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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

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      For Liverpool and Manchester City, a Showdown With Consequences

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      Manchester City and Liverpool meet Sunday in the first of a series of collisions that could decide as many as three trophies. Neither team can be sure of what comes after that.MANCHESTER, England — Pep Guardiola lay on his bed in a Madrid hotel room, staring at the ceiling, contemplating his next move. He had already endured two sapping games, half a dozen choleric news conferences, more than a week of highly charged, thinly veiled animosity. He was exhausted and exasperated, and he was still only halfway through.In the space of 18 days in the spring of 2011, Guardiola’s Barcelona encountered José Mourinho’s Real Madrid four times across three competitions. There was a clásico in the Spanish league. There was a clásico in the final of the Copa del Rey. There was a pair of clásicos, home and away, in the semifinals of the Champions League.It was not the games, though, that drove Guardiola to the sanctuary of his room. The games, if anything, were a release, a blessed respite from the endless rancor, the pervasive friction of Mourinho’s total psychological war. Guardiola knew he was being tricked into losing his cool, being sucked into a fight he could neither avoid nor win.In retrospect, those 18 days — captured by the Italian journalist Paolo Condo in his book “The Duellists,” — were the culmination of the defining rivalry of soccer in the early years of the 21st century, a clash of cultures that reverberated well beyond the long and vituperative shared history of Real Madrid and Barcelona.A series of four clásicos in 18 days in 2011, games that featured Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and layers of drama, were a seminal moment for soccer of that era. Photo by Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty ImagesIt was not just the clásico. It was not just Lionel Messi against Cristiano Ronaldo. It was not just Guardiola against Mourinho, the finest managers in the world. It was two competing visions, two contrasting styles, two opposing forces: the creator against the cynic, the light against the dark.In the immediate aftermath, it was Guardiola who had the air of the victor. He did lose his cool, as Mourinho had hoped, and Barcelona did lose the Copa del Rey final. But Barcelona won both the league and the Champions League that year. Hindsight, though, would suggest all of that came at a cost for both men.A year later, Mourinho finally claimed a Spanish title. It would prove to be the high-water mark of his time in Spain and the end of his decade of greatness (though he would claim a couple of championships elsewhere). Something changed in Mourinho after Real Madrid. His fire never burned as brightly.Guardiola, too, bore the scars. He left Barcelona in 2012, drained and weary. He could not, he said, go on. He needed a break. Mourinho was not solely responsible for that fatigue, but it is hard to believe that the intensity of the rivalry was not a significant factor in it. It took Guardiola a year’s sabbatical in New York for him to refuel.Now, more than a decade later, he could be forgiven for hearing distinct echoes of 2011. Over the next seven days, Guardiola’s latest masterpiece, the Manchester City team he has guided to three Premier League titles in four years, will face its greatest — and only — domestic challenger, Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, twice, across two competitions.Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, professional admirers but not friends in the truest sense. Jason Cairnduff/ReutersFirst, on Sunday, the teams will meet in the Premier League at the Etihad, in a game that will likely decide England’s next champion. Next Saturday, they will face off again, this time at Wembley in the semifinals of the F.A. Cup. Both matches may well prove a prelude to a third, altogether more epochal meeting: Liverpool and City are favorites to reach the Champions League final on May 28 in Paris.The parallel with those 18 days in Spain, of course, is not perfect. Manchester City and Liverpool have fostered a fierce rivalry in recent years, but it lacks the depth and the context of the clásico. Its tendrils do not stretch back decades, nor is it bound up with questions of politics and history and, particularly, national identity.Likewise, Guardiola and Klopp do not have the same combustible chemistry that Guardiola and Mourinho did. It would be a stretch to say they are friends, but, almost a decade after they first ran into each other in Germany, they remain cordial. In 2020, Guardiola called Klopp in the small hours of the morning to congratulate him on winning the Premier League. Klopp describes Guardiola as the best coach in the world at every opportunity.Many of the other ingredients, though, are present. Just as with Real Madrid and Barcelona, everything rides on games between these two clubs. One of these teams will win the Premier League. One of them will go into the F.A. Cup final as the heavy favorite. Only Bayern Munich might be considered a peer in the Champions League.Both coaches have done what they can to quash the idea, but both are perceived as chasing multiples of glory: City, a domestic and European treble, last achieved by an English team in 1999; and Liverpool, an unprecedented and, in reality, improbable sweep of all four trophies available to them. Their meetings are, in that light, the whole ballgame.Liverpool and Manchester City fans at a Champions League in 2018. The teams could still meet in the competition