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    How Europe's Super League Fell Apart

    LONDON — For 48 hours, soccer stood on the brink. Fans took to the streets. Players broke into open revolt. Chaos stalked the game’s corridors of power, unleashing a shock wave that resonated around the world, from Manchester to Manila, Barcelona to Beijing, and Liverpool to Los Angeles.That internationalism is what has turned European soccer, over the last 30 years, into a global obsession. The elite teams of western Europe are stocked with stars drawn from Africa, South America and all points in between. They draw fans not just from England, Italy and Spain, but China, India and Australia in numbers large enough to tempt broadcasters across the planet to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights to show their games.But while soccer is now the biggest business in sports, it remains, at heart, an intensely local affair. Teams rooted in neighborhoods and based in small towns compete in domestic leagues that have existed for more than a century, competitions in which the great and the good share the field — and at least some of the finances — with the minor and the makeweight.An uneasy truce between the two faces of the world’s game had held for decades. And then, on Sunday night, it cracked, as an unlikely alliance of American hedge funds, Russian oligarchs, European industrial tycoons and Gulf royals sought to seize control of the revenues of the world’s most popular sport by creating a closed European superleague.How that plan came together and then spectacularly collapsed is a story of egos and intrigue, avarice and ambition, secret meetings and private lunches, international finance and internecine strife. It lasted just two frantic, feverish days, but that was more than enough time to shake the world.The SecretLast Thursday, Javier Tebas and Joan Laporta were supposed to be having a cordial, celebratory lunch. A few days earlier, Laporta had been elected to a second term as president of F.C. Barcelona. Tebas, the outspoken, unashamedly bellicose executive in charge of Spain’s national league, wanted to be among the first to congratulate him on his victory.It did not turn out that way. Laporta revealed to Tebas that Barcelona was almost certainly joining a dozen or so of Europe’s most famous, most successful teams in a breakaway competition, one that would effectively unmoor its members from the game’s traditional structures and, crucially, its multibillion-dollar economy.The threat was nothing new. There has long been a perception, at least among soccer’s rich and powerful teams, that since they have the most fans, they generate the bulk of the sport’s revenue. It follows, then, that they should be treated to a greater slice of its income. Like clockwork, every few years they would float a plan to group the best teams together in a single competition. And, like clockwork, the grand plan would fail to materialize, the big clubs bought off by promises of more power and more money if only they would agree to stay.But Tebas felt this new effort was more serious, more real. Laporta told him that a half-dozen teams had already committed. Several more had been told that they had until the end of the weekend to decide.Tebas raised the alarm. He called officials in leagues across Europe. He called executives of powerful clubs. And he reached out to Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, the organization that Tebas knew had the most to lose.Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, excoriated the executives leading the Super League as “snakes” and “liars.”Richard Juilliart/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCeferin, a lean, plain-spoken 53-year-old lawyer from Slovenia, was baffled. Only a few weeks earlier, his close friend and ally Andrea Agnelli, the president of the Italian league champion Juventus, the scion of one of Europe’s great industrial families and the leader of the association representing European soccer clubs, had assured him that whispers about a new round of breakaway talks were only “a rumor.”Just a day earlier, in fact, Agnelli and his organization had recommitted to a suite of reforms to the Champions League, European soccer’s crown jewel and its biggest moneymaker. Everything was set to be approved on Monday.Still, the drumbeat of rumors continued, and Ceferin felt he needed to be sure. So as he slid into the front seat of his Audi Q8 on Saturday to start the eight-hour drive from his home in Ljubljana to his office in Switzerland, he decided to get to the bottom of things. He placed a call to Agnelli. His friend did not pick up.Ceferin — the godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child — texted the Italian’s wife and asked if she might get the Juventus president to call him urgently. He was three hours into his journey when his cellphone rang. Breezily, Agnelli reassured Ceferin, again, that everything was fine.Ceferin suggested they issue a joint communiqué that would put the issue to rest. Agnelli agreed. Ceferin drafted a statement from the car and sent it to Agnelli. An hour later, Agnelli asked for time to send back an amended version. Hours passed. The men traded more calls. Eventually, the Italian told Ceferin he needed another 30 minutes.And then Agnelli turned off his phone.The RevoltThe reason that the threat of a superleague had carried so much menace for so long is that much of soccer’s vast economy rests on a fragile bond.Both domestic championships — like England’s Premier League and Spain’s La Liga — and Pan-continental tournaments like the Champions League to some extent rely on the presence of the elite clubs to attract fans and, through them, broadcasters and sponsors. Without them, the revenue streams that filter down to and sustain smaller teams might collapse.For decades, the system rested on appeasing the rich teams just enough to encourage them to retain their loyalty to the collective. All of a sudden, that trust was fraying.As he arrived in Switzerland, Ceferin fielded two more calls that made clear how real the threat to European soccer’s future had become. Two teams, one English and one Spanish, informed him that they had been pressed to sign up for the breakaway league. They had decided to accept, but wanted to remain on good terms with European soccer’s governing body.Ceferin’s response was polite, but blunt. If they allied with the rebels, they should prepare for an all-out attack.With his inner circle, Ceferin got to work. They broke the news to some board members of the European Club Association, the umbrella group of about 250 European teams. Its president, Agnelli, and senior executives like Manchester United’s Ed Woodward had misled them about supporting the Champions League reform plan, they said.They told the clubs that, even though the breakaway clubs intended to remain in their own domestic leagues, too, the plan would see the value of those competitions’ broadcast deals collapse. Sponsorships would evaporate. It would decimate the rest of soccer’s finances. “They were outraged, they couldn’t believe it,” Ceferin said in an interview on Wednesday. “Even mafia organizations have some sort of code.”By lunchtime on Sunday, the roster of the insurgents was known. Ceferin started referring to them as the Dirty Dozen. As well as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid had signed up from Spain. There were six from England: Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. In Italy, Juventus had been joined by A.C. Milan and Inter Milan.New graffiti in Italy featured an image of Andrea Agnelli. It was titled “Il Golpe Fallito,” the failed coup.Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNot all of them were equal partners. Executives at Manchester City and Chelsea, for example, had only learned on Friday that the plan was in motion. They had been told that they had no more than a day or so to decide whether they were in or out. Either way, they were warned, the train was leaving the station.City quickly succumbed, but others proved more resistant. Bayern Munich and Paris St.-Germain, the dominant forces in Germany and France, had both been approached. They had declined the offer, preferring to stay — at least for the moment — aligned with the rest of Europe.They supplied some of the intelligence that allowed UEFA and national leagues in Spain, Italy and England to plan their counterattack. When the group learned that an official statement revealing the creation of the new competition, called the Super League, would be made late Sunday, they made plans to issue their own — disavowing the project.But before they could, the news leaked. The public outcry, particularly in Britain, was immediate. Fans hung banners outside their teams’ stadiums, and lawmakers took to the airwaves to denounce the rebels for their greed and disrespect toward soccer’s traditions.Gary Neville, a former Manchester United captain, unleashed a several-minute tirade against his former team and Liverpool, English soccer’s two most popular teams. The screed went viral, and it was soon being shared by opponents of the project via the messaging application WhatsApp.This was precisely what some of those involved with the project had feared. There had been doubts that the plan was ready to go live; insiders worried that it might not survive a fierce initial backlash. “This is not the time to do it,” an executive involved in the project warned. The executive suggested holding off until summer.By then, it was hoped, the clubs might have found a frontman for the breakaway. Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid, had been the driving force behind much of it; it was, to some extent, his brainchild. But his peers were aware that he would struggle to convince an English audience, in particular.The Manchester United co-chairman Joel Glazer, whose family also owns the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers; Chelsea’s Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich; and Arsenal’s Stan Kroenke, who controls nearly a dozen professional teams, almost never speak publicly. Manchester City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, doesn’t speak to reporters at all. And others considered for the role — like Liverpool’s majority owner, John W. Henry — were unwilling to accept it.There were also concerns that the rebels’ communications strategy — marshaled by Katie Perrior, a political operative close to Boris Johnson, the British prime minister — was too focused on winning governmental, rather than popular, support. There had been no effort to consult, involve or win over fans, players or coaches. An outcry might destroy everything before the lobbying effort could begin in earnest.Those concerns were not heeded. Agnelli, theoretically a voice for all of Europe’s clubs in his governance roles and a close friend of Ceferin, was feeling the strain of being, in effect, a double agent. He had protected the rebels’ secret for weeks, shading the truth — or worse — in talks with friends and allies. On Monday morning, though, he would have to sit on the dais with the rest of the UEFA board as it voted to approve changes to a Champions League that would be under mortal threat from the Super League.He knew the league was happening. With the signatures of Chelsea, Manchester City and Atlético Madrid in hand, the founding members were set. The financing, delivered by the Spanish advisory firm Key Capital Partners and backed by the American bank JPMorgan Chase, would mean billions in new riches. Agnelli simply needed the news out.Glazer, one of Manchester United’s co-chairmen, agreed. He was adamant it was time to press the button.And so, despite all the doubts, the clubs showed their hand just after 11 on Sunday night in London. An official announcement, published simultaneously on the 12 teams’ websites, revealed that they had all signed up to what they called the Super League. But by then, the narrative that the project was driven by the greed of a few wealthy clubs and their leaders had taken shape.“It was dead in the water by 11:10,” the executive involved in the plan said. “Everyone had climbed their hill and would not be able to come down.”Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid.Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA, via ShutterstockUncivil WarBy first light the next day, the battle lines had been drawn. And it was quickly clear that the breakaway 12 had next to no support.But rather than mount a public defense, sending out a phalanx of officials to make a case that the league was good for soccer’s entire pyramid, arguing that it would shower millions on the teams and leagues left behind, the Super League’s first act was to deliver a letter to Europe’s governing body, UEFA, and soccer’s global leadership at FIFA.The league, the letter informed the governing bodies, had already filed motions in several European countries to prevent anyone from blocking the project.Ceferin, meanwhile, was back to working the phones to rally opposition. He sought the support of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, even though the men rarely saw eye to eye. He also had a lengthy call with Oliver Dowden, the lawmaker responsible for sport and culture in Britain. Dowden said the British government would do everything in its power to stop the breakaway clubs from “stealing” the game.Soon Johnson, the British prime minister, was being interviewed on television, staking out a position against the plan in a savvy play for public support. His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, issued a statement condemning the plan. Prince William posted a tweet expressing his “concerns” about the Super League.By the time he appeared in public on Monday, Ceferin had led a UEFA executive committee meeting where Agnelli was notable by his absence. Agnelli had resigned his board post — and his role as head of the European clubs group — minutes after the Super League’s late-night announcement. With his seat empty, the remaining members voted through changes to the Champions League, and then got back to work in their effort to crush the new league that was threatening it.Ceferin, stern-faced, then excoriated the breakaway group in his first comments to reporters. He reserved specific vitriol for Manchester United’s Woodward, who he felt had misled him, and for Agnelli. Ceferin called the men “snakes” and “liars,” and described how they had led him to believe he had their full support for the Champions League revisions.“Agnelli is the biggest disappointment of all,” Ceferin said. “I have never seen a person who would lie so many times and so persistently as he did.”By then, the acrimony was spreading across the European soccer landscape. The Premier League held a meeting without its six rebel teams, and the remaining 14 clubs discussed what punitive measures to take against those who had signed up for the Super League. Daniel Levy, the chairman of Tottenham, one of the rebel clubs, asked Paul Barber, the chief executive of Brighton, to share a message of regret at the meeting. He did, but few seemed interested in Levy’s sentiment.In Italy, a hastily arranged meeting was even more febrile. Owners and executives of the teams in Serie A, the country’s top league, turned on officials from Juventus, Inter and Milan. Tensions were already soaring; cash-poor teams, their budgets devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, had been arguing with their richer rivals over television contracts and whether to accept investment from a consortium of private equity companies.Now Agnelli, who had quickly become a lightning rod for the Super League, was called a traitor by the chairman of Juventus’s crosstown rival, Torino. Agnelli, in a typically pugnacious manner, was said to have retorted with an expletive, saying he did not care if Juventus remained in Serie A.“It’s a betrayal,” the Torino president, Urbano Cairo, told reporters. “It’s what a Judas does.”English teams, notably Liverpool and Chelsea, had other reasons to be concerned. Their fans were already gathering outside the stadiums from which they had been barred by the pandemic, hanging banners denouncing the Super League on walls and entry gates.Late in the afternoon, hundreds of angry supporters surrounded Liverpool’s team bus as it made its way to Leeds United’s Elland Road stadium for a game. Inside the stadium, the Leeds players wore T-shirts expressing solidarity with soccer’s current system during warm-ups. When Leeds scored a late goal to secure a 1-1 tie, its official Twitter account mocked the visitors.Leeds United players warmed up Monday in shirts bearing a slogan opposing the proposed European Super League. Other clubs left out of the plan soon did the same.Lee Smith/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesPlayers, too, were starting to make their views known. Manchester United’s squad had demanded a meeting with Woodward to express not only their fury at being forced to find out about the plan through the news media, but their disapproval of the idea itself. Several other high-profile stars, playing for teams not involved in the breakaway, had posted messages disavowing the plan on social media.On Monday evening, after his team’s game with Leeds, Liverpool’s most senior player, James Milner, revealed that he and his teammates had not been consulted about the club’s involvement in the plan. “I don’t like it, and I hope it doesn’t happen,” he said.Inside the clubs, unease was mounting. The plan had been kept secret even from high-level executives — “It was an ownership thing,” said one executive at one of the teams involved — and there had been little warning of what was to come. At some clubs, an all-staff email flashed around just before the statement was released.At others, high-profile figures were left to read about it on social media. Paolo Maldini, a legendary former player and now an executive at A.C. Milan, had heard nothing until it was announced. Michael Edwards, Liverpool’s sporting director, was blindsided. Some started to worry about the safety of their families as the outrage spread.A wall in Barcelona. Outrage among fans was not limited to England.Nacho Doce/ReutersIn Switzerland, Ceferin was in his hotel room, drafting and redrafting a speech he was to make the next day at UEFA’s annual meeting. He had already started to field calls from Super League clubs, mainly from England, concerned about the growing backlash and the possible consequences they — and their players — could face by signing up for an unsanctioned tournament.In January, FIFA had warned clubs and players that anyone taking part in a breakaway league risked banishment from events like the World Cup. Earlier Monday, Ceferin had repeated the threat, but now his tone was softening.