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      in Tennis

      What Emma Raducanu Means for a More Complex Britain

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      Emma Raducanu, 18, galvanized the nation with her triumph in the U.S. Open, drawing congratulations from royalty and inspiring pride in her hometown outside London.LONDON — At long last, Britain got the outpouring of national jubilation it has craved this summer, not from a men’s soccer team that narrowly missed sports immortality but from a young woman with a radiant smile, Emma Raducanu, who stormed from obscurity to win the U.S. Open tennis title on Saturday.The straight-set victory of Ms. Raducanu, 18, over Leylah Fernandez, a 19-year-old Canadian, drew an eruption of cheers from crowds that gathered to watch the match at pubs in her hometown, Bromley, and at the nearby tennis club that set her on an improbable path to Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City.“The atmosphere is buzzing,” said Dave Cooke, manager of The Parklangley Club, where Ms. Raducanu trained for several years, starting when she was 6. The day after her victory, members brimmed with pride, recounting how she returned after competing at Wimbledon for a practice session.“Just to watch her train was phenomenal,” said a member, Julie Slatter, 54. “You just know she’s going to take it all the way.”Queen Elizabeth lost no time in congratulating the new champion for “a remarkable achievement at such a young age,” which she said was a “testament to your hard work and dedication.” Looking slightly dazzled Ms. Raducanu said, “I’m maybe going to frame that letter or something.”Dave Cooke, the club manager at Parklangley. He said Ms. Raducanu ‘‘strived to meet her dreams.’’Andrew Testa for The New York TimesHer victory made history on multiple counts: She became the first player to win a Grand Slam title from the qualifying rounds and the first Briton to win a Grand Slam singles title since Virginia Wade captured Wimbledon in 1977. Ms. Wade cheered on Ms. Raducanu from the gallery, as did Billie Jean King on the winner’s podium — two champions crowning a new one, and heralding, perhaps, a glittering new era for British tennis.For long-suffering British sports fans, Ms. Raducanu’s victory was also a kind of redemption after the heartbreaking defeat of England’s soccer team in the finals of European championships in July. England snatched defeat from victory in that game when it missed three penalty kicks in the deciding shootout against Italy.But on Saturday, Ms. Raducanu did not let a cut on her leg, from a fall late in the match, stop her from dispatching Ms. Fernandez, 6-4, 6-3, closing things out with an ace before falling to the court in joyous celebration. The timeout she needed to get her leg bandaged was one of the few anxious moments for Ms. Raducanu during a tournament in which she did not drop a single set.Like the national soccer team, Ms. Raducanu embodies the exuberant diversity of British society. Her victory is both a tacit repudiation of the anti-immigration fervor that fueled the Brexit vote in 2016 and a reminder that, whatever its politics, the polyglot Britain of today is a more complicated and interesting place.The daughter of a Romanian father and a Chinese mother, Ms. Raducanu was born in Toronto in 2002. Her family moved to England when she was 2, settling in Bromley, an outer borough of London known for leafy parks and good schools. A serious student, Ms. Raducanu has taken time off from the professional tour to study for exams, crediting her mother for keeping her focused on academics.A shopping street on Sunday in Bromley, Ms. Raducanu’s hometown.Andrew Testa for The New York Times“She’s got where she is because she’s a nice person and put in some hard work and strived to meet her dreams,” Mr. Cooke said.Though he described Ms. Raducanu as part of a generation of younger athletes who have stayed grounded and mentally strong, he said the Grand Slam title would impose new pressures on her.“You achieve something great, you raise your own bar,” he said. “We need to strip back those pressures from her.”Ms. Raducanu first came to national attention in June when she reached the fourth round at Wimbledon before withdrawing, telling coaches she was having trouble breathing.That setback led some commentators, including John McEnroe, to express doubts about her mental fitness, especially at a time when another female star, Naomi Osaka, has spoken openly about her struggles with the pressures of the game. Under the lights in Flushing Meadows, however, Ms. Raducanu silenced her critics. She looked fit, poised, and relentless.Her performance inspired people from all corners of British society. At her old club, girls talked about running into Ms. Raducanu in the school hallways or at local restaurants. Some said they hoped to follow in her footsteps.“We want to go into tennis,” said Yuti Kumar, 14, who attends the same school as Ms. Raducanu, Newstead Wood School, where the graduates include the actress Gemma Chan and Dina Asher-Smith, an Olympic sprinter.The actor Stephen Fry waxed philosophical, saying on Twitter, “Yes, it may be ‘only’ sport, but in that ‘only’ there can be found so much of human joy, despair, glory, disappointment, wonder and hope. A brief flicker of light in a dark world.”The Parklangley Club on Sunday.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesThe Spice Girls kept it simpler. “@EmmaRaducanu that’s Girl Power right there!!” the group tweeted.Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Prince Charles, Prince William and the Manchester United soccer team all sent their congratulations, as did the right-wing Brexit leader, Nigel Farage, who tweeted “a global megastar is born.”David Lammy, a Labour Party member of Parliament who is Black, noted that Mr. Farage once said he would not be comfortable living next to a Romanian (Mr. Farage later expressed regret for the remark). “You have no right to piggyback on her incredible success,” Mr. Lammy posted on Twitter.The dust-up echoed one earlier in the summer when Mr. Lammy faulted Conservative Party members for jumping on the bandwagon of the English soccer team, once it began winning, after having earlier criticized its players for kneeling before games to protest racial and social injustice.In Bromley on Sunday, though, the focus was on a local hero. Many believed her achievement would fuel a surge of interest in tennis playing — and other ambitions — among young people who have struggled to find motivation during the pandemic.“She’s a schoolgirl and she’s from Bromley,” said Jennifer Taylor, 40, sitting outside a pub. “I’m sure if she comes to Bromley, they’ll be a huge welcome for her.”As she prepared to return home, Ms. Raducanu alluded to Britain’s eventful sports summer, in which millions of fans, herself included, took to chanting the theme of the England team, “Football’s coming home.”Posting pictures of herself waving a Union Jack and holding the silver cup of the Open champion, she said, “We are taking her HOMEEE.”“The atmosphere is buzzing,” said the manager of the Parklangley Club, where Ms. Raducanu trained.Andrew Testa for The New York Times More

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      in Soccer

      A World Cup Every Two Years? Why?

