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      Chile Loses Appeal Seeking Ecuador’s Place in World Cup

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      A FIFA panel reaffirmed an earlier decision dismissing Chile’s claim that its rival fielded an ineligible player. Chile plans one last appeal.Chile failed Friday in its latest attempt to have its South American rival Ecuador thrown out of soccer’s World Cup, another setback in a high-stakes campaign that threatened to alter the field for the sport’s showcase championship only two months before the tournament’s opening match.An appeals committee at soccer’s governing body, FIFA, rejected Chile’s newest claim, agreeing with an earlier decision by a disciplinary panel to reject the contention that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player in several qualification matches. The FIFA appeals panel provided few details on how it reached its decision, though it said the fact that the player, Byron Castillo, holds permanent Ecuadorean citizenship as justification for siding with the original verdict in the case.Chile contends that Castillo, a 23-year-old defender, was not only born in Colombia but also that he is three years older than stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Chilean officials said they would make one final attempt to overturn the decision, and strip Ecuador of its place in the tournament, by appealing to the final arbiter of sports disputes, the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.The fight over the eligibility of Castillo, who plays professionally in Mexico, has for months generated uncertainty over Ecuador’s place at the World Cup, which opens in November. One of four qualifiers from South America, Ecuador is scheduled to face host Qatar in the tournament’s opening game on Nov. 20.Chile, which filed the appeal that also required Peru’s federation to make a submission, has for weeks fought a public battle to denounce Ecuador and Castillo. Under FIFA rules, fielding an ineligible player could result in a forfeit of any match in which that player took part.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.A New Flash Point: An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights with rainbow armbands during the World Cup could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.Ecuador finished fourth in South America’s qualifying competition, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup. But Chile had demanded that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo appeared, and that its opponents in those matches be granted three points per game. That outcome, Chilean officials had calculated, would rearrange the qualifying results in South America and lift Chile into fourth place, and into the World Cup, at Ecuador’s expense.To support its claim that Castillo should not have been allowed to play for Ecuador, Chilean officials scoured public records and social media posts and hired media consultants in Europe to keep attention focused on its case, and its claims. Chile’s federation, meanwhile, sent to FIFA registry documents, including birth certificates and other evidence — even paperwork that, it said, proved where and when Castillo was baptized.Only days before the appeal hearing, Chilean officials also secured an audio recording from a 2018 investigation in which Castillo appeared; in it, the player seemed to confirm details of his early life in Colombia. That recording was then published by news media.A FIFA disciplinary committee had rejected the claims against Castillo and Ecuador in June, but the organization’s rules allowed Chile to make its case anew to an appeals body. The hearing took place via video conference on Thursday but Castillo did not take part even though he had been required to join.“The footballing world heard a player who helped Ecuador qualify for the FIFA World Cup admit he was born in Colombia and that he gained an Ecuadorean passport using false information,” said Jorge Yungue, the general secretary of the Chilean soccer federation. “No wonder he refused to participate.”“What does it say about appeal committee that, confronted with all this, still they fail to act?” he added in a statement that confirmed Chile’s intention to go to CAS.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years. A wider investigation into player registrations in Ecuador looked into hundreds of cases and resulted in punishments for at least 75 youth players found to have falsified records. Wary of a mistake that might jeopardize Ecuador’s World Cup hopes this year, officials from its national soccer federation had held off on selecting Castillo for the senior national team until this year.Two years ago, in fact, the president of a special investigation commission convened by the federation appeared to suggest Castillo was Colombian, something that Chilean officials said they had substantiated. Ecuador’s federation finally selected Castillo for the national team after his nationality was recognized and formalized by judicial bodies in that country.For FIFA, the lingering case has been an additional burden as it grapples with ongoing concerns about the preparedness for Qatar to stage the World Cup. It got an assist from Ecuador in August, when the country’s soccer federation agreed to a request that its game be moved a day earlier so that Qatar could play in the tournament opener on a day free of other matches. More

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      The Hollywood Merger That Could Reshape Soccer’s Transfer Market

