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      The Super League Founders Are Now at War With One Another

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      Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona are threatening to extract damages from their former partners in a doomed European Super League.Less than two weeks after they became partners in a superleague project that would have cast aside the structures and organizations that have underpinned European soccer for a century, a group of the sport’s biggest clubs are now engaged in another pitched battle behind the scenes.This time, their fight is with one another.At the heart of the new battle are two letters: one renouncing the project, a short-lived Super League, and recommitting the teams to Europe’s existing system, and another threatening any club that walks away.European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, is demanding that the league’s founding clubs sign the first letter, which would complete the formal demise of the Super League and begin the smooth of repairing the clubs’ broken relationship with European soccer. Eight of the teams already have agreed to do so.But three of the 12 Super League founders — Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — are refusing to let the project die. Doubling down in a letter of their own, they are threatening to pursue legal action against their former partners to extract millions of dollars in penalties if any teams follow through on plans to withdraw from the league.The Super League, announced by its 12 founding teams in a late-night news release on April 18, collapsed 48 hours later amid a popular and political backlash. In the days and weeks since that humiliating retreat, club presidents and owners have held emergency meetings with leaders of soccer in their own countries and with UEFA to try to limit any punishment they might face for being part of a breakaway that would have devastated the value of leagues and clubs across Europe.UEFA has said it will treat repentant clubs more kindly than those that refuse to back down. Those that refuse, it has warned, risk the most severe penalty available: a two-year ban from the Champions League.Fans angry with the owners of Manchester United invaded the team’s stadium on Sunday, forcing the postponement of a Premier League game against Liverpool.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDocuments, messages and conversations with executives involved in the talks suggest that eight teams of the 12 original Super League members have agreed to sign a declaration legally distancing themselves from the breakaway competition, one short of the number required to force through the liquidation of a company set up in Spain to run it.The three holdout clubs, though, are warning others of severe legal and financial consequences if they break the commitments they made when they signed up.The dispute is an indication of just how badly and how quickly relations between the top teams have soured, and underscores how even after its demise the Super League continues to tear at the fabric of European soccer.A majority of the breakaway teams have told UEFA they will sign on to a letter confirming their intent to walk away. But in a draft of the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, they point out that if all 12 teams do not come to an agreement, efforts to revive the competition may be outside their control.UEFA shall “promptly receive” details of what formal measures each club has taken to break free of its obligations, the letter says.Despite the popular backlash to the project, opinions have hardened among the three clubs — Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — that were most committed backers of the project. They have vowed to press ahead with legal action to prove soccer’s current rules are incompatible with competition and free trade laws.In their letter, sent on Thursday, the clubs accused the teams that have publicly declared their intention to leave the Super League with committing a “material breach” of the founders agreement. Amplifying that damage by signing a declaration pledging their allegiance to UEFA would open them to significant damages, the letter warns.The Super League started to wobble even before the formal announcement of its creation. Within a day, some of teams started to make private entreaties to UEFA, acknowledging that agreeing to join had been a mistake.Less than 48 hours after the league was launched, Manchester City became the first team to officially announce its intention to withdraw. That started a cascade, with all six Premier League teams releasing public statements revealing their plans to withdraw.The defections left teams in Spain and Italy acknowledging the league was no longer viable in its original form, but not formally declaring they would not try to revive it.Two weeks later, as many as eight teams had told UEFA they were committed to walking away from the Super League project, and ninth, A.C. Milan, was on the verge of making the same decision. According to the Super League contract, the withdrawal of nine clubs can force the liquidation of the entity that was created to run the competition. That dissolution is one of UEFA’s requirements to put the entire chapter to rest for the clubs involved.The breakaway attempts continue to roil soccer on a domestic level, too. In Italy, the national association has introduced new regulations aimed at preventing any new breakaway attempts, while in England discussions are taking place over similar rule changes and also about how to punish teams whose actions threatened the interests of the Premier League.The Premier League is expected to announce the result of its consultation within days. One plan involves securing long-term commitments from member clubs not to join any unsanctioned competition, or to withdraw from the domestic competition, with severe penalties — including fines of more than $50 million — if they do.Finding a suitable punishment is proving difficult, however. Soccer’s leaders are aware that the collapse of the Super League owed much to the public opposition of fans of the English teams that had agreed to join it; punishing the teams in ways that do not anger those same fans is now the goal.That means clubs are unlikely to be hit with sporting sanctions, but rather with financial penalties aimed at the owners that backed the Super League plan. For now, one tangible response has been ostracism: Officials from the six breakaway clubs have been removed from the league’s internal committees. More

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      Manchester City Beats PSG, Advancing to Champions League Final

