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      Manchester City Beats Real Madrid in Champions League Semifinal

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      Manchester City had its way with Real Madrid — sort of. In the game’s aftermath, it was hard to shake the feeling that things had gone the other way.MANCHESTER, England — First thing Wednesday morning, Pep Guardiola’s staff will deliver to the Manchester City manager a meticulously annotated report of his team’s Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid. At roughly the same time, Carlo Ancelotti, his counterpart in the Spanish capital, will receive something very similar.Those dossiers will contain brief snatches of video, each highlighting some key tactical detail. There will be photos, too, offering a snapshot of a scarcely perceptible flaw in a player’s positioning or an expanse of the field left exposed or a darting run left unconsummated. There will, perhaps, be giant arrows in some lurid shade. There will certainly be reams of statistics.Guardiola and Ancelotti will settle down and comb through them, panning for whatever seam of wisdom they might find, mining deep into the detail in the hope of finding some kernel, some insight that might prove the difference when they play again next week. And as they do it, they will know, deep down, that it is all absolutely, fundamentally, unavoidably pointless.There is no hidden explanation, buried deep in a screed of numbers or encoded in high resolution pixels, for how Manchester City managed to beat Real Madrid yet ended the evening feeling like it had lost. Or for how it finished with four goals and the sensation that it should have had half a dozen more, or how it landed a succession of knockout blows only to find its opponent still standing there, smiling, complaining only of the mildest headache.Pep Guardiola had plenty of reason for concern during a win in which his team failed to capitalize on several opportunities.Catherine Ivill/Getty ImagesThe raw numbers of the game are not a magic eye puzzle; they are barely even a Rorschach test. No matter how long and hard you stare at them, they will not suddenly become an image, clear and sharp, of something that bears analysis and interpretation.They will not tell Guardiola how his team could be so obviously, so vastly superior by every available metric and in every conceivable way — slicker in possession and more inventive and creative and youthful and dynamic — and yet wholly incapable of shaking Madrid from its tail.And they will not enlighten Ancelotti as to how his team, somehow, remains alive and fighting in this semifinal, with a chance over 90 minutes in front of its own fans, baying and roaring, to defy all human logic and make the Champions League final. They will certainly not tell him how Real Madrid manages to keep doing this, over and over again, seeming to draw strength as it comes ever closer to the edge, continually finding the will and the wit to conjure its curious, self-perpetuating magic.Guardiola himself had acknowledged that before the game, half in jest, suggesting that there was not a vast amount of point in conducting the usual, instinctive analysis of Real Madrid because Ancelotti’s team is, by its very nature, so chimerical. He meant it, most likely, as a reflection on the virtuosity of Karim Benzema and Luka Modric, the ability of some of the finest players of their generation to bend a game to their will, but it sounded just a little like he was saying Real Madrid does not make sense.At times it felt like things could be far worse for Thibaut Courtois and Real Madrid, but several close calls ended up missing.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe is, of course, too respectful — even of Real Madrid, the club that stood as his archenemy for the first four decades of his career — to say that out loud, but his experience at the Etihad would not have contradicted him.Real was beaten within 10 minutes: two goals down, ruthlessly exposed, looking suddenly like the expensive collection of gifted but ill-matched individuals that all right-thinking people dismissed them as about four Champions League titles ago. David Alaba, his entire career spent among the elite, appeared to have been replaced by some callow ingénue. Toni Kroos appeared to age several decades with every passing minute.And then, from nowhere, Ferland Mendy slung in a cross, the sort that comes more in hope than expectation, and Benzema planted his foot and shifted his weight and scored, even though it was not immediately clear whether both the human body and the laws of physics are designed to work like that.No matter. City was still slicing Madrid apart at will. Riyad Mahrez hit the post. Phil Foden had one cleared off the line. A beat later, Foden converted an artful, clipped cross to restore City’s cushion, to relieve the tension swaddling the Etihad.The ball had come from the foot of Fernandinho, a creaking central midfielder reborn for the evening — in extenuating circumstances — as a marauding fullback. His rejuvenation lasted two minutes. Guardiola was still celebrating when Vinicius slipped past his makeshift opponent, sprinted half the length of the field, and slipped the ball past Éderson.Bernardo Silva and City had their moments to celebrate on Tuesday, but there were fewer of them than there could have been.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersCity came again, Bernardo Silva dispensing with all nuance and intricacy and simply kicking the ball, as hard as he could, his shot flashing past Thibaut Courtois. Benzema turned away, grinning ruefully, as though he could not quite believe the holes from which he has to retrieve his teammates.On anyone else, it might have looked like an admission of defeat, a final acquiescence to fate. But it is Real Madrid, and it is Benzema, and it is the Champions League, so obviously what happened was that Aymeric Laporte inadvertently — but inarguably — handled the ball in his own penalty area, and Benzema stood up and chipped a shot, languidly and confidently, straight down the middle of Éderson’s goal.Guardiola sat on an icebox in the technical area, his fingers steepling against his forehead, in horrified awe, as if trying to impose some reason on it all. It is a thankless task. This game did not make sense. Its outcome, the one that meant Real Madrid left Manchester with something more concrete than hope, with 90 minutes in front of a baying, willing Bernabeu between Ancelotti’s players and another Champions League final, did not make sense.There is no data point, no vignette, no piece of analysis that will adequately explain how Manchester City could beat Ancelotti’s team so comprehensively and yet leave with the tie poised so delicately. Real Madrid does not make sense, not in the Champions League, and all you can do is allow yourself to be washed away by it. More

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      With 10 Straight Titles, Has Bayern Munich Broken the Bundesliga?