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      As two behemoths join forces against boutique agencies in the fight for control and commissions, some fear profits could come before players.LONDON — Everything about the deal seemed to connote vastness. Most obviously, there were the figures: The merger created a company with a combined value of an estimated $5 billion. There was the language, too. A “landmark,” according to Variety. “Seismic,” The Los Angeles Business Journal said.In this case, though, time is the best way to gauge scale. It was in September last year when word filtered out of Los Angeles that two of the world’s biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners, had decided to join forces, but it was not until June that the union was given the green light.The nine-month delay could be attributed to antitrust investigators combing through the deal, trying to establish whether the unified agency would wield too much power. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly cast an eye over the prospective merger.The central concern was the potential impact on Hollywood from having two of its most influential agencies become one market-dominating behemoth, and what that might mean for the industry. The Screen Actors Guild, for one, expressed concerns that its members might be “disadvantaged” by the deal.At no point did anyone feel the need to mention soccer. It is there, though, where the deal’s impact might be felt most keenly.Both CAA and ICM have, in the last three years, expanded into soccer. In 2019, CAA acquired Base Soccer, one of Britain’s biggest sports agencies, with more than 300 professional clients. A year later, ICM completed a deal to buy the even-bigger Stellar Group, in what was thought to be the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history.For years, Base and Stellar have been powerhouses — Stellar, the largest agency in the sport, represents more than 800 clients — but they have also been rivals, and not always cordial ones. But as soon as the Justice Department signed off on CAA’s acquisition of ICM, they became teammates.That has ramifications, of course, for the firms, the agents who staff them and the players whom they call clients — including stars like Gareth Bale, Jack Grealish and Eduardo Camavinga. But the scale of the combined venture may also have a profound effect on the delicate power balance in the fraught, lucrative player trading business which acts as the financial engine for the most popular sport in the world.Poetic LicenseErkut Sogut, an experienced agent, has written a novel about the sometimes sordid industry in which he works.Gualter Fatia/Getty ImagesThere is one element of Erkut Sogut’s debut novel that, he admits, belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. Soccer is not, he wants to emphasize, actually controlled by a cabal of superagents who will resort to anything — sabotage, match-fixing, kidnapping, murder — to keep the game and its riches in their vise.Everything else, he maintains, is real. More than that, in fact: The plot of his book, “Deadline,” a thriller set against the backdrop of soccer’s transfer market, is drawn from firsthand experience. Sogut has spent 15 years as an agent, and he is best known for his longstanding association with Mesut Özil, the onetime Arsenal, Real Madrid and Germany playmaker. It is a world, he said, that does not demand a great deal of poetic license.The portrait of the industry he paints is not a flattering one. His characters are, by and large, hucksters and vultures, charlatans and sharks, operating in a sport rife with corruption and addled with cronyism. It is, though, intrinsically familiar: Soccer has grown accustomed to the depiction of agents as puppet masters in sharp suits and designer sunglasses, wielding ultimate influence over the fates of players and teams.That image, though, the one that suffuses Sogut’s novel, does not quite capture the reality of the industry as it stands now. The likes of Jorge Mendes — consigliere to Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho — may be cast as rainmakers possessed of sufficient clout to bend the whole market to their will, but they increasingly seem like the exception, rather than the rule. The world of agents is in convulsion, soccer’s latest battleground between new money and old hands.Though FIFA’s controversial decision, in 2015, to deregulate the industry opened the doors to any family member or friend who wanted to sign up to represent a player — a move that turned a chaotic and irrevocably murky world into a “complete free-for-all,” as one agent put it — the most significant new entrants in recent years have not been cowboy operators hoping to make a quick buck but established corporations panning for new fortunes.That market now includes not only CAA — which first entered soccer by handling the commercial deals of Mendes’s stable of stars — and ICM, but also the California-based sports agency Wasserman. The latter established a beachhead in English soccer in 2006, but has expanded rapidly in the last two years, acquiring another British agency, Key Sports, and the Spanish firm Top Value, as well as opening a German office.The appeal is no mystery. According to FIFA, agents and intermediaries made more than $500 million in commissions last year alone. In 117 deals, those paydays ran to more than $1 million. Even that seems like small change in comparison to, say, the deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City this summer: His representatives are reported to have earned somewhere in the region of $40 million simply for delivering his signature.Those sorts of figures are difficult to resist. “Football is the No. 1 sport in the world,” said Jonathan Barnett, a co-founder of Stellar. “If you want to be a major sports agency, you have to be involved.”The deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City paid off handsomely for him and his representatives.Craig Brough/ReutersThe Benefits of ScalePlenty of people have offered to buy Andy Evans’s business in the last few years. There have been inquiries from other soccer agencies and from firms that have never worked in soccer. There have been talks with several companies in Britain and at least one from the United States. None of the approaches, in Evans’s view, have felt quite right.Sometimes the finances have not added up. Sometimes Evans has not been sold on exactly what a new owner had planned for World in Motion, the agency he founded a quarter century ago. Mostly, though, he has not been inclined to sell at all. “I’ve been running it for a long time,” Evans said. “I’m not especially inclined to not run it.”The client list he has established is an impressive one — it includes Aaron Ramsdale, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and the England defender Conor Coady — but Evans has never had any desire to operate at the sort of scale of Base and Stellar. That was a conscious choice: He has long believed there was an advantage in being a David.He is conscious, though, that the arrival of the corporations, and in particular the merger between CAA and ICM, could start to alter that equation.Whenever he pitches a prospective client, Evans finds that the first question is always the same. “It is always, ‘Who else do you represent?’” he said. “Players want to know that more than anything else. They know that if you don’t know anyone, you can’t get anything done. People just wouldn’t pick up the phone.”That gives the monolith that has emerged from the union of CAA and ICM — and, as a result, between Base and Stellar — an almost unassailable advantage. Neither firm expects to lose any soccer agents as a result of the merger; the intention is to grow the client list rather than shrink it. The answer to the question “Who else do you represent?” might as well be “everyone.”“It has been a huge advantage in terms of commercial, marketing, organization,” Barnett said earlier this year, before the merger had been approved by the Justice Department, but he was adamant that even becoming part of ICM had been “fantastic” for both his staff and his clients. The impact of joining forces with CAA could be only greater still.Heavy LiftingMichael Yormark in 2013. He joined Roc Nation a year later.Omar Vega/Invision/APMichael Yormark, with his cut-glass jaw and his close-cropped hair, does not seem the sort to be easily intimidated. A veteran agent, he has spent the last six years steering the expansion of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label into international sports, painstakingly building out a roster of clients that started, by accident, with Jérôme Boateng and has since grown to include the Belgian star Romelu Lukaku and the Chelsea defender Reece James.Yormark might then have been expected to greet the prospect of a colossal new rival on his turf with something sandwiched between reluctance and dread. Instead, in an interview at Roc’s London headquarters, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “That deal is great for us,” he said.His logic is straightforward. Roc Nation’s pitch to prospective clients is based on what Yormark described as a “360-degree service,” one that focuses as much, or more, on meeting their aspirations away from the field than on negotiating new contracts or arranging money-spinning transfers. The label keeps its client list small by design.“The heavy lifting is in helping build a brand, a platform, whatever they want to do,” Yormark said. That is not possible, his company contends, with a client list numbering in the hundreds. “It would be hard to do what we do with 150 clients,” said Alan Redmond, Roc Nation’s head of football. “It would be impossible if we had 400.”Inside CAA, those concerns are airily dismissed. Executives believe that the company’s scale belies its flexibility. The example often cited is the N.B.A. player Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans.Williamson, when selecting his representation, made clear that he wanted a “boutique” feel, precisely the kind of treatment that Roc Nation has made its hallmark. To win his signature, CAA pivoted. Williamson and his family, one CAA executive said, have two points of contact at the agency, no more. The fact that those representatives are merely a tiny part of a giant company is hidden from view.There are others, though, who worry that the type of representation players might receive is far from the most significant consequence of the merger.While the arrival of corporations — with shareholders and workplace cultures and public images to worry about — may hint at an encroaching professionalization in what has traditionally been the kind of lawless industry Sogut’s novel depicts, it also exposes players to the possibility that their futures will be determined by a greater need to bolster a parent company’s bottom line.“If you have an agent who is under pressure to move you early because it is the best thing for the agency, it can compromise a career,” as one veteran agent put it.That has always been a risk for players, of course. They have always been vulnerable to their careers being shaped by their agents’ interests outweighing their own. It is that tension that makes the world of agency such a rich, compelling setting for a thriller, for example. There have always been sharks in the water. The only thing that has changed is the size of the fish. More

