forces behind its flashy purchases of showcase assets like another British institution, the department store Harrods, and the Shard, Britain’s tallest building. The father’s close links to the country’s leadership already have raised doubts that his son’s pursuit of United is merely a private investment.Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim may soon face other challenges, too. Friday’s deadline for bids was an artificial one, confected by United’s bankers to create urgency. Other bids may already exist, and new (and possibly higher) ones can still be presented.But one thing all the bids — public, secret or still to come — may benefit from is near universal agreement among United fans of all stripes that the club should no longer be run by the famously unpopular Glazers. The family acquired the team in a highly contentious deal in 2005 in which it leveraged the majority of the purchase price against the club, meaning United has spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying for the right to be owned by the family.Many Manchester United fans agree on one thing: They want the Glazers to sell.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat deal, while infuriating supporters, has been hugely profitable for the Glazers. Through fees and dividend payments, the family has already secured a return far higher than its initial direct investment (a fraction of the roughly $1.4 billion purchase price at the time). The club’s value has skyrocketed, with news media reports suggesting the family is now seeking as much as $7 billion to part with it.That price point will narrow the pool of potential owners considerably. At least one potential buyer told The New York Times last week that anything close to that figure was “madness,” and said that his group had walked away because it believes that United, which still carries debt of nearly $600 million, is not worth more than 3 billion pounds, or $3.6 billion.Yet in Raine, United’s owners have entrusted the job of soliciting offers to a bank with a recent track record of finding buyers willing to pay above-market prices. The firm, led by the New York banker Joe Ravitch, secured £2.5 billion (about $3 billion) last year in the sale for Chelsea. But that was more of a forced sale, one sparked by British government sanctions against Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Glazers do not face similar pressure. Their call for bids for United was framed as merely an effort to “explore strategic alternatives for the club.” That means whatever the billionaires offer, whatever they promise, wherever they call home, Manchester United will be sold only at a price the Glazers are willing to accept. More

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      Manchester City Beats Arsenal, and the Premier League Season Pivots

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      Manchester City’s 3-1 victory lifted it over Arsenal and into first place in the Premier League. But the title race is far from over.LONDON — Erling Haaland was just starting to sprint when he remembered his manners. He was about to race off to celebrate yet another goal with Manchester City’s fans when he stopped, turned on his heel, and bounded over to Kevin De Bruyne instead, grabbing him by the forearm, roaring wordlessly in his face.In the ecstasy of the moment, it was not entirely clear what Haaland wanted his teammate to do. De Bruyne, certainly, seemed a little confused. Was Haaland merely thanking him for the assist on his goal? Was he inviting him to join in the celebrations? For a breath, both players stood at an impasse, wondering what to do next. And then Haaland took off again, hurtling toward the traveling supporters at full speed, his arms flailing in the air.By this stage, it is a wonder Haaland, the Norwegian striker, elicits any excitement from scoring. His latest goal gave him 26 in only 22 games in the Premier League since joining Manchester City last summer. He is on 32 in all competitions. Haaland does not so much harvest goals as factory farm them. He knew, though, that Wednesday’s was not just another goal. This one was different.Not just because it sealed City’s 3-1 win against Arsenal, or even because it confirmed Pep Guardiola’s team would leapfrog its opponent at the summit of the Premier League. Its significance was more deep-rooted than that. That goal, this victory, effected a profound shift in the psychology of the title race. It had the air of the hinge on which the season turned.Erling Haaland and Manchester City pulled ahead of Arsenal, for the moment, in the Premier League standings.