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      Erling Haaland and Manchester City Near a Deal

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      City, which is nearing its fourth Premier League title in five years, confirmed that it had reached an agreement with Dortmund to acquire the 21-year-old striker.Manchester City has won the race to sign striker Erling Haaland, confirming Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to make the 21-year-old Norwegian goal-scoring machine the latest addition to a star-studded roster that is on the cusp of winning its fourth Premier League title in five years.“Manchester City can confirm that we have reached an agreement in principle with Borussia Dortmund for the transfer of striker Erling Haaland to the Club on 1st July 2022,” the team said in a curt statement on Tuesday. The club said it only needed to resolve contract terms with Haaland to make the deal official.Haaland’s departure this summer from Dortmund, the German team where he has spent the past two and a half seasons, had been widely expected. City outbid (or outmaneuvered) potential suitors like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich for Haaland, one of the world’s most sought-after young forwards.City and its rivals had been facing a June deadline to activate the release clause in Haaland’s Dortmund contract — said to be worth as much as 75 million euros, or just under $80 million. It still needs to agree to contract terms with Haaland, whose new salary is expected to make him one of the dozen or so highest-paid players in the world.Those figures are not an issue for Manchester City, which is bankrolled by the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble one of the world’s most-talented squads. But the numbers most likely put Haaland out of reach of other teams, including Barcelona, which is mired in a financial crisis that led it to lose Lionel Messi for free last summer, and Bayern Munich, whose sporting director said recently that adding Haaland “doesn’t make any sense” for the perennial German champions since the team already employs a world-class striker in Robert Lewandowski.Closing the deal for Haaland this week will allow him to say farewell to Dortmund’s fans in the club’s final game of the season on Saturday, at home to Hertha Berlin.City currently leads Liverpool in the Premier League title race by 3 points with three games remaining, but it surely entered the chase for Haaland with an eye on finally winning the Champions League. The trophy has been the goal of City’s leadership for more than a decade; the club finally reached the final for the first time last season, losing to its London rival Chelsea, and then returned to the semifinals this season before being eliminated stunningly by Real Madrid last week.A prolific scorer who possesses a fearsome mix of size, speed and skill, Haaland, who turns 22 in July, has been ticketed for global stardom since his teens. The son of the former Premier League midfielder Alfie Haaland, Erling Haaland made his debut for his boyhood club, Norway’s Bryne FK, as a 15-year-old, and joined Molde a year later, signed by the former Manchester United star Ole Gunner Solskjaer, who was Molde’s manager at the time.Haaland made his first splash at Molde in Norway, where he scored his first professional goals as a 16-year-old.Svein Ove Ekornesvag/EPA, via ShutterstockBy 2018, he was at Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, where he scored 17 league goals in his only season and added eight more in his first five appearances in the Champions League. Dortmund scooped him up less than a year later, and he hit the ground running by scoring a hat trick in 23 minutes in his debut.Haaland has 61 goals in 65 Bundesliga games for Dortmund, and 15 more in three Champions League campaigns.Once the deal is completed, he would join Manchester City almost 22 years to the month after his father did the same. Alfie Haaland signed with City in June 2000, only weeks before Erling was born, but retired in 2003 after several injury-marred seasons in Manchester and one infamous foul at the hands of Manchester United’s Roy Keane.Rory Smith contributed reporting. More

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      Chelsea F.C. Says It Will Sell to Boehly’s U.S.-Led Group

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      Chelsea, the Premier League soccer team whose sale was forced after the Russian oligarch who bankrolled its success was placed under crippling sanctions, will be bought by a consortium led by Todd Boehly, an American billionaire who is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the club said on Saturday.The price of 2.5 billion pounds, or $3.1 billion, would be the most ever paid for a team in any sport. The sale, one of the more unusual in modern sports history, still requires the approval of the British government, which imposed the sanctions on the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, and froze his assets, including Chelsea, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a statement posted on its website early Saturday, Chelsea said the proceeds from the sale would be placed into a frozen British bank account, with the intention that all of the funds will eventually go to charitable causes, as Abramovich has promised.In addition to the sale price, Chelsea said, Boehly’s group had pledged to invest 1.75 billion pounds in the club, some of it for much-needed stadium renovations.Boehly’s group is being backed by the American investment firm Clearlake and also includes Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss businessman, and Mark Walter, an American financier who serves as a co-owner and the chairman of the Dodgers.The decision capped two tumultuous months for Chelsea, its fans and Abramovich, who said on March 2 that he had reluctantly agreed to part with the team, just as Britain’s government was moving to impose restrictions on his fortune and his businesses.The sale process was accelerated once the government formally froze Abramovich’s assets, part of a wider set of sanctions imposed on a group of wealthy Russians with ties to Moscow after the war in Ukraine began. The government has called Abramovich a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.Roman Abramovich has owned Chelsea since 2003.John Sibley/ReutersChelsea has been in a kind of limbo ever since, operating under a special license issued by the government, which comes with strict conditions that have severely affected its business. The team is currently unable to buy or sell players in the summer transfer market, nor can it sell tickets or merchandise to its supporters. Its spending has been severely restricted, affecting everything from the team’s travel to the printing and sale of programs.The restrictions, meant to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich, will only be lifted once the sale is completed.Chelsea, led by Thomas Tuchel, the