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      At Champions League Final, the Fans Weren’t the Danger

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      Preconceptions about Liverpool supporters and policing decisions that didn’t prioritize their safety led to the chaos at the Champions League final. That’s dangerous for every fan.It can be hard, at times like these, to know exactly who to believe. On one side, there are the thousands of witness accounts, the contemporaneous reports from much of the world’s news media, the countless videos and an apparently bottomless reserve of high resolution photographs, all telling one story about last Saturday’s Champions League final.And on the other side, there are the claims of the politicians and administrators and law enforcement officials who were responsible for the staging of European soccer’s showpiece event and who would, ultimately, be held accountable if it was found that they had overseen a complete and colossal organizational failure. It is just so hard to know which side is more likely to be telling the truth.Not that it matters, of course, because the damage is done. Around 20 minutes before the game was scheduled to start, UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, announced to the Stade de France and to the watching world that the game would have to be delayed because of the “late arrival” of fans to the stadium.It was not relevant, it seemed, that images had been floating around online for more than two hours of huge lines not only at the stadium’s gates, but at its perimeter, too, or that it had been blindingly obvious for some time that there were impossible bottlenecks to get close to the ground, or that several journalists had informed UEFA of the problems.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNo, all of that was put to one side, and UEFA blamed the fans. It did so either without full knowledge of the situation at its own event — an unforgivable ignorance — or knowing that its statement was at best misleading or, at worst, an outright and pernicious lie.And that was all it took. As soon as UEFA decided that the real problem with this sporting event was all the people who wanted to watch it, the — let’s keep the lawyers happy — misinformation spread and disseminated and infected everything it touched. From that point on, Liverpool’s fans were presumed guilty until proven innocent, not least by considerable portions of the people who should, really, have been their allies: other soccer fans.Still, UEFA can take some solace from the fact that — even with that head start — it has not been the worst actor in the sorry story that has played out over the last week or so, a time that should have been dedicated to celebrating the marvel that is this ageless Real Madrid team.No, that dubious honor goes to various elements of the French state. Not just the body-armor-clad riot police — who sprayed tear gas at fans waiting patiently to attend a sporting event, who tried to funnel thousands of people through two narrow gaps under a highway overpass, who shuttered entry points without explanation for hours as the crowd gathered and swelled, and who then locked down the stadium during the game to pen fans inside — but their champions: the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, and to his counterpart for sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra.For almost a week now, Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra have blamed Liverpool’s fans on Twitter, in comments to the news media and in front of a rapidly-convened Senate hearing.France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, and the country’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey have blamed Liverpool fans despite all of those pictures of large, patient crowds. They have blamed Liverpool fans despite seeing videos of children being lifted from the ground to prevent them from being crushed. They have blamed Liverpool fans despite seeing footage of their own police officers squirting pepper spray and firing tear gas at people trying, quietly, to scan tickets.They have continued to blame Liverpool fans even as their own story keeps changing, even as the number of “fake tickets” presented at the Stade de France that evening has diminished from “30,000 to 40,000” to a fraction of that. They have stuck with their line even when it veered into baseless slurs, when it involved Oudéa-Castéra saying that Liverpool fans — maybe just English fans — posed a “very specific risk” to public safety.They have done so even though it does not take into account the problems that Real Madrid’s fans faced, or the footage and photographs of local residents forcing their way in, or the corroborated accounts of large-scale gang activity both before and after the game.They have done so even when it leaves more questions than answers: Where, precisely, did the 40,000 bearers of pretend tickets go, and why were they not captured wandering the streets of Saint-Denis? Were they ghosts? Other excuses have drifted into the realm of dystopian fantasy: Darmanin, at one point, claimed the police had to act because of the risk of a “pitch invasion.”This might all have the ring of a cover-up — and not even an especially good one, given how often the French authorities have had to contradict themselves — but there exists the possibility that it is not. Maybe it is not a series of outrageous and egregious lies. Maybe they have not seen all of those images, heard all of that testimony. Maybe it is just two politicians relying in good faith on poor, premature information. Maybe.It is hard, though, not to read into the persistence with which Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra have peddled their accusations a certain calculation.Despite the fact that their interpretation of last Saturday evening is demonstrably, provably untrue, they have stood by it because the alternative is unpalatable: Admitting that the French security services got this one wrong would mean admitting that they have also got their approach to policing French domestic soccer wrong and that they are probably going to get next year’s Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Paris Olympics wrong, too.Most of all, they have stood by it because, deep down, they know it will work. They know, at least, that it might create the illusion of an alternative set of facts. They know, too, that much of the heavy lifting will be done by prejudice, by those who would point out, archly, that this does seem to happen to Liverpool fans or England fans or just soccer fans as a whole an awful lot.They know that while social media allowed all of those images and videos and firsthand accounts to be surfaced and to be spread, citizen journalism is a much less potent force online than deep-rooted partisanship. They know that the latter will overpower the former at some point, at least enough to muddy the waters, to obscure not only this specific truth but also the idea of truth, to ensure that some blame is apportioned elsewhere.Plenty, certainly, have seized on the opportunity to assume that Liverpool fans, or English fans, or even a certain stripe of soccer fans as a whole must be at fault. Plenty have decided that this must be the first time that anyone has ever tried to gain access to an event by using a fake ticket, without wondering whether perhaps some of those people were victims, rather than perpetrators, of a crime, without asking if perhaps that is the sort of thing the authorities should be prepared to encounter.And yet the temptation to side with the authorities, in the aftermath of an event like this, rather than those who are different from you only in terms of the team they support is a dangerous one.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat was proved at the Stade de France on Saturday evening was that soccer — in France, at least — is still an industry content with having tear gas fired on its customers, on families and on children. That it finds it acceptable to put them in a position where they have reason to fear for their lives, to risk them being crushed to death, to assume all of them are equally guilty and then, rather than to ask how this might have been avoided, to have the temerity, in the face of all available evidence, to blame them for it.And that has ramifications for everyone. For any soccer fan, for any sports fan, for any participant in French democracy. The Stade de France is not the first time a UEFA final has descended into chaos. Last summer’s European Championship final, in London, prompted a governmental review. Last month’s Europa League final, in Seville, drew a letter of complaint from both clubs about the way their fans were treated.Increasingly, it appears that UEFA is no longer capable of staging these games. More troublingly, in France in particular, it would seem that nobody in any position of power is interested in discovering how to police events of this scale to make sure they are not only safe and secure but enjoyable, too. Nobody wants to accept responsibility. Nobody wants to learn lessons.What happened at the Stade de France, and the smear campaign unleashed in its aftermath, has ramifications far beyond the reputation of Liverpool’s fans. Allowing the allegations of Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra to take root is to allow this to happen again, to guarantee that there is a repeat, that another set of fans will be funneled and kettled and trapped and gassed and told — by those in power, by those responsible, by those who are supposed to have them in their care — that it is their fault.At times like this, it should not be hard to choose which side to believe, to know who is very obviously telling the truth.That Didn’t Work. Let’s Do It