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      At Ajax, the Future Is Always Now

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      Ajax sold the bulk of its Champions League-ready squad over the summer and never looked back. It can’t afford to.THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — As a rule, Arco Gnocchi regards himself as too old to buy a replica jersey with his favorite Ajax player’s name emblazoned across the back. Such displays of hero worship, he feels, are not entirely becoming of a person ticking through their early 40s. “Generally,” he said, “it’s for kids.”This summer, though, for the first time in roughly a decade, Gnocchi made an exception. The jersey he bought for the new season bears the No. 9 and, above it, the surname of Brian Brobbey, Ajax’s bullish, bustling 20-year-old forward. Brobbey struck him as the perfect choice. “He exemplifies everything Ajax embodies at the moment,” he said.That includes the fact that, in a couple of years at most, Gnocchi expects Brobbey to render his jersey obsolete. Brobbey has already left Ajax once — as a teenager, for an unhappy spell at the German club RB Leipzig — and, if things go to plan, he will leave again soon enough. “He is massively talented,” Gnocchi said. “He’ll be gone by the time he’s 23.”That is how business has worked at Ajax for as long as anyone can remember. It has long been a place players come from, perhaps the most prolific, reliable, high-caliber talent factory in world soccer. Ajax has seen Johan Cruyff and Marco van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp and Wesley Sneijder and Frenkie de Jong and countless others come. And, for half a century, it has watched them all go, too.In that sense, this summer was no different. The transfer window began with Edwin van der Sar, the club’s former goalkeeper who is now its chief executive, fondly bidding farewell to the goalkeeper André Onana — who departed for Inter Milan — and the right back Noussair Mazraoui, who was destined for Bayern Munich. He did not even seem especially fazed by the prospective loss of Ryan Gravenberch, a gifted 20-year-old midfielder, who soon followed Mazraoui to Munich. “He has a wish to leave,” van der Sar said.His serenity was no surprise. Ajax does not operate under any illusions. It expects players to leave. It budgets for it, plans for it and to some extent relies on it. “It’s a steppingstone team,” said Gnocchi, host of the “Pak Schaal” podcast, the most popular Ajax podcast in the Netherlands. “That can be difficult to accept, but if we’re a steppingstone team, at least we’re the best steppingstone team.”By the end of August, though, the mood among the club’s hierarchy had shifted. The departures had not stopped with Mazraoui, Onana and Gravenberch. Sébastien Haller, the focal point of Ajax’s forward line, had gone to Borussia Dortmund. The defender Perr Schuurs had joined Torino in Italy. Nicolàs Tagliafico, the long-serving left back, had left for Lyon.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockMatteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockRyan Gravenberch, top left, and Noussair Mazraoui went to Bayern Munich, and goalkeeper André Onana now backstops Inter Milan. Antony’s move to Manchester United, though, extracted a higher price.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe two that hurt, though, were Antony — a vibrant, virtuoso Brazilian wing — and Lisandro Martínez, a gritty, combative Argentine defender, an undoubted fan favorite. “He’s the sort of player who plays with his teeth bared,” said Marcel Stephan, a writer who has been watching Ajax since the late 1970s. Both Antony and Martínez ended up at Manchester United, where they were reunited with the other significant figure Ajax had lost this summer: Coach Erik ten Hag.They were not, it is safe to say, sent on their way with the club’s best wishes. Antony had to refused to train to force his move — and even then, Ajax held out sufficiently to force United to pay $101 million for his signature — while Martínez reportedly confronted the sporting director Gerry Hamstra over the club’s perceived unwillingness to let him leave.Even as Antony’s departure loomed, ten Hag’s replacement as coach, Alfred Schreuder, had already made clear that he felt there had been too much change. “We’ve already let a lot of players go,” he said as he faced up to the prospect of losing the Brazilian. “We want to keep a strong squad. New players have arrived, and we have told them what our plans are.”The solace, for the club, is obvious. Ajax’s annual budget stands in the region of $170 million. The sales of Martínez and Antony alone generated around $150 million. That money allowed Ajax not only to break the Dutch transfer record to sign Steven Bergwijn from Tottenham, but to afford a wage bill that far outstrips any of its domestic rivals. That financial advantage has helped Ajax win every Eredivisie title that was awarded since 2019.Every Ajax squad is a calculated mix of past, present and future. The current version opened its Champions League campaign with a 4-0 win over Rangers last week. On Tuesday, it will visit Liverpool.Piroschka Van De Wouw/ReutersThe impact on Ajax’s fans is more complex, an almost perfect distillation of all the benefits, blessings, imbalances and iniquities of modern soccer; it is, indeed, hard to think of a club that has been more exposed to the consequences of the sport’s willing obeisance to a ruthless free market.There is, of course, a sadness, an awareness that — as Gnocchi put it — Ajax’s “success is also its downfall,” a knowledge that the better it is at producing players, the more certain it is that those players will leave.There is a sense of if only, too: if only Gravenberch could have played alongside de Jong, rather than instead of him; if only Antony had stayed one more year; if only the club was not engaged in what is, inherently, a Sisyphean task. “It is always painful when a player leaves,” said Marjan Olfers, a professor of sport and law at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former member of Ajax’s supervisory board. “You cannot build a team for five years. You always have to start again.”Occasionally, perhaps increasingly, there are grumbles. “Anyone who remembers the 2000s and the 2010s is thankful for what we have now,” said Gnocchi, referring to a period when Ajax spent fortunes on mediocrities. “We’re very appreciative of good business, because we know it is possible to buy rubbish in return. But there are fans who feel the club is starting to feel more like a trading company than a soccer team.”And, certainly, there is plenty of resignation. “We’re used to it,” Stephan said. At 58, he said, after a half-century of following the team, the constant change is nothing new.Menno Pot, author of “The New Ajax,” a book that examined the club’s transformation in recent years, noted that — until relatively recently — any player leaving the club would be granted an emotional farewell. “We’d let off fireworks, fan groups would present players with presents,” he said. “We figured out a while ago there was no need. The players were going to leave. These are short-term relationships.”That, more than anything else, is what has been lost: the connection to Ajax’s role as a club that “educates young players, rather than acquires them,” as Olfers put it. Ajax fans, in general, “find it harder to identify with individual players,” she said. “It is more about the club.”Brian Brobbey: 20 years old, Amsterdam-reared and coming soon to a transfer rumor mill near you.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse, via Anp/Afp Via Getty ImagesGnocchi might have gone for Brobbey on the back of his jersey, but he believes the most popular shirt in the stands at Ajax’s stadium is not that of a budding homegrown superstar but Dusan Tadic, the club’s veteran playmaker. Tadic is 33 now. He is contracted to the club until he is 36. He is that rarest of things: a safe bet.But there is also a pride in knowing that Ajax is producing, in vast quantities, a raw material that the world’s richest clubs crave. “There is a beauty to it,” Pot said. There is hope, too, in great abundance, a confidence that tomorrow will be no worse than today, and might even be better.Most crucially, there is a sense of identity. The names on the jerseys may be fleeting, but the club itself stands for something that it once feared it had lost forever. That, more than anything, gives fans something to cling on to when everything else is in permanent flux.“I think, after the Bosman ruling in 1995, Ajax went through an identity crisis,” Pot said. “We did not know how to be Ajax any more. You heard it said that we could never compete in Europe again, that winning the Champions League just was not possible. And people were mostly OK with that.“But over the last few years, they have found the answer to that question. They have figured out how to be Ajax in the modern world. We have to rebuild completely every three years, and every once in a while we get a truly great team, one that could just go all the way. And when we do, it is something that is completely our own.”Peter Dejong/Associated Press More