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola, of course, had stressed this week that February is far too early for a single game to be conclusive, no matter how apocalyptic the tone of the prematch hype. The campaign is only narrowly past its halfway point. There are, as he said, so many games remaining. And besides, the arithmetic is skewed. Arsenal has a game in hand. Nothing, he was very clear, has been decided yet.Judging by the tableau of reactions to Haaland’s goal, that message had not quite made it through to City’s players. As Haaland tore away from De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan was in the corner, punching the air; Rúben Dias was locked in a tight, tender clinch with his coach, Guardiola cradling the defender’s face in his hands; Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish, both recently substituted, were racing back onto the field; and City’s coaching staff was howling into the night sky.It is only 10 days or so since Arsenal’s lead over City seemed if not insurmountable then certainly commanding. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team had beaten Tottenham in enemy territory, and had swatted aside Manchester United at home. Its lead over City had stretched to eight points. Arsenal’s youthful exuberance was slowly crystallizing into an imperious momentum; at some point, it had gone from being a club that hoped and become one that believed.Suggesting that tenor has been extinguished over the course of the last two weeks would be a stretch, but it is hard to deny that Arsenal has sputtered. First, Everton, its loins girded by a new manager, Sean Dyche, shut out the league leader at Goodison Park. Then Brentford, the Premier League’s specialist giant slayer, left the Emirates Stadium with a draw that was simultaneously fortuitous and largely merited.Suddenly, the daylight Arsenal had so painstakingly claimed at the top of the table had disappeared. City was right there, its breath hot on the necks of Arteta’s players. This game became less an examination of the comparative merits of two title contenders and more a test of Arsenal’s mettle.Martin Odegaard and Arsenal are winless in three games.David Klein/ReutersThe fact of defeat — to an opponent that has won four of the last five Premier League titles (for now, at least) — will sting rather less than the manner of it.Arsenal was hurried, rather than urgent, frantic, rather than intense. It looked, in other words, like exactly what it is: a work in progress, a young team on a steep trajectory but one that is yet to reach its apex. City’s first two goals, scored by De Bruyne and Grealish, came from avoidable errors, rushed decisions, poor choices. That happens to teams as they grow, of course. It was just not a great time for Arsenal to have a learning experience.City, by contrast, has honed its ruthlessness over the course of five seasons. On Wednesday, Guardiola’s team might not have played with its habitual control, the poise and the certainty that has become its hallmark; there was, instead, a frenzy to its performance, too, a fury that the club ordinarily reserves for any governing body that questions the legitimacy of its financial results.The temptation is to draw a direct link between the team’s performance and the 115 allegations of rule-breaking made by the Premier League last week, to suggest that Guardiola has successfully used those charges to convince his players — whom he had accused, not so long ago, of being rather too happy to rest on their laurels — that they have a cause to fight for, an injustice to set right.Perhaps that is true. Perhaps City’s squad has bought into the club’s conviction that it is on some rebel crusade, persecuted by the vested interests intent on doing it down. It is entirely possible that the players have been jolted out of whatever torpor Guardiola had detected by the seriousness of the allegations.Far more likely is that City’s players realized this was their chance. Manchester City has not been taking Arsenal lightly: that much was obvious when Ederson, the goalkeeper, was booked for time-wasting after barely half an hour, and when the team’s captain, Gundogan, was twice asked to calm his teammates down by the referee, Anthony Taylor.The difference, more than anything, was that City could channel that desperation, that hunger. That it could sense weakness and exploit it when Arsenal could not do the same. It does not mean anything is over, that Arsenal’s race is run. But for the first time in months, it feels like City has the edge, and that is often all it needs. More

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      Canada’s Women Pick Up Equal Pay Fight Ahead of Game With U.S.

