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      Bayern's Robert Lewandowski: The Making of a Goal Machine

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      Bayern’s Robert Lewandowski is the most complete, most ruthless, most polished striker of his generation. On Saturday, he broke a record that had stood for half a century.Robert Lewandowski does not characterize it as thought. Not conscious thought, anyway. In those moments when he has the ball at his feet and the goal in his sights, even after all these years, even when he can lay claim to being the most complete, most ruthless, most polished striker of his generation, he is not thinking.Or more to the point: He is not aware of himself thinking. He is not weighing options, rifling through possibilities, selecting the best of them. Thinking takes time, and there is no time. “There is not even half a second to think about what to do or how to do it,” he said.And yet he is thinking. Or more to the point: He is learning. He is absorbing information, analyzing it, filing it away.There was a moment in his game for Bayern Munich against Borussia Dortmund in March when the ball fell to Lewandowski on the edge of the penalty area. He took a touch, and a shot. It was not, by his own admission, “perfect.” His effort flew over the crossbar. Lewandowski turned away in disappointment, ruing an opportunity wasted.Except that it wasn’t. In that fraction of a second, the 32-year-old Lewandowski still noticed the following things: where Marwin Hitz, the Dortmund goalkeeper, was positioned on his line; when and how Hitz set himself to react to his shot; which of Dortmund’s defenders closed him down and which backed away; and the complex interplay of angles that accompanied their movements.He took all that in, computed it and reached a conclusion. “I thought that next time, maybe it would be possible to score either between the legs or to go for the far post,” he said. He logged it for later.An hour or so later, Bayern had recovered from the two-goal head start it had afforded Dortmund. Lewandowski had scored twice: once from close range, once from the penalty spot. Bayern led, 3-2.In the game’s dying minutes, Bayern’s Alphonso Davies crossed the ball to Leroy Sané. Rather than collect it, Sané feinted, allowing the pass to run through to the advancing Lewandowski. All of a sudden, he was pretty much where he had been in the first half: on the edge of the area, the ball at his feet, the goal in his sights.Again, he was not thinking. His subconscious had taken over. But this time, he had all the information he needed. One touch opened an angle. A second fizzed the ball low and beyond the reach of Hitz, into the far corner. “I had found the solution,” he said.The Straightest Way to GoalLewandowski has 39 goals for Bayern Munich, one shy of the Bundesliga single-season record that has stood since 1972.Pool photos by Andreas GebertStrikers, as a rule, tend not to be picky. Their ruthlessness is rooted in an understanding that all goals count the same: the one snaffled from a few inches after the goalkeeper has spilled the ball is no more or less valuable than a flying volley or an overhead kick. Artistic merit does not win games.It is a little surprising, then, that Lewandowski will confess to having a favorite type of goal. It is not the one you would expect from a player whose brilliance is rooted in economy. He does not, by his own admission, “like to make too much show.” He takes no more touches than necessary; every action is chosen only if it serves the ultimate purpose of scoring.That lack of ornament is his hallmark. It is why the first instinct of his teammate Thomas Müller is, in any given circumstance, to give him the ball. “I always try to find the straightest way to goal,” Müller said. As a general rule, he said, that path runs through Lewandowski.And yet there is one type of goal that Lewandowski enjoys more than any other: a strike from long range, the type Müller describes dismissively as “a circus shot.” “If I can score from outside the box, that is extra,” Lewandowski said.He can, at least, afford to be choosy. He has, after all, scored an awful lot of goals: 38 in two years for Znicz Pruszkow, his first senior club in his native Poland; 41 in two seasons for Lech Poznan; 103 in four years at Dortmund. At Bayern, somehow, his trajectory has grown even steeper.“I don’t feel I am 32,” he said. “I feel better than I did when I was 26 or 27.”Pool photos by Andreas GebertHe currently has 292 goals in 327 games for the club. This season, which started not long after his 32nd birthday, he has scored goals with bludgeoning, devastating consistency. After yet another hat trick as Bayern clinched a ninth straight league title on Saturday, he is one short of equaling Gerd Müller’s record of 40 goals scored in a single Bundesliga season, with two games to play. The mark has stood untouched for four decades, but Lewandowski could have broken it weeks ago: He had scored 35 goals in his first 25 games when he picked up a knee injury in late March.That, in a way, is what is most compelling about Lewandowski. There might now be just the faintest dusting of gray hairs at his temples, but he shows no signs of slowing. If anything, he is accelerating. “I don’t feel I am 32,” he said. “I feel better than I did when I was 26 or 27.”In part, he attributes that to the arc of his career. He was not earmarked for stardom from a young age. He did not start out in the academy of a major team. His first steps, instead, came in the Polish third division. From that point on, he said, he felt he “had to prove something.”When he arrived at Dortmund in 2011, he remembers feeling he had to train when others might have taken days off to recover: The pain, he said, “was not important.” Looking back, he wonders if he pushed himself too hard. “After three months, I was too tired, so I needed longer to show my form,” he said.To those who have worked with him, though, his hunger is only a part of the formula. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild this year, Jürgen Klopp, his manager at Dortmund, called Lewandowski the best player he has coached. “How he pushed himself to become the player he is today, that’s extraordinary,” Klopp said. “He took every step he needed to be that goal machine. Every one.”Built to ScoreOnly a knee injury has slowed Lewandowski this season.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Holger Broich looks at Lewandowski, he does not see what we see: the deftness of his touch, the surety of his finishing and the coolness of his head. Or, rather, he does not see only that. He sees beyond it, too, to what he has come to see as the real wonder of Lewandowski, the real source of his talent: the way, at the deepest possible level, that he is built.As Bayern’s head of science and fitness, Broich knows Lewandowski better than anyone. He knows that Lewandowski can tolerate an extraordinary amount of stress and pain, as his almost spotless injury record demonstrates. He knows that his metabolism allows him to develop, and regenerate, the sorts of muscle fiber a striker needs.He knows that at least part of that is hard-wired into Lewandowski’s DNA. “Talent is a very broad term,” Broich said. “It has to do with genetic prerequisites, too.”But Broich also believes that all of that accounts for only “40 to 60 percent” of athletes’ ability. The rest depends on who they are, what they do with it. And Klopp was not exaggerating when he said that Lewandowski’s whole life, for more than a decade, had been designed to help him score as many goals as possible.It started with cornflakes. “Every morning, I ate cornflakes with milk,” Lewandowski said. “I thought it was fine. It was only breakfast, I was skinny, I had muscles. I thought sweet things were OK because I didn’t have a problem with my weight. But sometimes, by 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., I was tired, even before training, and I didn’t know why.”So in his early 20s, he started to experiment. He cut out milk. He avoided refined sugar. “I saw a difference after a few weeks, a few months,” he said.But his focus was not on the immediate. “I thought that if I changed the things I did, it could help me play at a higher level for longer,” he said. “I knew I could not expect immediate results. I did it because I had to try. I knew if I started at the top level a little later, I could be there for longer.”Now — thanks in part to the expertise of his wife, Anna, a nutritionist — Lewandowski, semifamously, eats his meals in what is generally accepted to be the wrong order. “If I have time to have dessert, I prefer to eat it an hour or so before lunch,” he said. “I don’t always eat it, but if I do, I try to have a distance between carbohydrates and protein.”Lewandowski scored three times Saturday in a 6-0 rout of Borussia Mönchengladbach that sealed Bayern Munich’s ninth straight Bundesliga title.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is not simply his diet that has been refined. Over the years, Lewandowski has investigated anything and everything that might give him an edge. “These details make a big difference,” he said. “It is not just performance or ability: If something that can help me run faster, run more, recover quicker, I try to do it.”That, obviously, comes at a cost. A life built around scoring goals inevitably means a life stripped of other things. Lewandowski professes not to miss any of it; the only thing he regrets, he said, is that soccer’s unrelenting schedule means he does not get to be spontaneous, to take a weekend off to go away with Anna and their two daughters.And so even now he keeps searching for edges. He takes a keen interest in the work Broich and his sports science team do at Bayern: the performance diagnostics, the individualized training programs. What Lewandowski is — the way he is built: the muscle fibers and the metabolism and the genetic predisposition — might account for half of what he has achieved. The other half is down to who he is. After all, as Broich said, “the rest has to be acquired.”The Switch“He took every step he needed to be that goal machine,” said Jürgen Klopp, who coached Lewandowski at Dortmund. “Every one.”Pool photo by Leon KuegelerThere is a story that Lewandowski tells about a day spent on a golf course with a group of friends. They were there, ostensibly, for a friendly round. They were not competing, not in any real sense. Until, that is, Lewandowski noticed he had a chance to win.“It was like a switch had been flicked,” he said. “The professional player in me came out. The button changed from off to on, and I saw the difference between playing for fun and playing to win. You have to choose whether to have fun or whether to compete.”That time, Lewandowski managed to reverse the process. He did not win. “That time, I chose to have fun,” he said. (He may, of course, be saying this because he did not win.)There are other occasions, though, when he needs the switch. At Bayern, Lewandowski has won everything there is to win. He was chosen by FIFA as the world’s best men’s player last year. He is closing in on 500 career goals, and on Gerd Müller’s once-untouchable record. There is nothing left for him to prove.He has honed his instincts to such a point that he can, without thinking, absorb all the information he needs to solve a problem, to score a goal, in a fraction of a second. He has turned himself into a machine.But even now, every goal brings with it an overwhelming sense of joy. “You feel like you did when you were a child,” he said. It washes over him, now, for 30 seconds, maybe a minute.And then, every single time, he is faced with a choice. “You can think: I have scored once, it’s enough,” he said. “You can lose focus, start freestyling. Or you can think I have scored once, so maybe I can score another. Is one enough, or do you want more? You need the button.”Lewandowski has never had much difficulty making that choice. He does not even have to think. Or more to the point: He is not aware of himself thinking. “You press the switch,” he said, and you start to think about scoring again, and again, and again.A mural on the wall of an elementary school in Lewandowski’s native Poland.Wojtek Jargilo/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      Liverpool's Jordan Henderson: The Captain of Everything

