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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

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      The Conference League Is the Best European Tournament You’re Not Watching

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      AMSTERDAM — Over the course of the last year, setting out from his home about an hour north of Rotterdam, Remco Ravenhorst has followed his team to the glittering shores of Lake Lucerne and the concrete sprawl of suburban Berlin.He has seen his beloved Feyenoord play in the sleepy Swedish town of Boras and the firecracker hostility of Belgrade, Serbia. He has visited Prague, twice. He traveled all the way to Gjilan, on the far side of Kosovo, even though he knew that pandemic-related regulations meant he would not be allowed to enter the stadium.It has, he admitted, been quite an expensive enterprise. He has leaned heavily on the understanding of his employer, though he did skip a trip to Israel after deeming the two-week quarantine on arrival a little too much to swing. His commitment has been commendable, particularly given that it has all been for a competition even he thought was a joke when it was created.When UEFA, soccer’s European governing body, announced the details of its third continental tournament last summer, Ravenhorst was somewhere between unimpressed and unmoved. The event, the Europa Conference League, seemed to offer a pale imitation of European soccer: all of the games but none of the history, meaning, glamour or appeal.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockRitzau Scanpix/Via ReutersThree teams in the last eight of the Conference League (Feyenoord, PSV and Marseille) have a European Cup in their trophy case.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor fans of Roma, above, and Leicester City, the Conference League offers a welcome detour to places they don’t often go.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via Shutterstock“I wasn’t convinced,” said Ravenhorst, a former president of the Feyenoord Supporters’ Group. “Together with the idea for the European Super League and the changes to the Champions League, it seemed like it would just increase the gap between the bigger leagues and the smaller ones. It felt like another step toward a Super League in disguise.”He was hardly alone in that sentiment. Though Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, had promised the competition would make European soccer “more inclusive than ever before,” the reception for it was lukewarm at best.Europe’s major leagues saw it as another burden, players’ organizations worried that it would increase the risk of burnout and fan groups grumbled about yet another expense for those who wished to follow their teams. Feyenoord’s first home game — against the Kosovo side Drita — seemed to bear out all of the criticisms. In bright sunshine, De Kuip, the club’s ordinarily crackling stadium in Rotterdam, was barely half full.Nine months later, though, Ravenhorst rather sheepishly acknowledges that his feelings have changed. He is not alone. Last week, when Feyenoord hosted Slavia Prague in the first leg of its Conference League quarterfinal — with the Czech side securing a 3-3 draw with a goal in the 95th minute — De Kuip was packed.“The perception has totally changed,” Ravenhorst said. “There is a real positive energy now. People know we have an actual chance, and that gives you the feeling that you could have these kinds of games more often. It does not just have to be the same four, five or six teams from the same four, five or six leagues.”Before the Conference League’s debut, that is precisely what European soccer had become. Since 2013, only three teams from outside Europe’s major television markets — England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany — have qualified for the quarterfinals of the Champions League: two Portuguese teams, Benfica and F.C. Porto, and, in 2019, Feyenoord’s great Dutch rival Ajax.The Europa League has, traditionally, been a little more diverse, but in recent years that, too, has been increasingly vulnerable to the massive financial advantage enjoyed by teams from Western Europe’s grand leagues. Since 2018, only one side from outside the Big Five leagues — the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk — has qualified for the semifinals.“There is a very small space for teams outside the top 20 clubs on the continent to reach the knockout rounds of European competitions now,” said Kyriakos Kyriakos, a board member at the Greek team PAOK, which hosts Olympique Marseille in the second leg of its quarterfinal on Thursday in Thessaloniki. “For Greek teams, and for all of the midlevel championships in Europe, the Conference League has provided that opportunity.”Leicester City beat PSV Eindhoven, 2-1, on Thursday in the Netherlands to reach its first European semifinal.Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty ImagesThe lineup for the inaugural quarterfinals illustrated that perfectly. England, France and Italy were represented — through Leicester City, Marseille and Roma — but so too were the Czech Republic, Norway and Greece. The Dutch had two contenders: Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven.In an era when executives from the most powerful teams and the wealthiest leagues compulsively promote the idea that the key to European soccer’s growth lies in ensuring as many meetings as possible between the continent’s superclubs, the Conference League offers a different paradigm.It has, in many ways, been something of a throwback to European soccer as it was in what might be thought of as the sport’s premodern era, before the advent of group stages and seeded draws and the major leagues’ being granted automatic entry for multiple teams in each competition.To the fans following the Conference League, the relative unfamiliarity of the teams involved has not diminished the tournament. It has enhanced it. Where the Champions League feels like a treadmill running between a handful of cities, year after year, its youngest sibling has an air of adventure. “It is quite expensive, but the destinations are part of the attraction,” Ravenhorst said. What else, he said, would draw him to Boras or Lucerne or Gjilan?The appeal, though, runs deeper than just the opportunity for travel. “The