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      How to Watch the Champions League Final: Time, Streaming and Location

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      Manchester City is chasing its first European club soccer title, and Chelsea its trying to win its second. Here’s how to watch.Chelsea and Manchester City, two deep-pocketed titans of England’s Premier League, will play for the biggest prize in European soccer on Saturday when they meet in the Champions League final in Porto, Portugal.Chelsea, a serial collector of titles and trophies since 2003, has won the competition once before, in 2012. Manchester City, a club that only in the last decade emerged from the long shadow of its more famous (and much more decorated) neighbor, Manchester United, is playing in the final for the first time.That unfamiliarity may bring some nerves, and some intrigue. But new faces or old, everyone will head into the final with eyes wide open about the stakes.“If you win, you’re a hero,” Manchester City midfielder Kevin De Bruyne said this week. “If you lose, you’re almost a failure.”What time is the game?Kickoff is set for 3 p.m. Eastern. Unlike some kickoff times, that one should be pretty accurate.How can I watch?The game will be broadcast in the United States by CBS Sports and on the Paramount+ streaming app. If you prefer commentary in Spanish, go to Univision or the TUDN app.If you are anywhere else in the world, check this comprehensive list of broadcast partners on UEFA’s website, which includes everything from RMC Sport (France) to Qazsport (Kazakhstan) to the magnificently named Silk Sport (Georgia).Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola has won the Champions League as a player and as a manager. But not with Manchester City.Carl Recine/ReutersWill there be fans inside the stadium?Yes. Each club received an allotment of 6,000 tickets to the game, and organizers said the crowd would be limited to 16,500 — well short of the 50,000-seat capacity of Porto’s Estádio do Dragão.Chelsea returned 800 of its tickets, with its fans angrily claiming that onerous UEFA rules had “intentionally prevented” eager supporters from traveling.Manchester City, on the other hand, announced this week that its owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi royal and the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, had graciously picked up the travel tab for everyone.Fans in Porto, where the bars closed early this week.Pedro Nunes/ReutersWhat was the mood been like this week?Tariq Panja of The Times sent along this dispatch from Porto on Friday:Fans from England started arriving in small numbers throughout the week, and by Friday afternoon parts of the city were thronged by supporters of the two teams.A large group of Manchester City supporters became an attraction of sorts for locals as they drank beer and sang songs in the sunshine in the bars that lined one bank of the Douro river, one of the city’s main tourist spots.The fans were being closely watched by the Portuguese police, which the night before had to intervene when some visitors became frustrated by local coronavirus restrictions that forced bars and restaurants to close by 10:30 p.m.For many of the English visitors, the trip to Porto was the first time away from their country since its recent reopening after one of Europe’s longest lockdowns.Rúben Dias has been the savior of City’s defense this year.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressTell me something I can say to sound smart today.“Buying Rúben Dias changed everything for Manchester City, giving Pep Guardiola the quality he needed on defense to support that offense while it purrs along.”“Sure, Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic can become the first American to play in the Champions League final today. But he won’t be the first American to win it: That honor belongs to Jovan Kirovski, with Dortmund in 1997.” More

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      Revisiting Ilkay Gundogan

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      The Manchester City midfielder is a rare player in the Champions League final: one with experience in the game. He wants to know what it feels like to win.Ilkay Gundogan is a little sheepish as he admits it. It is not what he is supposed to do, he knows. He is supposed to take each game as it comes. That is the professional’s mantra. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Think about today, rather than tomorrow. That is what a sports psychologist would advise. It is what his manager, certainly, would recommend.It is not, though, what he has done. From the moment Manchester City eliminated Paris St.-Germain earlier this month to qualify for its first Champions League final, Gundogan has found himself thinking about almost nothing else. “There’s not been a day when I haven’t thought about this game,” he said. “Maybe too much, to be honest.”Even after Manchester City won the Premier League title — in absentia, effectively; the club’s crown was confirmed when Manchester United, its closest challenger, lost to Leicester City on May 12 — he did not feel in celebratory mood. The euphoria of that achievement almost passed him by. Instead, in his mind, it meant he could focus more absolutely on Chelsea, on Porto, on Saturday.“I tried to convince myself that everything was preparation for the final,” he said. “I didn’t want to hold back for one second. In training, in my private life, I tried to keep myself as up as possible.”City’s top scorer in the Premier League this season was not Gabriel Jesus, Raheem Sterling or Kevin De Bruyne. It was Gundogan, with 13 goals.Pool photo by Scott HeppellAffectionately, his friends and his family suggested that he was at risk of causing himself additional stress. Gundogan is smart, and thoughtful, and logical. He had considered the issue. They worried about him far more than he worried about himself. “This is just how I am,” he said.He has wondered, over the last few weeks, whether the final has occupied so much of his mental energy because he knows the pain of losing one. Alone on City’s squad, Gundogan has tasted the Champions League final. He was on the Borussia Dortmund team that lost, late, to Bayern Munich in London in 2013. It is not something he has put out of his mind. “When you get the taste of playing in that game, and you lose, it does feel like unfinished business,” he said.Every major final, of course, is laced with these sorts of stories: the club seeking revenge for a bitter defeat or the coach trying to cement his legacy or the president trying to live up to the legacy of his father or the team trying to quiet the ghosts of its predecessors.This weekend’s is no different. There are private stories, not unlike Gundogan’s. Chelsea’s Thiago Silva was part of the P.S.G. team that lost to Bayern Munich in Lisbon last year. He, too, will see this as a chance to address a regret. His teammate Mateo Kovacic, meanwhile, has been to the biggest game in club soccer twice, and has never played in it: He remained on the substitutes’ bench as Real Madrid lifted the trophy in 2017 and 2018.Gundogan in 2013, when he scored in the Champions League final but did not win it.