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      Erling Haaland, Darwin Núñez and Rediscovering the No. 9

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      It took Erling Haaland a couple of seconds to notice something had changed. Late last month, Haaland, the Norwegian striker, was inside the Manchester Institute of Health and Performance, patiently and quietly going through the many and monotonous steps of the medical exam that was part of his move to Manchester City.At one point, stripped down to nothing but a pair of briefs, Haaland was asked to take a deep breath and stand perfectly still, so that the club could get an accurate read of his height. He did as he was told. “OK, 1.952 meters,” the physician guiding him through the exam said, jotting down the figure on a piece of paper.That, Haaland thought, was not right. Everyone knows their own height. He checked what the doctor had recorded. There was the answer again. 1.952. “Wow,” Haaland said, sounding genuinely pleased with himself. “I’ve grown. Almost a whole centimeter.” A meaningful one, too: those extra few millimeters had tipped Haaland over a threshold. At the age of 21, he was now, officially, 6 feet 4 inches.Size is significant when it comes to Haaland. That is not to diminish his rich array of other qualities as a striker — his technical ability, his movement, his intelligence, his capacity to drop deep and build play, the power and precision of his finishing from either foot — and it is not something that exists in isolation.Indeed, watching Haaland in the flesh, what stands out first is his speed. Haaland is quick. He accelerates almost instantaneously, and then eats up the ground in front of him, his stride long and elegant. It is only after a beat that it is possible to realize that what makes that speed so striking is that it is unexpected, that it is being produced by a man with that frame.Erling Haaland’s mix of size, speed and strength makes him a test for any defender.Andrej Isakovic/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNor is it to pigeonhole the type of player he is, or to ponder how he will fit in to the intricate, delicate style of play preached by Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. Haaland has not been bought as some sort of battering ram. He is far more than a target man. It is just that, at first glance, that is how he is built.On a very basic level, Haaland is large, undeniably so. He is especially large in context. Elite soccer is populated, these days, by slight, almost elfin figures. Haaland is a head taller than most forwards. He towers over most fullbacks and wings. He has aerial clearance over central midfielders. He might even find the majority of central defenders a little diminutive.Darwin Nuñez, the Uruguayan forward added to Liverpool’s ranks by Jürgen Klopp this week, is similar. He is not quite so tall — only 6-foot-1, unless he, like Haaland, still has growing to do — but he possesses a similar profile. He drifts wide, rather than deep, to find space. He accelerates rapidly. He moves smartly.But he is, as Klopp noted, “powerful,” too. Liverpool’s forward line, these last few years, has been constructed around three players — Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah — who fit the accepted mold for modern forwards. They are nimble, fleet-footed, technically flawless. None, though, could be described as “powerful,” not in the sense that Nuñez is powerful.Klopp did have a more robust option at his disposal, in the form of Divock Origi, when he felt it was required — such as when needing a goal in a Champions League final, or playing Everton. Origi was, though, viewed more as a chaos agent than anything else; he was deployed almost exclusively as a Plan B. Like Guardiola, Klopp seemed to have moved beyond the idea of what might be called a “traditional” center-forward.The Uruguayan striker Darwin Núñez joined Liverpool from Benfica this week.Armando Franca/Associated PressThat both have, this summer, committed considerable proportions of their transfer budgets to inverting that mode, then, is significant. The explanations may be distressingly straightforward. City creates a plethora of chances every single game; adding Haaland is a surefire way to ensure more of them are turned into goals. Liverpool has, in Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, a precise aerial supply line. It makes sense to exploit it.Or it may, perhaps, hint at a shift that has ramifications outside the rarefied air of the Premier League’s top two. Strikers — pure, thoroughbred strikers — have become vanishingly rare over the last decade. Between the generation represented by Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema, Sergio Agüero and Luis Suárez — all in their mid-thirties now — and the one spearheaded by Kylian Mbappé, Haaland and, possibly, Nuñez, the No. 9 almost died out.True, there have been occasional oases in the desert: Harry Kane, a late bloomer at Tottenham Hotspur, and Romelu Lukaku, who flowered sufficiently early in Belgium that despite being five years younger than Suárez, both made their debuts in the Premier League in 2011.As a rule, though, soccer’s journey over the last 10 years has been away from what might be termed focal point forwards. The tendency, instead, has been to engineer more fluid, more dynamic attacking lines, built around players who can drift and roam and transform, depending on the situation: a generation encapsulated by generalists like Mané and Neymar and Raheem Sterling, rather than specialists.There is, most likely, no single explanation for why that might be. It may partly be philosophical: Guardiola, in particular, pioneered an approach in which a fixed No. 9 was optional and an aerial approach was deemed unsophisticated, while the German school that produced Klopp prioritized a player’s dynamism in the press. The rest of the sport followed suit.Haaland’s arrival could change the look of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.Lynne Cameron/Manchester City FC, via Getty ImagesBut the drift away from target men may have its roots, too, in the race to industrialize talent production over much the same time period. Soccer’s elite academies respond, in part, to what is being asked of them: If first-team coaches do not have much need for strikers, their counterparts in youth systems will not provide them.They will, instead, pour their energies into finding the types of players — ball-playing midfielders, inverted wingers, creative fullbacks — that the professional game now cherishes above all others.That pattern holds not only in Europe. Presciently, Arsène Wenger declared the better part of a decade ago that the old world, reliant on its academies, was no longer producing forwards. Only in South America, he felt, were the predatory instincts necessary to excel in the position still being honed on the street.Now even that no longer holds. In Brazil, clubs respond to the demands of the European market. They craft the raw materials into something they feel can be sold. And, for some time, pure strikers have not sold all that well.There is another relevant factor, though. Academies naturally place greater weight on the sorts of players they can produce. A well-honed youth setup, full of dedicated and talented coaches, can take gifted teenagers and turn them into neat, clever midfield players, or inventive inside forwards. What it cannot do is make them 6-foot-4.Haaland wearing soccer’s new favorite number for Norway last week.Ntb/Via ReutersIt is, then, difficult