“I had a feeling they wanted to repair this mistake and they didn’t know how to do it,” Ceferin said. So he changed his speech. Now, it offered an olive branch to those teams he knew were searching for one.He inched closer to winning them back when Pérez, the Real Madrid president, made what was in hindsight the disastrous — if brave — decision to defend the Super League plan on a flashy, late-night television show.Largely unchallenged by the hosts, he pledged that the league was an altruistic venture even as it funneled ever more billions to a handful of rich teams, and to lambast the Champions League reforms that Agnelli, now the Super League’s vice chairman, only weeks earlier had described as “beautiful.”In the headquarters of the other Super League clubs, executives held their heads in their hands. Still, though, they remained mute, unwilling to go public to defend a plan that Pérez claimed had been designed expressly to “save football.”The CollapseAs Ceferin prepared to deliver his keynote address on Tuesday morning in Montreux, reports began to emerge that several teams — Chelsea and Manchester City among them — were considering dropping out. Television networks and sponsors had come out against the breakaway plan, and the British government was threatening official action to block it.Any doubts among the teams hardened as FIFA’s Infantino dispelled growing speculation that he secretly harbored hopes the project would succeed.“Either you are in, or you are out,” FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, warned the breakaway teams.Richard Juilliart/UEFA, via Associated Press“If some elect to go their own way, then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” Infantino said, raising again the possibility that the renegade clubs and their players could face excommunication. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out.”Then it was Ceferin’s turn. He talked about greed and selfishness, but also about soccer’s importance in the fabric of European culture, and in the lives of the millions who follow the game across the Continent. He then made his direct pitch to the English clubs, the one he had written into his draft hours earlier.“Gentlemen, you made a huge mistake,” he told them, staring directly into the cameras. “Some will say it is greed, others disdain, arrogance, flippancy or complete ignorance of England’s football culture. It does not matter.“What does matter is that there is still time to change your mind. Everyone makes mistakes.”Within hours, the project’s demise started to snowball. In a meeting with the Premier League chief executive Richard Masters and fan groups from all six English teams, Johnson said he was considering detonating “a legislative bomb” to halt the putsch. More and more players came out against the idea. Marcus Rashford, Manchester United’s homegrown striker, posted an image on Twitter that read: “Football Is Nothing Without Fans.” Liverpool’s entire squad released a simultaneous message disavowing the project.The team captain, Jordan Henderson, had convened a meeting of his counterparts at every Premier League team to discuss a concerted response. Manchester City’s respected coach, Pep Guardiola, declared his opposition to the mere idea of a closed league of superclubs, saying that “it is not sport if you cannot lose.” It was a turn of events that the rebel clubs had not foreseen.As evening drew near, hundreds of fans gathered outside Stamford Bridge, Chelsea’s home stadium, to protest the plan before the team’s game with Brighton. They blocked streets, and surrounded the bus carrying the players when it arrived. Petr Cech, a club legend, went out to try to speak to the protesters. Inside, team officials leaked the news that Chelsea was exploring ways to exit its Super League contract.But it was Manchester City that was the first to break ranks officially, releasing a short statement saying it was pulling out.Manchester City, the Premier League leader, was the first founding member to back out.Jon Super/Associated PressThe Super League executives were stunned, unsure of what was happening. That night, Arsenal and its North London rival Tottenham announced their departures within minutes of each other. Manchester United confirmed that Woodward — its top executive and one of the main architects of the Super League — would leave the club at the end of the year. Then came a statement from the club that it was withdrawing, too. Almost immediately, Liverpool confirmed it was out.The Super League, having lost half its members, and its entire foothold in England, was finished. Inter Milan dropped out a few hours later, and then, as the clock ticked to the 48-hour mark since its grand announcement, the Super League released an unsigned statement acknowledging that the plan was no longer viable.By then, Ceferin was back in Slovenia, having completed the eight-hour return trip from Montreux. He stayed up until about 2 a.m., digesting the news. He released a statement welcoming back the English teams into the European fold. He started to respond to the thousands of messages that had swamped his phone over the previous two days.Then he closed his laptop, and helped himself to a double whiskey. More

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    FIFA's Infantino Issues Super League Warning; P.S.G. Won't Join It

    As opposition mounts to a breakaway European league, Paris St.-Germain opted out and an Italian team president called a rival backing the plan “a Judas.”Either you are in, or you are out.The president of world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, delivered a short but powerful message on Tuesday to the dozen rich and powerful European clubs whose planned breakaway Super League has threatened to upend the decades-old structures that underpin the world’s most powerful sport.“If some elect to go their own way then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, said in an address to European soccer leaders at their congress in Montreux, Switzerland. “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out. You cannot be half in and half out. This has to be absolutely clear.”Infantino’s intervention came amid mounting fury against a proposed European Super League that has turned the sports project into a national emergency in the three countries — England, Spain and Italy — that are home to its 12 founding members. More

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    Battle Over Super League Begins With Letters, Threats and Banners

    The founding members of a league that would reshape soccer have warned the sport’s leaders that they will fight any effort to block their plans.LONDON — The superclubs have called in the lawyers. The president of European soccer has responded, calling the teams’ leaders “snakes and liars.” And the fans want no part of any of it.The pitched battle to pursue, or prevent, a breakaway European soccer superleague started to take shape on Monday, hours after the stunning announcement late Sunday night by 12 of the sport’s richest and most popular teams that they were forming one.The plan threatens to redraw the European soccer economy, from rich clubs in the Premier League to tiny ones in every corner of the continent, and funnel billions of dollars toward a handful of wealthy elite teams. It would represent one of the biggest wealth transfers in sports history, imperil the future of marquee events like the Champions League and threaten the existence of the domestic leagues and the smaller clubs that were left behind.By first light on Monday, the fight was on. In a letter written by the breakaway teams, they warned soccer’s authorities that they had taken legal action to prevent any efforts to block their project.A few hours later, Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, used his first public appearance to denounce the group behind the plan and vowed to take stern action if it did not reverse course. He raised the possibility of barring players on the participating teams from events like the World Cup and other tournaments, and threatened to banish the rebel clubs from their domestic leagues. Sunday’s announcement, he said, amounted to “spitting in football fans’ faces.”By then the outrage was spreading. In Germany, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund — clubs seen as potential joiners of the breakaway league — distanced themselves from the plan. In France, Paris St.-Germain midfielder Ander Herrera lamented “the rich stealing what the people created.” In Spain, La Liga has convened a meeting of its clubs but will hold it without the three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid — who have agreed to join the Super League.And in England, coaches and players revealed they had not been consulted on the move, fan groups united in their opposition to the proposal, and, in Liverpool, supporters demanded the club remove their banners from the team’s stadium before its next home game on Saturday.“We feel we can no longer give our support to a club which puts financial greed above integrity of the game,” one of the groups said on Twitter.Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, threatened to punish the clubs leading a breakaway league, then offered them an olive branch.Richard Juilliart/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs they went public on Sunday with their plans for the European Super League, though, the proposal’s backers simultaneously wrote to the president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, and to UEFA’s Ceferin saying that they would like to work with the organizations but that they had also taken measures to protect their interests.The group includes a dozen top teams from England, Spain and Italy, such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Juventus, and its six-page missive made clear its intent to proceed, and to overcome any opposition.Rumors of the creation of the breakaway competition, which hopes to add three more permanent founding members to what will be an annual 20-team league, prompted FIFA in January to bow to pressure from UEFA and issue a statement that threatened severe repercussions against players and clubs involved in any unsanctioned tournament. FIFA issued a statement of “disapproval” of the breakaway plan on Sunday, but notably did not repeat the threat of expelling those who took part.Faced with that threat, though, the company created to control the new Super League said in its letter sent on Sunday that motions had been filed in multiple courts to prevent any moves to jeopardize the project, which, its organizers said, has $4 billion of financing in place.The company has “taken appropriate action to challenge the legality of the restrictions to the formation of the competition before such relevant courts and European authorities as may be necessary to safeguard its future,” said the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.At Arsenal, some fans vented their anger at the owner Stan Kroenke.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe superleague the clubs have agreed to form — an alliance of top teams closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than to soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the creation of the European Cup (now the Champions League) in the 1950s.Yet even as it detailed its pre-emptive legal actions, the six-page letter invited soccer’s leaders to hold “urgent” talks to find a common path forward for a project that the group says will benefit soccer even beyond the narrow group that will enjoy unparalleled riches. Under the plan announced Sunday, the 15 founding members of the Super League would share an initial pool of 3.5 billion euros, about $4.2 billion.That equates to some $400 million each, more than four times what the winner of the Champions League took home in 2020. In the letter, the founders of the Super League said they did not wish to replace the Champions League, but instead wanted to create a tournament that would run alongside it.The damage to the prestige and value of the Champions League, though, would be immediate and run into the billions of dollars, turning what has for decades been club soccer’s elite competition into a secondary event, one that is unlikely to retain anything close to its current commercial appeal.In a concurrent effort to make the event more valuable, UEFA on Monday ratified the biggest changes to the Champions League since 1992. And then Ceferin held a news conference in which he took direct aim at the rival league.Having digested the letter’s content, Ceferin said, he was in no mood to acquiesce to demands for an urgent meeting. Instead, he issued pointed rebukes to several of the men leading the effort, and singled out Andrea Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian champion Juventus.Agnelli, who resigned from his role on UEFA’s executive committee after the announcement of the breakaway, had spoken to Ceferin as recently as Saturday. At the time, Ceferin said, Agnelli had told the UEFA president he fully supported changes to the Champions League and dismissed talk of a breakaway as “just rumors.”“Agnelli is the biggest disappointment of all,” said Ceferin, who worked as a criminal lawyer before moving into soccer. “I’ve never seen a person who would lie so many times and so persistently as he did.”Ed Woodward, the vice chairman of Manchester United, gave his support for UEFA’s Champions League restructuring as recently as Thursday, Ceferin added. He said UEFA was considering seeking damages from the 12 clubs that formed the breakaway group, and even from some of their top officials.Still, he enters the next stage of the fight for control of European soccer with the support of some top club executives. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the chairman of the French champion Paris St.-Germain, was among the officials who voted to approve the changes to the Champions League, and he has resisted efforts to lure P.S.G., a club stocked with some of the world’s best players, to the new league.Teams in Germany, including last season’s Champions League winner, Bayern Munich, and its biggest domestic rival, Borussia Dortmund, also have declined to join the new venture. In another boost for UEFA, Bayern’s chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, was chosen to replace Agnelli on UEFA’s board.The substantial changes to the Champions League may now be consigned to irrelevance, though, if the breakaway clubs manage to get their way and take to the field in a competition that they said they hoped to begin as soon as this summer. Their urgency stems from their financing; the investment bank JPMorgan Chase has provided four billion euros in debt financing to start the league, but it is contingent on the group’s securing a broadcast contract.Manchester City and Liverpool are among the six Premier League clubs that have signed on to the new Super League.Pool photo by Jon SuperIn the letter, the group said that its urgency stemmed from the huge losses piling up as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The sight of games played in cavernous but empty stadiums has become the norm, and restrictions on public gatherings mean that hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost in gate receipts in every league in Europe, while broadcasters have also clawed back vast sums from leagues and competition organizers.The biggest European clubs have long been frustrated with sharing the wealth created by tournaments in which they are the biggest draw, and talks about a new league began well before the pandemic. Documents that leaked in 2019 showed that the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, an architect of the current plan, had sought to create an earlier iteration of a competition involving the biggest teams.The role FIFA will play in the fight over the Super League is intriguing, too. Its president, Gianni Infantino, has talked in recent years of creating new competitions to increase interest in soccer around the globe. As part of that push, he has given his backing to a 20-team superleague in Africa.FIFA issued a statement late Sunday in which it reiterated that it would not support a closed breakaway competition. The Super League’s founders, though, insisted that their event is not completely closed, since they plan to provide access every season to five teams outside the 15 founding members.Ceferin said he expected Infantino to dispel any doubts about his position on Tuesday when he addresses UEFA’s annual meeting.For now, UEFA and other groups opposed to the new competition are huddling to discuss their legal options, and engaging in talks with governments across Europe as well as with the European Union. Ceferin praised some of the politicians who have publicly condemned the Super League plan, including Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.Yet he also offered an olive branch to the rebel clubs.He told them it was not too late to come back from the brink. While relationships have been damaged, he said, he vowed to act professionally for the benefit of European soccer. While he felt betrayed by the “greediness, selfishness and narcissism” of some of those involved, he would not — with the possible exception of Agnelli — make things personal. Ceferin is the godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. More

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    Reaction to the Super League: Super Anger

    Reaction to the Super League: Super AngerWhen 12 of the world’s richest soccer teams announced plans on Sunday for a breakaway league that would remake European soccer for their benefit, it threw the sport into crisis.Billions of dollars are at stake. So is the future of the Premier League, the Champions League and the World Cup.The reaction has been scathing → More

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    European Super League to Include Six Premier League Teams

