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    The Premier League’s Asterisk Season

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    As it concludes an epic title race, soccer’s richest competition is a picture of health on the field. Away from it, the league faces lawsuits, infighting and the threat of government regulation.With five minutes left in his team’s penultimate game of the Premier League season, Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola found the tension just a little too much. As a rival striker bore down on his team’s goal, Guardiola — crouching on his haunches on the sideline — lost his balance and toppled over onto his back.Lying on the grass and expecting the worst, he missed what may yet prove to be the pivotal moment in the Premier League’s most enthralling title race in a decade.But the striker did not score. His effort was parried by goalkeeper Stefan Ortega, sending Manchester City above its title rival Arsenal in the standings and positioning it, if it can win again on Sunday, to become the first English team to win four consecutive championships.“Ortega saved us,” Guardiola said afterward. “Otherwise, Arsenal is champion.”That the destiny of the championship should have been determined only so late in the season seems fitting for what has, on the surface, been a vintage Premier League campaign.All of that drama, though, comes with a figurative asterisk. This season’s Premier League has been defined as much by turbulence off the field — points deductions, internecine bickering, legal disputes, fraud accusations and the looming threat of government intervention — as it has been by City’s (eventual) smooth sailing through it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Soccer Watchalongs Like Stretford Paddock Offer a Broadcast Alternative

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      Soccer fans are tuning out broadcasts in favor of watchalongs: streaming parties where you hear what you want to hear and see everything except the game.With the lights adjusted and the cameras rolling, the production team gives Joe Smith his cue. In five seconds, he will be broadcasting live to a couple thousand people. Mr. Smith’s mind, though, is elsewhere. “Slate is definitely the best way to build a roof,” he mutters to his co-host, Jay Mottershead, as the countdown hits three. “All these years on, they haven’t topped it.”And with that, they are on air. They will remain so for the next four hours, essentially uninterrupted: a broadcasting endurance test staged in a subterranean studio, all exposed brick and industrial lighting, in the middle of Manchester’s achingly hip Northern Quarter.Before they have finished, they will have touched on subjects as diverse as: the slightly alarming frequency with which Mr. Mottershead has nightmares; the declining popularity of lemon curd; and the story of a man who attends Mr. Smith’s gym exclusively to read vintage copies of “Cars” magazine.Occasionally, their freewheeling, faintly anarchic conversation to be interrupted by what is supposedly the purpose of the evening’s activity: keeping track of the game between the soccer team they support, Manchester United, and the Danish champion, F.C. Copenhagen.That is, after all, what will attract more than 100,000 people to their livestream over the course of those four hours. It is the diversions and the tangents and the stream of consciousness about roofing, though, that will keep them there.Watchalongs like Stretford Paddock’s have become big business, with full-scale production crews and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.Rory Smith/The New York TimesHard-Core CommunityThe concept of watching two people watch a soccer game might sound like a distinctly postmodern form of entertainment, a close cousin of the gaming streams that proliferate on Twitch and the unboxing videos that for some reason captivate children on YouTube.In soccer, though, the form has deep roots. The idea of making most games available to watch on television, after all, is a relatively recent one. In Britain, home to the Premier League, many games continue to be blacked out, in the interest of protecting in-stadium attendances.Barred from showing those games, broadcasters have for years had little choice but to find creative ways to keep viewers up-to-date on what is taking place in them. Most have settled on the format pioneered by Sky’s “Soccer Saturday” — launched in the 1990s — in which an array of former players sit in a studio, watching feeds of the games only they can see, and update viewers on key moments in real time. (Think of the N.F.L.’s popular Red Zone channel, only without seeing anyone actually playing football.)A group reaction to a last-minute goal on Arsenal Fan TV in 2021 made a compilation of the watchalong’s greatest hits.The form of the show that Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith host on Stretford Paddock, the Manchester United fan channel they co-own — or its counterparts on outlets like The Redmen TV (Liverpool) and We Are Tottenham TV (self-explanatory) — is essentially the same. The function, though, is distinct.Most of their viewers, Mr. Mottershead said, are also watching the games, either legally or illegally. “They turn the commentary down and listen to us instead,” he said. They do so because they want a much more narrowly focused product: Stretford Paddock’s audience only wants updates on Manchester United, for example, not news about anyone else who is playing at the same time.And, crucially, they want those updates delivered not by the compromised and biased mouthpieces of the mainstream media — what they see as retirees protecting their friends and business interests, or commentators with the nebulous but definite prejudice against their club — but by dyed-in-the-wool fans like them. “We might disagree on things,” Mr. Mottershead said. “But we all want United to do well.”Still, after more than six years leading watchalongs with Mr. Smith, Mr. Mottershead has come to believe that what draws in fans is not simply a matter of having their obsessions met and their biases confirmed.What his viewers are looking for, he thinks, is simple. They want someone to watch the game with them.Viral EmpireThe part of the soccer industry that is made for fans and by fans is necessarily tribal. Every club essentially exists in its own silo. The biggest names in the Manchester United content universe will be largely alien to those who follow Liverpool, just as celebrated Arsenal podcasters will have little or no resonance to Tottenham supporters.The crowning exception is Mark Goldbridge, soccer’s 44-year-old livestream kingpin and the genre’s only real crossover star. It is not just that his fan channel, The United Stand, currently has 1.77 million YouTube subscribers. It is that almost every time Manchester United loses (or draws, or concedes a goal), he is liable to reach many millions more.Footage from Mr. Goldbridge’s streams reliably goes viral: rants that are by turns splenetic, wildly N.S.F.W., and vaguely surreal. He will howl that Manchester United’s defense has “all the resistance of a papadum catching a bowling ball,” say, or that the club is accidentally employing “a team of slow giraffes.”Quite what it is about Mr. Goldbridge that has made him so prominent is difficult to pinpoint, and he offered no clues: He declined through his representation to be interviewed for this article, on the grounds that he is currently exploring opportunities away from “the watchalong space.”In interviews, Mr. Goldbridge has accepted that there is an element of cringe comedy, in the style of David Brent or Alan Partridge, to his delivery. Peter McPartland, a host on Toffee TV, a channel dedicated to Everton, agreed. “There is an awkwardness to him that makes him funny,” he said.Channels like We Are Tottenham TV and others all emphasize their bona fides as fans, and can offer faraway fans a glimpse of the in-stadium atmosphere they might never experience in person.Whatever it is, it is undeniably effective. “He has built an empire,” said Paul Machin, a founder of The Redmen TV, the Liverpool fan channel. The problem is less his success, other hosts said, and more in the copycats he has inspired.“People see his videos going viral,” Mr. Machin said, “so now there are a lot of Manchester United watchalongs where people you’ve never seen before are kind of performing their anger.”The economics of the internet, in theory, incentivize virality. In an industry in which there is a direct correlation between clicks and revenue, going viral is held to be both the greatest prize and the ultimate purpose of all online content.Those who earn their living from fan channels, though, see that kind of attention less as a goal and more as a danger. “We don’t want that virality,” said Ben Daniel, who founded We Are Tottenham TV with his brother, Simon, in 2017.Clips that break tribal lines tend to do so by attracting a considerable proportion of “hate watches,” he said — views from fans of other clubs relishing another team’s suffering. But those are not people who might hit the like button, or subscribe. Virality, it turns out, brings the wrong sort of fame.ParasocialOn the surface, the rewards for watchalong fame are thin. YouTube’s algorithm is weighted toward shorter videos, not hours of broadcast. The platform’s chats, which allow viewers to append payments to their comments or questions, drive only a couple of hundred dollars of revenue.The benefits are largely second-order ones. They are worth doing, Mr. Smith said, because they can drive subscriptions. Mostly, though, they do them because “it would be weird not to: The game is the culmination of everything we talk about.”He and Mr. Mottershead are old hands by the standards of the genre: Stretford Paddock has been doing watchalongs for almost a decade. Most of the newer versions trace their origins to the pandemic, when social distancing rules kept fans from attending games in person.Before then, fan channels focused on giving supporters who could not or did not attend games a digital version of the experience: a taste from outside the stadium, and inside the crowd, before, during and after games.“People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” one watchalong host said, wherever they happen to be watching.Rory Smith/The New York TimesWith the stands empty, that was not possible. All that was left was to offer running commentary on the games that they, like every other fan, were watching on television.When fans returned to the stands, though, the channels noticed there was still a sizable audience craving that type of in-game coverage. “It was so popular that we couldn’t drop it,” Mr. Machin said of The Redmen TV’s experience.Creators of Premier League watchalongs said they all appeal to roughly the same audience, distinguished only by tribal allegiance: fans generally between 16 and 35, though with a substantial proportion who are just a little older. A slender majority live in Britain, but there are healthy constituencies in Ireland, the United States and Australia, as well as whichever country a given team’s stars call home. Tottenham, for example, has a sizable following in South Korea thanks to the club’s beloved captain, Son Heung-min.They are all watching, too, for much the same reason. “People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” Mr. Machin said, wherever they happen to live.Watchalongs create a different sort of bond: a form of what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. Viewers want their biases to be reinforced. They want to know how other, like-minded fans are reacting to the games. But they also want the digressions, the asides about roofing and nightmares and cultural appropriation as it relates to hairstyles.They are, after all, watching from home, all around the world, each of them locked in their own little silo. What they want, more than searing insight or expert analysis or even a cheap laugh, is a connection to people who are doing exactly the same thing.Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith are not trying to offer them detailed commentary. They are trying to recreate the feeling, Mr. Mottershead said, of “watching the game with your mates.” More