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      Canada’s team, a Women’s World Cup favorite, went on strike last week as its battle with the country’s soccer federation boiled over.ORLANDO, Fla. — As Canada’s women’s soccer team walked onto the field for a pretournament training session on Wednesday, the vibe was one of just another practice.A few players chatted. Some sang along with the music blaring from a portable speaker. A small group tossed around a football — an American one — and acted out dramatic sideline catches.At a glance, it would have been nearly impossible to tell that the team was opposed to playing at this week’s SheBelieves Cup, which it is. It would have been impossible to know that it did not want to represent the Canadian soccer federation — which it most certainly did not.The players’ red practice jerseys told the other, far more discordant story: In a show of silent but very public protest, the players had turned their shirts inside out. Doing so hid the Canada Soccer logo, and showed the players’ disdain for how they say the federation has treated them during their ongoing equal pay fight.The fight is not new. For more than a year, Canada’s women’s team players have demanded that their federation provide them with equal pay, equal treatment and equal working conditions with Canada’s men’s team. This week, with the players exhausted by months of failed negotiations and outraged by recent budget cuts, the simmering feud boiled over.The players went on strike. The federation responded with threats. Statements were issued. Raw feelings were aired.Labor Organizing and Union DrivesTesla: A group of workers at a Tesla factory in Buffalo have begun a campaign to form the first union at the auto and energy company, which has fiercely resisted efforts to organize its employees.Apple: After a yearlong investigation, the National Labor Relations Board determined that the tech giant’s strictly enforced culture of secrecy interferes with employees’ right to organize.N.Y.C. Nurses’ Strike: Nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Manhattan ended a three-day strike after the hospitals agreed to add staffing and improve working conditions.Amazon: A federal labor official rejected the company’s attempt to overturn a union victory at a warehouse on Staten Island, removing a key obstacle to contract negotiations between the union and the company.“We feel as through our federation has let us down,” forward Janine Beckie said.Last week, the Canadian women said, they were dead-set on skipping the SheBelieves Cup, an important warm-up for this summer’s Women’s World Cup, which Canada — the reigning Olympic gold medalist in women’s soccer — will enter as a favorite.When they arrived for the tournament, in which they will play the United States (Thursday), Brazil (Sunday) and Japan (Wednesday), the players said some of those inequities they have become used to were glaring. There were fewer staff members than usual, they said. Fewer players in the camp, and fewer days in the ones to come. So the team refused to take the field.The strike, however, lasted only one day. A meeting with Canada Soccer went poorly; the federation, the team said, threatened to sue the players’ union and individual players for an illegal work stoppage. Saying they could not bear that risk, the players grudgingly returned to work, and committed to taking part in the tournament. It is doing so under protest, players said as they vowed to continue to find ways to amplify the issue with the public.Beckie and Christine Sinclair, the longtime team captain, said they could no longer represent the federation until the federation resolved its disputes with the team. Infuriated after Friday’s meeting with the federation, midfielder Sophie Schmidt said she resolved to retire on the spot, and asked the team’s coach, Bev Priestman, to arrange her flight home. Schmidt decided to stick around until the World Cup only after Sinclair talked her out of leaving.On Thursday night, Canada’s team will take the field knowing it has an ally in its opponent, a United States women’s team, and a blueprint in that team’s successful equal pay fight. The Americans spent years fighting their federation for equal treatment and equal pay, nearly a decade in which they managed court fights and legal filings while winning two World Cup titles. Though the United States team eventually lost its equal pay case in federal court, it emerged last year with a landmark agreement that might be the most player-friendly contract in women’s sports.But none of it was easy, the United States forward Alex Morgan said. Or fast.“Canada’s just getting started,” Morgan said Wednesday. “They know the long road ahead of them because we just went through that and I hope it’s a shorter road for them. We’ll do anything to publicize what they’re fighting for and why they should achieve that.”American stars like Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn said they had spoken with the Canadians and offered advice on strategies to achieve their goals. One key factor, Morgan and the other Americans said, is getting the public and sponsors involved in applying pressure on the federation to make changes.“I think they should use that as something that can be galvanizing and motivating for fans and players alike,” Rapinoe said.Priestman, the Canada coach caught between her players and her employer, said the team did not need any extra motivation. While the labor dispute might be erasing some of their focus heading into three crucial on-field tests, she said, the players are used to fighting for one another.“They’ll be together and make a stand together and they’ll work hard together,” Priestman said. “And I don’t doubt that.”She added, “I see a team fighting for each other, but also fighting for the next generation.”To make the public aware of that fight, the Canadians may wear their shirts inside-out again on Thursday, a public gesture previously employed by the American team during its equal pay fight. Other protests are under discussion, too, though Sinclair and the other team leaders declined to divulge any plans.Whatever they decide, the Americans said they would be proud to join in.“We are in full solidarity with them,” Sauerbrunn said. More