    A group that includes Juventus, Manchester United, Liverpool and Real Madrid has agreed in principle on a plan that would upend the sport’s structures and economics.LONDON — A group of the world’s richest and most storied soccer clubs has agreed in principle on a plan to create a breakaway European club competition that would, if it comes to fruition, upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound global soccer for nearly a century.After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which include Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea in England, and Juventus and A.C. Milan in Italy — could make an announcement as early as Sunday, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.At least 12 teams have either signed up as founding members or expressed interest in joining the breakaway group, including six from England’s Premier League, three from La Liga in Spain and three from Italy’s Serie A, according to the people with knowledge of the plans.The timing of the announcement appeared designed to overshadow Monday’s plan by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, to ratify a newly designed Champions League, a competition which would be decimated by the departure of its biggest teams.The New York Times contacted a number of clubs involved in the breakaway plans but all declined to comment or did not respond. A UEFA spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment. But the Premier League has written to its 20 clubs, warning members that its rules bar clubs from joining outside competitions without prior approval. In a statement, it said that it “condemns any proposal that attacks the principles of open competition.”The leaders of the breakaway group have been trying to get other top teams, like Germany’s Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund and the French champion Paris St.-Germain, to commit. But to date those clubs — and others — have declined to walk away from the domestic structures and Continental competitions that have underpinned European soccer for generations.P.S.G., for example, has been invited to join but has so far resisted the overtures. Its president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, sits on the UEFA board and also heads beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based television network that has paid millions of dollars to UEFA for the right to broadcast Champions League games.The teams committed to the super league plan are, for the moment, limited to almost a dozen clubs from Spain, Italy and England. A cohort of six teams from the Premier League — United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — represents the biggest grouping from a single country. Atlético Madrid is the other team from Spain that is said to have endorsed the project, while the Milan rivals Internazionale and A.C. Milan would join Juventus as Italy’s representatives.The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli has worked behind the scenes to round up allies for his super league plan.Massimo Pinca/ReutersUEFA and the top European leagues, though, are bracing for the breakaway announcement. Officials spent the weekend in discussions about ways to block the plan, including potentially banning the breakaway teams from domestic leagues and from next season’s Champions League, with the breakaway scheduled to begin in 2022. They also began contacting lawmakers at the European Union, hoping the bloc would be able to strengthen its hand in preserving the status quo.The repercussions of a split between European soccer and its best-known, best-followed and richest clubs would be seismic for all involved; without the top teams, UEFA and the leagues would face demands for millions of dollars in refunds from the broadcasters who pay billions for television rights to tournaments, and the clubs would lose revenue streams that could cripple their budgets as European soccer continues to emerge from the financial wreckage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.Among the most notable teams involved in the breakaway group is Juventus, the serial Italian champion. Its chairman, Andrea Agnelli, also leads the European Club Association, an umbrella body for more than 200 top division clubs, the majority of which will be left out of the proposed Super League. He is also a member of UEFA’s executive board. When asked by The Times this year to discuss his role in the talks of a breakaway league, Agnelli brushed off the idea as a “rumor.”Still, according to documents reviewed by The Times in January, plans for the breakaway league had gathered pace since the summer. Top clubs sought to take advantage of uncertainty in the soccer industry caused by the pandemic to forge a new path that would ensure a degree of financial stability for them but would also almost certainly lead to a significant — and potentially devastating — loss in value and revenue for teams excluded from the project.Each of the would-be permanent members of the proposed super league are being promised 350 million euros, or $425 million, to sign up, the documents said.Manchester United and Manchester City are part of a group of six Premier League giants backing the plan.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUnder the proposals reviewed at the time, the super league, which would play its matches in the middle of the week, sought to secure 16 top soccer franchises as permanent members and to add four qualifiers from domestic competitions. The clubs would be split into two groups of 10, with the top four teams in each group qualifying for the knockout stages, culminating in a final that would take place on a weekend.The event would, according to the documents, generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for the participating teams, which are already the richest clubs in the sport. (An alternative version of the plan proposed 15 permanent members and five qualification spots.) The group had entered into discussions with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to raise financing for the project, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The firm has so far declined to comment.UEFA found a powerful ally in opposition to the plans in FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. FIFA warned that any player who took part in such an unsanctioned league would be banned from appearing in the World Cup. The statement came after UEFAs president, Aleksander Ceferin, demanded support from his FIFA counterpart, Gianni Infantino, amid mounting speculation that the breakaway would have FIFA’s backing.European soccer leaders huddled on the telephone and in video conferences over the weekend to forge a counterattack. However, finding a solution to the potential loss of the biggest brands in soccer is not an easy task. The Premier League, for example, would lose much of its sheen — and almost certainly a lot of the commercial appeal that has turned it into the richest league in soccer — should it move to banish its top six teams.As member-owned clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid would likely require the support of the thousands of their supporters before formally joining, and any German clubs that agree to take part would face similar obstacles. All can expect heavy internal opposition; fan groups from across Europe had already voiced opposition since details of the plans for a super league emerged earlier this year. More

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    The Moral Case for Buying Erling Haaland

    Manchester City or another wealthy club might need to sign Erling Haaland, if only to save soccer from financial calamity.As the danger bubbled to the surface, there was an audible intake of breath among Manchester City’s substitutes. Once it had passed, a few seconds later, as they exchanged glances — of admiration, of relief — came a little murmur of appreciation. In the silence of the stadium, you could hear the sounds of game recognizing game.The chance had come out of nothing, really. Mahmoud Dahoud, the Borussia Dortmund midfielder, had worked himself a scintilla of space in the middle of the field and slipped a ball into the path of Erling Haaland.It had led to nothing, too. Haaland’s shot was saved by Éderson, the Manchester City goalkeeper. Dortmund would lose the game, thanks to a late goal from Phil Foden. A week later, after another defeat, it was out of the Champions League altogether. City would have its place in the semifinals.In that moment, though, it was not the outcome that mattered, but the process. Haaland is too tall to be that quick, and yet here was visible proof to the contrary, his sudden, brutal acceleration a storm gathering out of a clear blue sky. City defender Ruben Días has, for most of the season, been imperious and intimidating, and yet as he ran, Haaland shrugged him aside like a rag doll. It all left the impression that the Norwegian is less a promising young striker and more the physical manifestation of some ancient prophecy.The previous day, Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, had poured cold water on rumbling speculation that Haaland’s appearance at the Etihad Stadium was something of an audition. Manchester City, Guardiola said, did not have the money to meet Dortmund’s $180 million asking price for its crown jewel.Pep Guardiola already has more stars than starting spots.Wolfgang Rattay/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThough it required at least some willing suspension of disbelief, it would have suited City’s rivals to believe Guardiola. His record of incorporating archetypal strikers into his teams is, it is fair to