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      Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson has not played in months. But the art of being a captain is not limited to soccer, and for Henderson, leading is not limited to his team.LIVERPOOL, England — Jordan Henderson had plenty of things on his mind. First and foremost, there was the wound on his thigh, a legacy of the surgery he had undergone a few weeks earlier, and which was not yet properly healed. Until it had, he could not do much beyond change his bandages, and wait. The problem, he would admit, is that he is not much given to waiting.He needed it to heal so that he could train again, and he needed to train again so that he could play again. This was his next worry. That night, his Liverpool team was hosting Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinal. It was the sort of occasion that Henderson relishes, but the wound meant he would be absent, as he had been for about six weeks.Henderson is not much given to absence, either. In the course of several hours of interviews spread over the last three months, as he recuperated from the injury, he acknowledged often that he is a “bad patient.” He finds the stillness difficult, but he finds the lack of agency, the powerlessness, worse.He had been there over the winter as Liverpool’s season imploded. Ravaged by injury and running on empty, the club lost six home games in a row. It slipped from the Premier League summit to fourth and then sixth and then eighth. It felt, to Henderson, like it was his “responsibility” to help restore the course.And he knew that if the wound did not heal and he could not play again for Liverpool that his plans for the summer would be derailed. He had spoken to Gareth Southgate, the England manager, who had assured the 30-year-old Henderson that he would be given all the time he could to prove his fitness for this summer’s European Championship. Henderson knew, though, that there was a deadline, and that he would have to meet it.Henderson has not played since February but hopes to return in time to make England’s roster for this summer’s European Championship.Yet even with all of that on his plate, with all of that waiting and worrying to do, Henderson had taken on something else, too. He had been thinking a lot, recently, about abuse on social media. Like anyone in the public eye, he had firsthand experience of it: not only the constant, low-key droning of the snipers and the trolls, but the barrage of acid he had endured in his early days at Liverpool.He was less concerned about that, though, than about his friends and teammates who had been racially abused, about young players being exposed to it before their skins have thickened, about teenagers and children being bullied online. And so he did something that he is given to do: He found out how he could help.Earlier in the year, he had given testimony to a British government panel on the issue of social media safety. A week earlier, he had handed over control of his accounts to a nonprofit that fights online abuse. And then, as his teammates prepared to face Real Madrid, he held a Zoom meeting with executives at Instagram, peppering them with questions about what measures they were taking to help.They told him about tombstone folders and muting comments. He pressed them for answers on the mechanisms they have for reporting abuse. He learned about their use of artificial intelligence. He told them where he thought their efforts fell short.He did not, really, have to do any of it. He had enough on his plate. But that, as his friend and former teammate Nedum Onuoha said, is not really how Henderson works. “Jordan wants to listen, learn and understand,” he said. “He sees a greater perspective than his own.”Henderson does not put it in quite such glowing terms. He feels a “massive responsibility,” he said, not only to Liverpool, not only to fans, but to anyone who looks up to players. “We have the platform to help,” he said. It comes down, in his mind, to quite a simple equation. “If I can help, why would I not?”Hug It OutOne thing that becomes very clear, very quickly, in the cavernous silence of an empty Premier League stadium is that Jordan Henderson is extremely loud. During a game, he essentially offers play-by-play commentary: chiding and cheerleading, barking orders, directing play. He talks constantly. He stops only to gather breath, and shout.Henderson admits that his in-game monologues can sometimes go too far, and a few have led to apologies to teammates. “In the heat of the moment, you forget.” Pool photo by Carl RecineHe does not quite accept that assessment. He will admit only to being “vocal,” and he is aware that not all of his teammates appreciate it. “Some don’t mind,” he said. “Some don’t like it.” He has gotten better, over the years, at working out who falls into which category. If he calls it wrong, he is quick to make amends. “You hug it out,” he said, “and you move on.”Henderson came of age in an era when English soccer was still dominated by its captains. Roy Keane at Manchester United, John Terry at Chelsea, Steven Gerrard at Liverpool: They were symbols of and synonyms for the clubs they represented, captains in the tradition of Bryan Robson and Roy of the Rovers, figures who dominated games and bent seasons to their will.He became a captain, though, at a time when all that was starting to seem a little antiquated in the age of the supercoach and the system, when instructions come from the sideline and movements are learned by rote, when the rise of data has relegated the great intangibles — character and hunger and desire — to a sort of ancient superstition.To Henderson, though, being a captain matters. It is a responsibility he feels intensely, and personally. He thinks, a lot, about what it is to be a captain, about his own needs and those of his team, about the people management side and the Human Resources side and the psychologist side, about what sort of captain he wants to be.He has wrestled with that balance ever since he was given the job at Liverpool, handed the daunting task of following in Gerrard’s footsteps. In one sense, he was the obvious candidate: He had been a vice captain for a couple of years, and he had Gerrard’s seal of approval. “I always had the confidence that he felt I was the right person,” Henderson said.Steven Gerrard handing the captain’s armband to Henderson during a game in 2015, foreshadowing a change that became permanent.AMA/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn another sense, though, he was a risk. It is hard to imagine, now, but Henderson became captain only a couple of years after Liverpool tried to trade him for the American forward Clint Dempsey. When Jürgen Klopp arrived as manager not long after Henderson was appointed, there was speculation the coach might wish to demote him.Klopp did the opposite. He offered Henderson his unqualified support. The player had struggled, initially, with the weight of the captaincy. He did not want his teammates to think the honor had changed him, but replacing Gerrard, he said, “probably affected me mentally.”“I was taking responsibility for a lot of things. I’ve always put the team first, but I was taking too much on for everyone else. That can jeopardize your own performances. Jürgen helped a lot with that side of things. He helped me take a bit of the weight off my back. It felt like it got easier.”Henderson has not, by any stretch, abdicated responsibility. He still sees it as his job to help young players and new signings settle in to Liverpool’s dressing room. He still feels it falls on him to maintain morale, to gather the team’s leaders when things are going wrong, to act as a bridge with ownership when necessary. He still takes defeat badly, personally.As he recuperated from his surgery, as he waited for his wound to heal, it was that side of the role he missed most. He wanted to be out on the field, of course, to try to change the rhythm and the course of Liverpool’s season, which can end with the solace of a Champions League place if it wins at home against Crystal Palace on Sunday. But more than that, he wanted to be back in the training facility, urging and exhorting and listening and talking.He knew, though, that he could not. When teammates were injured, he always made a point of checking in on them, offering to help if he could. He did not want them to feel they had to return the favor.“They have enough going on with games and everything,” he said. “They can’t be worrying about me.” All That We Have BuiltWhen fans turned against Liverpool for joining a proposed Super League, its players were caught in the middle.Jon Super/Associated PressHenderson was at home when Liverpool’s team bus pulled up outside Elland Road in Leeds. The injury to his adductor muscle that had forced him out of action for two months was healing nicely; he felt stronger, fitter, better. His mood had improved, too. He had been able to see his teammates a little more. Liverpool’s fortunes were turning, upgraded from disastrous to merely disappointing.That evening he watched on television as fans surrounded the bus carrying his teammates, venting their fury at the proposals — reported the day earlier — for a European Super League.Liverpool’s players had found out about the proposals at the same time as everyone else. Initially, Henderson did not pay them too much heed. Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, had been central to the plans, but nobody had informed the players. As he read about the proposal, though, it struck him as inherently “unacceptable.” “Teams not being relegated isn’t right,” he said. “You have to earn your right to be in the Champions League.”When he realized the Super League was not just paper talk, Henderson’s immediate reaction was to protect not just his team. By then, someone on the trip let him know that, when the players got inside the stadium in Leeds, they had found shirts waiting for them in the dressing room that were emblazoned with the Champions League logo and the slogan: “Earn It.”“The T-shirts, I felt, were disrespectful,” Henderson said. “The players hadn’t done anything. It wasn’t something we wanted..”Leeds United players wore T-shirts critical of the Super League before a match against Liverpool. But they also left a set for the visitors, annoying Henderson.Pool photo by Paul EllisBut he worried, too, about his club. He felt loyalty and, to some extent, gratitude to Liverpool’s owners. “If you look at it, they’ve done a good job,” he said. “They’ve grown the club. They’ve put money in. They’ve built a new training ground. They brought the manager in.”His fear, though, was that the Super League might drive a wedge between the club and its fans, that the unity of purpose that had driven Liverpool to the Champions League title in 2019 and the Premier League trophy in 2020 would be irrevocably fractured. “I was worried it would tarnish it,” he said. “We have all built to this point, and I didn’t want a divide.”After the game, Henderson and his teammates discussed their next step. They decided, the next day, to post a message to their social media accounts, drawn from comments midfielder James Milner had made to a television reporter after the game. “We don’t like it, and we don’t want it to happen,” he had said.The idea was to release the statement simultaneously, a synchronized signal that Liverpool’s players were unified in their opposition, and done in a way that nobody would have to risk public wrath alone. But someone had to go first. The rest of Liverpool’s squad did not post the message until Henderson had pressed the button.A Captain for the CaptainsMost of the time, the WhatsApp group containing all 20 current Premier League captains lies dormant. It is updated occasionally, adding or removing members as teams are promoted and relegated, but for the most part, it is silent. Its members might, in some cases, be friends, but in the thick of the season, they are principally rivals.As soccer grasped at the significance of the Super League proposals, though, it buzzed into life. What had happened at Leeds had convinced Henderson that it was important the players presented a united front. Divisions along tribal lines, he knew, would only undercut the message.So on the same day as he was coordinating the Liverpool’s players’ response to the idea, he was suggesting a Zoom meeting of all the league’s captains to discuss a broader statement. In the end, it was not required: The Super League collapsed the day before it was scheduled to take place.But the effort was emblematic of how, over the last year or so, Henderson’s role as a captain has extended beyond Liverpool. Onuoha, only half-joking, calls him the de facto “captain of captains.”Onuoha, second from left, and Henderson, center, in 2010, when they played for Sunderland.