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      Premier League Buckles In Amid Covid Surge

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      Familiar fears return as the pandemic’s shadow returns to soccer, to sports, to everything.That familiar feeling, the one we hoped we had left long behind, is swelling once again. There is a precariousness in the air, a sense that everything is hanging by a thread, that the next step might be the one over the edge. March 2020 seems a world away, a lifetime ago, but we are here again.In parts of Germany and in the Netherlands, the ghost games are back, those afternoons that offer an eerie simulacrum of sport’s emotion. When Feyenoord and Ajax meet for the most ferocious game of their seasons this weekend at De Kuip — one of Europe’s most intimidating, most evocative grounds — the stands will be empty, silent. The voices of the players will carry out of the stadium, into the still air.In England, the games are starting to fall like flies. Tottenham’s trip to Brighton was first, last weekend, after an outbreak of Covid-19 among Spurs players. Then Manchester United had to close its training facility, and its meeting with Brentford was postponed. Burnley’s game against Watford and another Spurs match, with Leicester, soon followed.This weekend, half of the scheduled games are already off, the result of ongoing outbreaks at Brentford and Watford and Norwich and Leicester. That is at the time of writing; it hardly requires some great leap of imagination to think others might follow. Liverpool was missing three players during its win against Newcastle on Thursday, all of them isolating after returning “suspected positive” tests. These are “at the time of writing” days.It is that, more than anything, which has brought memories of the madness of March flooding back. Then, it was only one positive test, one suspended game, that brought the league to a halt. Now, as the cases rise and the fixtures fall, it is hard, at times, to see how it can play out with any other conclusion.Half the Premier League’s weekend games had been postponed as of Thursday.Jon Super/Associated PressNow, as then, the Premier League is adamant it will bulldoze its way through. The product, the content, cannot be stopped. There have been calls for a pause, for an entire round of games to be postponed so as to “break the chain” of infection that has taken root at clubs, as the Brentford manager, Thomas Frank, put it on Thursday. “The path we are on, I am not sure how long we can stay on it for,” Graham Potter, his counterpart at Brighton, said.The league intends to find out. “It is the league’s intention to continue its current fixture schedule where safely possible,” it said in a statement. Clubs have been instructed to restore the hygiene protocols they developed to allow soccer to restart last year. Players have been encouraged to limit their social interactions.League officials will follow government guidance on whether games should be played behind closed doors; it is most certainly not going to make that decision unless it has absolutely no choice. This is the same language, the same stalemate, the same bullishness that sustained the league in March 2020, as it convinced itself that it was different, it was special, it was protected. It lasted right up until reality dawned, and the spell was broken.There is no mystery why the Premier League should take that stance once more. There is no real logic behind a “circuit breaker” of a hiatus, not for a week. The Omicron variant is tearing through England, through the world. It will not take a break for the festive period, burn itself out by the time the Boxing Day fixtures come. These cases might clear up, but more would follow.And besides, the Premier League — like all leagues in all sports globally — know that stopping is one thing and that starting again is quite another. Choosing the moment to return would be fraught with difficulty, with allegations of ethical failures, with questions of moral decency. Modern soccer’s business model is based on meeting endless demand with bottomless supply.How long will scenes like this continue in England and elsewhere?Vickie Flores/EPA, via ShutterstockStopping is not an option, especially not now, not with English soccer’s great pride and joy, its hectic schedule over Christmas and New Year, on the horizon. This is the Premier League’s calling card, the week when — with Britain at home, at a loose end, itching for something to do and something to watch — it takes center stage. Losing those TV slots, having to repay that lost advertising, is unfathomable.So the Premier League will rumble on, the issue of when all these games will be played kicked down the road, each and every game laced with an added frisson of uncertainty, not just around the result but over whether it will happen at all.Perhaps that is the right thing. Soccer has proved — to its credit, ultimately — that it can play on through the white heat of a pandemic, even if it is a pale, shallow, deracinated version of itself. There is no reason to believe it cannot do so again. The games that are lost can always be made up.Or perhaps it is not. Perhaps this obstinacy, this money-driven self-regard, is putting the health of players and staff members and, while stadiums remain as full as a government Christmas party, fans in danger. Perhaps sensible minds would look at a fixture list pockmarked with absences and suggest that a few weeks off would not do any harm. The games that are lost, after all, can always be made up.In Germany, stadium restrictions have reduced crowd sizes again. But the games go on.Martin Meissner/Associated PressIt is — and this is a rare sentiment to express to a sports league — a difficult, unenviable line to tread. Nobody wants a raft of cancellations and postponements, a season ruptured by uncertainty. Nobody wants a break, an indefinite pause. Nobody wants teams to be battling outbreaks or players, coaches and staff to be getting sick.That is the most familiar feeling of all: the knowledge that, whatever comes next, there is no right answer, no clear way forward, that it will all be infinitely more fragile than it might appear on the surface, that it might all disappear in an instant, that it might never — or for so long that it might be never — feel the way it did, the way it should, again.That sensation, of everything hanging by a thread, is not some dim echo of March 2020. It is familiar because it has been with us ever since, below the surface, a dull ache that we cannot quite shift. It has not come rushing back. It just never left. It has become how we live, ever since we went tumbling over the edge.Spot the DifferenceEasy does it for Jorginho. Again.David Klein/ReutersThe danger of nostalgia is it tricks you into believing there is a right way for things to be, rather than just a way things were. Milk should come in bottles. Children should stare open-mouthed at a television screen, not open-mouthed at YouTube. The F.A. Cup should mean something.We should not, then, fall into that trap when asking if there are, now, too many penalties in soccer. The raw facts of the matter are straightforward: There are more penalties than there used to be. In the first decade or so of the Premier League, somewhere between 60 and 70 spot kicks were awarded each season.Since 2006, that number has been drifting in the general direction of upward: into the 80s, the 90s and then, last season, to 124. That is a significant change: There are now almost twice as many as there used to be; or, to put it into context, a penalty is now awarded roughly once every three games, rather than once every six.Whether that is good, bad or indifferent depends, really, on taste. It is certainly not necessarily the case that 60 penalties a season is the right number. To younger viewers, it would seem far too few. To much older ones, it probably seemed too many. There is, in reality, no Goldilocks number, no sweet spot, no objective truth.What we can say, with some certainty, is that such a steep increase in the number of penalties means that the game itself is now recognizably different. The frequency with which penalties are awarded means that players have changed the way they behave in the penalty area. Teams attack in such a way as to make a penalty more likely. Defenders find themselves constricted as to how they might do their jobs. All of these changes, needless to say, benefit the teams that attack the most.The deception of nostalgia means that it is difficult to say, with any certainty, that something must be done about the rise in penalties. Perhaps the game is better this way, not worse. But it does seem that, at least in some cases, the punishment no longer fits the crime.To give an example: Mateusz Klich definitely fouled Antonio Rüdiger in the final few minutes of Leeds’s defeat at Chelsea last week. He swiped right through him, aiming for the ball but finding only a leg. Rüdiger, as players are currently incentivized to do, collapsed like a lovelorn teenager, and gleefully watched as Jorginho earned the European champions a narrow win.Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger, right, tumbling under the challenge of Leeds United’s Mateusz Klich. But was it a penalty?David Klein/ReutersThe problem is the foul took place on the edge of the box. Rüdiger, a central defender, had his back to goal. He was not about to score. And yet the consequence of Klich’s poor judgment was that Chelsea had a penalty. The data suggests that a penalty is worth 0.85 of a goal. They are converted 85 percent of the time. More, now that Jorginho doesn’t just roll them down the middle.The reward, in other words, is disproportionate. Fortunately, there are ways to do something about that. Penalties do not have to be reserved for fouls in a particular area of the field; they could be deployed to punish something else: serious foul play, for example, or the denial of a goal-scoring opportunity.That might avert the problem of penalties being not only a frequent feature, but to some extent the defining point of the game. Change does not have to be bad. The danger of nostalgia, after all, is that it tricks you into believing there is a right way for things to be, rather than just a way things were.A Draw Without BordersThis task does not have to be difficult. Really, it doesn’t.Uefa/Handout Via ReutersWhile we are busy changing things, one further suggestion. The chaos of the draw for the last 16 of the Champions League on Monday might have been thoroughly enjoyable — who among us, after all, has not secretly wanted there to be a problem with one of these absurdly prolonged affairs for years? — but at its root was an issue of UEFA’s own making.According to UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, the error involving whether Manchester United could play Atlético Madrid that meant the whole thing had to be redone came down to a glitch with the “external software” that dictates which teams might face each other.Now, you might well point out that the amount of software required to tell three people how to pull a ball out of a pot should be no more complicated than that found in a long-forgotten Tamagotchi, but that is not quite right. UEFA insists on having an open draw that is not, in fact, open — teams cannot play opponents they faced in the group stage or rivals from the same country — and that makes the whole thing unnecessarily complicated.It makes some sense to keep teams that have already met in the competition apart. It does not make sense to maintain what UEFA calls “country protection” for a single round of games: It is abolished, after all, for the quarterfinals. Like away goals, it is a hangover from a different era, from the days when there were just a couple of teams from the same league.That is not the case any more. The vast majority of the teams in the knockout rounds come from Europe’s five major leagues (though well done to Portugal and the Netherlands for providing three this time around, including one quarterfinalist). Keeping them apart in the round of 16 does little but distort the draw, and marginally increase the chance that two domestic rivals will meet in the final.As Monday proved, it is in UEFA’s interests to abolish this carveout. Without country protection, there would be no need for an external software provider. UEFA could simply get some people to pick some balls out of a pot. And that, surely, is not beyond their wit. Surely.CorrespondenceRory, left, fielding readers’ responses to last week’s newsletter.Octavio Passos/Getty ImagesAs ever, last week’s newsletter managed to leave a trail of aggrieved dissent trailing in its wake. It is of some solace to me, at least, that my infractions were many and varied.Sebastian Royo, for example, quite rightly pointed out that Porto’s meeting with Atlético Madrid was “a tough game, and both teams were at fault” for the crackling tension that ensued. He also felt that the performance of the referee was, as they say, suboptimal. “To address that gamesmanship, you need good referees, and this one did not meet the standards.”I agree with Sebastian to a point. Porto most definitely was not merely an innocent bystander as the game boiled over, though I should stress that Atlético is such a repeat offender that you have to assume, eventually, that it is a deliberate strategy. As for the referee not being up to scratch: the fault for a burning building lies with the person who strikes the match, not with the firefighter who cannot extinguish it.Sarah de la Motte, meanwhile, feels I was too dismissive of the Bundesliga. “I’m a longtime Manchester United fan, and my husband a lifelong Bayern Munich fan,” she wrote. “We watch a huge deal of both the Premier League and the Bundesliga. As much as I hate to admit it, the Bundesliga is better: technically, for entertainment value, for competitiveness. There is less haphazard defending, uncertain pressing and rushed passing all around.”This is a subject that fascinates me. My instinct has long been that, in general, the top four or five leagues are all basically the same: One might be marginally stronger than another for a fleeting moment, but the differences are so slight as to be imperceptible. I feel — and fear — that is starting to change.For now, that the Bundesliga is more competitive is incontrovertible. Technically, as discussed last week, that may not be especially relevant. Whether it’s more entertaining depends, I suspect, on your emotional involvement. I would suggest, though, that there is definitely more haphazard defending in Germany than in England. That is in part what makes the Bundesliga fun. More

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      From Beckham to Ronaldo: When the Solution Is the Problem

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      Reshaping a team to suit a single player comes with a heavy cost: The thrills fade, and the problems remain.Not once, in two decades, had David Beckham heard the moment. He had witnessed it at the time, of course. More than that, in fact: He had summoned it and created it and lived it. He had, presumably, watched the moment more than once in the intervening years, too. But it was not until a couple weeks ago that he sat down and listened to it.The moment he did was — obviously — captured for posterity, a social media post as meta as they come: a man recording his own reaction to a recording of himself.As Beckham listens, he has a look of fierce concentration on his face, mixed with just a little genuine concern, as if he really does not know how it all ends. The audio plays in the background, an echo of his past: the last couple minutes of the BBC radio commentary of England’s meeting with Greece on the road to the 2002 World Cup.David Beckham listens to the commentary from his iconic England goal vs. Greece for the first time.His reaction says it all 🤩 pic.twitter.com/TYu7lRNWjJ— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) October 6, 2021
      Twenty years later, the game ranks among England’s most iconic. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team, the still-gleaming golden generation, needs a point from its final match, at Old Trafford, to qualify. But — drama! — Greece takes a first-half lead. Teddy Sheringham, by then a veteran, ties the score in the second half, only for the Greeks to retake the lead. The clock ticks. The crowd frets.And then, more than two minutes into injury time, England wins a free kick. The ball sits in that liminal zone: just close enough to goal for a shot to be worthwhile, but too far out for it to be the obvious play. Beckham stands over it, his head shaven and his shorts billowing.He glances up, and then back down at the ball, only one thing on his mind. Pulses raise. He rushes toward it, his arm acting as a counterweight as he whips his right foot around the ball. It arcs and streams toward the corner of the goal. Antonios Nikopolidis, the Greece goalkeeper, flies hopelessly toward it. Old Trafford inhales, and erupts.David Beckham against Greece in 2001.Darren Staples/ReutersIn the popular imagination, that game represents Beckham’s finest moment in an England jersey, the ultimate atonement for his sins three years earlier, when he was vilified after his country’s early exit from the World Cup in France. It was not just the last-minute goal, salvation at the death, but the performance that preceded it. Beckham was, nominally, playing on the right wing but he was not hidebound by such simple things as formations or instructions.Instead, he was everywhere: breaking up play, instigating attacks, setting the tempo, dictating the rhythm. He played as if he was trying to live up to some Platonic ideal of an English captain: refusing to be cowed, unwilling to countenance a lost cause, the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Blitz Spirit distilled into a diamond ear-stud and a pair of Predators.Scott Murray, the author and journalist, once suggested that the most significant player in the history of English soccer was a fictional one: Roy Race, the blue-eyed, blond-haired star of a series of long-running comic books.Each of his adventures followed a similar trajectory: Race’s team, Melchester Rovers, would be struggling in a game — because of malevolent opponents or a helicopter crash or terrorists or whatever — until Race, the unassuming but impossibly gifted hero, produced some devastating run or some booming shot to deliver victory, at the last, from the maw of defeat.Murray’s thesis was that Race imprinted on young readers’ minds the idea that soccer was, at heart, an individual sport, its outcome decided not by system or style or even collective competence but by individual will. The sport was, in effect, an embodiment of Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history: what happened was not subject to a miasma of colliding forces, but shaped by the mind and body of single, outstanding individuals.Race’s legacy, then, means England has always had a particular weakness for players who seem to grab games by the scruff of the neck, to bend events to their liking: Bryan Robson, Manchester United’s Captain Marvel of the 1980s, or Steven Gerrard, Liverpool’s Captain Fantastic 20 years later.Steve Gerrard in Liverpool: countless memories, multiple murals, no Premier League titles.