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      With a win over Paris St.-Germain, City worked past some demons and headed to the Champions League final.MANCHESTER, England — In those last few minutes, even with the game sealed and a place in the final secure, Manchester City’s staff members and substitutes could not sit still. They pulsed with energy. They roared at every poor challenge. They demanded action from the referee for every transgression. They cheered every completed pass.As the clock ticked into injury time, they fretted and fidgeted when Paris St.-Germain won a free kick within sight of Éderson’s goal. They cheered when it sailed over. The voice of Mark Sertori, the club’s longstanding masseur, bellowed out across the empty Etihad Stadium. “No chances,” he shouted. There were no more than 30 seconds left, and P.S.G. needed to score three times.To the rational brain, there was nothing to worry about. Two goals from Riyad Mahrez had long since put the outcome beyond doubt. The distant prospect of a P.S.G. revival had evaporated entirely when Ángel Di María, its Argentine wing, had kicked out at Fernandinho and duly been sent off. City had been home and dry ever since.But the rational brain goes quiet when the stakes are quite so high. For all that City has achieved in the past 13 years, as it has been transformed from hardscrabble makeweights to the pre-eminent force in English soccer, soon to be winners of three of the past four Premier League titles, and five of the past 10, the Champions League has become something of an open sore.Like P.S.G., City was built, at considerable expense, to win the Champions League. Not in the sense that it is the game’s final frontier, a team’s greatest ambition. It is that for City — this iteration of City, anyway — this competition is the ultimate purpose.It is why Pep Guardiola, the standout coach of his generation, was hired; it is why the people who hired him — his former colleagues at Barcelona, Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano — were hired. It is why he has been granted the chance to gather a squad that meets every single one of his demands at a training facility built to enable him to work in absolute serenity.Soccer does not, of course, work according to a formula, no matter how much money and expertise go into its construction. They have learned that at City the hard way.The long slog of the Premier League has proved easy to master in comparison with the chimera of the Champions League. There is, as Guardiola said, “something in the stars” in this competition, and it is hard to disagree: He has spent most of the past 10 years in charge of either a powerhouse Bayern Munich team or a Manchester City side of the most exquisite brilliance, yet this will be his first appearance in the final of this tournament since 2011.Riyad Mahrez scored both goals for Manchester City on Tuesday. With his team already at an advantage coming into the match, Mahrez left no doubt which team would advance.Martin Rickett/Press Association, via Associated PressThe disappointments have been startling in their variety, compelling in their unpredictability. Under Guardiola, City has been caught cold by a youthful and unheralded Monaco, and then blown apart by a surging and hungry Liverpool. It has had its heart broken by Tottenham and its brain frazzled by Lyon.And now, after a decade of trying, it has shattered that ceiling. What this game means for soccer is a question that — for all that the fans of both City and P.S.G. will resent its being asked — the sport must continue to contemplate.This, after all, involved two teams backed by the untrammeled wealth of Gulf States competing for a place in soccer’s most glamorous, most exclusive club competition. it should not be controversial to suggest that the motives behind their current primacy are not uniquely sporting.This may have been the first time they have met on a stage quite this grand, but the simple economics at play — particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic — suggest it will not be the last. They have spent their money differently, P.S.G. on individuals and City on the broader squad, but they have spent it in sums that few, if any, of their rivals can match.Ángel Di María of Paris St.-Germain was sent off after kicking Fernandinho during an altercation on the sideline.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesBut while the geopolitics and the morality and the broader ramifications matter, they do not matter — not in the moment — to the players and the staff who have been tasked with carrying Manchester City to the place where it wants to be. That is not the story they are part of, not to them.Instead, theirs is a story of personal ambition and childhood dreams and professional satisfaction, of seeing decades of dedication rewarded not by a lucrative contract or a high-profile transfer but by the long-anticipated chance to reach what is, in almost every sense, the pinnacle of their careers.That is why, a few minutes before the end, Kevin De Bruyne trooped from the field, his face flushed and his body heaving, and slumped into a chair. He, almost alone, did not spend the final few minutes bellowing and barking and chivying and chiding: There was not a drop of energy left in his body.He had spent it all chasing down P.S.G.’s defenders as they tried to play their way out of Manchester City’s relentless, lupine press, and haring back to snuff out danger on the rare occasions that Neymar threatened to pick a way through. He seemed, at one point, to lose his cool just a little, reacting to P.S.G.’s provocations, unable to resist the temptation to meet fire with fire. He had been cautioned already; he may have been removed for his own benefit.Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola with Phil Foden.Phil Noble/ReutersWhen the final whistle blew, he walked gingerly to the field, his legs heavy. His teammates were embracing in front of him. Guardiola’s coaching staff had arranged themselves in a line to greet every single player as they came off the field. Rúben Dias was shirtless in the bitter cold of what is in theory spring in Manchester, howling in the face of whomever he could find.Manchester City has waited more than a decade for this: the culmination of a project, the realization of a plan. Guardiola has waited 10 years to get back to the final of the competition that he, for one, cherishes more than any other. His players, though, have waited far longer. They have waited their entire lives, in fact, for this one shot. And that, in that moment, is what it meant. More

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      Manchester City Battles Premier League Over Alleged Rule Breach