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      Liverpool, V.A.R. and the Problem With Process

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      If process and hubris trump getting calls right, the system has broken down.There are very few coherent sentences in what will, in time, doubtless come to be known as the Luis Díaz Tape, a sort of Premier League equivalent to the Zapruder film. The various protagonists communicate in clipped and meaningless phrases, any clarity sacrificed on the altar of self-important brevity.The tape lasts only two minutes, and while it is not a particularly thrilling video — a group of faceless voices discussing procedure while staring at screens, advancing resolutely toward a presaged outcome — it is, by turns, tense and frustrating and never less than compelling.It is best considered, really, as a character drama. The setting is this: Díaz, the Liverpool forward, has just scored to put his team ahead against Tottenham Hotspur. The goal is ruled out, on the field, for offside. A few miles away, in a building at Stockley Park west of London, the Premier League’s Video Assistant Referee studio whirs into action.Darren England, the game’s designated V.A.R., wants to check if the goal should be allowed to stand. He commands that the footage be rewound and paused and decorated with a line. He determines that, no, Díaz had timed his run perfectly. “That’s fine, perfect,” he says to his colleagues in the video room and to Simon Hooper, the on-field official. “Check complete.”It is here that everything unravels. The goal should count, but England seems to have declared that the original call — no goal — is “perfect.” “Well done, boys; good process,” Hooper mutters. Tottenham restarts the game with a free kick. A couple of pregnant seconds pass by. Nobody seems to have noticed the non sequitur. The audience, though, knows.Luis Díaz, hero denied.Peter Cziborra/Action Images, via ReutersAt this point, the hero enters. Mo Abby is not a qualified referee; he is the technological specialist, present to operate the video equipment while the officials issue their expert judgments. “Are you happy with this?” he asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he knows he is stepping outside his role.Now, it all goes to pieces. The precise nature, the exact scale, of the error is suddenly clear to England and Dan Cook, his assistant. Another outsider, Oli Kohout — the hub operations manager, which is not a title that can be pithily explained — suggests pausing the game and allowing Hooper to correct the mistake.England is the one with the power to make that call. In the inevitable dramatization, it is at this point that the camera will focus intently on his face. His eyes will betray his panic, his fear, his dawning realization of his powerlessness. His voice, though, does not. The game has resumed. “Nothing I can do,” he says, again and again, with surprising conviction, his hubris sealing his fate.It is this that is, in truth, most troubling about the incident at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The last week has been rife with false equivalences. When the Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, suggested that the most sporting consequence of the mistake would be for the game itself to be replayed, the response was predictable. Should we replay the 1966 World Cup final? Argentina’s defeat of England in 1986? The 2019 Champions League final? That game last year where my team was on the end of a disputed, subjective call?The difference should not need to be spelled out, but since we are here: Plenty of teams have been the victims of errors no less consequential than the one that cost Liverpool last Saturday. In almost all of those cases, though, those decisions were made in good faith. The officials believed they were right. They did not press ahead in the clear, undisputed knowledge that they were wrong.There are plenty of reasons to be object to the existence, or at least the application, of V.A.R. It interrupts the rhythm of games. It diminishes the experience of watching soccer in a stadium, allowing the nature of the action to be determined remotely, by some apparently unaccountable external force. It creates and enforces an expectation of perfection that is impossible to attain and will, therefore, be a source of eternal disappointment.Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, offering some thoughts.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Díaz tape, though, is a perfect distillation of what may be the most significant objection to V.A.R. Darren England’s response, both plaintive and brash — “nothing I can do” — is rooted in a belief that what matters, above all, is the correct implementation of protocol. The rules, the sainted Laws, decree that once a game has restarted, it cannot be stopped. Errors are material reality. The referee’s decision is final, even when it is known to be wrong.This is indicative of what V.A.R. has done to soccer. Recently retired officials have a cloying tendency to lionize the days when they could apply what is known, euphemistically, as “game management.” Generally, this means referring to players by their nicknames, indulging in a false and unreciprocated chumminess, and allowing the more famous participants in a game rather more leeway than their lesser colleagues.Such an approach is, of course, flawed, but it is perhaps preferable to the technologically induced alternative, which is a world in which any form of discretion has been almost entirely removed. Quite how much soccer has shifted to allow itself to be adjudicated from afar is overlooked worryingly frequently.The most obvious example of this is handball, the definition of which seems to change with the seasons. The motivation behind this is not an attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the game, but to make it possible for a decision to be made on a screen.There are others, though. The shifting thresholds for red and yellow cards and the shrinking border between reckless and malicious are both inspired by the need to make an objective decision, one that does not rely on any human allowance for context or intent.This is the atmosphere in which referees now function, one in which they are not there to apply the rules as they see fit, but in which the rules are unyielding and inflexible and do not brook any interpretation. It is a world in which what matters is not whether anything makes any sense, but in which protocol — officious and unapologetic and blind — is king.This search for absolutism has led, ironically, to a sense of greater arbitrariness. That, in the aftermath of the Díaz incident, almost every club could pick out a litany of its own injustices in the recent past was designed to illustrate that Liverpool’s response was somehow excessive or self-pitying. Instead, it highlighted more than anything how fractured fans’ belief in the fair implementation of the Laws of the Game — always portentously capitalized — has become.Nobody is quite sure what the rules are anymore, because they have a tendency to change so often. This week, this is a handball and the referees are clamping down on time-wasting or players who demand yellow cards, and next week they are not.Decisions are imposed without adequate explanation by an officiating body that has issued 14 formal apologies since the start of last season but seems still, for some reason, convinced of its infallibility. The letter of the law is applied rigorously, but the spirit of it has been lost almost entirely. And the feeling that follows is the same as that which can be detected in the Luis Díaz tape: a sense of unmitigated frustration, of wild confusion, of total powerlessness. There is nothing Darren England can do, and in that he is no different from the rest of us.The 2030 World Cup Will Be Held … EverywhereTomas Cuesta/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is to Gianni Infantino’s credit, really, that he resisted the temptation to announce the location of the 2030 World Cup in the style of Oprah Winfrey giving out cars. Spain: You get a World Cup. Portugal: You get a World Cup. Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and, for reasons that will have to be explained later, Paraguay: You can all have a World Cup, too.The FIFA president will insist that this plan is perfectly sensible. Admirable, even. Hosting the tournament across three continents, Infantino explained on Wednesday, sends a message of “peace, tolerance and inclusion.” It means spreading the financial burden of a 48-team tournament, and by consequence sharing the joy.There is even just a hint of romance. South America has long believed it would be fitting if the World Cup’s centenary edition took place back where it all began: in Uruguay, the host of the 1930 tournament, and Argentina, the losing finalist.It had looked for some time, though, as if that might be impossible. Even with their resources pooled, the South American bidders did not possess the infrastructure — specifically the stadiums — to meet FIFA’s exacting requirements.Infantino’s solution — handing the tournament’s opening three fixtures to Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Asunción and then shifting the rest of the tournament to the Pillars of Hercules — will doubtless be sold as an ingenious compromise. That this plan effectively clears the path for the 2034 tournament to go to Asia, and to Saudi Arabia, is obviously just a coincidence.At this stage, all of this is still just an idea. The plan still has to be ratified by a vote of all 211 FIFA members next year. That it has been suggested at all, though, makes the organization’s ecological attitude abundantly clear. The 2022 World Cup might have been the single most environmentally damaging event ever staged. The 2026 edition is being held across a whole continent. The likelihood is that 2030 will take place across three.That may be the most consequential objection, but there is something less tangible to be mourned here, too. Elite sports may now be a televisual event, dislocated and remote, but it is the connection to a place that lifts a World Cup into something beyond mere content to be consumed.It is a chance for a country to go on hiatus, to revel in itself, to spend a month being swept away. That was true of Russia in 2018 and of Australia and New Zealand this year. It was that sense of proximity, the feel of a global carnival, that illuminated Qatar, far more than the stadiums. Spreading the World Cup around does not diffuse that. It dilutes it. Sure, everyone gets a little piece of it, but that does not have the same effect. Not at all. More

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      Harry Kane, Spurs and the End of the Line