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Gerrard, in particular, shone brightest when folded into a system that accentuated his abilities is never really mentioned. Nor is the fact that what may have been the lowest moment of Gerrard’s career — Liverpool’s defeat by Chelsea in 2014, effectively costing the team, and its icon, a Premier League title — was a direct result of his belief in heroes.Gerrard, that day, offered a glimpse of what happens when Roy Race exists in flesh and blood, rather than on the page: an endless round of hopeful, hopeless shots, each one more desperate than the last. Liverpool, so brutally effective that season, was suddenly blunted by its own captain’s conviction that salvation was a one-man job.Beckham’s performance against Greece stands in contrast to that, an example of the potency of the Raceian approach. His decisive intervention at the last moment, that picture-postcard free kick, seemed plucked straight out of the Melchester back catalog. Here was England’s soccer history being shaped, live on television, by a Great Man.There is, though, an alternative reading of that game, one that at least one elite manager privately endorses. Beckham’s positional indiscipline fundamentally undermined England’s balance. By abdicating his specific role, Beckham undermined his own team. He played well that day, but as a function of that, the rest of the side did not — and could not.It is a hypothetical, of course, but it is entirely possible that England might not have needed Beckham to score a last-minute free kick to rescue a point if he had not felt so compelled to be the captain, to be the hero. He may, in fact, have simply delivered England from a problem of his own making.That example is worth contemplating when assessing Beckham’s immediate — and current — successor as Manchester United’s No. 7.That Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the greatest players ever is not in question. That he has, since returning to England, scored a raft of crucial goals for Manchester United is indisputable. He scored the late goal that beat Villarreal in a Champions League group stage match. He scored the late goal that beat Atalanta in another one. Just this week, he repeated the trick against the latter, his 90th-minute strike salvaging a point for United in Bergamo, Italy.Ronaldo has, then, been cast as the solution to United’s problems, a plaster that covers his team’s many flaws. And that interpretation is, by pretty much any measure, correct.But it does not necessarily contradict the idea that Ronaldo’s presence diminishes other aspects of United’s play as the side heads into Saturday’s Manchester derby. As a former teammate at Juventus, Giorgio Chiellini, has said, when you have Ronaldo on your team it is impossible “not to play to him.”Cristiano Ronaldo keeps scoring goals. But is that all Manchester United needs?Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat means reshaping the attack to suit Ronaldo’s needs. It means not being able to press from the front, which means not being able to play a high defensive line, which means allowing your opponent more space in which to play and, most likely, more chances to score.United might not need to score quite so many late goals if it could play another system effectively. It might be the case that Ronaldo is solving problems that are, to some extent, a consequence of his presence, or at least the fact that his coach, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, has not yet hit upon a system that masks his flaws while highlighting his strengths.It is, of course, a measure of Ronaldo’s talent that he can still deliver his little miracles so reliably, just as it was a testament to Beckham’s brilliance that his free kick swept beyond Nikopolidis, and carried England to the World Cup. There was a wry smile as Beckham heard the last of the commentary, 20 years on, just the hint of a twinkle in his eye.What was not mentioned was what happened next: England made it to the quarterfinals, only to be beaten by a Brazil team stocked by impossibly talented individuals — Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and the rest — but coached by Luiz Felipe Scolari, the ultimate pragmatist, a manager who always put the system first. Only in comic books are games won by individuals. In real life, sometimes the solution and the problem are one and the same.The Only Place to BeAntonio Conte delivered just what Tottenham wanted in his debut: a win.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesFor two years, maybe a little more, Tottenham Hotspur has made nothing but poor choices. Firing Mauricio Pochettino, the coach who had not only established the club as a regular presence in the Champions League but who had taken a team constructed at a fraction of the cost of some of Europe’s heavy-hitters all the way to the final, was a poor choice.Still, every club makes mistakes. A smart replacement might have at least mitigated the damage. Instead, Tottenham appointed José Mourinho, that recidivist fire-starter, compounding the error.Firing Mourinho, back in the spring, could have been the point at which Spurs restored course, throwing a veil over a failed experiment and shifting back into the light. Except that the club dispensed with him in the week of a cup final — one that it lost — without the faintest idea of who might replace him.In the end, Spurs appointed Nuno Espírito Santo. He was, by most estimates, the sixth choice for the job, and he lasted only a little more than three months. This week, Spurs replaced him with Antonio Conte, a serial winner of championships with Juventus, Chelsea and Inter Milan, and without question the finest out-of-work coach in the world.There is something slightly off-kilter about this, as if it runs vaguely against some sort of natural law. Tottenham has done almost nothing right for two years. It has fallen at a rate that should not, really, be possible in a game as stratified as elite soccer, going from a Champions League final to the Europa Conference League — like the Europa League, but without the veneer of purpose — and the no-man’s land of the Premier League’s midtable. And yet, in Conte, Tottenham has not a punishment but a reward. It has failed so much it gets to win.And yet the appointment, in a sense, was inevitable. Spurs might not, on the surface, look extremely appealing to a coach of Conte’s caliber, but consider the alternatives. The jobs at Paris St.-Germain, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool are taken. Manchester United remains stubbornly wedded to being coached by a DVD of the 1999 Champions League final. Barcelona and Real Madrid have no money.Below them, there are a host of other clubs — Sevilla, Borussia Dortmund, Marseille and all the rest — who have either history or ambition or both, but none of them have the resources to match the team in ninth place in the Premier League. Tottenham, simply by virtue of being roughly the sixth-biggest team in England, is the most appealing proposition available to one of the finest managers on the planet: not because the club has done anything to deserve that status, but simply because of where it plays, and who it plays against.Red FlagThe Dutch referee Danny Makkelie sent a message with a red card on Wednesday.Dylan Martinez/ReutersThere was a nonchalance to Felipe that was hard, deep down, not to admire. His Atlético Madrid team was by 2-0 down at Anfield, with 10 minutes or so left until halftime. Sadio Mané was midway inside Liverpool’s half, the ball at his feet, starting to break forward with no little menace.Felipe could have sprinted to keep up with him. He could have drawn deep, heavy breaths and done all he could to stay on Mané’s heels, or at least made sure he was back in time to help out as Liverpool’s attack completed its crescendo. Or he could simply, without giving the impression of thinking too much about it, kicked Mané on the back of his calf, sending him tumbling to the grass, stopping the move at its inception.Felipe chose option B. Pretty much every player in his situation would have done the same. The so-called tactical foul is a fairly standard element of the game. Almost every elite team has at least one player employed, at least in part, because they are more than willing to use foul means, as well as fair, to stop a counterattack. Fernandinho does it for Manchester City. Fabinho does it for Liverpool. Sergio Busquets has done it for more than a decade.Ordinarily, the only punishment is a free kick. Occasionally, for flagrant examples, a yellow card might be flourished. Quite why, at Anfield, the Dutch referee Danny Makkelie went one step farther and sent off Felipe is not entirely clear. Diego Simeone, the Atlético coach, said the official told him it was because he “stamped” on Mané. Others argued the decision may have been related to Felipe’s obvious dissent after the foul.Either way, it may prove a useful precedent. I have never found the cynical side of the game off-putting. Dark arts, well-mastered, are arts nonetheless. But soccer is a spectacle, first and foremost, and it is hard not to think that spectacle might be improved if the truly blatant tactical foul was removed from the equation.It has happened before: The professional foul, now more generally referred to as Denial of a Goal-Scoring Opportunity — DOGSO, in the jargon — was only incorporated into the Laws of the Game in the early 1980s. That applied to instances when a player was through on goal, only to be deliberately brought down by an opponent. There is no reason it could not be extended to the rest of the field. The rules can change if doing so makes the game better. And if, as in this case, they might better reflect the spirit of the sport.CorrespondenceAn entirely valid criticism of last week’s piece on coaches from Pablo Medina