Again.Hold you applause for Barcelona, please.Dan Himbrechts/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was a time, a little while ago, when it was possible to feel quite encouraged by Barcelona. Xavi Hernández had made a bright start as manager, steering the club back into the Champions League. In Gavi and Pedri and Ansu Fati and Ronald Áraujo, the young and gifted core of a new team was starting to emerge.Even the club’s transfer activity seemed quite smart. Ferran Torres and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had given the team a lift in January. Franck Kessié, the Ivorian midfielder at A.C. Milan, had been secured on a free transfer for the summer, giving the team a dynamism it has missed for some time.True, the debts are still enormous, but the club seemed to have acquiesced to cold reality. It was cutting its cloth, balancing its books, adapting to its new strictures. It was even trying to rehabilitate its relationship with Ousmane Dembélé, an admirable but somewhat quixotic attempt to recognize that salvaging a distressed asset is cheaper than acquiring a new one.And then it emerged that it might be considering the idea of selling Frenkie De Jong to Manchester United. Now, on the surface, that felt like an unfortunate necessity: At 25, De Jong is the sort of player who might generate a fee with which to rebuild a team. Sometimes, those kinds of difficult decisions have to be made.But then it turned out that Barcelona was planning on using at least a portion of the money it might receive — most likely from Manchester United — for De Jong to buy Marcos Alonso and César Azpilicueta.Both are fine players, of course. Azpilicueta, certainly, would be an asset both on and off the field to Barcelona. But they are hardly spring chickens: Alonso is 31 and Azpilicueta 32. Alonso excels in a position, wing back, that Barcelona does not even use. This is not the work of a club that has learned its lessons. Not in the slightest.You Cannot All Be LeBronAll will be revealed, then, on June 17. In less than two weeks, humanity will finally discover the answer to the most burning question of the age: Which team will get to have endless, heated discussions about whether Paul Pogba is playing sufficiently well next season? And it will do so in the most apposite medium imaginable: through watching his own, personal documentary.Just a little of the sting from The Pogmentary — no, really — was drawn earlier this week, when Manchester United confirmed that Pogba would be leaving the club, six years on from his $100 million arrival, at the end of his contract. The “huge decision” that sits at the center of much of the promotional spiel of the documentary, it turns out, was not entirely his.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPogba is not the first player to go down this road, of course. His French teammate, Antoine Griezmann, announced his move to Barcelona in the form of what might as well broadly be called a documentary, too. That Griezmann, like Pogba, is a devoted N.B.A. fan is probably not irrelevant here. These are both transparent homages to The Decision, LeBron James’s great gift to the documentarian’s art.The problem, of course, is that LeBron James is one of the greatest players ever to grace a basketball court, a status that is probably just a little beyond both Pogba and Griezmann. If James’s announcement was full of hubris and self-importance — the phrase “I’ll be taking my talents” should always, always be laced with irony — then it is easy to feel there is something just a little more tawdry about soccer’s ersatz versions, something slightly, well, desperate.To the players, though, that is a price worth paying. Pogba’s time at Manchester United has, by almost any measure, been anti-climactic. The peak years of his career, at least at club level, have been spent seeing his status slowly fade, leaving a player once regarded as one of the finest midfielders in the world now widely regarded as an expensive luxury.The bombast and the faint pomposity of a glossy documentary, an announcement about his future — spoiler alert: He will probably return to Juventus — is, at its heart, a way of asserting that he is still a star, that he can still command attention, that he can still dictate his own terms. It is a message tailored, in part, to whichever club (again: Juventus) he joins. More than that, though, it has the air of a message to himself.CorrespondenceA couple of thoughts from readers on the final day of the Premier League season, which as far as I can tell happened several years ago. “Seeing how Serie A settles a points tie by looking at a comparable win/loss, why can’t the Premier League do something similar?” asked Erich Almasy. “Watching Manchester City run up the scores to get a higher goal difference is embarrassing and clearly hurts clubs fighting relegation.”(A brief translation for readers unfamiliar with league table math: Serie A separates teams that are level on points by head-to-head record. The Premier League does it on goal difference.)I will confess to being slightly torn on this one. Head-to-head seems slightly fairer to me — though not in this Premier League season, when it would have been no use at all if Liverpool and Manchester City had finished level on points, given both games between the two of them ended 2-2 — and I do believe that seeing teams run up the score is not especially compelling sporting entertainment.But what is the alternative? That City (and Liverpool) just take the last 30 minutes of games off? Goal difference is also, to my eye, more dramatic. A.C. Milan’s better head-to-head record against Inter Milan this year meant it effectively had an extra point; in England, there is at least the possibility of a team overturning a disadvantage in goal difference on the final day.Pep Guardiola left the final day as he entered it: confident Manchester City would bring him the Premier League title.Hannah Mckay/ReutersI am more inclined to agree with Chuck Massoud-Tastor. “How does the Premier League defend the idea of starting all games simultaneously on the final day? Would they not garner more viewership and excitement with staggered starts? Am I just being a provincial American?”Yes, Chuck, you are, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right. It would be possible to stagger at least some of the games on the final day, at least in some scenarios, as long as all of the games pertaining to relegation or Europe or the title happened simultaneously.I’m not sure any drama would be lost. In a way, it might even serve to allow each story line a little time to breathe. That said, the issue is in the logistics. You do not know which games will be significant for which prize until relatively late, and rearranging games on short notice would only inconvenience fans. More

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      Nigeria Adds Up the Costs of Missing the World Cup

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      Failure to qualify for Qatar has condemned Nigeria to a humbling summer instead of months of World Cup hype. Then there’s the fate of its famous jersey.In those initial moments of agony in March after Nigeria was eliminated from qualification for this year’s World Cup, the most immediate thoughts of Amaju Pinnick, the president of Nigeria’s soccer federation, were of the disappointment being felt by his 200 million countrymen in Africa’s most populous nation.He needed only to look down on the scenes unfolding inside Moshood Abiola National Stadium in Abuja, Nigeria, to see what it meant. Thousands of angry supporters had poured onto the field after the final whistle to vent their anger, knocking over the advertising boards, chasing the players from the field and clashing with security officers. “My first thought,” Pinnick said, “was to resign immediately.”But his mind quickly drifted elsewhere, too. In those first days after Nigeria’s elimination in a home-and-home playoff against Ghana, Pinnick said he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about another group feeling the sting of the team’s failure.“Oh what have we done,” he said, “to Nike.”For any country accustomed to attending the World Cup, the consequences of missing the tournament are substantial. The United States Soccer Federation stumbled through just such a soccer catastrophe in 2017, and Italy has now done it in two World Cup cycles in a row.For Nigeria, a leading light of African soccer that until this year had failed to qualify for the World Cup only once since 1994, the emotional and financial cost of elimination may be best told through the demise of a single deal: the carefully calibrated plan, worth millions of dollars and priceless publicity, linked to the release of a new national team jersey made by Nike.Nigeria’s jersey for the 2018 World Cup had been a breakout star, creating a frenzy and the type of buzz more expected from an appearance by one of the game’s star players than the arrival of a piece of apparel. Brightly colored and featuring a design that set it apart from the more staid, conservative offerings of most of the other teams at the tournament in Russia, Nigeria’s jersey became a must-have that summer, selling out almost immediately.Nigeria national soccer gear in London in 2018. It didn’t stay in stores for long.Frank Augstein/Associated PressNike received at least three million orders for the $90 shirt even before it went on sale. Lines formed at the company’s flagship stores in London and other cities on the day of its release. When it was finally made available online, it sold out in three minutes.Four years later, Nike and Nigeria — whose federation officials have sought to take full advantage of their brand through their relationship with the company — were hoping to build on that success with a new design this summer.