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      Soccer is in love with the Big Idea. But a focus on fundamentally changing the game’s calendar leaves no room for a necessary debate about fixing it.This is soccer’s age of the Big Idea. There is an incessant, unrelenting flow of Big Ideas, ones of such scale and scope that they have to be capitalized, from all corners of the game: from individuals and groups, from clubs and from leagues, from the back of cigarette packets and from all manner of crumpled napkins.The Video Assistant Referee system was a Big Idea. Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams was a Big Idea. Project Big Picture, the plan to redraw how the Premier League worked, was a Big Idea. The Super League was the Biggest Idea of them all — perhaps, in hindsight, it was, in fact, too Big an Idea — an Idea so Big that it could generate, in the brief idealism of its backlash, more Big Ideas still, as the death of a star sends matter hurtling all across the galaxy.And now, thanks to Arsène Wenger and a curiously obedient coterie of former players, we have another. This latest Big Idea is, at heart, a very simple thought, rooted in the noted Alan Partridge dictum about detective TV shows: People like them, so let’s make more of them. If the World Cup can grow in size, why not have it grow in time, too? Instead of playing it every four years, why not just play it biennially?Arsène Wenger, the man sent out to sell soccer’s latest Big Idea.Valeriano Di Domenico/Pool Via ReutersThe reaction, well, everyone could have guessed the reaction. As fans, our relationship with soccer is an intensely personal one. It is bound up in affection and mythology and nostalgia, and though it is one of the great collective experiences, every member of the crowd perceives it entirely independently.One might believe it to be a tactical endeavor; another might feel it is rooted in industry, heart and desire. It might bond me to a place, but it might tie you to your family. Above all, soccer links us all back to the most personal memory of all, our childhood, to a pure and unadulterated love, an unquestioning and unquestioned pleasure. Our devotion is to once again capturing the feeling we knew then.It is no wonder, then, that fans are coded to resist change. No matter what form it takes — V.A.R. or penalties being taken in the wrong order or the expansion of the World Cup — change is necessarily external. It is proof of someone else, someone other, tampering with the way our game works, taking it further away from its truest and highest form, the one that it just so happened to take when we were young.Wenger’s plan, then, was not met with rapturous applause. It has been condemned, pretty widely, not only by fans but by all but two of the groups that we now routinely describe as soccer’s stakeholders. Clubs, leagues, players: They are all against it. They all fear it congests the calendar yet further, that it strips the World Cup of some, or much, of its prestige. Its value, they say, lies in its rarity.FIFA’s Gianni Infantino, who has yet to hear a billion-dollar idea he wouldn’t at least entertain.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe two exceptions, of course, are the phalanx of so-called legends — John Terry and Michael Owen and Peter Schmeichel and the rest — consulted by Wenger, in his capacity as FIFA’s chief of global football development, ahead of, say, fan groups or the Bundesliga or UEFA; and the vast majority of FIFA’s 211 member nations, many of whom stand to benefit in some way from the expansion and are, not coincidentally, in favor of it.This is just the first of quite a long list of problems with Wenger’s idea: Why should a decision that impacts the game at the club level as much as internationally, one that has ramifications for anyone who plays or watches professional soccer, be decided by such a narrow interest group?What right — and apologies, here, if this comes across as Eurocentric — does the national federation of Oman or Uzbekistan or Canada, for that matter, have to vote on a proposal that would radically alter the way that European and South American club soccer, the great engines of the game, work? Particularly when they are not mere observers, judiciously selecting the best option for the game they love, but active beneficiaries of the plan?That is just the start of it, though. The other issues are many and varied. Wenger’s system would see a World Cup staged every two years; in the intervening summers, the six major confederations would hold their continental championships.Where, precisely, does this leave the women’s game? Would the Women’s World Cup have to compete with the men’s European Championship in odd years? What happens to the expanded Club World Cup that Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, has spent years conceiving and crafting and flogging?If the World Cup can retain its prestige despite doubling in frequency, can the same be said of the continental tournaments? Is the best way to grow African or Asian soccer to make those continents compete for eyeballs and interest with the European Championship? The answer, to both, is no. There have been four iterations of the Copa América in the last seven years, and each one has meant just a little less than the last; this summer, running concurrently with the Euros, the Copa was largely an afterthought outside South America.Aleksander Ceferin and UEFA want no part of a biennial World Cup.Catherine Ivill/Pool Via ReutersThat Wenger and FIFA have not yet been able to provide a convincing riposte to those issues — beyond pointing out that more countries would be able to qualify for the World Cup, which is the sort of thing that may well prove to be untrue in practice, no matter how much sense it makes in theory — is a shame, because his proposal is not without value. The Big Idea may be riddled with flaws, but the small ideas that support it are worth considering.Wenger wants to reduce player fatigue and soccer’s carbon imprint, as well as impose order on soccer’s archaic calendar, by streamlining the qualification process: Rather than a series of brief international windows, he would prefer either one, or two, longer ones per season. (When they would fall is not decided, but safe to say that taking a month off in October, just after Europe’s season has started, should really be an opening gambit at best). That is a Good Idea, one that merits capitalizing.So, too, the thought of a secondary global competition — a sort of Europa League World Cup — to run alongside the main tournament, offering smaller nations a viable target, is not without merit. Soccer fans are naturally conservative, but it would be self-defeating to spurn any notion of change whatsoever.Sadly, though, the potential benefits most likely will be lost, either because the whole plan is vetoed — UEFA, its nose tweaked by the sense that FIFA is simply bulldozing its vision through, has already vowed to fight it — or because they represent small victories in a resounding, overall defeat.There is a sadness in that, because there are plenty of ways that soccer’s format might be changed for the better, and this is the chance to do it. There is a reason that all of these Big Ideas keep emerging: In 2024, the game’s calendar effectively resets and, until it does, every option is effectively in play. This is an opportunity for change, the progressive and positive sort, if only all of the interested parties could resist the temptation to claim territory and investigate nurturing fertile ground instead.It should not be beyond the wit of soccer, for example, to keep Wenger’s ideas for a condensed qualification process and (more or less) contemporaneous continental tournaments, but abandon a biennial World Cup, with all its drawbacks.Christian Pulisic, among many others, surely supports fewer qualifying games, not more, after he was injured in one in Honduras on Wednesday.Moises Castillo/Associated PressInstead, everything would remain on a four-year cycle; one of the intervening summers would be given over to an expanded Club World Cup (again: a Big Idea that makes sense) and another would be left strictly fallow, to allow all men’s players a chance to rest and offer the Women’s World Cup an uninterrupted window on the global stage. (Women’s continental tournaments could run in the same years as the men’s, though not simultaneously).Why stop there? Qualification is long and arduous and, in South America, where almost everyone will qualify, will largely be pointless after 2022. Instead, guarantee the teams that make the last 16 of the Qatar World Cup a place in the group stage in 2026, setting a pattern that will reduce the number of teams for