level is high, and the games are between opponents who are more or less equal,” Kyriakos said. “The fans have loved it. The games have all been sold out.”That has not just been the case in Greece. Even in England, generally cynical about any idea perceived to be newfangled, Leicester City sold every single ticket for the visit of PSV last week. PSV had already done the same for Thursday’s return match, though it lost it, 2-1, and was eliminated.Parity has not necessarily come at the expense of quality. As Ravenhorst pointed out, Feyenoord’s group — consisting of Slavia Prague, Union Berlin and Maccabi Haifa — “felt like it could be in the Europa League.”Most important, perhaps, the teams themselves have become invested in the tournament. Roma’s visit to Bodo/Glimt in the first leg of the quarterfinal was marred by an altercation in the tunnel between a member of José Mourinho’s coaching staff and Kjetil Knutsen, the Norwegian team’s manager. Bodo lodged an appeal with UEFA when both were punished for the fight.Kyriakos, meanwhile, was anticipating an “amazing night” at Toumba — PAOK’s ramshackle, boisterous stadium, ranked as one of the most intimidating in Europe — for the return leg with Marseille, even though the Greek team entered needing to win by two goals to ensure its place in the semifinals.PAOK and Olympique Marseille in Thessaloniki, where the pregame filled the sky with smoke. Dimitris Tosidis/EPA, via ShutterstockIt was, he said, a “chance to achieve something monumental in our club’s history.” The fervor of PAOK’s fans, though, could not quite carry the team through: Marseille emerged from Toumba with a 1-0 win.Nobody involved is worried that the Europa Conference League emerged, fully formed, from UEFA’s imagination just a year or so ago. Nobody sees the games as meaningless exhibitions; how could they be, when they have come to mean so much? Nobody is complaining about the lack of history or glamour, not anymore.“I am a little bit biased,” Ravenhorst said last week as he prepared for his second journey to Prague this season, “but of course I like the competition now.” His adventure, like Feyenoord’s, shows no sign of ending. He has already booked his plane tickets to Marseille for the semifinal. He still has to persuade his boss. More

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      In a Georgia Mill Town, Soccer Presents a New Opportunity

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      DALTON, Ga. — The old folks are mostly white and carry in boxes of pizza and portable stadium seats to prop up their backs. The young mothers are predominantly Hispanic, and some press sleeping babies against their chests. Students and fathers are here, too. Most of Whitfield County has packed into Bill Chappell Stadium for the event of the spring: El Clásico, the annual boys’ soccer showdown between the county rivals Dalton High School and Southeast Whitfield High School.The match is a celebration of high-level soccer: Each team reigns as a state champion in its class and is ranked in the top 10 nationally. But the game has a deeper significance: It shows how immigration and a white-and-black soccer ball have transformed this city in the Appalachian foothills of Georgia.To understand what this place has become, look to the soccer field, where for 80 minutes the two teams performed a frenetic ballet, with the ball rocketing from one seemingly Velcroed foot to another. The only person on either team who was not Latino was Dalton Coach Matt Cheaves, who came here 28 years ago to evangelize soccer and found disciples in first-generation immigrants who were raised on the game.An estimated 2,800 people came to see the Dalton Catamounts take on the Southeast Whitfield Raiders in March. Matt Cheaves, the coach of the Catamounts, has helped popularize soccer in a state where football is king. Tune in to “Monday Night Fútbol,” a high school recap program on WDNN, or study the mural on the side of the Oakwood Cafe, with its illustrated history of Dalton, which has long been known as “the carpet capital of the world.” (More than 80 percent of the tufted carpet manufactured in the United States is produced in and around Dalton.) Catherine Evans Whitener, commonly referred to as Dalton’s first lady of carpet, is depicted on the mural, but so is a soccer goalie.Or visit James Brown Park, where “the cages,” as the retrofitted tennis courts are known, are packed with 6-, 8- and 10-year-olds playing rapid-fire soccer matches to five. Winners stay on.Only then will you understand how this town of nearly 35,000 — now 53 percent Hispanic — became an unlikely center for America’s slow tilt toward soccer and why it now calls itself Soccer Town U.S.A.It may not be as chest-puffing as the title of “home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States,” which Dalton held in the 1970s. It is not as sexy as “the hometown of the killer blondes,” as a headline in The Washington Post proclaimed in 1990 when a favorite daughter, Marla Maples, was involved with a married New York developer named Donald J. Trump.Still, this new identity was hard-earned, not only on the soccer fields but also on the factory floors, town halls and neighborhoods whose demographics were upended.“We came here to work in the mills,” said Juan Azua, a field services consultant whose family was among the first half-dozen Hispanic families to come here in the 1970s. “My parents called their brothers and cousins and told them there was work here. It was like, boom, another wave slammed into town and kept coming.”A section of a mural painted by Mayelli Meza in Dalton.Audra Melton for The New York TimesImmigrant workers who were wanted in the mills in good times were not so welcome when jobs became scarcer. After the Great Recession, Georgia passed a law creating the Immigration Enforcement Review Board to investigate citizen complaints about municipalities not enforcing immigration laws. Sheriffs used roadblocks to snare people without papers and handed them over to the federal government for deportation.America Gruner, president of the Coalition of Latino Leaders in Dalton, said hundreds of undocumented families left town from 2009 to 2012. Thirty percent of the Hispanic population remains unauthorized, she said.