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    Xabi Alonso Isn’t Coming to Save Your Team. Not Yet.

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    The patience of Alonso, the Bayer Leverkusen manager, says a lot about him, and just as much about a sport perpetually chasing the next big thing.Xabi Alonso has always done things at his own speed. As a player, it was his coolness, his control, his capacity to wait until precisely the right moment that made him one of the finest midfielders of his generation. As he contemplated the idea of becoming a coach, he saw no reason to change. He would continue to treat patience as a virtue.He did not start out on the second phase of his career with a five-year or a 10-year plan in mind. All he knew was that he was not in a rush. “I had an idea that I did not want to go too quickly,” he said. “But I had not really mapped anything out.”There were plenty of people who were more than happy to do it for him. Everything about Alonso seemed to indicate not only that he would go into management when his playing days drew to a close, but almost that he should. He had, after all, had the perfect education. He was as near to a sure thing as it was possible to imagine.He had played for some of the most garlanded clubs in Europe. He was one of the most decorated players of his generation, having won the Champions League with Liverpool and Real Madrid, domestic titles with Madrid and Bayern Munich, the World Cup and a couple of European Championships with Spain.He had learned at the knee of pretty much every member of modern coaching’s pantheon: Rafael Benítez at Liverpool; José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane at Real Madrid; Pep Guardiola and Ancelotti again at Bayern Munich. (Even then, he admitted that there is one notable absence from that list: Alonso would have “loved” to have been coached by Jürgen Klopp.)And, just as important, he had been a keen and gifted student. It was only in the last few years of his career, in Madrid and Munich, that Alonso actively sought to learn what it took to be a manager: He made a point of peppering Ancelotti’s and Guardiola’s staff members with questions, trying to arm himself with as much knowledge as possible. “I tried to be curious about the manager’s work,” he said.He had, though, always been more cerebral than most of his peers, an avid reader off the field and an expert interpreter of the game on it, blessed with such foresight that it sometimes appeared as if he was playing in real time and everyone else was on satellite delay. His coaches, modern soccer’s most revered minds, regarded him as their brains on the field.From the moment he retired, then, Alonso could probably have walked into any job he wanted. He could have fast-tracked his coaching qualifications, started doing a bit of judicious punditry work, called in a few favors, and been in charge of an underperforming Champions League team almost before the year was out. That, though, is not Alonso’s style.And so, instead, he took a sabbatical, and then set about earning his spurs. He spent three years back home in San Sebastián, working in the youth academy at Real Sociedad, his first club, the one he supported, the place where his father had worked. He did not conduct a series of regular interviews to ensure people knew about all of his achievements. As far as it is possible for someone of his renown, Alonso stepped into the shadows.Reasonably frequently, someone would try to coax him into the light: from Spain, from Germany, from England. “I had other possibilities,” he said, diplomatically, in an interview this week. “But I didn’t see them that clearly. I didn’t want to go somewhere I was not convinced.” He wanted to wait for just the right time, just the right place. A year ago, when Bayer Leverkusen approached him, he had a sense that it might have arrived.“I had the feeling that I had taken the right steps,” he said. It felt like a risk, of course, but he was ready. “It was the moment that either I tried, or I stayed at home. Maybe that would have been an easier life. It would have been more relaxed than right now.”Alonso’s quick success as Leverkusen manager already has bigger clubs circling.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockLeverkusen seemed a good match, though, the sort of club where expectations are high, but not unrealistic, and the pressure intense, rather than overbearing. It was a team with a good squad with ample room for improvement, a clear structure, a coherent vision of itself. “I had the feeling that everyone was pushing in the same direction,” he said. “That’s helpful. I had the feeling it was the right time and the right place.” He took the job.It was at that point that Alonso’s plan to take things slowly started to fall apart. Leverkusen had been toiling at the foot of the Bundesliga when he arrived. But by the end of his first season, he had managed to steer the club back into the Europa League.The job would soon get harder. Over the summer, Leverkusen sold Mousa Diaby, an electric French winger who had become the team’s most coveted asset. And yet, after 11 games of the new Bundesliga season, Alonso’s team has not lost a game. Leverkusen is top of the table in Germany, two points ahead of Bayern Munich. It has scored 34 goals. The only game it has not won was a 2-2 draw away at Bayern.All of which means the 41-year-old Alonso has overseen the best start to a Bundesliga season any team has ever made, outstripping even the imperious, Guardiola-era Bayern side in which he was a central figure.He now has to spend rather more time than he might like offering deadpan answers to questions about whether his team can lift the championship. (Predictably, he thinks it is too early to contemplate such a prospect; ask him again in April, he said).Alonso, it turns out, seems to be exactly as good at management as everyone assumed he would be. That does not mean he has changed his approach. He is still not in a rush. The problem is that the same cannot be said of the sport. Alonso always stood out because of his patience, because he possessed what the industry lacked.Barely a year into his senior management career, Alonso is already the favorite to replace Ancelotti at Real Madrid, and a contender to fill any vacancy that might arise at both Bayern Munich and Liverpool. “Maybe I could do all three,” Alonso said. “With Zoom.”He was joking, of course. He has been around long enough to know that he had to clarify that his “mind is 100 percent” at Leverkusen. It is much too soon, as far as he is concerned, to discuss where he might go next. According to his timeline, he is just starting out. “I don’t like to talk about my coaching with a lot of authority,” he said. “I don’t feel I have that authority. I’m so early.”He is young enough that he still joins in games in training — he smiled just a touch awkwardly and briefly blushed when asked if he is the best passer of the ball at the club, a physical reaction that translates roughly as “yes” — and he still cannot quite resist the lure of continually rolling a ball under his feet, caressing it, during training sessions.The withdrawal pangs from his playing days remain. “Playing is better,” he said. “Playing is much better. I shouldn’t say it but I do miss it.” As he is watching games unfold, he said, he catches himself quite often contemplating how much more fun it would be out on the field, putting a plan into action, rather than instructing others to do it.Not far removed from his playing days, Alonso might still be Leverkusen’s best passer.Federico Gambarini/DPA, via Associated PressThat is not to say he does not find management satisfying. Given his influences — in particular that great, all-conquering Spanish team and Guardiola, whom he considers a friend as much as a former manager — it is no surprise he has a clear “idea” of how he wants his team to play: a fusion of Spanish control and German intensity, all percolated through the “intuition” of his players.“They are the most important guys,” he said. When identifying potential recruits this summer, the key characteristic was not familiarity with a particular style but “intelligence,” the ability to shift between them, to make their own decisions, solve their own problems.“It is not about being robots,” Alonso said. “They have the knowledge to know what might happen, and then decide what is good with their qualities.”But management, he has discovered, is built not on grand ideas but of small gestures, too, less a matter of philosophy than personal relationships. He has had to learn “how to be a leader in certain circumstances: when to push, when to be a little softer, when not to let them relax.”Ancelotti, in particular, provided him with a clear example of how to do that, but Alonso knows he is not there yet. He is still forging into uncharted territory, for him. He needs to persuade his players to be more consistent, he said, not to drop the level they have set, not to allow their bright start to flicker and fade.He has never done that before. He is still learning, after all. He knows that will take time. He knows, too, that he has it. Soccer might be hard-wired to ask, almost immediately, what comes next. Alonso’s start has been quicker than even he might have imagined. That has brought opportunity, but it has also brought a challenge, too. He has to figure out how he can continue to take things slow.Simpler TimesAmong the many unique and heartening features of Sweden’s elite league, the Allsvenskan — and I will have much more to say on the competition and its thrilling final title race in the coming days — it is also the only major league in Europe happy to discover what happens if you just decide not to have video assistant referees.At the behest of its empowered fans, Sweden, and Sweden alone, has elected not to introduce V.A.R. Given the system’s performance elsewhere in Europe this year, it looks increasingly like a wise decision.In Sweden, the referee still has the final word.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesFor someone now accustomed to relying on remote confirmation of any and every incident on the field, though, it makes watching a game a slightly disorientating experience. The game on Sunday was settled by a penalty, the sort that might have been pored over for several minutes in the Premier League. Instead, the referee awarded it, the crowd cheered, and Isaac Kiese Thelin stepped up to take it.There was no second-guessing. There was no interminable delay. The decision was made, and it stood. It was the same when Elfsborg made two (from a distance, not impossible) claims for a handball in the dying moments, just before Malmo’s victory secured its latest Swedish championship. The referee waved both away, decisively; nobody had to hold their breath, to wait for V.A.R. to have its say.It was curious to note, too, that the protests from the aggrieved players were significantly less intense than they have become in the Premier League. Some objected, of course, and some pleaded their cases, but there was a recognizable absence of the sort of rage that can only ever be rooted in impotence. It is almost as if, by granting referees absolute agency rather than robbing it from them, Sweden has increased their authority, not diminished their status.CorrespondenceThis newsletter — particularly this section of this newsletter — is never afraid to duck the big issues of the day. I feel like we proved that beyond doubt with our discourse on where you can find the best ice cream, and the subsequent conversation around whether a soccer newsletter should concern itself with where you can find the best ice cream.Liz Honore’s question, then, might look fiendishly complex — a labyrinth of obstacles and booby-traps — but with clear eyes and a strong heart, it can be confronted head on. “Do you think, given Emma Hayes’s no-nonsense coaching style,” Liz asked, “she would have kept Megan Rapinoe on her World Cup squad, given her increased focus on nonsoccer-related issues?”In one sense, the answer to this is quite easy. Hayes does have a no-nonsense coaching style, that is true. But she has also worked with any number of players who have, admirably, taken it on themselves to bring issues close to their hearts into the public domain. So, no, I don’t think she would have disapproved of Rapinoe’s interests away from the game.The controversial bit is this addendum, which I may regret. I do not believe Rapinoe’s form dipped because of her advocacy work. I do, though, believe that Rapinoe’s form dipped, and I believe it is possible she was included in the squad to some extent because she was, in effect, too famous to omit. Whether Hayes would have done the same in that situation, I don’t know.Megan Rapinoe: too big to fail?Orlando Ramirez/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConJoel Dvoskin follows that up with a series of questions related to the Jim Harbaugh scandal, which I will admit right now is the sort of cheating that does not really seem like cheating to Europeans. Why wouldn’t he steal other people’s signs? Why would you have a rule about watching your opponents in advance?Joel’s two best queries — “Is cheating only a sin if it works?” and, “If everybody is breaking a rule, why is it still a rule?” — are worth bearing in mind as we discuss the parallel he drew with soccer.“People cheat in soccer all the time, but it seems to happen in a the context of a tacit agreement about the guard rails,” Joel wrote, correctly. “Eventually, the Premier League will find itself in as dicey a situation as faces the Big Ten today. In a sport with such intense competition, it is only a matter of time before someone decides to take ‘rules were made to be broken’ and ‘if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying’ to a previously unimaginable extreme.”It is entirely possible that soccer has already arrived at this moment. This week, Chelsea was accused of historic financial chicanery, and Manchester City, still facing 115 charges of similar offenses from the Premier League, announced eye-watering record revenues.Both would rather suggest that cheating is only a sin if it doesn’t work. More important, if the Premier League is unwilling or unable to punish both Chelsea and City appropriately — and the only logical sporting punishment is retrospective points deductions for the seasons in which the offenses were committed — then the league will have no choice but to ask if there is any point in having rules on spending at all. More