whom qualification is more of a chore than a chance. (This newsletter has previously advocated for this idea to be introduced for the Euros, too.) That increases the number of meaningful games, and allows elite players more rest.While we are at it: The Nations League concept has been successful, but should be abandoned; the Champions League should revert to its current 32-team format, rather than the new model brought in under the now rather passé threats of Europe’s old elite; strict rules should be introduced on how many players over age 23 any club can have on loan, as well as a system allowing players not regularly representing their clubs the right to cancel their contracts and enter a draft; the viability of cross-border leagues should be explored to reduce economic imbalance; solidarity payments from the Champions League should be drastically increased; a Club World Cup for women’s soccer should be instituted immediately.Soccer has an inbuilt, reflexive aversion to change, but that the sport is thinking about what shape it might take in the future should not be discouraged. Perhaps, in fact, that would be the biggest shame of all: not just if the sport’s age of the Big Idea resulted in the sort of change that leads to regret, in super leagues and saturation, but if it led to no change at all.Talk? No Thanks. Let’s Argue Instead.Brazil played several World Cup qualifiers shorthanded. Now the missing stars may have to sit out the weekend, too.Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt would be nice, of course, if soccer’s various competing interests — its leagues and its clubs, its national federations and its tournament organizers and its players’ unions — could all get around a table and thrash out a future that worked for everyone, rather than hurriedly scrabbling to grab whatever little piece of land they can.To know that such a prospect is a distant one, sadly, all you have to do is look at the simmering dispute between the Brazilian national federation and several Premier League clubs that may well strip a handful of England’s biggest teams of some of their most important players this weekend.Just before the international break, the teams of the Premier League decreed that they would not release players for South America’s World Cup qualifiers — though a couple, Aston Villa and Tottenham, later backtracked, to absolutely no consequence whatsoever — because Britain’s quarantine rules would mean any players who traveled would not be able to play for two weeks after their return. They did so with the backing of the game’s various authorities.At the end of the international break, Brazil demanded that FIFA invoke a rule preventing players who were denied the chance to play for their country from playing for their clubs for five days, meaning dozens must sit out this weekend’s Premier League schedule (and, in one case, a Champions League game on Tuesday). They did so with the support of a whole different set of authorities.It is not worth lingering on who is in the right here (it’s the clubs, in case you are wondering, at least partly because Brazil has not asked that the ban be applied to Richarlison, the Everton striker, seemingly for no better reason than that Brazil quite likes Everton), or even if the ban will hold up (at the time of writing, talks were ongoing, as they say).Far more significant is just how broken the lines of communication between the club game and its international counterpart appear to be. Would it have been too much to ask for the clubs to open a dialogue with Brazil before announcing their intentions? Did Brazil need to take such a drastic step? Is it really sensible to be throwing oil-soaked rags at the group of people weighing up the benefits of lighting a match?That is the environment soccer has fostered. That is the culture and the climate in which anyone and everyone is trying to make change. It is broken, at some fundamental level, because all sides not only prioritize their own interests, but seem somehow unaware that theirs are not the only interests in play. Until that ends, no change that comes will be positive. It is not immediately clear how it can be.The Rise of SpainReal Madrid eliminated Manchester City from the Champions League on Wednesday.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThere were, in Manchester City’s defense, mitigating circumstances. Half of its team was missing through injury; its preparation for the season has been disrupted, more than many, if not quite most, by the loss of players to the Olympics; it was, put simply, a draw sufficiently tough to be regarded as unfortunate.Still, City’s elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Real Madrid on Wednesday should not be dismissed as a one-off event. The context of Manchester City’s defeat is important, but so, too, is the context of Real Madrid’s victory: It is yet another piece in the mounting body of evidence that the emerging power in the women’s game is Spain.The United States may be the world champion. Canada may be the Olympic champion. England’s Women’s Super League may be the strongest domestic competition on the planet. France’s Lyon and Paris St.-Germain may remain prized scalps, era-defining supersquads.But it is a Spanish club, Barcelona, that finally dethroned Lyon as European champion last season. It is a Spanish player, Alexia Putellas, who was anointed player of the year by UEFA last month. And it is in Spain where Real Madrid — latecomers to the women’s game, having only officially fielded a team last year — has now joined its neighbor Atlético Madrid as a genuine counterweight to Barcelona.How Real fares in its debut season in the Champions League remains to be seen, though knocking out City, a team assembled at no little cost and with considerable pedigree on this stage, augurs well. But the presence of those three teams at the summit of the women’s game in Spain suggests that its rise is only just beginning, that the sport’s axis may be shifting not only east, to Europe, but south, to Madrid and Barcelona, too.Barcelona’s Alexia Putellas lifted the Champions League trophy in May. David Lidstrom/Getty ImagesCorrespondenceNo shortage of responses to last week’s column on whether clubs loaning out players on an industrial scale was morally troublesome. “How much do all these loan moves benefit and improve the player?” asked Ben Myers, rhetorically. “Answer: not at all. This is unfortunate because a player’s career becomes subservient to the financial needs of a club, and players watch their careers dry up.”Mendel Litzmann, though, begs to differ. “There are successful players from this academy loan system, pioneered by [Chelsea’s] Marina Granovskaia: Romelu Lukaku, Mohammed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne, Jamal Musiala. There is an irony that Lukaku was brought back to Chelsea, after being part of the loan system.”I’d probably fall somewhere in the middle on this. I don’t think there is an issue with clubs loaning players out for experience, as Chelsea did with Lukaku (before selling him, just as all the others were sent out and then sold on, for profit, raising the question as to whether Chelsea needed them in the first place, or whether they might have been better left elsewhere). Sometimes, a loan spell is exactly what a player needs. The problem arises when the players are loaned out, again and again, when it is abundantly clear the club has no intention of ever recalling them.Is it possible for a club to employ too many players?Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJay Radecki, meanwhile, looked at it from the players’ perspective. “The market for athletes in soccer is full, on the margin, of players who could make it. Accordingly, players seek their maximum compensation at any free moment but also, maybe more important, the security of a longer-term contract. This desire for certainty in both wages and employment are the counterpoints that allow clubs to control the loan market.” This, perhaps, is the main benefit for the players locked in the loan cycle: They are protected a little, for a while, from the vicissitudes of the game.And Connor Murphy volunteered the point of view of the clubs. “Gambling on prospects, like Marlos Moreno, is a risky business. Nobody wants to be left holding the bag after an expensive player flops. You want variance to work in your favor, not against you, so you sign a lot of players. You send them out and bide your time. Some players are stars, some are flops, and some are just OK. You keep the stars, eat the losses on the flops, and farm out or sell the ‘just OK.’” This logic is absolutely right, of course. Whether that logic is right in a whole other sense is the big question. More