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      As Germany’s perennial champion extended its decade of dominance, even its own fans were starting to worry that its success is getting a little boring.The first time Gregor Weinreich saw Bayern Munich crowned champion of Germany, he celebrated until sunrise. That was 1994. Three years later, when it happened again, he was so euphoric that he ran onto the field at the club’s old Olympic Stadium, a flare burning and sputtering in his hand. He was not alone. Many hundreds more did the same.Those memories remain sharp and clear and warm a quarter of a century later. His recollections of much more recent triumphs, by contrast, are already faded, fuzzy, indistinct. Weinreich knows Bayern won the title in 2014, and 2015, and 2016, and 2017, but he cannot tell them apart. “If you ask me about those championships, I have almost no memories,” he said.It is not hard to see why Bayern’s success has blurred into a single shapeless mass. On Saturday, the club beat second-place Borussia Dortmund — the last team to deprive it of the championship, back in 2012 — to win the Bundesliga title for the 10th year in a row.Weinreich did not plan to stay awake until dawn to exult in that achievement, to revel in the perpetuation of the sort of uncontested primacy that most fans, in theory, crave. His loyalty to Bayern Munich might be unswerving — he is a former chairman of Club Number 12, a Bayern fans’ group — but he does not particularly see yet another championship as a cause for celebration.He is not alone in that sentiment, either. “More and more Bayern fans are concerned about the lack of competition,” he said. “I don’t know if it is a majority yet. But of course more and more fans doubt the value of a competition that produces the same winner for 10 years.”Bayern Munich had claimed the Bundesliga trophy nine years running. On Saturday, it made it 10 in a row.Kerstin Joensson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn certain lights, this has been a compelling season for German soccer. Just over a week ago, Eintracht Frankfurt took so many fans to Barcelona for a Europa League game that the Spanish team had to launch an internal investigation into how quite so many of them acquired tickets.Eintracht won that night, booking its place in the semifinals of the Europa League. It might face another Bundesliga representative, RB Leipzig, in the competition’s final next month. S.C. Freiburg, a modest club from the picturesque fringes of the Black Forest, meanwhile, not only remains in unlikely contention to qualify for next season’s Champions League, but has reached the German cup final for the first time in its history.“All of the other fights have been pretty interesting,” said Christian Streich, the Freiburg coach who has come to be seen, in recent years, as a sort of voice of reason in German soccer. “Relegation has been interesting. There are teams going for the Europa League who have not qualified before. It is just that the Bundesliga title race has, unfortunately, not been too exciting.”That is hardly atypical. Bayern has finished each of the last two seasons 13 points ahead of its nearest challengers. Only once in the last decade — in 2019, when Dortmund limited the gap to two points — has Germany witnessed a genuine title race rather than a stately procession. That year apart, no team has finished within 10 points of Bayern since 2012.Dortmund, Bayern’s opponent on Saturday, was the last club to win the title other than Bayern. Wolfgang Rattay/ReutersThat success is, of course, to Bayern’s great credit. It has long been Germany’s biggest, richest, most glamorous team, but for years was held back by its supernova streak. Its combustible blend of powerful players, superstar managers and squabbling executives would self-destruct so reliably that the club became known as F.C. Hollywood. Consumed by infighting, it would every so often allow one of its rivals — Dortmund or Werder Bremen or VfB Stuttgart — to sneak in and claim a championship.Bayern’s relentlessness in the last 10 years has come to be explained, then, by its ability to control its taste for self-immolation. Bayern hire the right coaches, sign the right players, smartly appoint alumni to illustrious positions behind the scenes. It has, as Fernando Carro, the chief executive of Bayer Leverkusen, said, “done excellent work over the years.” Bayern is what happens when big teams are run well.And that, German soccer’s power brokers have long insisted, is a good thing. Executives at the Deutsche Fussball Liga, the Bundesliga’s governing body, have long presented Bayern’s dominance as an advantage for the league. Bayern’s virtue, the theory goes, not only serves as an advertisement for German soccer, but it exerts a pull on the competition itself, helping to drag everyone else along in its wake.Dario Minden, the vice chairman of Unsere Kurve, an umbrella group representing the interests of game-day fans across Germany, does not go along with that analysis. “It’s not that they don’t make mistakes,” he said. “They do. They make big mistakes. It is just that they have such an advantage that they can afford to make mistakes.”In his eyes, there is no great mystery as to why Bayern keeps winning. “The core of the problem is that Bayern’s annual budget is $380 million and Dortmund, the second-richest team, has a budget of $270 million,” Minden said. “Then there are small teams, like Greuther Fürth, operating on $19 million.”That financial advantage means Bayern exists in a different reality from its putative peers. “The simple fact is they don’t need to sell their players,” said Carro, the Leverkusen chief executive. “That means Bayern can keep the core of their team together for years.”Bayern’s wealth means it never has to sell stars like Thomas Müller, above, or Robert Lewandowski, the Bundesliga goals leader in seven of the past nine years.Andreas Gebert/ReutersTo Carro, that is not an insurmountable obstacle. Leverkusen, he said, starts every season believing it can end Bayern’s dominance. “If you don’t go in with that approach, you might as well not compete at all,” he said. “The margins can be incredibly slim. There have been chances for contenders to step in at times, and there will be new ones in the future. Yes, you need to perform on your highest level for a long time, but I am convinced it can be done.”To others, though, the situation is far more perilous. There are many, in Germany, who believe the Bundesliga now stands as a warning to every other major league in Europe about the dangers of what happens when, as Minden put it, the principle of “competitive balance is broken” on some fundamental level.“The Bundesliga is boring,” he said. “That is just common sense.”His opinion is not a niche position within German soccer. There is, indeed, a groundswell of support for the idea that something has to change. The issue is that nobody can quite agree on what that something might be.Weinreich, for example, argues that the status quo is effectively ossified by the fact that, every year, the same teams — led by Bayern — receive vast windfalls for competing in the Champions League, creating what is, in effect, an unbreakable virtuous circle. “The way the money is distributed was designed in such a way that a club that already has a dominant position in its country benefits,” he said.Last year, fans of both Bayern and Dortmund — the two most regular beneficiaries of the current system — suggested a change to the way that money is allocated, so that more of it flows to teams further down the food chain. “As far as I know, this was the first time that fans had demanded their own clubs receive less money,” Weinreich said.Others would go further still. Minden was part of a task force convened by Germany’s soccer authorities that recommended not only far more stringent financial regulations — largely designed to stop teams like Leipzig, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, who are underwritten by corporate backers — but also a luxury tax, modeled on the sort seen in sports in the United States.Carro, meanwhile, suggested that the only quick fix to Bayern’s hegemony would be to abolish the 50+1 rule that means Germany’s clubs must — with a handful of exceptions — be controlled by their fans. That would, in theory, allow for the sort of outside investment that reshaped the landscape of England’s Premier League, though it is one that has precious little popular support within German soccer. “The league should not strive to improve at any price or by any means,” Streich said.Even Bayern’s most senior executives have expressed an openness to changes that might weaken its grip on the Bundesliga title.