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      The Tottenham star has given everything for the club he has supported since childhood. As he nears the end of his contract, he owes it nothing.Presumably, Daniel Levy was going for a more flattering vibe. One day last month, Levy, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, told the students of the Cambridge University Union that he hoped a statue of Harry Kane would stand outside the club’s stadium one day, possibly its greatest-ever striker immortalized in bronze.Levy was, surely, simply trying to illustrate the scale of Kane’s achievements, the esteem in which he is held, the status he has accrued at the club he supported as a child and has frequently carried as an adult. It was merely unfortunate that it came across as just a little bit like emotional blackmail.This is, of course, a pivotal summer for Kane. At the end of June, he will formally enter the final 12 months of the six-year contract he signed at Tottenham on the eve of the World Cup in 2018. A few weeks later, he will turn 30. If he is to leave Spurs, then it is hard to escape the impression that it is now or never.On the surface, that decision should be an easy one. Kane is the England captain. Only Alan Shearer and Wayne Rooney have scored more goals than him in the Premier League, and he is already on Rooney’s shoulder, waiting to breeze past. Kane is the sort of forward who would slot easily into any team. He can play as a focal point, he can act as a poacher, but by inclination he is a playmaker, too. He is, in essence, a false False Nine.There would, then, be no shortage of teams willing to take on his — by the standards of his peers — relatively reasonable salary. Bayern Munich has long admired Kane, in particular. Chelsea might be able to reunite him with Mauricio Pochettino. Manchester United, as things stand, has younger alternatives in mind, but if they were to prove unattainable and Kane was available, it hardly requires a great leap of imagination to suggest that might change.Plenty of clubs would be happy to slot Kane into their plans, and their budget.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAny and all of his suitors could offer him not only a lavish salary but a chance at the glory that has thus far eluded him, too. Bayern, certainly, would be almost a guarantee of trophies and medals in great, heaving piles. Chelsea, like Manchester United, has on several occasions in the recent past won competitions basically by accident. Tottenham, by contrast, can offer him a statue.That, of course, is reductive. Kane’s leaving Spurs would not be a simple thing. Not just for his sincere, deep-rooted attachment to the club, but for more hard-nosed, professional reasons. Staying at Tottenham — or at least in England — would almost certainly allow Kane to surpass Shearer as the Premier League’s career scoring leader, an honor that may mean as much to him as winning a couple of Bundesliga titles. Besides, his yearning for a trophy may well come to an end with England at next year’s European Championship.Increasingly, though, it appears it might be his only viable choice. Back in 2018, when Kane signed his current deal, the club filmed a short video to announce the news to delighted, relieved fans. In it, Kane was depicted in the control room of Tottenham’s new stadium. It had not yet opened. Nobody had played there, scored there, booed their team off there, demanded the chairman’s resignation there.It was easy to see it as a package-fresh vision of Tottenham’s gleaming future, virgin and unsullied, a place of nothing but promise. Kane, having committed the prime of his career to the club — his club — saw only the potential. “I’m just excited to keep on the train,” he said, possibly misunderstanding the theme of the video, “and see where it can go.”Initially, of course, it stayed on track. A year later, Spurs had made the Champions League final; Kane was playing for his childhood club and gracing the grandest stage European soccer can offer. Tottenham felt agonizingly close to becoming the final member of the Premier League’s dominant triumvirate, alongside Manchester City and Liverpool.That was not quite what happened.Kane has never won a trophy with Tottenham, the club he has supported since childhood.Scott Heppell/ReutersIn the summer when Kane signed his new contract, as Pochettino encouraged Levy to “be brave and take risks,” Tottenham did not sign a single new player. Eventually, that lack of reinforcements proved telling. Spurs’ form dipped. Pochettino was fired, a few months after leading it in the biggest game in the club’s history.José Mourinho replaced him. Results briefly got better, then got worse again. He was fired a few days before a cup final. The club spent months without a manager, and then appointed Nuno Espirito Santo out of, well, desperation, really. It was not a success. He left, too.Antonio Conte stepped in, complained long and loud about so many subjects that it became obvious his real gripe was with the indignity of coaching Spurs. In March, he finally talked himself out of a job. His former assistant was appointed the caretaker replacement. The man in charge of finding his long-term replacement was banned from soccer. Spurs duly conceded five goals in 20 minutes at Newcastle.All that time, the club’s playing squad — the one that had brought Spurs to such prominence that the club was invited to be part of the European Super League, an insult that it seemed to regard as a compliment — has been decaying. Tottenham’s reputational stock, its appeal to potential recruits, has been tumbling.It had taken years of painstaking work, not least from Levy, to turn Spurs into a meaningful force in England and Europe. It took about two seasons for it all to unravel completely.Antonio Conte, one in a string of managers who couldn’t get Kane where he desperately wants to go.David Klein/ReutersOnce more, there will be a new manager this summer. The current front-runner, Julian Nagelsmann, seems perfectly tailored to what the club needs: still nauseatingly young, but possessed of considerable experience; keen to rehabilitate his image, so unlikely to feel Tottenham is lucky to have him; a purveyor of bright, attractive soccer; the owner of at least one skateboard.Levy would doubtless hope that Nagelsmann’s appointment would be enough to convince Kane of the club’s seriousness, its ambition, its attractiveness. To believe that, though, the striker would have to ignore everything else he has seen in the five years since he signed his contract. All of the disappointments. All of the missed opportunities. All of the glaring strategic errors. Spurs might get the right manager. There is no evidence to suggest it will provide him with the players or the time or the environment he needs to succeed.Kane’s statue outside the stadium that was supposed to represent the club’s transformation should not be dependent on whether he remains at Tottenham in perpetuity. He has already given the club more than enough to make the case for a monument in his honor. He has fulfilled his side of the bargain. He has lived up to his promise.The same cannot be said for Spurs. Kane knows where this train is going; or, more pertinently, he knows where it is not. It will hardly fill him with glee, but he will know, without doubt, that this is his stop.Your Happiness Is Not GuaranteedTottenham fans contemplating the long journey home from Newcastle.Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersTottenham’s players volunteering to reimburse those fans who had made the long journey to Newcastle — only to see their hapless, witless team fall 5-0 behind after 21 minutes — for the price of their tickets is a gesture rooted in the very finest of intentions. It is humble, generous, considerate. It speaks extremely well of them. It is, without question, A Nice Thing To Do.Sadly, it is also completely wrongheaded. Newcastle is a long way from London, certainly by British standards. Depending on your preferred unit of measurement, it is 280 miles; three hours (at best) and your life savings by train; or two and a half weeks on the country’s traffic-clogged, potholed and pit-scarred roads by car.Throw in the price of the ticket, and those Spurs fans would have committed a couple of hundred pounds and many hours of their lives to attend the game. That the players then turned in what must rank as one of the most inept performances of any club in the Premier League era must be galling to the point of offensive. That some of those fans should have gone public with a demand for refunds is an understandable reflex.Unfortunately, that is not how sport is meant to work. A ticket to a sporting event is not a guarantee of satisfaction. There is a chance, when you go to see your team or your favorite athlete play, that they will lose. There is a slim chance, too, that they will be humiliated.That is the risk that you take. The ticket gets you access to a sporting event, one in which the outcome and the nature of it is uncertain by definition. To expect or to demand a minimum standard of performance or your money back is, on one level, to miss the point of the entire exercise.Fan, we are told frequently, should not be a synonym for customer. The entrenched loyalty of the supporter should not be taken for granted, should not monetized, should not be milked for revenue. But that precious bond, between fan and team, works both ways. You buy a ticket for a game to support your team regardless of what happens. It is an act of hope, not expectation.That interpretation has withered, at least in part, because of the attitude of the clubs themselves; it should be no surprise that fans should start to behave as customers when they are treated as such. Customers demand a refund when their hopes are dashed. In any sport, though, that is just part of the deal.Refreshing ChangeArsenal has at last succumbed to cold, harsh economic reality. The Premier League, really, should make sure to send a note of thanks and a bouquet of flowers to Mikel Arteta and his players at the end of this season’s campaign. It is only because of their sudden, heartening rise that English soccer has even had a veneer of competitiveness for the last 10 months.The season, though, will end as recent seasons routinely do: with Manchester City being crowned champion. Doing anything other than wildly celebrating City’s success will be met, as ever, with accusations of bitterness and jealousy, of course, but then that has always been the flaw in Abu Dhabi’s master plan for the sporting arm of its foreign policy. As a rule, you can either win, or you can be loved. Rarely, if ever, do the two go together.Elsewhere in Europe, though, things are a little more uplifting. This newsletter makes no bones about the fact that it is desperate to see Napoli win Serie A — perhaps as soon as this weekend — if only to answer, once and for all, the question of whether the city itself will survive the celebrations.Dortmund, on track to dethrone Bayern Munich, will be one of a handful of surprise champions this season.Martin Meissner/Associated PressBut Luciano Spalletti’s team may not be the continent’s only unexpected champion. Feyenoord is eight points clear at the top of the Dutch Eredivisie, with only four games left. Ajax, at this rate, might not qualify for the Champions League. Either Panathinaikos or AEK Athens will win the Greek Super League, dethroning Olympiacos.And, of course, Bayern Munich has kindly decided to self-detonate at just the right time to give Borussia Dortmund the chance to end Bayern’s run of 10 straight domestic championships. Dortmund is a point ahead with five games left, but three of those matches are at home, and none of them against especially daunting opponents. Its young team will never have a better chance, if it can hold its nerve.Quite why this is happening is open to question: the World Cup, doubtless, has something to do with it. It may be, to some extent, because the financial might of the Premier League has had the effect of diminishing the great and the good of other domestic leagues. Whatever it is, though, it is to be welcomed, and not just by those who stand to benefit directly.CorrespondenceAn intriguing question from Tony Walsh to start this week. “Does Italy not qualifying for the World Cup explain the country having three teams in the Champions League quarterfinals?” he asks, omitting (as I did, last week) that it also has two Europa League semifinalists and one representative still standing in the illustrious Europa Conference League.My answer here is a resounding possibly. It might even be a probably. As with the sudden changes at the summit of the Bundesliga and the Eredivisie, the likelihood is that there are a rich variety of factors at play, but it seems rational to suggest that the added midseason rest for the vast majority of Napoli, Inter and A.C. Milan players has not been a hindrance.Italy’s new slogan: Forza everybody.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe issue of how soccer might change rumbles on, too. Several of you, including Matt Kauffman, would tweak the offside rule so that it was judged only on foot position — this seems reasonable to me — while Brent Hewitt prefers using a player’s “center of mass,” though I would suggest the length of his email might undermine his idea’s viability.Jim O’Mahony, on the other hand, offered at least one immortal sentence. “To hell with pleasing restless, bored teenagers,” he wrote, which is a sentiment I think anyone who has ever met a teenager can get behind. “The sport’s popularity is growing. There is no need to change. Stop worrying, and spend more time with your dog.”My dog is very much on board with that idea, Jim: I’ve been trying to get him into games for a while by explaining that I am his emotional support human, but nobody seems to be buying it.And thanks to Chloe Zeller, enjoying the last days of summer in Buenos Aires, for directing me to a mural of Lionel Messi — clad in his beloved bisht, and clutching the World Cup — in the city’s upscale Palermo district. It is, she notes, recorded on Google Maps as a “place of worship.” This seems entirely fitting.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      Reputation Meets Reality in the Champions League