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesIt is not a position Henderson has sought, but there is something about him that draws his peers and fellow professionals to him. The existence of the captains’ WhatsApp group at all, in fact, owes something to him.Last year, as soccer tried to pick its way back from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Henderson fielded calls from friends at several other clubs. They were all unsolicited, unexpected, and they were all broadly the same: the players wanted to help, but none of them knew how to do it. Instinctively, they called Henderson.“There were players doing it privately and players doing it with their clubs, but it struck me that we were more powerful together,” he said. He did his research, and corralled the captains to throw their — and their team’s — efforts behind an organization called N.H.S. Charities Together, which works to support staff members and patients of Britain’s National Health Service. The initiative was only made public because the players wanted staff to know they appreciated their work.Henderson was similarly engaged as the captains — through the same WhatsApp group — workshopped ideas for how to show support for the Black Lives Matter protests as the Premier League prepared to return to the field. It was Henderson’s idea to affix a Black Lives Matter badge to every player’s sleeve, but he proposed it only after reaching out to Black colleagues.The Black Lives Matter patch that all players wore on their jerseys to start the Premier League season.Pool photo by Cath Ivill“He called me during the protests to talk,” said the Nigeria-born, Manchester-reared Onuoha. “He asked me to tell him about my experiences. I love him for that. He didn’t have to make that call, but he wanted to learn, and to understand.”A New FightIn the aftermath of the Super League debacle, Henderson still had plenty of things on his mind. His training was ramping up. He would not, most likely, be able to play for Liverpool again this season, as his team sought to salvage a Champions League place, but he hoped to recover to earn his spot for England. This week, Southgate sent two physiotherapists to Liverpool’s training facility to check on his progress.And he was still thinking about protecting his teammates, still thinking about protecting his club, still thinking about making sure all of the players at all of the other clubs remained united. But he was also thinking, more broadly, about what happens next.“The Super League wasn’t right,” he said. “But the new Champions League isn’t right, either. There has been no consideration for player welfare. I know it is hard to hear players moaning when people are working nine-to-five, but we are giving everything when we play. You are exhausted when you come off after a game, and then you have no time to recover. It’s unacceptable. It’s screaming for injury.”Henderson trains alone at Liverpool, kept at a distance from his teammates by his injury and coronavirus rules. He has seen that firsthand. The injury that cost him the last three months of the season, he believes, was a result of soccer’s compressed, overloaded schedule. And he has “no doubt” that the ruptured patellar tendon that ended the season of Joe Gomez, his teammate with Liverpool and England, “was a consequence of what we have been asked to do.”It has all led him to the conclusion that something has to change. He does not know what that change might look like, not yet. All he knows is that he has a voice, one that carries way beyond the confines of an empty stadium, and that it is his duty to use it: on the N.H.S., on equality, on social media abuse, on whatever he feels strongly about.He does not do it because he thinks anyone should feel compelled to listen to him, just because he is a soccer player, just because he is a captain. He does it because he feels that status gives him a responsibility to speak, whenever he feels he can help. In his mind, it is quite simple. “If you feel strongly about something,” he said, “then it would be a bit of a sin not to.” More

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      The Super League Thought It Had a Silent Partner: FIFA

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      Publicly, soccer’s global governing body criticized a breakaway European Super League. Privately, it had held talks for months with the founders about endorsing the competition.Tucked away in the pages and pages of financial and legal jargon that constitute the founding contract of the Super League, the failed project that last month briefly threatened the century-old structures and economics of European soccer, were references to one “essential” requirement.The condition was deemed so important that organizers agreed that the breakaway plan could not succeed without satisfying it and yet was so secret that it was given a code name even in contracts shared among the founders.Those documents, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times, refer to the need for the Super League founders to strike an agreement with an entity obliquely labeled W01 but easily identifiable as FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. That agreement, the documents said, was “an essential condition for the implementation of the SL project.”Publicly, FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have joined other soccer leaders, fans and politicians in slamming the short-lived Super League project, which would have allowed a small group of elite European teams — a group that included Spain’s Real Madrid, Italy’s Juventus and the English powerhouses Manchester United and Liverpool, among others — to accumulate an ever larger share of the sport’s wealth.But privately, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen soccer executives, including one Super League club owner, Infantino was aware of the plan and knew some of his closest lieutenants had for months — until at least late January — been engaged in talks about lending FIFA’s backing to the breakaway league.The Super League was perhaps the most humbling failure in modern soccer history. Announced by 12 of the world’s richest clubs late on a Sunday night in April, it was abandoned less than 48 hours later amid a hailstorm of protest from fans, leagues, teams and politicians. Its founding teams have since apologized — some of them multiple times — for taking part in it, and a few could still face significant financial and sporting consequences.But the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to a week of public drama have laid bare simmering tensions between FIFA and European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, over control of billions of dollars in annual revenue; exposed a series of frayed relationships among some of the sport’s top leaders that may be beyond repair; and raised new questions about the role played by FIFA and Infantino in the project that shook soccer’s foundations.FIFA declined to respond to specific questions related to the involvement of Infantino or his aides in the planning of the Super League. Instead it pointed to its previous statements and its commitment to processes in which “all key football stakeholders were consulted.”The Super League’s discussions with FIFA began in 2019. They were led by a group known as A22, a consortium of advisers headed by the Spain-based financiers Anas Laghari and John Hahn and charged with putting together the Super League project. A22 officials held meetings with some of Infantino’s closest aides, including FIFA’s deputy secretary general, Mattias Grafstrom.In at least one of those meetings, the breakaway group proposed that, in exchange for FIFA’s endorsement of its project, the Super League would agree to the participation of as many as a dozen of its marquee teams in an annual FIFA-backed World Cup for clubs. The teams also agreed to waive payments they would have earned by taking part, a potential windfall for FIFA of as much as $1 billion each year. After their initial meetings, the advisers reported back that they had found a receptive audience.The Super League’s driving force: Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid’s president.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesObtaining FIFA’s support was not merely a hedge; the organization’s consent was required to prevent the project from being mired in costly and lengthy litigation and to preclude any punishments for the players who took part.But it was also an insurance policy for the players. In a previous superleague discussion in 2018, FIFA had issued dark warnings that players could be banned from their national teams — and thus the World Cup — for appearing in an unsanctioned league.By the middle of last year, the advisers from A22 were telling clubs that “FIFA was on board,” according to a Super League club owner. Others interviewed, including several with direct knowledge of the meetings who spoke anonymously because they would face legal action for publicly disclosing information subject to secrecy rules, said FIFA was at least open to the idea of the new league. But they said the organization and its leaders remained noncommittal — at least officially — until more details about the structure of the project were in place.Confident they could obtain the support they needed, the organizers discussed various concepts for their new league before landing on the one they presented to the world when they broke cover on April 18. The Super League, as it would be known, would have 15 permanent members but would allow access to five additional teams from Europe each season.A22 had been working on iterations of a superleague for as long as three years. Laghari, an executive at the advisory firm Key Capital Partners who has known the Real Madrid president, Florentino Pérez, since he was a child, was to be the league’s first secretary general. Pérez had long been the driving force behind a superleague, but now, as he had come to grow confident he had FIFA on board, the stars started to align for him and his friend.In Infantino, Pérez and Laghari had found an energetic president eager to remake the soccer business. Infantino often spoke about being open to new ventures and proposals — he has championed the expansion of both the World Cup and FIFA’s Club World Cup in recent years — as he sought to assert FIFA’s dominance over the club game in a manner unlike any of his predecessors. Pérez and Laghari also found kindred spirits in the men who controlled most of Europe’s top clubs. Most were drawn to a project that promised to open a spigot of new revenue while ensuring that costs would be controlled, leading to enormous profits and access to elite competition in perpetuity.Aleksander Ceferin, left, and Infantino in 2018. They have clashed repeatedly over control of club soccer, particularly in Europe.Alexander Hassenstein/Getty ImagesYet even as they received assurances from the A22 advisers about FIFA’s involvement, some skeptical club owners did their own due diligence by reaching out directly to senior FIFA officials. And