German coach who secured the Champions League title within months of taking over at Stamford Bridge last year, has endured on-field difficulties as it tries to navigate its new reality. The results have been mixed: While Tuchel’s team currently is in third place in the Premier League, it was eliminated from the lucrative Champions League last month. Several players with expiring contracts have announced that they will leave at the end of the season, and until the sale is completed, Tuchel and the club have no way to replace them.Boehly’s group was given a week to close the deal after being chosen last week as the preferred bidder by the New York-based advisory firm Raine Group and Chelsea’s board members.The sale was nearing a conclusion last week when it seemed to be upended, after one of Britain’s richest men, Jim Ratcliffe, announced a bid that mirrored the offer from Boehly’s consortium, after the deadline had passed. On Wednesday, Ratcliffe, who had emphasized his British credentials when making his offer, said Raine had dismissed his bid but vowed to keep fighting to secure the team.Chelsea’s price tag compares with the £1.8 billion valuation ($2.3 billion) for its London rival Arsenal, in 2018, after its American benefactor, the businessman Stan Kroenke, became the sole owner of the club by buying out the 30 percent stake of another now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, for more than $700 million. Unlike Chelsea, Arsenal has a modern stadium and its finances have been stable.Britain’s Treasury will have to issue a separate license for the sale to go through, with specific clauses that include a requirement that none of the sale proceeds go to Abramovich.The buyers and Raine have discussed the possibility of the proceeds going to victims of the war in Ukraine, an idea that Abramovich raised when he said he would waive an enormous debt owed to him by the club. But it is unclear how such a transfer would work.Todd Boehly, the American who leads the group that has reached an agreement to buy Chelsea, was at the club’s match against Wolves on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbramovich invested nearly $2 billion of his personal funds during his 19-year tenure as owner, during which he covered losses of about $1 million a week as he recruited some of the best players in the world. The strategy was expensive but successful: Chelsea enjoyed the most successful period in its history, becoming a serial contender for domestic and international honors and winning five Premier League and two European Cups.If Boehly’s deal to buy the team goes through with the required approvals from the government and the Premier League, which also has to give its blessing to the sale, his group will have to figure out a way to maintain that successes while paring losses associated with the on-field success and also committing hundreds of millions of dollars to renovating Chelsea’s aging Stamford Bridge stadium, which with a capacity of just over 40,000 is far smaller than the arenas that play host to the Premier League’s biggest teams.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Russia’s punishment of Finland. More

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      Andrea Pirlo Is Timeless

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      With elite soccer increasingly driven by coaches and systems, Pirlo feels as if he belongs to another era. But can a classic ever go out of style?Officially, whenever Andrea Pirlo has watched soccer over the course of the last year or so, it has been for work, rather than merely for pleasure. It might be almost a year since his first foray into management was ended, abruptly and unceremoniously, by Juventus, but being a manager is less a job and more a lifestyle choice, like being a monk, or a double agent. It cannot be switched off.He does not watch passively, losing himself in the thrill of the game. Instead, he tries to distill from what he is seeing some idea, some concept, some notion that might come in useful somewhere down the line. His appetite for coaching remains undimmed by his experience in Turin; he will, he knows, return at some point. Everything is research, revision, for that moment. “Anything that might help me do my job,” he said.But while Pirlo is now a manager by trade, he remains every inch an aesthete by inclination. That does not come with an off button, either. And so, he admits, he finds it intensely difficult, if not impossible, to watch a game if it does not bring him pleasure. “I want to see teams doing something positive,” he said. “They can do it well, or not so well, but I want them to try. But if there is not something interesting to see, I find a new game to watch.”For more than a decade, Pirlo served as elite European soccer’s version of Petronius, the sport’s appointed arbiter of good taste. He came to embody élan and panache and easy, timeless style. He made the deep-lying playmaker the game’s must-have accessory, for a while, at least. He single-handedly popularized the Panenka. He wrote a soccer autobiography that should not have immediately been pulped.It is intriguing, then, to know quite what, in Pirlo’s mind, qualifies as “interesting.” It is, after all, only five years since he retired — and only seven since he left Europe, where soccer’s searchlight shines brightest, for Major League Soccer — but, in that time, the game he left behind has changed considerably.The best measure of that, perhaps, is that Pirlo already feels as if he belongs to another era, another time, despite the fact that he has played in the Champions League final as recently as Lionel Messi. The last time either one graced that stage, the grandest that club soccer has to offer, was in Berlin in 2015, when Messi and Neymar and Luis Suárez swept Barcelona past Pirlo’s Juventus.That is not simply because soccer has a tendency toward instant amnesia. It is not just because, in the years in between his retirement as a player and his short-lived managerial tenure at Juventus he faded, just a little, from view. Nor can it be attributed, entirely, to the fact that many of the moments with which he is most indelibly associated are from what might politely be referred to as “some time ago.”Pirlo at Euro 2012. Maurizio Brambatti/European Pressphoto AgencyPirlo has spent the last few months designing and curating an NFT collection, like almost everyone else with a little time on their hands; it has taken as its theme his most treasured, most iconic memories. His first Champions League final, in 2003, when Babe Ruth’s curse still held. Winning the World Cup in 2006, something that occurred before the invention of the iPhone. His effortless, unfazed Panenka against England at Euro 2012, when Lance Armstrong was still a hero. These are all moments from a past so distant, both in a sporting and a cultural context, that it may as well be frozen in amber.And yet it is not that, or at least not only that, which makes Pirlo feel