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      P.S.G.-Bayern: Choupo-Moting Shows Benefits of the Slow Burn

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      Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting was never a can’t-miss talent. But as he leads Bayern Munich against P.S.G., he has proved he belongs right where he is.There were always plenty of things about Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting that caught the eye. The scouts dispatched to watch him tended to find that his build grabbed their attention first: tall but not rangy; broad-shouldered and muscular but lean. What held it, though, was everything else.He was quick: quicker than might have been expected for a player of his size. Choupo-Moting could be a target man, a flag that a team might plant in the ground to claim surrounding territory, but he could move. He could hold his own, physically, but there was a delicacy and a refinement to his touch, too.“He had a lot of positives,” said Kevin Cruickshank, a scout who tracked Choupo-Moting in the player’s native Germany for several seasons before helping bring him to England. “He had a combination of things that you do not see too often.”His most valuable trait, though, would not have been visible even to the most careful observer. Of all his many and varied characteristics, the one that has defined Choupo-Moting’s career more than any other has been his patience.These days, Choupo-Moting, a 33-year-old forward, is an established part of Bayern Munich’s squad, a member of the glittering cast at one of Europe’s great powerhouse clubs. This week, the draw for the round of 16 of the Champions League takes him to another of his alma maters, Paris St.-Germain. Choupo-Moting has spent the last five years on the grandest stages the game has to offer.Choupo-Moting with Neymar in 2020. He scored a vital goal in P.S.G.’s run and later played in the final against Bayern.Pool photo by David RamosHe has won domestic titles in France and Germany. He has scored to propel his team into a Champions League semifinal and played in a final. He has called some of the best players of his generation and the next teammates: Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, Robert Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer.Unlike most of them, though, he had to wait for it all to come. Choupo-Moting’s career has followed the sort of slow-burn trajectory that has become increasingly rare in modern soccer, where major clubs trawl the planet chasing any scent of juvenile promise and talent that is expected to ignite upon arrival.Choupo-Moting did not emerge, fully formed, from some hothouse academy, a teenager anointed for greatness. He spent his formative years at Hamburg, his hometown club, Germany’s great comatose giant. He left, at the age of 22 — by which time the game’s leading players are expected to have established themselves as stars — with an expired contract, a few dozen appearances and five goals to his name.By the time he was in his mid-20s, Choupo-Moting had earned a reputation as a steady, reliable Bundesliga forward. At Mainz, working with the club’s youthful, progressive coach, Thomas Tuchel, he scored 22 goals across three seasons. His three campaigns at Schalke proved similarly productive.He did not, though, worry that time was passing him by. “As a player, of course you have goals,” Choupo-Moting said in an interview last week. “But I always try to be happy for what I have. The highest level of success is happiness. I was happy at Hamburg, at Mainz, at Schalke. I was never sitting at home thinking: I am 24 already, I should be playing at another level. What if I don’t sign for a ‘big club’ this summer?“I never had that fear. I never had those questions in my head. I knew, as long as I tried everything, I would be happy. That’s all I wanted: to go home and say I tried my best. I was at Schalke, and for me Schalke was a big club. We played Champions League. That was one of my dreams. I had that fighting spirit to play on the highest level, but my parents always taught me to be patient.”Choupo-Moting scored five goals in his only season at Stoke City. When the club was relegated, his teammates said the bigger surprise was where he went next: P.S.G.Darren Staples/ReutersHis next step, in retrospect, seemed a backward one. He had always been attracted to England, drawn by the magnetic pull of the Premier League. When his contract at Schalke expired, Cruickshank and his colleagues at Stoke City — hardly a destination of choice — made their move.It was a deal rooted in pragmatism. Stoke saw in him a player “who could come in and help us straightaway,” Cruickshank said, rather than someone who could be molded into a star. That assessment proved basically correct. His payoff in a struggling team was modest: five goals and five assists in 30 games. Respectable, but not spectacular. Stoke was relegated.It was at that point that Choupo-Moting signed for P.S.G. His Stoke teammates had not exactly seen it coming.Doubtless, it helped that his former