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockMinden went further, suggesting he would find it “disgusting” — a form of “moral bankruptcy” — for German teams to be owned and operated by some of the investors who have bought Premier League teams. “I could not celebrate a goal that had been bought and paid for by a dictator who dismembers journalists,” he said.Besides, to his eyes, abandoning the 50+1 system would exacerbate the problem, rather than solve it. “It would cause huge damage,” he said. “It would still be the big clubs that attracted investment. The only global brand in Germany is Bayern Munich. The money would still come to them, and we would lose our democracy, and our culture.”Even the ultimate beneficiary of the current power balance has not proved entirely resistant to the idea of change. Earlier this year, the D.F.L. revealed that it was discussing — among a suite of options — the merits of appending playoffs to the end of the Bundesliga season.Most of its constituent clubs came out fiercely against the concept. The one that did not was Bayern Munich. “Of course, the league would be more attractive if it had more competition at the top,” said Oliver Kahn, the club’s chief executive. “There are no sacred cows for me. If playoffs help us, then we’ll talk about playoffs. A mode in the Bundesliga with semifinals and finals would mean excitement for the fans.”It would also, of course, diminish Bayern’s advantage, make it more prey to random chance, to a bounce of the ball, to the rub of the green. Perhaps that is what it would take, though, for the club — or at least some of its fans — to feel something again.It just won’t be this year. On Saturday, Bayern won its 10th consecutive championship. “And unless very improbable things happen, maybe there will be 15, or 20,” Weinreich said. Winning a championship is supposed to be unforgettable. The problem comes when you cannot remember one from another. More

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      Aliou Cissé Has Senegal Ready to Shine in World Cup

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      Aliou Cissé, one of the best of a new generation of African coaches, has reinvented Senegal’s national team and given the country a new sense of patriotism. His next goal: the World Cup.DIAMNIADIO, Senegal — Standing on the sidelines of Senegal’s brand-new national stadium, Aliou Cissé, the biggest fan of his own team, waved his arms at 50,000 fans, exhorting them to cheer even louder, his signature dreadlocks bouncing on his shoulders.Fans roared back, clapping and blowing their vuvuzelas at a more deafening pitch. Minutes later, Senegal defeated its fiercest rival, Egypt, earning a qualification for soccer’s World Cup, which begins this November in Qatar.“When we are together, Senegal wins,” a grinning Mr. Cissé, 46, said at a postgame news conference. Or, as he likes to repeat in Wolof, one of the country’s national languages, “Mboloo Mooy gagner” — “Unity brings victory.”If Senegal feels proud and patriotic these days, it’s thanks in large part to its national team — and to Mr. Cissé, a former professional player who has reinvented Senegalese soccer and built what is currently the best team in Africa.“The barometer of the Senegalese society today is soccer,” Mr. Cissé said in a recent interview with The New York Times in Diamniadio, a newly built city on the outskirts of Dakar where the new stadium sits. “People watch us play and they’re proud to be Senegalese, proud to be African.”Mr. Cissé led the squad that won the Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year, the country’s first soccer title. In doing so, he proved to the Senegalese people that one of their own could succeed where no one else had.Mr. Cissé speaking to the players during a World Cup playoff match between Senegal and Egypt in Dakar last month.Stefan Kleinowitz/Associated PressEuropean managers have long coached many African national teams, including Senegal’s, but that is changing, a shift embodied by Mr. Cissé.From Algeria to Zimbabwe, Sudan to Burkina Faso, a rising generation of African managers are building a new coaching culture on the continent. Sixteen teams now have local coaches, and the three sub-Saharan African teams going to Qatar later this year — Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal — all have former national players as managers.“More and more professional players on the continent want to be coaches,” said Ferdinand Coly, a former teammate of Mr. Cissé’s. “Local expertise is gaining ground.”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.Although Mr. Cissé maintains that European coaches have done a lot for African teams, that era is fading.Born in the southern Senegalese region of Casamance in 1976, Mr. Cissé moved to France when he was 9 and grew up in the suburbs of Paris, one of the world’s best pools of soccer talent.His trajectory is similar to many African players who were raised in Europe or joined youth academies there. “When I was out, I was French, but at home I was truly Senegalese,” Mr. Cissé said about speaking Wolof and following the family’s customs while in France.A picture of the Senegalese national team decorating the front of a building in Dakar.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesMr. Cissé joined the youth academy of Lille, in northern France, at 14, and played in French and English clubs in the 1990s and 2000s, including the French powerhouse Paris St.-Germain, Portsmouth and Birmingham City, which competed in England’s top league.At the 2002 World Cup, he captained a Senegalese squad participating in its first World Cup — one that stunned France, the world champions at the time, in a surprise victory that many still refer to with warm nostalgia. Senegal reached the quarterfinals, the team’s biggest achievement to date in the competition.As a coach, Mr. Cissé now appeals to both Senegalese players raised in their native country, and to those who moved to France in their youth like him, building a bridge between the squad’s “locals” and its “binationals,” as they are referred to among the team’s staff.It has been a long road to success. When Mr. Cissé took over the team in 2015, Senegal had been performing poorly at the Africa Cup of Nations and had failed to qualify for the last three World Cup editions. Mr. Cissé’s predecessors were fired one after another.Seven years later, Mr. Cissé, nicknamed “El Tactico,” for his efficient but restrained approach to the game, will bring Senegal to its third World Cup and his second one as a coach. The era when African teams were “observing,” is over, he says, and one will win the coveted trophy one day.“Why not us?” he said.Régis Bogaert, a former French youth coach of Mr. Cissé’s at Lille and now his deputy on the Senegalese team, said Mr. Cissé had conveyed a sense of mission to his players. “He is making many people want to be the next Aliou Cissé in Senegal and in Africa,” Mr. Bogaert said.Soccer players training on the beach of Cambérène, in Dakar, this month.