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      The Premier League’s financial might should allow it to dominate Europe’s top soccer competition. So why hasn’t that happened?Everyone involved was taking the positives. In Dortmund, Chelsea’s Graham Potter was talking about a “step forward” in his efforts to solve the gilded thousand-piece puzzle he has been handed by his club’s new owners. In Milan, Tottenham’s Antonio Conte was happy his “trust” in a youthful emergency midfield pairing had been repaid.Both were doing all they could to project an air of calm assurance. Conte, a man who could never be accused of bottling up his emotions, even used the word “relaxed” to describe his state of mind. Sure, Chelsea and Tottenham had both lost the first legs of their Champions League round of 16 ties, but that was nothing to worry about. There are the home games to come in a few weeks. Things will be better then. Wrongs will be righted. Everything is breezy.Neither manager’s pose was particularly ludicrous. Neither team had played especially badly. Both sides might have felt just a little unfortunate to have lost. Chelsea, still feeling its way to a settled identity after its winter excess, created a raft of chances against Borussia Dortmund. Spurs, its squad winnowed by injury and suspension, had menaced A.C. Milan. Both had lost only by a single goal. Both remain firmly in contention to make the quarterfinals.And yet, for all the legitimacy of those mitigating circumstances, for all the fine margins that separate victory from defeat and one interpretation of history from another, it is hard not to feel as if this sort of thing should not happen to the moneyed elite of the Premier League any more.Kepa Arrizabalaga and Chelsea lost at Borussia Dortmund. But all is not lost. Yet.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea, in case you have forgotten, spent more on players in January than every club in France, Spain, Italy and Germany combined. A.C. Milan found itself unable to compete on salaries with Bournemouth, a team with a stadium that has a capacity of 11,379 people. Dortmund’s business model involves the annual sale of its best players to England.Here they were, though, not just standing up to two of the best that the Premier League can offer but beating them. It may have been with home-field advantage, the backing of 80,000 or so bellicose fans, and it may only have been by the skin of their teeth. And it may not, in the end, mean much at all, should Chelsea and Spurs assert themselves in the return legs.And yet still they beat them, the reality of England’s unassailable financial power not quite living up to the theory.Two games is far too small a sample, of course, to draw any firm conclusions, but those defeats are part of a broader, more established pattern.For years, as the Premier League’s wealth has grown — its television revenues more than twice that of its nearest competitor, its clubs the richest on the planet — the assumption among its clubs, and the fear among its competitors, has been that at some point it would be able to break the Champions League to its will. Its teams, stuffed with the choicest fruits the market has to offer, would leave the rest of Europe trailing in their wake.It has not, though, quite worked out like that, certainly not as definitively as might have been expected.Chelsea beat Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League final, one of two recent finals matching Premier League opponents.Pool photo by David RamosIn the last five years, the Champions League has taken on a distinctly English inflection. Two of the finals in that time have been all-Premier League affairs, and there has been at least one English side (mostly Liverpool) in every final but one since 2018. And yet the long-anticipated wholesale takeover of the tournament has failed to materialize.Perhaps it is no more than an accident of fate that no English team has won a Champions League final against a foreign opponent since Chelsea’s victory against Bayern Munich in 2012. But it feels significant that only once — in 2019 — has the full cohort of four Premier League teams all made it through safely to the quarterfinals.The likelihood that this year will break that trend is minimal. Chelsea and Spurs might both be at only a slender disadvantage — and the absence of the away goals rule works in their favor from here — but even if they both recover to make it through, the chances of Liverpool’s overcoming Real Madrid remain slim.There are a host of possible explanations for that. The most obvious is that money is not necessarily a measure of virtue: Just because England’s teams have cash to burn does not mean they always spend it well, as Chelsea is currently doing its best to illustrate.Harry Kane and Spurs have work to do in the second leg against Milan.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most appealing, certainly in England, is that the very competitiveness of the Premier League is in itself a disadvantage; teams are so exhausted from domestic combat that they are prone to fatigue when it comes to Europe.The most likely explanation, and the most simple, is that an unwillingness to succumb to economic logic is coded into the algorithm of a knockout competition. Financial might is likely to prove decisive over the course of a league season. Turn a competition into an arbitrary shootout, conducted over the course of 90 or 180 minutes, and what can seem like a chasm in terms of revenue streams suddenly manifests as nothing more than the difference in the technical and psychological capacity of two sets of players.And that, most often, is nothing more than a hairline crack. Dortmund and Milan and all the others might find the English clubs calling every year, seeking to extract another star from them ranks in exchange for a king’s ransom, but they know too that there will be another player along soon enough, that they will be able to replace and replenish. There are, after all, always more players.There is something to celebrate and to cherish in that, a relief and a pleasure in the fact that wealth does not make a team — or a set of teams — invulnerable to misfortune or immune to the vicissitudes of fate, that European soccer has proved just a little more resilient to the Premier League’s supremacy than even its own clubs anticipated, that even now, money is no guarantee of happiness.Red Letter DayHistoric English soccer club seeks new owner. Serious offers only. Inquire within.Molly Darlington/ReutersTime for another addition to English soccer’s ever-expanding calendar of high holidays: alongside Cup Final Day, League Cup Final Day and the two Transfer Deadline Days, we can now reliably celebrate Soft Deadline for Investors to Submit Bids for a Major Club Day.Like Easter, this one moves around. It fell in April last year, in the midst of the scramble to take Chelsea off the hands of Roman Abramovich. This time, Raine, the investment bank that plays the role of Hallmark for this particular holiday, has decreed that the Manchester United sequel should come as early as mid-February.As of Friday, only one contender had gone public: Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and one-time Chelsea suitor who seems to have remembered late in life that his real passion is for sports rather than chemicals, had confirmed he would bid. He was expected to face competition, though, from at least one “U.S.-based consortium,” as well as “private” bidders from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia.That last prospect, of course, might have been greeted with caution, or even concern. The questions are obvious. How “private” could any bid emanating from a tightly controlled autocracy ever really be? What would be the implication for the integrity of both the Premier League and the Champions League, given the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United and the Qatari control of Paris St.-Germain?Or it might have been greeted with a breathless frenzy, focusing exclusively on what Gulf ownership might buy for the club and its success “starved” fans: Kylian Mbappé, or Jude Bellingham, or (genuinely, inexplicably) a new monorail running directly from Manchester airport to a giant mall outside Old Trafford.There are no prizes at all for guessing which description best fits the tone of much of the coverage, because there are no winners here. That serious questions over the integrity of the sport — let alone the issue of whether it is ideal that the Premier League should be a stage on which global power games are played out — should be so easily ignored thanks to the specter of yet more consumption, yet more acquisition, makes you wonder if the spirit of the whole enterprise has been lost along the way. The way you celebrate your holidays, after all, says a lot about where you are as a culture.An Old Truth, RevisitedStop us if you’ve heard this before but P.S.G.’s star-studded experiment doesn’t seem to be working. Again.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf the misadventures of the Premier League’s moneyed elite in the Champions League this week served as a reminder of one of this newsletter’s mottos — that there are always more players, no matter how many of them you buy — then the starting teams at the Parc des Princes brought another to mind.On one side, of course, there was P.S.G., a team that is rapidly becoming a definition of insanity in and of itself. It is now perfectly apparent that building a team around Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé does not work, not at the elite level, not when all three of them essentially refuse to engage in any defensive effort. P.S.G. may yet recover from a first leg deficit to Bayern Munich, but this is not a side that can win the Champions League.On the other was a Bayern team, its attacking line led by Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting. The Cameroonian striker suffers, as many do, from the long shadow of the Premier League.He has spent the better part of a decade and a half as a professional. He has built a steady, respectable career, one crowned unusually late by trophy-laden spells at P.S.G. and Bayern. To many fans, though, he will always be a curiosity: Hey, look at that, it’s that guy who played for Stoke City, except that now he’s in the Champions League.That is a shame, because Choupo-Moting’s story is telling in a number of ways. It proves, as he discussed with the Times, the value of patience. The timing of his rise suggests a shift in what elite clubs want from forward players, and as a corollary perhaps highlights a deficiency in the academy system. That tends, after all, to produce what teams want now, rather than what they might need in the future.Most of all, though, it illustrates that Choupo-Moting did not fail to shine at Stoke because of a lack of talent. Ability is often not what determines whether a move is successful or not. More important is whether the team, the style, the environment is right for a player to thrive. Choupo-Moting is evidence of the old truth that there is no such thing as a bad player, only the wrong context. More