“It was a sort of ghost town because people were afraid of being stopped, detained and deported,” Gruner said. “It was hardest on the children who were frightened that their parents would be sent away and they’d have to stay here.”Georgia has since abandoned the Immigration Enforcement Review Board, but Gruner said anti-immigrant sentiments persist in Whitfield County, where Trump won 70 percent of the vote in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.Still, there are victories: Dalton recently broke ground on a soccer complex featuring two FIFA-regulation-size turf fields.“I couldn’t imagine a soccer field being built a couple of years ago,” Gruner said. “We felt the anti-immigrant feeling in sports and our culture. It’s changing little by little. It’s not perfect. We have a long way to go. But there is more understanding.”Talent, Speed and a Work EthicNearly 2,800 people are here on a warm Thursday night to see the Dalton High School Catamounts take on the Southeast Whitfield High School Raiders. The most famous Clásico, of course, is any match between F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid, but the rivalry here is also intense and pits cousins against cousins and club team players against one another.On the sideline before the game, Cheaves is a soothing presence to his players. His ball cap is pulled down low, his encouragements uttered softly with a Southern lilt. He fell in love with soccer as a 5-year-old and played in high school and at the college club level.“I thought it was a blast the first time I kicked the ball,” Cheaves said. “I was good at it and thought I had something to contribute.”He arrived here in the summer of 1994 with a degree in health and physical education from the University of West Georgia. He had hopes of making a difference as a soccer coach, making him an outlier in a state where football is king.The Catamounts in the locker room before the match.“I grew up with old coaches who’d tell you that you were playing a Communist sport,” Cheaves said.Within days of his arrival, he discovered Dalton Soccer League, known informally as the Mexican league. On a field near the high school, Cheaves watched two teams of middle school students exchange nifty passes as if the ball were on a rope.“There was talent, plenty of speed and a work ethic,” he said. “I didn’t have to develop fundamental skill, but just keep them sharp.”The challenge was getting them to come out for the high school team.Cheaves’s first team had six Hispanic players. One was Roy Alvarran, 43, the son of migrant workers who picked oranges and peaches for 50 cents a bag before they found steady, salaried work in Dalton. Alvarran loved soccer but felt pressure to follow what he called “the Mexican route.” High school athletics and college ambitions were not on that route, he said.“You finish school, get married, have a kid at 18 or 19 and go to work in the carpet mill,” Alvarran said. “The Mexican route — so that’s what I did.”Alvarran, Azua and another friend, Todd Hudgins, are the unofficial historians of soccer in Whitfield County. They competed against each other in high school — Azua played for the Raiders, Hudgins for Northwest Whitfield High School. Together, they host “Monday Night Fútbol.”From left, Todd Hudgins, Juan Azua and Roy Alvarran, who played soccer in high school, now host a soccer show on a local station. Leaning over the chain link fence on the sideline, the friends were still competing as they reminisced.“The last three times we played Dalton it ended in ties,” said Azua, whose cousin is the head coach of Southeast Whitfield’s team.“A tie is like a loss to us,” said Alvarran, the current president of Dalton Soccer League.Dalton High School’s history is rich. The Catamounts made the playoffs in Cheaves and Alvarran’s first season. The next year, a few more Hispanic players showed up for tryouts, and a few more each year after that. In 2003, Dalton won the school’s first state soccer championship with an all-Hispanic team.The victories kept piling up: In the Cheaves era, Dalton is 436-59-19.So did state titles: The Catamounts were 64-0 over three undefeated seasons that ended with titles, in 2013, 2014 and 2015. In 2019, they were undefeated in 23 games, earning their fifth title and ending the season ranked No. 1 nationally. Covid-19 ended the 2020 season, but Dalton came back last year to add a sixth championship.Along the way, Cheaves passed up opportunities to go on to bigger jobs. “I didn’t want to bounce around,” he said. “I wanted to make a difference in life. I like seeing guys around town and what they have done.”The success of Dalton’s soccer program has transformed expectations beyond the field.The rivalry between the two teams pits cousins against cousins and club team teammates against club team teammates.In the last four years, Dalton has sent more than a dozen players to college on scholarships, including one who went to Wake Forest.Alvarran’s son, Jacob, a senior on the Catamounts, hopes to play at Dalton State. Roy Alvarran never went to college, but he left the mills and now sells insurance.“I want him to keep on going to school, not to jump into the carpet mill,” Alvarran said. “You can’t hate on it because they’re making $15-plus an hour. It saved my family, but there’s other ways to make money.”The stability offered by a regular paycheck at companies like Shaw and Mohawk Industries retains a powerful hold on the newer Daltonians. But now many are focused on a different path.“Every kid on this field could play in college at some level,” Azua said. “They all have the opportunity. The question is will they take that offer? And will their parents let them?”Uniting the Community“Our Community,” the mural on the side of the Oakwood Cafe in downtown Dalton, is the work of Mayelli Meza, whose family emigrated from Mexico. It was unveiled in early March after the artist spent four months on a ladder with brush in hand. Meza’s commission was to depict Dalton’s past, present and future.The muralist Mayelli Meza, her husband, Manny, and son Andree after the game.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMeza’s mural on the Oakwood Cafe depicts the town’s past, present and future.Audra Melton for The New York TimesIncluded are the first lady of carpet; carpet rolls; a kayaker, for the town’s love of the outdoors; and a train, for the impact the railroads had on extending Georgia’s multibillion-dollar textile industry.Two prominent elements are more personal to Meza. To evoke the diversity and female empowerment taking hold in her town, she included teenage girls — white, Black, Hispanic, Indian and Asian.Then there is the teenage goalkeeper.