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd there are broader themes. This is Pep Guardiola’s first encounter in a decade with the game in which he confirmed his brilliance, his opportunity to win a third European Cup, the high-water mark for any manager. It is the culmination of Manchester City’s relentless march toward the pinnacle of the European game, the coronation as the game’s supreme power that represents the ultimate purpose and vindication of Abu Dhabi’s billion-dollar intervention in soccer.But some stories cut through more than others. A few years ago, Gundogan granted The Times rare access to his rehabilitation from a torn cruciate ligament. Over the course of eight months or so, he allowed us to track every stage of his recuperation — from his surgery in Barcelona to his first steps in the gym and on to his return first to training and then to the field.He invited us into his home, introduced us to his family, allowed us to photograph him in his private box at the Etihad Stadium as — a little distracted, a little mournful — he watched his team play yet another game without him. He made us Turkish coffee. He showed us his collection of sneakers. He did not mind when we asked whether he needed quite so many in gold.One afternoon, after checking that nobody was around, he took us into the club’s sanctum sanctorum: the first-team changing room at City’s training facility. Strictly speaking, it is for players only; the club has a firewall around first-team areas, one that applies even to senior employees, let alone journalists.Stealthily, as though he was quite enjoying the transgression, Gundogan opened a door at the back of the room to reveal what looked, at first glance, like a spa room at a country house hotel: a sauna, a cold bath, a couple of pristine swimming pools, complete with retractable floors and basketball hoops.After injuring his knee, Gundogan offered The Times an unusually candid look inside his recovery.Kieran Dodds for The New York TimesMore important, he spoke openly and frankly about the loneliness of injury, the fear, the frustration, the self-doubt, the boredom, the existential angst of being unable to do a job that is also an all-consuming identity. He talked a lot about the close group of half a dozen friends that has surrounded him since he was young; about how the prospect of a monthlong vacation with all of them, in Los Angeles, had gotten him through the long, bleak spring that year.That injury was not the first setback Gundogan had experienced. He had previously missed out on playing for Germany in the 2014 World Cup and in Euro 2016, too. He had endured a back problem that, at one juncture, he feared might dog him throughout his career, perhaps even end it.He is cool and considered and rational — he is proud of his Turkish heritage, but in many ways, he is very obviously German — but those disappointments nagged at him. He worried, deep down, that he was cursed not to have the career he might have had.And then, slowly but surely, he made his way back. As he did so over the past few years, it would have been impossible not to take some pleasure in seeing him thrive after seeing, close up, all that he had been through, not to feel a little vicarious happiness when he started, all of a sudden, scoring goals as City swept the rest of the Premier League aside this season. There had been points when he worried that the injury would rob him of something, that he would return somehow diminished, and yet here he was, better than ever.Gundogan has won 10 trophies at City. Saturday offers the opportunity for one more, and a bit of validation.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillTo report on a game is to suspend emotion. It sounds deeply unconvincing, but it is true: From experience, what matters in the 89th minute of watching your team in a major final is not whether it holds on to a lead or staves off a defeat, but that you have a decent connection to the Wi-Fi, more than 40 percent of your battery’s life, and a lead section for the story your office expects that is not a complete disaster. The disappointment or delight comes only after the words are written.Personal connections, though, are more complex, harder to suspend; those are the stories that cut through. Whatever happens on Saturday, what will matter most is what always matters on these occasions: reliable Wi-Fi, a conveniently located power socket, a vague idea of something to write.Should Manchester City win, though, the first thought will not be what it means for the power dynamics of the game or where this places Guardiola in the pantheon of history’s greatest coaches. It will be much smaller, much more personal: that this is the moment Gundogan has waited for, that this is the moment he worried he might never get to have, that everything he has been through was, ultimately, worth it.Maybe This New Idea Is a Good Idea?Chelsea’s team rolled into Porto on Thursday afternoon.Violeta Santos Moura/ReutersThis is becoming something of a theme. This week, as you may have noticed, my unstoppable — no, really: We try to get him to take vacations, and he just … doesn’t — colleague Tariq Panja reported that UEFA was exploring the idea of tweaking the format of the Champions League, swapping out the current two-legged semifinals for a weeklong “final four” tournament.To those of you who follow college basketball in the United States, this concept will require no explanation. To those of you who don’t: In lieu of the traditional home-and-away semifinals, followed by a final in a neutral venue, all three matchups would be one and done, held in the same city, over the course of a few days.The reaction to this news, broadly, was predictable: much wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over UEFA’s riding roughshod over the long-suffering, match-going fan. It seemed, to be frank, a little overblown, as if this is just how soccer as a whole is conditioned to greet any change whatsoever nowadays, as the manifestation of some lingering evil.That is not to say the idea is perfect. It is not. The home leg of a semifinal is the biggest game a club can host at its stadium. Abolishing them would deprive tens of thousands of fans every year of an opportunity to attend a genuine, red-letter event. Travel to and accommodation in the predetermined host city every year would be chaotic, and expensive. And mixing fans of four clubs over the course of a week would be a strain on police resources.A change like this could not be imposed from above; it would have to be done in consultation with and with concessions to fans. UEFA would need to demand that cities provide reasonably priced accommodations as a condition of hosting. Flights, too, would have to be made affordable.But none of that is impossible. The idea could work. At the very least, it is surely worthy of discussion. It might be worse than what we have now. It might be tried and deemed to have failed. But there is also a possibility that it might prove better, more dramatic, more compelling.We have spent the last two months railing against the elite teams’ demanding that they play one another more often, claiming that the familiarity will breed contempt, that jeopardy is what makes the Champions League special. Reacting no less furiously to something that would introduce added jeopardy, and make games between the elite ever so slightly rarer, seems incoherent, as if what you are objecting to is not the nature of change, but change itself.Mañana, MañanaA sneak peek at Luis Suárez’s Christmas card to Barcelona’s board.