coach at Mainz, Tuchel, was now in charge in Paris. “He knew me,” Choupo-Moting said. “He knew what I could do, he knew I could still improve, that I could help a big team.” Despite all those years of waiting, and now closer to his 30th birthday than his teenage promise, the striker felt exactly the same way.Looking back, the transition has not been an easy one. Choupo-Moting had spent a decade or so in the relative shadows; the lights shine brighter at P.S.G., and Bayern, than they do anywhere else. “You have big players in front of you, players with bigger names, players with a lot of quality,” he said. Both in Paris and more recently in Munich, he had to wait for his chance to come.When it did, he felt he belonged. “You hear people ask why this player is at that club or another player at another club,” he said. “But you have to remember: Big clubs have a lot of quality people observing players.“If a player gets there, they deserve to be there. After that, it is on you, on the player, to show your potential, to show you deserve to stay at that level. With time, the quality you have determines if you get the chance. Some players get that chance straightaway. Sometimes you have to work more. But if you work hard, success will come.”That is what Choupo-Moting has found. At both clubs, it was assumed he would be a deputy to the frontline stars. At both, he more than proved his own worth. He scored a 93rd-minute winner in a Champions League quarterfinal for P.S.G. Though he largely had to fill in around Robert Lewandowski at Bayern, his numbers were impressive, averaging nearly a goal in every 90 minutes of playing time in the Bundesliga last season, and closer to two goals per 90 in the Champions League. When Robert Lewandowski departed Bayern last summer, the club decided not to acquire a replacement, preferring instead to trust in Choupo-Moting.Choupo-Moting is surrounded by bigger names at Bayern. “If a player gets there, they deserve to be there,” he said. After that, he added, it is on the player “to show you deserve to stay.”Nacho Doce/Reuters“It is difficult, because when a striker scores goals, you have to be patient,” Choupo-Moting said of the two years he spent as Lewandowski’s understudy. When Lewandowski left for Barcelona, he said, “I knew I would have a more important role. I always knew I could help the team. I had no doubts. From the beginning, I always told the people upstairs, the bosses, that I knew I could.”That he has made it, at last, to where he always felt he belonged is testament not only to his perseverance, but perhaps to something of a shift in the game itself. Players of Choupo-Moting’s profile — technically smooth but physically imposing strikers — have always been rare, but as the role of the forward has changed in recent years, they have become rarer still.“Maybe there was a time, when Pep Guardiola was with Barcelona, teams wanted to play with a real, strong No. 9, and it worked out,” Choupo-Moting said. Since then, he wonders if the game has come full circle. “It has changed,” he added. “Nowadays it is more and more important to have a striker who is strong, good with the ball, has that combination.”Soccer itself, in other words, has moved toward Choupo-Moting. The most exclusive teams on the planet have, belatedly, seen what was there all along. They might have taken their time. It is fortunate, then, that Choupo-Moting never had a problem with being patient. More

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      Champions League Overcrowding Was a ‘Near Miss’ for UEFA

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      Independent investigators concluded it was only a “matter of chance” that the dangerous scenes at last year’s Liverpool-Real Madrid final did not lead to deaths.A monthslong independent investigation into the dangerous overcrowding that jeopardized the safety of thousands of fans at last year’s Champions League final in Paris has placed the blame squarely on European soccer’s governing body, which organized the game. That no lives were lost in the crushes outside the stadium gates, the investigators’ harshly critical report concluded, was only “a matter of chance.”The investigation, which included dozens of interviews and the review of hours of video shot by fans, concluded that senior officials of the governing body, UEFA, made numerous mistakes in preparations for the showcase final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, creating a situation in which planning flaws were neither detected nor quickly addressed, and then tried to shift responsibility onto fans for the congestion that had put their safety — and potentially their lives — at risk.While the report, which runs to more than 200 pages, assigned part of the responsibility for the chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France to various other bodies, including the French police and the French soccer federation, it said the event’s owner, UEFA, “bears primary responsibility for failures which almost led to disaster.”Liverpool fans bore the brunt of the danger as poor organization, in addition to local transport strikes, led to dangerous crushes in which thousands of fans were left penned inside fencing and with nowhere to go. The report said the danger was exacerbated by the indiscriminate and widespread use of tear gas by police officers before the game, the first Champions League final featuring full crowds after two years of pandemic restrictions.And the report left little doubt that the day could have turned deadly, drawing a direct comparison to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which policing mistakes produced a crush inside an English stadium that eventually led to the deaths of 97 people.