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      City, the Gulf-backed soccer team on the cusp of a fourth English Premier League title, is fighting an investigation over financial control rules.LONDON — Manchester City, the English soccer team that is on the cusp of winning the Premier League for the third time in four seasons, is involved in a secret legal battle with the league over whether it complied with financial rules as it surged to become one of the sport’s dominant forces.The Premier League has been tight lipped since confirming in 2019 that it was looking into City’s finances a few months after the German news weekly Der Spiegel, citing internal club information, said the club had disguised direct investment by its owner, Sheikh Mansour, as sponsorship income. City has always insisted it has not broken any regulations and denounced the stolen documents as “out-of-context materials” that were published as part of an “organized and clear attempt to damage the club’s reputation.”City has spent millions of dollars defending itself since the allegations first emerged. Its lawyers are fighting against the league’s arbitration process, arguing that the club will not get a fair hearing, according to documents. City and the league did not immediately reply to a request for comment.City is challenging the Premier League in Britain’s civil courts, where hearings have been held behind closed doors, and where publication of material related to the case has been kept confidential despite intense public interest in the case. It is not known what action the Premier League would take if it found City to have breached its rules. Penalties in its rule book include points deductions and fines.City, backed by the billionaire brother of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, one of the richest men in the world, waged a successful battle in 2020 when it won an appeal against a two-year ban from the Champions League after being found to have breached separate cost control rules by the European soccer governing body, UEFA. City won its case at the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration after convincing judges that a time limit had elapsed on the evidence against it. The Premier League’s rules do not have similar deadlines.City requires just one more victory to be sure of the English championship. It is also on a charge toward securing its first Champions League crown. It holds a 2-1 advantage over Paris St.-Germain, another Gulf-controlled club, before Tuesday night’s decisive second semifinal game at its own stadium.The case is taking place against the backdrop of major scrutiny of owners in English soccer. A protest by fans of City’s crosstown rival, Manchester United, led to its game against Liverpool being postponed on Sunday after the two clubs joined City and three other English teams in signing up to a planned breakaway European competition. The plans were abandoned within 48 hours after a torrent of criticism and the threat of government action.Still, City won plaudits after becoming the first of the rebel English clubs to announce it had backed away from the project.City’s battle against the Premier League bears the hallmarks of its approach in the UEFA case. Before finding salvation through a technicality in the rules that set a five-year time limit on the infractions eligible for punishment, the club tried to have the case thrown out at the CAS before UEFA had even ruled.City’s stance in the Premier League case is a second major recent assault on the league’s governance structures. The owner of Newcastle United started legal action last fall against the league after it failed to clear a sale to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.City’s relationship with UEFA has strengthened significantly since it successfully appealed the Champions League ban. UEFA resisted appealing the CAS judgment even after Der Spiegel published new revelations that appeared to cast doubt on some of the evidence a senior City official provided to the court.UEFA told The New York Times in a statement that it had sought legal opinion on the chance of appealing the CAS decision after Der Spiegel published new emails. “The clear view was that such an appeal would stand little chance of success in forcing CAS to rehear the case and on the slim chance it did, the chance of success at a second hearing was also limited. A similar view was also taken on the possible success of a prosecution under the UEFA disciplinary framework,” said UEFA.Its president, Aleksander Ceferin, praised City personally, issuing a statement minutes after the team last month became the first to withdraw from the proposed breakaway competition.While the superleague proposals continue to attract widespread criticism, those involved in the negotiations insist part of the rationale behind them was to cool rampant spending that has imperiled the futures of some of the elite clubs as they seek to keep up with teams backed by wealthy benefactors, particularly those controlled by the Gulf nation states.Documents reviewed by The Times showed each team would have had to submit detailed financial information to financial auditors, as well as agree to rules forbidding owners from artificially inflating teams’ balance sheets. Penalties for breaches included a suspension or ban from the competition, as well as millions of dollars in fines.City’s backers say existing rules have been designed to keep historically dominant clubs from facing competition from up-and-coming teams. Sheikh Mansour has plowed more than $1 billion into turning City into the dominant force in English soccer over much of the past decade. His largess has been spent on acquiring top executives, players and Pep Guardiola, the pre-eminent manager of his generation.City has also spent millions on rejuvenating the deprived Manchester neighborhood where it plays its home games, building new facilities and creating jobs in an area that had suffered from high unemployment. More

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      In Anti-Ownership Protests, United Fans Rediscover Their Own Power