“That’s my son, Isaac,” Meza said, watching nervously from the fence as the final minutes of this Clásico ticked away.With his diving saves and last-minute deflections, Isaac Meza stayed a step ahead of the Raiders for 78 minutes, and Dalton High School was ahead, 3-1. But Southeast Whitfield conceded nothing, and with 1 minute 14 seconds left, the Raiders’ Nathan Villanueva got behind Dalton’s defense. Meza lunged forward, but the ball sailed past him.His mother grimaced and the Southeast Whitfield grandstand erupted — it was 3-2, and the Raiders were still alive.With 18 seconds left, the Raiders’ Angel Garcia stepped up for a free kick. He arced a shot over the wall of Catamounts standing sentinel in front of the goal. The ball hooked left. Meza leaped. His fingers brushed the ball, but it landed softly in the corner of the net.In soccer parlance, Garcia had delivered a perfect upper 90.Mexican American high school students in Dalton are increasingly seeking opportunities beyond the flooring mills.Mayelli Meza headed off to hug her muse. For the fourth consecutive time, El Clásico had ended in a tie.The next morning, Alvarran managed to remain in good spirits. It was not the triumphant ending he had hoped for. Instead, it was a perfect finish for the denizens of Soccer Town U.S.A.“I’ll have to hear that we tied for an entire year,” he said. “This game is what we look forward to every season, and the kids from both teams never fail us. Both teams are very good, but when they play each other, they bring out the best in each other. I hope you got to see how this rivalry is so passionately played, but also how it unites our community.” More

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      Manchester City Fights Off Atlético Madrid in Champions League

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      City, a team shaped by style, showed it was also skilled in the dark arts as it eliminated Atlético Madrid and moved a step closer to its first Champions League title.MADRID — Many things happened at the Wanda Metropolitano in the final 10 or 20 minutes, the ones that seemed to stretch on and on, long past the final whistle, until they almost constituted another self-contained bonus game, a separate third installment of a scheduled two-part drama.There was some hair-pulling. There was quite a lot of time-wasting. There was a full-scale brawl, dozens and dozens of players and team staff members all streaming down to a corner of the field to make their opinions known. There was a flurry of yellow cards, and a bright, angry red. There was Diego Simeone, conducting his orchestra, urging the stadium to bay and to howl and to snarl until the last breath.What there was not, the only thing missing, was much actual soccer. There were flashes, of course, Atlético Madrid charging forward, desperately hunting the goal that would break Manchester City’s resistance and take the game into extra time, extend their stay in the Champions League for another 30 minutes or, just maybe, another few weeks. For the most part, though, those endless last few minutes were a study in the art of not playing soccer.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesA foul by Felipe on Phil Foden sparked a sideline brawl.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressFelipe got a red card. Foden, and City, got a place in the semifinals.Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is, of course, very much part of Atlético Madrid’s identity. Simeone has spent a decade crafting a team in his own image, one that plays, just as he did, with a “knife between its teeth.”Atlético should, by rights, be a heroic underdog among Europe’s elite, a countercultural alternative to the hegemony of pressing and possession. It does not, after all, have the resources of its overweening neighbor, Real Madrid, let alone the state-backed clout of Manchester City or Paris St.-Germain, and yet it refuses to wilt, to succumb to financial inevitability.It is a potent testament to Simeone’s work, then, and to the great effectiveness of his inculcation, that his team can so easily and so frequently play the role of the Champions League’s obvious villain: a side of cynics, provocateurs and cutthroats, designed and built to draw the beauty and the soul from the game, happy to subvert any norm available in pursuit of victory, and in defiance of convention, its opponents and the game’s sense of moral rectitude.And yet, in all the fire and fury, it was not only Atlético that realized that a place in the semifinals hung not on talent and technique but on grit and grizzle, on a willingness to do whatever it takes.There is no team more associated with beauty than Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. He has come, over the years, to stand as an embodiment of soccer’s higher values, its ultimate arbiter of taste, its aesthete in chief. Guardiola means sophistication and style, and he has imbued all of that into the team he has built.Those were not the virtues, though, that allowed his team to escape Madrid unscathed, its place in a Champions League semifinal with Real Madrid secured, its chase for a domestic and European treble intact. City did not beat Atlético by overcoming its dark arts. It beat Atlético by borrowing them.Even City’s Pep Guardiola didn’t shy from the fight on Wednesday.