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      USMNT Beats Honduras in a Crucial World Cup Qualifier

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      Illnesses, injuries and a suspension marred the start of World Cup qualifying. A trip to Honduras offered a chance to right the ship.SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — For even the most assured players and talented teams, a maiden journey into the heightened drama of the World Cup qualifying tournament in North and Central America can feel like splash of cold water to the face.Here, world rankings have a way of losing their meaning. Club pedigrees and players’ salaries can quickly be forgotten. It is a rude awakening, a rite of passage. And the United States men’s soccer team is experiencing it yet again.Beginning last week, the Americans embarked on a three-game series of qualifying matches over seven days that they hoped would establish a baseline state of confidence for the long path to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Much of the last week had, instead, left them looking frazzled and unsure.After draws in their first two games — on the road against El Salvador and at home against Canada — the Americans’ game late Wednesday night against Honduras at the spartan Estadio Olímpico Metropolitano represented a final chance to salvage the week. A loss would have sent the team home in the beginnings of a tailspin. A draw would have prolonged the slow boil of anxiety.Instead, they strode off 4-1 winners, a result — delivered by four second-half goals after an abysmal, disjointed first half that felt like the nadir of an awful week — that will provide a kernel of positivity to cultivate in the weeks to come.The most valuable thing the players and their coaches will bring home, then, could be the lessons learned: about the perils of trusting too much in past results; about the precarity of the challenge that remains ahead; and about the fragility of a team’s best-laid plans and ambitions.“It’s a different animal than we’re used to,” Coach Gregg Berhalter said after the game, referring to the qualifying tournament. “So I think that this whole window was great for this group. We really needed that in terms of the eye-opening of what this experience actually is.”Brayan Moya’s diving header in the first half gave Honduras a 1-0 lead on Wednesday night.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe fear was that they were tiptoeing onto the same path an earlier version of the team traveled three years ago, when the United States fell one point short of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, ending a streak of seven straight appearances at the world’s most-watched sporting event. On some level, it seemed irrational: Even with the disappointing results from the first two games, the United States is heavily favored to qualify, perhaps more so after a win that will buoy their mood, and their hopes. But the bad memories of the last cycle remain raw in many people’s minds.“I can see it being, you know, just memories of the past, memories of the last qualifying round coming back,” Berhalter, who was hired after the 2018 World Cup, said of those concerns on Tuesday night. “And people say, ‘Oh, we’re in the same situation.’ I can understand that completely. What I’d say is this is a different group, and we’re focused on winning games, and we’re focused on getting points.”Such talk had not been convincing before Wednesday’s resounding win.Few would go as far as to call the Americans hubristic: The notion of this regional qualifying tournament as a gnarly obstacle course, with challenging factors unique in world soccer, has long been ingrained in the psyche of the team and its fans, and the players over the past week have spoken of the process with all due respect. They know, too, that it will continue with three more qualifiers in October, and two more a month after that.But the lofty standards imposed on the squad, the high expectation and calls for perfection, are in many ways of the teams’ own making.Berhalter said earlier this week that the tournament’s 14 games should be regarded by his players as “14 finals” — effectively labeling the entire slate of games as must-win contests.Christian Pulisic found little space to work, then left with an injury.Gustavo Amador/EPA, via ShutterstockBefore the first game last week, midfielder Tyler Adams laid out the team’s ambitious to-do list: “We’re looking for a nine-point week, bottom line,” said Adams, 22.And Weston McKennie said last week the United States needed to assert its position as the best team in the confederation. “The only way to do that is to dominate it,” he said two days before taking the field for the first World Cup qualifier of his career. “And to dominate, you’ve got to win your games.”These things, for a variety of reasons, did not come true against El Salvador and Canada. And for a half against Honduras, it did not seem as if they ever would. But then the halftime substitute Antonee Robinson pulled his team even three minutes into the second half, and the U.S. started to turn the tide. Ricardo Pepi, an 18-year-old striker from Texas, gave the Americans the lead in the 75th minute, and then set up midfielder Brenden Aaronson, another substitute, for an insurance goal in the 86th.Sebastian Lletget’s finish off a rebound three minutes into injury time closed the scoring, and, at last, restored the team’s smiles.Wins have a way of quieting, if not totally erasing, questions and distractions swirling around a group.On Sunday afternoon, for instance, McKennie was suspended for violating team rules and had to miss the team’s final two games of the week. McKennie said on Instagram before the game against Canada that he had broken Covid protocols.Berhalter said the disciplinary move was for the team’s long-term health. In the short term, it hurt. The suspension deprived the team of one of its best players, and McKennie’s teammates spent the ensuing days awkwardly answering questions about his conduct. World Cup qualifying runs through March, and Berhalter suggested that McKennie, who plays for the Italian powerhouse Juventus, would be back in the picture soon enough.“It’s an open-door policy,” he said. “There will very rarely be a situation where a player would never be allowed back into national team camp. That’s not how we operate.”Yet McKennie’s lapse was only the most high profile of the personnel headaches that have befallen the team since even before it gathered late last month.Timothy Weah, one of the team’s best attackers, never joined the group after hurting his leg while training with his club team in France.Christian Pulisic, the team’s captain and top player, missed the first game while trying to regain his fitness after testing positive for the coronavirus, and then limped out of Wednesday’s win with an ankle injury.Goalkeeper Zach Steffen was ruled out for the first game, and then the rest, first by back spasms, then by a positive coronavirus test.Gio Reyna injured his right hamstring in the first game against El Salvador and was sent back to his German club without taking the field again.Defender Sergiño Dest sprained his right ankle in the game on Sunday and departed, too.These issues made for a particularly complicated situation during a cramped window of games in which Berhalter had made no secret of his plans to rotate his lineup. But they also were just a taste of the ways things can spiral in the unforgiving landscape of World Cup qualifying.“It happens,” said Aaronson, 20, of his team’s simmering turmoil. “You have to get over things. I feel like as a team we just need to get over things.”Pepi scored the Americans’ second goal, giving them the lead, and Brenden Aaronson, right, added the third.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe next games will arrive fast: Jamaica, Panama and Costa Rica next month, then Mexico and a trip to Jamaica about four weeks later.Before then, the team has some growing up to do. Only six of the 26 players initially called into the squad had any experience in World Cup qualifying. Thirteen of them were 23 years old or younger at the start of training camp. Nine of the starters against El Salvador were appearing in their first World Cup qualifier. (That 10 members of the team are playing for clubs in the European Champions League this year reiterates the level of talent being unfulfilled thus far.)One problem that needed solving as they took the field Wednesday night was finding some scoring: Heading into the Honduras game, the United States had not produced more than one goal in any of its previous six games.They left the field after putting four past Honduras, letting them breathe a collective sigh of relief.“It’s a massive experience that we needed, just to show that with all the adversity we’ve gone through, we’re ready to come back from it,” Robinson said. “Obviously there’s been disappointing times on this trip. But in the end, we’ve ended it on a real high, and now we can attack October with everything we’ve got.” More

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      ‘Football Is Like Food’: Afghan Female Soccer Players Find a Home in Italy

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      Members of a team from Herat left behind the lives they had built in Afghanistan in hopes that they can build a future where they can play, and thrive.AVEZZANO, Italy — Two days after Taliban fighters seized Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, the Italian journalist Stefano Liberti received a message via Facebook: “Hi sir, we are in trouble. Can you help us?”The message last month came from Susan, 21, the former captain of Bastan, a women’s soccer team that had once been the subject of a documentary by Mr. Liberti and his colleague Mario Poeta.“Football is like food to me,” Susan would say later, and the fear that she might never play again under Taliban rule, “made me feel as though I was dead.” Like others interviewed in this article, only her first name is used to protect her identity.Thirteen days after she made contact with Mr. Liberti, Susan arrived in Italy along with two of her teammates, their coach and several family members. They touched down at Rome’s main airport after a flight made possible by the two journalists, a Florence-based NGO, several Italian lawmakers and officials in the Italian Defense and Foreign Ministries.The Herat group, 16 people in all, transited through a tent camp run by the Italian Red Cross in Avezzano, in the Apennine Mountains, where more than 1,400 Afghans evacuated to Italy have quarantined in recent weeks.Susan lined up with other Afghan refugees for a clothes distribution at the Red Cross camp.Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York TimesLike so many Afghans, the players left behind the lives they had built in order to make the trip. Susan halted her university studies in English literature to leave the country with her parents, two sisters and a brother.Women were banned from sports during the first Taliban era. Even after the group was ousted from power in 2001, playing sports continued to be a challenge for Afghan women, and for the men who helped them.In “Herat Football Club” the journalists’ 2017 documentary about the team, Najibullah, the coach, said that he had been repeatedly threatened by the Taliban for coaching young women.The Taliban’s return to power has raised fears not only that restrictions on sports will be reimposed, but also that the female athletes who emerged in the past 20 years will be subject to reprisals.Khalida Popal, the former captain of the national women’s team who left Afghanistan in 2011 and now lives in Copenhagen, used social and mainstream media last month to advise women who’d played sports in Afghanistan to shut down their social media accounts, remove any online presence and even burn their uniforms.“They have nobody to go to, to seek protection, to ask for help if they are in danger,” she said in an interview with Reuters. Another Herat player, Fatema, 19, also left behind her university studies, in public administration and policy. She arrived in Italy with a brother, but her father fell ill while they tried to get through the crowds at the Kabul airport, so he and her mother remained behind.“They said to me, ‘You go, go for your future, for football, for your education,’” Fatema said.“Playing football makes me feel powerful and an example for other girls, to show that you can do anything you want to do,” Fatema said. She expressed hope that would be the case in Italy, too. “I want to make it my country now,” she said.Fatema at the tent camp in Avezzano last week. “Playing football makes me feel powerful and an example for other girls,” she said.Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York TimesThe oldest of the three players, Maryam, 23, had already earned a degree in management and had worked as a driving school instructor in Herat. She saw herself as a role model, inspiring young women by example “because of football, because of driving.”“I was an active member of society,” Maryam said, a role she was certain she could not have under the Taliban.Maryam was the only team member to arrive in Italy alone, though she said she was hoping that her family would join her. “It’s hard for me to smile,” she said. “But I hope my future will be good, certainly better than under the Taliban.”The players say that many of their Herat teammates are still in Kabul, hoping to find transit to Australia, where some players on Afghanistan’s women’s national team have been evacuated.Last Friday, the three women and their families were relocated to the Italian city of Florence. In Italy, the national soccer federation, some soccer clubs and the captain of the national team, Sara Gama, have offered their support to the young Afghan players.Administering a coronavirus swab test at the Avezzano camp this month.Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York Times“There’s been a lot of solidarity,” Mr. Liberti, the documentary maker, said.And on a warm afternoon last week, Fatema and Maryam did something they had never done before: They kicked a ball around with a couple of boys.Asked how it felt, Maryam grinned broadly and gave a thumbs up.“It felt good,” added Fatema. “People didn’t look at us as though we had done something wrong.” More