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      In Premier League, Crisis Is a Constant

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      Change at Chelsea. A loss at Liverpool. Chaos is part and parcel of the Premier League story line. But it doesn’t have to be that way.Chelsea managed to cycle through it all in nine hours, give or take. First, bright and early on Wednesday, came the announcement that the club’s owners had decided to dispense with the services of Manager Thomas Tuchel, after a reign encompassing a mere 19 months and one measly Champions League title.The window for shock was a relatively brief one. Chelsea had only just concluded a summer of spending unlike anything the Premier League had ever seen — two months of shock and awe and photos of Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling chairman and interim sporting director — most of it seemingly conducted in accordance with Tuchel’s wishes.But no matter: An explanation emerged swiftly, centered on the desire of Boehly and the rest of his consortium to change the culture at Chelsea and their belief that Tuchel was not the right figurehead for that shift. Quite what form that new culture will take, and quite why the 49-year-old Tuchel could not be part of it, has not been adequately explained, at least not yet.Still, there was no time for questions. Graham Potter, the impressive coach of Brighton, had been installed as favorite to succeed Tuchel by lunchtime on Wednesday. Chelsea had been in touch with his current employer by dinner. He had “verbally agreed” to take the job — as opposed to agreeing by interpretive dance, presumably — by the time darkness fell.Welcome to the Thunderdome, Graham Potter. Rui Vieira/Associated PressAnd just like that, Chelsea’s crisis — one that had been difficult to discern, from the outside, before Tuchel was dismissed, and one that seemed to be entirely of its own making — had come and gone. Just like nature, though, soccer abhors a vacuum.So it was fortunate, in many ways, that by 8:46 p.m. Italian time, Liverpool had stepped forward to produce arguably the worst Champions League performance of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. Within 45 seconds of kickoff in Naples, Napoli had broken Liverpool’s holographic back line and hit the post. It went, it is fair to say, downhill from there.By the time the game ended, Liverpool had officially occupied the chaos space so recently vacated by Chelsea. Klopp, the coach who guided the club to two trophies — and a Champions League final — barely four months ago, was asked in his news media conference after the game if he was worried about being fired.Even by the standards of the Premier League, this was pretty good going: not just one major team in crisis, but two, and both of them on the same day. It is only a couple of weeks since Manchester United was afforded that status, a consequence of Erik ten Hag’s losing his first two games as coach, but that already seems to belong to the dim and distant past. Ten Hag’s stock is soaring: He has collected two more points than Tuchel, and three more than Klopp.Napoli 4, Liverpool 1: a single defeat, or an existential crisis?Ciro De Luca/ReutersIt is not ridiculous, of course, to suggest that both Chelsea and Liverpool have disappointed a little this season. Both have stuttered, in the Premier League and the Champions League alike. Both have seemed to be less than the sum of their parts. Both are not meeting the standard they set for themselves.Analyzing and interrogating why that might be is a legitimate exercise. Tuchel had seemed a little frostier, a little more downbeat than habitual in recent weeks; he seemed to chastise his team on a fortnightly basis in what proved to be the last couple of months of his tenure at Stamford Bridge. Rarely, if ever, did he indicate that he knew quite what was wrong, or how to fix it.That is the challenge facing Klopp, too. Liverpool, ordinarily so dogged and so fearsome, has looked distinctly fatigued through the opening weeks of the season. It has stirred itself only in patches, succumbing for vast periods of most of its games to a form of stagnant ennui, as if the players were running on fumes after six exacting years under Klopp.In those circumstances, it is in the nature of the world’s biggest teams that the scrutiny should be intense. That, in essence, is the bargain. Chelsea, like Liverpool and Manchester United, has been complicit in creating a sporting ecosystem in which it is expected to win all of its games, in which almost any defeat is unacceptable. The pressure, the hyperbole, when it comes, is the flip side of the bargain.And yet it was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool was humbled in Naples, it is true, but it was still only the second defeat of the club’s season, and only its fourth of the calendar year. Chelsea had stumbled against Leeds and Southampton, but it is only five points adrift of Arsenal, the Premier League leader. It would be a stretch to suggest that, for either team, all is lost.Part of that rush to judgment can be attributed — point your fingers here — to the news media, to the breathless coverage of the major powers of the Premier League, to the desperate need to fill the bottomless digital maw, to the talking-point culture that has slowly consumed soccer (and then everything else) in the past two decades.Marcus Rashford and United beat first-place Arsenal on Sunday. Problems solved?Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPartly, too, it is because these clubs expect the best and have paid handsomely for it. Chelsea invested $300 million on players this summer and happily would have spent more if possible. Liverpool spends more on the salaries of its current squad than all but three or four teams in the world, one of which is Manchester United. Those fortunes are paid out, essentially, to ward off things like teething problems and dips in form. That, again, is the deal.And, partly, it is because of the game that these superclubs have created: one in which the default assumption, now, is that the team that claims the Premier League title will do so with an almost impossible points tally, in a league in which Manchester City continues to roll on, seemingly unstoppable, Erling Haaland trampling opponents underfoot, and everyone else knows that losing any ground at all now means spending the season treading water, waiting for a chance to start again. There is a fragility, a desperation, an awareness that there is no room for error.It is difficult, though, to believe that any of this is healthy: not for the players and coaches commanded to maintain almost superhuman standards or risk being branded failures and not for the fans, always awaiting the moment the gloom descends.Most of all, it is not in the best interests of the game as a whole, which increasingly seems to exist on a bloodthirsty knife-edge, eagerly awaiting its next victim, the next chance to cry crisis, to dissemble its latest false idol, knowing full well that it will not have to wait very long at all.The Romance BusinessCeltic Park on Tuesday.