“Nike has been very religious about us,” Pinnick said. “I feel very, very bad — I feel like crying when you mention Nike. They went all the way to bringing out what would have been the best jersey again in this tournament.”The World Cup is a major sales moment for Nike, which outfits some of the tournament’s most prominent teams, including the current champion, France, but also the United States, England and Brazil, which has won more titles than any other nation.Designing and manufacturing World Cup jerseys is not a short process, either; it typically takes about two years before the products appear in stores. Pinnick’s reaction, then, was understandable: Nigeria’s failure to qualify will mean a colossal loss in what the soccer federation could have expected to reap from its share of sales, he said. (Fans of the shirt will still get a chance to own one: The shirt will be released, presumably amid much less excitement, in September.)Pinnick estimated that as many as five million jerseys might have been sold after qualification, though it is unclear how many jerseys Nike was planning to produce; the company declined multiple requests to comment for this article.Joe Aribo and Nigeria lost to Ecuador, 1-0, in a friendly on Thursday in New Jersey. It was the team’s second defeat in a week on its United States tour.Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesThrough its contract with Nike, Nigeria was entitled to a royalty of about 8 percent of each sale, Pinnick suggested. It would also have received a further $1 million in bonus fees from the company for making the World Cup. Those payouts, as well as additional eight-figure paydays from FIFA just for playing in the tournament, most likely would have meant a doubling of the Nigerian federation’s annual revenues of $20 million — a figure that was less than a tenth of what the biggest national soccer associations in South America and Europe generate.Shehu Dikko, the vice president of the federation, said a significant amount of the money earned through qualification would have been allocated before the tournament, on items like player bonuses, tuneup matches and training camps. (The team is currently in North America: It lost to Mexico on Saturday in Texas and again to Ecuador at Red Bull Arena in New Jersey on Thursday night.) “It is a huge financial blow for us,” he said, “and we have to recover.”There is another element of Nigeria’s failure, though, that is much harder to quantify. Over the decades, the Nigeria men’s soccer team, particularly when it is performing at major tournaments, has become a rallying point like no other for a population cleaved by social, ethnic and religious differences.“Football in Nigeria is life — it’s more than anybody can explain with words,” Dikko said. “You have to feel it. Nigeria has over 500 tribes, so many traditions, but football is the only activity that breaks through all of our fault lines. Once there is a football, everybody is a Nigerian. Nobody cares who you are, what you do or what language you speak. So football is more than just a game for us. It’s what binds this country together.”“Football is more than just a game for us,” one Nigerian official said of the sport and the national team. “It’s what binds this country together.”Afolabi Sotunde/ReutersThat level of interest and passion, though, means there also is a sharper focus on the performance of the federation.Under Pinnick, who assumed the role in 2014 and is the longest-serving soccer president in Nigeria’s history and who is also a member of FIFA’s governing council, Nigeria has had a mixed record. While he claims credit for modernizing the federation and attracting new sponsors, his tenure has failed to yield any major titles. A round of 16 elimination in the most recent edition of the Africa Cup of Nations — months before the team’s World Cup ouster — was its worst performance in that event since 1984. That came after a third-place finish in the previous edition and two consecutive catastrophic qualification campaigns in which Nigeria missed the competition in 2015 and 2017.Despite his initial impulse to resign in March, Pinnick now says he will stay on through the end of his term later this year. Not everyone supports the decision.Days after its World Cup exit, with Pinnick at his lowest, dozens of placard-holding protesters gathered outside the Nigerian headquarters in Abuja, calling for his ouster. Pinnick said the protest was not what it seemed; he suggested the crowd had been assembled — and paid — by opponents who have been trying to stymie his efforts since the day he first stepped into office.“They are professional placard carriers — you employ them, you rent them,” Pinnick said of the group that called for his ouster. “If you ask the guy why they are carrying the placards, they say they don’t know. They rent them for as low as 10 cents, 20 cents. People are hungry.”A few days later, there was another demonstration, more placards. This time the messages were different. They called on Pinnick to stay on. More

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      40,000 Fake Tickets at the Champions League Final? Actually, It Was 2,589.

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      The French authorities blamed tens of thousands of counterfeit tickets for the chaos before Saturday’s Champions League final. The official count was far lower.One of the main claims pushed by French officials to explain the chaotic crowd scenes that created a dangerous crush of fans outside last weekend’s Champions League final near Paris has been that tens of thousands of people arrived at the match bearing fake tickets.France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has claimed as many as 70 percent of tickets presented at the Stade de France in St.-Denis were fake. He told a news conference Monday that the “root cause” of the chaos was roughly 30,000 to 40,000 English fans bearing counterfeit tickets — or no tickets — who jammed the entrances.But according to official numbers reviewed by The New York Times, the exact number of fake tickets intercepted by stewards manning the entrance gates was far lower: 2,589, to be exact.That figure is almost three times the usual number of forgeries at the Champions League final, a game widely considered to be European soccer’s equivalent of the Super Bowl, but significantly lower than the figure used by Darmanin, who had as of Wednesday not provided details of the source of his estimate.Darmanin and France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who has made similar claims about fake tickets, have faced growing criticism over the handling of the game. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, on Wednesday called for “full transparency” in an investigation of the match-day scenes and their causes. At an appearance in front of a committee of the French senate later Wednesday, Darmanin admitted, “Clearly things could have been organized better.”“It is evident,” he added, “that this celebration of sport was ruined.”France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, faced testy questioning from lawmakers on Wednesday.Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn what became a testy appearance in front of the committee, Darmanin and Oudéa-Castéra came under sustained pressure over the organizational failures. In response, they largely repeated the language that has enraged Liverpool, its fans and members of the British government.At one point, Oudéa-Castéra told lawmakers that Liverpool supporters carried a “very specific risk” in the view of the French authorities, without elaborating what she meant.Darmanin, meanwhile, insisted the counterfeit ticket numbers were of an unprecedented scale, claiming at one point there were so many that stadium security guards thought their tools to validate them were faulty.The hearing lasted longer than an hour, ending with little clarity and a doubling down by the officials on their previous claims, again without evidence to support their conclusions.That prompted one lawmaker to ask: “Since Saturday, we have blamed Liverpool fans and the club, striking workers and locals for the chaos. What allows you to make these declarations without a thorough investigation?”Not all attendees had the same experience at the final. While most of Real Madrid’s fans arrived with electronic tickets, Liverpool requested paper ones for its official allocation of 23,000 tickets. Those tickets came embedded with two main security features: one that needed to be confirmed with a chemical pen and a second that was a laser engraving of the Champions League trophy.Those holding tickets without the two security features were to be denied access by stewards at an initial checkpoint far from the stadium’s bar code readers. But that system collapsed under a deluge of fans: To relieve the growing crush of people, officials abandoned those first checks and allowed the crowds to move closer to the stadium.The debacle has led to chorus of criticism of the security at the match, in which Real Madrid defeated Liverpool, 1-0, to claim its record 14th European title. Liverpool police who attended in supporting roles labeled the situation outside the gates “shocking.” The club, its fans and a European supporters group all called for investigations even as the game was underway. And in the days since, British government officials have demanded answers from their French counterparts and European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, for the treatment of thousands of Liverpool supporters.Thousands of fans were trapped for hours in tight crowds before the final, causing a delay to the match’s kickoff. Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSupporters faced multiple issues, including dangerous crushes, after being corralled into narrow spaces, and the final was delayed more than 30 minutes as the French riot police used tear gas and pepper spray on fans after appearing to lose control of the situation. At the same time, hundreds of local youths tried to force their way into the stadium, either through the turnstiles or by climbing over security fences. Officials estimated as many as 4,000 ticketless people may have succeeded.Part of the explanation into why Liverpool supporters found themselves trapped in such a small space has now turned to transportation problems on the day of the game, including a strike by workers that affected one of the major rail links to the stadium.UEFA and local officials have compared travel data from Saturday’s game to figures from the French Cup final held at the Stade de France on May 7. They found that one of the stations closest to the Stade de France had four times as many fans travel through its gates Saturday than had used the station during the French Cup final. That, they believe, contributed to the dangerous bottleneck of supporters.It may be months before a complete picture of what occurred at the stadium emerges. On Tuesday, UEFA, reeling from chaotic scenes at last year’s European Championship final in London as well as the recent Europa League final in Seville, Spain, appointed a former education minister of Portugal, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, to lead an independent inquiry into the failures around the Champions League final.The claims made by the French government’s representatives, though, continue to infuriate Liverpool and its ownership. The club’s chairman, Tom Werner, said as much in a caustic letter to Oudéa-Castéra, the French sports minister.He wrote, he said, “out of utter disbelief that a minister of the French government, a position of enormous responsibility and influence, could make a series of unproven pronouncements on a matter of such significance before a proper, formal, independent investigation process has even taken place.”He decried the “loose data and unverified assertions” presented to reporters Monday before an investigation had taken place.“The fact that your public position went against this objective is a concern in itself,” he added. “That you did so without any recourse to ourselves or our supporters is an even greater one. All voices should count in this process, and they should count equally and fairly.”As well as assailing Oudéa-Castéra for her claims, Werner also demanded a public apology. By late Tuesday, Oudéa-Castéra’s tone — though not her claims about fake tickets — had changed.“The issue of the false tickets does not change this: Liverpool is one of the greatest clubs ever,” she wrote on Twitter. “And on Saturday there were supporters with valid tickets that spent a terrible evening or were not able to watch the game. We are sorry for that.”Liverpool continues to be inundated with video evidence shot on cellphones by its supporters. The images, many of which have also been uploaded to social media, are sometimes harrowing, showing children and older fans dealing with the effects of tear gas fired — sometimes indiscriminately — by the riot police.Fans of Real Madrid faced similar problems on their side of the stadium. Since the final, several supporters have come forward to say they were attacked or robbed on their way in and out of the stadium.Amando Sánchez, 51, who traveled to Paris in a group of 14, mainly family members, said his 87-year-old father and an older brother missed the game as a result of chaos at the entry gates. Another brother, Sánchez said, fought off an effort to steal his ticket as he prepared to present it at a stadium turnstile.“Really no one was in charge,” Sánchez said in an interview Wednesday. More

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      Ukraine Is One Game Away From the World Cup

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      Competing for a place in a World Cup already comes with pressure, but Ukraine’s players have not shied away from what getting there would mean to a country under siege. They’re one game away.The emotion, in anticipation, had been so raw that, at times, it was easy to worry that it might prove overwhelming. Oleksandr Zinchenko, a Ukrainian midfielder, had talked about pride, about freedom, about proving to the world that his country would “never give up.” He had welled up with tears as he spoke.His coach, Oleksandr Petrakov, had admitted that many of his players were consumed by thoughts of family members trapped back home, haunted by the air-raid sirens and menaced by the fighting, and still picking up the pieces of lives shattered by a brutal, senseless invasion.As they prepared for the first of two playoff games that could, in the end, deliver them and their nation to the men’s World Cup, Ukraine’s players faced a daunting physical challenge.A handful of the players at Petrakov’s disposal compete in the leagues of Western Europe; they had been able, in some superficial, professional sense, to continue as normal these last three months. Their minds might have been elsewhere, of course, but their bodies were training and playing.For the rest, though, there had been no competitive soccer for months. Those players attached to Ukraine’s two most famous clubs — Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv, both now in exile from their homeland — have featured in a smattering of charity games in Poland and Croatia, staged to raise money for the many millions fleeing Russia’s invasion.The players each had a Ukrainian flag draped around their shoulders when they took the field.Robert Perry/EPA, via ShutterstockPetrakov was able to call his squad together last month for a training camp in Slovenia, the monotony broken only by the occasional tuneup match against club opposition. There had, though, been nothing comparable to the intensity of meaningful action; quite whether his team would have the physical capacity to match the first opponent blocking its path to the World Cup remained open to question.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.More pressing still, though, was the psychological hurdle. Ukraine’s players have not shied away from what winning a place at the World Cup would mean to the country. They have not tried to downplay how important something as trivial as soccer can be, even when it seems to be very trivial indeed.Several players are in regular contact with those fighting on the front line; they had come to understand that qualifying for just the second World Cup in the country’s history would have a significant effect on national morale. “We want to go to the World Cup, to give these incredible emotions to the people,” Zinchenko said. “Ukrainians deserve it so much at this moment.”As the players emerged into a sunlit Glasgow evening, each one with the country’s flag draped around his shoulders, it was impossible not to wonder if perhaps it might all prove too much. The pressure of playing to reach a World Cup can be inhibiting; the pressure of playing to reach a World Cup on behalf of a country at war, a country fighting for its existence, could be asphyxiating.And yet, what stood out about Ukraine, almost immediately, was a coolness, a composure, a detachment from the significance of the country’s first competitive game since the invasion. It shone through not simply in the three goals it scored to beat Scotland, 3-1 — a delicate lob from Andriy Yarmolenko, a precise header from Roman Yaremchuk and an emphatic finish late from Artem Dovbyk — or in the welter of other chances it created.Ukraine played with a coolness against Scotland.Mark Runnacles/Getty ImagesIt was also in dozens of little things. Ukraine passed neatly, incisively, with plenty of speed but a distinct absence of haste. Zinchenko, so affected by his sense of “mission,” as he put it, played with intricacy, verve and assurance. Yarmolenko was indefatigable. In defense, Ilya Zabarnyi and Taras Stepanenko were imposing, unruffled.Rather than being overwhelmed by emotion, Ukraine seemed to be unshackled from it, once the anticipation had ended and the moment itself had arrived. For the first time in a long time, the players were doing what they had always done, what they had been trained to do, and they reveled in it.It was not pride — a sense of purpose, a desire to make the people happy — that carried them through to a final playoff, against Wales in Cardiff on Sunday, in a game that will determine whether Ukraine’s story will end with a World Cup appearance in November. Instead, as soon as the whistle blew, they found freedom, and that had been more than enough. More

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      For USMNT and Others, World Cup Run Starts With a Sprint