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesSoccer, a national passion, is everywhere in Senegal, whether in the youth academies nurturing future talents, or on Dakar’s beaches, empty construction sites and pitches dotting the city’s corniche along the Atlantic Ocean.“To be the coach of the national team today is to be a politician,” said Mr. Cissé, who often repeats that he lives in Senegal and feels the country’s pressure on a daily basis, unlike his players or the foreign coaches who live abroad. “It’s about knowing the economy, the culture, the education and history of your country.”His sense of humor and fashion tastes have also helped with his popularity: Mr. Cissé often wears shiny white sneakers and thick black square glasses, and he keeps his dreadlocks under a New York Yankees or Team Senegal cap, giving him the air of a cool father. He has five children, whom he makes sound as challenging to manage as the national team.Mr. Cissé.Carmen Abd Ali for The New York TimesIf Mr. Cissé has shared Senegal’s biggest successes, he has also experienced some of the country’s worst traumas. In 2002, he lost 11 relatives in a shipwreck that killed more than 1,800 passengers off the coasts of Senegal and Gambia.Senegal’s victory at the Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year came 20 years after Mr. Cissé missed a penalty in the final of the same tournament, depriving the team of its first trophy back then — a memory that long haunted his nights, he said.Since then, Senegal has been having happier days on the pitch, and the national pride surrounding the team was on full display last month when Senegal defeated Egypt in a penalty shootout in its first game in Diamniadio’s stadium.Some fans said they had slept outside the stadium the night before to make sure they got the best seats. Hours before kickoff, thousands more lined up to enter, the sounds of whistles and drums filling the air.“It’s a great day for Senegal,” said Sally Diassy, a French-Senegalese 30-year-old who lives in France and said she was visiting Senegal to support her favorite team.Senegal’s Sadio Mane, left, celebrates after scoring a penalty during the World Cup playoff match between Senegal and Egypt.Stefan Kleinowitz/Associated PressThe jubilation on display after the win echoed the triumphant return of the Senegalese players after they won the Africa Cup of Nations in February. Tens of thousands of fans greeted them as they paraded in the streets of Dakar. President Macky Sall rewarded the team and Mr. Cissé’s staff with some land in the capital and in Diamniadio, along with about $83,000, an exorbitant sum that set off some minor protests in a country where nearly half of the population lives under the poverty line.But some players have also given back: Sadio Mané, the team’s star, has built a hospital in his native village. Kalidou Koulibaly, the captain, bought ambulances for his father’s village.“Players want to be role models in their own country,” said Salif Diallo, a veteran soccer journalist who has followed Mr. Cissé’s career as a player and a coach. “This team is changing the perception that Senegalese have of themselves.”Those who know Mr. Cissé say that once he is done with the national team, he will want to play a greater role for his country.“I’ve tried to set an example,” Mr. Cissé said of his career as both player and coach. “If a Senegalese player moves to Birmingham or Montpelier or wherever I’ve played tomorrow, I hope he will be welcomed because they will remember that Aliou Cissé was a good guy.”Supporters cheering as Mr. Cissé raises a trophy during celebrations in Dakar in February for Senegal winning the Africa Cup of Nations.John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Erik Ten Hag Appointed by Manchester United

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      The Dutchman is the latest coach tasked with resurrecting Manchester United, English soccer’s fallen giant that is enduring a near decade-long slump.Manchester United has turned to the Dutchman Erik ten Hag as the latest coach to help revive its fortunes after a near decade-long slump toward mediocrity. The decline has led to United’s falling away from contention for the Premier League championship, a title that once had seemed a divine right to fans of one of the world’s most celebrated sporting franchises.United’s sudden and now protracted run of poor form followed two decades of dominance under the legendary manager Alex Ferguson. Ferguson retired after United’s 20th and last championship in 2013, and a succession of high-profile coaches have been unable to replicate that success as United has fallen further and further behind its bitter rivals Manchester City and Liverpool.United, owned by the Glazer family, based in the United States, hope ten Hag will be able to replicate the success he has achieved with the Netherlands’ biggest club, Ajax, which he will continue to lead until moving to England at the end of the season. Under ten Hag, Ajax has regularly punched above its weight against wealthier European rivals, playing a swashbuckling attacking style, with homegrown talent, something that was once a signature of Manchester United teams built by Ferguson.United said that it had signed ten Hag to a contract through June 2025 and that it had the option to extend the agreement for a further year. United will pay Ajax about $2 million to release ten Hag.Under ten Hag, Ajax’s talented young squad has won a glut of domestic honors. But his highest profile success came in 2019 when he almost, and improbably, led the team to the final of the Champions League, falling just short after conceding a goal in the final seconds of the semifinal.“It will be difficult to leave Ajax after these incredible years, and I can assure our fans of my complete commitment and focus on bringing this season to a successful conclusion before I move to Manchester United,” ten Hag said.The task at United could not be more difficult. As United spent more money than at any other point in its history, its performances have only grown worse, leading to a succession of managerial exits and fan unrest against the Glazers.Ten Hag will be expected to oversee an overhaul of the club’s poorly balanced and costly roster, but also the culture of the club, where tales of locker room disharmony have frequently found their way into the public domain. News media reports said he would have as much $260 million to spend on new players during the off season.“It is a great honor to be appointed manager of Manchester United, and I am hugely excited by the challenge ahead,” ten Hag said. “I know the history of this great club and the passion of the fans, and I am absolutely determined to develop a team capable of delivering the success they deserve.”He will follow the German coach Ralf Rangnick, who was hired on a temporary basis to replace Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a popular former player with United who was appointed with little high-profile coaching experience and struggled to come to terms with the scale of the task of managing United, a team with a global fan base and expectations of success. He was not the only one to fail to meet those lofty expectations.United has stumbled from coach to coach with varying formulas — high-profile figures like Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho as well as the Scotsman David Moyes, Ferguson’s handpicked successor — without ever looking likely to come close to putting down foundations that could put the team back on course for regular success.Ten Hag’s appointment comes two days after United was humbled, 4-0, at Liverpool, which is currently engaged in a high octane, neck-and-neck race with City for the Premier League title. United has drifted to sixth place, 23 points behind the leader, City, and is at risk of failing to qualify for next season’s Champions League.The appointment is not unexpected. United had long targeted ten Hag as a possible new coach and had spoken with him on numerous occasions as it looked to plan for the future. United had alighted on ten Hag, 52, along with the Argentine Mauricio Pochettino, the Paris St. Germain coach, who drew admirers for his team-building work at Tottenham Hotspur. In the end it is ten Hag who has been entrusted with the opportunity to revive the fallen giant.