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      Ajax and the Fragile Business of Champions League Soccer

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      The stumbles of a famed Dutch club are a lesson in fallibility of even the best methods, and a reminder of how fast it can all go wrong at the top of the sport.All of the little things had been considered. The design was so painstaking that even the fine details seemed to possess explanatory power. The list of virtues on the wall, the way the light poured into the canteen, the communal spaces laid out according to Montessori principles. Everywhere inside the home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax, the human touches stood out.And yet, in essence, the youth academy known as De Toekomst was, and is, a factory, an industrialized production line geared for maximum efficiency. Its facilities might have been upgraded over the years, but in one guise or another it has been feeding players into Ajax’s team for decades. From there, its graduates have gone on to play for the Netherlands, to represent clubs across Europe. The clue, really, is in the name. De Toekomst means The Future.It is hard to define, accurately, quite what the academy means to Ajax. It is more than just its educational arm and its supply chain. It is not its secret weapon, because — along with its conceptual nephew in Barcelona — it may well be the most celebrated, most fabled youth system in soccer. To label it the club’s heart and soul is more poetic, but less exact, less meaningful. De Toekomst is where players receive the Ajax imprimatur. It is the club’s core, but it is also its edge.Ajax is not the only club to have a celebrated academy, of course. It is not even unique in inculcating its prospects in the tenets of a tightly defined, nonnegotiable philosophy.Ajax is different, now, not so much in how it runs its hothouse of talent but in what happens afterward, where De Toekomst sits in the club’s organizational structure, the role it plays in the business model. For most elite teams, youth systems exist somewhere on the spectrum between optional extra and unexpected bonus.At Ajax, the pipeline of young talent never stops pumping out new stars.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe idea, of course, is that at some point they produce a player or two for the senior side. Quite when that point might come, though, is deemed to be in the lap of the gods. It is a relatively new phenomenon that teams might take into consideration the talent emerging from its academy when planning its transfer strategy.The prospects who do make it through, on the whole, tend to offer a talent that is both ready-made and irresistible. Two or three or more fallow years may pass, and millions of dollars can be invested, waiting for a Phil Foden or a Trent Alexander-Arnold or a Gavi.At Ajax, the paradigm has always been the opposite. The whole club is geared toward the obvious but revolutionary idea that there are always more soccer players. De Toekomst is expected to produce excellent ones: Some years will be more fruitful than others, of course, but whether a trickle or a flood, the flow should always be constant.In return, the club ensures that there is space for them to fill. Ajax does not just graciously stand aside to allow older players to leave for brighter lights or greener pastures or a disappointing spell at Manchester United. It all but pushes them out of the door. Donny Van de Beek must leave so that Ryan Gravenberch can flourish. Gravenberch must go in order to allow Kenneth Taylor his opportunity.In the last five years or so, Ajax seemed to have perfected the formula. No team outside Europe’s self-appointed, self-selecting aristocrats — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, plus those backed either by a nation state or by the television bonanza on offer in the Premier League — had accommodated itself quite so well to the game’s new economic reality.Ajax produced and replaced, produced and replaced, as if De Toekomst itself was mining a bottomless seam. Every summer, ever greater profits swelled Ajax’s coffers, allowing it to invest further in those areas of its squad that the academy could not replenish.It ran the most expensive salary roll in the Netherlands. It added a string of championships. It started to compete, for the first time in two decades, with Europe’s superpowers. The club began to conceive of itself as a Dutch version of Bayern Munich, its primacy bleeding remorselessly into lasting dominance.And then, all of a sudden, it went wrong. Ajax finished third in the Eredivisie last year, missing out on a place in the Champions League. Its start to this season was even worse: After five games, it had amassed only five points, its worst opening to a campaign in 60 years.Ajax is off to a forgettable start this season.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLast weekend, Ajax found its nadir: With less than an hour played, the club found itself losing by 3-0 to Feyenoord, its archrival, on home turf. The team’s most demonstrative ultra group, the F Side, began to hurl flares onto the field in protest. The game was abandoned, the stadium cleared.Afterward, some fans tried to force their way back inside. Others were charged by mounted police officers. The final 40 minutes or so of the game were eventually completed on Wednesday. The Johan Cruyff Arena was empty. Ajax conceded a fourth goal almost immediately.Quite where the blame lies for the rapid unspooling of all that Ajax had built is open to conjecture. It may be related to the departures of two of the architects of the modern iteration of the club: Marc Overmars, the former sporting director, who left in disgrace, and Edwin van der Sar, the longstanding chief executive, who did not.Or perhaps the descent started in summer 2022, when the club sanctioned just a little too much change, watching as its coach, Erik Ten Hag, left for Manchester United. He took two of the team’s best players with him, at the end of a transfer window in which a half-dozen others had gone, too.Or maybe even that is one beat too far: It might simply be the case that Ajax erred by replacing Ten Hag with Alfred Schreuder, who did not see out even a season in Amsterdam. A more judicious succession plan may have allowed the club to ride out the transition and at least make it to this season’s Champions League, rather than being forced to sell another tranche of players simply to balance the accounts.The fans, though, made it plain that they had a different villain in mind. Sven Mislintat, the German sporting director brought in to retool the club’s squad — and to modernize its approach to recruitment — became a lightning rod for criticism with remarkable speed. The club, needing a sacrificial lamb after the chaos against Feyenoord, decided he was as good a candidate as any, and fired him.It seems unlikely the problem will be solved in one fell move, of course, but Mislintat always seemed a strange appointment, given just what it is that makes Ajax tick. His approach was focused on signing unheralded young players from overlooked markets — the German second division, Eastern Europe — and giving them a chance to shine.Ajax fired its German sporting director, Sven Mislintat, this week.Phil Nijhuis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn most contexts, that would be admirable. Ajax had enjoyed no little success in attracting players from Brazil (albeit not a market anyone could describe as overlooked) and Mexico in recent years. Mislintat’s mistake was forgetting that the first place Ajax should look for players is closer to home. The club’s future, after all, is always supposed to be on hand. His recruits were seen as barring the way for the next generation of graduates from De Toekomst. At that point, Ajax no longer really felt like Ajax.There are two warnings in all of this, both of them bleak, both of them with resonance far beyond Ajax. The first is that there is no such thing as a formula; no matter how certain a club’s place seems to be, no matter how assured its methods or lionized its approach, nothing is eternal.The second is that soccer is a fragile, perilous business. Building what made the club special, what made it successful, took years. Generations, really. It required not just a grand, overarching vision, but careful stewardship, delicate handling, nurture both loving and cautious. There were times when the journey was anything but smooth. There were undeniable miscalculations along the way. But Ajax had made it through, and built itself a place in a game that many felt had moved out of its reach.And then, in the space of a year — give or take — it has watched it all crumble to the ground. A couple of misjudged appointments, a handful of bad decisions, and all of a sudden it was gone. Ajax lost sight, perhaps, of what it was trying to do, of what made the whole thing work, and that was enough.Now it has to do it all again. It should not take quite so long for the club to chart its course this time, but how long that process will take is anyone’s guess. Inside Ajax, though, they will surely know that everything will begin wherever everything always begins. The priority will be to make sure the production line keeps firing. That is where Ajax will find its tomorrow. The clue really is in the name.CorrespondenceIt is important, I think, for news organizations to listen to their audience, particularly at a time when misinformation — the slightly unnecessary euphemism for “lying” — has such a dissembling effect on public discourse. And the message we have received from our audience, this week, has been loud and clear: You feel this newsletter should be about ice cream.“I am a loyal reader of the newsletter,” an email from John begins, fairly ominously. It sounds as if there is a “but” coming. Oh yes: “But your comments on ice cream have provided me with an impulse to write some correspondence. Having not yet seen your full list, I am struck by your choice of La Carraia in Florence as a top spot: for me, the best gelateria in that neighborhood is Sbrino.”(Kindly, John has also directed me to Cesare, in Reggio Calabria, a place that he in no way controversially has christened “the best” gelateria in Italy.)Ray Judoaitis, on the other hand, is a purist: Ice cream does not need to be ranked, he believes, because ice cream is good in its very essence. “Ranking ice cream shops may be futile, as I have rarely had a bad one. Therefore access and amount become significant. To that end, I recommend Café Maioli in Florence.”And over on whatever Twitter is called now, Georg Baumann wanted to alert me to the existence of Duo — Sicilian Ice Cream in Berlin; he believes it might prove to be worthy of inclusion. This, of course, is the point of the Ice Cream List: It is not, and can never be, definitive. You have to keep eating ice cream in order to make it as comprehensive, and as current, as possible. It is probably best thought of as a quest, except with more salted caramel than normal. More

