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      Champions League Final: Meeting Set on Move to London

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      UEFA officials and the British government will discuss shifting the Manchester City-Chelsea game from Istanbul to Wembley to sidestep coronavirus travel restrictions.European soccer’s governing body will hold talks with the British government on Monday about moving this month’s Champions League final to London because travel restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic have made it almost impossible for domestic fans of the finalists — the Premier League rivals Manchester City and Chelsea — to attend the match at its scheduled site in Istanbul.The final, which is planned for May 29 at Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, is the biggest day on the European club soccer calendar; like the Super Bowl and the Wimbledon final, Champions League final is one of the tent-pole events in global sports every year.Questions about where to hold the match have been growing since Turkey announced a lockdown late last month. They intensified on Friday, days after City and Chelsea clinched their places in the final, when the British government announced that Turkey was among the countries to which Britons should avoid all but essential travel.Officials from England’s Football Association already have opened talks with Europe’s governing body, UEFA, about moving the game, and they will be present at Monday’s meeting, when UEFA will outline its requirements for relocation. A decision most likely will be announced within 48 hours.If an agreement cannot be reached to move the final to London, a backup choice will be considered, most likely Porto, Portugal.UEFA’s demands are likely to present a dilemma for the British government, which will have to balance the popular appeal of bringing a major sporting event featuring two English teams to the country against the continuing public health need to control the spread of the virus.Among its demands, UEFA is expected to request that Britain waive quarantine requirements so its staff members, international broadcasters, sponsors, suppliers and officials can adjust their plans and attend the game.UEFA also is seeking guarantees about spectators. Fans can start attending soccer games in England later this month, but that figure is capped at 10,000 — a number that is far lower than the 25,000 fans that Istanbul has said it could accommodate. The British government relaxed that rule by saying 20,000 can attend the F.A. Cup final on May 17 at Wembley Stadium in London. UEFA will demand a similar accommodation.English officials have indicated to UEFA that the game can be played at Wembley, even though the stadium is already booked to stage promotion playoffs for the lower leagues that week. Those matches will be relocated to new venues or played on different dates. Two Premier League clubs have approached UEFA about staging the Champions League final at their stadiums, but UEFA is expected to insist that if the game is to be moved to England, it will have to be played at Wembley, a neutral venue familiar to both clubs and one that satisfies UEFA’s requirements for hosting major games.A market street in Istanbul, where a strict lockdown has closed shops in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThe decision would mean pulling the game from Istanbul for the second year in a row. Last year’s decisive Champions League matches — the tournament was postponed on the eve of the quarterfinals last spring to curb the spread of the virus — were played in a so-called bubble environment in Lisbon. They were moved only after Turkish officials had agreed to surrender their coveted role as host of the final in exchange for a promise that Istanbul would host the final this year.Officials in Portugal have told UEFA that they could accommodate this year’s final on short notice, too, perhaps in Porto, after the British government on Friday included Portugal in a list of countries its citizens could travel to without having to quarantine upon their return.Turkey has recently entered a new lockdown amid a rise in virus cases, and the country has been placed on the red list, a group of countries and territories for which travel from Britain is actively discouraged. Turkey, a popular destination for British tourists, had said it would lift its lockdown on May 17 — 12 days before the Champions League final — but government officials had warned soccer fans to stay home.“First of all, it does mean with regards to the Champions League, fans should not travel to Turkey,” Grant Shapps, the British lawmaker responsible for transport, said at a news conference after announcing the new regulations for travel in and out of Britain.Making matters more complicated is a 10-day quarantine requirement for individuals who return to Britain after being cleared to travel from red list countries. That would mean more than a dozen players on both squads potentially being ruled out of preparations for the European Championship, the quadrennial Continent soccer championship, that begins on June 11.“We are very open to hosting the final, but it is ultimately a decision for UEFA,” Shapps said, adding, “Given there are two English clubs in that final, we look forward to what they have to say.”For UEFA, there is sympathy for Turkey, which may now lose the final for the second straight year. One option being considered to appease Turkish officials is an offer for the final to be played in Istanbul in 2023, to coincide with the centenary of the Turkish republic.Both Manchester City and Chelsea would have brought large traveling parties and potentially thousands of fans to Turkey for the game, in addition to the hundreds of journalists and others who normally attend the final. Their supporters from outside Britain — who might have been allowed to attend the match in Turkey — most likely will not be included in the eased travel restrictions if the game is played in England.Manchester City, on course to clinch its third Premier League title in four years this weekend, claimed its first berth in the final on Tuesday, when it eliminated Paris St.-Germain, a finalist last summer in Lisbon.Chelsea, which won the Champions League in 2012, earned its place a day later by ousting Spain’s Real Madrid.In a quirk of the Premier League schedule, City and Chelsea met in a league game on Saturday in Manchester, with Chelsea delaying City’s domestic championship celebrations by securing a 2-1 victory. More