“In our conversations with Erik leading up to this appointment, we were deeply impressed with his long-term vision for returning Manchester United to the level we want to be competing at, and his drive and determination to achieve that,” John Murtough, United’s football director, said.United’s slide has been so profound that it may be years before ten Hag can be expected to make United challengers for the biggest titles. The current coach, Rangnick, said as much after the miserable performance against Liverpool, during which many United fans left the stadium well before the referee brought an end to the humiliation.“It is embarrassing, it is disappointing, maybe even humiliating,” a chastened but cleareyed Rangnick said on Tuesday. “We have to accept they are six years ahead of us now. When Jurgen Klopp came they changed at the club and lifted not just the team but the club and city to a new level. That is what needs to happen with us in the next transfer windows.” More

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      The Female Soccer Players Challenging France’s Hijab Ban

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      SARCELLES, France — Every time Mama Diakité heads to soccer game, her stomach is in knots.It happened again on a recent Saturday afternoon in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris. Her amateur team had come to face the local club, and Diakité, a 23-year-old Muslim midfielder, feared she would not be allowed to play in her hijab.This time, the referee let her in. “It worked,” she said at the end of the game, leaning against the fence bordering the field, her smiling face wrapped in a black Nike head scarf.But Diakité had only fallen through the cracks.For years, France’s soccer federation has banned players participating in competitions from wearing conspicuous religious symbols such as hijabs, a rule it contends is in keeping with the organization’s strict secular values. Although the ban is loosely enforced at the amateur level, it has hung over Muslim women’s players for years, shattering their hopes of professional careers and driving some away from the game altogether.Les Hijabeuses is an informal group of hijab-wearing women who play soccer together in an effort to draw attention to a French policy they say drives Muslim women out of the game.In an ever more multicultural France, where women’s soccer is booming, the ban has also sparked a growing backlash. At the forefront of the fight is Les Hijabeuses, a group of young hijab-wearing soccer players from different teams who have joined forces to campaign against what they describe as a discriminatory rule that excludes Muslim women from sports.Their activism has touched a nerve in France, reviving heated debates on the integration of Muslims in a country with a tortured relationship with Islam, and highlighting the struggle of French sports authorities to reconcile their defense of strict secular values with growing calls for greater representation on the field.“What we want is to be accepted as we are, to implement these grand slogans of diversity, inclusiveness,” said Founé Diawara, the president of Les Hijabeuses, which has 80 members. “Our only desire is to play soccer.”The Hijabeuses collective was created in 2020 with the help of researchers and community organizers in an attempt to solve a paradox: Although French laws and FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, allow sportswomen to play in hijabs, France’s soccer federation prohibits it, arguing that it would break with the principle of religious neutrality on the field.Supporters of the ban say hijabs portend an Islamist radicalization taking over sports. But the personal stories of Hijabeuses members emphasize how soccer has been synonymous with emancipation — and how the ban continues to feel like a step backward.Founé Diawara, the president of Les Hijabeuses.Diakité began playing soccer at age 12, initially hiding it from her parents, who saw soccer as a boys’ sport. “I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” she said, calling it “a dream.”Jean-Claude Njehoya, her current coach, said that “when she was younger, she had a lot of skills” that could have propelled her to the highest level. But “from the moment” she understood the hijab ban would impact her, he said, “she didn’t really push herself further.”Diakité said she decided on her own to wear the hijab in 2018 — and to give up her dream. She now plays for a third-division club and plans to open a driving school. “No regret,” she said. “Either I’m accepted as I am, or I’m not. And that’s it.”Karthoum Dembele, a 19-year-old midfielder who wears a nose ring, also said she had to confront her mother to be allowed to play. She quickly joined a sports-intensive program in middle school and participated in club tryouts. But it wasn’t until she learned about the ban, four years ago, that she realized she may no longer be allowed to compete.“I had managed to make my mother give in and I’m told the federation won’t let me play,” Dembele said. “I told myself: What a joke!”Other members of the group recalled episodes when referees barred them from the field, prompting some, feeling humiliated, to quit soccer and turn to sports where hijabs are allowed or tolerated, like handball or futsal.Mama Diakité, who plays for Jeanne D’Arc Drancy, after a match in Sarcelles, a suburb north of Paris. Technically, Diakité is not allowed to play in a hijab, but referees often look the other way.Throughout last year, Les Hijabeuses lobbied the French soccer federation to overturn the ban. They sent letters, met with officials and even staged a protest at the federation’s headquarters — to no avail. The federation declined to comment for this article.Paradoxically, it was Les Hijabeuses’ staunchest opponents who finally put them in the spotlight.In January, a group of conservative senators tried to enshrine the soccer federation’s hijab ban in law, arguing that hijabs threatened to spread radical Islam in sports clubs. The move reflected a lingering malaise in France regarding the Muslim veil, which regularly stirs controversy. In 2019, a French store dropped a plan to sell a hijab designed for runners after a barrage of criticism.Energized by the senators’ efforts, Les Hijabeuses waged an intense lobbying campaign against the amendment. Making the most of their strong social media presence — the group has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram — they launched a petition that gathered more than 70,000 signatures; rallied dozens of sport celebrities to their cause; and organized games before the Senate building and with professional athletes.Vikash Dhorasoo, a former France midfielder who attended a game, said the ban left him dumbfounded. “I just don’t get it,” he said. “It’s the Muslims who are targeted here.”Members of Les Hijabeuses meet regularly with Diawara (in pink sweater and black hijab) and supporters like the sociologist Haifa Tlili, left, who have offered help in their fight against France’s soccer federation. Stéphane Piednoir, the senator behind the amendment, denied the accusation that the legislation was aimed at Muslims specifically, saying its focus was all conspicuous religious signs. But he acknowledged that the amendment had been motivated by the wearing of the Muslim veil, which he called “a propaganda vehicle” for political Islam and a form of “visual proselytizing.” (Piednoir also has condemned the display of the Catholic tattoos of the P.S.G. star Neymar as “unfortunate” and wondered if the religious ban should extend to them.)The amendment was eventually rejected by the government’s majority in parliament, although not without frictions. The Paris police banned a protest organized by Les Hijabeuses, and the French sports minister, who said the law allows hijab-wearing women to play, clashed with government colleagues opposing the head scarf.The Hijabeuses’ fight may not be a popular one in France, where six in 10 people support banning hijabs in the street, according to a recent survey by the polling firm CSA. Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate who will face President Emmanuel Macron in a runoff vote on April 24 — with a shot at a final victory — has said that if elected, she will ban the Muslim veil in public spaces.But, on the soccer field, everyone seems to agree that hijabs should be allowed.“Nobody minds if they play with it,” said Rana Kenar, 17, a Sarcelles player who had come to watch her team face Diakité’s club on a bitterly cold February evening.Kenar was sitting in the bleachers with about 20 fellow players. All said they saw the ban as a form of discrimination, noting that, at the amateur level, the ban was loosely enforced.Even the referee of the game in Sarcelles, who had let Diakité play, seemed at odds with the ban. “I looked the other away,” he said, declining to give his name for fear of repercussions.Les Hijabeuses held a celebrity game in February that drew athletes, actors and other supporters who oppose the hijab ban.Pierre Samsonoff, the former deputy head of the soccer federation’s amateur branch, said the issue would inevitably come up again in the coming years, with the development of women’s soccer and the hosting of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, which will feature veiled athletes from Muslim countries.Samsonoff, who initially defended banning the hijab, said he had since softened his stance, acknowledging the policy could end up ostracizing Muslim players. “The issue is whether we are not creating worse consequences by deciding to ban it on the fields than by deciding to allow it,” he said.Piednoir, the senator, said the players were ostracizing themselves. But he acknowledged never having spoken with any hijab-wearing athletes to hear their motivations, comparing the situation to “firefighters” being asked to go “listen to pyromaniacs.”Dembele, who manages the Hijabeuses’ social media accounts, said she was often struck by the violence of online comments and the fierce political opposition.“We hold on,” she said. “It’s not just for us, it’s also for the young girls who tomorrow will be able to dream of playing for France, for P.S.G.”Monique Jaques More

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      Liverpool Edges City in Game of Early Goals and Managed Risks

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      Liverpool advanced to the F.A. Cup final by beating its Champions League rival at Wembley. But for both teams, every choice matters now.LONDON — In the single corner of Wembley bathed by bright sunshine, Kevin De Bruyne dutifully shuttled up and down. He stretched out his hamstrings and his calves. He made sure his ankles were nice and loose, and, with great time and care, made sure his laces were tight. He wanted everything to feel just right when the call came.It never did. With Manchester City trailing Liverpool by two goals, with its place in the F.A. Cup final and its aspirations of completing a domestic and European treble slipping from its grasp, City’s manager, Pep Guardiola, did not summon De Bruyne, his outstanding playmaker. The Belgian spent a few minutes in the sunshine, his gaze alternating between the game unfolding in front of him and Guardiola, and then he returned to his seat in the shade.Whether De Bruyne knew it or not, Guardiola had never considered anything else. He would, of course, have preferred to throw De Bruyne into the fray — or, indeed, to have him on the field from the start — but he felt, sincerely, that he could not.De Bruyne had sustained a four-inch gash on his foot in City’s Champions League clash against Atlético Madrid, in Spain, on Wednesday. It had been stitched closed before he returned to England, and he had been prescribed a course of antibiotics to stave off an infection. It was starting to heal. Introducing him into a game three days later, though, would risk reopening the wound. “Then we would lose him for more games,” Guardiola said. “At the end, I didn’t want to take that risk.”It was hardly surprising that Guardiola was a little coy on why, exactly, De Bruyne was dispatched to the touchline to warm up, given that he evidently had no intention of allowing him into the game.Perhaps it was a psychological ploy for the benefit of his teammates, a little boost as they sought to build on Jack Grealish’s second-half goal and further reduce the three-goal lead Liverpool had established in a dominant first half. Or maybe it was a little ruse to unnerve Guardiola’s Liverpool counterpart, Jürgen Klopp, to force him to contemplate what he might do if De Bruyne, arguably the most creative player in English soccer, suddenly entered the fray.Either way, the fact that De Bruyne was reduced to playing the role of theoretical threat encapsulated the greatest challenge facing these teams over the next six weeks.Both have been swept to the cusp of not just glory but some multiple of it — City hopeful, still, of winning both the Premier League and Champions League, Liverpool now in contention to complete a sweep of four available trophies — by the prowess of their players and the brilliance of their coaches, by virtue of being not only the most gifted teams but also the most intense, the most intelligent and the most industrious.What unfolds between now and the end of the season, though, will hinge as much on endurance as on ability. The line between absolute success and relative failure is as much a war of attrition as a battle of wits. What will define who wins the Premier League and, possibly, the Champions League will not be which team can soar highest but which can run deepest.Manchester City’s Fernandinho, left, and John Stones at the end of a long week.Tony Obrien/Action Images Via ReutersThat is particularly true for teams that find themselves competing on multiple fronts. Guardiola and Klopp both take great pains to stress that looking too far ahead can lead only to ruin, that allowing thoughts to drift to the hypothetical can serve only to distract from the concrete and the tangible.But every lineup choice, for both coaches, between now and the end of the season, must take into account not just the task at hand but also the challenges to come.Guardiola, at Wembley, named De Bruyne as a substitute despite knowing that he would not play. He was joined on that list by Ilkay Gundogan and Aymeric Laporte, both of whom were in De Bruyne’s boat, omitted from this game with hopes that they would be available for the next, against Brighton, in the Premier League, or so that they would not reduce their chances of playing in the Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid in 10 days.Strange as it seems to say it, for a team that has spent a decade or so building one of the two most expensive squads of all time — a team that includes among its alternates the most expensive player in British history — City’s list of available players is not particularly “long,” as Guardiola put it.