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      The protests, by Manchester United fans demanding the Glazer family sell the club, forced the postponement of a match after the stadium was stormed.At the Lowry Hotel, Manchester United’s players could do nothing but sit and watch. Outside, hundreds of fans had gathered, blockading the buses scheduled to take them on the short trip to Old Trafford. They were supposed to depart at 3 p.m., local time. It came and went. The crowd did not disperse. Then 4 p.m. ticked by on the clock. Still no movement.A couple of miles down the road, what had started out as an organized protest against the team’s ownership — the irredeemably unpopular and, by most definitions, parasitic Glazer family — had swelled and warped into something far more chaotic, far more wild.Hundreds of fans had broken through the security forces and made it onto the field. There were suggestions that some had found their way into the entrails of the stadium, reaching as far as Old Trafford’s sanctum sanctorum, the home team’s changing room. A small number of those still outside the stadium clashed with the police. Two officers were injured.United’s players were still restricted to their hotel rooms at 4.30 p.m., as the Premier League’s marquee fixture should have been kicking off. Manchester United against Liverpool is English soccer’s greatest rivalry, the meeting of its two most successful clubs. This edition even had a title on the line, for good measure, albeit indirectly: a Liverpool win would have handed Manchester City the championship.For a while, the Premier League refused to bow to the inevitable. The game would be delayed, it said, but would go ahead as soon as the players’ safety could be assured. By 5.30 p.m. — what should have been the start of the second half — the scales had fallen. The league released a short statement, confirming the match had been postponed.“We understand and respect the strength of feeling but condemn all acts of violence, criminal damage and trespass, especially given the associated Covid-19 breaches,” it read. “Fans have many channels by which to make their views known, but the actions of a minority seen today have no justification.”There are two roads that the league, the clubs involved and soccer as a whole can take from here. One is to focus on the method. It does not need to be pointed out that the violence outside the stadium — limited though it was — should be condemned. It cannot and should not be justified. The same is true of the more minor offenses of “criminal damage and trespass.”Those offenses open a door. They make it possible to depict all of those involved with the protests, both at Old Trafford and the Lowry Hotel, as hooligans and troublemakers and, above all, yobs, the epithet wheeled out whenever soccer fans need to be demonized.They disincentivize engaging with the sentiments behind the protests, make it easy to cast the events of Sunday as nothing but mindlessness and lawlessness. They turn emotion, sincere and deep, into nothing but self-serving revanchism: fans protesting because their team is not top of the league.Carl Recine/Action Images, via ReutersOli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey offer an easy solution, the panacea that soccer always turns to in the end. Win the Europa League later this month and all of this will be forgotten, nothing more than a few million more social media engagements for the club to cite in glowing terms in the next quarterly review of its finances.The second is to avoid that easy pitfall, and to focus instead on the message. The Glazers have never been popular at Old Trafford. There were protests when they completed their heavily leveraged takeover of a club they knew little to nothing about in 2005. There were more at the end of that decade, fans decking themselves out in the club’s first colors — green and gold — rather than its more famous red to signal their discontent.That hostility has never dissipated. But for much of the last decade, it lay dormant. Not because of United’s success — by its own standards, the last eight years have been disappointing — but because of the apparent futility of protest.Manchester United, like all soccer teams, might feel like a social and community institution. It might continually pitch itself as one. It might occasionally even act like one. But it is, in the most real and relevant sense, a business, and it is a business owned by the Glazers, and because no matter how ardent the protests, the Glazers did not seem to flinch, the energy dissipated.And then, two weeks ago, Joel Glazer, a co-chairman of the club, put his name to a proposal to start a European superleague, and the fury awoke. Fans of the other English teams tainted by association with the project have taken to the streets — a protest by Chelsea fans precipitated the league’s demise; their peers at Arsenal came out in the thousands a few days later — but none have gone quite so far as United. None have brought the league that styles itself as the greatest in the world to a standstill on one of its red-letter days.In part, that is down to the unpopularity of the Glazers. The reaction at each of the clubs involved has, in some way, reflected the fans’ relationship with the owners.Arsenal is desperate to be rid of another unloved American, Stan Kroenke: It came out in force. Liverpool, where Fenway Sports Group has some residual admiration, has been a little more circumspect. Manchester City has not seen any mass gatherings, testament to the debt of gratitude its fans feel they owe its backers in Abu Dhabi. At United, hatred of the Glazers runs deep.The message their protest sent, though, stretches way beyond parochial concerns or tribal affiliations. It is not just, as it might appear, that fans do not want a superleague. That was established beyond doubt a couple of weeks ago. It is not just that fans do not want their clubs to be used as playthings by owners who care less for the names on the roster than the numbers on the bottom line.It is that, after years of fretting that their teams had been hijacked by the billionaire class and that their game had been taken away from them by television contracts and rampant commercialism and unstoppable globalization, the last two weeks have taught fans that they are not quite so powerless as they once thought.If they do not want a superleague, they can stop it in its tracks; it follows, then, that if they do not want the game they have now, then they can do something about it. As one of the chants that United players will have heard, drifting up to their rooms in the Lowry from the street below, had it: “We decide when you will play.”Manchester United’s Scott McTominay, left, and Lee Grant watching the protests from inside the Lowry Hotel.Phil Noble/ReutersThat has not felt true for some time, but, all of a sudden, it is possible to believe it. It has gone unsaid for too long, but the whole cash-soaked edifice of modern soccer has been built on fans: the match tickets and the television subscriptions and the merchandise and the captive advertising demographic.All of the money that is frittered on sky-high salaries and inflated transfer fees and inexplicable agents’ commissions: It all, ultimately, comes from fans. Fans make it all add up. Fans keep the show on the road.And it is fans, now, who have realized that means they can make it stop, too: an abortive idea for a league here, so why not a major fixture there? They have, suddenly, rediscovered their power.The irony of all this, of course, will be lost on the Glazers, and all the owners like them. It was soccer’s easily monetized fanaticism that drew them to the game in the first place, and that eventually convinced them that their harebrained superleague scheme could work. The fans, they assumed, would go with them. They did not.And now, that same force is aligned against them. The methods it chooses cannot always be condoned. But the message is clear, and it is one that soccer would do well to heed. More

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      When the Goals Come Out of Nowhere