like an emissary from a different age. It is that players like him do not exist any more, not really. It is no surprise that, when asked which individuals he most likes to watch now, he picks out Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong, Marco Verratti, Jorginho.They all contain trace elements of Pirlo, in different ways — position or technique or role or poise — but none are quite cut from his cloth. De Jong is too industrious, Busquets too defensive, Verratti too chaotic, Jorginho too busy. Pirlo was the last of his line. Modern soccer does not produce, does not tolerate, players as languid as him, not in his position; nor, increasingly, does it have room for the sort of unhurried imagination that was always Pirlo’s hallmark.It has become, instead, a game of “automatisms,” as another of Pirlo’s peers, Cesc Fàbregas, put it earlier this year. “The manager basically tells you where you have to pass the ball in every moment,” Fàbregas said. “The player has to be positioned in their exact place. It’s becoming a robotic game. I’ve had various managers and it’s not just happened with one or two. It’s happened with four or five. This thing is here to stay.”It has drifted, in other words, from being a game defined by players to one designed by managers. Pirlo has noted the same shift. “Before, there were maybe not as many coaches who were so prepared, so obsessed with their work, so dedicated to finding the smallest detail so that they could improve,” he said. “It was simpler, in that way, but it was also more difficult: There was less data, fewer ways to study.”The game has changed. Pirlo says he has not.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockWhere, then, would that have left him? Would Pirlo, had he been born a decade or two later, have been forced to adapt to a different role? Would he have been molded into an unwilling defensive midfield linchpin? Would he have been asked to press relentlessly from the front, devoting his energies to restricting space, rather than expanding it? Would he, perhaps, have been disregarded completely, rather than enjoying one of the most decorated careers of his generation?He has an answer for that. No. “Maybe I would have done even better,” he said, with a smile. His logic is based on more than unflappable self-confidence. “It was a little more technical when I was playing,” he said. “Now maybe it is more physical. But there were a lot of players in my generation, a lot of teams with technical players of the highest level.“Maybe now there are not quite so many, so a bit of quality goes a long way. It would be just as valuable in this sort of soccer, maybe more so. Those kinds of players, the ones who are a little smarter, or a little more technical, are harder to find now. In all that speed, all that haste, there are certain situations where the most important thing is a little intelligence, a little technique.”Besides, Pirlo is adamant that certain truths about soccer hold, regardless of how the game’s fashions, its tastes, ebb and flow. He might watch it now with a manager’s eye, scouring what he sees for some strategic insight, some tactical maneuver, but he remains a player at heart. “You have to work within systems now more than you did,” he said. “But it always comes down to the players.” A coach, he knows from personal experience, is never in complete control of events. Even the finest strategies, the most complex schemes, hinge on the humans tasked with implementing them.“Everything can change,” he said. “It can be quicker or slower, it can have one style or another, but it is always the players that make things happen on the field.”In that, to Pirlo, it always remains the same, familiar, recognizable, as appealing as it has always been. “You can ask if it was more beautiful before, or more beautiful now,” he said. “But it is always beautiful.”A Straight SprintManchester City and Liverpool are separated by a point in the league, but by little else.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe question this weekend is the same as it is every weekend. Will this be the moment the Premier League title race takes its twist? Will Liverpool’s exertions on four fronts, its pursuit of the impossible, finally catch up with its players? Or will Manchester City, so smooth and so relentless, stumble and fall, offering Jürgen Klopp’s team a gap, a glimmer, an edge?The answer, thus far, has been just as consistent: No. A deafening, resounding no. There is a curious lack of drama to what should, by rights, be the most compelling denouement imaginable to the English season. City and Liverpool, two modern greats, are separated by a single point. Neither has the slightest room for error. Neither would grant its rival any mercy for even a single slip.And yet it all feels just a little bloodless. Liverpool wins. City wins. City wins. Liverpool wins. It is a straight road, with no blind corners or switchbacks or chicanes. Not just in terms of results, but in the nature of the games. City has not trailed in a Premier League game since February 19. Liverpool was behind for 17 minutes, in total, against City when the teams met in early April; other than that, Klopp’s team has not had a game to chase since conceding first against Norwich the same February day. Other than in their encounters with one another, there has been a distinct lack of this column’s favorite quality: jeopardy.Perhaps this is the weekend that changes. Tottenham, certainly, presents the most formidable opposition Liverpool has met since its visit to the Etihad. City must overcome the exhaustion, physical and spiritual, that comes from prolonged exposure to the madness of Real Madrid. Maybe this is when the twist comes, when Liverpool falls away, or when City stutters. Experience suggests it is not. All we can do is hope.Timing Is EverythingImmortality, Garth Lagerwey called it, in those heady, breathless minutes after the Seattle Sounders team he has spent years shaping into a true Major League Soccer dynasty had become the first American team to break Mexico’s stranglehold on the Concacaf Champions League.Whether this proves to be a watershed or not will only become clear in time, for both the league and for Seattle itself. Lagerwey has expressed his hope that the Sounders might now become a “global” team, the first real international breakout brand M.L.S. has produced, and he may be right. He will worry, though, that the timing has hardly been ideal.Alex Roldan and the Sounders are the first U.S. team to qualify for FIFA’s Club World Cup.Steph Chambers/Getty ImagesIt is, frankly, baffling that the Champions League final was scheduled on the same night as a (European) Champions League semifinal. Seattle’s achievement might have resonated a little more outside North America had it not been overshadowed by events in Madrid. The time difference mitigates against attracting a considerable television audience, but that is not the only route to exposure. There are, though, other ways