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      The schedule for Qatar is set, but rosters are not. For players in the United States and elsewhere, a few weeks in a camp and a handful of matches could change everything.CINCINNATI — Until a few days ago, Malik Tillman, a 20-year-old midfielder from Nuremberg, Germany, had never stepped foot on American soil.Five and a half months from now, if things go the way he hopes they do, he will be representing the United States at the World Cup in Qatar.As the international soccer world enters a supposedly quiet summer period, with the European season over and most players on an all-too-brief break from their clubs, Tillman’s story offers a compelling counterpoint to any notion that teams will merely hover in holding patterns until the tournament begins in late November.National teams, after all, have only two chances left to gather before departing for the World Cup — a few games this month and a second window of matches in September — and there is a lot to be done. Squads must be assembled. Tactics must be fine-tuned. Players’ dreams will be realized or deferred. Lives will be changed.One of them could be Tillman’s. This week, he completed the switch of his soccer allegiance to the United States, the home country of his father, from Germany, the nation where he was born and where he is a rising prospect at Bayern Munich. His first appearance for the United States could come this week, in a friendly against Morocco (Wednesday) or Uruguay (Sunday).“It took me a lot of time to make the decision, but in the end, I listened to what my heart told me,” said Tillman, who started getting to know his new American teammates at their training camp this week in Cincinnati. “I hope it’s the right decision. I’m happy to be here.”Malik Tillman played for Germany’s youth national teams before announcing plans to switch to the United States last month. His move was approved on Tuesday.Tibor Illyes/EPA, via ShutterstockFor national team coaches around the world, the remaining training camp windows, and the handful of exhibition matches played in them, represent valuable time to implement new ideas and refine the ones that got them to this point.For individual players — like Tillman and others who are on the fringe of their national squads — they are opportunities to make a positive impression, to catch a coach’s eye, to earn his trust.For the teams and their fans, the games may present one final moment, perhaps, to pause and dream. The nerve-racking struggle of qualification is over. The daunting crucible of the World Cup looms. Until November, anything seems possible.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.“We don’t want to go into the World Cup thinking we just want to participate,” U.S. midfielder Weston McKennie said. “A good World Cup for anyone is going as far as you can, making it out of the group stage. A perfect World Cup is winning it.“A lot of people say it’s far-fetched for us, but it’s the mentality that we have. We want to compete. We want to win. And we want to get as far as we can.”For Tillman, who played on several of Germany’s youth national teams, the past week has been a whirlwind. He arrived in the United States late Friday night. The next day, in front of his new teammates, he was presented with a cake for his 20th birthday.Gregg Berhalter, the coach of the U.S. men’s national team, who secured Tillman’s commitment only a couple weeks ago, delivered the cake to the player.“Malik’s coming in with a bang, baby,” Berhalter said. “Happy birthday, buddy!”On Tuesday, Christian Pulisic, the team’s best player, was tasked with announcing to the group that Tillman’s switch had been officially approved by FIFA. That sparked another boisterous round of applause from the group.Asked this week for his first impressions of the United States, Tillman smiled.“It’s huge,” he said, drawing laughter from a roomful of reporters. “Germany is kind of small.” Noting the sprawling streets he had seen in Cincinnati, he added: “It’s crazy.”Amid all the extracurricular activity, there were actual training sessions on the field, where Tillman has already impressed his coaches and teammates.“He’s shown a lot of quality in training, very good understanding of the game, very good first touch and awareness around the penalty box,” Berhalter said. “So that’s been great.”Coaches at the club level have tried using Tillman as a striker, and while he has not pushed back too much against their experimentation, he sees himself as a midfielder in the mold of his favorite player, the Manchester United and France star Paul Pogba: confident, fluid, versatile.“In my mind, I’m more of a 10 than a striker because I would say my strength is my vision, and as a striker, you don’t need that in your game because the goal is almost all the time at the back of your body,” Tillman said. “I like to attack the goal, to see the goal in front of me.”Tillman said Berhalter has told him he, too, envisions him as a No. 10, a more creative role currently occupied by the likes of Pulisic, the Americans’ actual No. 10. That was one of the points that persuaded him to switch to the United States, Tillman said.The biggest selling point from Berhalter, though, was telling Tillman he could potentially make a World Cup roster this year — something that would have been impossible with Germany.Of course, outside of a small core of players like Pulisic, McKennie and Tyler Adams, no American player’s place in Qatar is guaranteed. Anything can happen as they fight for spots. Tillman knows that. So do his teammates.On many players’ minds, for instance, was the plight of defender Miles Robinson, who was largely viewed as a lock for the World Cup roster until last month, when he ruptured his left Achilles’ tendon while playing for his club, Atlanta United.Robinson’s injury was a sudden reminder to the American players of their own fragility. Defender Walker Zimmerman said he found himself allowing anxieties about injuries to seep into his mind.“When you’re looking at your goals that are right in front of you, and you’re just always a little bit more hesitant, it’s hard to fight that, but you have to,” Zimmerman said.Aside from worries about injury, players this week also expressed concerns about optimizing their situations with their clubs. For those who have signed, or could sign, with new clubs in the current European off-season, there has been a need to weigh long-term goals against the short-term practicalities of earning immediate playing time in the run-up to the World Cup.Consider Brenden Aaronson, who achieved a personal dream of signing for a Premier League team when he joined Leeds United in May. The move, he acknowledged, means he will have to fight all over again for playing time in a potentially more competitive situation. Sitting on the bench does not augur well for a player’s form.“It’s definitely a risk,” he said, “but it’s a risk I was willing to take.”All three U.S. goalkeepers — Matt Turner, Zack Steffen and Ethan Horvath — could struggle for playing time at their clubs this fall. Turner, above, is moving to Arsenal.Julio Cortez/Associated PressFor now, there are spots to be won up and down the American depth chart.Berhalter, for instance, has no go-to striker. He has not named a starting goalkeeper. And he has said he does not know who his backup left back will be.“I’m not sure the question needs to be answered right now, and the reason why is we have time,” Berhalter said when asked about the goalkeeper position. “I think it’s time to just let all this play out, and that’s the beauty of time in this case.”Players like Tillman and others, though, know the clock is ticking. More

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      Luis Díaz Is the Liverpool Star Who Never Should Have Made It

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      Follow live updates of the UEFA Champions League final.LIVERPOOL, England — Luis Díaz bares his forearm and places a finger on his wrist, as if taking his own pulse. He does it without breaking eye contact, without pausing for breath. He does not seem to notice he is doing it. It is a reflexive, unconscious motion, the best way to demonstrate what he means.Díaz does not, he says, speak Wayúu, the language of the Indigenous community in Colombia to which he can trace his roots. Nor does he wear traditional clothing, or maintain every custom. Life has carried him far from La Guajira, a spit of land fringed by the Caribbean Sea on one side and Venezuela on the other, the Wayúu homeland.It is at that point that he traces his veins with his finger, feels the beat of his heart. “I feel Wayúu,” he says. He may not — by his own estimation — be “pure” Wayúu, but that does not matter. “That is my background, my origins,” he said. “It is who I am.”As Díaz has risen to stardom over the last five years or so — breaking through at Atlético Junior, one of Colombia’s grandest teams; earning a move to Europe with F.C. Porto; igniting Liverpool’s journey to the Champions League final after joining in January — his story has been told and retold so often that even Díaz, now, admits that he would welcome the chance to “clarify” a few of the details.Luis Díaz joined Liverpool in January, and helped fire its run to Saturday’s Champions League final.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome of those have been muddied and distorted by what Juan Pablo Gutierrez, a human-rights activist who first met Díaz when he was 18, describes as the desire to “take a romantic story and make it more romantic still.” The great Colombian midfielder Carlos Valderrama, for example, is often credited with “discovering” Díaz. “That’s just not true,” Gutierrez said.And then there is the tendency toward what Gutierrez labels “opportunism.” Countless former coaches and teammates and acquaintances have been wheeled out by the news media — initially in Colombia, then through Latin America, and finally across Europe — to offer their memories of the 25-year-old forward. “There are a lot of people, who maybe met him for a few days years ago, who bask in the light that he casts,” Gutierrez said.Still, the broad arc of his journey is familiar, in both senses. Díaz had an underprivileged upbringing in Colombia’s most deprived area. He had to leave home as a teenager and travel for six hours, by bus, to train with a professional team. He was so slender at the time that John Jairo Diaz, one of his early coaches, nicknamed him “noodle.” His first club, believing he was suffering from malnutrition, placed him on a special diet to help him gain weight.Though its contours are, perhaps, a little more extreme, that story is not all that dissimilar to the experiences of many of Díaz’s peers, an overwhelming majority of whom faced hardship and made remarkable sacrifices on their way to the top.What makes Díaz’s story different, though, and what makes it especially significant, is where it started. Díaz does not know of any other Wayúu players. “Not at the moment, anyway, not ones who are professional,” he said.There is a reason for that. Scouts do not often make their way to La Guajira to look for players. Colombia’s clubs do not, as a rule, commit resources to finding future stars among the country’s Indigenous communities. It is that which lends Díaz’s story its power. It is not just a story about how he made it. It is also a story about why so many others do not.