say, mixed: Robert Lewandowski fit his Bayern Munich side perfectly, but neither Samuel Eto’o nor Zlatan Ibrahimovic quite suited the masterpiece he built at Barcelona.His attitude to Sergio Agüero, arguably City’s finest-ever player, has been a little uncertain over the last five years, too. It is perhaps relevant that Agüero, who turns 33 in June, will leave the Etihad when his contract expires this summer, after a decade of prolific service, despite initially expressing an interest in extending his stay as recently as the start of this season. Guardiola would have to tweak his approach, at least a little, to suit Haaland.But still: It would be entirely understandable for those teams tasked with keeping pace with City to prefer not to have to find out if he could make it work. In theory, at least, the combination of a team as good as City — currently on course for an unprecedented domestic and European quadruple — and a striker as devastating as Haaland would make the club close to unstoppable for years to come.It is not, though, quite that simple. There are countless reasons for City’s rivals and peers to hope the club does not sign Haaland, but there is one counterargument sufficiently compelling to render all of them moot. Manchester City might need to sign Erling Haaland to save soccer from financial calamity.As the season reaches its climax — down to the final four in the Champions League and Europa League, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Ajax and Sporting Lisbon all brushing their fingertips against championship trophies — it is possible to believe that soccer has successfully played through the pandemic. The ball, the show, the money from broadcast deals: It has all kept on rolling, stanching the losses and limiting the damage.In reality, it has only cleared the first hurdle; the economic impact of the pandemic has yet to bare its teeth. Clubs’ accounts across Europe are already littered with multimillion dollar losses. More than a year of empty stadiums has left teams large and small with a shortfall in revenues that they cannot simply, or quickly, make up.If a rich club meets Dortmund’s price for Erling Haaland, the money will trickle down through the soccer economy.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven for those lucky few cosseted by wealthy benefactors or cushioned by European prize money or covered by the Premier League’s gargantuan television deals, money is scarce; scarcer than it used to be, anyway. That much was evident in January, as transfer spending dropped precipitously. Teams are tightening their belts and hoping to get through.As much as it is easy to rail against soccer’s transfer market — the obscenity of the sums involved, the conspicuous consumption, the pervasive dogma that problems are solved by acquisition, rather than improvement, the unease at the idea of players reduced to assets to be traded by institutions — that is a problem, and potentially an existential one.Not for those, perhaps, at the top of the tree, the ones who might have to make do with the squads stuffed full of internationals already at their disposal for a year or two, but for everyone beneath them.The transfer market is, for all but a handful of teams, a crucial conduit for wealth: a “solidarity mechanism,” as Vincent Mannaert, the chief executive of Club Bruges, the Belgian champion, put it last year. It is how the money at the top flows down, from the Premier League and the super-clubs on through Europe’s minor leagues and out into the world.The fear stalking executives and owners is that the fallout from the pandemic will disrupt that mechanism. In France, where the losses from soccer’s hiatus a year ago have been compounded by the league’s decision to abandon last season and the collapse of a television deal, clubs would ordinarily sell players to balance their books.The problem, this time around, is that they are not sure who they will sell them to: Their usual buyers in Spain, Germany and Italy are all suffering, too. England, perhaps, remains a viable market, but greater supply than demand will serve to depress prices; so, too, the fact that French clubs are now perceived as distressed sellers.To some, that is just the start of it. Norman Capuozzo, one of the leading agents in South America, believes clubs at all levels will prioritize shedding wages. “Below the elite, there will be a lot of players released, a lot of free transfers, a lot of loans,” he said. The market, in other words, will be flooded to the point of saturation by castoffs and bargains.The only thing that can change all of that is an injection of cash: enough to crank the market mechanism back into gear, enough to enable teams not to cut players from their squads, enough to help teams spend a little, enough to keep the wheels turning and the money flowing, from the top on down.The millions spent by City and P.S.G. and Real Madrid eventually find their way to places like Wolfsburg and Ajax and Club Bruges, above.Johanna Geron/ReutersIt is here that Manchester City comes in: a club that felt confident enough in the middle of a pandemic to establish the biggest salary bill in English soccer history. There are alternatives, of course: Paris St.-Germain, maybe, which set out to inflate the transfer market beyond everyone else’s reach when it signed Neymar in 2017; or Chelsea, the modern game’s defining Gatsby, happy to spend $250 million last summer, only a few months after soccer had been on the brink of implosion; and Manchester United, a commercial juggernaut so powerful it emptied its stadium and posted a profit.None of that should be read as a criticism. It is merely as an assertion that these teams have been happy to shape the transfer market to further their own success, as is their inalienable right, overpaying on both fees and wages when it suited them, with the side effect/added benefit of driving up prices for everyone else.For once, though, there is cause even for those teams who believe themselves to have suffered from the rise of the superclubs to be thankful for their presence. The money that City — or P.S.G. or Chelsea or Manchester United — might give Dortmund for Haaland would, after all, travel a long way.Much of it would not rest at Dortmund. Perhaps some of it would trickle down through the Bundesliga: to Augsburg for Felix Uduokhai and Wolfsburg for Maxence Lacroix and Borussia Monchengladbach for Florian Neuhaus.From there, on it would go: from Wolfsburg and Mönchengladbach to teams in France, and from those French sides to Belgium, and from Belgium out to Scandinavia and Africa and Colombia, the transfer market suddenly liquid after a year of heavy, unmoving solidity, teams willing to pay fees and able to pay wages.It should not be especially controversial to suggest that the owners of Manchester City, P.S.G. and Chelsea are not involved with soccer exclusively because of their love of the game. They did not necessarily buy into the sport because of their desire to compete, either, or even just to make money (as is the case at Liverpool and Manchester United, for example).They all bought into soccer because of what soccer can do for them. Perhaps, then, this summer is a chance for payback, for them to do something for soccer. It should not, really, be too much to ask. All they have to do is what has come so easily to them in years past: spend money and sign players.The Final FourIt should not, perhaps, be much of a surprise that three of the teams with the capacity to buy Erling Haaland are also in the Champions League semifinals: City, Chelsea and P.S.G. were, after all, in an unusually strong position to ride out the financial impact of the pandemic, and to mitigate the sporting consequences.There will be time, in a couple of weeks, to assess the geopolitical consequences of the two semifinals — and whether, as the memes have had it, we are in the unusual position of seeing Real Madrid as the good guys — but, for now, let us focus on how they might play out on the field.Will Olivier Giroud, Christian Pulisic and Chelsea play a cautious and dour game against Real Madrid?Julio Munoz/EPA, via ShutterstockThe immediate reaction is to assume that one semifinal will be cautious and dour, and the other crackling with light. Chelsea has been miserly since Thomas Tuchel took over, after all; Real Madrid held off Liverpool at Anfield on Wednesday night with a performance of obdurate discipline. All of the brio and the verve will, presumably, come from the meeting of P.S.G. and Manchester City.That interpretation feels a little off, though. Real defended astutely against Liverpool — it had a commanding lead to protect — but it still gave up four or five gilt-edged, clear-cut chances; even with Sergio Ramos and Raphael Varane restored to the defense, relying on Chelsea’s finishing being as bad as Liverpool’s is a recipe for disaster. (Nobody’s finishing, at this point, is worse than Liverpool’s.)P.S.G., meanwhile, thrilled in attack against Bayern Munich, but might easily have conceded seven in the first leg alone. It remains a team of neon moments, less coherent and complete than Manchester City, but it will take encouragement from the fact that City’s form has dipped just a little in the last few weeks: not by much, but enough to give Neymar and Kylian Mbappé reason