to be entirely certain what came first: Did Europe, in particular, stop producing strikers because soccer’s elite coaches felt they had moved beyond them? Or did soccer’s elite coaches move beyond strikers because none of the requisite level were emerging from the ever-more-prolific academies?What Guardiola and Klopp have spotted, then, is a competitive edge. Only a handful of teams possess a high-quality powerhouse center-forward. Only one or two boast one that is not already well into the autumn of their careers. Perhaps that is the next step in the evolution of the related, but distinct, styles both coaches have crafted: the repurposing of old virtues to fit the new game.That, in turn, will have a profound effect on soccer’s incessant pipeline. If the perception is that center forwards in the style of Haaland and Nuñez are back in fashion, then there will be value in producing them: if not the target-men of old, perhaps, then certainly a modern version, players able to fit into complex counter-pressing systems but also, in a very basic, very real way, extremely large. Size may matter once more. The No. 9 may yet have another day in the sun.Brick WallsZinedine Zidane: Next manager up?Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe last few weeks have passed in a curious limbo for Mauricio Pochettino. He is still, officially, the coach of Paris St.-Germain, in the sense that he has not yet been fired. There has been no announcement, no expression of gratitude and regret, no statement offering him the club’s best wishes for the future, no mournful image of a drooping corner flag posted on social media.At the same time, though, Pochettino is very much not the coach of P.S.G. If he has not been fired by the time you read this, then he will be fired very soon indeed. His tenure can be measured in days, maybe. Weeks, at the absolute outside. He knows it. The club knows it. The fans know it, and so do the players.It is hard to say it is cruel, this Schrödinger status, because it is only soccer, and because there are plenty of prospective employers out there for a coach of Pochettino’s caliber, but it is a little undignified. It does not suggest a club that has a concrete plan of action, a crystal-clear foresight.More damning still are the identities of the two coaches competing to replace him. Zinedine Zidane makes sense: not just a glossy name for a superficial club, but a coach with a proven ability to take a motley collection of superstars and turn them into a cogent force. He certainly has a more compelling case than the alternative, Christophe Galtier, who might have won the French title with Lille last year, but his specialism is in helping the overmatched punch above their weight.But then does appointing Zidane as coach fit with the hiring of Luis Campos as P.S.G.’s de facto sporting director? Campos’s expertise is in spotting young talent, the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Victor Osimhen. Those are not the kinds of players P.S.G. allows to flourish. They are not, particularly, the kind of player Zidane has worked with before.Such is the modern P.S.G., though, a club that remains happy to throw as many ideas as possible against a wall and see what sticks. Whoever replaces Pochettino, it seems a fair bet that in a year, maybe two, they will find themselves in exactly the same position, waiting to be put out of their misery, doomed not by their lack of ability but by a club unable to commit to a direction, to choose where it wants to go, what it wants to be.Draw Your Own ConclusionsShould this man still be running soccer clubs?Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time Gérard López relinquished his ownership of Lille, the club was both on its way to the French title and drowning in debt. Despite bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in player sales on a reasonably regular basis, two of his main lenders, JP Morgan Chase and the activist investment fund Elliott Management, were growing concerned that López would not be able to meet his loan obligations. Eventually, late in 2020, they forced his hand.Six months later, López was back in French soccer. He had bought Bordeaux, a national champion only a little more than a decade previously, at a reduced price after its previous owner, an American investment firm, had placed it in administration. López had, it was said, saved the club from bankruptcy.Last month, Bordeaux was relegated from Ligue 1 after finishing last in the table. Things, though, may still get worse: This week, citing the club’s precarious finances, French soccer’s licensing body demoted Bordeaux again. The team has said it will take up its right of appeal against a “brutal” decision, but as things stand, Bordeaux will begin next year in France’s third tier.Still, at least it has not suffered the same fate as Royal Excelsior Mouscron, a team across the border in Belgium. In May, Mouscron was stripped of its license and relegated to Belgium’s fourth tier. Last week, saddled with debts of $4.5 million and unable to find a willing investor, it filed for bankruptcy. Mouscron is — was — owned by López.Last year, the Portuguese side Boavista was banned from registering new players by FIFA. This year, Fola Esch, a team in Luxembourg, was implicated in a suspected money-laundering scheme involving Lotus, a now-defunct Formula 1 team. The common thread in all the stories, again, was their owner: López.Doubtless, there are differences in each of these cases. The roots of the problems will vary from club to club. But one question hovers above all of them, a question that should be addressed not to López but to soccer’s authorities: Why has he been allowed to keep buying clubs? How could he be deemed a suitable owner for Bordeaux six months after being forced out Lille because of the club’s debts? Who, exactly, is looking after the game?CorrespondenceA couple of bugbears requiring attention in this week’s correspondence section. Bruce Tully, for example, is perhaps slightly unreasonably aggravated by “stutter-step penalty kicks.”“They look ridiculous, and they’re not in the spirit of the game,” he wrote. “Penalty takers already have a tremendous advantage. They don’t need to resort to silly gimmicks that serve only to embarrass the goalkeeper. Neymar and Jorginho are perhaps the worst offenders.”His suggestion — to limit the number of steps a taker is allowed in the run-up — is a sensible one. I have a deep-seated distrust of the stuttering run-up, based on the entirely woolly logic that you’re more likely to lose your rhythm. I suspect we will see it less frequently in the next couple of years, on the grounds that goalkeepers have now worked out, both with Neymar and Jorginho, that standing still is the best approach.If anything, David Krajicek has identified an even more obscure irritant. “Is there a more overworked cliché in Premier League broadcasting than the worn-out trope of teams ‘asking questions’ of the opposition’s defense?” he wrote. “Are Brits contractually required to use it? Did they learn it in school?”This is difficult for me to share, because “asking questions” is part of soccer’s lexicon to me. It encapsulates what analytical types might refer to as a game state, in which one team is enjoying the majority of the attacking possession but is not, necessarily, taking lots of shots or scoring lots of goals. (The stage after “asking questions” involves “peppering” or “laying siege to” the goal.) An alternative might be useful, though. I’ll start the bidding with “stress-testing.” More