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      Harry Kane and the Power of Individual Achievement

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      Soccer prefers to recognize collective triumphs ahead of personal milestones as the true measure of success. But glory comes in many forms.The record had, it turned out, been playing on Harry Kane’s mind. Players always insist that they are oblivious to these things, that they regard them as little more than statistical ephemera. Ordinarily, it is only once the achievement is banked and the challenge met that they will admit to the blindingly obvious.Kane has spent a considerable portion of this bisected, staccato season waiting and wondering. He had the air of a player counting down, rather than up. Every goal he scored for Tottenham was not added to his tally for the campaign, but subtracted from a historical deficit.Nobody had ever scored more goals for Spurs than Jimmy Greaves, the slick, ruthless striker who was the star of the club’s golden team of the 1960s. His mark — a total of 266 — stood for more than half a century. Nobody, in recent years, had looked close to breaking it: not Vincent Janssen, not Steffen Iversen, not Chris Armstrong.And then along came Kane, a homegrown striker, a boyhood fan, an England captain. He started the season on 248 goals, a vast majority of them in the Premier League, 18 behind Greaves, 19 from sole possession of the record. The presumption was that Kane would break it, sooner rather than later. By the time everything ground to a halt for the World Cup, the gap was gossamer thin: five more to equal it, six to surpass it.Kane drew level on a Monday night, against Fulham, and then finally had his moment last Sunday. It was fitting, really: not, as he said, because he scored the goal that secured his place in history against Manchester City, “one of the best teams in the world,” but because he did so with an archetypal Kane goal — a sudden sliver of space, a single touch, an unerring finish.Kane’s goal against Manchester City on Sunday was his 267th for his boyhood club.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSoccer does not, it has to be said, give these moments quite as much pomp as other sports. The N.B.A. not only had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in attendance when LeBron James broke his scoring record this week, it allowed the game — between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Oklahoma City Thunder — to be paused for a brief ceremony. Kane merely got his name flashed up on Tottenham’s big screen. “Congratulations Harry,” it read.Still, that was enough for Kane. “It is surreal,” he said afterward. “There’s been so much talk about it, and I wanted to get it done as soon as possible. It’s a special feeling. I couldn’t have asked for more. Jimmy was one of the best strikers to ever play the game, so to even be mentioned in his company is amazing. To go above him is a dream come true.”The next record in Kane’s sights is, arguably, even more significant. That strike against City last Sunday made Kane only the third player in history to score 200 goals in the Premier League. He should, with a fair wind, rank as the second highest scorer the competition has seen by the time spring rolls around; Wayne Rooney is only a little ahead of him, now, on 208.He will have to wait a little longer to overtake the current scoreboard leader. Alan Shearer scored the last of his Premier League goals in April 2006, a penalty in an emphatic Newcastle win against Sunderland. He picked up an injury a few minutes later that ended up costing him the final few outings of his valedictory tour.Shearer has never regretted that he might have added to his tally; that he signed off by scoring against his team’s fiercest rivals has always struck him as the perfect conclusion. And besides, 260 goals — excluding the 23 he scored before the Premier League was branded into existence — was not a bad total, all in all.Oddly, for all that he achieved, it never really felt as if Rooney would catch Shearer. Kane, from this point, really should do it. He is still only 29. Convention would suggest that, as long as he avoids major injuries, he has another four years before he is considered an elder statesman. At his current clip, he may have reeled in Shearer by the end of the season after next.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersIt may well be the case, then, that in Kane the Premier League is watching the greatest scorer in its history. Whether that matters or not, though, seems to depend on who you ask.There is a school of thought, one that has been given considerable voice over the past week, that Kane would trade in not only his status as Tottenham’s record goal-scorer but the chance to surpass Shearer for a single medal to place on his shelf at home: a Premier League title, a Champions League, an F.A. Cup, the other one.This is, of course, how soccer thinks. It is unabashedly, resolutely a collective sport, one that does not revere individual achievement as much as, say, baseball or football. There is a reason that it did not occur to anyone at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last Sunday to do anything other than flash Kane’s name up on the screen, as if it were his birthday, just as there is a reason that many are uncomfortable with the idea of a player actively identifying winning a Ballon d’Or as an ambition.The trophies handed out at the end of the season, and the medals gathered by the end of a career, are seen as the only true gauge of attainment; what a player might achieve individually is always secondary to what success it produces, a means rather than an end. It is in the team that glory lies.It is an admirable philosophy, one to which all those actively involved in the game subscribe almost universally, but it is one that undersells the significance, the status, perhaps subconsciously afforded to the rarest, most precious individual watermarks. Glory, it is fair to say, comes in many forms.Shearer is an apposite example. He did, of course, win a Premier League title; just the one, with Blackburn Rovers in 1995. That is not, though, how he is remembered, as a “mere” English champion. Nobody much under the age of 35 would remember that Blackburn team; a whole generation has been born and raised since he scored that final goal against Sunderland.Instead, Shearer is revered now for his status as the Premier League’s leading goal-scorer. It is, after all, something only he can claim, the one thing that Shearer has that, for two decades, nobody else has possessed. It has carried his name through history in a way that winning the league could not. It is his glory, and it is his glory alone.That is what Kane has at his fingertips: not just a fleeting statistical quirk but a piece of history that is all his, something that will endure long after his career has finished. He would, doubtless, prefer it to be accompanied by something more tangible, a piece of silver and gold, something that can be mounted and framed and admired, a triumph shared with his teammates, with his family, with his fellow Tottenham fans.But to have scored more goals for Tottenham than anyone, to be the player with the most goals in the Premier League: These are no mere trifles. They ensure Kane’s name will echo, resonant and proud, long after he has slipped into the past. And that, in many ways, is the ultimate form of glory.Paul Childs/Action Images, via ReutersCheaper DetergentThink, for a minute, of all the work that went into convincing Cristiano Ronaldo to sign for Al Nassr, the Saudi club where the Portuguese forward is seeing out his (sporting) dotage. The flights. The meetings. The pitching. And all of that just to get in the room with the 38-year-old Ronaldo, to take yet more flights, to hold yet more meetings, to do yet more pitching.And all of that is without mentioning the cost: the salary that scrapes $213 million-a-season, according to some reports; the suite at the Four Seasons in Riyadh where he and his family have set up home; the invitation to Paris St.-Germain to play an unwieldy and vaguely nonsensical exhibition game.It was, of course, worth it in the end: Ronaldo has brought so much attention to Al Nassr, to the Saudi Pro League, to Saudi Arabian sports in general that all of those involved in making the deal happen doubtless regard it as a runaway success.Using sports as a tool of soft power, though, is a funny thing. This weekend, one of Al Nassr’s domestic rivals, Al Hilal, will become the first Saudi team (and only the third Asian team) to compete in the final of the Club World Cup, having beaten the South American champion, Flamengo, in the semifinal. Many of its players will be familiar; Al Hilal provided the bedrock of the Saudi team that beat Argentina in the World Cup a couple of months ago.Salem Aldawsari, whose goal led Saudi Arabia over Argentina at the World Cup, scored twice as his Saudi club, Al Hilal, stunned Brazil’s Flamengo, 3-2, on Tuesday. Al Hilal will face Real Madrid in Saturday’s final.Mosa’Ab Elshamy/Associated PressIn the space of three months, then, Salem Al-Dawsari, Saleh Al-Shehri and the rest have twice proved that the most effective way of using soccer to win hearts and minds, to exert influence, to enter the global consciousness is simply to be good at it.The victory over Argentina, for example, did far more to embed Saudi Arabia in the soccer world than buying Newcastle United or hosting the Italian Super Cup ever could, thanks to the traveling army of raucous Saudi fans. Likewise, the sight of Al Hilal facing off against Real Madrid will do more to promote the Saudi Pro League than a hundred clips of Ronaldo scoring penalties for Al Nassr.Both moments, after all, confer one thing on Saudi as a soccer — and perhaps a sporting — nation that none of those expensive purchases ever could: They grant the country’s players, teams and league legitimacy, authenticity, in front of a global audience. It must be galling, too, that it does not cost nearly as much to put together.Marsching On TogetherJesse Marsch, now the former coach of Leeds United and the future coach of … what exactly?Lee Smith/Action Images, via ReutersFarewell, then, to Jesse Marsch, the Wisconsin native who leaves after 11 months as Leeds United manager neither mourned nor missed. His dismissal, after a run of seven Premier League games without a win, felt unpleasant but unavoidable: That is, ultimately, just how soccer works.That, certainly, is how it felt to the club’s fans. They had not turned on Marsch because they had taken against him, particularly; there was a sense, broadly, that they could see what he was trying to do. It just had not worked. Marsch can take a sort of curious pride in the fact that there has been no great pleasure in his demise.Quite where Leeds goes from here is not clear: The club has failed in its pursuit of at least two possible replacements, Raúl González and Andoni Iraola, and faces a struggle to persuade a third, the Dutchman Arne Slot, to leave title-chasing Feyenoord in the middle of the season.Whoever takes the role will, at least, have a competitive squad to mold, not least in the American midfield — Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie — that Marsch had only just completed. This Leeds team is good enough to avoid relegation; that it is involved at all is testament to how competitive the middle and lower rungs of the Premier League are this season.For Marsch, the future seems a little more clear-cut. He has a résumé better than any American coach of his generation: experience in the Premier League and the Bundesliga with Leeds and RB Leipzig, a taste of the Champions League with Red Bull Salzburg. He would, in other words, be an ideal candidate for any high-profile national team jobs that happen to come available.It’s All in the TimingQuietly, without wishing to cause a stir, the Premier League uploaded a statement to its website Monday morning. It was nothing major, no cause for alarm, just the most popular soccer league on the planet accusing its serial champion, its great modern superpower, of spending more than a decade breaking the league’s financial rules. All of Manchester City’s success, the Premier League was suggesting, might one day require an asterisk.Three days later, a very different kind of story broke, one that was designed to be as loud and eye-catching as possible. A consortium of unnamed Qatari investors, it was reported, were close to submitting a bid for Manchester United, the club they regard as the “crown jewel” of global soccer.There was not, it has to be said, a great deal of detail beyond that. It is not clear who the potential owners are — other than that they are not, apparently, in any way linked to the Qatari state, in case you were wondering — or even how likely the prospective bid is to be accepted. United’s current owners have instructed Raine, the investment bank, to find a buyer. A mystery suitor from a nation thought to be awash with cash going vaguely public is, one would imagine, not a terrible thing for either.Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag, most definitely not making a shopping list for the summer.Phil Noble/ReutersGiven the timing, though, it was curious to read what the mystery group had planned for the club. They might sound like bromides — talking to fans about the redevelopment of Old Trafford, wanting their prospective takeover to be “for the good of the community,” intending to hand Erik ten Hag, United’s manager, a vast amount of money to play with in the transfer market — but they have, remember, been let slip by someone, somewhere along the line.Manchester United does not need an infusion of money to make splashy, expensive signings. It handed Ajax $100 million for Antony less than six months ago. What it has long required, if anything, is a more cogent internal structure and a more streamlined, more effective scouting department. (The club has, in fairness, made considerable progress on this recently.)But that is not exactly a compelling argument to get fans onside, and so those with designs on buying the club did what potential investors always do: promise to spend vast sums of money on new players, tell the fans what you presume they want to hear.There is no reason to believe, of course, that they would do that by taking the same approach as City is alleged to have taken. Given the proximity of the two events, though, it was hard not to wonder if soccer would be better off if spending money was not regarded as the calling card of a desirable owner, if it was not such a reflex, if it was not the first thing anyone promised. More