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      Champions League: Manchester City Bends the Story to Its Will

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      This season’s City might be Pep Guardiola’s coaching masterpiece: a juggernaut so fearsome that not even Hollywood writers dared suggest it could be beaten.The writers of “Ted Lasso,” the acclaimed, sugar-sweet Apple TV comedy, never particularly worried about being hidebound by reality. The world they created was, after all, based on an inherently fantastical premise: an American coach with no knowledge of soccer succeeding in the tumult of the Premier League.There would have been little point, then, in dismissing as too far-fetched the idea of a makeweight sort of a team signing a proxy for Zlatan Ibrahimovic just because its owner insulted him in the bathroom, for example, or a dog being killed by a wayward penalty kick, or West Ham being invited to take part in a global super league.It was notable, then, that there was one line the writers felt they could not cross. At the end of “Ted Lasso” — in all other aspects a determinedly romantic and uplifting show, an unabashed underdog story of empowerment and personal growth and the overwhelming power of nice — Manchester City still wins the Premier League. Even in fiction, City cannot be dislodged.City is not the villain, not really, in the Lasso Cinematic Universe. That role goes, instead, to a combination of conventional thinking and West Ham. Pep Guardiola even makes a cameo appearance in the show’s penultimate episode, offering a brief, distinctly Lassoist homily about winning being significantly less important than his players being good people.Rather than the bad guy, City serves as what the show’s eponymous hero refers to as his “white whale.” It functions as the series’ final level boss, a portrait of immutable sporting perfection, the one opponent that cannot be overcome by Lasso’s mustachioed, good-humored positivity.Even when his team eventually defeats Guardiola, the victory proves futile. The following week, City goes and wins the league anyway. Lasso, like so many others, finds that second place is the best outcome available to everyone else. “Such a shame,” one character tells Lasso in the show’s final scenes. “City are just too good.”As a piece of analysis, it is hard to top. This year, as for five of the last six, City has been far too good for anyone else in England. Even when it sat eight points behind Arsenal in the Premier League table, the season drifting to its conclusion and the distance to the finish line winnowing, it felt like City’s title to lose.From the middle of February — when a wasteful draw at Nottingham Forest prompted a full and frank exchange of views among the City players that Guardiola himself has described as the season’s pivotal moment — until the moment the title was won, City played 12 games in the Premier League and won them all. In that three-month spell, as The Independent pointed out, it found itself behind in a match only once. The unusual state of affairs was rectified after 10 minutes.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe F.A. Cup was the second leg of Manchester City’s quest for a treble.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Premier League trophy came first, City’s fifth title in six years.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven as it reeled in Arsenal, Guardiola’s team had an even grander prize in its sights. It was sailing smoothly through both the F.A. Cup and the Champions League, the prospect of a treble — victories in the league, the cup and in Europe — starting to loom on the horizon.The treble is, in truth, a distinctly English obsession. Manchester United’s 1999 squad is the only English team to have won all three major trophies in the same season. Though the feat has become significantly more common in recent years — Barcelona and Bayern Munich have both done it twice in the last decade and a half — it still functions as a trump card, the ultimate claim to greatness.Its rarity is precious, to United more than anyone else. That last week’s F.A. Cup final should have pitted the two Manchester clubs against each other felt fitting: Here was United’s chance to preserve the club’s honor, to protect its proudest accomplishment. It duly held out for roughly 12 seconds. The last vestige of English soccer’s resistance melted away. City, it turned out, was just too good.Nowhere, though, has that been made more plain than in the Champions League. That it is glory in Europe that Manchester City’s power brokers and paymasters — as well as its coach — crave more than anything else has long since drifted into cliché.Winning the Champions League has become, if it has not always been, Manchester City’s animating force: its final rite of passage, its final challenge, its white whale. To some extent, it is the purpose of the whole project.Everything — the fortunes spent on players, the state-of-the-art academy, the appointment of Guardiola, the global network of clubs, the accusations of breaches of financial regulations in both the Premier League and the Champions League, the legal battles, the risk that everything it achieves may yet be tainted, the distortion of the sport’s entire landscape — will be vindicated, at least in the club’s own estimation, only if and when City can call itself champion of Europe.City has, then, attacked the Champions League with a singular determination this season. Bayern Munich was obliterated in the first leg of the quarterfinals. Real Madrid held out for a little longer in the semifinal, but was routed at the Etihad in the second leg, the reigning champion dismantled both surgically and brutally.Guardiola made an exception for that victory against Real Madrid — it was, he conceded, among the very finest of his tenure — but as a rule he tends toward the coy when presented with all of the superlatives his team attracts. Habitually, he will always insist that his Barcelona team remains the finest he has ever coached, simply because it was spearheaded by Lionel Messi. His presence alone, Guardiola believes, automatically elevates any team.Perhaps that is true: Messi did lend Barcelona a wonder, a sense of the breath being taken away, that no other player — not even Erling Haaland or Kevin De Bruyne — can hope to match. And yet, by the same token, perhaps that makes the team Guardiola has crafted at City even more impressive. From a coaching perspective, it may be that this is his true masterpiece.Pep Guardiola with his most recent Premier League winner’s medal. He’s desperate to add a Champions League version.Carl Recine/ReutersCity has, of course, provided Guardiola with the most conducive working environment in the sport. He benefits not only from a budget that, effectively, allows him to obtain whichever players he wants, but from the sort of complete, uniform institutional support that can only ever be an aspiration at most clubs.That he has used it to produce a team that does not have a single apparent flaw, though, is testament to nobody but him. Manchester City, the 2023 edition, barely concedes chances, let alone goals. It scores from set pieces and counterattacks and long spells of possession. It can hurt opponents on the ground and in the air.It does not, as previous versions might have done, have an ever so slight tendency toward profligacy, thanks to the seamless integration of Haaland into Guardiola’s side, something that — perhaps more in hope than expectation — many expected to be at least a little bit of a challenge when the Norwegian arrived last summer.But that is not the switch that defines this vision of Manchester City; Guardiola’s most significant contribution, this season, lies elsewhere.John Stones anchored a rebuilt Manchester City defense that held Arsenal, and every other opponent, at bay.Adam Vaughan/EPA, via ShutterstockLast summer, he was concerned, just a little, about his resources at fullback, a key position in his system. Oleksandr Zinchenko had left. His replacement, Sergio Gómez, had initially been pointed out to the club as an investment for the future. João Cancelo’s form was patchy and his attitude, at times, questionable.And so Guardiola invented a solution. Rather than asking one of his fullbacks to step into midfield, as he had for the last year or two, he gave the task to a central defender, John Stones, and drafted in Nathan Aké and Manuel Akanji, two of the less prominent members of his squad, to balance things out.He explained the idea relatively briefly to his players; they had a few training sessions to try to iron out any kinks. And then, a couple of weeks later, they were trying it in a game. There were one or two who felt it was a risk, but it proved worth it: Stones, as much as Haaland, has emerged as City’s key player.More than anything else, it is that change that has made City untouchable in England, and in Europe, since the turn of the year. It has already delivered two trophies; only Inter Milan, now, stand in the way of a complete set.It is curious, then, that it should also — effectively — be one of the major plotlines in the final season of “Ted Lasso”: the coach has an epiphany, and everything clicks into place. That, of course, was a mere piece of fiction. Guardiola’s success is concrete, factual, real. Both have the same ultimate conclusion, though. In the end, Manchester City wins. More