to attract attention in our fractured media age.More unfortunately, it is not yet clear when Seattle may get its chance to — as Lagerwey put it — face “Real Madrid or Liverpool” for a trophy (a claim the champions of South America and Africa might suggest is premature).This was supposed to be the year that FIFA’s much-vaunted Club World Cup expansion took place. That has been postponed, seemingly indefinitely. There is no word, as yet, on when or where the more traditional competition — the one featuring the six regional champions and a nominee from the host nation — will take place. That is a rather more complex issue than normal, of course, because there is a great big World Cup slap-bang in the middle of next season.FIFA will, doubtless, find a fix — most likely a late, unsatisfactory one — at some point. Seattle, certainly, has earned its moment on the international stage, to claim another first, becoming the first American team to have the chance to become world champion.CorrespondenceThe great thing about this newsletter is that it serves as an education to me, too. “I was confused by your expression ‘dopamine-soaked reverie,’” wrote Jim Goldman. “I’m a practicing endocrinologist — and a Tottenham fan — and this phrase didn’t make sense to me.”Now, I cannot claim to be an endocrinologist, not even a lapsed one, so I will bow to Jim’s wisdom on this. I was under the impression that dopamine was the chemical released during pleasurable situations, such as a reverie or when you encounter a really good sandwich. Further research suggests the reality may be a little more complex. I stand (partly) corrected.Line of the week, meanwhile, goes to Brian Marx. Or, more accurately, his daughter, Natalie. “She wondered why there is so much noise about finding a new owner for Chelsea, when it is clear the club is owned by Karim Benzema,” Bob wrote, doing the decent thing and not claiming the punchline as his own.Well played, Natalie.Juan Medina/ReutersJavier Cortés, on the other hand, forces me to issue a clarification that the views expressed in this section do not necessarily reflect my own; a mention is not, by any means, an endorsement. “I agree with your definition of fandom in Europe and Latin America,” he wrote. “It is part of a person’s cultural background.” In the United States, Javier — not me — believes, “most fans are just followers of commercial brands. That explains why, if people move from one city to another, they change teams.”He does, it should be pointed out, make an exception for baseball, where the existence of teams with more than a century of history possess “a real fandom.”There are, I will admit, elements to American sporting culture that are oblique to me, in particular the ability to disregard a team after a lifetime of support, even to disavow it completely, should it pack up and leave. (I understand why fans would take that measure; I just do not understand how.)My instinct, though, is not to decry those differences as evidence of inauthenticity, but rather to chalk them up to a different cultural reality. That is the authentic experience of supporting a team in the United States. It may not follow the same patterns and mores as fandom in Europe, but that does not make it any less sincere, any less genuine, or any less real.That’s all for this week. All thoughts, as ever, are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com; we take note of and appreciate them all. Well, most of them. Certainly more than 50 percent. You can find my thoughts on the gnawing tension of the Premier League title race on Twitter, too, if you’re that way inclined.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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      Sounders’ Concacaf Champions League Title Boosts Seattle’s Soccer Stature

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      Sounders F.C. captured M.L.S.’s first CONCACAF Champions League title with a win over Pumas U.N.A.M. Our columnist remembers the day soccer took root in Seattle.SEATTLE — Everything broke right for the Sounders, who were prodded for nearly two hours of grinding action by a sea of Seattle fans in blue and green who pushed their trademark electric energy to the pitch.This was history — and it felt like a joint effort between a team and its supporters.For over 20 years, no Major League Soccer team had ever won the CONCACAF Champions League tournament, which includes the best teams from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. But the Sounders ended the drought with a Pacific Northwest downpour: a 3-0 win over the Pumas of Mexico on Wednesday.How important was the win?Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei, the tournament’s most valuable player, raised the championship cup after Seattle’s win. Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesDuring this week’s run-up to the match, Sounders General Manager Garth Lagerwey called it a chance at soccer immortality.In a promotional hype video, none other than the retired Seahawks icon Marshawn Lynch called it a “big (expletive) game.” At halftime on Wednesday, with the Sounders ahead 1-0, M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber stood in his suite at Lumen Field, looked me steadily in the eye, and called this match the “biggest game in the history of the league.”Since its inception in 1996, M.L.S. has sought to become an American league of such quality that it could stand toe-to-toe with world powers. But until now, failure was a regular rite of passage for M.L.S. in this annual tournament, with teams from the rival Mexican league having won the last 13 Concacaf tournaments.Well, the Sounders buried those failures on Wednesday.Initially the match was choppy and bogged down by physical play that forced a pair of key Sounders, João Paulo and Nouhou Tolo, to leave with injuries. But Seattle flashed its trademark resilience. Goalie Stefan Frei, named the tournament’s most valuable player, backed up a stout defense, and Sounders kept up the attack until forward Raul Ruidiaz scored on a deflected shot late in the half. In the 80th minute, Ruidiaz added another goal off a smooth counterattack.Nicolás Lodeiro sealed the victory with a goal in the 88th minute and ran toward the stands to celebrate among a frenzy of fans.Winning qualifies the team for the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament stacked with soccer royalty. The Premier League’s Chelsea won it last. Either Liverpool or Real Madrid will represent Europe next. Just being in the same draw as teams of that pedigree is entirely new for M.L.S.It’s fitting, then, that the Sounders will lead the league to this new precipice. Since entering M.L.S. during a wave of expansion in 2009, they have enchanted this soccer-rich city by winning two M.L.S. Cup championships in four runs to the finals. Seattle has led the league in attendance in all but two seasons, with area fans bringing the same fervor to Lumen as Seahawks fans have come to be known for. Maybe more. A tournament-record 68,741 fans showed up to watch the home team play the Pumas. On a Wednesday night.How did Seattle become an American soccer behemoth?Fans cheered a Sounders goal during Wednesday’s match.