“It is OK when everyone is fit,” he said. The subtext, of course, was that it would not be when injury and fatigue set in. Though Guardiola prefers a concentrated, high-caliber squad, for a club of City’s long-term vision — not to mention its unrivaled resources — that is more than a little surprising; it is hard to imagine that the situation will not be amended during the summer transfer window.Sadio Mané scored twice for Liverpool. But more — and bigger — games loom.Tony Obrien/Action Images Via ReutersKlopp has taken the opposite approach. Liverpool’s squad, bolstered by the arrival of Luis Díaz in January and somewhat untroubled by injury in recent months, is sufficiently well-equipped these days that he was able to rest some of his key figures against Benfica in the Champions League last week — a privilege Guardiola, facing a pitched battle with Atlético Madrid, was denied — and still advance. That, in turn, allowed him to name a full-strength side at Wembley on Saturday, a fact that likely proved the decisive factor.The catch, of course, is that Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and the rest of the team have only 72 hours before they face Manchester United in the Premier League, with a Merseyside derby against Everton lingering on the horizon. Their legs will be just a little more weary for those games because of their exertions against City.Klopp, in that sense, took as much risk as Guardiola; sticking is no less of a gamble than is twisting, after all. That is the position in which both coaches, and both teams, find themselves: weighing risk and reward, hoping they call it right, knowing that everything is on the line. More

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      European Super League Fallout, Now in a New York Court

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      A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.For Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA, the Super League fight never fades away.Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA, via ShutterstockThe implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work. More

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      You Decide Which Games Matter

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      The F.A. Cup and the Conference League have meaning not because of tradition or design, but when the players, and particularly the fans, decide they are important.Only a little more than a year ago, the Europa Conference League was still just an idea. It did not, in truth, even seem like an especially good idea. Explaining where such a league would fit into the game’s pecking order, what its purpose would be, hardly had the making of a compelling elevator pitch.Europe already had two continental tournaments: the wildly popular Champions League and the broadly tolerated Europa League. Why not add a third, then — one that encompassed all of the teams that were not quite good enough to qualify for the other two competitions?Why not advertise this new tournament as a way to make European soccer more “inclusive,” a prize available to the sort of teams that have been locked out of major finals for decades? And make sure to include a single, resentful representative from each of the powerhouse leagues of western Europe? And how about a long, cumbersome and deeply unappealing name?And yet, though the Conference League as a concept seemed nothing short of folly, the sort of notion that could only be conjured up by a stifling and self-important bureaucracy, we are rapidly approaching the point where we have to acknowledge the improbable: It is, as it turned out, a good idea.Its games are competitive. Its stadiums are full, or close enough. The teams involved, even the ones that might have been expected to view this new league as an encumbrance, are sufficiently invested in the idea of winning it. There has been at least one angry encounter in a tunnel, the sure sign of a competition with meaning.Countries that have for years had precious little interest in the final stages of Europe’s showpiece tournaments have found themselves enjoying the best kind of soccer: winner-take-all in the springtime. Even those fans who initially saw the Conference League as a money-grab, a consolation prize and — worst of all — an entirely artificial construct have been won over.That unexpected, immediate success is intriguing. The prime charge against the Conference League — as it always is against any newfangled competition — was that it lacked history and therefore could not possibly have any purpose, authenticity or heft.Roma fans after their team beat Bodo/Glimt to advance to the Conference League semifinals.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockThe past is what soccer generally mines for meaning. Teams that win the Champions League or a domestic title are weighing themselves against all the teams that have gone before. By winning, these teams can etch their names in the pantheon of their predecessors.That the Conference League can matter to those involved without any of that history, though, suggests that meaning in soccer does not function quite as we have assumed it does.Value is not an innate thing. The Champions League does not carry more weight than any other tournament by divine right. It will not always necessarily be seen as the game’s highest peak; its beginnings, too, were accompanied by such considerable skepticism that the English decided, initially, not to deign it with their presence.Nor can significance be reliably measured in pounds, dollars and euros. The Champions League is not the most important tournament because it is the most lucrative; it is the most lucrative because it is the most important. Someone — probably SoftBank, if we’re honest — could launch a far richer competition at any point but would not make it more meaningful.No, value is not inherent. Rather, it is applied. It is a form of cultural convention, a tacit agreement among players and coaches and executives and, particularly, among fans: We determine which tournaments matter.The Champions League’s power lies, in part, in its stars and history.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThe Conference League illustrates that axiom perfectly. The tournament is important because those involved have decreed it to be important.So, too, in reverse, goes the fate of the F.A. Cup. Anyone who has ever spoken with an English soccer fan of a particular vintage will know that there once was a time when the F.A. Cup final was the highlight of the season.The buildup started hours before kickoff. Fans streamed down by train, car and horse-and-cart by the thousands, ribbons tied to their lapels, hands clasping rattles, just to be on Wembley Way to watch their heroes. To win the cup was, the myth goes, better than winning the league because the whole country watched the cup final.Myth is, perhaps, a touch harsh. As recently as the mid-1990s, the day of the F.A. Cup final was the centerpiece of the English soccer calendar. For years, it was the only game regularly broadcast on television. It was a more widely accessible occasion, and therefore a more memorable one.Mythical or not, the F.A. Cup’s status has diminished over the last three decades. The cup no longer matters quite so much as it once did, not because the competition has changed — it has not — but because the circumstances around it have.The creation of the Premier League necessitated proclaiming that competition’s significance at the expense of almost everything else, and after a while, the propaganda became self-fulfilling. Soccer’s natural order shaped itself around the league. The F.A. Cup became an afterthought.The Premier League, too, heralded the dawn of soccer as a televised product; the cup would no longer be exceptional merely because it was broadcast. At the same time, the game’s increased internationalism and the advent of the Champions League made Europe a priority for more teams than ever before and a richer prize, too. The F.A. Cup got a little lost in the mayhem.Liverpool and Manchester City, fresh off a meeting in the league, will renew their rivalry in an F.A. Cup semifinal on Saturday.