“In the judgment of the panel,” the investigators wrote in comparing the two incidents, “the different outcomes were a matter of chance.”Yet, even as the scenes outside the Stade de France were still unfolding, investigators said, efforts were made to blame supporters for the chaos. Aware of the troubling scenes outside, UEFA announced the start of the game would be delayed because of the “late” arrival of supporters. “This claim was objectively untrue,” the report said.Later, French officials, including the interior minister Gérald Darmanin, blamed English fans for what Darmanin said was a “massive, industrial and organized fraud of fake tickets.” The report, commissioned by UEFA, found there was little evidence to back up the claim.UEFA and its most senior officials, notably Martin Kallen, the head of events, were singled out for overall responsibility for what one of the report’s main authors described as a “near miss.”UEFA blamed late-arriving fans when it delayed the kickoff of the final, a claim that the report found was “objectively untrue.”Getty Images“There was contributory fault from other stakeholders, but UEFA were at the wheel,” the report said.The publication of the final report came several months after it was anticipated; UEFA officials had first suggested it would be completed by September. The investigation involved hundreds of interviews and the analysis of footage, including many hours of video shot by supporters caught up in the crushes as they tried to enter the stadium. Dangerous bottlenecks, packed entrances and ramps, and tear gas employed by the police — sometimes sprayed indiscriminately at groups of supporters that included children and disabled fans — added to the chaos.“Unfortunately, the enthusiasm around the game rapidly turned into a real ‘near miss’ which was harmful to a significant number of fans from both clubs,” the report said. “This should never have happened at such an important sporting event, and it is unacceptable that it took place at the heart of the European continent.”The use of the term “near miss,” the panel said, was deliberate and agreed upon by all stakeholders interviewed to mean “an event almost turns into a mass-fatality catastrophe.”The report raised new concerns about security preparations for next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris, with its authors describing events around the Champions League final as a “wake-up call” for Olympic organizers. The panel said evidence collected from Michel Cadot, the French government official responsible for major sporting events, suggested there remained “a misconception about what actually happened and a complacency regarding what needs to change.”An earlier investigation into the Champions League final by two French parliamentary committees had also assigned blame to the authorities, labeling the dangerous overcrowding a “fiasco” caused by a combination of faulty coordination, bad planning and errors by the authorities responsible for organization and safety.The new report offers a fuller view of how the day unfolded, painting a picture of organizational chaos, with decisions taken by individuals without adequate knowledge of what was happening in real time. It said UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, was asked to make a call on delaying the kickoff even though he had not been in the match control room or in contact with security officials; he had been in a meeting with the King of Spain in a V.I.P. area.French policing came under scrutiny after the final. Paris will host next year’s Summer Olympics. Christophe Ena/Associated PressTaken in its totality, the report attempts to show how UEFA delegated or removed itself from any oversight of the security operation at the stadium to such an extent that it “marginalized” its own safety and security unit, headed by Zeljko Pavlica, a confidant of Ceferin’s.Fans arriving at the stadium were greeted by battalions of French riot police, dressed in protective clothing and with supplies that included batons, shields and pepper spray.“The police, unchallenged and accepted without question by other stakeholders, adopted a model aimed at a nonexistent threat from football hooligans,” the panel wrote, adding, “Ultimately the failures of this approach culminated in a policing operation that deployed tear gas and pepper spray: weaponry which has no place at a festival of football.”UEFA had faced criticism about the composition of its panel, with concerns raised about its neutrality after the appointment of a former education and sports minister in Portugal, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, as chairman. Brandão had previously worked closely with Tiago Craveiro, who was hired last year as a senior adviser to Ceferin.To counter those claims, UEFA added more members to its panel, including its former security head, Kenny Scott, and fan representatives, including Amanda Jacks, an official at the Britain-based Football Supporters Federation. Jacks informed Brandão on Monday that she had accepted an unspecified position at Liverpool and would be starting her new role in March.The report will make uncomfortable reading for UEFA, with some of its top officials now under scrutiny for their actions both on the day and in the planning for the biggest game on the European soccer calendar.“Senior officials at the top of UEFA allowed this to happen, even though the shortcomings of its model were widely known at senior management level,” the report said. More

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      Champions League or Super League? No One Wins.