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      Champions League Final: Inter Milan Tries to Live in the Now

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      Inter made the Champions League final with Italy’s oldest squad and its highest debts. Whatever happens in Istanbul cannot stop the financial squeeze to come.Barely six weeks ago, Inter Milan defender Milan Skriniar was lying in a hospital bed in France, recovering from spinal surgery. A lumbar issue had been bothering him for some time and, reluctantly, he had decided that endoscopic intervention was required. He had not played a second of competitive soccer since the early days of March, nor has he played since.Yet when Internazionale names its team for the Champions League final against Manchester City on Saturday — the club’s most significant game in 13 years — Skriniar will, in all likelihood, be among the available substitutes.His teammate Henrikh Mkhitaryan, the veteran Armenian midfielder, has not played for three weeks after picking up an injury in Inter’s semifinal win against A.C. Milan.His treatment began immediately: His thigh strain was being addressed even as the celebrations of that victory unspooled around him. Mkhitaryan has not yet been given medical clearance to train with his teammates. Still, there is a decent chance that he will be named in the starting lineup for the biggest game club soccer has to offer.Manchester City, the overwhelming favorite to win this season’s Champions League, arrives in Istanbul best represented by Erling Haaland: a perfectly tuned, purpose-built machine, running smoothly, silently, an irresistible masterpiece of engineering.Inter, on the other hand, is best represented by the likes of Skriniar and Mkhitaryan: It is a team that is creaking, straining, pushing at the outer limits of its ability, an avatar for a patched-up, jury-rigged sort of a club that is held together, these days, by little more than bandages and hope.Joaquin Correa and Inter held off their city rival A.C. Milan to reach the Champions League final.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere have, certainly, been less likely Champions League finalists than Inter, one of the great old names of European soccer: Bayer Leverkusen in 2002, perhaps, or Monaco a couple of years later, or even Tottenham in 2019. Few, though, made it to the game’s grandest showcase against a background of such uncertainty.It is not just that Simone Inzaghi, the club’s coach, presides over the oldest squad in Italy, a team in which the focal point of the attack — Edin Dzeko, 37 — might regard the cornerstone of the defense, the 35-year-old Francesco Acerbi, as a youthful ingénue.Nor is it simply that, for as much as half of the team, this may be the final hurrah in an Inter jersey: Skriniar is one of 11 players whose contracts will expire, or whose loan spells will end, at the close of the current season. That reality has left the club facing the prospect of having to restock its squad almost from scratch.Inter, though, has far graver concerns about its future. In 2016, Suning, the Chinese retail conglomerate, paid $307 million to take a 70 percent stake in Inter, a deal that was — at the time — seen as the spearhead of China’s sudden, lavish and state-approved investment in European soccer. The new ownership would, in theory, finance Inter’s return to the game’s head table. The team’s training facility would be upgraded. So, too, would the club’s offices. And, of course, the players would follow.Simone Inzaghi became Inter’s manager in 2021, after his predecessor quit rather than sell off his title-winning squad.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRomelu Lukaku, right, left in that purge but has since returned. Lautaro Martínez chose to stay.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSuning’s ownership has not, on the field, been disastrous. In 2021, Inter won its first Italian title in more than a decade. Inzaghi has subsequently added the Coppa Italia, both this season and last, to the club’s honors. Inter has become something of a mainstay of the Champions League; it made the round of 16 last year, and has reached the final this time.That relative return to success, though, has come at a cost. Inter is the most indebted club in Italy; according to its most recently published accounts, its total liabilities run at around $931 million. In the last two years for which information is available, it recorded losses of almost $430 million, leading to punishment from European soccer’s governing body. It fined the club 4 millions euros (about $4.3 million) for breaching fiscal controls last year, and it has threatened a bigger penalty (26 million euros, or roughly $28 million) if it does not get its finances in order.Inter has been caught in a sort of rolling financial crisis for several years, thanks to the combined impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the dwindling support of the Chinese state for investing in European soccer and, most notably, Suning’s own troubles.In 2021, the conglomerate had to accept a $1.36 billion bailout, financed in part by local government, in the face of its spiraling debts. The same year, it permanently closed its Chinese team, Jiangsu Suning, months after it secured the title, citing the need to focus exclusively on its core retail business. Last year, Steven Zhang, the 32-year-old son of Suning’s founder who serves as Inter’s president, was held liable for $255 million of debt and defaulted bonds in a Hong Kong court.If Inter has been shielded from the worst of the fallout — it continues to exist; its players still get paid — then it has suffered at least some collateral damage. Suning has been engaged, for years, in efforts to cut costs: In 2021, Antonio Conte, the coach who delivered the Serie A title, stepped down when it became clear that many of the players who had delivered the trophy would have to be sold.Inter’s two most valuable assets, the forward Romelu Lukaku, now returned to the club on loan, and the defender Achraf Hakimi, left anyway. To save its investment, Suning secured a $294 million loan from Oaktree Capital, a California-based asset management firm, to help with the club’s running costs.Ever since, Inter’s days of plenty have receded further and further into the past. This season, it spent several months playing without a sponsor on the front of its jersey, a significant and ordinarily reliable source of income for all of Europe’s major teams, after DigitalBits, a cryptocurrency firm, failed to make scheduled payments on its $80 million agreement.Inter’s blank jerseys were a throwback look for the latter stages of the Champions League, but the reason behind them was a problem.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Saturday, Inter’s jerseys will instead bear the logo of Paramount+, the streaming service that broadcasts both Serie A and the Champions League in the United States. The arrangement is the product of a last-minute deal reportedly worth $4.5 million. For the same fee, Paramount’s branding will appear on the backs of Inter’s jerseys next season.That sum, though, does not begin to address Inter’s problems. The loan to Oaktree is due next May. With interest, the total sum to be repaid stands at around $375 million. The revenue from Inter’s unexpected run in the Champions League will certainly help with that, but so, too, would acquiescing to another fire sale of talent.If the club cannot meet its obligations, Suning will automatically cede control of the club to its creditor. “Paying a debt at the level of interest that the club is paying Oaktree is not sustainable,” Ernesto Paolillo, the club’s former general manager, said last month. “Steven Zhang won’t be able to export capital from China and nor will he be able to cover the debt with other resources. He will have no choice but to default on the agreement and sell the club to them.”“It’s not our plan,” Oaktree’s managing director, Alejandro Cano, said in March, when asked if the firm’s intention was to take control of the club. “We want to work as excellent partners and offer support. But who knows?”Suning reportedly has opened talks with Oaktree to extend the loan, but it has also started exploring another possibility: an outright sale. Zhang has twice denied that Inter is on the market, insisting last October that he was not “talking with any investors” and reasserting in April that he had “not had talks with anyone.”Inter’s president, Steven Zhang, with Inzaghi after the club won the Coppa Italia final in May.Daniele Mascolo/ReutersIn September 2022, though, the boutique investment bank Raine — the firm that handled the sale of Chelsea to Todd Boehly and Clearlake and which is currently overseeing the Glazer family’s efforts to divest itself of Manchester United — won the mandate to seek new ownership for Inter.Several parties have expressed an interest in buying the club, according to executives with knowledge of the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive discussions. A handful, largely drawn from the United States and including both private families and equity investors, have been given a tour of Inter’s facilities and a broad rundown of its accounts.So far, though, there has been one major sticking point: the cost. Suning values the club at around $1.2 billion, not coincidentally the exact amount that RedBird Capital Partners paid to buy A.C. Milan last year. Given the realities of Inter’s financial position, nobody has yet been willing to bite.That has left Inter in purgatory. In negotiations, the club remains defiant: Those who have worked on transfers with Inter in recent months have noted that at no point have its executives pleaded poverty. The club retains an undeniable, undimming appeal, too. Lautaro Martínez, its World Cup-winning striker, was presented with a chance to leave last summer but chose to reject it, so settled did he feel in the city and at Inter itself.Pride, though, does not pay the bills. There have been times when cash has been in such short supply that the club has not been up-to-date on its share of the payments for the architects and designers working on the stadium it is intending to build, together with A.C. Milan, not far from San Siro.Inter, perhaps, cannot afford to think about the future now. It arrives in the Champions League final battered and bruised, taped and strapped, aging and fading. There is a chance — slim, but a chance nonetheless — of glory in the immediate present. What it means, where it goes from here, can wait for another day. More