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      In Qatar’s World Cup Summer, the Mercury Rises and the Clock Ticks

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      DOHA, Qatar — The sun comes up before 5 a.m. and immediately puts the entire city on convection bake. By lunchtime, the temperature has finished its methodical climb up the scale, from unusual through uncomfortable to unbearable and then, finally, to unhealthy. The wind off the bay offers no relief; in June in Doha, even the summer breeze blows hot.This was to be the summer the World Cup came to Qatar, an idea that seems as preposterous now as it did a dozen years ago, when the tiny Gulf country, let’s just say, acquired the hosting rights to soccer’s biggest championship. FIFA’s own evaluators had labeled a summer World Cup in the Gulf as “high risk,” and a single morning’s walk this week confirmed that assessment. Still, for years, Qatari organizers promised to deliver what they had proposed, whatever FIFA asked: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for soccer.Organizers, of course, eventually came to their senses, or at least to that one sense that lets humans differentiate hot from sun’s anvil hot, and in 2015 moved the tournament to the winter. The past week, though, offered a glimpse of what might have been.Peru fans seeking shelter from the sun in the Souk Waqif, top, and a rare sight on the streets of Msheireb in midday: humans.Over eight days, Qatar hosted three intercontinental playoff games that determined the final two teams in the field for this year’s World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica. Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test-drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one’s perspective.Five months from the World Cup’s opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months. All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day. Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.Some Peru fans from California took their own World Cup trophy to Qatar. Their team, alas, won’t be going.World Cup messages dot plazas and open spaces across Doha. Qatar bid for a summer event, but will host in the winter instead.Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000 strong, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. Many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening, to sip coffees, to stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital’s rebuilt marketplace — filling its tables, disappearing into its warren of stalls and shops. But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they’d visit, one couldn’t help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.Organizers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup — 32 cheering sections, just like Peru’s, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colors and carrying their own hopes.The stadium in Lusail, Qatar’s largest venue, is equipped with individual cooling vents under each seat.A new turf field growing under artificial light at Lusail; different blends of grass are installed depending on the season.Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organizers. Qatar’s decision to require those attending the World Cup to have proof of a ticket purchase to enter the country or book a hotel room could help keep the numbers down. Saudis and Emiratis who love soccer could pour across the border to bring those numbers right back up. But the tournament also is four full days shorter than its predecessors in Brazil and Russia; if it turns into a chaotic mess, then at least it will be a shorter one.There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.The heat? That’s so low on Qatar’s list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops into the 80s by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.The World Cup stadium in Lusail is decorated with collages of photographs of the workers who built it.For others, the preparations rarely stop. Outdoor work is prohibited in the heat of the summer day.On game days it won’t have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia’s shootout win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius), even though it was still well over 90 degrees outside the stadium’s open roof and swirling metalwork shell.In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.To see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a work in progress rather than a completed vision. More

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      World Cup Will Allow Five Substitutes and Bigger Rosters

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      A rule change means coaches will for the first time have the option to make as many as five changes per game, and draw them from deeper benches.DOHA, Qatar — The use of extra substitutes in matches, a change to longstanding soccer tradition brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, was formally written into the sport’s rules on Monday, only five months before the start of this year’s World Cup in Qatar.Under the revision to soccer’s purposely brief rulebook, the Laws of the Game, approved by its rule-making body, the International Football Association Board, coaches at this year’s tournament — and in any other competition — will be allowed to use as many as five substitutes per game instead of three.The expansion already had been in place on a temporary basis, introduced in 2020 and framed as an effort to protect the physical and mental health of players. But it had been widely adopted in domestic leagues around the world and by top competitions like the Champions League, and praised by coaches who welcomed the tactical flexibility it offered. Chelsea Coach Thomas Tuchel, for example, called the change “brilliant” for big teams and small ones alike.Making it permanent sets the stage for another change: FIFA now can expand rosters for the tournament, to 26 players instead of the former limit of 23.Both of Monday’s decisions mean that, for the third straight cycle, the World Cup will kick off with a major rules change: Goal-line technology made its debut at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and the replay system known as video-assistant review was approved in time for the 2018 tournament in Russia.The use of five substitutes was approved by IFAB as a temporary measure in 2020. At the time, leagues were rushing back into a compressed schedules of matches — sometimes in the heat of midsummer, and without their customary preseasons — as they scrambled to make up games and fulfill multimillion-dollar television contracts.But the temporary measure has been retained in many of the world’s top leagues, and like their club colleagues, national team coaches — welcoming the flexibility and options the extra subs and bigger rosters will offer in the biggest event on the soccer calendar — are expected to agree with the change being made permanent.Club coaches may favor it, too, especially if it eases the strain on their top players even in modest ways: To accommodate the scorching summer heat in Qatar, this year’s World Cup was moved to the winter months, meaning it will arrive in the midst of most club seasons, and put an added hardship on elite players already weary from soccer’s nearly nonstop schedule since the game’s pandemic pause in 2020.Added substitutes are now common from Europe to leagues like Major League Soccer in the United States. The Premier League — which used five subs initially and then reverted to three subs the past two seasons, will make the change back to five beginning with its coming season.Expanded rosters are also not new. Europe’s governing body allowed teams to name 26-player rosters for last summer’s European Championship, and South American officials approved 28-man teams for last summer’s Copa América in Brazil. In those cases, coaches were still allowed to name only 23 players to their active rosters for each game. But the decision to allow gameday rosters to include 15 subs instead of 12 will give coaches wiggle room at the time when the coronavirus could still decimate a team in a matter of days. More