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      A Greek striker is one of the top scorers in Europe, and his play has caught the eye of big clubs. But are his goals a product of his talent, or his environment?Giorgos Giakoumakis had never scored goals. Not in great numbers, anyway. He had played 22 games, spread across three seasons, before he finally managed a single one for his first club, a team of modest ambitions and close horizons called Platanias, based on his home island, Crete.In the early stages of his career, he broke into double figures for a single campaign only once, mustering 11 goals in his final season at Platanias. It appeared, at the time, to be his breakthrough. That summer, he moved to A.E.K. Athens, one of the three powers that dominate the Greek capital.There, Giakoumakis would carve out his own little place in the club’s mythology. Midway through his debut season, he scored a 93rd-minute winner to settle a derby with Olympiacos, decisively swinging a finely poised title race in A.E.K.’s favor. It was his first league goal for the club. It would also prove to be the last.He spent much of the next two seasons out on loan, A.E.K. hoping either that he would find his form or that it might find a buyer. The signs were not promising. A spell back on Crete — this time with O.F.I. — brought two goals. A year in Poland, with Gornik Zabrze, produced only three.Giakoumakis seemed set for a career as a journeyman. There was nothing on his résumé that so much as hinted at what would happen next.This season, out of nowhere, Giakoumakis has been transformed into one of Europe’s most prolific forwards. He has scored 24 goals in 27 league games. He got three on his debut with his new club. He has scored four goals in a single game twice. He scored 11 — previously his career-best for an entire campaign — in January alone. That month, no player in Europe scored more.More impressive still, he has done it all while playing for VVV Venlo, a club struggling to avoid relegation at the foot of the Eredivisie, the Dutch top flight. It currently sits 17th out of 18 teams. Earlier this season, it managed to lose by 13-0 to Ajax. It has recorded only six wins all year, and has scored only 39 goals. Giakoumakis accounts for almost two-thirds of them. “Without him,” his teammate Christian Kum said, “things would have been much worse for us.”Giakoumakis after Venlo’s most notable result this season: a 13-0 defeat to Ajax in October.Olaf Kraak/EPA, via ShutterstockThat sort of form attracts attention. Giakoumakis’s career prospects have been, in the space of just a few months, utterly transformed. He is now a fully minted Greek international, having made his debut for his country in November. Clubs further up soccer’s food chain have suddenly taken an interest. Norwich City, recently promoted to the Premier League, has watched him. So, too, has Southampton.Many would caution them to treat his supernova burst with a degree of skepticism. This sort of thing happens, after all, with curious frequency in the Eredivisie. Dutch soccer has a long, proud and quite odd history of previously unheralded strikers suddenly hitting an almost impossibly rich vein of form.Sometimes — as in the case of Ruud van Nistelrooy, Luis Suárez or Klaas-Jan Huntelaar — it is a harbinger of greater things to come; they could score great gluts of goals in the Eredivisie because their talent, their dedication and their brilliance meant that they could score great gluts of goals anywhere.And sometimes — as in the case of Georgios Samaras, Vincent Janssen or, perhaps the most famous example, the Brazilian Afonso Alves — it is not. Sometimes, the volume of goals a striker scores in the Eredivisie is, if not quite an illusion, then certainly a trick of the light. Sometimes they do not go on to shine on a grander stage. Sometimes, their success says more about the shortcomings of Dutch soccer than it does about them.“You do wonder why it always happens here,” said Arnold Bruggink, formerly of PSV Eindhoven and now an analyst for ESPN. “It is because all the teams want to play in the Dutch way. Even among the smaller teams, there is a sense that you have to play well. Everybody wants to do the same, even if they don’t have the quality to do it.“It is a very young league, and it gets younger every year: it is not unusual here to have central defenders who are 19 or 20. A player who is 26 is a veteran. And young players make mistakes. If you look at the bottom teams in Spain or Germany, they will have conceded maybe 50 goals in 30 games. Here, it is often 60 or 70.”Vincent Janssen’s 27 goals at AZ Alkmaar earned him a move to Tottenham in 2016. He now plays for Monterrey in Mexico.Julio Cesar Aguilar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInstinctively, then, it feels as if Giakoumakis’s story is actually about Dutch soccer: Its moral is that because goals come fast and loose in the Eredivisie, their meaning is difficult to discern, a reminder that there is no correlation between how many goals a player scores in the Netherlands and how many they might score elsewhere.And yet there is a problem with that reading. Goals might be cheap in Holland, but not every Eredivisie team has a striker — every season — who scores them by the bucketload. The leading scorer at Ajax, as it canters to another championship this year, is Dusan Tadic, a midfielder. Something, then, must be different about Giakoumakis, just as something must have explained Alves or Janssen in years gone by.The answer, of course, lies in context. There is a degree of serendipity in how Giakoumakis found himself in Venlo. It is not the sort of club that can afford to be choosy. It plays in one of the smallest stadiums, and has one of the smallest budgets, in the Eredivisie. At Venlo, success is getting to fight relegation again next year.Stan Valckx, the man in charge of cobbling together its shoestring team, has no vast network of scouts. He cannot pay colossal transfer fees. He has to keep his eyes and his mind open, and he has to take risks. Most of all, he has no choice but to listen to every pitch from every agent for every player. “I always answer the phone,” he said.That is how he found Giakoumakis. Last March, he got yet another unsolicited call, from an agent suggesting he take a look at a 26-year-old Greek striker playing in Poland. Valckx did what he always does: a little cursory investigation. Giakoumakis’s numbers were not especially impressive. “If you just looked at the statistics, he probably would not have come to us,” he said.Giakoumakis has already made his debut for Greece.Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated PressFootage of his performances, though, was more promising. “We have a team that plays more often in its own half than the opponent’s,” Valckx said. “We need a striker with depth in his game, who can hold the ball up, who works hard.”Giakoumakis ticked those boxes. The club’s manager at the time, Hans de Koning, was encouraged by how Giakoumakis tended to celebrate his (rare) goals with his teammates, rather than taking the acclaim for himself. His salary was within Venlo’s reach. Valckx flew to Poland to watch him in the flesh, only to find that — because of attendance restrictions to combat the spread of coronavirus — he was not allowed into the stadium.Instead, he watched the game in a sports bar. Still, he liked what he saw. The next day, he met Giakoumakis in a hotel. The player had done his research. He knew a little about his prospective teammates. He could identify which system Venlo played. Valckx was convinced this was a risk worth taking.He does not pretend that he expected Giakoumakis to take Dutch soccer by storm. He did not think — he possibly did not even hope — that he was signing a player who might end the season as the Eredivisie’s top scorer, ahead of all the coruscating young talents at Ajax and PSV. He saw Giakoumakis as the sort of player who might “score a goal every now and again, as a bonus.”But it is not only in the Eredivisie