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLuis Suárez, deep down, will not be impressed. The Uruguayan striker was unceremoniously dumped by Barcelona last summer, the club deciding that he was so old and so expensive that it would — despite the protestations of Lionel Messi — be a relief to offload him onto Atlético Madrid.A year later, of course, it has worked out quite nicely for Suárez: He scored the goal, last Saturday, that gave Atlético its first title in La Liga since 2014. That his exit still rankles, though, is clear: The sweat from that game had barely dried before he was suggesting that Barcelona had “undervalued” him.That will only be exacerbated by the fact that, a year later, Barcelona has at last identified a replacement. To take over from the then-33-year-old and thus over-the-hill Suárez, the club has plumped for the, er, 32-year-old Sergio Agüero. In public, Suárez has given the move his “complete support.” In private, he cannot fail to not to see the irony.That is not to say there is no sense in Barcelona’s apparent transfer policy this summer. In addition to Agüero, the club is hoping to add Georginio Wijnaldum (30) and the 27-year-old Dutch forward Memphis Depay. Eric García, a 20-year-old defender, is the only notable introduction of youth into a squad in desperate need of rejuvenation.It appears that Sergio Agüero will pursue his next trophy at Barcelona.Pool photo by Peter PowellWhat unites all four, of course, is the fact that they will not cost Barcelona a cent in transfer fees. All of them are out of contract. Their salaries may be burdensome, but they represent a chance to bulk out the team on a shoestring. Given Barcelona’s precipitous financial situation, adding four players for nothing would seem to be smart business.And yet the suspicion lingers that none of this solves the problem. Both Agüero and Wijnaldum are too old to have any resale value at all when the time comes for them to leave. Depay, too, will depreciate quickly. Barcelona, once again, is taking the short-term path when salvation lies in the long: selling off whatever aging stars they can this year, adding youth where possible, and starting the long, slow process of rebuilding.He might have had his revenge, but Barcelona was not wrong, last summer, to release Suárez. He is in the twilight of his career. He was earning a lot of money. That was not the mistake (though selling him to Atlético was, clearly, foolhardy). The mistake is replacing him with a player of exactly the same profile, solving today’s problem without thinking about tomorrow.Penalties Are Easy NowVillarreal players who made their penalties charging the goalkeeper who finally stopped one, Gerónimo Rulli.Pool photo by Aleksandra SzmigielAt the point when Gerónimo Rulli, an actual goalkeeper, stepped up to dispatch what was presumably the first penalty of his career with all the practiced élan of a seasoned striker, it felt as if the Europa League final might go on forever.Manchester United and Villarreal had played out a grinding 1-1 draw over the course of 120 minutes and were now seemingly inseparable even by penalties. All 11 Villareal players had scored — those who seemed nervous and those who seemed calm, the youngsters and the veterans, the forwards and the defenders. Even Raúl Albiol, who has apparently transmogrified into a weary fisherman.And all 10 of United’s outfield players had matched them. Of those, Luke Shaw alone had any real reason to feel fortunate, his shot squirming away from Rulli’s left arm and nestling, with a sigh of relief, in the corner of the goal. The rest had all been picture perfect: precise and powerful, penalties as executed by machines.It was David De Gea who broke the streak, a cruel inversion of the usual law that goalkeepers are supposed to be heroes in penalty shootouts, not villains. As the inquests into United’s defeat began, the line between success and failure felt grotesquely thin: How dare Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the United manager, not have factored in that his goalkeeper might not be great at taking penalties?De Gea’s failure, though, highlighted just how good all of the other penalties had been. This seems to happen more and more now — penalty shootouts in which more than the traditional five are required, in which all of the players seem to have the technique and the poise to convert, even under intense pressure.It is worth asking why that might be. Players, generally, are technically better than they were a couple of decades ago. Clubs practice shootouts more often (though not Villarreal, as it happens). Managers focus intently on the psychology of their squads, readying them for these high-pressure moments. And does that mean that we might need to find an alternative to penalties? Asking goalkeepers to take penalties is, after all, not too far removed from the way of settling ties soccer used to have: the toss of a coin. There must, somewhere, be a better option.CorrespondenceWe start on an existential note from Tse Wei Lim: “There is something very capitalist, or perhaps Shakespearean, about the idea that Atlético, having learned to excel in La Liga, should now attempt to excel in Europe. Is there anything wrong with a club being content with domestic excellence and a profound sense of identity?”There is not, not at all, and this is something that soccer as a whole might do well to consider (and I include myself in that). Not achieving the ultimate success — if that is what the Champions League represents — does not consequentially make you a failure.Named for Madrid and dressing like Spain: lots of letters about Real Salt Lake this week.Andy Clayton-King/Associated PressA lively exchange of views followed the discussion of team names in Major League Soccer. Ryan Humphries believes those that work “build on European names without pilfering them: Columbus Crew and my hometown Philadelphia Union shine because they embody the idea of a united front, just as in Manchester and Newcastle, but in a distinctly American way. This is opposed to Real Salt Lake or Sporting Kansas City, which really sound like Gucci knockoff identities.”(This is a great phrase and I will, sadly, be stealing it without attribution.)Joey Klonowski, meanwhile, suggests “the best team names capture the history or iconography of their city. In America, that’s possible with American-style names (Portland Thorns, Chicago Fire) or with Euro-style names (Minnesota United).” I agree, though the Fire thing is weird: Why celebrate an event that destroyed a city? You wouldn’t turn Napoli into the Naples Volcanoes, would you?And more disdain for Real Salt Lake from Don Waugaman. The most egregious example, Don wrote, of “an attempt to impose a borrowed form of authenticity on a product is Real Salt Lake, a direct rip-off of one of the world’s biggest soccer teams in a country that was founded on anti-monarchism. Couldn’t we at least have gone with ‘Republica Salt Lake’?” Or, to follow the Fire example, maybe the Salt Lake Winter Olympics Bid Scandal.That’s all for this week. I’ll flick through your questions and comments and ideas while I’m enjoying the — checks weather app — rain in Porto. More

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      Nike Says It Ended Deal With Neymar Amid Investigation of Sexual Abuse

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      Nike said that Neymar, the soccer superstar, had refused to cooperate with an investigation into “credible allegations of wrongdoing” made by one of the company’s employees.Nike ended its sponsorship agreement with the Brazilian soccer superstar Neymar last year after he refused to participate in an investigation of an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a Nike employee, the company confirmed Thursday night.Nike said its investigation did not reach a conclusion as to whether an assault had occurred, which was why it made no public statement at the time.“No single set of facts emerged that would enable us to speak substantively on the matter,” Nike said in a statement. “It would be inappropriate for Nike to make an accusatory statement without being able to provide supporting facts. Nike ended its relationship with the athlete because he refused to cooperate in a good faith investigation of credible allegations of wrongdoing by an employee.”The accusation of assault was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday night. Nike’s statement obtained by The New York Times matched comments made to The Journal by Hilary Krane, Nike’s general counsel.A spokeswoman for Neymar, 29, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but denied the accusation to The Journal.Nike first signed Neymar to a sponsorship agreement in 2005, when he was just 13 years old and playing for the youth team of Santos F.C., one of the biggest clubs in Brazil. The company continued sponsoring Neymar after he moved to F.C. Barcelona and then to Paris St.