the word they got back, according to a team executive with direct knowledge of at least one of those conversations, was the same they were hearing from Madrid: If the plan was put together in a certain way, FIFA would not oppose it.Those talks gave the clubs and JPMorgan, the American investment bank that had agreed to finance the project, a level of comfort about its viability. Their confidence wavered, though, when leaks about a potential superleague emerged in news reports in January, accompanied by whispers of FIFA’s involvement in the talks.Alarmed by the reports, European soccer’s top official, Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, held an urgent meeting with Infantino at UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland in which he asked Infantino directly if he was involved in the plan. Infantino said he was not, but he initially demurred when asked to commit to a statement condemning the proposals. Amid intense pressure and growing requests for comment, though, he backed down.On Jan. 21, a statement was issued in the name of FIFA and soccer’s six regional confederations. It said a “closed” European league would not be recognized by FIFA or the confederations and reiterated the threat of a World Cup ban for any participant.The statement shocked the organizers of the Super League, as their talks with FIFA until that stage had been positive. But according to people involved in the planning, they also sensed a signal in its wording: FIFA said it would not recognize a closed competition, but the Super League was now planning to supplement its roster of 15 permanent members with five qualifiers every season.The A22 advisers, according to the club owner, insisted that loophole meant all was not lost. “They reported that FIFA was still open to something,” he said.The founders’ plan was to tie the Super League to FIFA’s Club World Cup, the owner said. That way the clubs would commit as many as 12 of the biggest teams in Europe to Infantino’s ambitious global competition in exchange for FIFA’s blessing of their new league. To sweeten the deal, they considered waiving $1 billion in potential payouts to allow FIFA to keep the money as a so-called solidarity payment that could be spent on soccer development projects around the world.It is unknown if any more talks took place between FIFA and the Super League clubs in the weeks before the clubs broke cover and announced their project. But FIFA was the last of the major soccer governing bodies to issue an official statement on the proposed league after the clubs went public, and it only did so after UEFA, top leagues and politicians had made clear their opposition.Arriving as Ceferin was calling the leaders of the breakaway league “snakes and liars,” FIFA’s statement was far more measured. Any talk of excluding players from the World Cup was quietly dropped, and FIFA instead offered nuanced, conciliatory language. FIFA said it stood “firm in favour of solidarity in football and an equitable redistribution model which can help develop football as a sport, particularly at global level.”It also reiterated that it could only “express its disapproval to a ‘closed European breakaway league’ outside of the international football structures.”For those engaged in the breakaway, the words — as they had in January — were vague enough to suggest that there was still hope for their project, that FIFA might still be open to providing its backing.Within 48 hours, though, their hopes were dashed. Opposition to the plan had by then reached a fever pitch. Fans in Britain — where six of the 12 founding members were based — were protesting in the streets, and politicians had threatened to enact laws to block the league.Fans of Chelsea and the five other Premier League clubs that had signed up for the Super League forced their teams to reconsider and withdraw.Matt Dunham/Associated PressInfantino, just as he had in January, once again came under pressure from Ceferin to distance himself from the plans. He did so in a speech to UEFA’s congress on April 20 in which he effectively walked away from the Super League project.“We can only strongly disapprove the creation of the Super League,” Infantino said. “A Super League which is a closed shop. A breakaway from the current institutions, from the leagues, from the associations, from UEFA and from FIFA. There is a lot to throw away for the short-term financial gain of some. They need to reflect, and they need to assume responsibility.”Hours later, realizing that the “essential” requirement their contract had called for would not be forthcoming, the first clubs started to walk away. By nightfall, all six English clubs had announced they were out. By midnight, three other founders had followed.Today only three teams — Pérez’s Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — remain as holdouts, refusing to sign a letter of apology demanded by UEFA as a condition of their reintegration into European soccer. If they do not sign, all three face significant penalties, including a potential ban from the Champions League.Infantino, meanwhile, faces pressures of his own, not to mention accusations of betrayal. The head of the Spanish league, Javier Tebas, openly called him one of the masterminds behind the breakaway league and said he had told Infantino as much when the men met briefly at the UEFA Congress.“It’s he who is behind the Super League, and I already told him in person,” Tebas said this month. “I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Behind all of this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino.” More

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      The Premier League Took a Knee. For Some, That's Not Enough.

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      For 11 months, players across England have taken a knee to highlight racial injustice. But some fear the leagues who endorsed the protests will move on without making meaningful changes.Michael Oliver blew his whistle, but nothing happened. The Premier League had been waiting for three months for this moment, forced into unwilling suspension by the coronavirus pandemic. This was its grand return, the first game back, a late spring evening at Villa Park last June. And yet there was no sound, no fury.Instead, as Oliver’s whistle trilled, the players of Aston Villa and Sheffield United dropped to one knee. Though none of the players had done it before, the choreography was flawless. They remained there for a few seconds, a silent, defiant tableau. English soccer’s year of protest had begun.Some of the details have changed since the players started taking a knee. That night, for example, the back of each player’s jersey bore not their name but the slogan Black Lives Matter. Badges on their sleeves that once bore the same phrase have since replaced by new ones reading No Room For Racism.The act, though, has endured for the last 11 months, playing out before every Premier League game and at the vast majority of matches in the other three tiers of professional soccer in England. For many, that longevity has supplemented, rather than diminished, the significance of the act.“I feel the power every time the players drop down and show solidarity,” said Troy Townsend, the head of development at Kick It Out, a nonprofit organization that works to promote equality and inclusion within soccer.The protest has served, according to Simone Pound, Head of Equalities at the Professional Footballers’ Association, the players’ union, as an “impactful call for equality and justice.”“I believe in taking the knee,” she said. “I’m grateful to the players, too, because as a Black woman, I feel like they provided a symbol of immense power at a time when we all needed it.”Tottenham’s Serge Aurier before kickoff at Leeds this month.Pool photo by Jason CairnduffThe players did not have to defy the league to take part. No player has been threatened with ostracism or censure. No national anthem — a largely American pregame tradition — brought politics or patriotism into play. The protests have, instead, taken place with the express support of the game’s authorities, its organizers, its broadcasters, its owners. A sport with no longstanding tradition of protest has, for almost a year, not only permitted but encouraged its players to make their voices heard.There are some, though, who worry that kind of sanctioning only serves to neuter the protest, that by absorbing it into the ritual of every game — the walk from the tunnel, the pregame team photo, the jog into position — it has become “just something we do,” as Wilfried Zaha, the Crystal Palace forward, has put it.In their eyes, the year of kneeling will soon recede into the past with all of the other campaigns and slogans that soccer has rolled out before, all of them designed to give the impression of demanding change while avoiding the need to institute it.“Apart from people talking about it, what has actually changed in football?” said Les Ferdinand, a former Premier League striker and now the technical director of Queens Park Rangers. “I did think it was powerful, at the start, but we don’t need more badges or T-shirts or gestures. We’re asking for action.”Item Number SixTroy Deeney waited and waited for someone to mention Black Lives Matter. Last June, Deeney, the Watford striker, joined the other 19 captains of the Premier League’s teams on a video call with the competition’s executives to discuss the practicalities of the league’s looming return to action.The agenda for the meeting ran to six items. Last on the list was how the league and its players might respond to the Black Lives Matter moment. After the fifth subject had been cleared, though, Deeney heard someone say: “Unless anyone’s got anything else to say, we’ll wrap the meeting up there.”Deeney did have something to say. He and the Leicester captain Wes Morgan, who is also Black, had been exchanging messages during the call. Deeney told Morgan he was going to speak up. “Actually, I’ve got a huge problem,” Deeney said, taking himself off mute. Eight minutes later, by his own account, he finished speaking.At that point, everyone else joined in. Kevin De Bruyne, Jordan Henderson and Seamus Coleman — the white captains of Manchester City, Liverpool and Everton — offered their support for what Deeney had said. The league’s executives, too, indicated that they were open to ideas.Sheffield United’s David McGoldrick was one of the first to suggest players kneel before matches.Pool photo by Peter PowellIt was De Bruyne who suggested replacing the players’ names with Black Lives Matter. Henderson suggested a badge. Deeney volunteered his wife’s design services. “Within 24 hours it went from try and avoid the conversation to having Black Lives Matter on the back and the Premier League badge changed,” Deeney said.In hindsight, the most significant suggestion came from David McGoldrick, the Sheffield United captain. He wondered if the players should borrow the symbolism of Colin Kaepernick and a host of players in American sports and take a knee before games.“It’s not an accident that the gesture came from America,” Townsend said. “I know there’s been communication between players in the United States and players in England. American athletes have empowered players over here. People used to worry that things like that were bad for their club, but now the players realize the strength and impact they have.”The players did not, at that stage, have a plan for how long the kneeling protests might last. They continued to kneel before every game while playing out the delayed end of last season. And on the eve of the new campaign, in September, they reaffirmed their commitment to the idea. “We will carry on doing it until there’s change,” said Lewis Dunk, the Brighton captain. The game’s authorities again gave their blessing.