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      With Stakes at Their Highest, Manchester City Rises Higher Still

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      MANCHESTER, England — No matter what happens from here, regardless of whether Manchester City’s campaign in the Champions League ends with medals and parades and the realization of the club’s ultimate, meticulously-planned dream, it felt as if something shifted amid the delirious, crowing tumult of the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night.It is not enough to say that Manchester City defeated Real Madrid to seal a place in the Champions League final for the second time in three years. It is not just that Pep Guardiola’s team demolished the reigning champion, outclassing the club that regards this competition as its own private party by 4-0.It is that City did so with a performance — given the circumstances, given the stakes, given the identity and reputation and talent of the opponent — that surely ranks among the finest, the most dominant, this tournament has seen. This was Manchester City sending a message, making a statement, proving a point. And in the process, it was also Manchester City vanquishing its ghosts.Midfielder Bernardo Silva scored Manchester City’s first two goals.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJulián Álvarez had the fourth, moments after he came on as a substitute.Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGuardiola’s travails in this tournament are well-known. He is, by common consensus, the finest coach of his generation, and yet he has spent much of the last decade or so finding new and inventive ways not to win the Champions League. He has contrived to lose to Monaco and Lyon, Liverpool and Tottenham. He lost a final to Chelsea because he fiddled with his team. He lost a semifinal to Real Madrid in the blink of an eye.It has become a trope that Guardiola, in his urgency, overcomplicates matters. There is a theory — one that he himself alluded to here — that his background, as a Barcelona fan, has given him what might look in certain lights like a slightly unhealthy fixation with this tournament.He has always scotched it as nonsense, of course, dismissing the idea that there might be a pattern, attributing the repeated disappointments to nothing more complex than the vicissitudes of the game. That has done little to quell the sense, though, that the Champions League had become his — and by extension Manchester City’s — Achilles’ heel, the one world that the club’s bottomless, state-backed wealth and knife-edge precision could not conquer.

      .css-fg61ac{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;position:relative;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-fg61ac{margin-bottom:0;-webkit-flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);}}.css-1ga3qu9{-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-preferred-size:50%;flex-basis:50%;}.css-rrq38y{margin:1rem auto;max-width:945px;}.css-1wsofa1{margin-top:10px;color:var(–color-content-quaternary,#727272);font-family:nyt-imperial,georgia,’times new roman’,times,Songti TC,simsun,serif;font-weight:400;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1wsofa1{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;}}@media (max-width:600px){.css-1wsofa1{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}.css-1nnraid{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;margin:0 auto;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1nnraid{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;height:auto;gap:8px;}}.css-1yworrz{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row-reverse;-ms-flex-direction:row-reverse;flex-direction:row-reverse;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1yworrz{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);gap:8px;}}The many moods of Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.

      Perhaps, given the nature of the City project, that was always likely to evaporate eventually. This is a club, after all, that has an unavoidable mechanized quality. For all the richness of its style, the gleam of its talent, it is hard not to discern the cold, calculated precision with which it has been constructed.It is a club that feels as if it has been built — to the exact specifications of the best coach in the world, and then equipped with the best of everything that money can buy — rather than one that has grown. At some point, that was always going to tell. At some point, establishing yourself as the Champions League’s dominant force is less a sporting challenge and more an economic formula.That, though, should not be allowed to disguise the style with which City swatted aside Real Madrid. Guardiola had, in the days preceding the game, detected in his players the three ingredients he believed would be required if they were to seal a place in the final against Inter Milan in Istanbul on June 10.There was a sense of “calm,” he said, a lack of panic and anxiety and nerves. There was “tension,” too, the edge, the alertness that is necessary to perform. And, crucially, there was the “pain” of what happened last year, when City fell victim to that peculiar magic that is wielded by Real Madrid and Real Madrid alone. For a year, Guardiola said, his team had been forced to “swallow the poison” of that game. This was the chance to purge it.In the first half, in particular, it felt as if this might come to be remembered as the high-water mark of Guardiola’s project in Manchester, the culmination of the team he has spent the past six years constructing, honing, polishing, perfecting.By halftime, City led by 2-0, thanks to two goals from Bernardo Silva, and it would have had every reason to feel more than a little disappointed. Erling Haaland had missed two glorious opportunities. Kevin De Bruyne had whipped an effort across the face of goal.Real Madrid had spent 45 minutes pinned back not only in its own half but in its own penalty area, apparently powerless to break City’s spell, to escape its stranglehold. Its players, many of them veterans of multiple triumphs in this competition, seemed harried and frantic, suddenly stripped of their poise and their prowess.Toni Kroos and Luka Modric of Real Madrid after Silva’s second goal.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesLuka Modric could not judge the weight of his passes. Toni Kroos kept giving the ball away. Vinícius Júnior, stranded on the left wing, forlornly urged his teammates to step forward. Federico Valverde, overwhelmed in midfield, seemed continually baffled to discover that there was always another light blue jersey behind him.Real Madrid’s reputation is such, of course, that even when wounded most teams would consider it a threat. At no point, though, did City consider shrinking into itself. Guardiola, clearly, had scented something: not just the chance to win a game but to change the story, to shift the emphasis.Riyad Mahrez came on. Phil Foden came on. Whirling, gesticulating, prowling on the touchline, Guardiola urged his players forward. Manuel Akanji made it three. Julián Álvarez, in the dying embers of the game, added a fourth. A victory turned into a triumph, and then morphed into a rout.This was not simply City taking revenge on Real Madrid for last year. It was City exorcising all of those demons it has built up over the years, all of the disappointments it has endured, all of the times the machine that Guardiola has built has stalled at precisely the wrong moment.At the final whistle, as Real Madrid’s players sank to their haunches — bereft at the defeat, relieved the humiliation was at an end — the Etihad Stadium was filled with wild, discordant noise. The club was playing Gala International. The fans were roaring, booming, exulting. The word “Istanbul,” displayed in neon pink, was emblazoned on the giant screens in the corners of the stadium. Guardiola, his energy almost frantic, was hopping and jumping and dancing with his players.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGreatness now rests in Manchester City’s grasp. It should claim the Premier League title this weekend, its third in a row. It has already qualified for the F.A. Cup final, against Manchester United. It will, though Guardiola protested it, be an overwhelming favorite in the Champions League final. It is 270 minutes, no more, from winning a treble. Whatever happens, though, whatever comes next, this victory was not simply a step on the way. It was a destination in itself, the night that Manchester City vanquished its ghosts. More