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesSome of them, at least. Just like its host, Guardiola’s team, for once, did not seem especially interested in playing soccer, either. It played, instead, for time. Every throw-in seemed to take an age, and every free kick and every goal kick, too. No injury was shaken off; even the most minor bump and bruise warranted an extended period of treatment. Balls that had run out of play were knocked just a little farther down the line, out of the reach of Atlético’s players. No slight was too minor not to be met with indignation.That should not be read as a criticism of Manchester City; far from it. Often, it is so easy to be dazzled by the brilliance of Guardiola’s side that its character, its courage, is overlooked. His record in the Premier League, in particular, in recent years has been built as much on defensive parsimony as attacking threat. City does not wilt and it does not doubt; it keeps going, remorselessly, absolute in its conviction that it will be proved right in the end.As the Metropolitano — this sleek, modern stadium built by the success of Simeone — somehow morphed into the Vicente Calderón, Atlético’s crumbling, intimidating, nakedly hostile former home, what carried City through was not its magic but its mettle. That is as much part of Guardiola’s recipe as anything else.And nor, for that matter, should it be read as a criticism of Atlético. “What matters more than anything in soccer is winning,” Simeone said after the game, not long after the players had confronted each other in the tunnel once more. “It does not matter how you do it.”Even Guardiola conceded that Atlético had come close to winning, that it might have scored, might have won, if it had only possessed just a little more luck. “They had the actions to score,” he said. “We had to live this situation. We had to suffer. We were in big, big trouble.” On another night, in another world, he seemed to say, everything could have been very different.That Simeone’s team had been able to run City so close was not despite its brinkmanship, but because of it. As Atlético did what it does, in those final few minutes, as the sense of outrage outside the steep concrete banks of the Metropolitano started to build, so too did the noise inside it. The crowd responded to its team’s snapping and growling, ratcheting up the pressure just a little more, shifting things imperceptibly in the host’s favor. Atlético is not the way it is for fun. It is the way it is because it works.“They know how to do this better than any other team in the world,” Guardiola said. Nobody, anywhere, does not play soccer better than Atlético Madrid.Guardiola sounded impressed, in a way. He knows there are times when that is what matters, that is what counts. He knows that his team will, at times, need to be a little like Atlético Madrid if it is to return here and celebrate again in a few weeks’ time, if it is to climb the only peak it is yet to scale, to claim the Champions League. More

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      Real Madrid Edges Chelsea to Reach Champions League Semifinals

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      A curving assist by Luka Modric and an extra-time header by Karim Benzema carried Real Madrid back to the Champions League semifinals.MADRID — The noise rose and swelled with every second that ticked, changing timbre and tone as it did so. It started with whistles, desperate and urgent, only to turn into something closer to a roar, formless and elemental, filled with angst and anticipation, as if the sound itself could ward off any more suffering.By the time the final whistle blew, it was so loud that it seemed to be bubbling up from the ground or rumbling down from the sky. Somehow, though, that proved to be the prelude: The release was still to come, as Real Madrid’s and Chelsea’s players collapsed to the turf, the victors on the day defeated and the beaten triumphant over two legs, and the Bernabeu crackled and shook.This is not the first time a Champions League game has ended like this, of course: The spectacular comeback and the breathtaking twist now rank as this competition’s calling card, a feature so regular that it is remarkable, in a way, that every time it happens it somehow retains its capacity to surprise.It is not even like it is a rarity here. The sight of Real Madrid’s players, spread-eagle on the field in a state of pure, blissful exhaustion, having somehow turned certain defeat into a triumph actually happens with alarming frequency. It happened just a month ago or so, against Paris St.-Germain, for a start.This is just what the Champions League does: produce evenings in which Villarreal, a team bobbing just above mid-table in Spain, can knock out Bayern Munich and still find itself overshadowed. It is just what Real Madrid does: flirts with disappointment, toys with disaster, and then flicks a switch and emerges victorious.Even by those standards, though, Real Madrid’s draining, stirring, thrilling defeat of Chelsea — on aggregate (5-4), if not on the evening itself (a 3-2 loss) — managed to be more draining, more stirring, more thrilling than most.Chelsea’s three goals had briefly given it hope it could reverse its first-leg deficit.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThere was not just one comeback, after all, but two, stitched together in the same marathon game: Chelsea overcame the two-goal lead Real Madrid had established in London last week, seemingly booking its place in the semifinals in the process, and then Real Madrid, beaten and cowed, rose from the ashes to snatch it away.Everything turned on a single pass. For 80 minutes, Real’s fans had done nothing but suffer. They had arrived at the Bernabeu in high spirits, drifting up the Paseo de la Castellana filled with absolute confidence that Carlo Ancelotti’s team could get the job done. It is Real Madrid in the Champions League, after all. That is just how these things work.It lasted all of 15 minutes, pierced in a flash by Mason Mount’s opening goal. The Bernabeu became unsettled, uneasy. Real Madrid seemed to freeze, as if arguably the most experienced, most grizzled team in Europe was not quite sure what the protocol was in this situation. Chelsea smelled blood.Just after halftime, Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger scored — a simple goal, a header from a corner, as if all of this is quite easy — and the tie was level. An oppressive, fretful silence descended, the sound of 61,000 people waking up and remembering that, oh yes, this Real Madrid team is quite old now, isn’t it, and it’s been through a lot, and it’s in need of a refresh.There was a brief flicker of hope when Marcos Alonso’s goal was ruled out for the slightest of handballs, but it proved illusory. A few minutes later, Timo Werner skated and skidded around the edge of the six-yard box and bundled the ball over the line. The jeers rained down, then, just for a moment. A few people headed to the exits. A few people always head to the exits. At this stage, everyone really should know better.Rodrygo’s goal, off a curling pass from Modric, set the stage for yet more drama in extra time.