-Germain, establishing himself as one of the world’s best and most popular players. But he switched allegiances to Puma in 2020, without an explanation for leaving Nike before his contract had expired.In 2018, a longtime employee filed a complaint to Nike, according to The Journal, which cited documents it reviewed and unnamed people familiar with the investigation. According to The Journal, the complaint said that during a marketing tour in the United States in June 2016, the woman helped Neymar, who appeared to be drunk, into his hotel room after midnight. While there, Neymar tried to force the woman to perform oral sex and blocked her from leaving the room, the complaint said, according to The Journal.The woman asked Nike about the status of her complaint in 2019, The Journal reported. The company, which believed the woman had not wanted it to take any action on it, according to Nike’s statement, hired an outside law firm to perform an investigation. While representatives for Neymar denied the accusation to the law firm, according to the Journal, he refused to personally be interviewed, prompting the termination of his sponsorship agreement.Around the same time in 2019, Neymar was accused of raping a Brazilian model, Najila Trindade, whom he had flown to Paris. He said they had consensual sex, and he published a number of explicit messages he had exchanged with Trindade on social media, resulting in a backlash against Neymar and many of his sponsors.No charges were filed against Neymar in the case, and the Brazilian authorities eventually charged Trindade, who publicly identified herself as Neymar’s accuser, with slander, extortion and fraud. The first two charges were dropped, and Trindade was acquitted of fraud. More

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      Champions League: Deep Pockets, Deep Benches, English Winners

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      Manchester City and Chelsea seal an all-Premier League final thanks in part to resources and rosters that no club, not even their biggest rivals, can match.MANCHESTER, England — Edouard Mendy’s palm would still have been stinging from the Karim Benzema shot he had saved seconds before as his Chelsea teammates advanced down the field. N’Golo Kanté exchanged passes with Timo Werner, parting Real Madrid’s defense. Kai Havertz’s delicate chip clipped the bar and fell, gentle as a feather, onto Werner’s head.By the end of Wednesday’s game, Chelsea’s superiority would be painfully apparent, its place in the final of the Champions League its ample and just reward. Mason Mount would add a second goal, but there might have been many more. Havertz alone might have had three. Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea cut Real Madrid apart with an ease that, at times, bordered on embarrassing.“They played better,” Casemiro, the anchor of Real Madrid’s overworked midfield would say. Thibaut Courtois, the Madrid goalkeeper, simply described Chelsea as “the superior team.” But in that space between Mendy’s save and Werner’s goal, what would grow into a chasm was but a sliver. All that separated this result from another, quite different, was an inch or two.Sergio Ramos and Real Madrid were swept aside at Chelsea.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt had been the same in Manchester’s springtime snow the previous night. Riyad Mahrez had given Manchester City the lead only a minute or two after Paris St.-Germain had thought, wrongly, that it had won a penalty. From that point, City was immaculate. In hindsight, its victory, too, seemed predetermined, inevitable.But in that moment — had the ball struck Oleksandr Zinchenko a few inches lower; had P.S.G. been able to capitalize on the pressure it had exerted in the opening exchanges — everything turned on nothing more than the bounce of a ball, the precise placement of an arm.The nature of sports determines that, in large part, interpretation is downstream from outcome. The explanation for and the understanding of how a result came about is retrofitted, reverse engineered, from the unassailable fact of the scoreline itself.The assumption, in the case of this week’s Champions League semifinals, is that the evident supremacy of Manchester City and Chelsea would have told regardless: that Chelsea would have created those chances even if Benzema had scored; that City would have possessed the wit and the imagination to overcome conceding an unjust penalty.Manchester City has the deepest squad in the world, allowing it to swap out one star for another at any time.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat is possible, of course. Make no mistake: Chelsea and Manchester City most definitely are better teams than Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain. They are more complete, more coherent, smarter, fitter, better drilled. But at this level, among the handful of the greatest teams in world soccer, there is no such thing as a vast difference. There are only fine margins.That is what Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City coach, meant on Tuesday night when he said that there can be “something in the stars” in the Champions League. Strange things happen. The best team does not win. The dice roll. Games and destinies hinge on the merest details: a stroke of luck, a narrow offside, a player slipping as he takes a penalty.It is Guardiola’s job, of course, to do all he can to make sure his team is not susceptible to the vicissitudes of fate, to ensure that the players at his disposal are talented enough, that his tactical scheme is effective enough, that his squad is fit enough to minimize the power of what is, in effect, random chance. But most managers accept there is a limit to what they can do: Rafael Benítez, who won the Champions League with Liverpool, saw his job as getting his team to the semifinals. After that, he knew, to some extent he had to trust to luck.What is clear, though, is that increasingly those fine margins are falling in favor of English teams. Before the year 2000, there had never been a European Cup or Champions League final contested between teams from the same country. Since then, there have been eight: three all-Spanish finals (2000, 2014, 2016), one each for Italy (2003) and Germany (2013); and three for England (2008, 2019 and, now, 2021).That concentration, of course, reflects not only the preponderance of teams from western Europe’s major leagues in the competition — those four countries now supply half of the teams that comprise the tournament’s group stage — but serves to demonstrate the shifting power balance between them, evidence of which league possesses the mix of tactical nous, technical virtuosity and sheer physicality to take center stage.When Italian teams led the world in tactics, they tended to dominate the Champions League. Spain’s golden generation, combined with first the brilliance of Lionel Messi and then Real Madrid’s second-generation Galacticos, were so technically gifted that no master plan could stifle them, until Germany’s homespun counter-pressing approach punched a way through. The Premier League’s best years have come when its traditional athleticism is married to cutting-edge tactics and technique, imported from continental Europe.That is precisely what has happened over the last few years, of course. England is now home to most of the world’s finest coaches, Guardiola and Tuchel among them. It first adopted and then advanced the German