“The impact was obviously greater at the start,” said Nedum Onuoha, the former Manchester City defender. “People have got used to it. But every time the players do it, the commentators have to say something about it, they have to explain why they’re doing it. These are still conversations that need to be had. They still highlight that greater issue.”Over the course of the season, though, the spirit of unity that had inspired the protest started to splinter. In September, Queens Park Rangers announced that its players would no longer take the knee before games. Ferdinand said the gesture had “reached the stage of good P.R. but little more than that.” After the turn of the year, others followed suit: first individual players — Lyle Taylor of Nottingham Forest, Brentford’s Ivan Toney and Palace’s Zaha — and then entire clubs, including Brentford and Bournemouth. “We’re kind of being used as puppets,” Toney said. “Take the knee and the people at the top can rest for a while.” Zaha, for one, said he preferred to “stand tall.”Face to FaceAs he looks back on almost a year of protest within soccer, there is one image that stands out to Kick It Out’s Townsend. It is not from those early days last year but from this April, long after taking the knee had become an accepted, unremarkable part of soccer’s iconography.In March, a Slavia Prague player — Ondrej Kudela — was accused of racially abusing Glen Kamara, a Black midfielder for the Scottish champion Rangers, during a Europa League game. The next month, in the next round of the competition, Slavia Prague was drawn against Arsenal.When the teams met in the second leg in Prague, days after Kudela was issued a 10-game suspension for abusing Kamara, Slavia’s players stood together on the center circle, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. A few yards away, Arsenal’s starters took a knee. Their captain, Alexandre Lacazette, moved even closer, staring directly at the Slavia team from one knee, as if challenging them to understand his gesture.“It was one of the most powerful images I have seen,” Townsend said. “And the referee, the symbol of authority, was kneeling with them.”Townsend has worked in soccer for long enough to know that the power of images alone will not be enough to institute the sort of change that he knows is necessary. “Too often, the game has let the victim down,” he said, pointing to the disparity between the punishments meted out to fans found guilty of racially abusing players and a fellow professional doing so.Ferdinand points, too, to the issue of the almost complete lack of Black managers and executives in the English game, and especially at its highest levels like the Premier League.“People always say that Black players need to get the experience to get the jobs,” he said. “I am seeing white players with no experience get jobs. I am seeing white managers who haven’t even been players get jobs. It is Caucasian manager after Caucasian manager, and it doesn’t change because nothing changes at the levels where we need change.”Behind the scenes, though, some of that change — the incremental, structural sort — may be starting to happen. The Premier League now has a Black Participants’ Working Group feeding into its policy decisions. The Professional Footballers’ Association, the English players union, is running governance courses designed to prepare its Black members to take places on the boards of clubs and governing bodies.“Changes are happening,” Pound said. “Are they happening fast enough? No. But will those voices calling for change potentially make that change happen faster? Yes, I think they will.”What nobody is quite sure of, at this point, is what comes next. Talks continue about what form, if any, the ongoing protest will take next season. A number of possibilities are under discussion.Les Ferdinand, Q.P.R.’s director of football, has been a vocal proponent of seeing more people of color in roles like his.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersOnuoha suspects that only when the kneeling stops will its value be seen. “If you take it away, then the topic vanishes,” he said. He said any new form of protest has to be as visible as kneeling. “Make people have to mention it, so that those conversations keep happening.”“Doing something is better than doing nothing,” he added. “If this is imperfect for you, then the onus is on you to come up with something better.”Pound worries, a little, that the message may be lost in a discussion over what individual players choose to do. Townsend does not want the kneeling to stop, not when it may resonate more than ever next season, once fans return to stadiums.“I think football has got away with it a little bit,” he said. “Everyone could jump on board because you were rarely going to have an incident in an empty ground.” That may change, he said, when there are people in the stands who might — as a small number did at last weekend’s F.A. Cup final — not agree with the act, or even with the broader sentiment.Townsend said he was no less tired than Ferdinand of soccer’s ability to come up with a campaign, to pat itself on the back, and then to move on. He, too, is sick of slogans that lead to stasis.This time, though, he detects a genuine shift. For a year, before every game, the players of the Premier League have been protesting. There is a momentum there that will not just evaporate. “The key thing is that all of this has been driven by the players,” he said. “And the players have made it very clear that they want change.” More

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      Juventus Finds Its Fall Guy in Andrea Pirlo

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      Andrea Pirlo was given a difficult task and failed at it. But if Juventus misses out on next season’s Champions League, it won’t be entirely his fault.The jokes almost wrote themselves. Last summer, Juventus announced that it had installed Andrea Pirlo as coach of its under-23 team. It was a thoroughly sensible idea: the perfect place for a beloved former player to cut his teeth in a new phase of his career, the ideal spot for him to take his first job in management.The same, at the time, could not be said for what came next. Ten days after getting that job, Pirlo was handed another, this time as coach of Juventus’s first team, the one that included not only several of his former teammates, but Cristiano Ronaldo, too. And so the jokes came, cheap and quick and irresistible. Pirlo must have really impressed in those eight days! No wonder he got the job: He’d never lost a game!The official explanation was only a little more convincing. “Today’s choice is based on the belief that Pirlo has what it takes to lead an expert and talented squad to new successes,” a Juventus club statement read. There seemed to be only three feasible, overlapping explanations, and none of them reflected especially well on the team’s hierarchy.One — the most likely — was that it had decided to fire his predecessor, Maurizio Sarri, with little time to find a replacement who was not already in-house. Pirlo just so happened to be in the right place at the right time.The second explanation held that Pirlo was a place-holder, willing to do the job for a year or two, until a more suitable candidate became available.And third was the thought that, after nine Serie A titles in nine years, Juventus had come to the conclusion that it could employ anyone it wanted — the least talented of the Backstreet Boys, a friendly spaniel, or maybe, at a push, Sam Allardyce — and still win the league.Whatever the club’s thinking, its folly was ruthlessly exposed over the subsequent nine months. It is not just that Juventus has ceded its title, or even that it has surrendered its dynasty so meekly. It is that the decline has been far steeper, far quicker and far more consequential than the club could possibly have imagined.On Saturday, Juventus hosts Inter Milan — the team coached by its former manager, Antonio Conte, and overseen by its former technical director, Giuseppe Marotta, and that has swept to the championship this year — knowing that it must win if it is to retain any realistic ambition of playing in the Champions League next season. Otherwise, barring a collapse from one or more of Atalanta, A.C. Milan or Napoli, the ignominy of the Europa League beckons in Turin.Juventus currently lies in fifth place in Italy, just outside the Champions League places for next season.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe likelihood, of course, is that much of the blame for that will be placed squarely on Pirlo’s shoulders. Already, his future is the subject of intense scrutiny in the Italian news media: There have been various reports in the last few weeks of emergency talks inside the club to establish whether he will be allowed to fulfill the second and final year of his contract.Outside, too, he seems to have been identified as the source of the problem. This week, a handful of Juventus fans confronted — though that is not quite the right word for what was, basically, quite a congenial conversation — the veteran goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon outside a training facility the club was using and asked if it was true that the squad had given up on its rookie manager. Buffon assured the supporters it was not true.Regardless, Pirlo is experienced enough to know this is how it works. The manager is always the fall guy, and particularly in these circumstances. Juventus had won nine consecutive titles with experienced managers at its helm. The year it appointed a neophyte, it collapsed. It is hardly outrageous to believe those two things might be connected.For all the significance they are afforded, for all that we hang on their every word and elevate the best of them to guru status, managers do not make quite as much difference as we think. There have been several academic studies on how much of an impact they have on results. The book “Soccernomics” held that managers account for, at most, 8 percent of a team’s performance. “The Numbers Game” had it slightly higher. Neither estimate puts a manager’s significance close to the importance of money, or luck.That is not to say managers do not matter. Elite soccer, in particular, is a sport of the very finest of margins; often, all that separates great triumph from bitter disappointment is a momentary lapse of concentration here or a little extra fitness there. A single, controllable factor that affects 8 percent of the outcome matters a great deal.Inter Milan, led by the former Juventus manager Antonio Conte, won its first Italian title in a decade this season.Matteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockPirlo would, on the surface, seem to be proof of that. Juventus had what appeared to be an unassailable advantage over its domestic competition for almost a decade, and yet when it traded an experienced manager for an inexperienced one, it slumped not by a few points, but from first to, potentially, fifth. Eight percent is the difference, it turns out, between Serie A titles and the Europa League.A little deeper, though, the picture is more complex. The reason that soccer tends to react to disappointment by changing the manager is that it offers the illusion of the simple solution: Fix that 8 percent and everything else will follow. In the case of Juventus — in every case, for that matter — it does not quite work like that.The club that Pirlo inherited was not quite the smooth-running machine it appeared. His appointment itself was proof of that: He was hired on short notice because the incumbent, Sarri, had proved stylistically unsuited to the squad. Pirlo, from the start, appeared equally ill matched: The soccer he wanted to play did not seem to be the sort of soccer that fit the players at his disposal.Pirlo didn’t create the problems at Juventus, but he didn’t fix them, either.Alberto Lingria/ReutersThat sort of disjointed, disconnected thinking has infected almost everything Juventus has done for some time, perhaps since it last reached the Champions League final in 2017. The signing of Ronaldo — a hugely expensive indulgence, even if his performances preclude its being called a mistake — is the most glaring example. But there are many more.Juventus has spent the past few years desperately trying to offload whomever it can in order to reduce its salary commitments and to comply with European soccer’s financial regulations, often relying on curious swaps to do so: João Cancelo for Manchester City’s Danilo, Miralem Pjanic for Barcelona’s Arthur. It has left many on the squad feeling unwanted and uninvested.At one point, Juventus lent Gonzalo Higuaín to A.C. Milan and then Chelsea, only to welcome him back when Sarri was appointed. It then spent a summer trying to offload the playmaker Paulo Dybala, arguably its most gifted attacker other than Ronaldo, in order to pay Higuaín’s wages.Dybala stayed and, eventually, Higuaín left. Last season, Juventus was forced to leave Emre Can off its Champions League squad — without offering him any warning — because its playing resources were so bloated. He departed soon after, along with a clutch of other exiled veterans.Even the signing of Ronaldo — a commercial success and, broadly, a sporting one, too — has hardly been an exercise in joined-up thinking. At this stage in his career, Ronaldo is effectively a pared-down attacking spearhead; he cannot, or at least does not, run and press as he might have done a decade ago. And yet Juventus has presented him with two coaches whose approaches work only if attackers do just that: first Sarri, and now Pirlo.Will Cristiano Ronaldo accompany Juventus into the Europa League next season?Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is easy to see why Juventus would want to assume that Pirlo is the source of all of its troubles, to decide that changing the coach, swapping out the rookie for a more garlanded name, has the air of a panacea. It was a gamble, and it backfired. He wasn’t good enough, not yet. It was too much, too soon.That might all be true, but it is not the root of the problem. Pirlo is not a cause; he is a symptom. The issue, for Juventus, is not with the man who got the job, it is with the people who gave it to him, whose expertise runs so deep that they took a coach with eight days’ experience and threw him into one of the most challenging jobs in Europe, and expected it all to work out fine.A coach, after all, makes only 8 percent of the difference. The other 92 percent comes from the structure and the organization and the thinking behind the manager. Perhaps, as Juventus confronts its demise, the blame should be apportioned on similar lines.The Meaning of the CupBrendan Rodgers and Jamie Vardy haven’t given up on the cup’s magic.Pool photo by Richard HeathcoteIt is the memories passed down between the generations that slowly, steadily accrete into something that becomes a tradition, and so it is with the greatest tradition in English soccer: worrying about the diminishing majesty of the F.A. Cup.Those who were there speak in hushed tones of the year that Manchester United was forced to pull out because the authorities wanted the team to play in a tournament in Brazil instead, or of the time that Liverpool sent out a squad of under-7s because the club had a more important game in Qatar the next day.But every club has its own story: a set of reserves sent out to play so as to save the first team for the league; a manager admitting that the cup is a distraction from the much more important business of securing 14th place, rather than 15th, in the Championship.Nowhere is this played out in more somber tones than on British television, where the only thing that interrupts the self-flagellation about the demise of the magic of the cup is the advertising proclaiming that it is, in fact, alive and well. It is a rich irony, because what has destroyed the cup more than anything else is television, both because of the money it has poured into the Premier League and because of its insatiable demand for content.One of the things that made the cup final special was the fact that it had a whole day reserved for it: We called it “cup final day.” There is no better gauge of its reduction in status than the fact that this year the game — Chelsea vs. Leicester on Saturday — will be squeezed in between Southampton’s meeting with Fulham and Brighton’s match with West Ham.Still, there is hope. The other problem faced by the F.A. Cup these days is that it is almost always won by a team that considers it, at best, a consolation prize and, at worst, an afterthought, as Chelsea will if it emerges victorious at Wembley this weekend. It is nice for Chelsea, winning the F.A. Cup, but its eyes are cast on much brighter horizons.Things are different for its opponent, Leicester City. Leicester has never won the cup. It came close, three times, in the 1960s, but lost in each final it reached. For some time — possibly until it won the Premier League in 2016 — those defeats defined the club, at least in the eyes of a generation of fans. This weekend is a long-awaited chance to address that longing.Winning the cup would mean a lot to Leicester — so much, in fact, that it might even have the power to change the meaning of the cup itself, to prove that the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated, that it does not have a fixed value, but rather that it signifies rather more in some contexts than in others and that, in the right hands, it still matters very much indeed.Glory DaysSporting, which ended a long title drought this week in Lisbon.Pedro Nunes/ReutersFrom a Premier League perspective, this pandemic season has not brought quite so much chaos as anticipated. Manchester City, for the third time in four years, stands as English champion. It is the same in Germany, where Robert Lewandowski’s Bayern Munich picked up a ninth consecutive championship last weekend.Elsewhere, though, the picture is different. Inter Milan had waited 11 years to win Serie A. Lille is two games from winning its first French title in a decade. Atlético Madrid needs two more wins to claim the Spanish championship for the first time since 2014.But no club had waited quite so long as Sporting Lisbon (yes, yes, I know: Sporting Clube de Portugal). Until this week, it had been 19 years since the club last won the league, almost two decades of watching its two great rivals, F.C. Porto and Benfica, trade the title between them.Under Rúben Amorim, its promising coach, Sporting has ended that purgatory in style, going through the season undefeated. That it did so in a season of empty stadiums is a shame, of course, but it did not seem to diminish the celebrations in Lisbon on Tuesday.A word, too, for Ajax, champion yet again in the Netherlands. Rather than mount the trophy it received for winning the Eredivisie in its museum, the club chose to melt it down and create tens of thousands of little stars, one to be sent to each season-ticket holder, a reward for their perseverance in this most difficult of years, something to hold close as a memento of the year they had to stay apart.Not All Ideas Are Bad IdeasNever, it seems, underestimate the vengeance of a governing body scorned. In the month or so since the chaotic life and unmourned death of the European Super League, UEFA has been unsparing in its pursuit of the dozen clubs who concocted the plan, its own little Catilines.Nine of the teams were made to sign a humiliating mea culpa, repudiating their rebellion and promising never to do it again. Particular venom has been reserved, though, for Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, the three holdouts. UEFA has commissioned a disciplinary panel to decide their fate, and the domestic leagues of Spain and Italy may follow suit. The latter is already threatening to deny Juventus a license for next season unless it performs repentance.There is no doubt, of course, that much of the anger over the proposed breakaway was justified. There is little reason to sympathize at all with any of the clubs involved. But that does not mean that UEFA is best advised to use its new power — or, rather, its long-term foes’ sudden impotence — as nothing more than a cat o’ nine tails.Bringing the mutineers to heel provides short-term satisfaction, of course. It flexes the muscles, slakes the thirst for vindication. But it also risks failing to engage with some of the ideas that lay beneath the self-interest and opportunism of the breakaway — some of which, like proper financial controls, are worthy of consideration.Fans in Manchester after City clinched the Premier League title on Tuesday. Soccer’s current economic systems work just fine for the fans and their club.Jon Super/Associated PressMost of all, though, UEFA is in danger of calcifying the status quo, offering it a false status as the final form of the game and demonizing all change at just the point when European soccer needs it most. Not change as devised by the elite, perhaps, but change of some sort.Currently, the economics of the game work for, at most, a couple of dozen clubs: those owned or operated by nation states or individuals of fabulous wealth, and the lesser lights of the Premier League. That is not enough. The central problem with the Super League was that it sought to put a pin in history, to freeze the elite forever as it happens to be now. UEFA’s taste for retribution risks doing precisely the same, but for the game as a whole.CorrespondenceA brilliantly curious question from Bill Eash. “The layout of most Premier League fields includes a small extension outside the playing field,” he points out, correctly. “Most of that surface is sloped to the barriers. I wonder: Are injuries incurred by that design? And what’s its real purpose?”Yes, very occasionally, players hurt themselves by being forced to run at full speed down a hill into a barrier, though thankfully not as often as you would think. And no, I have no real idea why some stadiums — Old Trafford has the starkest off-field slope, I think — are designed like that. I guess it’s to do with drainage, but it has always struck me as a strange idea.Pool photo by Ian WaltonLaurence Guttmacher has a similar “question of culture,” as he put it. “Soccer teams play a man down while someone warms up before entering the pitch. Basketball players enter a game after prolonged periods on the bench. Both sports involve similar physical demands, so why the difference in approach?”I haven’t watched enough basketball benches to confirm this thesis, but if it’s right, my instinct is that it must be rooted in some sort of tradition — soccer players do it because they always have, and basketball players don’t because they never have — and that basketball is probably wrong on this one. It would, I think, be a good idea if the players stretched before coming on. That’s just good sense, isn’t it?Luke Doncic, ready for any type of game to break out.Jerome Miron/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAnd the final one of this orthodoxy-challenging trifecta comes from Carl Lennertz, who asks about the relationship between “the transfer fee versus what the player earns.” This is an especially good one, and it is a subject we should think about more.Essentially, they are totally disconnected. There is no consequential link between a players’ salaries and the fees they can command: A player earning $250,000 a year could cost $50 million to sign; a player on $10 million a year might be given away for some nominal sum. Both are left entirely to the market to decide. I wonder, though, if it might not be a bad idea if that changed, and transfer fees were to become more, well, explicable.By contrast, Rob Haxell is here to pick holes in arguments, particularly my (borrowed) suggestion that there might be ways of reducing the elite teams’ ability to hoard talent. “I wonder how Liverpool would feel about Virgil van Dijk being available on a cut-price deal this summer because they didn’t give him enough playing time?” he wrote, fully aware that an injury exemption would not be an especially difficult thing to draw up. More

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      The Lost Days of Raúl Jiménez