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThat was the mood, then, when Luka Modric got the ball, just inside Chelsea’s half, with 10 minutes to play. There was, to the naked and untrained eye, no option ahead of him; just Rodrygo, the young Brazilian wing, racing off on the other side of the field, dutifully tracked by a defender. Modric had no choice but to turn back, to change the angle of attack, to build again.Or, it turned out, he could sweep a ball with the outside of his right foot just beyond the Chelsea defense and straight onto Rodrygo’s boot, inside the area, timed perfectly for him to steer a shot past Edouard Mendy without breaking stride. The pass did not exist. Modric found it anyway, and in doing so, Real Madrid found its belief.That goal took the game to extra time, giving the home team, the impending Spanish champion, a reprieve. Real Madrid does not waste those.Karim Benzema, scorer of all three of his team’s goals in the first leg, headed Real Madrid into the lead on aggregate with 96 minutes gone. By that stage, all sense of order had fractured, all thought of planning or reason or strategy cast to the winds.Karim Benzema scored four times in two games against Chelsea.Juan Medina/ReutersChelsea threw all of its players forward. Real Madrid’s substitute left back, Marcelo, ended up playing as a forward, for reasons that even he did not really understand. There were frights: a shot from Jorginho, a header from Kai Havertz. The whole evening, the whole campaign, seemed to hang by a thread.All the while, the noise was building, yearning at first and then impatient and finally righteous and demanding. It became a place and a crowd crying to be put out of their misery. Nobody heard the whistle. Nobody could hear the whistle.They knew it was over only when they saw the players on the turf, all the breath drawn from their bodies, their legs suddenly buckling, a conclusion at once impossible and inevitable. They should be used to this by now, really. This is how it always ends, at Real Madrid, after all. It just does not always end like this. More

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      Exiled by Russian Bombs, Shakhtar Donetsk Embraces Its Journey

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      It wasn’t the sounds of the bombs, though he did hear those, that brought back the memories for Darijo Srna. It was the air raid sirens.When they blared in Kyiv shortly after 6 a.m. on Feb. 24, Srna froze in terror. His mind flooded with thoughts and recollections of his childhood, of his first experience with war, when the former Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s.Since then, soccer has taken Srna, 39, far from his home in Croatia to a distinguished career, the bulk of it with the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, where he is currently the director of football, and to games in the Champions League and at two World Cups. But in an instant, the sounds of sirens brought it all back.“I started to panic,” he said. “You have some trauma for all your life, for sure — deep in yourself. That is something you try to forget. But you can never forget these types of things.”Shakhtar Donetsk had run from bombs before. In 2014, the last time Russian forces invaded Ukraine, missiles landed on Shakhtar’s stadium. Within days, the club packed and headed west, beginning a nomadic existence: to a new home in Lviv, in the far west of the country, and then east again, to Kharkiv, before settling in the capital, Kyiv.Darijo Srna, who spent 15 years at Shakhtar as a player, is now a top official at the club.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesNow Shakhtar is on the move again. Last week, after receiving special permission to take military-age men out of the country, its players and coaches landed in Istanbul. With war leading to the suspension of the second half of the Ukrainian season, Shakhtar will soon become a touring team, playing exhibition games — the first was Saturday in Greece — to bring attention to the plight of Ukrainians and to raise money for the war effort.Shakhtar Donetsk had never stopped being a team. Now, it hopes, it will be a symbol, too.“I don’t know which kind of team in the history of football can be compared to us,” Srna said. “No other team has ever felt or lived what we have in these past eight years.”A Team in ExileShakhtar players training in Istanbul last week. They needed government permission to leave Ukraine, where an emergency law requires military age men to stay.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesShakhtar officials had been convinced there would not be a war, even as Russia massed forces and equipment on Ukraine’s border; even as the players began to fret; even as worried family members called them daily at a winter training camp in Turkey with news, warnings, pleas.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.U.S. Returns: Five years after a calamitous night cost the U.S. a World Cup bid, a new generation claimed a berth in the 2022 tournament.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it always expected for hosting the World Cup.So in February, Sergei Palkin, Shakhtar’s chief executive, called a meeting in an effort to assuage the growing concerns.“I said that everything would be OK because the president of Ukraine, everybody, was saying that no problems, war will not come,” Palkin said.The team flew back to Kyiv. But Palkin was wrong. Three days later, Russian troops streamed across the border, and rather than prepare to play the second half of its league season, the team’s management suddenly found itself needing to make altogether different calculations.While many of Shakhtar’s Ukrainian players relocated to Lviv, which hosted the team when it was first forced to leave Donetsk, a group of more than 50 players and staff members took refuge in a hotel owned by the team owner Rinat Akhmetov. From there, timely help and frantic phone calls helped forge a plan to get the club’s foreign players and their families to safety.Srna was a key conduit in those discussions, which also involved players’ unions, Ukrainian and neighboring soccer federations and the sport’s governing body in Europe, UEFA. He said his own experiences — he was also a member of the team the last time it fled to safety, in 2014 — served as a guide.