to believe.The Steph Curry MomentLong-range shots, like this one by Ronaldo, have fallen out of favor.Francisco Seco/Associated PressAt last, long-awaited vindication. I wrote in this column earlier this year that it felt as though the idea of shooting from range was dying out in soccer, dismissed by the sport’s data-dominated thinking as an outdated inefficiency. This week, a paper presented by researchers at the Belgian university KU Leuven to the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has borne that out.Long shots have, they found, decreased over the last six years (the first season considered, 2013-14, dovetails with the rise of data in soccer pretty neatly). There are now 2.2 fewer shots from range in any given game; the number of shots from inside the penalty area, by contrast, has increased.That is only part of the vindication, though. The academics did not conclude that this was a great leap forward, proof of the triumph of science over hope, but wondered if perhaps the trend had gone too far. “The potential payoff of not shooting is that an even better shot may arise down the line,” the paper said. Using artificial intelligence, though, they concluded that “there is no guarantee of this happening.”Instead, the lead researcher, Maaike van Roy, said that there were “specific zones” where teams should be shooting rather than recycling possession; having a go, to use the technical term, may be no more or less of a gamble than working the ball out wide and flinging (again, apologies for the jargon) a cross in.Fans have known this for generations. After all, it does not take Rinus Michels to work out that there is a value in shooting that extends beyond the likelihood of scoring from the effort itself: There may be a rebound, or you may win a corner, or the shot might hit a beach ball. You do not need to be Arrigo Sacchi to understand that the mere possibility that you might shoot forces defenders to break their lines to close you down.But this is not a defeat for analytics; it is not proof that the reliance on data has gone too far. The relationship between science and tradition does not need to be inherently antagonistic. Instead, it is best understood as a case of the advancements in analytics helping to refine the traditional reading of the game.Yes, sometimes it is worth shooting from range, but only from certain areas, in certain situations and at certain times. You and I might have ideas about when those circumstances might arise, but it is only through the use of data that we can be sure that they are right. Analytics is there to deepen our understanding of the game, not to counteract it.CorrespondenceAs was to be expected, the book recommendations have flooded in over the last few days. “The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro,” “The Glory Game,” “How Football Explains the World” and “Soccernomics” all received multiple recommendations, all of which I endorse.Several of you nominated Fever Pitch, too, which I’m sure is very good; its influence, certainly, makes it worth your time. I can’t personally vouch for it, though: I have, appallingly, never read it. Or seen the film. Generally, I try to avoid reliving unpleasant childhood memories, and the one that centers on Michael Thomas’s most noteworthy contribution to English soccer history is at the very top of that particular list.Roland Mascarenhas, meanwhile, asked if the reader who started this conversation — Alexander Da Silva — would be willing to consider expanding the book group beyond whichever circle of friends he was presumably thinking about inviting. If others wish to join, I’m happy to put it to Alexander and see if you meet his no doubt exacting criteria.(This is risky, isn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that ends with me, Alexander and Roland in front of a special committee of the Senate, answering questions about how we’re using people’s data and whether we have accidentally become a vector for the collapse of democracy. And all because Roland didn’t just buy my book like he should have done.)Rachel Block asked if last week’s column dispensed too easily with the idea that Chelsea might beat Real Madrid in a Champions League semifinal. Possibly, though not intentionally: it was merely an attempt to say that it’s hardly a stretch to believe that Real could knock Chelsea out. Either way, hopefully that has been addressed this week. More

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    Real Madrid vs. Barcelona: Too Big to Fall

    The Clásico has lost some of its luster as a season-defining day, but while its profile has fallen, its importance has not.It does not require a great leap of the imagination to envision the final few weeks of the season playing out like this:Atlético Madrid, shredded by nerves and running on fumes, surrenders its place at the summit of La Liga. Barcelona, restored and unbeaten since the turn of the year, supplants Diego Simeone’s team, reclaiming its crown.At the same time, Real Madrid, the familiar scent of European glory in its nostrils, breezes past Liverpool and edges Chelsea to win a place in the Champions League final. Real Madrid would, by most measures, be the underdog in Istanbul. Manchester City and Bayern Munich, certainly, are more coherent, more complete teams. Even Paris St.-Germain, its mission for revenge fueled by the brilliance of Kylian Mbappé, has more star power, more forward momentum, as it proved so thrillingly on Wednesday night in Munich.But it is Real Madrid, and it is the Champions League, and these things do not necessarily conform to logic. It and Barcelona, the twin, repelling poles of the Clásico, each may be no more than seven weeks from glory. Both have spent much of this campaign in what looked like free fall. It is hardly inconceivable that, in a few weeks, they will have come to rest, still at the pinnacle.That does not mean that the perception was an illusion. Barcelona’s financial strife is alarmingly real, even after the election of a new president. Its salary commitments are still greater than those of any other team. Its squad is still aging. It has still frittered away hundreds of millions of dollars in the transfer market. It has still squandered its legacy, still alienated the greatest star in its history, still lost sight of itself.Real Madrid’s situation is not quite as perilous, but here, too, are the telltale signs of institutional complacency and endemic drift. Its team is starting to creak with age. Its policy of paying premium fees for prodigious young talents — often with only a smattering of senior games under their belts — has not yet yielded the fruit the club imagined.Vinicius Jr. of Real Madrid, which is chasing a record 14th Champions League title.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockIts payroll, too, is littered with unwanted high-earners; Real Madrid’s finances have been stretched by the revamp of the Santiago Bernabéu that has forced it to play home games at its training facility for a year; its belief that it can sign both Erling Haaland and Mbappé over the next two summers seems fanciful at best and faintly hubristic at worst. Lulled by glamour and success, Real Madrid has allowed itself to be transformed into the personal fief of its president, Florentino Pérez.All of those issues were not imagined by a muckraking, scurrilous news media; they are not proof of some sweeping anti-Barcelona and yet somehow also anti-Madrid conspiracy. They are real, and they all manifest on Saturday, when the clubs will meet on the outskirts of the Spanish capital for the second Clásico of the season.When, 50 years from now, sports historians come to look back on European soccer’s imperial phase, examining how it became what David Goldblatt has described as the single greatest cultural phenomenon of the modern era, they could do worse than to start with those 18 days in 2011 when Real and Barcelona played one another four times.Even from the relatively shallow vantage point of 2021, those two and a half weeks have the air of a seed and a flower, a dawn and a dusk and the midday sun. It was, in the first decade of the 21st century, what soccer had been building toward. It would be what soccer, in the second decade of the 21st century, would measure everything against.Juan Medina/ReutersFelix Ordonez/ReutersThe War of 2011: Guardiola and Mourinho, Messi and Xabi Alonso and polite disagreements.