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor an hour, Celtic Park was the stage of one of the great Champions League nights. It bubbled and simmered and, as Real Madrid struggled to contain Celtic’s delicately cultivated spirit of adventure, it boiled and roared. Callum McGregor hit the post, and for a moment the noise was such that even the reigning European champion struggled to regain its composure.The Champions League would be diminished beyond recognition without these occasions, of course. There is something visceral, something compelling about the precise sound generated inside one of Europe’s great stadiums — Celtic Park and Ibrox in Glasgow, Napoli’s Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, the Velodrome in Marseille — when one of the continent’s self-appointed elites rolls into town.It is important to note, though, that the root of all the son et lumiere that makes those nights so special is an inequality so deeply entrenched that it can make Celtic — one of the world’s great clubs — feel like an impossible underdog, as if it were a part-time outfit made up of cobblers and dental hygienists on an unexpected cup run.It is an inequality that has, to a large extent, been created and intensified by the Champions League itself, as it funnels more and more money to fewer and fewer clubs. As stirring, as emotive as those games can be, they come with a grim irony, too: At least part of the appeal of the Champions League can be traced to its ability to take the consequences of imbalance and turn it into spectacle.How to Solve a Problem Like the Premier LeagueToni Kroos, at least, is not worried.“The television money has been significantly higher in England for years,” Kroos, a Real Madrid midfielder, said this week, when asked about the yawning chasm between the spending of the Premier League’s clubs and everyone else. “It hasn’t resulted in English teams’ winning everything.” Europe’s three club competitions last season, as he pointed out, were won by teams that were conspicuously not English.Kroos is as articulate and thoughtful a player as they come — although he does harbor a worrying admiration for the music of Robbie Williams, a personal stain that cannot be disregarded — but his interpretation on this matter is a little glib. The contrast between the financial strength of the Premier League and the fragility of its rivals is a cause for concern.It is something, though, that can be addressed, should UEFA find the will or the conviction to do so. There is nothing it can do, of course, about the amount of money that flows into the Premier League, either from television networks or from external investors, be they private equity firms or nation states.But it can regulate the way that money can be spent. It has already imposed limits on the number of players a club can send out on loan. It could also increase the number of locally reared players each team must name in its squad or the number of players under a certain age. It could investigate the idea of regionalized leagues, too, to help decrease the competitive imbalance.It should, though, do something. Because the alternative is that the major clubs of continental Europe will determine that the only solution — the only way to try to keep pace — is to cut UEFA, and their national leagues, out of the equation altogether.CorrespondenceAs the adage has it, if there is one thing journalists like talking about — apart from other journalists, behind their backs — it is journalism itself. The craft. The art. The mission. The diminished expense accounts. Thanks, then, to Tim Lott for affording me the opportunity to clear my throat.“Reading all the coverage of Chelsea, I’m struck by the narrative that (I suppose) Todd Boehly and his folks are selling,” he wrote. “There are certain themes common in all stories: Thomas Tuchel’s detachment behind the scenes, a minor spat over Cristiano Ronaldo, so many attackers wanting out.“This has got me wondering about the sausage-making: How does everyone end up with mostly the same story? And why hasn’t anyone been able to report it beforehand?”The universal symbol of a club in crisis: the corner flag photo.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockTim is right: There are times at which various lines are pushed by various interested parties, all of them effectively competing to make their version of the truth the one that takes hold (but none of them, for the most part, are actually willing to put their name to it). The journalist’s job, on those occasions, is to pick through the morass, to find the common themes, to try to work out what is most cogent.Tuchel’s dismissal is a little different. The reason most of the reporting covers similar ground this time is because — as far as my own investigation could gather — that is, largely, what happened. That it might have been reported earlier is a valid point, but there is a tendency, in soccer as in so much else, to reverse-engineer explanations, to determine cause only when consequence is clear.We had an anonymous question, too, on one of the finer points of transfer reporting. “You mention that Erling Haaland’s true cost was approximately $100 million,” the Mystery Correspondent wrote. “Does this mean the published fees are regularly less than the actual cost?”The answer to this is: kind of. As a rule, the fee that is reported has always been the amount the buying club pays the selling club. Increasingly, though, that convention seems inadequate, not just because salary is often the bulk of the cost to the purchaser, but because — as the Haaland deal illustrates nicely — a cheaper price can mean a higher cut goes to the agent(s). It is, perhaps, time to discuss transfers in terms of their total cost, rather than simply focusing on one aspect.A great point, meanwhile, from Tom Karsay. “Maybe it should be pointed out that the money Manchester United [and everyone else] spent doesn’t come from owners’ pockets,” he wrote. “It comes from the advertising revenues of the television networks, which comes from our labor, the sweat of our brows. Maybe fans, keeping that in mind, would be less likely to cheer new acquisitions.” More