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      Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich and the Bitter End

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      A star striker is eager to move to Barcelona, and his club doesn’t seem to realize it might be its own fault that he wants to go.Robert Lewandowski does not, in his own words, like to make “too much show.” He is, and always has been, a touch more impassive than the average superstar. He does not greet his goals, the ones that have come for so long in such improbable quantities, with a roar, or a leap, or a scream. Instead, he grins. For the really good ones, he might go so far as a beam.He is the same off the field. Lewandowski is warm, smart, immediately likable, but his charisma is more subtle, more steady than that possessed by his peers, the finest players of his generation. He does not have the bombastic streak of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He does not relish the spotlight quite like Cristiano Ronaldo.His Instagram account encapsulates it. There are, of course, occasional glimpses of yachts and supercars and picture-postcard tropical vacations — he is still a millionaire soccer player, and it is still Instagram — but they are interspersed with images of Robert Lewandowski, the purest striker of the modern era, pushing a child’s stroller at Legoland, and Robert Lewandowski, serial German champion, tickling a small dog.The impression he has cultivated, over the years, is of a player who regards all of the attention, all of the glamour, all of the noise not as an unavoidable consequence of his work, or even as an unwelcome distraction. Instead, he has always treated it as an active hindrance. Lewandowski’s job is to score goals. He is good at it, and he is good at it because he takes it extremely seriously.All of which has made the last two weeks something of an outlier. For perhaps the first time in his career, at the age of 34, Lewandowski has suddenly gone rogue.It started last month, not long after the ticker-tape that accompanied Bayern Munich’s 10th straight Bundesliga had been cleared away, when he declared — publicly — that he wanted to leave the club where he has spent eight seasons, the peak of his glittering career, immediately. “What is certain at the moment is that my career at Bayern is over,” he said.Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockThat was unexpected enough, the silent, reluctant superstar suddenly leveraging all of his renown, all of his influence, all of his clout to make as much noise as possible. But it did not end there. Instead, Lewandowski has doubled down, again and again. He has insisted that he does not want to “force” his way out of Bayern. As ever with Lewandowski, his actions speak for themselves.In a series of interviews — at almost any given opportunity — he has chastised Bayern for its lack of “respect” and “loyalty,” its apparent refusal to find a “mutually agreeable solution,” its failure to “listen to me until the very end.” He said that “something inside of me died, and it is impossible to get over that.”Perhaps most seriously, he intimated that his treatment might make other players reluctant to join the club. “What kind of player will want to go to Bayern knowing that something like this could happen to them?” he asked. Of all the sideswipes, all the jabs, that felt the most damaging, the most irretrievable. “I want to leave Bayern,” he has said, in various formats, over and over. “That is clear.”From the outside, it is not immediately apparent why that should be, why Lewandowski — with a year left on his Bayern contract — would have taken such a provocative path in order to secure his release.After all he has achieved in Germany — eight league championships in a row at Bayern, to go with two he won at Borussia Dortmund, a Champions League title, sundry domestic cups, and more than 40 goals across all competitions in each of the last seven seasons — he would be forgiven for wanting a change of scenery, a different challenge, to end his career at Barcelona, say. His approach, though, suggests something deeper is at play.Lewandowski has led the Bundesliga in goals in each of the past five seasons.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersAs is traditional, soccer has tried to answer that question by imbuing trivial details with tremendous narrative power. A few weeks ago, a report in the German outlet TZ revealed, Lewandowski had exchanged angry words with Julian Nagelsmann, Bayern’s young coach, when it was suggested that the latter might like to change his striker’s positioning when competing to win headers.Lewandowski, not unreasonably, pointed out that his career statistics rather suggested that he knew what he was doing. Yet when the inevitable meta-analysis of the incident was conducted, it was concluded that not only did Lewandowski not respect Nagelsmann — whose playing career extended no further than his teens — most likely the rest of the Bayern squad did not, either.It is not with Nagelsmann, though, that Lewandowski’s relationship has collapsed. Such encounters are not exactly rare. Nagelsmann is, by all accounts, broadly popular with Bayern’s players, who admire his verve and his ideas, even if they remain slightly skeptical about his effectiveness after his first season.Instead, the problem has its roots elsewhere in Bayern’s hierarchy. Amid the blizzard of words produced first by and then about Lewandowski, the most incisive came from his agent, the not-exactly-wildly-popular Pini Zahavi. “He hasn’t felt respected by the people in charge for months,” Zahavi told the German outlet Bild. “Bayern didn’t lose the player Lewandowski. They lost the person, Robert.”The source of that tension can be found in Bayern’s ill-concealed, and ultimately futile, pursuit of Erling Haaland. Hasan Salihamidzic, a decorated player in Munich at the turn of the century now installed as the club’s sporting director, had earmarked Haaland as Lewandowski’s eventual replacement. When it became clear to Lewandowski that the club was contemplating his demise even as he closed in yet another record-breaking season, he felt an unspoken covenant had been broken.Bayern’s sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic.Andreas Gebert/ReutersIt may not soothe Lewandowski’s ego, but it would be remiss of Bayern not to be considering who will, at some point, step into his shoes; no matter what order you eat your meals in, at some point time comes for us all. Where Salihamidzic erred was in allowing his vision to become public; or, more accurately, in allowing it to become public and then not succeeding in signing Haaland. All of a sudden, Bayern had a disaffected superstar and no replacement.That may have ramifications beyond Lewandowski’s immediate future: As he has made abundantly clear, barring an unlikely change of heart, that will now lie elsewhere. “Breakups are part of football,” he said.For Bayern, though, that may only be the first issue. For a club that has spent the last decade collecting trophies so serenely that it has become possible to imagine a world in which it wins the Bundesliga in perpetuity, this is a delicate time. Not in terms of its domestic primacy — that, sadly, is now hard-wired into the system — but most certainly in its attempts to compete in Europe.Bayern has been able to ride out the rise of the petro-clubs, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain, better than the likes of Juventus, Barcelona and to some extent Real Madrid not only because of its commercial potency, its operational expertise and its corporate appeal, but because it functions essentially as a Bundesliga Select XI.Every year, Bayern has cherry-picked the best talent from the rest of Germany — often using the lure of guaranteed trophies and an inevitable place in the latter stages of the Champions League as leverage to pay a lower price — to fill out its roster. This has a twin benefit: It weakens domestic competition, and enables Bayern to match, and occasionally to overcome, the arriviste elite elsewhere.Lewandowski collected his eighth Bundesliga title with Bayern this season.