pressing style — and in Guardiola’s case, Spanish-inspired possession — marrying it with England’s long-cherished virtues of industry and physicality and both acquiring and developing players of sufficient technical brilliance to pull it off.For all of that to happen, though, England relied on its primacy in a fourth — and perhaps most significant — factor: resources. It should be no surprise that the Premier League is now anticipating a second all-English final in three years, both in the Champions League and, potentially, in the second-tier Europa League, too.Its teams, after all, have access to the sort of revenue that is unimaginable to their peers on continental Europe, thanks largely to the income from the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals. It means that, while Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the rest can buy the same quality of player as England, only the Premier League’s elite can buy them in a certain quantity.That trend has become more pronounced, more obvious, in the age of the pandemic. The Premier League has been able to absorb the impact far better than any of its peers. And the two teams that have been able to outlast everyone else in the Champions League have been able to ride it out better than anyone.Three days before facing P.S.G. in the second leg of the Champions League semifinals, Manchester City traveled to Crystal Palace. Though it is within touching distance of claiming the Premier League title, Pep Guardiola’s team is not there quite yet: There was still something riding on the game. And yet the team he named contained only one player — Fernandinho — who would face P.S.G. City still won, comfortably.It has been a similar story for much of the last six months. Guardiola has regularly changed five, six or seven players between games, with little or no drop-off in performance or result. No other team — in England, let alone Europe — can call on that sort of depth.There is a reason that City seems so fresh, so cogent, at a time when teams across Europe are gasping for air, desperately cobbling together teams from the players they have available. The defensive partnership Real Madrid played in its semifinal against Chelsea was the 14th different combination it has used in the last 20 games. City, by contrast, could allow Ruben Días and John Stones to take the weekend off, saving them for battles ahead.Chelsea does not quite compare — seven of the players who took the field against Real Madrid had faced Fulham over the weekend — but its durability is no surprise when you consider that it spent more than $250 million on strengthening its squad last summer, as most of the rest of the game wrestled with the economic shortfall caused by the pandemic. Tuchel could leave Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic on the bench on Wednesday, just in case he needed an infusion of talent worth north of $100 million.None of this, of course, is to diminish what these teams have achieved, to suggest that they do not deserve their place in the final, or to downplay the work their coaches have done in taking them to European soccer’s showpiece game. Indeed, in many ways, City-Chelsea is the perfect final for the year that soccer has had: that, at the end, the two teams left standing were those best placed to weather the storm, to endure the compact, draining schedule, that found that games that hung in the balance were weighted, ever so slightly, in their favor. More

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      Champions League Final: The Rich Get Richer

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      Seismic shocks to European soccer’s landscape have turned Saturday’s Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea into a sign of things to come.The shadows are drawing in across Europe.Inter Milan must shed millions of dollars from its salary bill. One or more of its brightest lights will have to be sold. Antonio Conte, the coach who only a few weeks ago ended the club’s decade-long wait for an Italian championship, does not intend to stick around to see his title-winning team broken up.Barcelona, a billion dollars in debt, must build a squad to meet its princely ambitions on a pauper’s budget. The club’s wish list does not extend much beyond the giveaway aisle: Sergio Agüero, Georginio Wijnaldum, Eric García and Memphis Depay are all out of contract, all available for nothing, a cut-price cavalry.Juventus must strip back in order to retool. Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, knows his fans crave a Galáctico but also that he cannot afford one. The usual delirium of transfer rumors swirls around Manchester United and Liverpool, but some players will have to go in order for others to arrive.It is not just the grand houses that are feeling the pinch. The Lille team that won the French title will be stripped for parts. The rest of Ligue 1 faces a fire sale. Spending in the January transfer window was a fraction of its normal level across all of Europe’s top five leagues.After years of plenty, money is tight, and times are straitened, for everybody. Almost everybody.Manchester City paid more than $80 million to add Rúben Dias, who became the cornerstone of its defense.Pool photo by Peter PowellTimo Werner, center, was the prime acquisition in Chelsea’s free-spending pandemic summer.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere remain a handful of bulls in soccer’s bear market, not just immune to but liable to benefit from the recession unfurling all around them. Saturday’s Champions League final features two of them. A little more than a decade ago, it seemed certain that the 2010s would be dominated by the coming of Manchester City and Chelsea. Between them, they represented soccer’s new dawn: Chelsea, bankrolled by the wealth of its billionaire Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, and City, transformed by the functionally bottomless riches of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. For a while, their meetings were referred to as El Cashico, always with the slight ghost of a sneer: a confected nickname for an ersatz imitation of an authentic rivalry.Indeed, when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan first arrived at Manchester City, it was Chelsea where he first trained his sights. Chelsea had been so confident of signing Robinho, the Brazil forward, from Real Madrid that its website had started selling jerseys emblazoned with his name. When the Spanish club noticed, it withdrew from the deal. City, eager to make a statement of intent, duly stepped in.The next summer, City tried to go a step further, identifying John Terry — Chelsea’s captain — as its priority transfer target. The club was, it was reported, prepared to pay him a then-unthinkable $300,000 a week. He chose not to accept, eventually, but City at least managed to bloody Chelsea’s nose: Abramovich was forced to reward Terry’s loyalty by making him the club’s highest-paid player.It took much longer for an on-field rivalry to develop. The clubs did, as predicted, emerge as the prime forces in English soccer in the 2010s: Between them, they have won eight of the past 12 Premier League titles. But rarely did they find themselves in direct opposition. More often than not, one waxed as the other waned, and the greatest threats to their immediate ambitions came from the ranks of the established elite both were seeking to usurp.Now, though, the situation has changed. Over the last year, the landscape of both English and European soccer has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has diminished almost all of their peers and leaves both Chelsea and City in a position of almost unparalleled strength. This Champions League final is not the culmination of a rivalry. It is, instead, a