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      As Women's Soccer Grows, So Does Its Competitive Divide

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      The success of a handful of top women’s teams is a testament to their clubs’ commitment. But a growing competitive divide should be addressed before it’s too late.MANCHESTER, England — It is remarkable, really, what you can fit into that time when there is time for one last chance. A corner whipped in, a header flashed toward goal, a finger outstretched to divert its flight just enough so that when the ball lands, it is on metal rather than nylon.The last chance, it seemed, had come and gone. As it turned out, that was just the first of the last chances. The second fell to one of the world’s finest players, almost surprised to be all alone in an ocean of space, unable to react in time. And then the third: the most ruthless striker in the game running clean through, the championship within reach. There was time, still, but space was suddenly at a premium.And then the whistle blew. A game drawn, gratification delayed. Manchester City Women and Chelsea Women had fought each other to a standstill, 90 minutes and a little more of high drama and impeccable quality delivered by a collection of superstars and punctuated by four goals, shared evenly. It was the perfect title decider in all but one sense: It did not decide anything.Instead, the draw meant that the race to crown this season’s Women’s Super League champion would go to the wire. Both City and Chelsea had two games left; Chelsea led the table by only two points. If Emma Hayes’s team — simultaneously managing its quest to reach the Champions League final — slipped, Manchester City would be there to pounce.Both have played once since, and both won. Which means that everything is at stake on Sunday afternoon, the final day of the season. Chelsea will be home against Reading, and should, in all probability, claim its fifth title in seven years. But while City is on the road, it has the (theoretically) marginally easier engagement, at West Ham.Chelsea’s women, like its men’s team, have advanced to the Champions League final.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressFor the W.S.L., it is the perfect denouement to the season. Not simply because great tension always generates great sport, regardless of the circumstance, but because these two teams have done more than any others in recent years — Arsenal apart — to drive the standard of the league skyward.Between them, Chelsea and City have drawn some of the world’s best players to England. Chelsea paid a world-record fee to sign the Danish forward Pernille Harder from Wolfsburg, not long after it had reportedly made Sam Kerr, the Australian striker, the best-paid female soccer player on the planet.City, meanwhile, has tempted Rose Lavelle, Abby Dahlkemper and Sam Mewis, three members of the United States’ World Cup-winning squad, to Manchester. They count a group of England internationals among their teammates, including the striker Ellen White and — brought home from Lyon, for so long the leading light of the women’s game — the defenders Alex Greenwood and Lucy Bronze.It is no surprise, then, that the W.S.L. is now seen by many as the finest, strongest women’s league in the world. And while it is a little harder than normal to gauge interest levels in the midst of the pandemic — there are, after all, no attendance figures to report — viewership is growing. Last year, a weekly highlights show on the BBC, despite a late-night slot, attracted an average of half a million viewers.Sam Mewis is one of three top Americans at Manchester City, which will need a win and a Chelsea defeat on Sunday, the final day of the season, to claim the title.Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersIn theory, that pattern will hold. In March, the cable network Sky agreed to pay more than $10 million a year for the domestic broadcast rights to W.S.L. games, with some remaining on the free-to-air BBC. The league signed deals last year to showcase its games in Italy, Germany and the United States. According to a survey by RunRepeat, a data analysis firm, that increased exposure should meet a willing audience.But that progress also presents a pressing challenge. It is to their immense credit, of course, that Manchester City and Chelsea have invested so much in their squads, but it has — with rare exceptions — left them severely overmatched against the rest of the league.Between them, the clubs account for all but one national title since 2014. This year, Arsenal and Manchester United, each with a cadre of high-class recruits, have just about been able to keep pace, but the rest of the W.S.L. has been cut adrift, and the gap that has opened between the leaders and the pack is stark.In January, Manchester City beat Aston Villa, 7-0, one week and then Brighton, 7-1, the next. Bristol City, battling relegation, has conceded eight goals in a loss to Manchester City and nine in a defeat at Chelsea. The day before that particular humbling, back in September, Arsenal scored nine against West Ham.Bristol City sits last in the Women’s Super League, having won only twice all season.Andrew Boyers/Action Images, via ReutersIt is the same across much of Europe. Later this month, Chelsea will face Barcelona in the Champions League final. Barcelona’s domestic record this season is simple: 25 played, 25 won. It has scored 127 goals and surrendered only 5. In one 17-day stretch in April, it won consecutive games by scores of 7-1, 9-0 and 6-1.Juventus has won all 19 of its games in Italy, scoring six against Florentia and nine against Bari. In France, Lyon has lost once all year — to Paris St.