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDaniel BolívarAs far as Gutierrez could tell, Luis Díaz was not only not the best player in the tournament, he was not even the best player on his team. That honor fell, instead, to Diaz’s friend Daniel Bolívar, an inventive, shimmering playmaker. “Luis was more pragmatic,” Gutierrez said. “Daniel was fantasy.”In 2014, the organization Gutierrez works for, O.N.I.C. — the official representative group of Colombia’s Indigenous populations — had set up a nationwide soccer tournament, designed to bring together the country’s various ethnic groups.“We had seen that the one thing they all had in common, from the Amazon basin to the Andes, was that they spent their free time playing soccer,” Gutierrez said. “Some played with boots and some played barefoot. Some played with a real ball and some played with a ball made from rags. But they all played.”The event was the first of its kind, an unwieldy and complex logistical affair — the travel alone could take days — that unspooled over the course of a year. Its aim, Gutierrez said, was to “demonstrate the talent that these communities have, to show that all they lack is opportunity.”The message was intended to resonate beyond sport. “It was a social and political thing, too,” Gutierrez said. “The word ‘Indian’ is an insult in Colombia. The Indigenous groups are called primitive, dirty, savage. There is a long legacy of colonialism, a deep-seated prejudice. The tournament was a way to show that they are more than folklore, more than the ‘exotic’, more than headdresses and paint.”Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is a long way from the dusty fields of Diaz’s Colombian hometown, Barrancas, to the manicured pitches and bright lights of the Champions League.Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome teams, like F.C. La Guajira, now train on artificial turf fields, but that is no guarantee that scouts from the country’s biggest clubs will ever see them play.Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy the time the finals — held in the capital, Bogotá — came around, Gutierrez was involved in another project. In 2015, with Chile scheduled to host the Copa América, a parallel championship was arranged to celebrate the continent’s Indigenous groups. Colombia’s squad would be drawn from the best players in its national tournament.The team from La Guajira, representing the Wayúu community and featuring Díaz and Bolívar, had made the finals, and its two standout players were selected for inclusion in the national team. It would be coached by John Jairo Diaz, with Valderrama — referred to throughout Colombia exclusively as El Pibe — included as technical director.Valderrama’s involvement meant a lot to Luis Díaz. “That he saw me play and liked me is a beautiful thing,” he said. “I didn’t know him at all, but I admired him a lot. He’s a reference point for all of Colombian football. It was a huge source of pride that Pibe Valderrama might choose me for a team.”Valderrama was not, though, quite as hands-on as has often been presented (a misconception he does not appear eager to correct). “He was an ambassador,” Gutierrez said. “We knew that where the Pibe goes, 50,000 cameras follow. It was a way of making sure our message was heard.”Díaz shone at the tournament, performing well enough that Gutierrez received at least one approach, from a club in Peru, to try to sign him. It would prove a watershed. There were, Díaz believes, plenty of good players in that team. “The problem was that some of them were a little older, so it was difficult to become professional,” he said. He would prove to be the exception.Valderrama’s seal of approval, as well as the news media coverage the tournament generated, led to a move to Barranquilla F.C., a farm team for Junior — the first step on the road to the elite, to Europe, to Liverpool. It was the start of Diaz’s story.And yet, as Gutierrez points out, laughing, Díaz was not exceptional. “He was not the best player in that tournament,” he said. “He wasn’t even the best player on his team.” By common consensus, that was Bolívar.Daniel Bolívar was a former teammate of Díaz’s. Those who watched them say he was a better player.Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBolívar’s story is not as well-known as that of Díaz. It does not have the stirring ending, after all: Bolívar now works at Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine in South America, back in La Guajira.But his story is far more typical of Colombia’s Indigenous communities: not of a gift discovered and nurtured, but of talent lost. “There is no reason he could not be playing for Real Madrid,” Gutierrez said of Bolívar. “He did not lack ability. He lacked opportunity.”The Lucky OneFor all the challenges he faced, the obstacles he had to overcome, Díaz knows he was one of the lucky ones. His father, Luis Manuel, had been a gifted amateur player in Barrancas, the family’s hometown; Díaz still grins at the memory of how good his father had been. “Really good,” runs his assessment.By the time Díaz was a child, his father was running a soccer school — La Escuelita, everyone called it — and in a position to give his son the benefits of a more structured sporting education than he had received. “You could see that he was a little more professional, even then,” Gutierrez said. “He was a bit more advanced, and the credit for that goes to his father.”His father’s dedication to his career is what made the difference, what turned Díaz into a unicorn: He not only helped him train, but his decision to run the soccer school meant his son had competitions to play in. Those enabled him to win a place in the Wayúu team for the Indigenous championship as a 17-year-old, which positioned him to win his spot in the national team a year later, which led to his move into the professional game.Díaz’s first drew notice at an Indigenous tournament in Colombia. That led to a move to bigger teams and, eventually, to Porto.Manuel Fernando Araujo/EPA, via ShutterstockNot everyone, of course, can benefit from that constellation of factors. “In these regions, there is not the support in place,” Díaz said. “There are a lot of good players there, but it is hard for people to leave, to take that step and follow their dream. They can’t leave for reasons of money, or for family reasons. And that means that we are losing a lot of players with a lot of talent.”Gutierrez hopes that Díaz can be an antidote to that pattern. “For a long time, the view has always been that Indigenous peoples do not exist,” he said. “That is the legacy of colonialism: that they are not seen, or they are only seen as something exotic, something from folklore.”Díaz’s presence on soccer’s grandest stage — he could, on Saturday, become the first Colombian to play in and win the Champions League final — is a way to “deconstruct” that image, Gutierrez said. “This is a community at immediate risk of extinction,” he said. “And now, because of Lucho, it is in the light of the world’s cameras. He is sending a message that his community cannot send.”There is no doubt in Díaz’s mind about where he comes from, of whom he represents. He does not speak the language, but it is the blood in his veins, the beat of his heart. Díaz is the exception, the talent that was found while all the others were lost. His hope, Gutierrez’s hope, is that he will not be alone for long.Daniel Munoz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Champions League Final Preview: Liverpool vs. Real Madrid

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      Real Madrid and Liverpool will square off on Saturday in Paris. The game is a rematch of the 2018 final.PARIS — As collisions of star power, pedigree and history go — and provided you don’t support one of their rivals — it would be hard to conjure a better Champions League final this season than Liverpool vs. Real Madrid.The teams meet Saturday in Paris to crown Europe’s club champion. Real Madrid, which won the Spanish league this year, is chasing a record 14th Champions League title after narrowly dodging elimination in the semifinals. Liverpool, the runner-up in the Premier League but holder of two cups already this spring, will be hoping to lift the Champions League trophy for the seventh time.Here’s what you should know.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHow can I watch the game?Saturday’s final will be broadcast by CBS (English) and TUDN (Spanish) in the United States, and streamed on Paramount Plus. Coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time but — and this is critically important — the game will not start for another 90 minutes. Plan your day accordingly.Not in the United States? You can find your local viewing options — from Canal+ to Canal Dos to the wonderfully named Silknet and Wowow — on this list of UEFA’s television partners.What time is the final?The ball will roll off the spot at 9 p.m. in Paris, which is 3 p.m. Eastern. It will almost certainly travel backward, though that hasn’t been required by the rules for eight years now.Federico Valverde may start on Saturday. His son is not expected to play.