Uribe, who points out something that should have been addressed. “Is Marcelo Gallardo really trapped?” he wrote. “As you said, River Plate is one of the biggest teams in the world. Certain teams in Europe might have and pay more money, but is that enough to consider going there a step up?”This is slightly tricky, because Pablo is right: River Plate is a far, far “bigger” club — whatever that means — in terms of history than quite a few of the teams now considered Europe’s elite. It would be admirable, and understandable, if Gallardo regarded River as the ultimate destination.But at the same time, coaches, generally, want to work with the best players, and those players are now clustered in Europe. Perhaps we can agree on this: Gallardo should be being offered these jobs. It’s up to him whether he takes them.Felipe Gaete noticed a name that should have been mentioned, too. “Manuel Pellegrini’s career path is quite similar from the one you say Gallardo must follow: started in his native Chile with not much ‘success,’ champion in Ecuador, in Argentina, put Villarreal on the map, until he got the job at Real Madrid only to be dismissed after one season because they opted for someone who played a double role: manager and showman,” he wrote. “Isn’t that a reason why the managers you mention don’t get the big step up? Because they wouldn’t produce headlines? Is it only down to the C.V. or also for marketing? Since managers don’t sell shirts, they might be expected to sell papers.”That is a very good point, I think. Club executives are easily impressed by a figure who gets major media play, and as a rule — as far as Europe is concerned — that discounts anyone who works anywhere else.The newsletter favorite Fernando Gama was also moved to write, explaining why Gallardo would be especially well-qualified for a move to Europe. “No one faces more pressure than the big clubs in South America: Visits from ultras, violence, a schizophrenic journalism that is only result-driven (well, this may be everywhere), the irrational ire of fans,” he wrote. “I don’t say these are good things. But they exist. At a crazy level.“The stakes may be different, especially in terms of money, but the pressure in South America is much more than the pressure in Europe. I’m pretty sure Gallardo is well-prepared. The two things that have made it harder for him to make the leap are his salary — he is very well-paid — and whether players will believe in him: European players also believe the gap with South America has always been insurmountable.” More

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      At Wrexham and Elsewhere, the Soccer Is Just a Story Line

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      In a steady stream of documentary series, more and more clubs are turning themselves into content. But where does spectacle end and sport begin?LONDON — The cameras were rolling even before the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney could be sure there would be anything to film.Last November, Reynolds and McElhenney were waiting anxiously to discover if their bid to buy Wrexham, a Welsh club marooned in the fifth tier of English soccer, would survive a vote from the Supporters’ Trust, the fans’ group that had rescued the team from bankruptcy and run it on a threadbare budget for years.The actors had reason to be confident: When they had presented their ideas to the Trust in a video call, the reaction had been positive. Still, as they waited for the call that would inform them of the result of the vote, they did not know if it would be good or bad news, and that put them in something of a bind.McElhenney had concocted the idea of buying a soccer team after inhaling both seasons of “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” the successful Netflix series that detailed the fleeting ups and frequent downs of another faded club rooted in postindustrial Britain. “He told me: ‘We should do this. We should buy a club and make a documentary,’” said Humphrey Ker, one of McElhenney’s writers and the person who had recommended the Sunderland series to him.If the Wrexham trust rejected the actors’ ownership bid, their plan would be up in smoke; after all, with no club, there would be no documentary. But for the documentary to work, it had to follow their adventure in soccer from the very start. So as they waited for the phone to ring, McElhenney and Reynolds had to decide, effectively, which came first: the content or the club?Wrexham is not the only place wrestling with that question. Soccer has long provided fertile ground for film and television, but the rise of streaming platforms — with their insatiable appetites and generous wallets and breakthrough series involving entirely fictional teams — has triggered a deluge of productions.Some, like Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary series, have tried to draw on the inbuilt appeal of some of the world’s biggest clubs, embedding multiple camera crews over the course of a season with teams like Manchester City, Tottenham and Juventus.Amazon’s “All or Nothing” series has followed several top clubs, with their permission.Amazon PrimeManchester City, Tottenham and Juventus have opened their doors to the series already.Amazon PrimeOthers have eschewed the editorial control — and considerable fees — the game’s superpowers demand in favor of a more authentic aesthetic embodied by “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” in which the club is less the subject of the documentary and more a backdrop against which a human story plays out.But there is one crucial difference between many of those projects and their forerunner. In Sunderland, the producers were mere observers of the club. At Wrexham, and elsewhere, they are something more: They are actors in the drama.“Soccer clubs are the best content investments in the world,” said Matt Rizzetta, the chairman of the creative agency North Six Group and, since 2020, the principal owner of Campobasso, a team in Italy’s third tier. “They stand for a set of values, and they automatically connect with people in a way that almost nothing else can match.”Rizzetta said his decision to invest in soccer was driven by his heart — it was a “lifelong dream” to own a team, he said, particularly one based close to the part of Italy where his grandparents had grown up — but his thinking behind buying Campobasso, in particular, was governed by his head.“We looked at around 20 teams, all in that area,” he said. Campobasso stood out. It had once reached the second division, but had found far more snakes than ladders in recent years. It is based in Molise, a region that often complains it is overlooked by the rest of the country: Molise Non Esiste, as the self-deprecating local slogan puts it: Molise doesn’t exist.That suited Rizzetta perfectly. His strategy was centered on “content, storytelling, marketing and media,” he said. “Being a club owner now is different to the 1980s and 1990s. Provincial teams, in particular, need new revenue streams to reinvest in the product, and content is one of the most underutilized channels.”To remedy that, Rizzetta’s North Six Group signed a deal with Italian Football TV, a YouTube channel, for a documentary series that would follow Campobasso on its (eventually successful) attempt at winning its first promotion in decades.“It was a story that needed to be told, this team from a part of the country that has been forgotten,” Rizzetta said. That obscurity, to some extent, helped make the project viable. “It was a small, sleepy club,” he said. “It had the feel of a start-up. We kind of had a blank slate. There was nothing we could do that would be wrong.”Not every group of supporters, though, welcomes that kind of approach. This summer, it was announced that Peter Crouch, the former England striker, would be joining the board of Dulwich Hamlet, a team based in a well-heeled enclave in south London where he made a handful of appearances in the early stages of his career.The move was not motivated purely by altruism: Crouch’s experiences, it emerged a few days later, would form the basis of a documentary bankrolled by Discovery+. According to several people involved with the project, the network had explicitly conceived the idea as a chance to create its own version of “Sunderland ’Til I Die.”“Sunderland ’Til I Die” has served as a model for a host of documentary producers.NetflixThe idea has “received a mixed response,” said Alex Crane, a former chairman of the Dulwich Hamlet Supporters’ Trust. “Some fans are genuinely excited,” Crane wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Others are very skeptical, and are querying what the club gets out of it.”Certainly, the apparent theme of the documentary — that Dulwich faces a “bleak future” and Crouch has parachuted in to save it — has not been universally accepted. The Brixton Buzz, a community news outlet, suggested, with some profanity, that the “TV narrative” had been concocted purely for the sake of the series.That trap — contorting themselves to become a more marketable pitch — is one Rizzetta is adamant clubs must avoid. In September, North Six Group added Ascoli — in Italy’s second division — to its stable of teams. It appealed to the club’s former owner, Rizzetta said, as a “strategic operator” that could reproduce its Campobasso success on a larger scale. Among the first things the new owners did was sign an exclusive deal with Italian Football TV.