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. Part of it is the city’s history of embracing the unconventional and outré — which still describes professional soccer in the American sports context. Seattle birthed Boeing and Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It gave the world grunge rock and Quincy Jones. Jimi Hendrix went to high school three miles from Lumen Field. Bruce Lee sharpened his martial arts skills just a short walk away.One of its great works of art is a troll sculpture that sits underneath a bridge. It’s become customary to drape it in a mammoth blue and green Sounders scarf before big games.The love felt by this city for soccer in all its forms — from the Sounders to O.L. Reign of the N.W.S.L., to colleges and junior leagues — is also the product of a specific past and a specific team: the original Seattle Sounders of the long-defunct North American Soccer League.From 1974 to 1983, those Sounders teams were part of the first bona fide effort to bring big-stakes, U.S.-based competition to professional soccer within this hemisphere.If you ask me, a Seattle native who grew up in that era, I say the love began, specifically, with a single game.Since I was 9 years old I’ve called it the Pelé Game. That’s when I took a city bus downtown to watch that original iteration of the Sounders. The date was April 9, 1976, the first sporting event ever held at the now-demolished Kingdome.A crowd of nearly 60,000, then the largest in North American soccer history, watched Seattle host the star-studded New York Cosmos and its leader, the greatest player the game of soccer has ever seen: Pelé. The Black Pearl, as he was known, had come to the N.A.S.L. to celebrate a last stanza of his career — and as an ambassador to spark the game in North America. I don’t remember details of that match as much as I remember being in awe of the lithe and powerful Brazilian.Pelé didn’t disappoint. He scored two goals in a 3-1 win.The game was a harbinger. Those first Sounders players quickly became local legends, deeply woven into the city’s fabric. In those days, it seemed to me that a Sounder visited every classroom in every public school. In 1977, the Sounders made it to the league’s Soccer Bowl title match. Played in front of a full house in Portland, Ore., a three-hour drive south, they lost to the Cosmos, 2-1, in the last non-exhibition game Pelé ever played.Pele, center, looked on as his New York Cosmos teammate Giorgio Chinaglia, left, ran at the Seattle Sounders defense in 1977.Peter Robinson/EMPICS, via Getty Images“I still have his jersey,” Jimmy McCalister said in a phone interview. I could almost see the smile in his voice. A defender on that Seattle team and the N.A.S.L. rookie of the year in 1977, McCalister told me how he’d somehow summoned the nerve to ask Pelé for his fabled No. 10 jersey. The legend obliged. The jersey now sits in McCalister’s lockbox.“People call me from time to time, wanting to buy it,” he said. It’s not for sale. Some things are worth more than money. The jersey contains memory and soul.McCalister loves the modern day Sounders. He hailed their cohesiveness, blue collar work ethic, and their growing talent. Raised in Seattle, he is one of many Sounders who remained in the city after their playing days were over. These days he runs one of the top junior development clubs. Many others stayed to teach the game, coaching in clinics and at high schools and colleges. Some helped guide a now-defunct minor league team — also called the Sounders.They kept soccer alive in the fallow pair of decades between the N.A.S.L.’s demise and the birth of M.L.S.Fredy Montero met fans who stayed nearly an hour after Sounders’ win.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night, nearly an hour after the game, fans remained in Lumen Field. Vast swaths of them. Joyful chants rumbled down to the confetti-covered field. Players responded by lifting the gold Champions League trophy high. Unlike that Kingdome game of 1976 — the original Sounders versus the glitzy, star-studded Cosmos — this matchup wasn’t memorable because of the opponent. It was memorable because of the home team, which just put itself on the international map. And that would surely make Pelé, long soccer’s proudest ambassador, more than a little proud. More

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      When Will the Seattle Sounders Play in the Club World Cup?

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      One prize for Seattle’s Concacaf Champions League title was a chance to face some of the world’s best clubs. When are those games? “No clue,” one FIFA official said.The Seattle Sounders won the Concacaf Champions League on Wednesday night, beating Pumas of Mexico, 3-0, to claim a 5-2 victory on aggregate in the two-legged final. The victory made Seattle the first team from Major League Soccer to lift the trophy in a generation, and gave the United States the continental title it has coveted for more than 20 years.It should also make Seattle the first M.L.S. team to play in the FIFA Club World Cup.Except that no one, not even FIFA, is sure when that event will take place, or what it will look like. The tournament’s traditional December window is unavailable this year because of the World Cup in Qatar, and grand plans for an expanded Club World Cup in China have gone nowhere after they were announced and then promptly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.“No clue,” one FIFA official said in a text message when asked when Seattle could expect to take part in the event.The Club World Cup has been held annually since 2005, with representatives of each of FIFA’s global confederations facing off to determine a world club champion. Top European teams have dominated the event, with the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Chelsea lifting the trophy in the last decade. Facing off against teams like that in an international competition has been a dream for many M.L.S. players, executives and fans.FIFA, which runs the Club World Cup, has been eager to expand the tournament, and it put a plan on the table for a 24-team tournament shifted to the summer and held every four years instead of annually. In a meeting in Shanghai in October 2019, it approved the change and awarded China the hosting rights for the first edition in 2021. The coronavirus soon made that plan unworkable.The pandemic-delayed 2021 Club World Cup that was held in February, and won by Chelsea, was nominally the final one under the old, smaller format. Holding another one in 2022 could be problematic, with league schedules already being squeezed by the enforced break caused by the World Cup that opens in November. There has been talk of holding the first expanded version in the summer of 2023, but as of now there is no official date for the event.Under the original plans for the expanded tournament, three teams from the Concacaf region — covering North and Central America and the Caribbean — would participate. One of them presumably could be the Sounders after Wednesday’s victory, although the official qualifying criteria has not been announced.It is also possible that the old, smaller format will be retained for a few more years: Not even Sounders officials were sure in the afterglow of Wednesday night’s win.