“Unfortunately,” he said ruefully, “this is my third war.”Only after the players were on their way home to South America and elsewhere did Srna embark on a journey of his own: what turned out to be a 37-hour drive to Croatia, where much of his family still lives, to reassure them he was safe. Two family members on his father’s side were killed after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, so his weren’t the only nerves that needed calming.Sergei Palkin had tried to reassure his team that there would be no war. He was wrong.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesAfter touching base, though, Srna quickly set about tackling a new task: how to move the dozens of children based in Shakhtar’s youth academy outside Kyiv out of harm’s way. The effort was professional but also intensely personal: Many of the children were only 12 and 13, about the age Srna had been when he first experienced war.Hajduk Split, Srna’s first professional club, said it would be willing to accommodate the boys if they could get to the city. Dinamo Zagreb, another Croatian team, said it would provide buses if Shakhtar could get the players to Ukraine’s border with Hungary. The players and the rest of Shakhtar’s traveling party spent two days at Dinamo’s stadium, Srna said, where they were fed and evaluated by doctors before moving on to Split.Today, because of the effort, more than 80 children, some of their mothers and a few aging coaches and medical staff members are safely in Croatia, far from the worst horrors of war, training and even playing games again.“I just put myself in their situation,” Srna said of his involvement. “I didn’t want these children to stay and listen all day to bombing and bullets.“What I remember when I was a kid, I remember who gave me chocolate, who gave me a ball, who gave me water. And that was what was most important.”Waving the FlagShakhtar players wore Ukrainian flags onto the field against Olympiakos on Saturday.Yorgos Karahalis/Associated PressLike every other corner of the Ukrainian population, Shakhtar has been touched by the war in more serious ways, too. A coach from the team’s academy died after his hometown was overrun by Russian forces in the first weeks of the war. Two staff members from the team’s merchandising department have taken up arms.Shakhtar’s training site in Kyiv also bears the scars of conflict. Chunks of its training fields have been gouged by shelling, and artillery fire ripped open sheds where the team stored training equipment.The conflict has also brought renewed attention to figures like Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest man. Like a handful of oligarchs in Russia, he grew immensely rich — sometimes amid questions of dubious means — in the wild and unpredictable aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Akhmetov has made a point to be seen as contributing millions of dollars of his fortune to the war effort, and he said in an interview that he remained committed to his country and team. “All our efforts are focused on the only thing that matters — to help Ukraine win this war,” he said.The efforts of Akhmetov and his soccer team are now entwined with those of the Ukrainian government — relationships that have already helped Shakhtar overcome some unique hurdles. Before it could depart for Turkey, for example, the club needed special government exemptions from an emergency law barring military-age men from leaving the country during the war. Those approvals finally arrived on Wednesday afternoon. Now that it is based in Istanbul, its tour will serve several functions.The games, starting with one against Olympiakos in Athens on Saturday, are viewed in part as a diplomatic tool, a chance to personalize Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis, raise money for the country’s military and provide humanitarian aid for its citizens.But the matches will also play an important sporting role. Several Shakhtar Donetsk players are also members of Ukraine’s national team, and the games will help to ensure their fitness ahead of a key qualification playoff in June for the 2022 World Cup. (Shakhtar’s rival, Dynamo Kyiv, is playing a series of exhibition games for the same reasons; both clubs have said they will call up players from other Ukrainian teams to supplement their rosters, in part so Ukraine has the best chance of advancing to the World Cup in the June playoff.)Shakhtar’s games have multiple aims: to raise awareness about the country’s plight and to keep its national team sharp ahead of a World Cup qualifying playoff in June. Yorgos Karahalis/Associated PressThe Shakhtar team that will take part in the coming tour — matches against Polish and Turkish clubs have been arranged, and games against A-list opponents could follow — has been shorn of much of its international talent: Most of those players exercised an option allowing them to temporarily sign with teams outside Ukraine after the outbreak of war. Most will never return. But some, like the Brazilian defender Marlon, have said they will be back, and others are mulling their options.“We are not angry, we are all human beings,” Srna said. “It’s important they are safe and with their family.”The new season in Ukraine is, for now, scheduled to begin in July. With so much damage to the country and war still raging, the timetable appears to be little more than a place holder. When soccer returns, as it eventually will, nothing will be the same.It is not even clear if Donetsk, Shakhtar’s home, will remain a part of Ukraine, a prospect that could make the team’s temporary exile a permanent one. Whatever the case, whatever the conclusion, team officials said Shakhtar would never turn its back on its roots.“They can put any flag they like in Donetsk,” Srna said. “But Shakhtar will always be from Donetsk; it’s something no one and nothing can ever change.”Wherever Shakhtar ends up calling home, whoever it plays in the interim, one idea remains impossible to even contemplate: games against Russian opponents. Palkin said he was confident European soccer officials would ensure that Ukrainian teams would not cross paths with opponents from Russia in future competitions. But he had a simple answer if Shakhtar was ever faced with such a matchup. “We wouldn’t play,” he said.Louiza Vradi/Reuters More