where what goals — or a lack of them — signify is difficult to pin down. What has enabled Giakoumakis to shine at Venlo is that the way the team plays suits him. His sole job is to be in the box, to win the ball in the air, to take chances. “I have never seen a striker so focused on goals as him,” Kum said. He is not asked to do anything he is not good at.The same is surely true of all of those improbable names who went before him, Samaras and Janssen and Alves and all the rest. They, most likely, thrived because they found themselves in teams that accentuated their strengths and disguised their weaknesses.That they could never burn quite so brightly as they did in the Eredivisie does not mean they were bad players who got lucky. True, perhaps, they benefited from those callow and generous defenses that make goals a little easier to come by in the Netherlands. And true, maybe their golden year was an exception, rather than the rule.But it seems likely, too, that some fundamental truth was missed: that goals and the ability to score them are not innate traits, something that can be smoothly transplanted from one place to another with nothing lost in transit.That nothing at all on Giakoumakis’s résumé suggested he was capable of this season did not mean it was impossible; that his time at Venlo has been so fruitful does not mean he will automatically be able to do the same next year, whether he is in the Netherlands or England or elsewhere.Whether he is good or bad or indifferent is not fixed; what came before will not define what comes after. What they say about goals is, perhaps, true of all players: What matters most is being in the right place, at the right time.Strength in DepthManchester City’s 2-1 win in Paris moved it within reach of its first Champions League final.Alex Grimm/Getty ImagesFor the second time in three years, the Premier League stands on the cusp of a clean sweep. In 2019, English teams took up all four slots in Europe’s major finals — Liverpool beating Tottenham to the Champions League, Chelsea overcoming Arsenal in the Europa League final — and, in 2021, it is 90 minutes away from repeating the trick.Manchester City and Chelsea, certainly, are well-placed to make the Champions League final. City is in the stronger position, thanks to Paris St.-Germain’s second-half collapse, but Chelsea has less to fear: It turned out that beating a Liverpool team that had also lost to Burnley and Brighton did not prove Real Madrid was ready to reclaim its European crown.Christian Pulisic is the first American to score in a Champions League semifinal.Bernat Armangue/Associated PressManchester United, meanwhile, demolished Roma, 6-2, to seal — or as good as seal — its return to the Europa League final. Arsenal retains a hope of completing the set: Mikel Arteta’s flawed and fragile team lost at Villarreal, 2-1, but he will have seen enough to believe redemption is possible next week in London.It is dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions from relatively small sample sizes, but the direction of travel seems clear. The coronavirus pandemic has eviscerated the finances of clubs all over Europe, but the same financial advantages that made the Premier League such a force in 2019 have enabled its clubs to ride the storm better than most.There will always be exceptions, of course. Perhaps the Europa League will return to its rightful home in Seville next year. Maybe Bayern Munich or Barcelona will be able to mount a successful Champions League campaign in 2023. No rule will ever hold entirely true. But it feels distinctly like prominence is now the Premier League’s to lose.Management Shake-Up at Red Bull HQJesse Marsch, who won a league and cup double at Red Bull Salzburg in 2020, will take over the company’s Leipzig operation next season, the club said Thursday. He will replace Julian Nagelsmann, who is moving to Bayern Munich.Pool photo by Maxim ShemetovCorrespondence: Super League SpecialIt might only have lasted two days, but what a two days it was. All that plotting, all that intrigue, all those appearances by Florentino Pérez on late-night Spanish television — I hope they do another superleague soon. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that the very notion of it brought a deluge of correspondence, the best of which I’ve tried to answer below.Dave Moore: How much of the intense anger has to do with Brexit and class antagonism? Yes, people resented having tradition and history messed with, but isn’t part of the ongoing white hot outrage directed at the feeling that in a world in which there is a finite amount of money, people like these owners have a lot of it, and then they wanted even more?Quite a lot, Dave. I think this is the same feeling that we would have toward things like Big Tech or governmental corruption if it didn’t all seem so complex and distant. The idea of the Super League upset fans on a sporting level — promotion and relegation is almost sacred, it seems — but the perception of greed from the already staggeringly wealthy was too much to bear.Walid Neaz: If the rules were slightly different, might the plan have succeeded? For example, if the 12 teams didn’t have a permanent spot beyond the first season, but could then be subject to relegation if they had a bad year?There is definitely a format that could have made this idea more palatable — I have an idea myself that I might be willing to share once everyone has stopped shouting — but a lot of the failure was a public relations one. Nobody ever made a good case for change, even if the change in question was bad.At Real Madrid, the big question is: OK, now what?Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBill Kelsey: How deep into dire straits are Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus if they are clinging to this idea?Deep, in the case of the two Spanish teams. Juventus’s problem is more sporting: The club’s executives know it isn’t possible to keep up with the Premier League teams or P.S.G. This was the only way of equalizing the revenue.Stephen Gessner: People forget that the Premier League was formed in 1992 by a breakaway group of owners who needed more revenue, mostly from TV.True, but the Premier League was always attached to the rest of the Football League by promotion and relegation. In one sense, it was a rebranding, more than a breakaway.Paul Speelman: Would some sort of salary cap be worth looking at?Yes, in principle, but no, in practice. How do you implement that rule across Europe, let alone South America and Asia? And how do you get lots of competing clubs who don’t trust one another to sign up for it?Michael Fisher: Don’t you think players need to be more involved in decisions concerning the future of soccer?Absolutely. I wonder if there is a time, now, for FIFPro — the global players’ union — to be more central in these discussions. More parochially, it strikes me that there is a pressing need for a Premier League-specific union within the broader English union, the P.F.A.Some of the most public protests against the Super League came from players who would be locked out of it.Pool photo by Mike HewittKathleen Hayward: Why is nobody discussing the $130 million penalty clause, which Florentino Pérez is unlikely to forgive?Good question, though I suspect the answer is that nobody is quite sure at this point how enforceable it is. As I understand it, there were clauses in the contract that made pulling out possible in certain situations. Besides, officially Pérez hasn’t given up on it yet ….Matt Watts: I’m interested that there was no mention of your change of stance on the issue: that something like this was inevitable?That was my stance, Matt, and you’re quite right: I hadn’t factored in how vitriolic the opposition to it would be, or how potent the impact of that would prove. Now I’m of the view that this idea is dead in the water for at least 10 years. But that said, in a way, I was right: It was inevitable that they would try it, and they did. (Is that a stretch? It feels a stretch.) More