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressWhat’s the vibe in Paris?Our correspondent Tariq Panja was on the streets on Friday, where he reports that it was oddly quiet compared with previous finals. His dispatch:France is the center for world sports this weekend, with the Champions League final at the Stade de France in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, the French Open across town at Roland Garros and Formula One’s Monaco Grand Prix on the south coast, if you prefer your sporting twists and turns in the literal sense.Paris was easily able to absorb the influx of fans, though in its usual tourist hot spots there was little sign that soccer’s biggest game was in town. That might have been owed to a warning issued to supporters of both teams that they risked fines of 135 euros (almost $150) if they turned up wearing club colors in places like the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Élysées, the grand avenue that is typically flooded with visitors.Instead, the tournament organizer, UEFA, and city officials hosted fans of the rival teams in separate venues closer to the city limits. That could be normal caution, fears of the coronavirus or the fact that France may not be entirely thrilled to have the game: It only got the hosting rights in February, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it untenable to go to the original host city, St. Petersburg.Still, the final — the first to be played in front of a full stadium since Liverpool last won the tournament in 2019 — did attract the well-heeled and well-connected, with UEFA’s luxury hotel a magnet for former players, high-ranking officials, politicians, agents and assorted extras.About a mile away, Real Madrid’s leadership, led by the club president, Florentino Pérez, gathered before heading in a convoy of buses to watch the team train at the Stade de France. Perez traveled to Paris with a security detail amid concerns his presence might be seen as provocative only a week after he failed in his efforts to lure Kylian Mbappé, the star player on France’s biggest team, Paris St. Germain, to Madrid.The final also was the first time that Pérez and the UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, met in person since a Pérez-led effort to create a European Super League failed spectacularly just over a year ago. Pérez, who is still suing UEFA over the Super League’s demise, and Ceferin, who called some of the plotters behind it “snakes” and “liars,” sat alongside one another at an official dinner at the Louvre on Friday night.Let’s hope the meal didn’t require sharp knives at each place setting.What kind of game can we expect?Luis Díaz, second from left, and his Liverpool teammates kept the mood light at their final training session on Friday. Frank Augstein/Associated PressOur soccer columnist Rory Smith offered a quick preview in his newsletter this week (sign up here):Paris St.-Germain almost looked as if it were waiting for the wave to crash. Chelsea seemed determined to resist, right up until the moment that the storm hit. Only then did Thomas Tuchel’s team realize its powerlessness. Manchester City, meanwhile, had almost made it to shore. Once it felt the tide change, though, it could do nothing but succumb.It is difficult, on the eve of the Champions League final, to avoid the suspicion that this Real Madrid story cannot possibly end in a dispiriting 2-1 defeat to Liverpool in Paris. There has been too much drama, too much magic, in the last two months for it to conclude in any way other than smoke and fire and white ticker tape drifting down from the sky.Indeed, the test for Liverpool on Saturday — more than technical or tactical or systemic — is psychological. Real Madrid has been able to snatch victory from defeat against three of the best-equipped opponents in Europe because its players believe in the club’s almost mystical refusal to wilt.But Madrid has been helped by the fact that the opposition are inclined to believe it, too. Particularly in the Bernabéu, there is a distinct, almost palpable edge to otherwise accomplished teams, a discernible awareness that at some point — almost entirely unannounced — Real Madrid is going to do something elemental and unfathomable, and nobody will be able to stop it.To win its seventh European Cup on Saturday, Liverpool will have to break that sequence. Its manager, Jürgen Klopp, said this week that he finds it more helpful to focus on preventing Real Madrid from getting into a position to wreak its particular brand of havoc — easier said than done, of course — than simply to watch the highlights of those two frenzied minutes against Manchester City, over and over again. “There are another 88 minutes in the game,” he said.In that sense, Liverpool is probably the toughest test Madrid could have faced in the final. Not necessarily because it is a better team than Manchester City — the Premier League table, indeed, rather suggests it is not — but because it will see in this Madrid an echo of its former self.Don’t worry: Marcelo is fine. Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThe Madrid players at Carlo Ancelotti’s disposal are of a higher quality, of course, and the experience of his squad — many of his stars are going for a fifth Champions League crown in nine years — is incomparable. But the nature of the way the team plays, conjuring those irresistible surges, is not.It was that sort of style, after all, that carried Liverpool to the final in 2018, the one it lost to Real Madrid in Kyiv: the ability to “finish” a game, as Klopp put it, in no more than a couple of 10- or 15-minute stretches. The roles have reversed completely now. Liverpool will seek to control events in Paris, while Madrid waits for its storm to gather from a cloudless sky. It will come. Liverpool will know that. The challenge is what you do when it breaks.Haven’t we seen this movie before?Liverpool and Real Madrid met in the 2018 final in Kyiv.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYes, in a way. Both teams have been regulars in the latter stages of the Champions League, and regular visitors to the final, over the last decade.Liverpool is playing for the trophy for the third time in five years, a stretch of some of the most thrilling — and most beautiful soccer — in its proud history. Real Madrid is in the final for the fifth time since 2014; in each of its previous four visits since 2014, its fans will quickly point out, it has left with the trophy.But despite their storied histories, Liverpool and Real Madrid have met in the final only twice.Liverpool beat Real Madrid, 1-0, in 1981, when the tournament was still known as the European Cup, and when it was Liverpool that was in the midst of a string of recent titles.Real Madrid won the rematch by 3-1 in 2018, continuing its own string of recent titles.That final still stings for Liverpool, which endured two horrible mistakes by goalkeeper Loris Karius that sealed its fate and lost forward Mohamed Salah to an ugly tackle from Real Madrid supervillain/legend (descriptions may vary) Sergio Ramos in the first half.Salah was forced from the game with a shoulder injury after the tackle, in which it appeared Ramos had hooked his arm as they fell. Ramos no longer plays for Madrid, but Salah does not appear to have forgotten.“We have a score to settle,” he said this week.Any injury concerns?It doesn’t look like it. Liverpool’s Thiago, who has been the precision-passing engine of its midfield, and Fabinho, who does a lot of the hard work behind him, were both back in training this week, Coach Jürgen Klopp said.I haven’t prepared. Tell me something I can say to sound smart.“The matchup between Vinícius Junior and Trent Alexander-Arnold on the wing should be fascinating, given how involved Alexander-Arnold usually is in Liverpool’s attack despite playing right back. If he gets caught forward too often, Vinícius can punish him.”My friends say I should skip the final because soccer is boring.Get better friends. More

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      The True Cost of Kylian Mbappé’s New Deal

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      It is easy to be dazzled by money in soccer, especially as the figures blur into incomprehension. But the numbers matter because of what comes next.It was not, Kylian Mbappé would like you to know, about the money. True, it might look — to the childlike, the innocent, the uninformed — as if he has spent the last year or so playing Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain off one another in order to drive up his value and elicit the most lucrative contract possible. But that, rest assured, is just an illusion.Money, in fact, barely came into the negotiations, certainly with P.S.G. In Mbappé’s telling, that particular subject appeared only at the end: There were a “few minutes” of discussions about how much he would be paid, he said, but there were many months picking over the precise nature of P.S.G.’s “sporting project.”Quite what shape that project takes is not yet clear, of course. Mbappé has denied that the three-year deal he signed last week includes a set of clauses that guarantee he has a veto, in effect, over various appointments at the club, ranging from managers to sporting directors to players.Whether the clauses are written down hardly matters. It is inconceivable that any club would make the sort of financial commitment P.S.G. has made to the 23-year-old Mbappé and not run crucial decisions past him. Lionel Messi enjoyed similar influence in his later years at Barcelona. That is the privilege afforded to the world’s best players.Mbappé and the P.S.G. president Nasser al-Khelaifi both declared themselves thrilled with the player’s new contract.Michel Spingler/Associated