this year.Anthony Devlin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat their aims are so lofty illustrates that Liverpool and City can reasonably be regarded as the best two teams on the planet — Bayern alone may have the right to quibble with that assessment — just as Real Madrid and Barcelona could be in 2011. They are again led by the two finest coaches of their generation, the two minds who have done more than anyone else to define and distill what elite soccer will look like in the 2020s, the two scions of two great schools of thought. The rivalry of City and Liverpool does not have roots in the past. But it does encapsulate the present.The absence of overt institutional hostility between the clubs, meanwhile, should not be mistaken for affection. The schism that runs between Manchester City and Liverpool can feel superficial, almost confected, a friction that is performed out of instinct rather than something heartfelt. But it is not.There have been a series of flashpoints, ordinarily deemed serious transgressions by one side and dismissed as petty by the other: City’s complaint at the improper accessing of its recruitment software by Liverpool’s staff in 2013, an offense for which Liverpool paid £1 million ($1.3 million) in compensation; City’s team bus being pelted with bottles on arrival at Anfield in 2018; Liverpool’s annoyance at a 2019 video of City’s players adopting a terrace chant referring to its rival as “victims of it all,” an insult that is often associated with the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, which caused the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans.All of these events, though, are rooted in a deep-seated clash of competing corporate philosophies. Liverpool’s hierarchy believes that Manchester City’s primacy has been achieved through a form of financial doping — as highlighted most recently by another cache of leaked documents published in Der Spiegel. Manchester City’s executives, in turn, see Liverpool as the prime example of a longstanding cartel that feels threatened by the emergence of genuine competition.The same can be said of the coaches. Klopp and Guardiola’s mutual admiration should not make one forget the intensity of competition between them.Guardiola and Klopp rare disguise their emotions on the touch line.David Klein/ReutersIn a scene in “All Or Nothing,” the documentary that followed City’s victorious Premier League campaign in 2018, Guardiola and his coaching staff discuss the threat posed by Liverpool’s famed front three. That, in itself, is not especially remarkable. What stands out is that they are doing it in the changing room at Goodison Park, a few minutes before a game against Everton.Guardiola has never made much secret of his focus on Liverpool. That same year, he told a seminar at the city’s university that he did not read many books these days, because after a few minutes of trying his mind would wander to “Jürgen Klopp and Liverpool.”Earlier this year, with City apparently sitting on a comfortable lead at the top of the Premier League, he was asked if anyone could catch his team. Of course, he replied: Liverpool. “They are always there,” he said. “They’re a pain.” On Friday, he described Klopp as the “greatest rival” of his career.“When I retire and I’m playing golf, I will look back on Liverpool as the hardest opponent I faced, without doubt,” Guardiola said.For the last four years, the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester City, between Klopp and Guardiola, has defined English soccer. The next seven days — and perhaps the next six weeks — may decide how its story is told in years to come. As Guardiola knows from personal experience, though, that level of competition leaves its mark. It is entirely possible that, when it has all come to an end, neither coach, and neither team, will quite be the same again. More

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      Soccer’s Focus Needs to Be Product, Not Packaging

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      A simple rule change paved the way for the modern soccer we watch today. An obsession with Super Bowl-style changes won’t move it forward.Everything started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. More precisely, he was bored by that year’s men’s World Cup. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the swelling aria of Nessun Dorma: None of it could quite dislodge his sensation that it had been, by and large, a deeply “ugly” tournament.That thought inspired Jeandupeux to explore why that might have been. As he described it to the estimable Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used an early example of soccer analytics software, a platform called Top Score, to examine what form the game took, particularly in matchups in which one team took an early lead.The answer, as he found it, was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the winning team’s goalkeeper had “10 times as many touches” as all of the other players combined. The best way to win in soccer, Jeandupeux had discovered, was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.He sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, a functionary in FIFA’s technical department, the part of soccer’s world governing body that looks after the actual soccer. His warning was stark. “Such possession is bound to kill the game,” he wrote, unless there was rectifying action. Jeandupeux had an idea of what that might be.His timing, it turned out, was immaculate. FIFA had been worrying about an epidemic of time-wasting for about a decade, but had always found the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the British-dominated body responsible for the game’s rules — reluctant to