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      Real Madrid's Marcelo May May Miss Game for Election Duty

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      Unless the Brazilian defender is excused from working at a polling place next week, he may miss his club’s Champions League match at Chelsea.Real Madrid could be without one of its best defenders for a semifinal match in the Champions League next week because he was randomly selected to work a shift at the polls during local elections in Madrid.Marcelo, a fullback who started the first leg of Real Madrid’s semifinal against Chelsea on Tuesday in Spain, was randomly selected by the Spanish government to work at the polls next Tuesday, when there will be elections for seats in the Madrid Assembly, El Mundo reported. A second Madrid player, Victor Chust, was also selected, but he is injured and will not be missed by the team.All registered voters in Spain are eligible to be randomly selected to work at the polls. Though Marcelo, 32, was born in Brazil, he has played for Real since 2007 and has been a Spanish citizen for a decade.Spanish law allows for exemptions, which may be given for “professionals who must participate in public events to be held on the voting day that are scheduled before the electoral call when the party cannot be replaced and his nonparticipation forces suspension of the event, producing economic damages.”In the past, soccer players and others with pressing business have been excused from the polling duty. In 2019, for example, Aitor Fernández, a Levante goalkeeper, did not have to work the polls because his team had a match that day.Even leaving aside whether Marcelo is irreplaceable and whether the game would have to be canceled in his absence, there is another problem for Real’s appeal: In the case of Fernández, his game was the same day as the election. In Marcelo’s case, the second leg of the semifinal against Chelsea in London is not until the following evening. But Real Madrid is planning to travel to England a day early, the same date of the elections, and because of coronavirus protocols it may not be possible for Marcelo to make the trip on game day.El Mundo reported that Marcelo was “very upset by his electoral luck.” Real Madrid and Chelsea tied the first leg, 1-1, on Tuesday, when Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic became the first American to score in the semifinals of the competition.If he has to stay behind, Marcelo will at least pick up a small bonus: Poll workers are paid 65 euros ($78) for their day’s work.A logical replacement for Marcelo at left back would be Ferland Mendy, but it is not clear if he will be ready to return from a calf injury. More

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      Real Madrid’s Marcelo May Miss Chelsea Game for Election Duty

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      Unless the Brazilian defender is excused from working at a polling place next week, he may miss his club’s Champions League match at Chelsea.Real Madrid could be without one of its best defenders for a semifinal match in the Champions League next week because he was randomly selected to work a shift at the polls during local elections in Madrid.Marcelo, a fullback who started the first leg of Real Madrid’s semifinal against Chelsea on Tuesday in Spain, was randomly selected by the Spanish government to work at the polls on May 4, when there will be elections for seats in the Madrid Assembly, El Mundo reported. A second Madrid player, Victor Chust, was also selected, but is injured and will not be missed by the team.All registered voters in Spain are eligible to be randomly selected to work at the polls. Though Marcelo, 32, was born in Brazil, he has played for Real since 2007 and has been a Spanish citizen for a decade.Spanish law allows for exemptions, which may be given for “professionals who must participate in public events to be held on the voting day that are scheduled before the electoral call when the party cannot be replaced and his nonparticipation forces suspension of the event, producing economic damages.”In the past, soccer players and others with pressing business have been excused from the polling duty. In 2019, for example, Aitor Fernández, a Levante goalkeeper, did not have to work the polls because his team had a match that day.Even leaving aside whether Marcelo is irreplaceable and whether the game would have to be canceled in his absence, there is another problem for Real’s appeal: In the case of Fernández, his game was the same day as the election. In Marcelo’s case, the second leg of the semifinal against Chelsea in London is not until the following evening. But Real Madrid is planning to travel to England a day early, the same date of the elections, and because of coronavirus protocols it may not be possible for Marcelo to make the trip on game day.El Mundo reported that Marcelo was “very upset by his electoral luck.” Real Madrid and Chelsea tied the first leg, 1-1, on Tuesday, when Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic became the first American to score in the semifinals of the competition.If he has to stay behind, Marcelo will at least pick up a small bonus: Poll workers are paid 65 euros ($78) for their day’s work.A logical replacement for Marcelo at left back would be Ferland Mendy, but it is not clear if he will be ready to return from a calf injury. More

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      At Real Madrid, the Champions League Can Still Slip Away