“Content is still a big part of our strategy,” Rizzetta said. “But it will have to be done in a different way. Ascoli has a different message, brand and story. It is sacred to its community.”Reynolds and McElhenney have been equally explicit about their plans. “The documentary is a huge part” of the project, McElhenney said on the actors’ first visit to Wrexham in October. “We feel that is the best way to really do a deep dive into the community. You can televise the games, but if you’re not following the story of the players and the story of the community, ultimately nobody is really going to care.”Wrexham is already feeling the benefits of its sprinkling of Hollywood stardust. A raft of impressive signings arrived over the summer to strengthen the team. There has been investment, too, in the club’s infrastructure.“The stadium is being remodeled,” said Spencer Harris, a club director before the takeover. “The first team’s training facility is much better. The club are building for long-term success. It feels sustainable.”Some of that new money has come from ticket sales — crowds are up this season — and some from a spike in the sale of replica jerseys. By October, Wrexham had sold more than 8,000 — almost as many as it would ordinarily ship in a good year — with the Christmas rush still to come.But perhaps most significantly — and lucratively — the jerseys themselves are a little different. The away shirt is green and gray, McElhenney’s tribute to his hometown Philadelphia Eagles. Ifor Williams Trailers, formerly the club’s principal sponsor, has been replaced by the more recognizable insignia of TikTok. Expedia’s logo stretches across the shoulders.Though the team’s first game of the season was televised nationally in Britain, it is not the audiences that tune in to BT Sport to watch the National League that coaxed brands of that stature to invest in Wrexham. Far more appealing was the prospect of being front and center on prime-time television.In May, Reynolds and McElhenney announced — in the wry style that has characterized their ownership so far — that they had sold two seasons of their documentary, “Welcome to Wrexham,” to FX. It will include the moment they received the call to confirm that their bid to buy the club had been approved by the fans. It was all captured on film. The content, it turned out, was inseparable from the club. More

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      In Newcastle, Songs Drown Out the Hard Questions

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      As long-suffering fans cheered the arrival of Saudi riches at their club, talk of the new owners’ plans and the current team’s flaws took the day off.NEWCASTLE, England — In the shadow of St. James’s Park, a man in a flowing white thobe was standing on a chair outside Shearer’s bar, conducting a swaying choir. It cycled through all the newest numbers in Newcastle United’s songbook: the one about being richer than Manchester City, the one questioning the identity of Paris St.-Germain, the one that just goes: “Saudi Mags.”As their voices resounded along Strawberry Place, gathering strength as more picked up the tune, a group of men in kaffiyehs approached. One had a Saudi flag draped over his shoulders. Another was carrying two portraits: one of King Salman, the head of the Saudi royal family, and one of Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler.Instantly, the songs blended tunelessly into a cheer: It was assumed — though never actually established — that the man with the portrait was an actual Saudi, rather than a local, cosplay version. Members of the chorus wanted a handshake, a photograph. Some mimed bowing down in thanks. And then, plastic pints of lager in hand, they resumed the singing, louder and more jubilant than before.This was, in one sense, the day it all became real. Newcastle’s takeover by a consortium dominated by the Public Investment Fund — the sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi state, of which Mohammed bin Salman is chairman — is more than a week old, but, until Sunday, it remained something that existed only in the abstract.It was a news release. It was a stage-managed video of the financier Amanda Staveley and her husband, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, two minority partners in the deal who had been appointed — or appointed themselves — as its public faces, awkwardly meeting the players at the club’s training facility. It was something that had happened on paper and in the papers, but not yet in the flesh.Only with the first game of the new era could that change. Not because Newcastle, suddenly, would be a particularly good team: The players would still be limited, the squad fragile, the manager still unpopular, the standings still more than a little ominous after a 3-2 defeat to Tottenham. It would change because Staveley, Ghodoussi and, in particular, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the P.I.F. and Newcastle’s new chairman, would be in attendance at St. James’s Park. Only then would this new future, the one that the club’s fans have been awaiting for more than a decade, slip from the realm of the theoretical into something tangible.Callum Wilson got Newcastle off to a flying start by scoring in the second minute.Scott Heppell/ReutersNewcastle’s new Saudi chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, lower left, sat with the minority owner Amanda Staveley, right.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockBuoyant before the match, they and the crowd were soon watching Tottenham attackers slice through their team.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is soccer’s great skill, of course, its ability to bend and twist and adjust to any new reality. There is no story line too outlandish to be folded into its sweeping, infinite script, no limit to the willing suspension of disbelief, no line in the sand, no beyond the pale.The biggest club in the world imploding because of its own hubris? Write it up. A yearslong plot to change the face of the sport that is destroyed in 48 hours? Just a regular Tuesday. One of the world’s largest investment funds buying a club that employs Joelinton so as to burnish the image of a repressive autocracy? Fine, why not?There is an adaptability that comes with having no moral compass. Not only can soccer tolerate almost any twist, no matter how improbable, it can also do so in a matter of hours, turning what might once have been unthinkable into the way things have always been in the space of a 90-minute game. How else could nation states use the Premier League as a proxy stage for their geopolitical strategies.And yet at St. James’s Park on Sunday afternoon, even as reality bit, it was impossible to escape the strangeness of the whole scene. There were the children, outside, with their homemade headdresses. There were the teenagers with the Saudi flag cast across their shoulders. There were the men in robes, adulation for their new owners in the form of cultural appropriation.Then, strangest of all, as Newcastle’s longest-standing and longest-suffering fans in the Gallowgate End unfurled a banner of defiance — quoting the local singer Jimmy Nail and his description of this city as a “mighty town” — the stadium’s public-address system cut in and asked the stadium to give a “warm Geordie welcome” to al-Rumayyan.As one, the fans rose and turned to face the directors’ box, cheering and applauding for 20, 30 seconds. Newcastle has always romanticized its heroes, perhaps more than most: It is a club that carries the memories of Jackie Milburn and Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer on its lips at all times.There is a banner, slung from a railing in the stadium’s East Stand, that features a quotation from and an image of another of those heroes: Bobby Robson, a beloved former manager. A club, it runs, “is the noise, it’s the passion, the feeling of belonging.”That is exactly what Saudi Arabia has bought with Newcastle. It is exactly why it has bought Newcastle: so that its emissary might get the sort of reception Shearer or Keegan might get barely a week into his association with the club.There was, in the end, only one element that remained reassuringly familiar: the game itself. Newcastle took the lead after not quite two minutes, St. James’s Park melting into outright mayhem, before slowly, surely, fading from view.Tottenham took control of the match, and silenced the crowd, with three first-half goals.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockTottenham Hotspur, supposed to be here as nothing but guests at its host’s party, scored three times in a first half delayed after a fan collapsed in the stadium’s East Stand. The players had to summon assistance from Newcastle’s medical staff when it became clear the situation was serious. The fan was transferred to a hospital, it was announced.There was little mood for jubilation after that. The stadium fell quiet, almost contemplative, rousing itself only to demand the manager, Steve Bruce, be fired immediately. There are limits, it would appear, even to Newcastle’s sentimentality. This was Bruce’s 1,000th game as a manager. He is from Newcastle, and supported the team as a child.On Sunday, his Magpies were jeered off the field. That has happened a lot around here, over the last few years. It is that which the fans are hoping to escape; it is the new ownership group’s ability to deliver a different sort of future that persuaded some to don fancy dress, and many more to choose to turn a blind eye to why, exactly, Saudi Arabia might want to buy a Premier League soccer team. They are happy to be Saudi Mags, now, to tolerate any amount of strangeness in the hope of a richer, better reality. More

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      Jimmy Greaves, English Soccer Star, Is Dead at 81