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      The Problem With Chelsea (Hint: It May Not Be the Manager)

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      Six days after spending more in a single transfer window than any club in history, Chelsea’s new owners fired the team’s coach, Thomas Tuchel. Now what?The caveat, right from the start, was experience. The consortium, fronted by Todd Boehly and bankrolled by the private equity firm Clearlake, had the money. That much was plain. They had, after all, paid $2.8 billion to buy Chelsea in a frantic, opaque auction, making it the most expensive acquisition in the history of sports.They had expertise in the business, too, or some form of it: Neither Boehly nor Mark Walter, a comparatively late addition to the ownership group, was a sporting neophyte. Both own a slice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that investment, in recent years, has proved a relatively adroit one.No, the only thing that could be held against the new owners, the only thing that gave Chelsea’s fans pause for thought as they considered what a post-Roman Abramovich future might bring, was that none of them — Boehly, Clearlake, Walter or Hansjorg Wyss, the octogenarian Swiss billionaire who had brought the group together — knew the first thing about English soccer.Three months in, those doubts have been overcome. Scarcely 100 days have elapsed since the group took official control of Chelsea. In that time, it lavished more than $300 million on new signings — more than any club had ever spent in a single transfer window — and then, with the ink still drying on the last couple of contracts, decided to fire its manager only a half-dozen games into the season.If they carry on like this, Chelsea’s new owners will fit into the Premier League’s hyperbolic soap opera just fine.Todd Boehly and his partners have been remaking Chelsea all summer. Change has not been cheap.David Cliff/Associated PressFrom the outside, Chelsea’s decision to part company with Thomas Tuchel in the early hours of Wednesday felt distinctly, comfortingly familiar. The team had lost the previous evening in its opening Champions League engagement against Dinamo Zagreb. That defeat came on the back of a stuttering start to the Premier League campaign that has left Chelsea in sixth, just 5 points behind first-place Arsenal but already smarting from losses to Leeds United and Southampton.This was, then, the new Chelsea behaving precisely as the old Chelsea always had, with a short-termism so ruthless it almost qualified as proud. Spending an unimaginable sum of money to furnish a manager with the team he desired only to dismiss the manager at the first hint of trouble? Roman would be proud.Internally, the picture was a little more nuanced. Tuchel’s brief reign — he was in place for only 19 months — had hit its peak early, in the uncanny valley of lockdown soccer, when he took a team that had been struggling to qualify for the Champions League under his predecessor, Frank Lampard, and turned it into the champion of Europe in four months. Rarely, if ever, has a coach had such an immediate, spectacular effect.The 49-year-old Tuchel, though, failed to build on that starburst. He was presented, a year ago, with the $111 million signing of Romelu Lukaku, theoretically the player who could catapult Chelsea to a first Premier League title since 2017. It did not quite work out like that. Lukaku was allowed to leave the club this summer on loan.Though Tuchel steered the team to two domestic cup finals in his first full campaign — losing both on penalties against Liverpool — and handled with poise and dignity the geopolitical storm that engulfed the club in the wake of the British government’s decision to sanction Abramovich, Chelsea’s season petered out, with the German’s side eventually finishing 19 points behind Manchester City.Tuchel in better days. Last year.Susana Vera/Pool Via ReutersThat malaise had not gone unnoticed by the club’s newly installed hierarchy. Nor had Tuchel’s demeanor over the summer, which grew more detached, more disaffected with every passing week.In July, he bemoaned that his players’ “level of commitment, physically and mentally,” was insufficient. By August, he described them as “not tough enough.” On Tuesday, after losing in Zagreb, that had metastasized into admitting that “everything was missing” from his team’s performance.Those public complaints betrayed a growing unease in private. Tuchel had come to be known at Chelsea as a gregarious, warm, affable sort — at a club with plenty of managers to compare him to, he fared well — but a number of players felt he had become more truculent, more distant in recent months, particularly with those he did not consider his most reliable lieutenants.Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, noticed the same thing. As they attempted to retool the squad this summer, they had sought Tuchel’s counsel frequently, asking the manager — in the absence of a technical director — to direct them to his preferred targets.That was not a role that Tuchel relished particularly; he was far happier to be left alone to coach. As the transfer window gathered pace, Boehly and Eghbali found that Tuchel had a tendency to prove difficult to contact at critical junctures. Whatever relationship they had been able to establish in their few weeks working together began to fracture and fray.Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest of Chelsea’s players, new and old, opened the Champions League with a loss on Tuesday.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAs the relatively curt statement released by the club to announce his departure suggested, Boehly and Eghbali did not feel they had acted rashly. They had, instead, reached the decision to part company with Tuchel even before defeat in Zagreb. The travails of the early part of the season were supporting evidence for their conclusion, rather than the thrust of their case.For all the mitigating circumstances, though — and while the owners have been swift to identify Graham Potter, the intelligent, affable and talented Brighton manager, as Tuchel’s likely replacement — it does feel as if his dismissal fits a pattern.Boehly has taken on the role of interim sporting director with vigor and determination. Those at the club have been stunned by his work ethic, and he has made an effort to establish a rapport with many of the game’s most influential agents, inviting some of them to watch games from his box at the club’s stadium.In some cases, that has borne fruit. Chelsea spent a lot of money this summer, but it spent much of it well. Wesley Fofana may have been expensive, but he is also one of the most promising defenders in world soccer. Raheem Sterling has for years been one of the Premier League’s most devastating attacking players.The deals that did not come off tell a story too, though. There was the offer for Romeo Lavia, a player who had made just a handful of appearances for Southampton since moving from Manchester City in July; Chelsea offered to pay at least double what he had cost in August.Then there was an attempt to sign Edson Álvarez, a Mexican midfielder at the Dutch club Ajax, which bubbled to the surface as the transfer window was closing. The approach came so late, in fact, that Ajax was able to use it as proof that Chelsea was not spending to any plan, but rather for the sake of it — an argument that worked sufficiently well for Álvarez to decide to remain in Amsterdam.As they reached the (entirely artificial) watershed of their 100th day in charge of the club, Boehly and Eghbali reportedly spent considerable time contemplating the sort of culture they wanted to establish at Chelsea.They wanted to shift away from the urgency and the uncertainty of the Abramovich years and build something more sustainable, they decided, and they felt that Tuchel was not the right sort of figure to oversee that change. He was better suited, they determined, to the old ways, when nothing lasted forever, and Chelsea’s manager lived each day as if it could be the last.And yet here we are: Six games into the season, six days after the end of the transfer window, Chelsea has fired its manager on the back of a few poor performances and because of rumblings of discontent among the playing squad. Perhaps this will be the last hurrah of the old Chelsea, the final break with the past. Or perhaps a culture, once embedded, is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money and ambition you have. More