change. There was one person at the top of the organization, though, determined to break the stalemate. Rather inconveniently, that person was Sepp Blatter.A few months after that World Cup, Blatter had created what he called Task Force 2000, which is precisely the sort of name that Sepp Blatter might come up with for something. Led by Michel Platini — again, in hindsight, a little problematically — it was given the job of identifying ways to make the game more appealing, more dynamic, more dramatic.Jeandupeux’s letter, passed to Platini and his fellow Task Force members, crystallized many of their thoughts. Now they not only had empirical proof that soccer had grown slow, cautious and dull, but a recommendation as to how to change it. Jeandupeux had suggested that the most egregious form of time-wasting — one that had been a soccer cornerstone for decades — be outlawed: Goalkeepers, he said, should be banned from rolling the ball to a teammate, getting it back, and picking it up again, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.The Task Force decided that proposal did not go far enough. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers should no longer be able to use their hands to receive a pass from any teammate. Within a few months of Jeandupeux’s submission to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the backpass rule.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEverything in modern soccer flows from that single change. Without that letter, without that Task Force — and, yes, sadly, without Blatter — there is no tiki-taka, there is no gegenpressing, there is no Arsène Wenger or Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There is no game as we currently see it.It is easy for fans of a certain vintage to scoff at soccer’s tendency to treat 1992 as some sort of Year Zero, to bristle at how easily everything that happened before the dawn of the Premier League and the Champions League — an entire century — is dismissed as an irrelevant prehistory.But 1992 was not just a rebranding exercise. It also brought a substantive shift in the nature of soccer itself. That summer, two years after Jeandupeux sat down and wrote his letter, the backpass rule came into force. It is a legitimate before and after: The soccer that would follow was not just fundamentally different from what went before, it was better.It is important to remember that as, once again, the sport finds itself discussing change. UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has already rubber-stamped a new format for the Champions League. This week, it confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified on what has been called, a little euphemistically, “historical merit.”Even that, though, did not go far enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as chairman of the European Clubs’ Association — rather than president of Paris St.-Germain or chairman of BeIn Sports or chairman of Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation — Al-Khelaifi has other changes on his mind.They range from the rather vague — amounting essentially to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFTs” — to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes it is worth exploring the idea of an expanded European Super Cup, turning a semi-serious showpiece into a tournament in its own right, one that may be played outside Europe. He would consider a Final Four-style tournament for the Champions League. He would, reading between the lines, contemplate changing kickoff times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.Despite the very obvious self-interest of their source, despite the fact that not all of these ideas are his, and despite the circumstance — almost exactly a year since the sudden launch and swift death of the European Super League project — these ideas should not be rejected out of hand.They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, but nor are they entirely devoid of merit. Soccer would do well to remember that, at first, it was assumed that the backpass law would simply encourage goalkeepers to launch the ball at every given opportunity; nobody imagined that its ultimate consequence would be Éderson.Expanding the Super Cup is, on the face of it, a reasonable idea. It is possible that the benefits of staging the semifinals and final of the Champions League in a single location — the sense of occasion, the drama of a one-and-done knockout — would outweigh the undoubted complications in security, logistics and the loss of revenue and, crucially, atmosphere generated by semifinals on a club’s home turf.Albert Gea/ReutersEven the concept of teams’ being given a pass into the Champions League despite not qualifying domestically is not quite as absurd as has been presented: Though such a proposal would, doubtlessly, increase the inequality that remains the game’s greatest challenge, there is at least some logic in the idea that how you perform in the tournament itself should be rewarded.There is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, then, simply because they represent change. Change, as Jeandupeux would testify, can sometimes bring improvements, and in ways that are not immediately apparent. The problem, in fact, is the opposite; these ideas do not represent change enough.It was striking, for example, that Al-Khelaifi should cite the Super Bowl as an example of the sort of things soccer should be doing. Why, he asked, was the final of the Champions League not more of an event? Why was it not more of a show? Why was there not a litany of the world’s biggest musical acts lining up to play at the world’s biggest annual sporting fixture?These are all questions that soccer executives ask with alarming frequency. (The answer