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      Pool photo by Catherine IvillRaúl Jiménez does not remember rising for the header that nearly ended his career.His partner, Daniela Basso, can never forget it.For 45 minutes, she feared he might be dead.Now she must cope with seeing him play again.The Lost Days of Raúl JiménezRaúl Jiménez remembers arriving in London with his Wolverhampton Wanderers teammates. He remembers walking onto the field at the Emirates Stadium an hour or so before that November game against Arsenal, briefly taking in his surroundings and heading back inside to get changed. He would, as usual, be leading the Wolves attack.After that, everything is blank.All he has of the five days that followed are snapshots, fuzzy and inchoate. He knows he was in the hospital. Nurses brought food to his bed and accompanied him to the bathroom. There were tests to check his balance. His girlfriend, Daniela Basso, spoke to him in video chats so he could see their 6-month-old daughter, Arya. Those are, he said, his días perdidos, his lost days.Basso would be forgiven for craving the peace not of having forgotten but of never having known. She remembers every single minute with an aching, piercing clarity. She has to pick through the story carefully, as though she can process only a little of it at a time. Every so often, she glances at Jiménez, sitting beside her on a video call, as if to reassure herself that her darkest fears were not realized.She was at home in Wolverhampton when Wolves’ game kicked off on Nov. 29. She had just finished bathing Arya. She was trying to settle her to sleep. The game was only a few minutes old when Arsenal won a corner kick.Jiménez, a Mexican striker on defensive duty, glanced the ball clear as David Luiz, the Arsenal defender, raced in. Luiz’s forehead smashed into the side of Jiménez’s skull. The sound of the collision was loud enough to be heard through the television broadcast. Jiménez crumpled to the grass.Raúl Jiménez’s Wolverhampton teammates wore shirts with his name onto the field for their Premier League game at Liverpool on Dec. 6, a week after he sustained a skull fracture in a match at Arsenal.Pool photo by Jon Super“In that moment, unfortunately, my first thought was that he had died,” Basso said. “Normally when players fall and get hurt, they react.” She can bring herself to smile at this point. “That is when you know if they’re faking or not. But that time: nothing. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see his eyes.”She grabbed her phone and called anyone she could think of: the medical team, which she could watch on television placing Jiménez into a breathing apparatus, gently placing him on a stretcher and rushing him to a hospital. She tried the club’s player liaison officer, then the physiotherapists. Eventually, she got through to the club secretary. All he could do was tell her he would let her know as soon as he had news.“It was 45 minutes until I knew he was alive,” she said. “Not until I knew that he was well, or that he would be OK, just alive. Imagine 45 minutes where I had to try to keep myself calm and tell myself it would all be all right.”Eventually, she got through to the club doctor. He alleviated her worst fears. Jiménez was on his way to a hospital. The relief, such as it was, was short-lived. The doctor told her Jiménez would be operated on immediately. She asked if she should go to London. He said yes. “That was the second shock,” she said. “The doctor knew I had a baby. When he said yes, I knew how serious it must be.”The club sent a taxi to collect Basso and Arya and take them to London. The trip took almost three hours. She remembers that Arya would not sleep throughout the journey. But not once, Basso said, in that unfamiliar car in the middle of the night, did her 6-month-old cry. “Everything goes through your head,” she said.The couple does not have family in Wolverhampton; their only support network, as Jimenéz put it, is their two dogs. Basso, an actress whose relationship with the striker has seen her relocate first to Portugal, then Spain and now England as his career has progressed, was the point of contact for everyone. “Our families and our friends in Mexico were bombarding me,” she said. “I had to be strong. I had to tell them it was going to be OK.”By the time she and Arya arrived in London, Jiménez was in surgery. She waited. For two or three or more hours. The time blurred and warped. When the surgery on his fractured skull was finished, she was permitted to see him, but only for a couple of minutes. He was still sedated. “They told me it had gone well,” she said. “But because of Covid I couldn’t stay with him.” When Basso and her daughter arrived at a hotel, at 8 a.m. the next day, Arya finally went to sleep.Jiménez and Daniela Basso, months after the surgery that repaired his fractured skull.Courtesy Topnotch ManagementJiménez stayed in the hospital for a week, though he remembers little of that, too. His contact with Basso and Arya, because of restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, was through video calls. “Nobody could see him,” Basso said. “We spoke to him just to let him know we were near. So he knew he was not alone.” The sight of him walking, unaccompanied, out of the hospital the next Friday was, she said, “the best thing, just to have him with us.”For Jiménez, the next few weeks passed slowly. His doctors warned him to take it easy. It might take a while, they said, for his balance to come back. He tired quickly, and admits now that he had “a couple of siestas a day.” There were visits to the hospital for scans, to check for any swelling in the brain and to make sure the fracture in his skull was healing. Apart from that, all he could do was wait.Basso, on the other hand, was struck by the speed of it. “It was hard that first week, but the week after, it was impressive,” she said. “I would have taken five months to recuperate, but he seemed to get better quicker.” She wonders if the fact that he is an athlete helped accelerate his recovery.Not quite three weeks after surgery, Jiménez returned to the team’s training facility, just to feel the turf beneath his feet again, to reconnect with his teammates. Within a month, he was taking his first steps toward playing again: first in the gym, working on his mobility, his coordination, his balance.A few weeks later, he was back on the field, first to run and then, by early March, to train. When he will play again is not certain — the 30-year-old Jiménez had hoped to be able to return this season or for international commitments with Mexico this summer, but there is no definitive timetable — but simply feeling like a soccer player again feels like a major triumph to him.“You feel like part of the team again,” he said. “You’re training with them, keeping the same schedule as them. At the start, I would arrive on my own, train on my own, and then by the time I’d finished, the rest of the squad had gone. It was hard at the start. It’s when you’re training with them that you feel part of the team again.”His involvement is governed by strict rules. He has been told not to head the ball, at least not yet. It is one of the strengths of his game, one of the things he loves about playing. When that is eventually permitted, he will start with a softer, smaller ball, to help his skull build resistance. There are benefits, though. “They told my teammates to be careful with me,” he said. “It is weird for them, and weird for me. I get the ball, and nobody can touch me. It’s like being Messi.”Jiménez returned to training in March but said it was strange. “Nobody can touch me,” he said. “It’s like being Messi.”Harry Trump/Getty ImagesWhat he never doubted, not for a second, was that he wanted to come back. Basso never saw him deflated or infuriated, even in those difficult first days. More than once, she said, she told him he should cry if he felt like it. He told her there was no need because he knew he would play again.“I never thought that I didn’t want to go back,” he said. “It is what I have done for as long as I can remember. It is the thing that brings me most happiness. Playing again was my motivation. I wanted Arya to see me play, and that is the best motivation I can have. I was always confident. If the skull heals well, if the brain is completely recovered, I can play again.”For Basso, it is more complex.Her priority, of course, is that her partner “is here with us, and he is OK, whether he plays again or not.” But she still struggles with the memories of what she saw and what she felt, the “horrible” moments when it all comes rushing back. She has to remind herself that Jiménez is at home, that the surgery was successful, that his doctors are confident there was no lasting damage to his brain. “When I think about it, I see that he is here, and it settles me,” she said.She has had to wrestle, too, with the worry of what it would mean to see him out on the field once more, in a game where there are no rules telling opponents to go easy on him, to avoid contact, where he would not only be allowed to head the ball — albeit, most likely, with some sort of protective cap — but actively encouraged to do so.The conclusion she has reached, though, is that she trusts the doctors overseeing his recovery, and she trusts Jiménez. She has taken strength from his absolute conviction that he will return. “If he decides to play, then he has to go with everything, to go without fear,” she said. “The moment you have fear is the moment that accidents happen. If you decide you can’t do it, it is fine to say you can’t. But don’t do it for fear. Whatever his decision, here I am.”She has thought, too, about whether she will ever be able to do what she did that evening last November: idly sit down to watch him play, free of worry, not fearing the worst. She has always enjoyed watching his games, and she worries now that she will “have my heart in my hands” every time he takes the field, the echoes of what she heard and the flashbacks of what she saw never dimming.But if and when he does return, she will, she thinks, watch. Jiménez misses plenty of things about soccer. “The journey from the hotel to the stadium, the feeling of going out on the field to play,” he said. Most of all, what he misses is “scoring a goal, the most beautiful feeling, the satisfaction of doing your job, of helping your team.”The next time he does it — and Basso, like Jiménez, is confident there will be a next time — she will be watching. “I trust him,” she said. “I will watch the games, and I will enjoy the goals. And my daughter will enjoy watching her dad score a goal.”Wolves has three games left in its season. If his doctors clear him, Jiménez could play in one. If not, he could make his return to the field with Mexico this summer.Pool photo by Catherine Ivill More

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      A Barcelona Star on Style, Substance and Another Champions League Final