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockLewandowski, plucked on a free transfer from Dortmund, stood as a symbol of that approach when he arrived; at the moment of his departure, he may well signal the need for its abandonment. The Bundesliga’s clubs, after all, have never wanted to sell to Bayern, and now, given that Germany is the cash-soaked Premier League’s bazaar of choice, they do not have to. English teams pay more, and they do not insist on beating you twice a season afterward.Bayern will, instead, have to plot another course. It may have to start to offer more lucrative salaries — its approach for Liverpool’s Sadio Mané suggests that realization has arrived — and it may even need to identify other markets, other demographics, from which to source its recruits.It will have to do that at a time when its institutional knowledge is in the hands of Oliver Kahn, an intelligent, imposing figure but still relatively inexperienced in his role, and Salihamidzic, whose record in the transfer market was mixed even before his part in the impending loss of Lewandowski.Bayern has weathered the changes in soccer’s ecosystem by sticking, unabashedly, to an approach that produced results, and by entrusting its fate to a grizzled, respected set of executives. For a decade, it has worked. Without much fuss, without too much show, Bayern Munich has constructed the most successful period in its history. The public, toxic departure of Lewandowski is the first hint of rust at the heart of the big red machine.Endless, ShamelessQuick question, Karim: Would you rather have two weeks off, or four more games?Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYou may not have noticed — you may, in fact, have taken very deliberate steps to avoid it — but, even deep into June, soccer refuses to be stopped. As well as a raft of exhibition games and qualifying matches for the next African Cup of Nations, there have, at the time of writing, already been two rounds of Nations League games in Europe.And the good news is, if you missed them, there are two more to come: After a long, arduous season that came on the back of another long, arduous season and a sprawling European Championship, Europe’s elite men’s players will finally get a vacation starting on June 15.All of this was deemed necessary, of course, because someone decided to squeeze a World Cup into the middle of the traditional European season. They did it for entirely honorable reasons, though, so that’s all fine. Likewise, it is hard to begrudge the coaches of the planet’s various national teams for feeling that they might like to have at least a bit of time working with their players before they decide who will, and who will not, be part of their plans for Qatar in November.The decision to plow on with the Nations League, though, feels counterproductive. The tournament is UEFA’s nascent pride and joy — at least at the international level — and, when the season’s schedule was being mapped out, it made clear that it was not prepared to place it on hiatus in order to afford the players a rest. Doing so, the organization worried, would stifle all the momentum the event had built.Sadly, the alternative may be even worse. The Nations League is being played out to a backdrop of complete indifference from fans and barely-concealed irritation from the players; Kevin De Bruyne, for one, has made it clear he thinks it is a complete waste of his, and everyone else’s, time. All of a sudden, the Nations League has become exactly what it was meant to replace: a series of meaningless games that are met with apathy or resentment.CorrespondenceA French soccer federation official, Erwan Le Provost, said this week that closed-circuit video footage of events outside the Champions League final had been automatically deleted, as required by law, because judicial officials did not request the footage within seven days.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt seems that there is a broad range of views among the On Soccer Newsletter community about the fiasco that marred last month’s Champions League final, and I’ll do my best to represent them.Let’s start with Christopher Smith. “At the African Cup of Nations, there was a stampede at the Olembé Stadium in which eight people died,” he wrote. “I don’t recall seeing anything like the indictment of France and UEFA being leveled at Cameroon and C.A.F. In fact, at least in your newsletter, this event doesn’t seem to have merited a mention at all.”These are valid points. I would suggest that there was plenty of condemnation of both Cameroon and African soccer’s authorities, but I would agree that UEFA attracted more. This is not an easy sentiment to express, but I suspect that is simply because the Champions League final is a far more high-profile event. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but it is (most likely) the determining factor.That the Olembé tragedy did not appear in this newsletter was an oversight, but I would at least direct you to the coverage of both the disaster and the tournament elsewhere in The Times.Others focused, instead, on the tension between the French authorities’ version of events near Paris and the experiences of the fans themselves. “My only thought is how close we came to another Hillsborough,” wrote Alicia Lorvo. “The fans were traumatized at what was supposed to be a happy, fun event. The people who were there with real tickets must be compensated. France must be forced to hold an independent inquiry. The situation is intolerable.”Teresa Olson, sadly, was not surprised. “It was not the fans, but the utter indifference to accommodating the sellout crowd effectively,” she wrote. “We had the same experience during the Women’s World Cup in 2019. Gates were not opened until there was physically no way they could process everyone, and there was complete indifference as to whether the fans could get to their seats in time for the games.”It is important to remember that, I think: The way the Champions League final was policed is not unusual in France. The authorities followed their playbook, with one slight twist, explained by Javier Cortés. “With all due respect, most of us still think that English fans are (for the most part) unbearably arrogant who tend to violence once they have a few beers in their bellies,” he wrote. “English fans are generally not well-liked outside their islands.”Or inside them, as it happens. Nobody enjoys criticizing the English more than the English, Javier, and there is no question that the behavior of some English fans on foreign trips can be abominable. That clearly played into the thinking of the French authorities.The Euro 2020 final was not England’s finest hour (and a half).Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockThe counterargument would run that Liverpool has been to two other Champions League finals in recent years, in Kyiv and Madrid, with no trouble at all. Problems do not trail in its fans’ wake. More important, that line of argument prompts the question as to whether funneling all of these risk factors into one place, and then locking them outside of a stadium, is really the best way to allay your worst fears. I’d suggest that it is not.Larry Machacek saw the situation along similar lines. “I conjure up images of drunk and cocaine-fueled young men, particularly the one with a flare lodged in a personal space, and the stories of Italian fans kicked in the head,” he wrote. “A few bad apples can and do tarnish the lot. France has successfully hosted many major sporting events and will continue to do so. How about advising readers of the outcomes of last year’s Euro 2020 fiasco at Wembley? Are there any profound learnings from the U.K. you would recommend?”My instinct on the first point is similar to my response to Javier: I’m not sure there is any evidence of gaggles of Liverpool fans engaging in the sort of mayhem we saw in London, and I’m not convinced that it is fair to decree them guilty until they have arrived. Doing so belies an ignorance of the differences between fans’ following a club and (a minority of) fans who follow England. They aren’t the same people, and they don’t behave in the same way.On the second, it is indisputable that what happened at Wembley last year was no more or less appalling than what happened in Paris. The problem, in both cases, was with the manner of response: Where the French were too heavy-handed, the English were too laissez-faire. There was no attempt to control the crowd whatsoever until it was too late.The lesson, then, is that neither of those approaches work, and that UEFA needs to recognize that. It should have a sense of best practices for how these occasions are managed, and central to it should be the principle that fans, wherever they are from, are welcome guests to be treated with respect, rather than a problem to be faced. More