“We don’t have the format yet; we don’t have the location,” Garth Lagerwey, the team’s general manager, told reporters. “We’re told, probably February-ish. Probably Middle East maybe.”Despite the uncertainty, Lagerway, a longtime M.L.S. executive, did little to hide his excitement at the achievement. “We’re going to play Real Madrid or Liverpool, man,” he said. “In a real game.”Officially, FIFA would only say Thursday that “further details about the FIFA Club World Cup 2022 will be announced in due course.”An American team has nearly played in the Club World Cup once before. The very first Club World Cup, in 2000, was an eight-team event in Brazil. That year was the last one in which an American team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, won the continental championship. So for the 2001 world event, expanded to 12 teams, the Galaxy was duly entered alongside Real Madrid and other teams from around the world.But financial concerns and the collapse of a sponsor led the event to be scrapped. It was revived in 2005 in its current format. Too late for the Galaxy. Mexican and Costa Rican teams — to the immense frustration of M.L.S. — have won the title every year since.Now that the Sounders have broken that streak, they and M.L.S. will hope the Club World Cup — whenever it is held, and whatever it looks like — goes more smoothly.Tariq Panja contributed reporting. More

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      Chile Files Claim Seeking Ecuador’s Place in the World Cup

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      A dispute over a player’s eligibility could alter the qualifying results in South America. Chile has asked for forfeits, and Ecuador’s spot in Qatar.Qualification for this year’s soccer World Cup, already disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, now faces more uncertainty after Chile this week called on FIFA to throw out Ecuador and hand its place in the tournament to Chile instead. Chile contends that its South American rival fielded an ineligible player who is in fact Colombian.To support its case, Chile on Wednesday filed a multiple-page claim, reviewed by The New York Times, that contains registry documents, including birth certificates, that it says show the defender Byron Castillo was born in Colombia three years earlier than is stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Under the rules of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, playing an ineligible player could result in a forfeit, or several of them — a consequence that could upend the qualifying results in South America. Ecuador finished fourth in the recently concluded qualifying campaign for Qatar, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup, which begins in November.Chile is demanding that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo played, with the opponents automatically granted three points per game. If FIFA agrees, as it has in at least one recent case in South America, that would lift Chile into the World Cup at Ecuador’s expense.Castillo playing against Chile in November. Chile is asking FIFA to award it forfeit victories in both of its qualifiers against Ecuador.Marcelo Hernandez/ReutersChile’s legal effort added a new complication to the qualification process for the 2022 World Cup. FIFA oversaw an opulent ceremony in Doha last month to finalize the groups and schedule for the tournament’s opening stage even though four places have yet to be decided. The final teams will not be determined until June, when two intercontinental playoff games and the final European qualifiers take place.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, officials from the national soccer federation had held off selecting Castillo until this year.A Guide to the 2022 World CupThe 32-team tournament kicks off in Qatar on Nov. 21.F.A.Q.: When will the games take place? Who are the favorites? Will Lionel Messi be there? Our primer answers your questions.The Matchups: The group assignments are set. Here’s a breakdown of the draw and a look at how each country qualified.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it expected for hosting the World Cup.Traveling to Qatar: Thinking about attending the tournament? Here is what you should know.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 now say they have substantiated.“The level, both in quantity and quality, of the information and evidence that we have been able to collect has surprised even us,” Eduardo Carlezzo, a lawyer representing the Chilean federation, said Wednesday. Carlezzo claimed that in addition to an Ecuadorean birth certificate used by Castillo, there was also a Colombian one for a child with a similar name born in 1995 and whose parents have the same names as Castillo’s. “How could we not act with this level of evidence in hands?” Carlezzo said.Concern over Castillo’s eligibility appeared to have concerned Ecuadorean officials as well. In March 2021, Carlos Manzur, the vice president of Ecuador’s soccer federation, suggested as much in comments reported by the local news media.“I think it’s a matter of playing it safe, avoiding problems,” Manzur told reporters at the time. “I think he is a good player. If it were up to me, I would not have him play for the national team. I would not take that risk. I would not risk everything we are doing.”About a month later, an Ecuadorean court provided Castillo with an identification document that appeared to pave the way for him to make his national team debut, which he did about five months later in a set of games that included a 0-0 home draw with Chile. He has since played in eight games overall, including a 2-0 victory at Chile in November that all but ended the latter’s hopes of qualification. After questions over Castillo’s eligibility were reported in regional media outlets, Manzur, the Ecuador soccer official, declared that any inconsistencies in Castillo’s documentation had been corrected and that his Ecuadorean identity had been confirmed. “The national team waited until that was corrected to incorporate the player into its squad,” said Manzur.That will now have to be determined by FIFA.