to that last one, for what it’s worth, is that the world’s biggest musical acts know full well that they would be jeered if they played the Champions League final, because all of the people in the stadium are there to see a soccer match, not a concert.)Patricia De Melo Moreira/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNobody, anywhere, is quite so obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run Europe’s soccer teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, or the reality that soccer is more popular by an order of magnitude worldwide than the N.F.L., and that it has achieved all of that despite not having a halftime show. It gives the impression that soccer’s leaders have startlingly little confidence in the sport in which they have invested.That is not the case, of course; the reasoning is a little more subtle. The game’s power brokers propose these things — fireworks, dance troupes, rebranded competitions, format changes and all the rest of it — because, while the changes that would have the most effect are far simpler, they are very much not in their interests.The way to make every game “an event,” as Al-Khelaifi put it, is not to invite Maroon 5. It is to increase the competitive balance between the two competing teams so that the result does not feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stages are not “compelling” is not because there is no Jean-Michel Jarre-style light show before kickoff; it is because it is a group stage, and so there is no genuine sense of jeopardy.Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of soccer — of sports — understands that: Memories only need to stretch as far back as last week, and the playoffs for the World Cup, to realize that drama is not generated by the staging of a game or even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.Al-Khelaifi, of course, is not going to propose any change that radical, any change that meaningful. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit P.S.G. or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues, even after the Super League debacle, to dominate UEFA’s thinking.Instead, he and his peers will continue to believe — and to insist — that soccer’s route to growth lies in improving the packaging, rather than the product. Like Jeandupeux, all those years ago, they very clearly sense in some way that things are just getting a little boring. The difference is that they are holding on to the ball, and they will do all they can to not give it back.Here’s What Else We Did This WeekKevin De Bruyne, center, and Manchester City broke through, eventually, Atlético Madrid’s defense.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night, it was very difficult to have any sympathy with the idea that the Champions League needs to change at all, other than perhaps by introducing some sort of rule that Karim Benzema’s presence should be compulsory in all matches.The previous evening, spent watching Manchester City try to break Atlético Madrid’s fearsome resistance, was not quite as entertaining. That is not because Atlético should not rely on grit and grizzle more than flash and flair, but because a cornerstone of any great defensive performance is some sort of attacking threat.And you may not have noticed, because FIFA has not been keen to publicize it, but it turns out we are not getting a biennial World Cup after all. Even the expanded Club World Cup seems to have faded from view somewhat. This happens a lot to Gianni Infantino’s big ideas, when you think about it.CorrespondenceA Qatar World Cup will turn off some viewers.Noushad Thekkayil/EPA, via ShutterstockIn good news for Alan Goldhammer, but bad news for both FIFA and the many and varied sports-washers of the world, we can now say with some certainty that he is far from alone.The audience for this newsletter is a self-selecting demographic, of course — one defined, let’s be clear, by its impeccable taste — and so cannot be treated as a broad sample. But it would appear that there are quite a few of you out there, like Alan, who do not intend to bless the Qatar World Cup with your attention.“I refuse to lend my eyes to an event which is designed by a nasty regime to bolster its image,” wrote Nathan Wajsman. “I also skipped the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing. It may not mean anything to the organizers, but it means something to me.Sjaak Blaauw has come to the same conclusion. “With 6,500 people having lost their lives, and many workers not having been paid what was their due, I cannot condone this,” he wrote.Some are a little more conflicted. “I am getting closer to Alan Goldhammer’s sentiment, but it is taking more time and thought for me,” wrote Rashmi Khare. “I feel more and more like I am being manipulated. If I participate, my eyeballs and my dollars will be used to justify the corruption that led to this tournament. If I do a full blackout, it’s just one less eyeball/dollar from billions.”And others still offered a different perspective. “Good on Mr. Goldhammer,” wrote Nick Adams, before acknowledging that rather than not watch, he would “put my mind to thinking how to make Qatar safe for all visitors, how I would voice a protest, and how I would do something to change the corrupt decision-making process” that led to the tournament’s being held there in the first place.There were many more submissions, all of them just as sincerely held and articulately expressed. Thank you to all of you who emailed, and please keep them coming. The correspondence on that subject has been rivaled only by the continued debate about deep dish “pizza,” including an assessment from Bart McKay that I enjoyed enormously. “Deep dish pizza,” he wrote, “is just casserole with better P.R.” More