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      He was the first player to lead scoring in England’s top league for three straight seasons, but he may be best known for one game he missed: the 1966 World Cup final.Jimmy Greaves, one of the greatest goal scorers in English soccer, has died. He was 81.Tottenham Hotspur, where he played for nine years, announced his death on Sunday but did not say where he died or cite the cause.Greaves suffered a minor stroke in 2012. His family thought he had made a full recovery, but he had a more severe stroke in 2015.An all-around striker as adept with his head as he was with either foot, Greaves scored 44 goals in just 57 matches for England.But even though he was the first player to lead scoring in England’s top league for three straight seasons, he may be best known for one game he missed: the World Cup final.Greaves was England’s star striker going into the 1966 tournament on home soil. But he was injured in a first-round match against France and surrendered his place in the lineup to Geoff Hurst.Hurst scored the only goal in England’s quarterfinal win over Argentina and kept his place on the team at the expense of Greaves. Hurst earned lasting fame by scoring the first hat trick in a World Cup final; Greaves famously sat impassively on the bench as England celebrated their 4-2 win over West Germany at the final whistle.Substitutions were not permitted at the time and squad members didn’t receive medals, as they have at World Cups since 1974. A campaign by fans led to the presentation of medals to Greaves and 10 other members of the squad, known as the “forgotten heroes,” in 2009. Greaves sold his 18-carat medal at auction in 2014 for £44,000 (about $60,000).“It was devastating for me that I didn’t play in the final,” Greaves said in 2009. “I always believed that we would win the World Cup and I’d be part of it, but I wasn’t.”Greaves in 2013. After his soccer career ended, he moved into television.Action Images/Action ImagesJames Peter Greaves was born on Feb. 20, 1940, in East London. He began playing for Chelsea when he was 17.At 20 years and 290 days, he became the youngest player to tally 100 league goals in English soccer. He scored 41 times, a club record, in the 1960-61 season to secure a lucrative move to A.C. Milan.He scored nine goals in 12 games with Milan but did not settle in Italy, instead ending his brief stay to return to London with Tottenham, where he would spend the next nine years and score 266 goals in 380 games, a club record.Tottenham’s manager, Bill Nicholson, paid £99,999 for Greaves — to spare him the pressure, he said, of being England’s first 100,000-pound player.The move apparently worked: Greaves scored a hat trick in his opening match, a 5-2 win over Blackpool, and helped Tottenham retain the Football Association Cup.In 1963, he scored twice in a 5-1 win over Atletico Madrid in the European Cup Winners Cup, a victory that made Tottenham the first British side to win a European trophy. He was the first division’s leading scorer — a feat he would repeat in 1964, 1965 and 1969.Greaves switched to West Ham in 1970, traded for his former England teammate Martin Peters. He retired at the end of the season with a record total of 357 goals in 516 league matches.He made a brief comeback for the nonleague club Barnet in 1978, but soon quit again and moved into television. He was a presenter of the long-running Saturday show “Saint and Greavsie” in Britain with the former Liverpool player Ian St. John.Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Gallery Lures Soccer Fans to Tottenham Stadium for Art

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      A new gallery at the stadium of Tottenham Hotspur, a top London club, is presenting contemporary works to visitors, with mixed results.LONDON — Annie Lawrence, 8, was looking excited on Sunday afternoon. She was about to see Tottenham Hotspur, the soccer team she supports, play its first game of the English Premier League season — but her exhilaration wasn’t entirely because of the impending game.Lawrence was standing in OOF, a gallery dedicated to art about soccer that opened last month in a building attached to the club’s stadium gift shop. Some of the works on display seemed to be making her as happy as a Tottenham win.OOF’s opening show, “Balls” (until Nov. 21) features 17 pieces of contemporary art made using soccer balls, or representing them. There’s one made out of concrete, and another in silicon that looks like it’s covered in nipples.Pointing at a huge bronze of a deflated ball by Marcus Harvey, Lawrence said, “I’d like that one in my bedroom.” The artist said in a phone interview that the work might evoke anything from Britain’s decline as an imperial power to the end of childhood.Yet for Lawrence, its appeal was simpler: “It looks like you could sit in it, like a couch,” she said.Fans making their way to Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium on Sunday for the club’s first match of the English Premier League season.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe futuristic Tottenham Hotspur stadium viewed from a window of the gallery.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAnnie Lawrence, 8, posing in front of one of her favorite works in the show: “Kipple #2” by Dominic Watson.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesLawrence then took her father upstairs and looked at a piece called “The Longest Ball in the World,” by the French artist Laurent Perbos. “It’s looks like a sausage!” she said, before grinning for photos in front of another piece that features a papier-mâché soccer ball rotating in a microwave.Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the works on display. Downstairs, Ron Iley, 71, looked at the ball covered in nipples by the Argentine artist Nicola Costantino. “Load of rubbish,” he said, then walked out.The worlds of art and soccer don’t necessarily mix. The most well-known recent work to combine both is a bust of Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese player, that made headlines when it was unveiled in 2017 because it looked nothing like him. Other pieces, like Andy Warhol’s acrylic silk-screens of Pelé, are little more than simple tributes to great sportsmen.Eddy Frankel, an art critic who founded OOF with the gallerists Jennie and Justin Hammond, said he wanted to show that art about football, as soccer is known in Britain, can be exciting, complex and thought-provoking. “We’re using football to express ideas about society,” Frankel said. “If you want to talk about racism, bigotry, homophobia, or if you want to talk community and belief and passion: All of that, you can with football.”A visitor photographs Nicola Costantino’s “Male Nipples Soccer Ball, Chocolate and Peach.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesFrankel said he used to keep his passion for soccer quiet in Britain’s art world, since “you can’t really get away with being into both.” That changed one night, in 2015, when he was at Sotheby’s to report on an auction of a monumental painting by Gerhard Richter, the German painter. The sale clashed with a game featuring Tottenham Hotspur, the club Frankel supports, so he started watching the match on his phone. Soon, about 15 people behind him were leaning over to get a view, he said.“I just went, ‘Oh, so there are people who care about football in the art world like I do,” Frankel said.In 2018 he launched OOF as a magazine that explored the intersection of his passions. “We thought we’d maybe get away with four issues,” he said. The biannual magazine is now on issue eight.Setting up an exhibition space seemed the logical next step, Frankel said, adding that he initially wanted to open it in a former kebab shop near Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, which is in an area about eight miles north of London’s traditional gallery districts. But when he and his partners approached the local council for help, they suggested contacting the club instead, which offered a 19th century townhouse that sits incongruously outside the club’s futuristic stadium and is attached to its gift shop.Most of the works on display at OOF are for sale, with some pieces worth up to $120,000, yet the gallery has a much higher footfall than most commercial galleries. More than 60,000 fans come to the stadium on game days, and on Sunday, a few hundred spectators peeled off from the crowds for a look around, many dressed in Tottenham Hotspur’s uniform.OOF is located in a 19th-century townhouse owned by the club that can be reached via the stadium gift shop.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesOOF’s organisers: The art critic Eddy Frankel and the gallerists Jennie and Justin Hammond. “The Longest Ball in the World,” by Laurent Perbos, is on the floor in front of them.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAbigail Lane’s “Self-Portrait as a Pheasant” is made from a football, bird wings, oil paint, painted wood and glass.Alex Ingram for The New York Times“We’re basically running a museum, without a museum budget,” Frankel said.A tongue-in-cheek sign at the entrance asks visitors not to kick the art, but not everyone had complied, Frankel said: On a recent visit, Ledley King, a former Tottenham Hotspur captain, had given “The Longest Ball in the World” a light boot.Pebros, the artist behind the work, laughed when told about the incident in a telephone interview. “Maybe he doesn’t go to many galleries, so he didn’t know,” he said.The current squad, including its famed striker Harry Kane, had not yet been to visit the gallery, Frankel said. The players were trying to keep social interactions to a minimum during the pandemic.“Obviously, we’re a commercial gallery so it’d be nice to sell some art,” Frankel said. “But the real success is if we can get loads of people through the door, and get them to engage in contemporary art, who normally wouldn’t,” he added.Many of the several hundred visitors on Sunday fit that bill. “We don’t go to galleries if we’re honest,” said Hannah Barnato, 27, there with her partner. “But it’s interesting. It’s different,” she said.Paul Deller’s “A Playground of Bubbleheads’,” a work the artist made in 2020 and 2021.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesSam Rabin, one of three guides in the gallery who talk the fans through the works, said that was a common reaction. “I’ve never heard the phrase, ‘It’s different,’ more than I have working here,” he said.But many visitors, especially children, showed a deep connection with the art on display, he said, adding that this proved soccer and art were not the separate worlds they might seem. “They’re both emotional experiences,” he said. “They’re both worthwhile experiences.” More