-Germain, the team that is on the cusp of denying Lyon a 15th title in a row. Even that is relatively unusual: Until that defeat, Lyon had not lost a domestic game since 2017.None of that is to blame the clubs who have invested in their women’s teams. It is strange, in fact, that more teams cut off from success by the economic disparity in the men’s game have not poured more resources into their women’s sides, where glory comes much cheaper. Chelsea’s Harder, the most expensive player in the world, cost somewhere in the region of $300,000, which is not quite what Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang earns in a week.The commitment from Chelsea and City and the rest has, without question, been not only a completely valid business decision, but a driving force behind the sustained growth of the women’s game, capitalizing on the boom generated by the success, in particular, of the 2019 World Cup. The task for the leagues, though, is to ensure that their competitions have breadth, as well as height.In Continental Europe, the answer is simple. Spain’s top flight, for example, is not yet fully professional; the expectation is that, as more teams go full time, they will be better placed to start to reel in Barcelona. In England, the hope is that the imminent television deal will not only swell coffers across the board, but also encourage those clubs that have been wary of investing that they will see a return on their money.Lieke Martens and Barcelona are unbeaten in the league for two years running.Joan Monfort/Associated PressAs dangerous as it can be to compare the dynamics of the women’s game with the men’s, though, the evidence suggests it is not always quite that straightforward. One of the dangers of the model employed to grow the W.S.L. — using the renown of brands from the men’s game to kick-start the women’s — is that, ultimately, the thinking remains the same. What worked, or was perceived to work, for the men is applied unthinkingly to the women. That is, after all, how it is done.The risk is that it is not only the successes that are copied, but the mistakes, too. The greatest challenge facing the men’s game is the lack of competitive balance both between and within leagues: the presence of an entrenched and unreachable elite slowly eroding first the hope and then the interest of everyone else.There is no reason for the women’s game to be forced into that same pitfall, for the W.S.L. to split into the same miniature divisions that fracture the Premier League. Whether the mechanism to prevent it is financial (a tweak to the distribution of revenue) or sporting (some sort of draft model) is not clear, but it is worth discussing.That meeting between Chelsea and Manchester City, the game with all those last chances, was as compelling as any there will be in any league, anywhere in the world, this season. Its drama was exquisite, its cast stellar, its execution flawless. It was the sort of game that should be spread around the many, rather than monopolized by the few.The Country That Cried WolfThere are many, within soccer, who resent England’s tendency to, at the slightest opportunity, wheel out that rusty old cliché about being the sport’s home. It is bad enough that it does so when bidding to host a tournament far in the future — witness the slogan for Britain and Ireland’s 2030 World Cup campaign — but it is barely tolerable when the effort is dressed up as not just a chance to return the game to its roots, but an act of charitable salvation, too.It happens, essentially, for every major tournament. It happened before the World Cups in South Africa and Brazil: Neither could afford it, so play it in England. It happened before the World Cup in Russia: Putin is bad, play it in England. And it has been happening for 11 years about the World Cup in Qatar.None of the lawmakers, observers or, yes, fans who offer the suggestion seem to appreciate not only the degree to which they are offering an almost offensively easy solution for enormously intricate geopolitical issues — “To solve the human rights problem in Qatar, I would simply play the World Cup in England” — but also how presumptuous it sounds. Mostly, though, they do not seem to get quite how annoying it must be for everyone else.It is somehow fitting, then, that the first time there is a case to be made for their reflex argument, nobody wants to hear it.It’s not coming home.Matthew Childs/Action Images, via ReutersAs previously noted in this newsletter: It would make sense, in the midst of a pandemic, to host this summer’s European Championship entirely in England. And it would make possibly even more sense to play this year’s Champions League final — currently scheduled for Istanbul, on May 29, but contested by two Premier League teams — in England (or maybe Wales). Turkey has just entered a new lockdown, after all. Its coronavirus rates are troubling. Encouraging around 10,000 English fans to travel across Europe for a game of soccer, in the current circumstances, is ridiculous.As things stand, though at least one English club has offered to step in, and though at least one of the finalists has asked UEFA to contemplate moving the game, it is unlikely anything will be changed. It is too late, too complex, too sensitive: Istanbul was, after all, supposed to hold the final in 2020. Forcing the city to wait another year would be unpalatable.But it is hard not to wonder if perhaps the entreaties of the English would be given more than a cursory hearing if the same demand had not been made