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      Proponents of a European superleague do not lack for opposition. Those on the other side rarely have to explain why the status quo is worth saving.The feedback to the latest proposal for a European soccer superleague could not exactly be described as positive. On Thursday, the so-called sports development company that has spent much of the last two years pitching the idea produced its latest vision of what European soccer could — no, should — look like.The proposals were based on months of conversations with more than 50 clubs around Europe, according to the consultancy’s chief executive, Bernd Reichart. Those discussions, he said, had been boiled down into a set of 10 “principles,” most of them based on generic buzzwords like “sustainability” and “competitiveness” and “revenue distribution.”The central idea, though, was to replace the existing competitions run by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA — most notably the Champions League, which returns with its knockout stages this week — with a “multi-divisional” European competition comprising 60 to 80 teams and controlled, owned and operated by the clubs themselves.It did not, it is fair to say, go down well. Javier Tebas, the chief executive of La Liga and noted wallflower, described the superleague organizer as “a wolf disguising himself as a grandma.” The European Clubs Association called the latest ideas “distorted and misleading.” European Leagues, the umbrella body for the continent’s domestic tournaments, said that the game’s current model is “far from being broken and does not need to be fixed.”Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, railed on Twitter about the horrifying prospect of a competition dominated by a few big clubs.Susana Vera/ReutersThe prize for the best statement, though, went to the Football Supporters’ Association, a British organization representing fan interests. “The walking corpse that is the European Super League twitches again, with all the self-awareness one associates with a zombie,” its statement began. That was, as these things go, quite a strong start.Still, minor setbacks. Reichart, the Super League architect now flogging his company’s workshopped revisions, said the revised principles were intended as just a starting point, a way to begin a conversation with an even greater range of soccer’s “stakeholders.” It is, after all, one thing to knock down an idea. It is quite another to offer another in its place.In that spirit of openness and construction, then, here is another set of proposals, an alternative blueprint for soccer’s future that takes into account each of the newest superleague suggestions.1. MeritocracyThe same teams — four from England, two from Spain and one each from Germany and France — should make the Champions League quarterfinals every year. Entitled fans of these teams should complain that the group stages are “boring.” All other clubs should be locked out, in both a sporting and financial sense. Also the Europa League and Europa Conference League should happen.2. Domestic competitionsDomestic leagues should be won by the same teams, again and again, until those triumphs themselves become meaningless. England has special dispensation to have a maximum of three potential champions at any time.Common cause? The UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, with the Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly.Damir Sencar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images3. Stable resourcesThe big teams should take most of the money, and win all of the trophies. The Premier League should dominate the financial landscape, allowing every other domestic league to wither on the vine. Clubs should be encouraged to be as irresponsible as possible in order to cling on to its coattails.4. Player healthA variety of different organizations should insist on as many games as possible, paying only lip service to the idea of player health. The players must not, at any point, be consulted on this.5. Financial sustainabilityOwners should be welcomed with open arms, no matter how many people they have dismembered. Soccer should, effectively, become a competition decided by which investment banks steer which clients toward which clubs. Once in place, these princelings and private equity firms should be encouraged to spend as much as possible in the transfer market, forcing rivals to risk bankruptcy to keep up, distorting the idea of value and making their own clubs entirely dependent on their continued and limitless largesse.6. The world’s best competitionAll of the best players should play for the same handful of clubs, mainly in England. Whole leagues should be turned into informal feeder competitions. The most prestigious teams in those leagues should be