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      Harry Kane on England, Goals and His Future at Spurs

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      LONDON — There are a lot of things that everybody knows about Harry Kane. First and foremost, there is the fact that he is the captain of England’s national soccer team, a status that bestows upon its bearer the sort of profile unavailable to most athletes, particularly in tournament years. It is part-of-the-furniture fame, royal family fame. Everyone has heard of Harry Kane.Then there are the goals. Harry Kane scores goals with startling efficiency. He scores goals with both feet and with his head. He scores goals from close range and from long distance, for good teams and bad. He does not really seem to be subject to things like form or confidence. He simply started scoring goals seven years ago and never stopped.He has scored so many that he is seventh on the list of the Premier League’s career top scorers; with a fair wind, he will be third next year at this time and within touching distance of the record-holder, Alan Shearer, not long after he turns 30. By that stage, in all likelihood, he will have usurped Wayne Rooney as England’s leading scorer, too.What colors he will be wearing as he does so is anyone’s guess. Everyone has known for some time, of course, that Harry Kane is one of Tottenham’s own, the star of the team he supported as a child.Over the last few weeks, though, a drip feed of interviews has made it clear that, in Harry Kane’s mind, that might have to change this summer, if he is to fulfill his ambition of winning collective awards, rather than individual ones. The expectation is that at some point, one of Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea will make him the most expensive English player in history.Kane scored 23 goals for Tottenham this season, winning the Premier League scoring title for the third time.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesBut that is where the knowledge stops. Harry Kane is captain of England, he scores a lot of goals and he is about to star in his very own transfer saga. Beyond that, Harry Kane is something of an enigma. It is a neat trick: for a player of his status, and an athlete of his generation, to be as well known as he is and yet not well known at all.Occasionally, some trivial jetsam floats to shore. He went to the same school as David Beckham. He married his childhood sweetheart. He likes “Dexter,” the television show. He is an ardent fan of the N.F.L. in general and Tom Brady in particular, and harbors hopes of playing that other kind of football — as a kicker — someday.They are mere details, glimpses of what lies beneath, rather than a whole picture of a personality. His name, perhaps, illustrates it best. Most players are referred to exclusively by their surname, a tradition that reminds them they are just cogs in a machine. Only a select handful are afforded the privilege of being known simply by their first name.For Harry Kane, it is neither. Calling him “Kane” would seem disrespectful: He is more than just another player. But he is not a “Harry,” either: Somehow that would be too intimate, too familiar.Instead, he will lead England into this summer’s European Championship — hoping to win an international tournament in a final on home soil — as Harry Kane, forename and surname, like a reverse Pelé. It is an honor, in a way, but it is also a sign of some subconscious distance, as though he is a brand, or a corporation, or a place.There are a lot of things everyone knows about Harry Kane. But knowing who he is, or what he is like, is not one of them.BalanceAt the end of his first campaign with Tottenham, Kane and his teammates traveled to Australia for a brief tour. It had been Kane’s breakout year: He had scored 21 goals in 34 Premier League games. Almost overnight, he had gone from a fringe player, forever being shipped out on loan, to a blossoming idol.Kane, though, had not noticed the transformation. While he was in Sydney, he decided that he fancied a stroll. He took himself to the nearest mall, expecting to be able to quietly wander around in peace. Instead, within a few minutes, he found himself swarmed by hundreds of fans. Unable to escape, he had to call the club to get him out.The memory has stayed with him. “I think, at the start, I was a bit naïve about what being famous would be like in terms of what you can and can’t do,” he said. “I appreciate it, obviously, and I enjoy parts of it, and I suppose when I retire and it’s gone, I’ll be able to tell you if I miss it or not. But there are restrictions that come with it.”Kane in the stands after England’s victory in the 2018 World Cup Russia quarterfinals.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesKane traces that naïveté to the fact that he had never really considered the “famous” part of “famous footballer.” He grew up, in Chingford, Essex, on London’s northeast fringe, dreaming of playing for Tottenham and for England. His idol was Beckham. Kane cites him as his “role model,” but that admiration went only so far.“I had a mohawk when he had one,” Kane said. “But he wasn’t a role model for me in terms of what he was wearing. It was how he conducted himself. I wanted to be a footballer, that was it. I was not really worried about being in the public eye.”Kane never lost that single-mindedness. Long before he established himself at Tottenham, as he made his way around the country with the smaller clubs where he had been sent, countless coaches were impressed by his doggedness, his determination.At Norwich, Chris Hughton recalled Kane practicing finishing for so long that all of his teammates, as well as the goalkeepers, left him to his own devices. At Millwall, he asked his manager, Kenny Jackett, if he could help him get better in the air. Even now — when most of Kane’s week is spent recovering from one game and preparing for another — he admits to being a little “addicted” to improving his performance data.“I compete with myself,” he said. “When I broke into the Premier League, I was not quite as physically developed as the other players. With Mauricio Pochettino, we did a lot in the gym, trying to improve my strength and speed and power. I got a bit addicted to improving the statistics. I put pressure on myself to get better.”He takes the same approach to the other aspects of being one of the most famous athletes in the country. Kane is not, by his own admission, the sort to “get into situations where I am photographed on a night out.” That side of celebrity, so available to him, is rejected not through necessity but inclination.He keeps his commercial commitments restricted, too. He will not commit to any sponsor engagements 48 hours before a game: Even if they might largely involve, in his words, “standing around,” a photo shoot lasting a few hours can be draining. “And the games are the most important thing,” he said.He works only with a handful of carefully selected sponsors, ones deemed by the player and his brother, Charlie, who is also his agent, to be a natural fit. “If it’s just for the money, it can be hard work,” he said. Like most players, he has a portfolio of charitable causes that he supports, too, some public and some private.Last year, Kane struck an innovative deal to become the main jersey sponsor of Leyton Orient, the east London club where he first played senior soccer, as a way of supporting it during the pandemic. (Kane gave the advertising real estate over to three of his chosen charities.)A 17-year-old Kane at Leyton Orient, during one of several loan stints early in his career.Paul Childs/Action ImagesHis business interests are growing, too. He is one of several England players to have invested in STATSports, a technology company that provides GPS tracking vests to teams across a range of sports. He made the decision not just for profit, but because he felt it “fitted my personality well.”But Kane’s extracurricular activities are notably limited compared with some of his peers’. He could probably have an arrangement with Egyptian Steel, but doesn’t. He might prove a powerful advocate for a facial fitness product in Japan, but he is not tempted to find out. Kane is a familiar face, a familiar name, but not because he is relentlessly marketed. He does not seek to trade too much on his fame, because to him his fame is secondary.There is a reason the things that everyone knows about Kane extend no further, really, than the field itself: because that is all that he has focused on. “I don’t want that attention,” he said. “It is a conscious effort to avoid it. Football is my job. I dedicated a lot of time and work to be where I am now, and I think some players lose sight of that. You start to think the other things are more important, more exciting, but what I am paid for is to work hard and be professional.”What we know