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      Manchester City Ties Liverpool, Defending Its Turf and Its Lead

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      In a Premier League season of the finest margins, four goals add to the drama but don’t change the title math for Pep Guardiola and Manchester City.MANCHESTER, England — Midway through the second half, as the game on which a season hung started to build in a nerve-shredding, pulse-straining crescendo, Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold found himself waiting to take a throw-in within a couple of feet of Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager.Ordinarily, in these circumstances, the conventions of rivalry dictate that the two adversaries must studiously ignore each other’s presence. The manager offers instruction to someone standing in the opposite direction. The player averts his gaze, lest acknowledgment be mistaken for treachery.Guardiola, though, has little truck with convention. With Sunday’s game paused for an injury, he sidled over to Alexander-Arnold, draped his arm over his shoulder and initiated what can only be described as a chat. He was, as he always is, somewhere between animated and agitated, but there was a broad grin on his face, genuine affection in his gestures. It was unmistakable: In the game with everything on the line, Guardiola was enjoying himself.City’s Pep Guardiola and Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold defusing the tension, if only for a moment.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesThat should not, really, be surprising. The meeting of indisputably the best and second-best teams in England — order yet to be determined — and most likely the best and second-best teams on the planet, had produced an abundance of things to enjoy. The goals, of course: four of them evenly shared in a 2-2 tie, each of them brilliantly conceived and surgically executed. And the chances, too, the majority of them falling to City, all spun out of golden thread.All of that, though, was simply the product. The greater satisfaction, perhaps, was in the process, the compelling ebb and flow of two finely balanced forces, a high-speed, high-caliber call and response. City pressed Liverpool, breaking its rhythm, triggering errors. Liverpool withstood the onslaught, drawing the sting and striking back. City twice took the lead, through Kevin De Bruyne and Gabriel Jesus; Liverpool twice picked its way back, through Diogo Jota and Sadio Mané.That is not, though, the sort of thing that is supposed to appeal to a coach, particularly with quite so much on the line. This game had been pinpointed, months ago, as the one that would decide the Premier League title. As the season rolled on and rivals fell away, its significance had only grown.Manchester City is chasing a domestic and European treble. Liverpool can still, in theory, complete a clean sweep, winning all four of the trophies available to Jürgen Klopp and his team. This game had the air, from the outside, of the moment on which all of that would stand or fall. It was only after this that all that had gone before would have any meaning, any consequence.With all of that at stake, though, there was Guardiola, smiling away, laughing and joking with Alexander-Arnold as if he did not have a care in the world. Perhaps it was some sort of subtle psychological warfare. Perhaps he was trying to gain some sort of edge, to distract and discombobulate his opponent.Or perhaps Guardiola sincerely relished the experience, the chance to see if he could kill off the challenge — for now, at least — of Klopp, the coach he has described as the greatest rival of his career, and Liverpool, the team he has called, in the most complimentary terms imaginable, a “pain” in a particularly sensitive area.Most of the time, after all, Guardiola finds himself forced to try to unpluck the massed ranks of a defense, to overcome an opponent with little ambition and precious little hope. It is not every day that he finds a team willing to stand up to him, or capable of doing it.Or perhaps he knew that the day that had been declared decisive would not decide anything. Half an hour or so later, after all, the final whistle had blown on the 2-2 draw and everything remained as it was. Both teams stood where they had before. Manchester City, which now has seven games to play in the Premier League, has one point more than Liverpool, just as it had at the start of the day.It might have been better, of course: After 30 games and 94 minutes of the Premier League season, City’s Riyad Mahrez had found himself on the edge of the Liverpool penalty area, the ball at his feet and Alisson, the visiting goalkeeper, stranded. Mahrez seemed almost spoiled for choice. He attempted a deft lob, conjuring an artful parabola, but his calculations were off, just barely. The ball looped down, over the bar rather than under it, and the chance to win here, to stretch clear of Liverpool in the table, was gone.Who knows? In time, City may come to regret that miss. This is a Premier League season of the finest margins, and whichever of these teams wins the title, there will be precious little between them.But, for now, stasis was enough. Stasis, from Manchester City’s point of view, was acceptable. A sense of vindication, if not quite triumph, swept around the Etihad Stadium as the players stood on the turf, heaving breath back into their lungs. John Stones, the City defender, pumped a fist in the air.There was a feeling of one down, at least one more to go. These teams will meet again next weekend, in the semifinals of the F.A. Cup, and could yet find each other in Paris at the end of next month, with the Champions League trophy at stake. Guardiola, it is fair to say, probably would not enjoy that one quite so much.In the Premier League, though, Manchester City still has the advantage. For now, anyway. It is a slender one, but it is an advantage. Its fate is in its hands. Liverpool, by contrast, must rely on someone else to find a way to stop Guardiola’s juggernaut at some point between now and the end of May.City’s lead is a single point, and it has been earned over the course of nine long months. An entire season has gone into that single point. At the end, though, a single point is enough. When things are so finely poised, when there is so much to enjoy, a single point can be a chasm. More