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      Chile pierde en su intento de sustituir a Ecuador en el Mundial

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      La federación chilena de fútbol argumentaba que Ecuador debía ser expulsado del torneo por utilizar un jugador no elegible durante la fase de clasificación. La FIFA no estuvo de acuerdo.El intento de Chile de expulsar a su rival sudamericano, Ecuador, de la Copa del Mundo fracasó el viernes, cuando un panel disciplinario del organismo rector del fútbol mundial rechazó un reclamo de que Ecuador había alineado a un jugador no elegible en varios partidos de clasificación.El caso giraba en torno al defensa Byron Castillo, que según Chile no solo había nacido en Colombia, sino que tenía tres años más de los que figuraban en los documentos que lo identificaban como ecuatoriano. La federación de fútbol chilena presentó documentos de registro, incluyendo certificados de nacimiento, que, según dijo, respaldaban su reclamación.De acuerdo con las normas de la FIFA, la alineación de un jugador no elegible puede dar lugar a la pérdida de cualquier partido en el que participe dicho futbolista.Ecuador quedó en cuarto lugar en las eliminatorias del continente, con lo que obtuvo una de las cuatro plazas de pase automático asignadas a Sudamérica para el Mundial. Pero Chile había exigido que Ecuador perdiera los ocho partidos de clasificación en los que participó Castillo, y que sus rivales en esos encuentros recibieran tres puntos por partido. Los funcionarios chilenos habían calculado que esa fórmula cambiaría los resultados de la clasificación en Sudamérica y llevaría a Chile al Mundial de Fútbol a expensas de Ecuador.La FIFA dijo que sus funcionarios habían analizado las presentaciones de todas las partes involucradas en el caso —que también involucró a Perú, país que competirá en una clasificatoria internacional el lunes por un pase a Catar— antes de concluir que Ecuador no tenía ningún caso que responder.Chile dijo que apelaría el fallo.“Estamos consternados con la decisión”, dijo Eduardo Carlezzo, abogado que representa a la federación chilena. “Es una enorme cantidad de pruebas, tanto de Colombia como de Ecuador, lo que demuestra sin ninguna duda que el jugador nació en Colombia. Por lo tanto, apelaremos y esperamos que esas evidencias sean consideradas en su totalidad”.La federación ecuatoriana de fútbol emitió un comunicado después de que Chile presentara su demanda en mayo, en el que rechazaba lo que calificaba de “infundados rumores” sobre Castillo, de quien dijo que era ciudadano ecuatoriano en el sentido jurídico y deportivo.“Rechazamos categóricamente cualquier intento de quienes pretenden evitar su participación en el Mundial de Fútbol de Catar 2022, la cual fue obtenida legítimamente en la cancha”, dijo entonces la federación.Los antecedentes de Castillo han sido cuestionados durante varios años, después de que una investigación más amplia sobre las inscripciones de jugadores en Ecuador analizó cientos de casos y dio lugar a sanciones para al menos 75 jugadores juveniles que se descubrió que habían falsificado sus documentos. Temerosos de un error que pudiera poner en peligro las esperanzas de Ecuador en la Copa del Mundo de este año, los responsables de su federación nacional de fútbol habían aplazado la incorporación de Castillo a la selección de mayores hasta este año.Hace dos años, de hecho, el presidente de una comisión especial de investigación convocada por la federación pareció sugerir que Castillo era colombiano, algo que los funcionarios chilenos argumentaron que habían corroborado. More