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      Inter Milan, Finding a Way, Reaches Champions League Final

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      Lautaro Martínez scored late in the second half to give Inter a date with Real Madrid or Manchester City in next month’s final in Istanbul.Simone Inzaghi has spent most of his season on the brink. His Inter Milan team had been sufficiently erratic that the club appeared of the mind to end Inzaghi’s tenure as manager if he failed to make it past the last 16 of the Champions League. He survived that. Most assumed it was simply delaying the inevitable. The ax would fall if — maybe when — Inter fell in the quarterfinals.A month or so later, the shadow that has trailed Inzaghi for so long has disappeared, and there is nothing left but light. Over the course of two legs — both held at San Siro — his Inter team swept past its neighbor, rival and housemate, A.C. Milan, to reach its first Champions League final for 13 years. Its berth in the final — sealed with a 1-0 victory on Tuesday, and a 3-0 triumph on aggregate — marks not only the finest achievement of his career, but one of the most improbable adventures the competition has seen.LuLau with the dagger. 🥶 pic.twitter.com/fsynbEohaK— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) May 16, 2023
      Inter will, of course, be seen as little more than cannon fodder for either Manchester City or Real Madrid, two very modern powerhouses, in the final. But even that underdog status does not quite capture the sheer improbability of the club’s presence in the biggest annual game in world soccer.For years, Inter has been facing mounting financial problems. Its debts reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Its owner, the Chinese businessman Steven Zhang, has been seeking to sell the club for several seasons, even before the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Inter’s accounts.Quite how desperate the situation has become was neatly illustrated by the club’s blank jerseys for both semifinals against Milan. Inter does not currently have a primary sponsor; the cryptocurrency firm that had occupied that prestigious advertising real estate having failed to make its payments earlier this year.Inter’s Edin Dzeko, who scored a vital goal in the first leg. Isabella Bonotto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe straitened finances are manifested in the club’s squad, which lacks the star power of most Champions League finalists. Other than its captain, Lautaro Martínez, and the midfielder Nicolò Barella, Inter does not possess a slew of assets the rest of Europe’s giants would covet. Inzaghi, instead, has had to work with a selection of veterans, castoffs, hopefuls and journeymen.And yet, against Milan, it produced a performance of remarkable poise and control. Edin Dzeko and Henrikh Mkhitaryan had effectively settled the tie last week, scoring two goals inside the first 11 minutes inside the same stadium, and Milan rarely threatened to mount a comeback in the return. Inter may lack glamour and flash, but few teams in Europe have quite so much grit and grizzle.Martínez’s goal, late on, sparked wild celebrations among Inter’s fans, but in truth they might have started booking their flights to Istanbul long before it went in. None of them would have expected this to be how their season ended: a team seen as a makeweight, at least in Europe, thrust onto the greatest stage of all. Inzaghi, though, has taken them to the brink. More

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      When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone

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      Shakhtar Donetsk’s foreign stars fled Ukraine when Russia invaded. Now some are returning or signing up, proof that the lure of opportunity can trump fear.By the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.When Shakhtar returned to practice after a monthslong hiatus abroad, the cosmopolitan air of the club had vanished. A roster that had been dotted with almost a dozen Brazilians just over a year ago now contains only one. Clubs elsewhere in Europe, shopping for bargains amid broken contracts, skimmed off other talent. Even Roberto de Zerbi, Shakhtar’s highly rated Italian coach, had moved on.Traoré, like all the others, could have gone, too. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, issued an edict shortly after the start of the war that allowed foreigners, whatever their contractual status, to unilaterally quit Ukrainian teams and sign elsewhere.Traoré was vacationing in Barcelona on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. He could only follow from afar as Shakhtar’s foreign stars — crammed in a hotel conference room with their families — pleaded for help as war planes circled the skies above Kyiv. Within a few days, they had left the country. Those who escaped did not return.Traoré returned to Amsterdam, where he had previously played for the Dutch club Ajax, to wait out the early months of the war. While the rest of Shakhtar’s armada of foreign talent found new clubs — some back home in Brazil, others in Europe — Traoré took his time. Slowly, the thought of returning to Shakhtar started to look like not only a viable option but the right thing to do.“I had many options,” he said after a recent practice in Kyiv, where the team has been based for the last few weeks. “The club knows. I know. And we discussed it. But I decided to stay.”For him, he said, “it’s in my culture that when they give you something, you have to give something back. For me, it was time to give back the love they gave me before.”Traoré said that he understood why many of his teammates decided not to return. He admitted that he had some difficult conversations with his wife and parents before agreeing to do so. (His wife is now living with his parents at their home in Paris.)For most of the season the team lived in a hotel complex in the western city of Lviv, but it has recently moved to Kyiv, closer to its training ground. A return to Donetsk, in the east, is out of the question; Russian forces have controlled the city since last year, joining separatists that forced Shakhtar into exile as long ago as 2014.The club Traoré has rejoined is a shadow of the powerhouse it once was. The squad and its finances have been gutted; Shakhtar estimates that it has lost at least $40 million worth of talent for nothing as a result of FIFA’s decision to let players walk away from their contracts.Shakhtar and rivals like Dynamo Kyiv play their league matches in empty stadiums. Shakhtar remains on course for a return to the Champions League next season.Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters“We have no money,” the club’s chief executive, Sergei Palkin, said on a recent visit to London. The Ukrainian league’s return, as much a symbol of the country’s resolve as a sporting competition, is played out in front of empty stands and to the sound of occasional air raid sirens forcing players from the field. The league’s television contract has collapsed. Sponsors have all but disappeared.“We have no income from Ukraine,” Palkin said. “Zero.”What money there is has come from Shakhtar’s presence in the Champions League and the Europa League, European soccer’s second-tier competition, and from the record transfer fee the club received by selling its star Ukrainian forward Mykhailo Mudruyk to Chelsea in England.New money cannot come soon enough. While FIFA allowed foreign players to leave Shakhtar without a fee, it insisted the club pay any debts to the clubs it signed those foreign players from, including a handful that did not play a single minute for the club because of the war, according to Palkin.Traoré’s decision to return, then, came as a pleasant surprise. He had cost the club $10 million in a transfer fee when he joined from Ajax in 2021. A forward who was not considered a mainstay before the war, he is suddenly a pivotal figure, and not just for what he is doing on the field.His continued presence, Traoré and the club hope, is a sign to potential recruits that soccer in Ukraine remains a viable career option. It is an option that proved alluring to players with European dreams like Kevin Kelsy, an 18-year-old striker from Venezuela.The 18-year-old Venezuelan striker Kevin Kelsy said his family was worried about his move to Shakhtar. “When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockNot so long ago Kelsy would not have been a target for Shakhtar, which for years used the wealth of its oligarch owner to shop at a higher price bracket. But now, in its more straitened state, Shakhtar has turned to eager young players like Kelsy and recruits from Georgia and Tajikistan.Kelsy said signing a five-year contract with a club in a country at war was a surprisingly easy decision. The prospect of fulfilling a dream of making it to Europe trumped everything else, he said — even the persistent threat from Russian missiles and planes, the regular drone of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant explosions. His family, though, had questions.“When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” he said in an interview in Spanish. “They knew everything that happened, and there was a little bit of nervousness and a little of fear. But I spoke to them about this theme, that it’s very important for me to go to play football in Europe, in a big team like Shakhtar, and in the end they understood.”Kelsy, like the scores of South Americans who have signed for Ukrainian clubs in the past, views the club as a steppingstone on a journey that he hopes might one day propel him to the club of his dreams, A.C. Milan. Games in elite competitions like the Champions League, he knows, offer an elite stage to show he belongs. (Shakhtar, which led the Ukrainian league entering the weekend, is on track to return to the competition next season.)Having lost so many players, Palkin, the Shakhtar chief executive, now insists that any new recruits sign contracts that include clauses that would prevent them from taking advantage of any FIFA regulations that would allow them to suddenly leave. Any player who signs on now, he said, surely understands the commitment they are making.So strong is the pull of making it as a professional in Europe, though, that Kelsy said not even war could stop him from coming. “I try not to think about it,” he said, “and focus on what matters now.”As a new recruit, Kelsy knows no other reality as a Shakhtar player. That is not the case for Traoré, who recalls far more luxurious times. In those days, jet travel and big crowds were the norm, not the long, arduous bus journeys that are now required to fulfill fixtures in empty stadiums.“It’s not normal life like we used to have: no home, you can’t see family, and also you have to always be careful, sirens on all the time,” he said. “But you get used to it.” More