quite so often over the last two decades. It creates the impression less that this is a coolheaded response to a unique set of circumstances, and more that it is fairly typical opportunism. It is a shame. For once, there is good reason to play something in England. It’s just that nobody has any reason to listen.Real Friends Ask QuestionsEden Hazard suffering against Chelsea. It was his smiles afterward that rankled some.Toby Melville/ReutersThe music was funereal. Josep Pedrerol, the host, sat in a television studio, cast in silhouette. When he spoke, his tone was somber, his cadence grave. A non-Spanish speaker might have assumed that he was pronouncing on some national sorrow, some unthinkable loss, or that he had just learned a close friend had recently eaten a beloved pet.He was, instead, telling his viewers that Real Madrid had been eliminated from the Champions League, and that they might like to blame Eden Hazard — overweight, apparently, and unforgivably caught smiling with some of his former Chelsea teammates. Hazard, Pedrerol said, had “laughed in the face of the Madrid fans.” After this brazen transgression, Hazard “could not play another second for Madrid.”It would be easy to laugh off the show that Pedrerol fronts — El Chiringuito, a gaudy staple of Spain’s late-night television schedule, the place that Florentino Pérez bafflingly chose to pitch his European Super League to the public at large — as a bombastic and overblown outrage factory. It is, in fact, not much of an outlier.This sort of thing does not happen only in Spain, of course; let those who are in glass houses cast the first accusation of underperformance and all that. But there has long been a strand of coverage of Real Madrid in general, and the Real Madrid of Pérez in particular, that adopts this sort of tone: utterly jubilant in victory, a toddler’s temper tantrum in defeat, with the blame always, reliably, directed away from the man who runs the club.Pedrerol knows his audience, of course. He is doubtless sincere in his views. There is an appeal, too, for fans to see their own disappointment reflected back to them. On Wednesday night, Pedrerol was manifesting what many of them were probably feeling. But if these outlets have Real Madrid’s best interests at heart, it is difficult to see how, exactly, they are helping.Is demanding Hazard be sold at the first opportunity the best way to encourage him to give his best to Real Madrid? Is treating every defeat as some sort of crime against nature likely to foster the sort of environment that allows a team to be built smartly and sensibly?And, most of all, is refusing to suggest that Pérez might in some way be accountable — given that he is more than happy to take the glory when times are good — really going to address Real Madrid’s issues at their roots? It feels unfair to describe the journalists who work at these outlets as little more than Madrid’s “friendly” news media, but there are times when it goes beyond that. They give the impression of being mere clients. Real friends, after all, ask questions.CorrespondenceA rare image of Donny van de Beek, right, playing for Manchester United.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsLast week’s column on Dutch soccer has opened the floodgates. Well, the trickle-gates. Well, just this email from Jos Timmers:“Last year, Donny van de Beek went to Manchester United for an enormous amount, but he hardly ever plays. Now his participation with the Dutch national team in the European Championship is in danger. He is just one of the many talented players who are lured into a megacontract by the clubs with the deepest pockets and then languish on the reserve bench or, worse still, in the stands. I cannot understand how they are capable to cope with this situation.”The conundrum van de Beek — and the many others like him — faces, I think, is that it is hard to turn down the opportunity (sporting and financial) to play for one of the game’s modern giants. Players believe in their abilities. They have the confidence to assume that they will play, no matter how high the standard around them.But I also think this is an area where soccer could, perhaps, take administrative action to make the game a little less unequal. ESPN’s Gabriele Marcotti has suggested reducing the number of players any team can register in its squad to 19 or 20, rather than the current 25, with players under age 21 exempted. This would, he argues correctly, spread talent around more evenly: to make Manchester United less likely, in other words, to stockpile players of the talent of Donny van de Beek.I wonder if you could go farther, though. What if every player’s contract had a clause in it saying that they would be available for sale at a set price (or even for free) if they failed to play a specified percentage of games over the course of the season? At the end of the campaign, they would be allowed to move on (if they chose to do so), rather than being consigned to another year as a squad filler by a team with no real use for them.Hansi Flick, right, will hand Julian Nagelsmann a Bundesliga-winning team, and the expectation that he keep it on top.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSabine Brettreich asks how Julian Nagelsmann will fare at Bayern Munich, where he will take over from Hansi Flick this summer. I could be cheap and say I would guess that Nagelsmann will win the league, but that is perhaps to downplay how interesting the appointment is.Nagelsmann’s career has been unusual: no playing background to speak of, but a lot of coaching experience for someone so young. Bayern has always seemed his natural destination, but it is also a test: Will a playing squad of that quality afford him the respect that he deserves? My instinct is that it will work, but that is not, I think, guaranteed. More

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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