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      Sacramento Republic in U.S. Open Cup Final Against Orlando City

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      Deep runs in the competition are rare for clubs from outside Major League Soccer. But Sacramento already knocked off three M.L.S. teams, and Orlando City looms on Wednesday.Professional soccer teams from cities like Omaha, Richmond or Detroit get only one chance a year to take their shots at opponents from America’s top league, Major League Soccer. That comes in the U.S. Open Cup, a competition for clubs at all levels that dates to 1913.M.L.S. teams have dominated the Cup since they first entered the competition after their league’s formation in 1996. Only the Rochester Rhinos, in 1998, have lifted the trophy as a lower-league team since then, and in the two decades since only one team from outside M.L.S., the Charleston Battery in 2008, had made the final.This year, Sacramento Republic, a team in the second-tier United Soccer League, has knocked off three straight M.L.S. teams in the Open Cup to advance to the final in Orlando, where it will have a chance to match Rochester by beating Orlando City on Wednesday night.“There is a gap, there’s no getting away from that,” said Coach Mark Briggs of Sacramento. “Over the course of a 35-game season, that gap would be shown pretty well. But that gap could shrink on a one-off occasion.”Coach Mark Briggs has led Sacramento to three wins over M.L.S. teams in the Cup run.Josh Pierce / Republic FCWe In the case of Sacramento, one-off wasn’t enough.After three early-round wins, Sacramento found itself in the round of 16 in May, hosting the San Jose Earthquakes, an M.L.S. team with a larger squad, more expensive players and far more resources. Republic beat San Jose, 2-0, then topped the Los Angeles Galaxy away from home as well, 2-1, in June. The Republic edged Sporting Kansas City on penalty kicks in July in the semifinals.The run has offered the team’s players, used to competing in the second-tier U.S.L., chance after chance to show how they measure up against a league that is, in most other respects, walled off to them. Those are chances they have missed for two years after the 2020 and 2021 Cups were canceled by the pandemic.“It’s a good opportunity to showcase your skills against some higher-level talent, some bigger teams,” said Conor Donovan, a Sacramento central defender. “It’s an opportunity that a lot of U.S.L. players and lower-division teams relish.”Maalique Foster, a Sacramento wing, said the divide that separates the leagues can serve as a powerful motivator. “You have to give it your all to show you deserve to be there,” he said. “I always have to be better than the guys who think they are better than me, or think that I don’t deserve to be there.”Sacramento’s home semifinal in July against Sporting Kansas City went 120 minutes without a goal before it was decided in a penalty-kick shootout.With both teams perfect, Foster stepped up for the fourth penalty for Sacramento. Rather than blasting the ball left or right, he delicately chipped the ball in the center, a shot known as a panenka, as Kansas City goalkeeper John Pulskamp helplessly dived to his right.Foster said that he had decided to try the panenka after Sporting’s William Agada had an earlier penalty saved, but then was awarded a retake that he made and celebrated.“That was the one penalty I couldn’t watch,” said Briggs, the Sacramento coach. “I had a feeling that he would try to do something clever. Fair play to him for making it. I trusted Maalique to score. I just didn’t know what he was going to do with it.”Foster celebrated with a back flip — a direct response, he said, to the flip that Agada had executed to a torrent of Sacramento boos after making his retaken penalty.With both teams perfect through four kicks, the longtime Sporting player Graham Zusi had his attempt saved by Danny Vitiello. Rodrigo López then scored to send Sacramento to the final.The victories over three M.L.S. teams have been especially sweet for Sacramento officials and fans after the city was initially offered a spot in M.L.S. in 2019, only for the deal to fall apart. Todd Dunivant, the team’s president and general manager, said the team was “still keeping the door open” for a berth in M.L.S. someday.For now, though, sandwiched between games against Louisville City and Loudon United, Republic will play Orlando City, who are currently on track for the M.L.S. playoffs.Both of Sacramento’s home games against M.L.S. teams drew capacity crowds of 11,569 to the club’s lively but tight stadium, Heart Health Park.Republic FCShould Sacramento pull off a fourth consecutive upset, there will be glory, but not much remuneration. “There’s not a big windfall at the end of the rainbow for us,” Dunivant said. “I think the biggest thing for us is that it reignites the fan base. We’ve had more interest from new partners, more interest from the community, and more people coming to our games.”Both of Sacramento’s home games against M.L.S. teams drew capacity crowds of 11,569 to the club’s lively but tight stadium, Heart Health Park. “The atmosphere at our home field was electric,” Donovan said. “It was probably the best atmosphere I’ve played in in my career.”Whatever happens on Wednesday night — the final in Orlando is a sellout, too — Sacramento Republic F.C. will be remembered as a rare lower-league team to make it that far. “We don’t think we’ve achieved anything yet,” Dunivant said. “There’s one massive game yet and its going to be the hardest one yet.” More

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      Our Interview With Kylian Mbappé: Audio Excerpts

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      ‘I’m Going to Stay a Player’0:40Mbappé’s new contract has given him a new status and importance at P.S.G. But that also gave rise to reports that he now has the power to hire and fire coaches, or otherwise shape the direction of the club and its roster.That’s just not true, he told us. More

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      Real Madrid a Great Test for Celtic’s Champions League Model