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      A history of Champions League success is part of the fabric at Real Madrid. No club has won it more often. But rivals keep driving up the price.Real Madrid knows the route. The first stop will be at Almudena, the Spanish capital’s cathedral. Then it is on to Puerta del Sol, in the heart of the city, before a reception at the Palace of Communications, where the local council sits. The formalities over, it is out on to Plaza de Cibeles, the fountain-cum-roundabout where Real Madrid always celebrates its triumphs.The path is a well-worn one. “Something of a routine,” as Real Madrid’s captain, Sergio Ramos, put it in 2018. The club has done it 13 times before; a substantial proportion of this current squad has done it four times since 2014.It has done it so often that there are rules in place now. The players are no longer allowed to climb up the statue of Cybele, in a chariot drawn by lions, that stands at the center of the roundabout, after one of their over-exuberant forebears managed to break her arm. Instead, one will be allowed to place a scarf, delicately, around her neck. Real Madrid knows what it does, where it goes and how it behaves when it wins the Champions League.From left, Marcelo, Cybele and Sergio Ramos. All are regulars at Real Madrid celebrations.Javier Lizon/EPA, via ShutterstockThere is no equivalent among the three teams who might yet deny Real Madrid a 14th crown this year. Manchester City has made it to the semifinals for only the second time in its history. Paris St.-Germain is here for only the third time. Chelsea, Real Madrid’s opponent in the semifinals on Tuesday, has at least staged one victory parade, in 2012, but precedent is not quite the same as tradition. Chelsea would have to plot a map for another. Real Madrid can do the journey on autopilot.This, then, is Real Madrid’s stage. In one light, Coach Zinedine Zidane’s team should be the last choice of the four remaining contenders to win European club soccer’s biggest prize. Manchester City is free and clear at the summit of the Premier League, on the cusp of a third title in four years under the guiding hand of Pep Guardiola, the finest coach of his generation.P.S.G. is propelled by not only the most expensive player of all time, but by Kylian Mbappé, the 22-year-old standard-bearer for soccer’s next generation. Chelsea, revived under the German coach Thomas Tuchel, was reinforced by $250 million worth of talent last summer — in the middle of a pandemic — and now only concedes goals to teams managed by Sam Allardyce.Real Madrid, on the other hand, is ravaged by injury. The player signed to sprinkle it with stardust, Eden Hazard, has barely featured in the two years since he joined. It failed to make the quarterfinals of this competition in 2019 and 2020, and came within a whisker of elimination in the group stage this time around.Though it has not lost in any competition since January, its form has been stop and start. It followed a week in which it beat Barcelona and Liverpool with scoreless draws against Getafe and Real Betis. It has not even been able to do what Real Madrid does best: take advantage when its neighbor and rival, Atlético Madrid, loses its nerve.But this is precisely the point when Real’s history becomes an active force, rather than a scenic backdrop. Every single one of the Champions League trophies Real Madrid has acquired is on display in the club’s museum. Twice, in recent years, it has had to expand the cabinet that holds them. This is not a problem any other team has. No other team feels quite so at home in this competition as Real Madrid.It is strange, then, that only a week ago the club’s president, Florentino Pérez, was busy trying to destroy it. The Super League project that he had spent three years developing — and substantially more time conceiving — might have been designed to “save soccer,” as he put it, but it could have done nothing but diminish the Champions League, the very trophy that plays such a central role in his club’s self-identity.He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little skittish when that point was made to him on one of the ill-judged and, significantly, solitary television appearances he made to defend the Super League.Would Real Madrid’s first Super League victory — it was never questioned that Real Madrid would win the Super League, which is telling in itself — be the club’s first victory in that competition, or would it be its 14th European Cup? “It might be the 15th,” he answered. “The 14th might arrive this season.”Pérez had to be oblique, to swat the issue away. He cherishes winning the Champions League more than anyone else; in that trophy is, in his eyes, all the justification, all the answer, he ever needs. Even as he concocted the Super League, he would have known that to diminish the Champions League would, by proxy, serve to diminish Madrid’s history, and his own.Real Madrid President Florentino Pérez with the club’s Champions League trophy collection in 2016, before he had to expand the case yet again.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhy he was prepared to do that can, in part, be gleaned from Real Madrid’s balance sheet. The club is drowning in debt, behind on its salary bill — another six-monthly installment of player salaries is due on June 30 — and hamstrung by the costs of renovations to its stadium, the Bernabéu. There is a loan from Providence, an American hedge fund, to pay back. There are transfer fees outstanding. Real Madrid, put simply, needed the money.But Pérez’s rationale can be seen, too, in the identity of those teams hoping to beat Real Madrid to the Champions League trophy in Istanbul next month: Chelsea, underwritten by the private wealth of a Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich; Manchester City, turned into a contender by its state backers in Abu Dhabi; Paris St.-Germain, the team that bought Neymar, financed by Qatar.This is the new world order that Pérez has long feared, coming to pass. He knows that Real Madrid cannot compete for resources with these teams, no matter how often the Spanish government agrees to buy its training facility. It only has so many training facilities to sell, after all, and besides, in a world in which P.S.G. can pay $258 million for Neymar — a fee paid, to some extent, with the specific aim of distorting the transfer market — even that may not be enough.It is hard to have too much sympathy. “They have to control costs, not increase income,” Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, said last week. It was a sensible sentiment; if Real Madrid, like Barcelona, cannot pay the salaries or the transfer fees of Europe’s rising powers, then they should cut their cloth accordingly.Both clubs have frittered away hundreds of millions of euros on poor signings and inflated salaries; neither has the sort of coherent vision for their future that Manchester City, say, has carefully (and expensively) nurtured. Their crisis is in no small part of their own making. They could start again, trust in youth, run themselves more sustainably, and still enjoy the vast advantages conferred on them by their revenues.But that, at Real Madrid, is easier said than done. It is not a club that will accept second best. Pérez knows that the continued popularity of his presidency rests on his ability to deliver “a time of total glory,” as he said in the aftermath of the club’s 13th Champions League trophy, now three years past.It is a club, instead, that knows by heart the route of its own valedictory tour, and that expects to make the journey every year. For years, it has felt as if the Champions League has belonged to Real Madrid, and yet here it is, slipping away, that familiar path becoming more and more arduous every year. More