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is not to say that, from the perspective of 2022, the F.A. Cup does not matter, or that it does not produce drama, romance, intrigue or glory. The competition does on all fronts. But its value relative to the rest of the game has been reduced, both for those involved with the games and those watching them.A competition’s meaning is not fixed. It can rise and fall, depending on our tastes. The game — that uneasy alliance of all of those who play and watch and run and love soccer — decides what matters.The Europa Conference League is a useful reminder. It might easily have failed, had the cynicism of the major European leagues — the ones who believe that all anybody wants is to watch the same teams play each other, over and over again, in various combinations — proved infectious. That it has thrived is not simply because it was a good idea. It is because we accepted that it was a good idea and because we decided that it mattered.Emotional IncontinenceKenny Shiels should probably rethink a few things. Liam Mcburney/Press Association, via Associated PressWe are, you will have noticed, in the future these days. You can tell because there is Wi-Fi on planes now. There is an app on your phone that lets you read any language under the sun, as in Star Trek, up to and including Welsh. There are electric cars on the road and countless, pointless NFTs and an ever-rolling culture war seemingly designed to splinter society because nobody ever guaranteed that the future would be good.And yet, for all that — despite the undeniable fact that it is 2022 — this week Kenny Shiels, a man employed as the coach of Northern Ireland’s women’s team, seemed to suggest that his players found it harder to respond to conceding a goal than a men’s team would because women are more “emotional” than men.Now, obviously, this is an offensive, absurd thing to say. It is self-evidently sexist and the perpetuation of a harmful stereotype by someone in a position of power and authority. It does not, really, suggest that Shiels is in quite the right job.But there is one question that is, perhaps, worth addressing. Has Shiels — a former player and the son of a former player — ever seen any men’s soccer?Has he not witnessed the histrionics, the performed outrage and the screeching hyperbole that accompanies every single result, good or bad; the gimlet-eyed fury of managers who feel they have been wronged; the overwrought celebrations that accompany the scoring of a simple tap-in or the garment-rending that follows the conceding of an avoidable goal?And if he has, has he never stopped and wondered if maybe the better question is whether men are too emotional for this game?What You May Have MissedSpeaking of histrionics: Manchester City edged Atlético Madrid on Wednesday night, not by rising above its opponent’s fabled cynicism but by matching it. “No team in the world is as good at this as Atlético,” the City coach, Pep Guardiola, said. His players did a decent impression, though, and for that they deserve credit.That game was, however, only the third most compelling story of the quarterfinals. Villarreal, written off as no-hopers before the last 16, let alone the final eight, snatched a late equalizer to eliminate Bayern Munich; Real Madrid, meanwhile, emerged triumphant from an evening of two comebacks against Chelsea, a game that instantly warrants a place in the ranks of modern Champions League classics.Étienne Capoue, center, and Villarreal are the surprise of the Champions League.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMore warranting of an emotional response is the story of the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk. That the team has been unable to return to its home city for years — ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — has slowly become one of those strange circumstances that European soccer just kind of accepts.Shakhtar has used Lviv, Kharkiv and, most recently, Kyiv as its residence-in-exile, and after a while everyone seemed to accept that rootlessness: Oh yes, Shakhtar is at home in the Champions League again, hundreds of miles from home.Now, as my colleague Tariq Panja noted, the club has been displaced again, this time to Istanbul, where its first team trained after leaving Ukraine, and to the Croatian city of Split, where its academy players have found shelter after the outbreak of war, once again. Central to organizing that offer of sanctuary was the club’s Croatian technical director, Darijo Srna (who ranks, as it happens, among my top 20 favorite players of all time).Srna knows some of what his young charges are going through. His life was interrupted by war in his homeland, too, when he was roughly the same age as some of them are now. His account of what the team has been through is well worth your time.CorrespondenceFirst of all, thanks to Daniel Shultz for expressing in precisely three sentences what it took me an entire column to outline.“The thing that blows my mind about the idea of every Champions League game being an event on the scale of the Super Bowl is that there is only one Super Bowl every year,” he wrote. “The N.F.L. doesn’t try to hype every football game like the Super Bowl. Do the powers-that-be in soccer have no concept of the value of scarcity?”A couple of you, meanwhile, followed up on last week’s column about Daniel Jeandupeux and the seismic effect of the backpass rule by pointing out other rule changes that deserve just a little bit of credit for forging the sport as we see it today.Henry Schultz suggested that the gradual — rather than overnight — change in what sort of tackles were and were not permitted slowly allowed a more technical approach to the game to flourish. “What little I remember of the 1990 World Cup final was the German players mobbing Diego Maradona with everything short of closed fists,” he wrote.Seamus Malin, on the other hand, highlighted the impact of increasing the incentive for victory. “Around the same time” as the backpass change, he reminds us, “the amount of points teams got for winning went from two to three, making the difference between a draw and a win more significant.”England was ahead of the curve in this rare case: The Football League introduced three points for a win in 1981, at the instigation of another relatively unlikely soccer visionary, the former player, coach and commentator Jimmy Hill. Not until 1994 did the World Cup adopt the measure, and it was another year still before FIFA officially got on board.Perhaps, in time, we will come to see Anthony Jackson’s suggestion as no less influential. “As I watch the end of a thrilling Real Madrid game against Chelsea and grow tired of the incessant time-wasting by tired Real players, I’ve had an idea,” he wrote. “In the final 10 minutes of each half, the clock stops for all stoppages. No more injury time. Just players playing the full 10 minutes of ball in action.”Doing so would not necessarily stop time-wasting, sadly. There would still be value in interrupting the momentum of your opponent, in ensuring that the final few minutes lacked fluency and rhythm. Besides, as the backless rule proves: Predicting where change will lead is not always easy. Often, its effects are unexpected. More