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      The Premier League Crucible Produces Something New: Ideas

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      England has long relied on imported players, imported coaches, imported best practices. Now it’s trying something new for a change.Manchester City had been in possession of the ball for a minute, no more, but to the denizens of the Santiago Bernabéu, it felt like an hour or more. Pep Guardiola’s team moved it backward and forward and then backward again. It switched it from side to side, sometimes via the scenic route, stopping off to admire the view from midfield, and sometimes taking the express.Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned about this state of affairs. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semifinal that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around. The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerized by the swirling patterns.The crowd, though, did not like it one bit. The modern Real Madrid might be something of a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing itself as the game’s greatest statesman and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries its fans are not willing to cross.The idea that a visitor, no matter how talented, should come to the Bernabéu and look as comfortable as Manchester City did, in that spell on Tuesday night, was clearly one of them. Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that it might as well have had its feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.And so, as if to make its displeasure known, the crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to take a more aggressive stance, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.Real Madrid is not used to being bullied on its home field.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt was hard, in that moment, not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is now horribly outdated. The idea that English soccer lacks refinement when compared with its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger viewers might struggle to believe it ever existed at all.The Premier League’s emissaries have, between them, conquered all of the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabéu. A couple of years later, Arsène Wenger’s team did the same thing to A.C. Milan at San Siro. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City itself have all won at Camp Nou or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they have been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might even have been just a little bit lucky.Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness that their opponents cannot match. England has not had any reason to be ashamed for some time.City’s display in Madrid might not have led to a victory — not yet, anyway — but the scale of its superiority was nevertheless noteworthy. In part, of course, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and molding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of its ideas.Pep Guardiola, imported innovator.Borja Sanchez Trillo/EPA, via ShutterstockThere should be nothing especially controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, is not identifiably English, not in any real sense. It bears about as much relation to the century of English soccer culture that preceded it, in fact, as the modern Manchester City does to the club that occupied the stadium on Maine Road for all those years.The colors are the same, of course. Something about the atmosphere, too, is native, idiosyncratic, even if it is all a little quieter these days. Perhaps it is possible to discern a little Englishness in the tempo of the game, in how crowds celebrate corners, in the ongoing appreciation for a thundering tackle.But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well. The training methods, the organizational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.That, it should be stressed, is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped to transform what was once a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet. The transformation in England’s soccer culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.But while the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory. The soccer its teams play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers. Every tweak, every trend, every notion has washed up on these shores eventually (and, sometimes, a little reluctantly). It is a showcase of soccer’s contemporary thought.Rarely, though, have any of those ideas actually emerged in England. Perhaps a degree of skepticism is an enduring streak of Englishness, or perhaps it is a function of the league’s wealth: Why experiment when you can, in effect, pay someone else to take those risks for you?All of the innovations that have changed English soccer have been developed elsewhere, in the start-up cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time and Claude Makelele and his eponymous role all the way to the high press preached by Jürgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.It is, then, entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing, at Barcelona, or an ancillary midfielder, at Bayern Munich. Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.At the Bernabéu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control. It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the center of the field that meant Real Madrid had to be so passive that it risked the wrath of its home crowd.John Stones, the central defender unbound.Jose Breton/Associated PressNothing in soccer is ever truly new, of course. All of these positional switches are, as the journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted, simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played essentially as orthodoxy in the 1930s.Many of them have fluttered around elsewhere, too, occasionally popping up in the least likely of places. Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example, a team that regularly allowed its defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as soccer’s cutting edge.That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval, turns it automatically into best practice. Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England.Fitting FinaleMr. Messi will inform you of his decision when he is good and ready.Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNothing, Jorge Messi would like you to know, is decided yet. His adult son, Lionel, will not be making any decision on the identity of his future employer until the end of the French season. And with good reason. The Ligue 1 title race sure is a nail-biter, and Messi would not want any of the Paris St.-Germain fans who are so devoted to him to think his focus might have drifted elsewhere.That does not stop the speculation, of course. So far this week, there have been reports that Messi’s “priority” is to remain in Europe; that he has agreed to a deal to sign with a club in Saudi Arabia; that he is talking to a club in Saudi Arabia but has not yet signed on the dotted line; that he is waiting for the green light from La Liga before completing a move back to Barcelona.Needless to say, not all of these things can be true. It is hard to tell if any of them are. There is never any paperwork produced to support any of the claims. There are never any on-the-record quotes from people actively involved in the negotiations. Everything is hazy, indistinct, disguised behind what is, in this case, the coward’s or the liar’s veil of deep background.As previously noted, the most romantic conclusion to all of this is that Messi returns to Newell’s Old Boys, or failing that Barcelona. In many ways, though, it feels increasingly fitting that he should draw the curtain on his career in Saudi Arabia.What could better encapsulate this era of soccer, after all, than the sight of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two men who define the modern game, who crystallized everything that it is, eking out the final drops of their talent in a country that has sought to co-opt them, and their phenomenon, for its own purposes, effectively weaponizing their star power? Perhaps, in a way, that is where Messi should be. Perhaps Saudi Arabia was your destiny all along.Every End Has a StartFor Victor Osimhen and Napoli, it’s celebrations today and consequences later.Andrea Staccioli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmong soccer’s very worst traits is its restless, obsessive desire to know what comes next. Managers who pull off unexpected successes must, always, be encouraged to move to different clubs, bigger clubs, to see what they might do next. Players enjoying breakthrough seasons must immediately be photoshopped into the jerseys of their many and varied suitors. No achievement is allowed to exist merely for and of itself. Meaning is only bestowed when it is clear where glory might lead.It feels a little reductive, then, to ask what might come next for Napoli. It is hard to think of a less appropriate question. Napoli has waited 33 years to win Serie A for the third time. The city is still caught in a wave of euphoria. This is no time to think about the future. Worrying about all the chores you have to do tomorrow does have a habit of ruining the perfect today.It is intriguing to consider, though, whether those celebrations might become a rather more familiar sight, as Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, has intimated. As the author Tobias Jones has pointed out, Napoli’s title was not a stereotypically Neapolitan triumph: It had its roots not in the magical or the mystical but in the comparatively mundane details of intelligent recruitment and adroit coaching. Those are the sorts of things, of course, that can be repeated.They will have to be. It is not just fans or the news media that have a habit of assuming that all success is a steppingstone. Europe’s apex predators do, too. Manchester United, Chelsea and Bayern Munich are all casting covetous glances at Victor Osimhen, the Nigerian forward who did so much to carry Napoli over the line. Others are watching the Korean defender, Kim Min-jae, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the edge-of-the-seat Georgian winger.Napoli’s plan, as things stand, is to lose no more than one (most likely Osimhen), and then use the fee it receives — $150 million or so — not only to find his replacement but to add further ballast to its squad. If the club can invest as judiciously this summer as it did last, then it may be that the party in Naples is just getting started.CorrespondenceRoyale Union St.-Gilloise after reading last week’s newsletter.Yves Herman/ReutersExciting times for this newsletter, which treads virgin ground this week by issuing an apology to a whole nation. Well, a bit of one, anyway. “A small correction from a fan of Union Saint-Gilloise,” Flor Van der Eycken wrote. “The club is not Wallonian, but from Brussels.”My lawyers, of course, would point out that this subject was raised in a direct quote from a reader, and thus morally I am in the clear, but trying to apportion blame here feels churlish. It happened on my watch, and so it is my fault. I apologize, unreservedly, to any Belgians who feel let down.Tony Walsh, meanwhile, is evidently on a very similar page to me. One aspect of Napoli’s stirring victory in Serie A that has intrigued me — and probably warrants further investigation — is how those long-serving players who left the club last summer feel about it. Lorenzo Insigne, a Neapolitan to his core, and Dries Mertens, an adopted son of the city, are the best examples, but Tony wonders about someone else. “A penny for the thoughts of Kalidou Koulibaly,” he wrote. “Eight years in Naples, and then when they win the title he is amid the chaos at Chelsea.”And Carolyn Janus Moacdieh noticed a somewhat surprising parallel in last week’s note on Leeds, a club where fans have been taught that process is no less significant than outcome. “I will not defend the show ‘Ted Lasso,’” she wrote (unnecessarily: This newsletter is pro Lasso and the causes of Lasso.) “But Marcelo Bielsa’s philosophy at Leeds sounds a lot like the idea which the creators have integrated into the show: What you do is not as important as how you do it.”And another week, another suggested career path for my dog. “I think he can learn from Pretinha, a dog that supports my team, Fluminense, and celebrates each time the team scores,” Fernando Secco suggests. “Since Fernando Diniz became coach, the dog has been celebrating a lot.” I would suggest we are reaching a tipping point as we accumulate evidence that dogs improve soccer. Maybe the solution to how to make the game more engaging to teenagers was in front of our faces, tongue lolling and tail wagging, this whole time. More