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      Chile Loses Bid to Replace Ecuador at World Cup in Byron Castillo Case

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      Chile’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament for using an ineligible player in qualifying. FIFA disagreed.Chile’s bid to have its South American rival Ecuador thrown out of soccer’s World Cup failed on Friday when a disciplinary panel at soccer’s global governing body rejected a claim that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player in several qualification matches.The case involved the defender Byron Castillo, who Chile contended was not only born in Colombia but also three years older than is stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean. Chile’s soccer federation produced registry documents, including birth certificates, that it said supported its claim.Under the rules of the governing body, FIFA, fielding an ineligible player could result in a forfeit of any match in which an ineligible player took part.Ecuador finished fourth in the continent’s qualifying competition, claiming one of South America’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 the World Cup at Ecuador’s expense.FIFA said its officials had analyzed submissions from all the parties involved in the case — which also involved Peru, which will compete in an intercontinental playoff next week for its own place in Qatar — before concluding that Ecuador had no case to answer.Chile said it would appeal the ruling.“We are dismayed with the decision,” said Eduardo Carlezzo, a lawyer representing the Chilean federation. “The amount of evidence is huge, both from Colombia and Ecuador, proving without any reasonable doubt that the player was born in Colombia. Therefore, we will appeal and we hope that those evidences shall be full considered.”Ecuador’s soccer federation released a statement after Chile filed its claim in May in which it rejected what it called “false rumors” about Castillo, who it said was an Ecuadorean citizen in a legal and sporting sense.“We categorically reject any attempt by those who seek to avoid our participation in the World Cup in Qatar, which was legitimately obtained on the field,” the federation said at the time.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years after 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 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 continued to argue they had substantiated. More

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      US Men’s National Team Draws With Uruguay in a Friendly

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      The young American team came away with a scoreless draw against the 13th-ranked team in the world as it continues to tinker with its roster and tactics ahead of the World Cup.KANSAS CITY, Kan. — For the United States men’s national soccer team, a string of four games this month against a diverse set of opponents presents any number of productive opportunities.There are moments to workshop collective tactics, moments to evaluate individual players, moments to strengthen the interpersonal bonds that make up the group’s general character.And then there are moments like Sunday, when the team could face an elite opponent, pull out a measuring stick and plainly take stock of its own quality in the middle of its monthslong preparations for this year’s World Cup.Providing the test was Uruguay, the 13th-ranked team in the world, and the Americans were reasonably satisfied with the result: a hard fought, 0-0 draw in an exhibition played before a crowd of 19,569 fans in Kansas City, Kan.Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach, said he had told his players to embrace the challenge and enjoy the game. “It’s not often you get to play against guys of that quality,” Berhalter said after the match, sounding upbeat about the outcome and praising his players for an “A-plus effort.”The testing and inquisition and self-reflection will continue in the months to come, though before the game, there did emerge at least one bit of certainty: Wales will be the United States’ first opponent at the World Cup in Qatar after beating Ukraine, 1-0, in a scintillating play-in game earlier in the day in Cardiff, Wales.The inclusion of Wales completed Group B, which along with the United States includes England and Iran. “Now we finally know our opponents, and we can finally set our sights on that group, and how we get out of it,” said Walker Zimmerman, who along with his teammates tried to follow the play-in match as they sat in meetings and ate lunch before their game. Also before the start of the game, the team announced it would be sending a letter to Congress calling for stronger gun laws in the wake of a spate of high-profile mass shootings in the country this spring. The players on Sunday also wore orange arm bands in support of Wear Orange, a movement to raise awareness about gun violence in America. “People can say it’s not the guns, it’s the people, but we have to start somewhere,” forward Christian Pulisic said about the letter. By Sunday evening, the players’ attention was fully on Uruguay. In Kansas City, Diego Alonso, the Uruguay coach, rotated his lineup somewhat from the team’s previous game against Mexico. Big names like Federico Valverde and Edinson Cavani (who misfired on an open net in the waning moments of the game), for instance, played only the final 30 minutes or so. But La Celeste, as the team is known, still presented a stern, star-studded task for the U.S.In its traditional sky blue shirt, Uruguay controlled play early, dissecting the American defense with purposeful passing, resulting in a number of nervy, narrow misses. But the U.S. gradually gained a foothold after withstanding that early pressure, threatening Uruguay with a sequence of chances, with right winger Tim Weah in particular providing repeated spurts of danger and creativity in the first half.“A lot of us are young, and we’re still getting that experience against these high-level teams,” Weah said before the game. “So I feel like playing a team like Uruguay that has a lot of stars is amazing.”Berhalter afterward singled out a number of players for praise, including the reserve defender Joe Scally, who he said persisted gamely despite a couple of early mistakes; goalkeeper Sean Johnson, who made a crucial second-half save to preserve the draw; and midfielder Tyler Adams, who Berhalter said “had an extra gear, and extra spark, and was all over the place.” The 15th-ranked United States began its training camp this month with a game against Morocco, ranked 24th. And the team’s next two games this month represent a bit of a drop-off in overall quality: Grenada (170th) on Friday in Austin, Texas, and El Salvador (74th) on the road on June 14.So the match on Sunday and the Americans’ solid performance — that they emerged from a sparring session with a top team mostly unscathed — will represent an optimistic development for a young team trying to mold itself into a contender.“The idea is to play quality teams,” Berhalter said, “and the reason why is because you want to go into the World Cup with confidence you can beat anyone on any given day.” More