harbinger of what the future might hold.They owe their prospects of uncontested primacy to a confluence of factors. Foremost, of course, is the economic impact of the pandemic, and the year of empty stadiums and balance-sheet black holes.To assemble their star-studded teams, Chelsea and Manchester City have relied on some of the deepest pockets in soccer.Pool photo by Shaun BotterillEstimates vary, but most suggest that the pandemic has cost Europe’s clubs somewhere in the region of $5 billion, almost half of it borne by the 20 richest teams on the continent, some of whom — Real, Barcelona and Juventus in particular — were already struggling under the weight of mismanagement.City and Chelsea, because of the largess of their owners, seemed blissfully unaffected by that contraction. City spent $140 million on central defenders alone at the start of this season as its payroll hit an English-record high: almost $500 million-a-year, at a time when most of its rivals were trying to limit their spending.Chelsea spent more last summer than any other team in Europe, and almost as much as all 18 teams of the Bundesliga combined. Chelsea paid out more in fees, in fact, than it had at any point under Abramovich, taking advantage of being a rare predator in a world of prey to acquire the likes of Timo Werner and Kai Havertz effectively unopposed.There is little reason to believe, given the limited horizons across much of the rest of Europe, that this summer will prove any different. Among their peers, there is a growing acceptance that competing for talent with Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain is no longer feasible.Combating that, of course, was part of the rationale behind the short-lived and unmourned Super League. Buried in the aborted competition’s founding document were a set of specific provisions on spending that went way beyond the Financial Fair Play regulations that govern the Champions League.There would be “zero tolerance” for the manipulation of balance sheets. Expenditure on players, coaches and salaries would be strictly capped — at 55 percent of club revenues, or 27.5 percent of the highest-earning club, an effort to favor those teams with the largest fan bases — and clubs would have to commit to being profitable over a three-year period.The rules would be overseen and enforced by a monitoring body, responsible for auditing member clubs’ finances, ruling on sponsorship agreements and sanctioning anyone who transgressed. It was to be called the Financial Stability Group.City was part of the project, of course, but it was also, as those involved in its creation admit, its target. The Super League was not just a power play to grab a greater share of soccer’s revenues; it was also, for some of those involved, the only way to level a distorted playing field.Its collapse, though, has weighted the dice ever further in the favor of the new elite.Will even the dream of a Champions League final soon be out of reach for all but a few teams?Pool photo by David RamosManchester City and Chelsea had already, in effect, been given a free pass when UEFA announced, last year, that it was suspending the financial regulations that previously prevented both teams from making full use of their owners’ wealth. The losses across Europe were so broad and so great, it said, that barely any teams would be able to meet its criteria.UEFA is adamant that the system is not defunct. It says it is currently examining how to redraft and improve its cost-control rules to give them a “stronger focus on the present and the future.” European soccer’s governing body has said that it believes “wages and transfer fees, which represent the majority of clubs’ costs, must be reduced to acceptable levels.”But in their current absence there are benefits for those in a position of strength. First, by stockpiling talent now, they can in effect get in before the door closes. Second, and most important, they have an opportunity to shape the new rules to their needs.City, Chelsea and P.S.G. had long felt that the previous system of Financial Fair Play did not so much apply to them as apply at them. The original idea, their logic ran, of ensuring European soccer did not take on too much debt had been co-opted by a cartel of the game’s established powers to prevent clubs from investing in their teams, an effort to set in stone their position at the pinnacle.This time, though, as a consequence of the Super League, it is City — who in withdrawing started the collapse of the breakaway — and P.SG. — which never joined it — who can expect to have a seat at the table when the new rules are discussed. Whatever form of financial regulation is introduced, it is more likely to represent their interests than the ostracized old elite. Chelsea, its ambitions aligned with those two, will benefit by proxy.That, of course, is what those clubs who find their positions of power under threat fear: not that the collapse of the Super League will lead to some utopian, egalitarian vision of soccer’s future, but that one set of vested interests will be exchanged for another.Privately, owners admit there is little prospect now of holding back City, in particular. Some in England believe the club could win the Premier League for the next decade if it continues to use its wealth as adroitly as it has. In Europe, the fear is that the Champions League will become the exclusive preserve of the new elite, rather than the old.To some, of course, that may be a good thing, a welcome change after years of dominance by a handful of entitled and presumptuous superclubs. To others, it will have the feel of yet another step toward some grim vision of soccer’s future, where the global game becomes the plaything of oligarchs and plutocrats and nation states.Either way, the path from there to here has been laid, irrevocably, over the last year as the pandemic hit and the money dried up and the regulations loosened and the establishment crumbled. The new future is here, and it starts on Saturday. More

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      ‘Baggio: The Divine Ponytail’ Review: Dribbling Through a Career

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      This biopic of the Italian soccer player Roberto Baggio is a botched effort.“Baggio: The Divine Ponytail,” a Netflix biopic billed as “freely inspired” by the life of the Italian soccer player Roberto Baggio, concludes with a group of the athlete’s fans greeting and applauding him. In real-life clips during the credits, an announcer calls him “probably the most beloved player in Italian football.” It’s a measure of how muddled the movie is that it never conveys how or why he became beloved.Even the soccer is perfunctory. Instead of lingering on the pitch, the director, Letizia Lamartire, cuts to Baggio’s friends and family watching on TV. Chronologically malapportioned, the film races through key developments, such as Baggio’s recovery from an injury or commitment to Buddhist meditation, and more than once abruptly flashes forward several years.Clichés become a kind of shorthand. At dinner in 1985, Baggio (Andrea Arcangeli) informs his parents and siblings that he’s signed a valuable contract. “Well, you can pay me back for the windows you broke,” scoffs his father (Andrea Pennacchi), who later adds, “Even if you earn more, you’re no better than your brother, who’s busting his ass at the factory.”By half an hour in, when the film reaches the 1994 World Cup, where Baggio plans to fulfill an apparent childhood promise to his dad, the coach likens him to the celebrated player Diego Maradona. Nothing the film has shown from the sulky Baggio, whose hair gives him his nickname, has primed viewers for the comparison.It’s possible that “Baggio: The Divine Ponytail” will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.Baggio: The Divine PonytailNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      USWNT's Catarina Macario Is Just Getting Started