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      USMNT Ties Canada, Its Second Straight Stumble in Qualifying

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      After settling for disappointing draws in its first two World Cup qualifiers, the U.S. men’s soccer team heads to Honduras in search of answers, and its first victory.NASHVILLE — If every World Cup qualifying campaign is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows, then the United States men’s soccer team has not yet left the ground.The Americans have played two games in four days to start the final round of their regional qualifying tournament for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and though they expected to win both matches, they have settled instead for two disappointing draws.These are early days, still. There are 12 games to go. And two points are better than none.Tras las segunda fecha de #WCQ, @miseleccionmx sigue en la cima con paso perfecto, y @fepafut se colocó en el segundo puesto. pic.twitter.com/a8EuFXL9Cw— Concacaf (@Concacaf) September 6, 2021
      But there has been a restless desire within the team and its fan base for an assured start to this qualifying cycle given the disaster of the last one, when the team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. This group, which includes young talents employed by some of the world’s best club teams, had hoped to begin the healing process.Instead, there are more questions about the team’s competence, more anxieties about history repeating itself and more desperation to win the next game, which arrives Wednesday night in Honduras.“There’s ups and downs and bumps in the road, and we just have to keep responding when we’re called on,” said Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach. “We can do two things. We can feel bad for ourselves or we can continue on with a positive attitude and try to get a positive result in Honduras.”Tajon Buchanan, left, and Canada have as many points (two) as John Brooks and the United States do after two games.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressThe stage was set in many ways for a restorative performance on Sunday night at Nissan Stadium in Nashville. The grass was lush. The home crowd was genteel. The novice players’ nerves were supposedly settled.In other words, none of the excuses Berhalter had tossed around over the weekend to help explain his team’s underwhelming 0-0 tie last Thursday in El Salvador — about the knobbly field of play, the hostile atmosphere, the number of team members playing their first qualifying game — were applicable as the Americans registered another dissatisfying draw, 1-1, in their second game against Canada.The team’s failure to meet the moment left it searching for answers.The Americans looked ungainly passing the ball. They took the scenic route when shortcuts were needed, lumbering around the perimeter of the Canadians’ dense defensive shell. It was a familiar set of problems: copious possession, scant production. The United States kept the ball for 71 percent of the game, but Canada’s sit-back-and-counterattack game plan worked just fine, and the result seemed fair.“We needed much faster ball movement,” Berhalter said. “Everyone could see from the outside, we took way too long on the ball.”He added, “We have to figure out ways to break down a compact defense because I’m sure there’s going to be other teams that come to the United States and do the same thing.”Christian Pulisic, the Americans’ captain and best player, who returned to the lineup after missing the El Salvador game while he recovered from a positive coronavirus test last month, was critical, too — even if it was unclear whether he was targeting the coaching staff, his teammates, himself, or some combination of the three.“I think we need new ideas at times,” he said, adding: “It just felt like we couldn’t break them down. We just need some new solutions. Obviously it wasn’t good enough.”Pulisic went on to suggest that the team could have conducted itself differently after taking the lead early in the second half by making adjustments and perhaps adopting a more defensive mind-set.“I think it’s important in games like this, tough games, to just grind it out and win these games 1-0 at times,” he said.Such pragmatism requires some savvy, and it is unclear how much this team possesses. The squad is populated by intriguing youngsters, many of them technically skilled in ways that subvert longstanding stereotypes about American soccer players. Trophies in two tournaments this summer — the Gold Cup and the Nations League — stoked excitement about what the group could do.But this month the group’s youth, and acknowledged naïveté, have looked like liabilities.“It’s a team sport,” midfielder Tyler Adams said when asked about the players’ strong pedigrees. “It doesn’t matter where we come from. If we don’t go out and do the things we’re good at, we’re just a group of names on a piece of paper.”It has not helped matters that this team has been depleted by a combination of bad luck and indiscretion.Before Sunday’s game, the team announced that Gio Reyna, one of its best attackers, would be out indefinitely with a hamstring injury and that Zack Steffen, Berhalter’s first-choice goalkeeper, would leave the squad, too, after testing positive for the coronavirus.Sergiño Dest left the game with an ankle injury in the first half. Alphonso Davies, right, departed with his own pain in the second.Christopher Hanewinckel/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe team also announced before kickoff on Sunday that the star midfielder Weston McKennie would miss the game in Nashville after violating the team’s coronavirus policy.“I am sorry for my actions,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I will be cheering hard for the boys tonight and hope to be back with the team soon.”For McKennie, who tested positive for the virus last October, the indiscretion (which the team declined to detail) hinted at a worrying pattern of behavior. In April, McKennie was suspended by his club team, Juventus, after he hosted a party at his home in Turin that violated a local curfew and needed to be broken up by the police.Berhalter late Sunday night declined to say whether McKennie would be available for Wednesday’s game in Honduras.These bouts of misfortune and personal slip-ups are hard to digest when each game carries so much weight. There is only so much time to get things right, only so many setbacks a team can withstand.“The way we’ve been framing it to the guys is that every game is a final,” Berhalter said. “Fourteen finals, that’s how we have to approach it. So the urgency is always going to be there until we’re mathematically secure with qualifying.”The Americans last month unveiled a marketing slogan — “Only forward.” — that reflected a desire to put their recent failures behind them. But Pulisic on Sunday could not help dwelling on the past, noting that in the last cycle the team had lost its first two matches. Those poor results precipitated the firing of Coach Jurgen Klinsmann.By that standard, the Americans are in better shape now. By any other measure, they are falling worryingly short of expectations. More

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      Brazil-Argentina Match Stopped When Health Officials Storm Field