converted into talent factories for clubs whose accidental wealth has made them lazy, and everyone else should be bought out as part of a network of teams that functions essentially as a holding pen for prospective transfers.7. fan experienceAny suggestion of mounting disinterest among fans should be put down to young people no longer having attention spans, rather than the fact that soccer’s existing structures have turned the vast majority of games into meaningless processions.8. Don’t forget the womenWe have to mention women’s soccer, though how low down the list it is indicates where it lies in our priorities. Women’s soccer should continue to be an afterthought, modeled entirely on the men’s game — regardless of whether the men’s game functions effectively or not — because who has the time to think about it more deeply than that?9. SolidarityAny team that slips in status should face financial ruin. The constituent clubs of the Champions League would, ideally, be indistinguishable from one year to the next. Teams relegated from the Premier League should be handed parachute payments that essentially ensure they return immediately, but everyone should continue to pretend there is a pyramid that allows for near-impossible organic growth.10. Respect for the lawTeams that break the flimsy financial rules we put in place should not be punished. Instead, craven organizations should let them off with piecemeal fines, subtly affirming that you can do what you want as long as you are rich enough. Clubs and leagues should claim to be self-policing, rejecting any oversight, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.These 10 alternative principles, of course, are the obstacle that a superleague — or anyone proposing radical change to the status quo — must overcome. Reichart has to explain his ideas. He has to put them into an action plan. He has to try to make them palatable. He has to persuade people to come over to his vision.Whether that vision has much merit is open to question. Its one concrete suggestion — a broad, league-based tournament sitting above the domestic competitions — is at best a matter of taste. Subjectively, a European superleague seems a downgrade on the Champions League’s current arrangement, but it is probably no worse than the so-called Swiss Model set to come into force next year. (It does, ironically, work far better as a paradigm for how to grow women’s soccer in Europe, even though it clearly cares little for that aspect of the game.)The problem with criticizing new proposals is that nobody ever has to outline the alternative. None of the alphabet soup of governing bodies and lobbying groups ever have to explain where they think the game is going; how they envision its future; how they plan to address the blindingly obvious flaws in the “model that is not broken and does not need to be fixed,” the ones that — as UEFA’s own financial report, released on Friday, noted — have made soccer increasingly reliant on capital injections from owners and turning a blind eye to mounting debts.The Super League’s ideas man, Bernd Reichart, with two of its biggest proponents, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid, left, and Joan Laporta of Barcelona.Mariscal/EPA, via ShutterstockSo long as they can avoid laying out their own plan for the future, the game’s current leaders can instead cast anyone proposing change as greedy and cynical and self-interested and hope that nobody points out the hypocrisy in those charges.They can rely on the fact that some fans yearn hopelessly for a return to a lost past, one in which the European Cup is a straight knockout tournament and Nottingham Forest is the champion of England, and that others, the ones whose teams either monopolize glory or happen to be in the Premier League, feel that things are working out quite nicely just as they are.They can depend on the understandable, and largely correct, suspicion of all fans that anyone suggesting something new has an ulterior motive, without ever being moved to wonder quite why all of these bodies are so furious at the very idea of their authority being challenged.There is no reason to believe that Reichart, and his consultancy, A22, have the best interests of European soccer at heart, just as there was no reason, in 2021, to buy into Florentino Pérez’s suggestion that he was trying to save anyone but Real Madrid.But, when taking up the cudgels, it is worth asking not only what your opponent wants but what your allies want, too. It is worth assessing the reality of what you are defending: a reality in which the gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe turns into a chasm, where the Champions League is a closed shop, where the rich have it all and still want more. That is what they are fighting for. They just never have to explain it. More