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      Premier League Preview: Has Arsenal Pulled It Together? Will United Fall Apart?

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      Six contenders (more or less) and five story lines (plus a few extra) as the new season kicks off with everyone chasing Manchester City (again).Somehow, it is that time again. Cue the dramatic music, crank up the content generator and get ready to absorb the hottest takes around: the Premier League season is upon us once again.Quite what form this edition of soccer’s great hubristic soap opera will take is, of course, not yet clear. That, after all, is the fun of the thing.As the 20 teams in the richest league in the world return to the field this weekend, though, there are several questions that linger over everything. How they are answered will go a long way to determining how things play out.Will Manchester City Beat Manchester City?Manchester City’s reaction every time someone suggests its time with the trophy is up.Dave Thompson/Associated PressThe obvious question before the start of every new Premier League season is which team is likely to have won the thing at the end. Unfortunately, in the current incarnation of the league, it is not a particularly interesting inquiry. Manchester City will win it, as it has four of the past five editions, and it will most likely do so by seeing off a spirited but ultimately futile challenge from Liverpool. Although, this time, there is just one small caveat.The idea that Erling Haaland’s presence will somehow disrupt City’s rhythm sufficiently to impact the team has been overblown; it may be an awkward marriage for a few months, but both are more than good enough to thrive despite that.Far more important is the fact that Haaland is currently just one of 16 senior outfield players at Pep Guardiola’s disposal. That would be a risk in a normal season. This one has a great big World Cup in the middle, making it seem like a colossal gamble.Is Arsenal Back?Gabriel Jesus practicing a pose Arsenal expects to see a lot this season.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt sounds like damning Arsenal with faint praise to suggest that Mikel Arteta’s team has won the preseason — largely because it is — but, amid all of the hype and exaggeration, the last few weeks have produced some genuinely encouraging signs for the Spaniard and his fellow documentary stars.Gabriel Jesus, certainly, has the capacity to be a transformational signing, and his former Manchester City teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko may not be far behind. Arsenal looks like a much more complete side than it did a year ago. Not one ready to challenge City or Liverpool, perhaps, but one that could end the club’s long exile from the Champions League.Will Tottenham’s Impatience Pay Off?Richarlison traded life at the bottom of the table at Everton for a view of the summit at Spurs.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe biggest obstacle to Arsenal’s resurrection sits just down the road. Not at Chelsea, where a chaotic transfer window will most likely end with a stronger and yet somehow less coherent squad, but at a Tottenham transformed by Antonio Conte, the sort of supernova coach who comes in, pushes his players to the limit and then implodes. The worry, when he arrived at Spurs, was that the club had an almost diametrically opposed approach.That, it seems, was not a problem. Tottenham is very much in win-now mode. Ivan Perisic, Richarlison and Yves Bissouma have been brought in to turn a side good enough to get into the Champions League last year into one that can push for the title. Given the strangeness of the season, that does not seem impossible. Spurs has one chance under Conte, effectively. It has done all it can to take it.Manchester United: DiscussA rare sight this season: Cristiano Ronaldo happy at Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images, via ReutersIn what may have been the purest distillation of modern soccer imaginable, Cristiano Ronaldo received a rapturous reception upon his return to Old Trafford last weekend. Manchester United’s fans clearly wanted him to know how much he meant to them, even as he has made it very obvious he does not wish to remain at the club.Roughly 45 minutes later, having been substituted, Ronaldo was leaving the stadium at halftime, very much against the wishes of his manager, Erik ten Hag, and apparently convinced that he did not need to stick around.There has, believe it or not, been progress at Manchester United this summer. Ten Hag is a smart appointment. The club has made a couple smart signings. But it is a curious progress, one tempered by the fact that United does not appear to have a list of recruits beyond players ten Hag knew and liked and undercut by the Ronaldo saga. As things stand, he may be forced to stay merely because nobody else wants to sign him. How ten Hag handles that will define the early months of his reign.Can Anyone Break the Seal?Declan Rice and West Ham floated into Europe last season. Is more in their future?Justin Tallis/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn one view, this season should be the best chance since 2016 for a team outside the traditional Big Six to make a run for a place in the Champions League. The whole campaign will be affected by the World Cup, and it is hardly ridiculous to suggest that the superpowers — stocked as they are by players headed to Qatar — may be more susceptible to fatigue in the aftermath.Whether any team can emerge from the pack, though, is a different matter. Newcastle ended last season on a Saudi-bankrolled high, but it has been substantially quieter than the LIV golf series this summer. Leicester and Wolves seem to be stagnating. That leaves, perhaps, West Ham — bolstered by a couple of smart additions — as the only viable candidate. More likely still, of course, is that David Moyes’s team cannot last the pace either and that at the end of a season unlike any other, everything will be precisely the same as before. More

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      Welcome to Soccer’s Strangest Season