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      After a disagreement about quarantine rules, a high-profile match was interrupted by government officials seeking to deport four Argentine players.A World Cup qualification game between Brazil and Argentina, South America’s most successful soccer teams, was halted after only a few minutes on Sunday after Brazilian health authorities walked onto the field during play as part of an effort to deport four Argentine players accused of violating coronavirus quarantine regulations.In chaotic scenes in São Paulo, a group of Brazilian public health officials entered the field minutes into the highly anticipated showdown and ordered Argentina’s players off the field as officials from both sides, a small crowd allowed inside the stadium and a global television audience struggled to comprehend just what was taking place.Brazilian Health Authority officials potentially trying to deport @Argentina players Players going back into the tunnel #BRAvsARG #WCQ #CONMEBOL pic.twitter.com/gIENNTjfZz— fuboTV (@fuboTV) September 5, 2021
      At issue was the status of four members of Argentina’s roster, including three starters who play club soccer in England’s Premier League. According to local regulations, foreign travelers who had spent time in Britain in the previous 14 days are required to quarantine upon arrival in Brazil.Officials from a Brazilian health regulator, Anvisa, said in a statement that they had concluded the Argentine players had lied about being in England on forms when they entered Brazil. Two days of meetings had failed to resolve the issue, the agency said, so it sent staff members to the stadium where Brazil and Argentina had taken the field on Sunday afternoon, to seek the players’ “immediate segregation and transportation to the airport.”Argentina arrived in Brazil on Friday morning with four England-based players. All of the players had first traveled to Venezuela, where Argentina played an earlier qualification game last week, before arriving in Brazil three days ago.In images beamed live around the world, health officials and some of the Argentina players were involved in a brief altercation before the team returned to its locker room. The on-field discussions eventually involved officials from both teams and stars like Lionel Messi and Neymar.Brazil’s Neymar and Argentina’s Lionel Messi sought explanations before leaving the field.Amanda Perobelli/ReutersThe match’s referee eventually suspended the game. Once Argentina retreated to its locker room, Brazil’s players waited on the field before beginning an improvised training session using half of the field to entertain the stunned crowd. Meanwhile, a police motorcade prepared to take Argentina’s players away from the stadium.The decision to abandon the game came on a day of drama in World Cup qualifying around the world. In Africa, Morocco’s team had to flee the capital of Guinea, Conakry, after reports of a military coup in the West African nation a day before those squads were to meet in a qualifying match. And in Tennessee, the United States announced that one of its players had tested positive for the coronavirus and a second, the star midfielder Weston McKennie, had been suspended for violating team policy, which McKennie said on Instagram was Covid protocol.The events in Brazil threaten to further damage relations between FIFA, soccer’s governing body and the organization responsible for the World Cup, and Europe’s top clubs and leagues, who have been embroiled in a dispute over the release of players for the qualification games.Several European leagues and teams had already taken unilateral decisions to prevent their players from traveling to South America for World Cup qualifying games this month, complaining that they had no choice because the players would be forced to miss key league games had they done so. Brazil was missing nine players for the Argentina game, and other nations were also hobbled by clubs’ failures to release players.Tottenham and Aston Villa of the Premier League did allow their Argentines to travel, however. Tottenham Hotspur’s Cristian Romero and Giovani Lo Celso were in the starting team in São Paulo, as was Aston Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez. His teammate Emiliano Buendía was a substitute.Goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez of Aston Villa, left, and Tottenham midfielder Giovani Lo Celso, center, were two of the three England-based players in Argentina’s starting lineup against Brazil.Andre Penner/Associated PressThe incident occurred only hours after the Brazilian health regulator Anvisa said four Argentine players must isolate and could not play in the match. The local news media had reported that the players involved failed to report that they had been in Britain, a charge Argentina’s soccer federation denied.It was unclear why Anvisa did not take action before the game, given Argentina’s team had been in the country for three days and because the agency had earlier said that the four England-based Argentina players must isolate and not participate in the games at the stadium.Some of Argentina’s players, including its captain, Messi, lingered in the tunnel area for several minutes after the match was stopped as officials and players alike tried to make sense of the dispute. Eventually, about an hour after play had first been suspended, South America’s regional soccer body, CONMEBOL, announced the game had been abandoned.CONMEBOL noted that the decision to abandon the game was the referee’s, but noted that FIFA had final authority over the matches.“The World Cup qualifiers are a FIFA competition,” CONMEBOL said in a statement posted on Twitter. “All decisions concerning its organization and development are the exclusive power of that institution.”Lionel Scaloni, Argentina’s coach, said in comments posted on the national team’s Twitter page that the team had not at any point been notified that it could not field the British-based players, and he questioned the timing of the health officials’ raid. “We wanted to play the match, the Brazilian players did, too,” he said.Claudio Tapia, the president of Argentina’s soccer federation, disputed the accusation that any of the team’s players had lied about their travel. He said Brazil’s health authorities had approved the rules under which Argentina’s team had traveled to Brazil.“You cannot talk about any lie here because there is health legislation under which all South American tournaments are played,” Tapia said. “The health authorities of each country approved a protocol that we have been fully complying with.”A Brazilian television commentator reached the head of Anvisa during the live broadcast of what should have been the first half of the game. The Anvisa official, Antonio Barra Torres, said the Argentine players had ignored instructions to remain in isolation while awaiting deportation from the country for failing to declare they had been in Britain.“They moved to the stadium, entered the field and there was a sequence of noncompliances,” he said in comments published by Globo.The interim president of Brazil’s soccer federation, Ednaldo Rodrigues, criticized the timing of the decision by health officials, saying the players could have been sent home after it concluded.“I feel sorry for all the sports fans who wanted to watch the game on television,” Rodrigues told Brazil’s SporTV. “With all due respect to Anvisa, they could have resolved this earlier and not waited for the game to start.” More

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      Everton's Women Are 'Not Shy About Being Ambitious'

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      A series of changes, big and small, has a strengthened Everton believing it can hold its own with deep-pocketed rivals in England’s Women’s Super League.LIVERPOOL, England — Some of the changes have been small, so small as to be imperceptible, at least from the outside. This summer, for the first time, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the uniforms of its women’s team. It is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder that, in women’s soccer, many little battles are still being won.Those small changes, though, still have an impact; they still offer a marginal gain. The laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who is supposed to be analyzing video or planning coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All that time saved can now be put to proper use. Everything can be just a little bit better.And some of the changes have been considerable, like the nine new players who have joined Everton squad over the last few months. There is Toni Duggan, an experienced England international, the German defender Leonie Maier, the Italian midfielder Aurora Galli, and three players signed from Rosengard, Sweden’s champion-in-waiting, dubbed the Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates.The most significant change, though, at least as far as the club’s coach, Willie Kirk, is concerned, is the one that is hardest to describe. It struck him, most clearly, while away with his team on a preseason camp in Scotland last month. Something, he could tell, had clicked.Everton’s coach, Willie Kirk, has found it easier, and cheaper, to close the gap between midtable and the top than his men’s counterparts.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images“Maybe it is self-belief,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it is the feeling of watching another player walk through the doors and thinking: Yep, that’s another quality signing. Maybe it is knowing that not one player can be sure they’re starting in the next game, and that competition driving standards.”Kirk may not be able to name it, not precisely, but he is happy to talk about it. The first time Izzy Christiansen, the club’s vastly experienced midfielder, sat down with Kirk — in the winter of 2019 — her abiding impression was of a coach who had absolutely “no fluff,” she said. He did not try to give her the hard sell as to why she should sign with Everton.“There wasn’t a pitch,” Christiansen said. He simply bought her a coffee — “That’s one way to persuade me to join a club,” she said — and explained how he saw her as a player, what he thought she would bring to the team, and what he, and his club, were trying to do. “It was matter-of-fact,” she said.He is exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We are not shy about being ambitious,” Kirk said.It is telling that, when asked if the plan for the season is to challenge the Big Three of England’s Women’s Super League — Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal — when the season opens on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “That’s what we intend to do,” she said. “To compete, and to surpass. We want to take the club back into the Champions League, where it belongs.”Of course, the landscape of women’s soccer has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, in the decade or so since Everton last graced that competition. At the start of the 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. They were teams mostly populated by British players; few, if any, trained in the same facilities as their respective men’s teams.Chelsea used deep pockets and expensive signings to climb to the top of the Super League last season.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressThe W.S.L. of 2021 is starkly different: dominated by the polyglot squads constructed, at lavish expense, by Chelsea, City and Arsenal. The former boasts not only the most expensive women’s player of all time, the striker Pernille Harder, but the highest-paid female player in the world, Sam Kerr.Manchester City can call on the backbone of the England national squad — the captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White, half a dozen others — and has sufficient financial clout that it was able to tempt one of Everton’s best players, the Australian wing Hayley Raso, to Manchester this summer. Arsenal, meanwhile, can lay claim to possessing possibly the world’s best player: the Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, it picked up one of the American star Tobin Heath.Those three teams have stood, almost unchallenged, at the summit of the W.S.L. for some time. They have combined to win the last five titles — Chelsea claiming three — and have accounted for every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. They are, as Kirk admitted, a formidable barrier.And yet the club believes it can break that stranglehold. “I’ve made it clear to the players that to do it we will have to punch above our weight in terms of budget,” he said. “Finance does come into it, but we feel we are there.”He credits the club’s “clever” recruitment, led by its sporting director, Sarvar Ismailov — a nephew of Alisher Usmanov, the business partner of Everton’s majority owner Farhad Moshiri, who has now been appointed to the club’s board — for much of that growth. “We have to be flexible, and we have to be smarter,” Kirk said.Within the club, Ismailov is credited with both having a keen eye for talent and an ability to drive a bargain: There are, Kirk has said previously and approvingly, “not many in the women’s game who like him.” It was Ismailov who led the campaign to land perhaps the most eye-catching of Everton’s summer recruits, the 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison, the club’s record signing.Anna Anvegard, left, and Hanna Bennison, center, are teammates in Sweden. Everton added them both, as well as Nathalie Björn, with the three players earning the nickname Swedish House Mafia.Jamie Sabau/Getty ImagesBut that is only one element. When she looks back at the club she joined almost two years ago, now, Christiansen sees “something special,” something that Kirk traces not just to the raft of new players.“We have improved our working practices,” he said, a category that doubtless includes the hiring of a uniform attendant. “We have signed a lot of previous winners. We have always had a positive environment, but that breeds a winning culture.”It is a trend he sees across the club. Everton is working on building a new stadium (principally) for its men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, are both Champions League winners. The ambition for the women’s team, in Kirk’s eyes, is no different to the ambition for the men’s.Perhaps, though, that relationship does not function quite as it is often presented. Everton has been condemned — through sheer economics as much as anything else — to life in the upper mid-table of the Premier League. It would cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees to even have a hope of overhauling Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s men’s teams.In the women’s game, though, it can now consider itself a force. It can talk of winning a place in the Champions League, and it can think, not entirely idly, of winning a championship. It can contemplate meeting clubs that exist on a different stratum in men’s soccer as something approaching equals in women’s.That has not come cheap — Bennison alone cost a “substantial six-figure sum” to coax from Rosengard — and it has not been straightforward. But Everton, unlike many of its peers in the no-man’s-land below the elite in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, to challenge, and perhaps to surpass. That impetus has not flowed from the men’s team to the women’s but, if anything, the other way round.That is what all of those changes, the small and the large alike, have added up to: a club that has a stage on which to be truly ambitious once more, and a team that is not afraid to talk about it. More