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      She learned soccer in Brazil and developed in the United States. Now a pro in France, the 21-year-old forward is proving she belongs alongside the world’s best players.The first steps of Catarina Macario’s path toward professional soccer are easy to pick out, even in the grainy videotapes of her playing the sport as a girl. She doesn’t scissor over the ball so much as dance over it. She darts past defenders or lobs the ball over them. She leaves goalkeepers flat-footed.Even before she had entered her teens, Macario had mastered the two skills every Brazilian striker learns early: how to put the ball in the net and how to race toward the nearest camera to celebrate.And yet Macario was different. Soccer is ubiquitous in Brazil, so it was only natural that she gravitated to the game played on its beaches, fields and streets. But as a young girl growing up in São Luís, a coastal city in Brazil’s northeast, and Brasília, the capital, she used to wonder if becoming a professional was even viable.In a country where 47 percent of the population identifies as mixed race, Macario was a triple outlier: a girl with dark skin who played soccer. Discrimination and a lack of opportunities were common. So were insults. She was called a monkey. A lesbian. Just for wanting to play.“Sadly, I was often the only girl at that time,” said Macario, whose first forays in the sport were games with classmates in a futsal league and on boys’ teams. “It was very much so shamed upon to be a girl and playing soccer.”She added: “I knew I loved soccer and I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I would question whether it would even be possible just because of that.”Less than a decade later, Macario, 21, has carved out a place for herself alongside the top players in the world.Macario signed with Lyon in January. It is battling P.S.G. for the French title.Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn January, she turned pro, announcing she would forgo her senior year at Stanford University — where she scored 63 goals in 68 games — to sign with the world’s most dominant professional team, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin. Weeks later, her switch in citizenship complete, she made her debut for the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team (and scored in her second game). On Tuesday, she was expected to be named to the United States roster for an important pre-Olympic tournament.If Macario’s rise continues, and if she can beat out a who’s who of more experienced players — Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Tobin Heath, Christen Press, Lynn Williams — for a place in the American attack, she could be headed to the Olympics by July, and to a World Cup by 2023.“I think she is the future of what the U.S. women’s national team wants to be,” Macario’s former coach at Stanford, Paul Ratcliffe, said in a phone interview. “I envision they could build a team around her, that’s how highly I think of her as a player.”Sometimes, she can hardly believe how far she has come, and how fast.“To me, I’m essentially just this little kid that’s going to play with the best players in the world,” Macario said in a video call this spring from her apartment in Lyon, France. “It’s a little intimidating, but at the same time, that’s the challenge — that’s why I chose to be here.”On the ball, Macario is eye-catchingly quick, powerful enough to create space, deft enough to leave defenders grasping at the ones she has vacated. After Macario’s first goal for the U.S. national team, Megan Rapinoe called her a “different kind of player.” Others have placed her on an higher plane: comparing her to Brazil’s six-time world player of the year, Marta.Even in her childhood, Macario stood out. She says she can’t recall the number of lamps she and her older brother broke while playing soccer in their apartment in Brazil, but she remembers the hours she dedicated to extra training with her father before practices to nurture her talent. It was what she used to answer the discrimination, the obstacles and the people who told her a girl didn’t have a place in soccer, and show them she deserved one “based on what I did on the field.”“Maybe,” she added, “I’m even better than you.”When she turned 12, though, a rule barred her from continuing to play with boys in Brasília, where her family was living. Without any competitive girls’ teams as an option, the family took a leap of faith, Macario said, and decided to allow her to move to the United States with her father and brother to secure a better future.When the family arrived in San Diego, they didn’t speak English, and were grappling with the separation from Macario’s mother, who remained in Brazil, where she worked as a doctor. The long-distance relationship continued for seven years. Her mother still lives in Brazil, with plans to travel to France.“The one thing that was keeping us together, in a way, was the fact that I was playing soccer and that I was getting better,” Macario said.A brilliant youth career attracted the attention of top college teams, but there was a constant pressure, she said, to keep going, to make the family’s sacrifices worth it.Macario was a record-setting scorer and two-time national champion at Stanford.Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group, via Associated PressHer steep rise from college star to full-time professional was swift after she became an American citizen last October. Hours earlier, she had been called up to her first training camp with the senior national team. But to be eligible to play, she first needed the approval of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. When it arrived in January, the U.S. women’s coach, Vlatko Andonovski, wasted no time bringing her into the fold.“Of course, as an immigrant to the U.S.A. myself, I understand how special it is to get that U.S. passport, so I’m really happy for her,” said Andonovski, a native of North Macedonia.Andonovski was in a select group of people from whom Macario sought guidance as she weighed the choice of a career in Europe or in the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States, where many of her national teammates play. The decision to go to Lyon was Macario’s, but Andonovski told her he supported whichever path she chose as long as her play continued at a high level. “Most important,” he said, “what she is getting in France is training with world-class players every day.”Moving to Europe is a nontraditional path for most American college players, though increasingly an option for national team stars. While her decision to go and to take on learning yet another language was difficult, Macario said her choice of playing for the United States over her birth country, Brazil, which had pursued her for years, was a simple one.“I left Brazil for a reason, and that was because my parents wanted a better life for my brother and I,” she said of moving to the United States. “For me, it’s home. It’s where I became who I am today.”“It’s a little intimidating,” Macario said of competing at the highest levels of women’s soccer, “but at the same time, that’s the challenge.”Gregg Newton/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd while the most surprising part of her trajectory — from youth scoring sensation in Southern California to national champion at Stanford to the women’s national team to Lyon — may be the speed with which it took place, she says she knows she still has quite a bit to learn.“I’m not up to that level yet,” she said of training against international teammates like Lyon defender Nikita Parris or alongside forwards she has long admired, like Lloyd. “During practices, they’re so intense. It almost makes the games easy.”Now she shares the field with them and others, and she expects to continue to do so for years to come. Looking forward, she said, her goals are simple.“Win everything,” she said, laughing. More