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      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

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      The teams drew the first leg of their Champions League semifinal as each tried to prevent the other from playing to its strengths.Erling Haaland had his instructions. His Manchester City teammates were methodically working the ball from the center circle all the way back to Ederson, the goalkeeper, but Haaland was not watching. He knew what was coming. Ederson pitched the ball high into the night sky, an unusually rudimentary opening gambit for a team coached by Pep Guardiola.Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend. He was moving to where it was going to make landfall. He started to gather a little speed. And then, just as the Real Madrid defender David Alaba met the ball — his header sending it back into the sky — Haaland arrived, crashing into him. Not dangerously or recklessly but, with only about 40 seconds elapsed, certainly ominously.Guardiola being Guardiola, of course, the working assumption has to be that this was all preordained, the sort of effort that he has spent time perfecting on the training ground for Tuesday’s match. An understudy would have been drafted to act as Haaland’s crash test dummy. Haaland, the Norwegian striker, would have been lectured on the finer points of clattering technique. No, Erling, don’t barge into him like that; lead with the shoulder just a touch more.In this case, though, perhaps the agency lay elsewhere. Standing behind Alaba, watching the opening skirmish unfold, was Antonio Rüdiger, the German defender. Happenstance had brought him into Real’s lineup — standing in for the suspended Eder Militão — but he is not the sort to back away from a test of strength.Rüdiger has that valuable knack, for a central defender, of ensuring he gets the game he wants. He may as well have been licking his lips at the sight of Haaland’s opening salvo on Alaba. Clearly, this was going to be his sort of evening.This Champions League semifinal was, on a macro level, always going to be cast not just as a tussle between old glory and new money, the establishment and the aspirant, but as a conceptual collision, too. Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid is inherently improvisational and player-centric; Guardiola believes, more than anything, in the power of his collective, his system. It is free jazz against orchestral arrangement. (The score, after the first of two legs, is 1-1; no sweeping conclusions on scant evidence can yet be drawn.)Vinícius Júnior, left, scored Real Madrid’s only goal.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesBut it was also — and at times, it seemed, mainly — an arm wrestle between Rüdiger and Haaland. That is not to suggest that either player is nothing but brawn, of course. Rüdiger’s job is to ensure that things do not happen; his successes are, often, inherently invisible to those not blessed with his foresight. Likewise, for someone so large, Haaland can make it very difficult to say with any certainty where he is at any given time, right up to the point when he materializes, peeling off an opponent’s shoulder.On this occasion, though, both players willingly indulged what might be described as their more muscular instincts. For an hour and a half, the two of them pulled and pushed and strained and tensed, relishing the atavistic thrill of it, each trying to establish nothing grander than sheer physical dominance over the other.Here was Haaland, dropping deep to pick up the ball, being thrown to the ground by Rüdiger. Here was Rüdiger, for some reason slipping his head through the crook of Haaland’s elbow, effectively giving his consent to be placed in a headlock, grinning in (presumably) accidental homage to Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he did so.Most judges, by the end, would have scored it a split decision: Haaland did not score, a rarity this season, and in truth had only a couple of sights of goal; his presence was central, though, in creating the space that led to Kevin De Bruyne’s equalizer for City, the strike that will make Guardiola’s team the slight favorite when hostilities are resumed next week in England.And that, perhaps, will not displease either coach. For all their philosophical differences, what was striking about this game was just how aware both teams were of the other’s strengths, their capacity to inflict damage. That, more than anything, might have been the enduring lesson of their encounter in a semifinal last season: Madrid conscious of just how good City can be; City conscious that a team can be as good as it likes against Madrid and still lose.Real, on home territory, was at times so passive that it tried its fans’ patience; the Bernabéu is not used, after all, to its visitors having the temerity to keep the ball for long periods of time. There was a point, midway through the first half, when City’s passing started to affront the crowd’s dignity: What had started as whistling turned, slowly but surely, into jeers.For Ancelotti, though, that was a price worth paying: Tactically, strategically, it made sense for Real to dig in, to sit deep, to lie in wait, and then to pick its moments. A few minutes later, his approach bore fruit: Eduardo Camavinga, playing the hybrid fullback/midfielder role that is so de rigueur these days, spotted a gap and levered it open, then found Vinícius Júnior in sufficient space to fizz a shot past Ederson.Even a goal down, though, City did not see the need to adopt a more assertive, more aggressive posture. Guardiola’s insatiable appetite for possession is not a purely offensive maneuver: To some extent, it is a defensive measure, too. More than he would like to admit, perhaps, he hews to his old rival José Mourinho’s adage that “whoever has the ball, has fear.”Kevin De Bruyne, right, scored Manchester City’s equalizer.Manu Fernandez/Associated PressIf Guardiola’s team is in control, he knows the opposition cannot score. In those moments, watching the ball sweep hypnotically between his players, he can feel safe. Against Madrid, a team whose superpower is its ability to score at any moment and effectively without any warning, that is doubly important.It was, both sorts of coaches seemed to have decided, that sort of occasion, one in which the focus was on preventing the opposition from expressing its identity. And so Haaland, the most devastating forward in Europe, a player who has seemed at times in his debut season in England like an inevitable force of nature, was employed — at least in part — as a battering ram.Guardiola and Ancelotti will both take heart that their approach worked, that nothing has yet been lost. Both will know, though, that at some point it will not be enough merely to stop the opposition; to win, someone will have to be themselves. More