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      The Problem When Soccer Clubs See Athletes as Assets

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      Chelsea and Manchester City have both found ways to monetize their army of spare signings by loaning them out. But should soccer incentivize that, or limit it?One of the things that appealed most to Manchester City about Marlos Moreno was his flexibility. The club spotted him as a teenager, coming off the back of a breakthrough season in which he helped Atlético Nacional, his hometown club in his native Colombia, win not just a national title but the Copa Libertadores, too.Moreno, then 19, had the air of a rising star. He was the sort of prospect who stood out among the thousands of players around the world whose names and performance data flash in front of the eyes of the scouts and analysts at Europe’s biggest clubs.City’s recruitment team liked what it saw: not just Moreno’s finishing, but his creativity, his ability to play in a variety of places. The club decided to strike, paying Atlético $6 million or so to sign him, and tying Moreno to a five-year contract. Executives were sufficiently excited by the acquisition of a player they felt was one of the most promising in South America to mention his name to Sheikh Mansour, City’s owner.“He’s a versatile player,” City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, said when Moreno’s arrival was confirmed. “We believe he has a fantastic future in the game, and with City.”That was five years ago, in August 2016. Moreno, 24, has now completed his initial, five-year deal with City. He has not played a single game for the club. He has, instead, spent the last half-decade on a series of loans. As it turned out, he has needed to be a very versatile player indeed. Just not in the way Begiristain intended.There is, on the surface, little pattern to the arc of Moreno’s journey these last few years, no easy evidence of some grand design at play. Sometimes, he has gone to clubs in Manchester City’s orbit — Girona and Lommel, two of his stops, are owned by City Football Group — and sometimes he has not. There have been spells in Spain, Portugal and Belgium, but also Brazil and Mexico. If there is a rhyme or a reason, it is difficult to discern.Marlos Moreno, left, signed with Manchester City in 2016 but has yet to play for the club.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockThis summer, Moreno left Manchester on loan again. (There has never been official confirmation that he has signed a new contract, but it can only be assumed that City extended his terms beyond their initial expiration date this summer.) He has joined Kortrijk, in Belgium. It is his seventh club in five years.Moreno is not, though, an outlier. There are plenty of players on City’s books who have a similar story to tell. Yangel Herrera, a Venezuelan playmaker, is now on his fourth team in four years since signing with Manchester City. None of them was Manchester City. Patrick Roberts, once considered something of a breakout star in English soccer, is with his sixth team in six years. He has, at least, appeared for Manchester City in a Premier League game. That was in 2015.But this is not simply a Manchester City phenomenon. Chelsea, too, has a troupe of players on loan: 21, in fact, after the closure of the transfer window. Some of them — like Billy Gilmour, the Scottish midfielder lent to Norwich City for the year — are undertaking a vital step in their development. The hope at the club remains that they will come back stronger, better, more experienced and ready to command a place with the first-team squad. Others, like the fullbacks Kenedy and Baba Rahman, are not.Chelsea is often credited — if that is the right word — with pioneering the idea of a soccer club as two separate but linked businesses: one designed to put the best team on the field, with the aim of winning trophies and claiming glory; and one set up to trade players, with the aim of making a profit that can then be reinvested in the other side of the company.Matt Miazga’s Chelsea tenure has been a European tour: He has been lent to clubs in the Netherlands, France, England, Belgium and, most recently, Spain, where he now plays for Alaves.David Aguilar/EPA, via ShutterstockWhether Chelsea invented the idea is a matter of debate. Several Italian teams might suggest they were operating along similar lines long before the current European champion. There is no question, though, that Chelsea has not only industrialized the concept, it has refined it, too.Its approach has two strands. Some players are bought, developed and sold a couple of years later, flipped like real estate. Others, though, are treated as rentals, lent again and again to different clubs, the return on the initial investment spread over several years of loan fees.This practice could, perhaps, be named in honor of goalkeeper Matej Delac, a Croat who spent nine years at Chelsea, and spent each and every one of them at a different club. The whole approach — of effectively spinning off a player-trading business as another part of a club’s identity — could easily be termed the Chelsea model.Except that it is, now, not just Chelsea. It is Manchester City, too, with Moreno and Herrera and others. Liverpool is doing it more frequently. There are players at Juventus and Real Madrid, among others, who have had similar experiences. It is now pretty much standard practice at most of Europe’s elite clubs.There is a reason it has been widely and quickly adopted: It is a good idea. It is a particularly good idea now, when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged most clubs’ finances and only a handful of teams are able to pay actual transfer fees. The loan market will grow and grow. Having players contracted for that very purpose ensures a steady stream of income: small beer, perhaps, for a team like Manchester City or Chelsea, but perhaps a vital source of funds for the teams expected to compete with them.The impulse behind it is not just economic; it is also, to some extent, sporting. The teams that are good at it — the ones that can identify talent and develop it, the ones that can command a market for those players, the ones that can place them adroitly at teams that allow their value and demand to grow — are the ones that are rewarded by the system. Chelsea can bring in Romelu Lukaku, to some extent, because it has developed an effective transfer strategy to offset some of the costs. That is to its credit.There is only one sticking point. It is a simple question, and it is one that does not traditionally detain soccer for long, but it is worth asking. Is this OK? There is economic sense here. There may be some sporting logic, too. But morally, is the idea of players not as athletes but as assets something we should not just accept but incentivize?The transfer market, as a whole, is underpinned by a deep weirdness. It is rarely mentioned — the soap opera of the market is sufficiently compelling that we, as observers, willingly suspend our disbelief — but it is unusual that an employer can prevent an employee from taking another job, one that is better paid or more appealing, regardless of what that employee wants.Manchester City signed Yangel Herrera as a teenager but has yet to play him. Instead, he has appeared in Major League Soccer and for three Spanish clubs.Savvides Press/EPA, via ShutterstockOf course, plenty of employees have contracts, which bind them to a company. But for the most part, they also have notice periods, giving them some sort of agency over their careers and lives. Perhaps a company might make life difficult should a star employee wish to leave. Perhaps it will place him on some type of gardening leave. There are not many examples where it will keep him until a prospective employer pays a