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      After Stumbling to the Finish Line, Liverpool Clinches Champions League Place

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      A win at Anfield guaranteed the club a place in the Champions League next season, but only a brief respite before it plunges into soccer’s new reality.LIVERPOOL, England — The goals arrived just as the nerves were fraying and the anxiety mounting, just as the 10,000 fans inside Anfield for the first time in a long time were recalling that watching soccer, live and in the flesh, is not how memory might have made it seem. It is not all celebration and carnival and song. Most of the time, it is nothing but stress.In the end, Liverpool’s road on the final day of the Premier League season was a straight one; the twists and turns would come elsewhere. Jürgen Klopp’s team needed to win to clinch a place in next season’s Champions League, and it duly delivered a victory by beating Crystal Palace, 2-0. The fretting and the furrowing would be for Chelsea and Leicester City, the other two teams in the chase.But Anfield did not know that, 20 minutes in, when Leicester took the lead at home against Tottenham and Liverpool was toiling against Palace, the sort of obdurate and organized opponent that had made the club’s winter so bleak, and for a brief moment the table rumbled and Klopp’s team was fifth, out in the cold.Fans had not been here for the six consecutive home defeats that derailed Liverpool’s season: they had all happened in a sterile and silent Anfield, but they had left a scar. And so as the news from Leicester filtered through, the mood seemed to shift. The songs, initially jubilant, felt a little more urgent.It took some time for the fans to set aside their stress and celebrate again.Pool photo by Paul EllisSadio Mané’s opening goal proved a potent antidote, for a while. Chelsea was losing at Aston Villa, Leicester winning. But as the clock ticked, the specter of the worst-case scenario appeared. Liverpool’s margins were fine. One mistake and a goal elsewhere and there would, at the last, be a sting in the tail.Anfield seemed on edge once more. The songs had stopped. In their stead came impatient rumblings whenever danger seemed to bubble, disappointed groans when an attack broke down. It is not only fans who might have romanticized the reality of being at a game, of the presence of a crowd. It can inject energy and vim and zest into players. But its demands can also cow and daunt and unnerve them.It was at that point, with the game and the day and the season entering its final few minutes, that Mané scored again. Anfield exhaled. The news elsewhere was good: Chelsea was losing, and so, too, was Leicester, kicking away the reprieve it had been offered. Liverpool had left it late to be sure, but it was safe.The songs could start again; the final odds and ends could be tied up. The departing Georginio Wijnaldum was afforded a rapturous ovation by the fans, and a guard of honor by his teammates. There was a lap of appreciation. Coming back to Anfield would bring a happy return.Liverpool didn’t need it in the end, but Gareth Bale and Tottenham provided some late — and vital — assistance at Leicester.Pool photo by Shaun BotterillBy Liverpool’s recent standards, of course, this season still goes down as a disappointment. In 2019, the club’s last game was a victory in the Champions League final. Last year, belatedly, its final appearance at Anfield was to lift the Premier League trophy. Merely securing a seat at Europe’s top table is not what Klopp and his players aimed to do this year.But all achievements are relative. Liverpool is not alone in having suffered a spree of injuries this season, but it is not easy to come up with another team — perhaps Leicester aside — that has been quite so hard hit. Klopp has been without his first-choice central defense since November. He lost his only specialist backup in January.The two midfielders Klopp deputized as back-line cover missed considerable spells, too (one, the captain Jordan Henderson, only returned to the substitutes’ ranks on Sunday). When he said, on the eve of this game, that Manchester City would not have been crowned champion if it had suffered similarly, particularly in the condensed schedule of the pandemic, it was treated as a barb, an unbecoming serving of sour grapes. He did have a point, though.Claiming third place, in those circumstances, may not represent a great triumph, but it still ranks as a considerable achievement. As recently as March, Liverpool was in free fall, risking compounding the hundreds of millions of dollars lost as a result of the pandemic by missing out on the riches of the Champions League.Klopp, though, has forged an impressive unanimity of purpose since then. Liverpool’s last 10 games have brought eight wins, and no defeats. It has been the in-form team in English soccer for the last two months. It is understandable that Klopp’s vision of the future is bullish, centered on the belief that when his squad is restored to fitness, Liverpool will be “the team nobody wants to play” once more.It is not, though, quite so straightforward. The pandemic might have had a more direct impact on teams like Arsenal and Tottenham, but its effect on Liverpool should not be underestimated.The club has won no little acclaim in recent years for its astute use of the transfer market: spending big when necessary — on the likes of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk — but also on its ability to snuffle out comparative bargains: Andy Robertson, Wijnaldum and even, to some extent, Mohamed Salah.Such liberal spending may not be possible as the club wrestles with the financial black hole opened by the pandemic. It will not be alone in that, of course. For Liverpool, though, just as worrying is the fact that it has only been able to spend that money because of its almost unrivaled ability to sell players.For Jürgen Klopp and James Milner, merely salvaging a Champions League place from this season was worth celebrating. Next year, the team and its fans will expect more.Pool photo by Paul EllisLiverpool has sold better than anyone in recent years, both in gleaning vast sums for its stars — the $170 million or so banked from Barcelona for Philippe Coutinho — and in haggling premium amounts for unwanted assets.It sold Dominic Solanke to Bournemouth for $22 million or so, and the backup goalkeeper Danny Ward to Leicester for $15 million. Danny Ings, Ryan Kent and Rafa Camacho — Ings aside, names hardly recalled at Anfield — raised about $50 million between them.Those are prices, though, that belong to another world, one of boundless money and limited thought. Liverpool will not be able to raise such eye-watering sums for Divock Origi and Xherdan Shaqiri and Marko Grujic and the rest this summer. If it harbored hopes of selling either Mané or Salah for a premium fee in order to finance the team’s next transformation, it is likely to be disappointed, too. For players of their age, the luxury market has stalled as well.Liverpool’s late run to the Champions League has, perhaps, drawn a little of the sting, given the club a little more elastic to play with as seeks to avoid such a narrow escape next year. With his injured stalwarts returning, Klopp is right to expect brighter things. But the road is not always as straight as it turned out to be at the end of a fraught and troubled campaign. There are still twists and turns, chicanes and hairpins, to negotiate. More