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      The World Cup will split seasons in two in much of the world, including the Premier League campaign that opens this weekend. What is revealed could be fascinating.Gian Piero Ventrone surveyed his handiwork with just the hint of a smile. A few minutes earlier, Ventrone, Tottenham Hotspur’s fitness coach, had gathered the club’s players together on the turf at the Seoul World Cup stadium and informed them of their next assignment.They had, by that stage, already been training for more than an hour, in searing heat and cloying humidity. Now they had one final exercise: Ventrone instructed the players to run the length of the field. Not once, or twice, but 42 times. The winner, he said, would be the last man standing.Now, as he looked around him, he saw those same players strewn across the field. Son Heung-min had collapsed, his muscles screaming and his lungs burning. Richarlison had sunk to his knees, gasping for air. Harry Kane had vomited. Ventrone was satisfied. Preseason, as far as the club’s fitness coach could see, was going swimmingly.Son Heung-min is feeling the effects of Conte’s gruelling pre-season drills 😳pic.twitter.com/g5mvtjlPV1— The Spurs Web (@thespursweb) July 11, 2022
      There was something strange, though, about the footage of that session — held in front of 6,000 fans during Spurs’ tour of South Korea — when it emerged last month. The methods deployed by Ventrone felt just a touch anachronistic, a relic of a bygone era, when players let themselves go over the summer, before they invented tactical periodization, before everyone was strapped to a GPS vest at all times.They felt particularly outdated this summer of all summers, though, given what lies ahead not only for Son, Kane and the rest of Tottenham’s team, but for several hundred of the world’s best players in England’s Premier League and elsewhere. The season on which they are embarking — the Premier League and the Bundesliga kick off this weekend — may well be the busiest, longest and most draining they will ever experience. As a result, it might also be the strangest.Arsenal, rebuilt around striker Gabriel Jesus, kicks off the Premier League season at Crystal Palace on Friday. It could send players from a half dozen countries to the World Cup in November.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersIt is not quite right, of course, to say that this is the first time in soccer’s history that there has been a winter World Cup. Chile in 1962, Argentina in 1978 and South Africa in 2010 were all winter World Cups. Nor is it strictly accurate to declare this the first time there has been a World Cup in the middle of the club season; after all, not every domestic competition runs from August to May.What makes Qatar 2022 unique, instead, is the fact that it will be the first World Cup to take place in the middle of the season for the overwhelming majority of its participants.Eight days before the tournament starts, most of the players summoned by their nations will still be locked in club combat in Europe. Exactly a week after it finishes, those employed by teams in the Premier League, at least, will be expected to take up the cudgels once more.In between, some of them will have taken part in seven of the most important games of their careers, all of that stress and emotion and exertion condensed into only a few weeks and played out in a series of purpose-built stadiums surrounded by towns and neighborhoods that exist for no reason other than the staging of a single event. This World Cup is not just a hiatus, a brief intermission to the season; it is a lacuna, a disconnect, a deus ex machina.Quite what its impact will be is difficult to predict. As usual, the return of the Premier League brings with it a suite of known unknowns that will define the season: Will Erik ten Hag turn Manchester United around? Why has Pep Guardiola decided that Manchester City does not need a full complement of substitutes? Can Arsenal be trusted?Manager Erik ten Hag is navigating a tricky situation with Cristiano Ronaldo, who wants out of Manchester United.Ed Sykes/Action Images Via ReutersNone of those questions, though, is nearly as pressing as attempting to discern the effect of the World Cup. It is hardly revelatory to suggest that there will, in effect, be two halves to this season: the first, a jostling for position, running from this weekend until the first week of November, and then a second, a sprint for the line, commencing late in December and concluding with the Champions League final on June 10.Those two periods, though, may not bear any real relation to one another. It is easy to imagine that, in the weeks immediately before the tournament, players anticipating a place in Qatar might suddenly become conspicuously — if not entirely consciously — risk-averse, and that afterward, the usual order of things will be upturned by players exhausted from the World Cup being thrust immediately back into action against colleagues who have had a month to rest and to relax.That might, in an optimistic reading, be a good thing. Perhaps the creeping predictability of even the Premier League — the league where anything can happen, as long as it involves Manchester City winning the title — will be put on hold, even just for a year, as the randomness invoked by a midseason World Cup upturns the established order.Julián Álvarez and Erling Haaland give Manchester City an entirely new look up front.Tony Obrien/ReutersOr perhaps not. Perhaps the gap between the elite and the also-rans is now so great that it takes more than a few weary limbs to level the playing field. Perhaps the squads of the self-appointed aristocrats are so strong that they will emerge not only unscathed, but with their dominance somehow enhanced.All that can be certain is that there will be an impact. What was so noteworthy about Ventrone’s brutal training session in Seoul was not that it was taking place on the eve of a season in which managers might have been expected to safeguard their players’ fitness, rather than risk burning them out long before the end, but that it was in South Korea at all.Tottenham, like the rest of the Premier League’s big beasts, had seen preseason as a chance to take the show on the road, to play a couple of money-spinning exhibition games around the globe. The players were not gently introduced to the longest, strangest season of their careers. They were, instead, flown across the world and then run into the ground. That is just the start of it. More than ever, this season, the winner will be the last one standing.The Real Test AwaitsThe United States beat England in the semifinals of the 2019 World Cup. The teams will collide again in a friendly in October in London.Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesA few minutes before the final whistle, Vlatko Andonovski rose from his seat, smoothed the figure-hugging salmon-pink sweater he had chosen for the occasion, summoned his colleagues and made for the exit. He had, apparently, seen enough of both France and the Netherlands. He did not need to know who won. (France, futilely.)Andonovski, the United States women’s coach, seemed quite relaxed that night in Rotherham, just as he has throughout his stay in England for the final stages of Euro 2022. He was not making notes. He chatted happily with the phalanx of other managers and executives and scouts gathered in the tournament’s various directors’ boxes. He seemed unperturbed, unruffled.Do not, though, be fooled. Andonovski will have departed Europe in no doubt that next summer will not be quite so insouciant as this one. In a host of ways, Euro 2022 represented a seismic shift for women’s soccer in England and in Europe: the size of the crowds, the interest of the television audiences, the immediately discernible boost in momentum and, most pressing for Andonovski, in terms of the caliber of its play.Over the course of his stay, he will have noted that the threats to the United States’ hegemony are many and varied: a French side sufficiently gifted to beat the Dutch, the defeated World Cup finalists of three years ago, despite the absence of three of its brightest stars; a Germany reborn thanks to the blazing promise of Lina Magull and Lena Oberdorf.And, of course, most notably, an England team blessed with a depth of resources and richness of talent that perhaps makes it the equal of the United States, a team imbued with a conviction and a purpose by its coach, Sarina Wiegman, and now pulsing with the confidence and self-belief that only triumph can bring.The United States remains the standard-bearer in the women’s game, of course. There is a reason that tickets for its visit to Wembley in October sold out in only hours, and it is not just to do with coursing English pride. Alex Morgan, Rose Lavelle, Sophia Smith and the rest are a blockbuster draw. But Andonovski will have left the Euros in no doubt that his team’s dominance is in more peril now than it has been for a decade, as Europe surges into view. His job is to quell that rebellion. His days of relaxation will not last for long.Wants Are Not the Same as NeedsJoan Laporta: man of the people (but especially the people who demand new signings).Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOf all the many eye-catching lines in my colleague Tariq Panja’s interview with Joan Laporta, the man hoping he will find the exit to the hole currently occupied by Barcelona if only he keeps digging, one in particular stood out. The club’s 400 million fans, he said, “require a level of success” that renders the idea of a patient, painstaking rebuild impossible.There is no question that Laporta’s approach to Barcelona’s crisis — spending vast sums on new signings in the hope of winning trophies immediately and kick-starting a “virtuous cycle” of triumph and investment — is risky. Still, though, it is just about possible to discern some sort of logic behind it.What is curious is the notion that this is what his club’s fans not only desire, but demand. Laporta almost seemed to be suggesting that, if Barcelona does not maintain a steady supply of flashbulb moments and fond memories, then those 400 million souls would simply drift away.To many, that is not how fandom works. Fan, after all, is not a synonym for consumer. A fan does not drift away when thick turns to thin. A fan can bear a couple of fallow years (especially at a time when Barcelona could very easily point to Pedri and Gavi and Ansu Fati and convince those same fans that a golden dawn lay at the end of a brief period of night). A fan should, in theory, be more concerned by the club’s long-term health than its short-term glory.And yet, for Barcelona as much as any elite team, that does not appear to be how all fans work. Laporta’s approach is defended to the hilt by an army of supporters on social media. His lionization is such that one member compared him, in what may be a first, to both the Pope and Kim Jong-un.Perhaps Laporta is right. Perhaps there is a section of Barcelona’s public that demands immediate satisfaction, that cannot countenance the idea of a few years of finishing as low as, say, third. Those are the people that Laporta believes he has to appease. Perhaps he is right. They are, it seems, real. They do exist. Whether they should be described as fans or not is a different matter.CorrespondenceMark Cuban would be delighted to know that he has prompted such contemplation among the readership of The New York Times’s pre-eminent soccer newsletter. He’d be even happier to know that so many of you agreed that he was right to worry that fans who come to sports through TikTok may not have the attention span to watch a whole game.“Kids may have grown out of ‘Tom and Jerry,’ but cartoons and the networks they ran on didn’t have an algorithm in their pocket, one they’ll carry for the rest of their lives, to keep that impulsive short-fix delivery method in their hands and vision,” wrote Eric Blind.Joel Gardner wrote along similar lines. “Cuban got rich in the sports business from his college days, so we ignore him at our peril. Kids have always had attention issues. Never before, though, have there been so many stimuli. The evening news is no longer Walter Cronkite. Ditto ‘SportsCenter,’ with its plays of the day. Cram that down through social media to TikTok, and it bodes ill not just for sports but for all human discourse.”Tim Ireland/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Brian Yaney, meanwhile, Cuban sounded like “another parent engaged in a desperate daily struggle to extract his child from the mind-numbing oblivion offered by transient social networks and to engage them in positive developmental activities.” Brian worried that by demurring, I was not “paying enough attention to the real world,” outside of sports consumption.I did not want to dismiss Cuban’s concerns glibly, certainly. I’m a parent, too, and though my children are too young to have encountered social media, we have already seen the effects of on-demand streaming on one of them. (Just cartoons and some portent of doom called ‘Blippi,’ but only because we couldn’t get him to pay attention to ‘Succession.’)And, as Neil Postman so brilliantly illustrated, I have no doubt that the condensation of information, and the conflation of news and entertainment, has wreaked untold damage on public discourse.In the context of sports, though, I have more hope. It doesn’t strike me as especially unusual that kids wouldn’t watch entire games; it seems logical that appreciation for a sport develops as we grow older and more comprehending of its nuances. And even if that is not the case, it strikes me as a shame that nobody in sports ever thinks that maybe it would be easier to address things like a lack of competitive balance than work out a way to boil down an entire game into a 12-second video clip. More