wholly arbitrary sum in compensation.We tolerate this state of affairs in soccer partly because of tradition, partly because it protects sporting integrity; partly because we (wrongly) assume that everyone is extremely well paid anyway; partly because players do jobs we all dream of doing, so we adore them individually but hate them as a concept; and partly because the transfer market is an important and reasonably effective mechanism for wealth distribution.Even by these low and strange standards, though, the use of players as nothing more than assets — to be fattened for sale like livestock or to be rented to the highest bidder — feels like a step too far.It is akin, perhaps, to those complex derivative packages traded on financial markets, the ones that are bets on the outcomes of bets, on and on into eternity. The original purpose has been lost: It is no longer about trading to get better; it is simply about trading to make money. And the things being traded, in this case, are humans, ones who are no longer in control of their own destiny, not really.This is one of those rare problems in soccer that has a relatively easy solution: The authorities who run and, in theory, safeguard the game could quite easily rule that clubs can have only a certain number of senior professionals on their books. They could ban teams from having more than, say, five players on loan at any time.They could, but of course they won’t, which means there will be more cases like Marlos Moreno and Yangel Herrera and Matej Delac and all the others, forever on the move, hired out to whoever will take them, bonded to a club that sees them not for what they can do but for how much they can make.Selling TomorrowAntoine Griezmann completed a round-trip journey to Madrid. Barcelona paid coming and going.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust as time expired, the money started pouring in. The great bazaar of Barcelona had been open all summer, but it was only in the final couple of days that anyone came through the doors, the buyers and the bargain-hunters, all hoping to take advantage of soccer’s great distressed sellers.If the sale of Emerson Royal to Tottenham was a little strange — he had officially joined Barcelona only a month earlier — it is the departure of Antoine Griezmann that will sting the most: the sheer humiliation of allowing a player signed with great pomp and ceremony two years ago to return, initially on loan, to Atlético Madrid.Still, it could not be helped: Barcelona’s most pressing need was first to save and then to raise money, and at the end of the transfer window it had done just that. Lionel Messi has gone; Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué, Jordi Alba and Sergi Roberto have all agreed to reduced terms; Griezmann is off the salary bill. By next summer, when his move to Atlético is made permanent, Barcelona will have generated $115 million in sales.What Barcelona could not do, of course, is sell off the players that it most needs to sell: the high earners, the waning stars, the reminders of its years of folly. Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Samuel Umtiti are all still there. Barcelona does not have a vast amount in common with Real Madrid, but here, perhaps, there is some common ground.Whether Real’s approach (or approaches) to entice Kylian Mbappé this summer was real or not we will never know, not truly: Real Madrid insists it was, Paris St.-Germain is adamant it was not. Either way, the club has spent the last couple of seasons trying to raise the funds necessary to sign the 22-year-old Mbappé: funds that would either have been used as a transfer fee or as a golden handshake.To do that, it would have liked to sell players like Gareth Bale and Isco: big names on money to match. But nobody came forward, and so instead Real Madrid has had to cash in on a suite of promising youngsters: Achraf Hakimi and Sergio Reguilón and Óscar Rodríguez last season and Martin Odegaard this summer.The policy has worked, of course, but it brings with it an unavoidable question: How much brighter would Real Madrid’s future have been, how much more balanced would its side be, if it had been able to add Mbappé to a promising young squad, rather than having to sell off many of those players to finance his eventual arrival?It is the same question that lingers over Barcelona. Emerson, like Junior Firpo and Carles Aleña and Carles Pérez and Arthur before him, might not have made Barcelona great again, but he would, at least, have helped to rejuvenate an aging squad. Instead, he was sold, as they all were, to cover the costs of the mistakes of the past. Barcelona’s finances are in better shape now than they were a month ago. The price is a high one, though: It has had to mortgage tomorrow to pay for yesterday.CorrespondenceThere was an intriguing thought in an email from Jillian Mannarino, touching on the varying fortunes of Arsenal’s two senior teams. “Everyone following the Premier League is talking about how bad Arsenal men’s team is,” she wrote, “but no one seems to be talking about how good Arsenal’s women’s team is: stacked with superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Kim Little, Danielle van de Donk and Beth Mead, and consistently good for the last decade.”Arsenal has at least one team that is making its fans smile.Steven Paston/Press Association, via Associated PressWe will cover the start of this season’s Women’s Super League in England elsewhere this weekend. But it is worth pausing a moment on Arsenal, too, because there is a stark contrast between its two elite divisions.The women’s team recruits sufficiently and consistently well enough — including the arrival of Tobin Heath this week on a free transfer — to punch above its weight: It has not spent quite as much as Chelsea and Manchester City in recent years, but it remains a peer of those teams in a way that it is very much not in the men’s game. How can that be explained? Why can the club make good decisions for its women’s team, but not its men’s? Is it to do with the executives working on the women’s side? And if so, should someone maybe not ask their advice?These are questions I cannot answer — though I will endeavor to do so — but I can, at least, furnish Mary Jo Berman with a response. “Did Barcelona receive nothing in return for Lionel Messi?” she asked. “Couldn’t they have traded him or transferred him for cash?” They couldn’t, for the very simple reason that the club had allowed his contract to expire: He was free to move wherever he wanted. The fact that Barcelona allowed that to happen, too, remains the most interesting aspect of this summer.And Calvin Wagner was quite right to pull me up on a poor turn of phrase last week. “The transfers of Messi, Mbappé and Ronaldo are clearly more driven by the statement of acquiring their star power than footballing fit,” he wrote. “But surely the Lukaku deal has more sporting logic to it? It seems to me that he brings greater marginal gains in sporting quality to Chelsea relative to the other transfers mentioned in your column.”This is, of course, quite right. Lukaku makes complete sense from a sporting perspective — he fills a glaring need that Chelsea has — in a way that Ronaldo, for example, does not, particularly. Lukaku was included simply because of his cost, one that would have been beyond the reach of all but three or four teams this summer, rather than because of the motivations behind the deal, but that should have been made more clear.That’s all for this week. We may now be behind the paywall, huddling against the cold, but the usual rules still apply: Questions go to askrory@nytimes.com, urgent matters go to Twitter, all of the other thoughts I’ve had this week that I could not crowbar into this newsletter are littered throughout Set Piece Menu.Have a great weekend,Rory More