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      Under its well-traveled Australian coach, the Scottish champion has become a gateway to Europe for Japanese players, and a model for clubs trying to punch above their financial weight.Ange Postecoglou did not have much time. The Australian coach was not Celtic’s first choice as manager: The Glasgow club had, instead, spent weeks last summer trying to persuade the Englishman Eddie Howe to take the post. By the time Postecoglou was hired in June 2021 — and served out his mandatory quarantine upon arrival in Scotland — he had little more than a month before his first competitive game.Time was not the only thing he was lacking. The situation at Celtic Park, as the 57-year-old Postecoglou would later admit, was faintly “chaotic.” Celtic’s team, recently beaten to the Scottish title by Rangers for the first time in a decade, was in dire need of an overhaul, a squad so lacking in both quality and quantity that Postecoglou was reduced to drafting in youth players to pad out his early training sessions.There was also nobody to tell him when reinforcements might be coming. Celtic had appointed a new chief executive only a couple of months earlier, but it was still searching for someone to serve as technical director. Postecoglou, who had never worked in Europe before, was on his own.His response to that challenge did more than simply restore Celtic to the pinnacle of Scottish soccer, wrenching the title back from the other side of Glasgow at the first opportunity and immediately transforming Postecoglou — whose arrival had been greeted with a skepticism that bordered on suspicion — into a wildly popular figure.It also did more than merely return the team, for the first time since the fall of 2017, to the group stages of the Champions League. The club begins its campaign on Tuesday evening by welcoming Real Madrid, the reigning European champion, to the place its fans call Paradise.Instead, Postecoglou’s approach laid down what amounts to a blueprint, showing how Celtic can ensure it does not have to endure such a prolonged absence from the continent’s elite again. And it might help the dozens of clubs caught in the same quandary — the brightest lights in the lesser leagues, the big fish in the small ponds — thrive in European soccer’s hopelessly skewed financial ecosystem.Celtic Manager Ange Postecoglou. He has turned his knowledge of Asian players into an advantage in Scotland. Russell Cheyne/ReutersPostecoglou, as he sought to revive Celtic, identified two key “points of difference.” The first was his style of play, a percussive, expansive approach best encapsulated by the slogan that became something of a mantra for the club last season: “We never stop.” It is easy, Postecoglou said this month, for a manager to claim they intend to play attacking soccer. He prides himself on delivering it.The second point, though, was arguably more immediately significant. One brief sojourn in Greece apart, Postecoglou had spent his entire career in Australia and Asia; Celtic hired him on the back of three successful years at Yokohama F. Marinos, Manchester City’s cousin club in Japan. There, Postecoglou thought, was an edge. “I could tap into some transfer markets that were a little bit unknown,” he said.Celtic already had a longstanding connection with Japan — the playmaker Shunsuke Nakamura spent four years at the club in the first decade of the century. But, in the absence of a settled structure at the club, Postecoglou leaned in to it, making Kyogo Furuhashi, a bright, prolific forward who had risen to prominence with Vissel Kobe, the first high-profile signing of his reign.Postecoglou was aware he was taking a risk. There was, as he said, plenty of doubt as to whether Furuhashi would be able to shine in Scotland.: Few fans would have known that, in the words of a scout at another Scottish club, the “standard of the J League is higher than the standard in Scotland.” Even fewer would have had a chance to see Furuhashi play.“Maybe if I hadn’t managed on that side of the world, I might have had the same skepticism,” Postecoglou said. The lack of time, though, meant he did not have much choice. He gave Furuhashi his debut before he had even trained with his new teammates. “He’d only had lunch with them once,” Postecoglou said.The risk, though, paid off so well — Furuhashi would end his first season in Scotland with 12 goals in 20 league games — that by December, Postecoglou was happy to go back. This time, he returned with three players: Reo Hatate, Yosuke Ideguchi and Daizen Maeda, a former charge from his time at Yokohama. All but Ideguchi are likely to start against Real Madrid on Tuesday.Postecoglou has been keen to stress that, though all four players are Japanese, they should not be grouped together. “They are different people; they are different players,” he said earlier this year. “They are all totally different. They all have different personalities. They have had different careers so far, and they offer something different to the club.”They are all, though, proof that Postecoglou was correct to identify his knowledge of the Japanese market as a potential advantage.Furuhashi has six goals in six games for Celtic this season. Russell Cheyne/ReutersThough there are sufficient Japanese players in Europe — primarily clustered in Germany, Belgium and Portugal — that earlier this year Hajime Moriyasu, the national team coach, could name an entire squad without a single J League player, few European teams employ permanent scouts in Japan.Indeed, until relatively recently, even those who sent representatives to scour the J League for players found it was not particularly easy. This was not just because of the cost and distance of travel, but because all of the league’s games tended to kick off at the same time, meaning a week’s trip might yield the chance to take in only one or two matches.Likewise, few European agencies have a footprint in Japan, disconnecting the country from the networks that can play a vital role in player recruitment. Those difficulties disincentivized European teams from looking too closely at the Japanese market. Celtic engaged only because of Postecoglou’s firsthand knowledge: “I’ve got that added advantage of knowing the market,” he said. “When I took over I was definitely going to use that expertise.”In doing so, he has helped to make Celtic a paradigm. Thanks to Postecoglou’s connections, Celtic has been able to retool its squad for a fraction of the cost it would have taken to acquire equivalent players from Europe, enabling the club to overcome at least a little of the financial disadvantage it experiences simply by virtue of calling a relatively small country — and by extension television market — home.It is an approach the club has started to build on. It has appointed Mark Lawwell, another alumnus of Yokohama — and the City Football Group network that runs the club — to oversee its recruitment division. Even before his official appointment, Postecoglou was bringing in players not just from England’s lower leagues, the traditional hunting ground for Scottish clubs, but from Russia and Argentina, Poland and Israel.The approach also makes the Celtic Postecoglou has built an example other clubs in its station — the champions cut adrift by the gathering of power and wealth by Europe’s major leagues — can follow. Those teams do not always have the time, or resources, that the continent’s true giants can match. By using a little knowledge, though, by finding something where scarcely anybody else has looked, they can level the playing field, just a little. More