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      Man City, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal: Premier League Season Hangs on Final Day

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      As City and Liverpool take aim at the title and Arsenal and Spurs settle the last Champions League place, Leeds is playing for its Premier League life.From the vantage point of its end, there is something strange and distant — almost alien — about the start of a season. It is only 10 months ago, after all, barely the blink of an eye, and yet beliefs and convictions and truths from back then now seem as archaic as the idea that we once believed you could see the future in the entrails of a goat, or that people carried pagers.It is, for example, not yet a year since Nuno Espirito Santo was chosen as the Premier League’s manager of the month for the start he had made to life in charge of Tottenham Hotspur. Likewise, the idea that Romelu Lukaku “completed” Chelsea’s team, or that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer could deliver a title for Manchester United, or that running a repressive autocracy should prevent you from owning a Premier League team might as well belong to a different world.It may not seem like it, but all of that occurred in the same Premier League season that concludes on Sunday. And while those matters have been settled, countless others have not. As far as we have come, as much as we have learned, very little has yet been decided. There is still no champion crowned, no complete list of teams that have qualified for Europe, no conclusion to the relegation battle. A season can feel like it lasts a lifetime. This time around, it all comes down to one game.

      The TitlePep Guardiola gave Phil Foden and the rest of his team two days off this week.Peter Powell/ReutersPep Guardiola, above all, wants his players to be relaxed. In the aftermath of Manchester City’s draw at West Ham last weekend — the one that effectively guaranteed the identity of the Premier League champion would be decided on the season’s final day — he did not, as might have been expected, haul his squad in for extra work.Instead, with the club’s season now hanging on a single game, he gave them some extra down time. The whole squad was granted two days’ break, a chance to rest and recuperate and escape the pressure. Ilkay Gundogan went off to get married.Guardiola is right, of course, to identify that the test awaiting City is primarily psychological. In ordinary circumstances, it would easily dispatch Aston Villa on home territory: a couple of quick, early goals, a brutal display of superiority, an imperious saunter over the line. The challenge, this weekend, is to make the circumstances appear as ordinary as possible.City does not, as it turns out, have any margin for error. The 14-point advantage over Liverpool it held in January has been whittled to just one. City has had several chances to settle the matter in recent weeks — Riyad Mahrez might have beaten Liverpool in early April; he might have beaten West Ham, too — but it has failed to take them. Now, if Guardiola’s team stumbles again, and Liverpool beats Wolves, the title will go to Anfield.The teams have been in this position before, of course: In 2019, they went into the final day separated by a single point, too.At Anfield that day, a great roar went up when news filtered through that Brighton had taken a first-half lead over visiting City. On the sideline, Jürgen Klopp knew it was “too early.” City duly struck back, emphatically — winning the game by 4-1 and claiming its second successive title. The “intense pride” Klopp felt was tempered only by the knowledge that his team had picked up 97 points and it had still not been enough.Things are a little different this time. Liverpool has already won two trophies this season, sweeping both the F.A. Cup and the Carabao Cup. Just as in 2019, it has a Champions League final on the horizon as solace, too.Liverpool has won two trophies this season and will play for a third in next weekend’s Champions League final.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockMore important, perhaps, its yearning for a domestic title is no longer quite as desperate. It ended its three-decade wait for a championship in the eerie silence of pandemic soccer in 2020. Klopp and his players are more circumspect than they could be in 2019.City’s task is complicated not so much by the nature of its opponent, but by the identity of Guardiola’s counterpart. It is doubtless just a coincidence that it should be Steven Gerrard who should have the final chance to push Liverpool over the line, but soccer does not really do coincidence. Villa has two former Liverpool players — Danny Ings and, in particular, Philippe Coutinho — in its ranks, too. There has been a lot of talk of narrative determinism on Merseyside over the last week.It is City’s great strength, of course, that it rarely succumbs to such superstition. It is more than good enough to swat Villa aside, regardless of Gerrard’s intentions and motivations. Guardiola is well aware, though, that his team will have to be relaxed to do it. No matter how good this City side is, if the outcome is in the balance with 10 or 20 or 30 minutes to go on Sunday, the nerves will start to shred.The Champions LeagueHarry Kane and Tottenham hold the slightest of leads over Arsenal entering the season’s final day,Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOf all the issues yet to be resolved, the battle for Champions League places next season is perhaps the most straightforward. In theory, anyway, the identity of the fourth English team to qualify for next season’s Champions League was settled 10 days ago, when Tottenham beat its bitter rival, Arsenal, in the North London derby.That win — followed by a win over Burnley three days later and Arsenal’s defeat at Newcastle on Monday — allowed Spurs to leapfrog Mikel Arteta’s team. It also means Tottenham goes into the final day with a two-point advantage, and a vastly superior goal difference. Simply avoiding defeat in its final game would be enough to ensure its safe passage back into Europe’s elite, and condemn Arsenal to another year on the outside.That should not be too much of an ask: Antonio Conte’s Tottenham faces Norwich City, long since relegated and the proud owner of precisely one league win since January. The outcome of Arsenal’s curtain call, at home to Everton, should be irrelevant. (The squabble over the last slot in the Europa League is almost a mirror image: West Ham will snatch that from Manchester United if it overcomes Brighton and United fails to beat Crystal Palace.)For both Arsenal and Spurs, the immediate future hinges on which side of that divide they finish. Once a mainstay of the Champions League, Arsenal has not featured in the competition since 2017. The club intends to offer Arteta considerable financial support in the transfer market this summer regardless of where the team finishes, but the options it will have for how to spend that money will be defined by whether it is in the Champions League or not.Spurs’ absence is significantly shorter — a finalist in 2019, it has missed only two years — but its return is no less meaningful. A place in the Champions League may be enough to convince its restive coach, Conte, to stay on, not least because it would allow him greater freedom in bolstering his resources. It might also stave off another summer dominated by doubts over where, precisely, Harry Kane sees his future.The DamnedEverton’s win on Thursday meant it was out of the relegation fight.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is a photo of Dominic Calvert-Lewin, shirtless and smiling beatifically, that just about sums it up. He is standing on the field at Goodison Park, surrounded by fans and by police officers, wisps of smoke passing above his head. His eyes stare into the camera. It is an image of outright salvation.At halftime on Thursday, Everton looked doomed. It was losing at home to Crystal Palace, and the possibility of the club’s first relegation in close to a century was hovering ever nearer. And then, in 45 minutes, Frank Lampard’s team performed a pulse-quickening rescue act. One goal. Another. Then with five minutes to go, Calvert-Lewin launched his body at a cross and headed home a winning goal. Everton had taken it right to the last moment, but it had survived.As fans flooded onto the field at Goodison Park, swarming their heroes and, in at least one incident, using their moment of euphoria to needlessly antagonize Patrick Vieira, the Palace coach, the relegation battle was reduced to two. Watford and Norwich are gone to the Championship next season. One of Leeds United and Burnley will join them.The probability is that it will be Leeds. It travels to Brentford, a place it has not won since the end of rationing in the 1950s. Leeds must, realistically, win and hope that Burnley loses at home to a Newcastle team that has long since fulfilled its ambition for the season.Jesse Marsch and Leeds are almost out of time.Lee Smith/Action Images Via ReutersThe reason for that is significant. Leeds’s form has turned around, just a little, since Jesse Marsch was installed as its coach — replacing the beloved Marcelo Bielsa — at the end of February. Marsch has won three and drawn three of his 11 games, and three of the five defeats he has suffered have come against teams in the top six. The other two came in his first two games.It is the nature of soccer, though, that it will be deemed Marsch’s fault if Leeds slips back to the Championship after two years in England’s top flight, if the return to the elite that the club spent 16 years dreaming of turns out to be nothing but a fleeting visit. That is the nature of management; the ruthlessness of it explains the salary.And yet, if Leeds is demoted, the defining factor will not have been its form under Marsch but its permeability in the last days of Bielsa’s regime. Bielsa lost his last four games by an aggregate score of 15-0. In the space of four days in December, Leeds conceded 11 goals. Its vulnerability, ever since then, has been its goal difference. That is why it is effectively a point behind Burnley even as they are level on points. That, more than anything, is what leaves Leeds United on the brink of the abyss once again, relying on nothing more than hope for salvation. More