“We understand, based on all the information and documents collected, that the facts are too serious and must be thoroughly investigated by FIFA,” Pablo Milad, the president of Chile’s soccer federation, said in a statement to The Times. “We have always respected the fair play principals and we hope that the other federations do the same.”Ecuador finished in the fourth and last automatic place in South America’s 10-nation World Cup qualification group, two points head of Peru, which will meet either Australia or the United Arab Emirates in June for a place in the finals. Chile finished below sixth-placed Colombia in the standings, but Castillo did not play in either of Ecuador’s games against Colombia or Peru. That has left Chilean officials believing the six points they should get from the forfeited games — and the six Ecuador would lose — would leapfrog them into Ecuador’s qualification spot.For FIFA, Chile’s complaint adds further complication to a World Cup qualification campaign that already has suffered significant disruption. The coronavirus delayed games around the world for months, and meant that Oceania’s entire series of games had to be held in Doha. Other games were pushed back until after the tournament draw. (One of those as-yet-unknown countries was placed in a group with the United States.) Then, in March, Russia was thrown out of the European playoffs after invading neighboring Ukraine, which also led to a playoff game between Ukraine and Scotland being rescheduled.Chile will point to recent precedent in another sport to argue its point. Last month, Spain was disqualified from rugby’s 2023 World Cup after being deducted points for fielding an ineligible player in two games. But it also has recent experience with a similar situation in soccer: During qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, Chile was awarded a forfeit after FIFA found Bolivia had fielded an ineligible player in two matches. More

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      How Real Madrid Beat Manchester City

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      All but beaten in its Champions League semifinal, Real Madrid scored once, then twice, then a third time to snatch a victory and add to its legend.MADRID — There was nothing. There was no noise. The Santiago Bernabéu stood silent, subdued, waiting for the bell to toll. There was no spark. Real Madrid had long since run out of ideas, and they were running low on hope, too. Most pressingly, there was no time. There were 30 seconds left, plus maybe a little extra purgatory, and then it would be over.Real Madrid’s campaign in the Champions League this season has run on magic and miracles. The comeback against the glittering array of Instagram influencers arranged in the vague shape of a team by Paris St.-Germain. The revival against Chelsea that hinged on a single, unstoppable pass from Luka Modric.But there comes a point when reality has to intrude, when the chaos has to give way to order. There are certain inevitabilities that even Real Madrid, soccer’s great self-actualizers, a team that runs exclusively on the power of its own imagination, have to acknowledge. This was one of them. This was the point where all of it came to an end.And then, in a single, blinding flash, it happened. There were no warning signs, no rumbles of thunder, no auguries, no harbingers. One minute Manchester City was in complete control of its semifinal, leading by a single goal on the night and by two, a yawning chasm, on aggregate. Jack Grealish had missed a couple of chances to add a little gloss to the score line, but nobody seemed overly concerned.Then, in a beat, the world turned upside down. With 89 minutes and 30 seconds played, Rodrygo reacted quickest to Karim Benzema’s knockdown and stabbed a shot past Éderson. He gobbled the ball from the back of the net, and sprinted straight back to the halfway line. The Bernabéu stirred to life. There was noise.Even Real Madrid fans thought it was over. Until it wasn’t.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersOn the sideline, the fourth official, Davide Massa, was fumbling with his electronic scoreboard. He lifted it above his head, the number six illuminated in bright, lively green: six more minutes. Now, suddenly, there was time, and it carried hope in its wake. Real Madrid, though, did not need it. It does not work like that. It swept up the field again. Dani Carvajal conjured a cross. There was Rodrygo again, his header flashing past Éderson.This time, he did not seek out the ball. This time, he raced off, sprinting to the edge of the field, careering as close to the stands as he could. His teammates followed him. The fans poured over each other, a liquid mass, in their delirium. This is exactly what they had been expecting when they had arrived at the stadium a few hours earlier, and still they could not quite conceive of how, exactly, Real Madrid had done it.Vinícius Júnior collected the ball after Rodrygo’s second, and for the first time Real Madrid felt victory was within reach.Juan Medina/ReutersNor, for that matter, could anyone else. It does not seem too florid, too ethereal, to suggest that Real Madrid does not so much beat teams at soccer as overwhelm them by harnessing some elemental force, something that naturally occurs in its environment. Its players spend a considerable portion of their time encouraging their fans to make more noise, whipping them into an ever-increasing Eleusinian frenzy, for that very purpose.At times, it resembles a form of alchemy, the transformation of a succession of base metals — a smattering of garlanded veterans, a couple of raw hopefuls, a coach with an expressive eyebrow and an easy charm, a team with no recognizable, cogent plan beyond a pervasive sense of its own destiny — into something precious.Here, though, it was something else, something more akin to a Big Bang. Real Madrid did not particularly like the turn the universe was taking. It did not have any great desire to exist in a dimension in which Manchester City was in the Champions League final and it was not. So it simply, in the blink of an eye, created a new one, one it found much more to its liking.That second goal, the one that sent the game to extra time, marked the moment that one reality ended and another came into being. Manchester City was now living in Real Madrid’s world, and the ending in Real Madrid’s world is always the same.A few minutes into extra time, Karim Benzema tumbled over Ruben Días’s outstretched leg. The referee, Daniele Orsato, pointed with a theatrical flourish to the penalty spot. Benzema, obviously, scored, because Benzema was always going to score. In the space of five minutes, with a break and a breather in between, Manchester City’s understanding of how things worked had been shattered.Benzema sent Ederson the wrong way and sent his penalty into the side netting in extra time.