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      Lieke Martens and Barcelona will face Chelsea on Sunday. Both have their sights set on raising the standard for success in the women’s game.In many ways, the trajectory of Lieke Martens’s career has mirrored the growth of professional women’s soccer in Europe.In the past four years alone, she has scored as the Netherlands won a European title, played in a Champions League final, been crowned the world’s best player and come within a victory of a World Cup championship.Along the way, Martens, the Barcelona and Netherlands star, has ridden the wave in popularity for a sport that not so long ago struggled to gain attention and sponsors, fill stadiums or even provide a viable career path for many of the most talented players in the game.The Barcelona team became professional in 2015, and in six years has grown to become the most dominant one in Spain. This season, it scored 128 goals and allowed five as it cantered to the league title, winning all 26 games it has played so far. Its dominance, and that of longtime women’s soccer powers like Olympique Lyon and Sunday’s opponent, Chelsea — not to mention more recent investments from deep-pocketed newcomers like Manchester City and Real Madrid — is reshaping the women’s club game on the continent.Martens and Barcelona eliminated Paris St.-Germain to reach the final.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Barcelona, women’s soccer is here to stay. While the program’s budget of 4 million euros, almost $5 million, is dwarfed by its investment in the men’s roster, the team’s managers are determined to inculcate the players with the same philosophy of technical excellence and the possession-based system that is the hallmark of Barcelona soccer from the junior ranks to the pro leagues.“To play and to compete in the way we want, in the standard we want to compete in, for that, the best players are the ones that grow with us and are perfectly adapted to that style,” said Markel Zubizarreta, the executive responsible for women’s soccer at Barcelona.Barcelona now has 13 players on its roster who have come through its academy, but in a manner reminiscent of how a Dutch great, Johan Cruyff, led the men’s team to glory five decades ago, it is Martens who carries the star power. Days before she will lead Barcelona against Chelsea in Sunday’s Champions League final, Martens, 28, discussed the growth of women’s soccer, the changes she has seen during her decade in the sport and the power of belated (but significant) investments in the women’s game.This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.What are the emotions like three days before the biggest game in women’s club soccer?It’s a bit different. The full focus is on this one big moment for the club. In the end, we shouldn’t change anything because we have done so well this season. We have to continue what we have been doing.Not so long ago, there were very few fully professional clubs in Europe, very few opportunities to forge a successful career, and now we are seeing unprecedented investment and interest. Can you describe this period?I think people are really interested in watching women’s soccer now, whereas five years ago people were not really that interested. Now people are really excited to see those big games, like the final. How have you noticed this increase in interest?If you see the media attention, for example. This week, it’s amazing the number of requests we got. Yesterday I was busy. I’m busy today. The focus has never been as big. If I see, for example, the national team, how many people came to the stadium before the pandemic — it was always sold out. Those things are amazing. When I play here in the Johan Cruyff stadium, it is always full. People want to come and see us and support us. It is really different to a few years ago.Amandine Henry, right, and Lyon humbled Martens, left, and Barcelona, 4-1, in the 2019 Champions League final.Tobias Schwarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSweden was once the vanguard of growing the women’s professional game, and you played there before joining Barcelona. But teams like Rosengard and Kopparbergs, which shut down in December, can no longer compete with the world’s wealthiest clubs. Is the changing dynamic a bittersweet one?Kopparbergs, Rosengard, those clubs were needed. They really put the effort in, really supported the women’s game. But of course at the end we have been really waiting for the big clubs to believe in women’s football. And it’s progress. We’ve had to wait for it, but it also helps us to reach a better level, to make women’s football more interesting.What is the difference in environment you encountered at Barcelona?Rosengard had a really good staff, and things around us were really good, but it was only a women’s club. But I think it’s impossible to compare with the big clubs. It’s a really good thing that we finally have all those big clubs in it. I’m really happy that Real Madrid is also joining now. That’s what we need in the women’s game.Can you see a qualitative impact of all this investment on performance?I’m so happy to play against really good players. That’s what we need. Before, those players were amazing, but now we have so many more really good players, and that’s so cool. I think in the future it’s going to be even better because all those girls that are at the highest level now didn’t have the best training when they were a little girl. Little girls now are getting the same practice boys do at the same age.How important is the Barcelona style, the values the club instills in its players, to the performance we see on the field? Some people say not sacrificing the style in the 2019 final led to Barcelona being overrun by Lyon that day.I think that’s why they are really specific with who they bring in. They want people who will fit into the Barça style, and, like you said, in the final in 2019 it was already 3-0 after 50 minutes, but it had been a really good experience for us. We take that into this Sunday as well. I think it will be a totally different situation. How have you coped personally with the sudden fame your success with the Netherlands and Barcelona has brought you?After winning the Euros in 2017, I got recognized everywhere in the Netherlands and even overseas. Off the field my life has changed, but I have to deal with it. It’s part of it, and that’s what men’s football has, and that’s what we wanted. I always said it would be nice to get the recognition. And now we have it.Martens and the Netherlands lost to the United States in the 2019 World Cup final. The teams are both in this summer’s Olympic tournament.Piroschka Van De Wouw/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you think you will use that higher profile to lead on issues beyond the field, in the manner of, say, Megan Rapinoe?Actually, I haven’t used it that much. I should use my voice a bit more. I will do that in the future. Barcelona went unbeaten in the league this season. Do you, perhaps, wish the other teams were better, and the league more competitive?By doing well in the Champions League, we are showing Spain really invests in women’s football. I think it will also help the Spanish league to get better, but we have to be patient. It just needs a bit more time. We are moving in the right direction, if you see what we have done, in a couple of years in Barcelona. And I’m really happy with what Real Madrid is doing. The level is getting higher, but you can’t go from zero to 100.This season’s final — Chelsea-Barcelona — is a marked change from when Lyon was the only show in town. (Lyon had won the Champions League five years in succession before losing in the quarterfinals this year.)Lyon has a really good team, but it’s really good that other teams are in the final. It’s really exciting to see other teams have also improved a lot. They have invested in women’s football, and it’s paying off. More

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      Champions League Final: Porto Replaces Istanbul as Host

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      UEFA will take this month’s Manchester City-Chelsea final to Porto after talks to bring the game to London failed to produce an agreement.This month’s all-English Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea will be played in Porto, Portugal, a shift of one of soccer’s showcase events to one of the few countries where Britons can travel without restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic.European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, cleared the last hurdles to shifting the game from its scheduled site in Turkey on Wednesday. It confirmed the move on Thursday.The #UCLfinal between Manchester City and Chelsea will now be held at the Estádio do Dragão in Porto.6,000 fans of each team will be able to attend.Full story: ⬇️— UEFA (@UEFA) May 13, 2021
      The decision to move the final from Istanbul, which recently re-entered a virus-related lockdown, came after discussions between European soccer leaders and British government officials, who had been seeking to bring the game to London. When the sides failed to reach an agreement that would have allowed the teams and their domestic fans to avoid international travel, Portugal was chosen as the site of the game for the second year in a row.The final, which will be played May 29 at the Estádio Dragão in the coastal city of Porto, is the biggest day on the European club soccer calendar. It had been scheduled to be played at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, but that would have ruled out attendance for most British fans of the finalists, since Turkey is on a so-called red list of countries to which travel is discouraged.Holding the game in Turkey also raised the prospect that players and officials from both teams would have to quarantine for as long as 10 days upon their return to England. That would have complicated the preparations of a handful of national teams for this summer’s European Championship, which begins June 11.The game will be played with Estádio Dragão’s capacity of about 50,000 reduced to less than half that figure. City and Chelsea are expected to receive 6,000 tickets for their fans, figures that mirrored the allotments in Turkey.Chelsea beat Manchester City, 2-1, in a Premier League match on Saturday. The teams will meet again in the Champions League final on May 29.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsEurope’s governing body, UEFA, and British officials began holding direct talks on Monday, three days after the British government placed Turkey on its red list of countries, destinations where all but essential travel is prohibited.The British government said it was open to holding the match at Wembley Stadium in London, and even was prepared to agree to allow thousands of fans to attend, but they acknowledged that UEFA, as the tournament organizer, would have the final say. UEFA provided a list of key requirements, mainly around exemptions to quarantine rules for visitors.UEFA’s demands created a problem for British officials, though, since they had to balance the popular appeal of bringing a major sporting event featuring two English teams to the country against continuing concerns about public health amid a spreading virus. When the government balked at UEFA’s request that it waive quarantine requirements so UEFA’s staff members — as well as international broadcasters, sponsors, suppliers and officials — could attend the game without an isolation period, the prospect of a London final was dead.In Portugal, the European soccer body has found a familiar savior to get it out of a crisis. The country — and Lisbon in particular — rode to the rescue last year when the Champions League’s final stages, including a final also set for Istanbul, had to be reorganized because of the outbreak of the pandemic.The tournament, suspended on the eve of the quarterfinals, was completed with a knockout format and in a so-called bubble environment in Lisbon. Turkish officials had agreed to surrender their role as host of the final in exchange for a promise that Istanbul would host the final this year.Discussions about a move were completed quickly. Last Friday, after City and Chelsea had confirmed the all-English final and as talk swirled about a change of venue, Tiago Craveiro, the chief executive of the Portuguese soccer federation, reached out to UEFA. Officials at the soccer body were then reeling from that day’s sudden announcement that travelers from Britain faced severe restrictions for any travel to Turkey. That created a crisis that went well beyond questions about fan access.Players on both sides faced the prospect of having to isolate for 10 days upon their return to Britain, creating doubts over their participation in the European Championship, the national team competition organized by UEFA that is second in size and importance only to the FIFA World Cup.With Portugal on Britain’s green list — and thus subject to far less stringent travel rules — Craveiro offered to organize the final at short notice. Porto was picked because it did not get an opportunity to stage Champions League games last year when the event was confined in its Lisbon bubble.Sympathetic that Istanbul is losing out for the second straight year, UEFA officials are considering offering Turkish officials the Champions League final in 2023, to coincide with the centenary of the Turkish republic. More