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      How to Watch the Ukraine-Wales World Cup Playoff Game

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      A European playoff on Sunday is a winner-take-all affair for Ukraine, a nation at war, and Wales, which hasn’t been the tournament since 1958.For months after Russia invaded their country in February, the members of Ukraine’s national soccer team were unable to hold so much as a practice together, let alone play a game.On Sunday, they will play for a place in the World Cup.That game, once unthinkable for Ukraine’s team, and by far the least of its concerns, will be against Wales at Cardiff City Stadium, a modest arena about 1,500 miles from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and a world away from the horrors and traumas and worries of war.Here’s what you need to know.How can I watch?The game is being broadcast in the United States by ESPN and streamed on its ESPN Plus service. (Warning: You may see listings saying the match is on ESPN2; it was, until Friday, when the network reassessed the interest in the game and moved it to ESPN.)Broadcast coverage on ESPN begins at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. The game kicks off at noon.What’s at stake?Sunday’s match is, in the strictest sense, a winner-take-all affair. The victor on Sunday will claim one of the final three places in the World Cup in Qatar when it kicks off in November. The loser can try again in four years.Ukraine hasn’t qualified for the World Cup since 2006, its only previous trip to the tournament.But Wales has waited even longer: Its last — and only — World Cup appearance was in 1958, and the team is eager to end that drought, even if it means ending Ukraine’s dreams at the same time.“It’s still missing,” said the Wales captain, Gareth Bale, who has five Champions League titles on his résumé but not a single minute in the World Cup. “We have a game tomorrow to put that to bed and qualify. Everyone wants to play at a World Cup. It’s no different for me.”Gareth Bale, the Wales captain, at training on Saturday.Mike Egerton/Press Association, via Associated PressHow did the teams get here?Sunday’s game is the final match of a four-team playoff — two semifinals and a final — that didn’t go as anyone expected. The games were originally scheduled for March, but Ukraine’s semifinal against Scotland was postponed soon after Russia’s invasion, even as Wales went ahead with a game against Austria, winning by 2-1.In April, FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of the World Cup, announced the Ukraine-Scotland match had been rescheduled for June 1, with the final — already set for Wales — to be held a few days later.Read More on the World CupAmbitious Goals: FIFA has given up on a plan to hold the World Cup every two years. But its president’s plans for the future are bold.Female Referees: Following the selection of three women among the World Cup’s 36 referees, the event in Qatar may be the first edition of the men’s tournament in which a game is refereed by a woman.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — and a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.On Wednesday, Ukraine beat Scotland, 3-1, in a game charged with emotion at Hampden Park in Glasgow. It was the Ukrainians’ first official game since November.Was Ukraine expected to be here?Until the Scotland game, it was hard to know what to expect from Ukraine. Rescheduling its World Cup playoff was one thing. Preparing for the game was another matter.Like most of Europe’s national teams, Ukraine has players who are scattered across the continent: Oleksandr Zinchenko just won a Premier League title with Manchester City, and Andriy Yarmolenko (West Ham), Ruslan Malinovskyi (Atalanta) and Roman Yaremchuk (Benfica) all play for big European clubs. That meant the core of the team was getting regular training and games, even if their minds were constantly distracted by the war back home.But the Ukrainian league shut down as soon as Russia invaded, leaving the bulk of Ukraine’s players with no place to play. The top clubs Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv managed to get their players out of the country and set up camps abroad and a series of exhibition matches so their players could train.At the same time, Ukraine’s coach, Oleksandr Petrakov, set up a training camp in Slovenia for his team, and cycled in members of the squad as they became available. All the while, messages poured in from Ukraine: from soldiers, from family members, from friends fighting to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty from Russian troops.“They make only one demand,” the veteran midfielder Taras Stepanenko told The Guardian of the messages he and his teammates receive. “‘Please do everything you can to go to the World Cup.’”What are they saying?Ukraine Coach Oleksandr Petrakov: “We have a very difficult situation in the country. Not everyone watches football. We have grief, people are dying …”“We don’t think about it. We are thinking about how to make our fans happy, our armed forces, and focused on the game.”Wales captain Gareth Bale: “We’ll be the most popular team in the stadium, that’s the main thing. We understand the awful things going on in Ukraine. Our hearts go out to the kids, families and people of Ukraine. We’ve all felt awful during this time and not been able to do too much. But come tomorrow, it’s a game of football. We want to win.”Ukraine defender Oleksandr Karavayev: “We understand that the most important game in our lives is ahead.”What’s next for the winner?Since the World Cup draw took place in the window between the original dates of the playoff in March and Sunday’s playoff final, the winner of the game in Cardiff will know its World Cup path immediately.It will land in a group with England, Iran and the United States and open the World Cup on its first day, Nov. 21, against the Americans. More