about Harry Kane, in other words, are the things that he wants us to know.A Star’s HavenBy his own estimate, Kane has watched “The Brady 6,” a documentary about the six quarterbacks chosen ahead of Tom Brady in the 2000 N.F.L. draft, a dozen or so times. Last spring, like millions of others, he found himself captivated by “The Last Dance,” the documentary series highlighting Michael Jordan’s final year with the Chicago Bulls.Given the scarcity of information about Kane, those two fairly unsurprising viewing choices — professional athlete is intrigued by stories of great athletes — are often co-opted as false insight into who the 27-year-old Kane is away from the field. Barring evidence to the contrary, they prove, after all, that he likes the N.F.L. and basketball.But neither one seems particularly extracurricular. Kane has spoken previously of the echoes he hears of his own story in Brady’s rise — a player written off by most before his career had begun, who managed to go on and conquer the world — and “The Last Dance” is, in the eyes of more than one soccer player, a case study in the nature of greatness. These are not outside interests for Kane. It is background reading.The one place that Kane does seek solace from soccer — the one place he goes deliberately to escape — is the golf course. It is his haven, his chance to take his mind off his relentless drive to self-improve by persistently trying to get better at something else. “It is my way of meditating,” he said. “When you’re playing, it is all you are thinking about for four or five hours. It gets me away from football.”Kane hinted at his potential departure from Spurs during a golf-course interview this year.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesPerhaps, then, it was only on the golf course that Kane felt comfortable enough, detached enough, to confront the issue of his future. He had been dropping hints for months — if not longer — that his ambitions and Tottenham’s might be starting to diverge, though as a rule he had stopped short of anything that might be considered undiplomatic.Last month, though, while playing golf with Gary Neville, the former Manchester United captain turned television pundit, he was blunt. A difficult conversation with Tottenham was coming, he told Neville; he felt he could go on and win trophies for years to come, and if the club could not provide a team to do that, he would have to consider his options.He is at the stage of his career when he is starting to think about legacy, weighing those individual awards, the scoring titles and the player of the year accolades, against the ones that define a player: the titles won and the cups lifted and the trophies claimed.In an interview with The New York Times in late April he said he “didn’t panic” about it, that he did not believe he had one last shot at winning something, but he will know, too, that time is not limitless. He will turn 28 in July, and is starting to think of what people will know about him when, years down the line, he is no longer the England captain, no longer scoring goals.And he knows that one thing stands out above all others. “England is No. 1 for me,” he said. “It is the biggest thing you can achieve. I dreamed of playing for England, but I also dreamed of winning something for England. That is on top of my list. You play Premier Leagues and Champions Leagues every year, but a major tournament only comes around once every two years. The window is a lot smaller. To win something with England: That would be No. 1.”It would outstrip whatever he achieves, for himself and for his club, whichever club that is: to be England captain, winning a major trophy for the first time in almost 60 years, and doing so on home soil. Make that happen, and that will be the only thing that people will know about Harry Kane. It is the only thing they will need to know. It will be the only thing that matters.“I dreamed of playing for England, but I also dreamed of winning something for England. That is on top of my list.”Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      The European Super League Explained

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      Whether you’re a lifelong fan or an outsider who doesn’t know your Manchesters from your Madrids, we’ve got answers to your pressing questions.A little more than a year after European soccer found a renewed sense of unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the sport now faces its greatest crisis in a generation.Late on Sunday night, 12 of the world’s biggest soccer clubs unveiled a plan to launch what they called the Super League, a closed competition in which they (and their invited guests) would compete against one another while claiming even more of soccer’s billions of dollars in revenue for themselves.The announcement cast doubt not only on the ongoing viability of the Champions League — the sport’s showpiece club competition — but also called into question the very future of the domestic leagues that have been soccer’s cornerstone for more than a century.All of a sudden, it is not clear where soccer is heading, or what it will look like when it gets there. Here, then, is what we know so far.First things first: What is a Super League?The concept has been around for decades: a Continental competition that incorporates all of the most famous names from the Europe’s domestic leagues every year into an event all their own. For a long time, it has effectively been something between an aspiration and a threat. Sunday night, though, was the first time anyone had given it a physical form.Who gets to play in it?So far, there are 12 founding members. The teams that have been the driving force behind the project — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Juventus — have kindly invited eight other clubs to join them: Barcelona and Atlético Madrid from Spain, Inter Milan and A.C. Milan from Italy, and the rest of the Premier League’s self-appointed Big Six: Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal.They expect to be joined soon by three more permanent members, though it is not clear yet why those teams have yet to disclose their involvement. Paris St.-Germain in France and the Portuguese giant F.C. Porto were seen as likely candidates, but both have distanced themselves from the project. The organizers are eager to have a team like Bayern Munich, the reigning European champion and one of the world’s biggest clubs, but on Monday, Borussia Dortmund’s chairman said that not only was his team out but also that Bayern agreed with his position.Whatever the final roster, those 15 founding teams will form the league’s bedrock. The full allotment of 20 clubs each season will be fleshed out by a rotating cast of five more teams, chosen through some sort of formula that the organizers haven’t gotten around to deciding just yet.That sounds a lot like the Champions League.It does, to be fair. But the roster for the Champions League is set each year based on clubs’ performance in their domestic leagues. The Super League will have permanent members who face no risk of missing out on either the matches or the profits.The ‘Super League’ AnnouncementTwelve leading European soccer clubs issued a statement on Sunday confirming their plans to form a breakaway league. Here’s what they said at the time.Read DocumentHow will it work?The 20 teams will be split into two divisions — 10 teams in each — and then play one another home-and-away. At the end of the regular season, the top four clubs in each division will progress to a knockout round that will be familiar to viewers of the Champions League. The difference is that those playoffs will be held over the course of four weeks at the end of the season.Will the Super League teams still play in their current domestic leagues?That is absolutely their plan. It may not be the leagues’ plan.Is this about money?Yes. According to their own estimates, each founding member stands to gain around $400 million merely to establish “a secure financial foundation,” four times more than Bayern Munich earned for winning the Champions League last season.But that is just the start, really: The clubs believe that selling the broadcast rights for the Super League, as well as the commercial income, will be worth billions. And it will all go to them, rather than being redistributed to smaller clubs and lesser leagues through European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. At the same time, the value of domestic leagues and their clubs will diminish drastically as they are effectively rendered also-rans every year.Two architects of the Super League: Liverpool’s John Henry and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez.Armando Babani/EPA, via ShutterstockWon’t the Super League teams fight over all that money?The founding members have decreed that spending on transfer fees and wages will be capped at a certain percentage of revenue, which — theoretically at least — gives owners far more chance to restrict their spending at the same time as they are maximizing their income.Sounds good for those clubs. Their fans must be happy?Not so much, no. The reaction has been one of spittle-flecked rage at the betrayal of tradition. It does not help that, though several of the clubs have released statements insisting they will consult with fan groups as the project develops, nobody thought to do that ahead of time.It is hard, though, to be sure how universal the sense of outrage and betrayal is. There is a little evidence — though it is hardly overwhelming — of a demographic split in the reaction to the idea, and it may be that this is what the clubs are banking on: that older fans may be more wedded to tradition, and younger ones may be won over more easily. More