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPep Guardiola’s team is not the first to experience that, of course. It is hard to tell whether it is something about the Bernabéu that does it, or whether it is the effect of feeling like you are living in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this place has an unrivaled ability to unsettle even the greatest players, the smoothest teams. It scrambles the brain, jumbles the code, shorts the wiring.It happened to P.S.G., too, when Gianluigi Donnarumma stumbled on the ball and Neymar and Lionel Messi disappeared from view. It happened, too, to Chelsea at the last — or what seemed, until very recently, like the last — with the European champion seemingly coasting to victory and then, without ever really noticing, staring down the barrel of defeat.City, more than anyone, should have been immune. It is hard to imagine a team more versed in its ideas than Manchester City — though Liverpool would have a case — or a team better equipped to remain steadfast to its principles.And yet City, too, froze. Even before everything fell apart, it had seemed inhibited, cagey, troubled by something, a reduced version of the team that might — with a little more ruthlessness and a touch more luck — have scored six or seven in the first leg last week. It had only found a little composure after Riyad Mahrez had scored, when the prospect of a place in the final against Liverpool at the end of May was so tantalizingly close.That, ultimately, is the effect of Real Madrid’s belief. It believes it will win with such conviction that it proves contagious. That is the form its magic takes: it is a glamour, the power to dazzle an opponent, to convince it that the world should be as you see it, as you would want it to be.It cannot be explained. It does not require specific ingredients, or any ingredients at all, really. There can be no noise, no hope, no spark and no time, and yet Real Madrid can still conjure it from the air, from the sky, from something deep within. It is something that happens, something that happens to Real Madrid, and to whoever has the misfortune to be standing in its way. More

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      Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ Jersey Sells for $9.3 Million

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      The shirt worn by the Argentine soccer star when he scored two fabled goals, one of which he attributed to divine aid, fetched what is believed to be the highest price ever paid for a sports item.During the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup, the English soccer player Steve Hodge looped a ball to his goalie that was intercepted by the Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona, enabling Maradona to score one of the most notorious goals against Hodge’s team.It would become one of the most talked-about goals in professional soccer: In a fast-moving sequence, Maradona got away with using his left hand to palm the ball, and he later invoked “the hand of God” to explain what had occurred.In the stadium tunnel after Argentina won, 2-1, Hodge asked Maradona to exchange jerseys.Now, the victor of the exchange seems debatable. Maradona advanced to the finals and won, but Hodge received a shirt that, dried sweat and all, he just sold for nearly $9.3 million at an auction held by Sotheby’s — believed to the highest price ever paid for a piece of sports memorabilia.Sotheby’s announced the sale on Wednesday on Twitter. It did not specify the buyer. In a news release, Sotheby’s quoted Hodge calling it a “pleasure” to have exhibited the shirt for the last 20 years at the National Football Museum in Manchester, England.He added, “The Hand of God shirt has deep cultural meaning to the football world, the people of Argentina, and the people of England and I’m certain that the new owner will have immense pride in owning the world’s most iconic football shirt.”Leila Dunbar, an appraiser of pop culture merchandise, said that the sale was emblematic of the recent increase in the value of sports memorabilia. “Since 2020,’’ she said, “this latest ascension is like nothing I have ever seen in more than three decades in the business.”Maradona, generally considered along with Pelé among the best-ever soccer players, was known for scrappiness and sudden bursts of virtuosity. Both those characteristics were epitomized by his play in the second half of that quarterfinal match against England, which took place in Mexico City.Diego Maradona during the World Cup quarterfinal soccer match between Argentina and England in Mexico City on June 22, 1986.Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesAfter the left-hand infraction, Maradona immediately began to celebrate, before English players had a chance to explode at the referees.Four minutes later, Maradona scored what soccer fans consecrated in a vote held by the sport’s governing body, FIFA, as the “World Cup Goal of the Century.” Starting in his team’s own half of the field, dribbling backward momentarily, sprinting one moment and in another slowing to a prance, he traveled 70 yards, circumvented five English players, then blew past the team’s goalie and — in a nanosecond before tumbling over — kicked in the winning goal.The Falklands War, which ended in a British defeat of Argentina, gave the match a larger symbolic dimension.“This was revenge,” Maradona wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Diego” (2000). “It was something bigger than us: We were defending our flag.”The authenticity of the jersey was questioned a few weeks beforehand, when Maradona’s eldest daughter, Dalma Maradona, told Agence France-Presse that her father had given Hodge the jersey he had worn during the match’s relatively uneventful first half.A spokeswoman for Sotheby’s told AFP that the auction house had undertaken “extensive diligence and scientific research” to authenticate the jersey’s use during the game’s climactic moments. Written accounts by both Maradona and Hodge confirm an exchange of jerseys after the game. (In an email, a Sotheby’s spokesman assured that the jersey had not been washed since then.)Rich Mueller, the founder and editor of Sports Collectors Daily, a website devoted to the sports memorabilia industry, said the sale represented the highest price he had ever heard anyone paying for memorabilia, in an auction or a private sale.The most recent record-setting sports items sold at auction have included a Babe Ruth jersey, which sold for $5.6 million in June 2019, and a document that laid out the founding principles of the modern Olympics, which sold for $8.8 million in December 2019.To illustrate the way the prices for sports memorabilia have skyrocketed, Ms. Dunbar, the appraiser, pointed out that in 2017, a Jackie Robinson jersey from 1947, his rookie season, sold for around $2 million, and last year, a 1950 Robinson jersey sold for more than twice as much — around $4.2 million. Ms. Dunbar estimated that a Robinson jersey that went on sale could now bring $10 million to $20 million.“People are realizing these items can be appreciated like a work of art,” Brahm Wachter, the head of streetwear and modern collectibles at Sotheby’s, said. “I’ve wanted to sell the shirt for a long time, perhaps the longest of any item I’ve actually had the privilege of selling.” More