PressIt does not, though, indicate that there has been quite so much of a shift in P.S.G.’s “sporting project” as Mbappé might want to believe. For the past 10 years, P.S.G.’s policy has been to hire extravagantly gifted superstars at eye-watering costs and cater to their whims. There are countless stories about Neymar’s occasionally laissez-faire approach to training. At least one coach found that his squad did not, deep down, agree with him that it might need to press its opponents.P.S.G. has fostered an indulgent, individualistic ethos, with little or no thought for structure or system, and that has, ultimately, prevented the club realizing its greatest ambition: winning the Champions League. To break with that, P.S.G.’s plan appears to be to retain an extravagantly gifted superstar at an eye-watering cost and cater to his whims.And the cost is eye-watering. Mbappé will pick up at least $75 million in salary over the course of his contract, after taxes. There is a $125 million golden handshake to sign on. Factor in the roughly $200 million P.S.G. turned down from Real Madrid last summer, and the deal has cost P.S.G. $400 million or so.It is easy, now, to be dazzled by money in soccer, to feel inoculated against the sport’s excess. There are after all just so many zeros. After a while, the numbers cease to offend, creeping higher and higher until it seems arbitrary to draw a line — why is $25 million-a-year too much, but $15 million-a-year acceptable? — and the figures start to blur into incomprehension.But they do matter in the end, and they matter because of what follows in their wake. Money in soccer is not really about money. The players do not genuinely believe that they require those extra few hundred thousand dollars because otherwise they will be bereft. Yes, they generally (and understandably) want to maximize their earnings from a brief career, but their motivations are often more rooted in power, and status, and worth.P.S.G.’s star power may be unmatched. But does it have a plan?Michel Spingler/Associated PressThe parable about Ashley Cole, the former Arsenal defender, nearly swerving off the road because his club had offered him $63,000-a-week, rather than the $69,000-a-week he believed he was due, is not about a man appalled by the prospect of looming penury. There is almost nothing, after all, that $3.5 million-a-year can buy you that $3.2 million-a-year cannot.No, what upset Cole was the sense that Arsenal did not value him as much as his teammates or — worse — his peers. Other players of his quality were earning far more than him, he knew, and if Arsenal was not prepared to offer the going rate, then perhaps the club did not value his contributions quite as much as he thought it should.That is the problem with the Mbappé deal. Every time the salaries of the superstars rise, they slowly but surely drag everyone else’s with them, pulling the sport’s Overton window further and further into the stratosphere.P.S.G. will be able to cope with that, of course, when Mbappé’s teammates appear asking for improved terms in light of the new normal. Even $400 million is not a figure that will rattle the nation state of Qatar. And perhaps its peers among Europe’s elite will be fine, too, when Mohamed Salah or Kevin De Bruyne or Vinícius Junior or Pedri start their next set of negotiations by using Mbappé as a starting point.But further down the food chain, there will be a problem. Some clubs will swallow the extra cost of retaining talent, with all the risk that entails. Others will choose to cash in and sell on, further entrenching the divide between the aristocrats and everyone else.The statement released in the aftermath of Mbappé’s decision by Javier Tebas, the outspoken president of La Liga, was a strange one, fermented almost entirely from sour grapes. His central tenet — that the best way to protect everyone from competitive imbalance was to introduce more of it to the competition he runs — fell somewhere between craven and hypocritical.And yet, under all of that, Tebas has a point. It is dangerous for salaries to be artificially inflated by clubs with no constraints whatsoever on their finances. It does pose a threat to the health of soccer as a whole. It is, in certain lights, not entirely dissimilar to the basic problem of the Super League.The issue, of course, is that there is nobody, nobody at all, who is prepared to do anything about it. Tebas was not the only executive to be provoked by Mbappé’s signing into making a slightly odd statement. His Ligue 1 counterpart, Vincent Labrune, responded to Tebas by reminding everyone that both Real Madrid and Barcelona have been found to have benefited from illegal state aid.Al-Khelaifi himself took the unusual stance of suggesting Tebas was concerned that Ligue 1 might catch La Liga, simultaneously misunderstanding that worrying about that sort of thing is the essence of Tebas’s job, and apparently denigrating the league that both his club and his broadcast network, beIN Sports, have done so much to subsidize in recent years.(None of this was quite so strange as Emmanuel Macron, the French president, intervening to persuade Mbappé to stay in Paris: Macron is a sincere and passionate Marseille fan, and should presumably love nothing more than to see Mbappé disappear to Spain, along with most of his teammates.)That all of them could see no further than their own agendas was neither surprising nor outrageous. Tebas’s role is to promote and protect La Liga, just as al-Khelaifi’s role — or one of them, at any rate — is to act in the best interests of P.S.G. And it is, without question, in the best interests of P.S.G. not only to hoard as much talent as possible, but to make it incrementally more difficult for all of its rivals to keep up.What is more disappointing is that there is nobody, anywhere, who appears willing or able to confront these issues, not from the perspective of an individual club or a specific league but with the interests of the sport — the industry — in mind. What is good for P.S.G. or Real Madrid is not necessarily in the best interests of the game as a whole; soccer is crying out for someone in a position of influence to say that, but they remain conspicuous by their absence.La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, criticized the deal that kept Mbappé in France but not the offer that might have brought him to Madrid.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most obvious candidate, UEFA, has recused itself of its responsibilities, confounded by its twin role as weighty ultimate authority and callow competition organizer. It is UEFA that has allowed the self-interest to fester and the venal to prosper. It is UEFA that has forgotten that for soccer to function in good health, it has to be treated as a collective endeavor.If it is not, it risks being fractured beyond repair, the golden goose trussed and quartered, sold off to the highest bidder in a market contorted beyond all reason by a handful of teams — and that description fits both Real Madrid and P.S.G. — and, now, by a single deal, one act of vanity and bravado by a club that refuses to allow anything to stand in its way, whose vision for the future is that everywhere should be Paris, for whom it really is not about the money. Because when you have enough of it, money is meaningless, and there are so many zeros that it loses all sense at all.CorrespondenceChelsea: champions of England six times, but never Europe.Matthew Childs/Action Images Via ReutersWilliam Ireland, clearly, has been picking through this column with a fine-toothed comb. “I have seen it said that England’s Women’s Super League is the strongest in the world and I don’t understand why,” he wrote.“Chelsea has been humbled in the Champions League in the last two years. Arsenal looked well off the pace this year. When teams from Europe have played teams from the N.W.S.L., Lyon and Barcelona Femení have been matched. The W.S.L. has been getting more publicity and more fans, and that’s great, but right now it seems it’s not the best in Europe, much less the world.”This is a great point, and there are a few factors that go into it. First, of course, is your general English exceptionalism. Second, soccer’s innate Eurocentrism. Third, a degree of hyperbole that is linked, deep down, to the W.S.L.’s rapid rise.But most interesting is the fourth, something noted by at least a couple of Barcelona players: television. A lot of soccer from the Spanish women’s top flight, for example, is not broadcast. That makes it hard for people to know how high the standard is; much of what we see is Barcelona winning games, 8-0, and it is natural, to some extent, to assume that many of its opponents are substandard.Domestic dominance can make it hard to take the measure of Lyon and Barcelona. Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe view of Barcelona’s Norwegian wing Caroline Graham Hansen, certainly, is that it is not the case; she argues that the ease with which Barcelona wins games is testament to its ability, rather than an indictment of its opponents. Until fans can judge that with their own eyes, though, the tendency will be to assume that the league we see most — the W.S.L., say, or the N.W.S.L. — is the strongest.Bob Honig, meanwhile, wonders whether the presence of the (men’s) World Cup in the middle of next season might “make club teams that are not so reliant on national team players more competitive?”This is a logical conclusion, of course. Those teams whose players are given a rest halfway through next season should benefit from that break; the skill gap should, to some extent, be closed by a greater degree of freshness. I think we can all hope that is the case, but let’s not forget the golden rule of modern soccer: Whatever happens, the big teams win. More