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Clásico was not only the meeting of soccer’s two great powers or the world’s two best teams. It was also the clash of its two brightest stars, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the supernova game. It was a battle of wills and a battle of minds: José Mourinho against Pep Guardiola, defense against attack, destruction against creation, darkness against light.These were days when soccer held its breath.It is somehow fitting, then, a decade later, that the most materially impactful Clásico of the last few years will take place on Saturday night in the Éstadio Alfredo Di Stéfano, rather than the Bernabéu. It is a reduced circumstance for a diminished game.The stakes are high. The winner will take prime position to dislodge Atlético Madrid from the summit of La Liga. The loser, as is the case whenever these two meet, will suddenly be flirting with crisis. It is, without question, the biggest game of the weekend. It is not, though, the centerpiece of the European season as once it was, the fixture that makes the world stand still.In part, that is because of the decline of the teams themselves. Barcelona and Real Madrid are no longer the two best teams on the planet. That honor, currently, falls somewhere between Manchester and Munich. It would be possible to build an argument that neither Spanish giant is, at this moment, in the top five.Even in a pandemic, even in a closed stadium, the world will be watching.Nacho Doce/ReutersThere is still Messi, of course, but there is no Ronaldo, no Xavi, no Andrés Iniesta, no Xabi Alonso. Both teams are in the throes of (reluctant) generational change, works in various stages of progress. The quality — aesthetic and technical — will not be as high as it was on Wednesday night, when P.S.G. stormed the Allianz Arena.But that is also because of the broader decline of La Liga. Spain has long since vacated its position of primacy. France is the world champion, and the world’s most prodigious producer of players. Germany — and, to some extent, the city of Leeds — is the wellspring of soccer’s ideas. England is home to its finest league. Spain, as a whole, has lost its place at the vanguard.And yet, for all that, it is not difficult to envision the season ending with celebrations on Las Ramblas and at the Plaza de Cibeles, with Barcelona anointed kings of Spain and Real Madrid restored to its traditional status as Rey de Copas.That such a denouement is possible is testament, first, to our tendency to assume that decline — soccer as a whole, in fact — runs in straight lines, to reverse-engineer an explanation for every event. If Barcelona wins a championship, rumors of its demise must have been greatly exaggerated. If Real Madrid wins the Champions League, its methods must work.Luka Modric and Real Madrid won the season’s first Clásico, 3-1, in October.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt does not always, if ever, work like that. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes stars align. Not everything has a deeper meaning, and not every success illustrates some broader truth. Sometimes Liverpool wins the Champions League with Djimi Traoré at left back. Sometimes Croatia gets a golden generation. Had Real Madrid been paired with Manchester City, rather than Liverpool, in the Champions League quarterfinals this week, its almost mystical relationship with the European Cup would not seem quite so potent.But that Barcelona and Real Madrid can be so close to the summit after a season spent at the depths is also a reminder that how far, and how fast, you fall is only one part of the equation. The other is where you are coming from.Between them, Barcelona and Madrid account for seven of the last 14 Champions League titles. They were soccer’s animating force for more than a decade. Each, at different times in that period, reached heights that few teams have reached. Both remain fabulously wealthy, in terms of talent and in terms of revenue. Both retain many of the players who helped them to touch the sky. Their talent may have waned, but it has not evaporated.Eras do not end overnight. History does not run in a straight line. The Clásico of 2021 will be a shadow of the Clásicos of 2011. That Real Madrid and Barcelona have fallen is not in question. But it should be no surprise that there might yet be glory awaiting one, or both of them. They did, after all, have quite a long way to fall.Take a Stand, but Lose 3 PointsValencia supported Mouctar Diakhaby after he said he was racially abused, and then played on.Roman Rios/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is hard to identify the most dispiriting part of the episode last weekend in which Valencia’s Mouctar Diakhaby reported that he was racially abused by the Cádiz defender Juan Cala. Ordinarily, there would be a clear answer: that it happened at all. This time, though, there is another option: that it is hard to identify whether that was, in fact, the most dispiriting part.First of all, there is the fact that it was not the only episode of racist abuse of a soccer player that weekend: several more players, as always happens, were racially abused online. Then there is the fact that, even if Cala is telling the truth in his stringent denials of the accusation, if there has just been some sort of misunderstanding, we are still in a position in which it is easy to believe a soccer player might have been racially abused by an opponent, on the field, in 2021.And finally, there was the sight of Valencia — having initially walked off the field in solidarity with Diakhaby — returning to play out the game, without the victim, but against the accused perpetrator. Cala had asked to play on, and did so. Diakhaby, on the other hand, was understandably not in the right mind to continue.His club played on, it revealed later, because it had been warned — by some unidentified third party — that it would be risking a points deduction if it did not return to the field. If this is true, it does not reflect especially well on Valencia: How many points, exactly, is your player’s dignity worth?More important, the decision to continue (and to threaten to punish a team that will not) reflects appallingly on soccer’s antiracism posturing. All the slogans and all the campaigns in the world are worth nothing if, when presented with an accusation of racist abuse on the field, the immediate reaction is to try to stifle protest, to protect the product at all costs.As usual, this is an area in which soccer’s authorities — more than the players, certainly, and to an extent the clubs — are complicit. These decisions should not be ad hoc, rested on the shoulders of the individual who has endured abuse. If a player believes he has been racially abused, the referee should be under instructions to call off the game. There should be no threat of punishment, no gray area. It is for the sport as a whole to make a stand, on behalf of those who play it.Sign of the TimesIt’s spelled Haaland, with three As.Phil Noble/ReutersIn hindsight, maybe it was the context, not the act itself, that caused such consternation. The officials in Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday did not, it is fair to say, have a great evening: The decision to rule out Jude Bellingham’s goal — and, more to the point, to do so before the video assistant referee was able to contribute — did not exactly scream competence, after all.Still, the outrage that followed those fleeting glimpses of the assistant referee, Octavian Sobre, asking Erling Haaland to autograph his red and yellow cards felt a little overblown. The point of autographs has always eluded me — look at this scrap of paper that a person I have seen on television unthinkingly and resentfully scrawled on! — but it is hard to read the incident as anything other than entirely harmless and even, deep down, quite sweet.Why should an official not want a souvenir of what is likely to be one of the biggest occasions of his career? Who, exactly, is suffering here? Why would we automatically assume that Sobre, who has devoted decades to his job, would sacrifice the integrity of his decisions just because he happened to be a big fan of everyone’s favorite goal cyborg? (Sitting at the Etihad as the controversy unspooled, it was hard not to notice quite how much emphasis seemed to be placed on Sobre’s nationality, too.)As it turned out, of course, there was a wholly different rationale for it. Haaland was not particularly special. Sobre had also hoped to get an autograph from Pep Guardiola. He has been collecting them for years, then auctioning them on behalf of an autism charity he supports in his native Romania. At that point, the shouting was quieted, just a little.It would be nice to think that a lesson might be learned here: to gather all of the available facts before rushing to judgment; to avoid leaping to the most aggravating conclusion possible; to resist the temptation to meet the slightest perceived transgression with fury. You probably wouldn’t hold your breath, though.CorrespondenceAn open goal presented by Alexander Da Silva, who is (admirably) starting a “book club themed around soccer history, politics and tactics,” and wants advice on possible reading material. Well, Alexander, this one was critically acclaimed. It didn’t sell especially well, but if anything that just makes it more exclusive.As for other — some might say lesser, not me, but some — works, there is an abundance. So many, in fact, that I wonder if I should put some sort of list together: It’s a question we get reasonably frequently.A reading list, you say? Let me check in the back.Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn short: Jonathan Wilson’s “Inverting the Pyramid” remains the compulsory work on tactical history. Depending on which sort of politics you’re interested in, there’s “Fear and Loathing in La Liga” (Sid Lowe), “Angels With Dirty Faces” (Wilson again, you can’t escape him), “Brilliant Orange” (David Winner) or Simon Kuper’s “Football Against the Enemy,” which is more than 25 years old now, but remains genre-forming. For more modern material, “The Club,” by Josh Robinson and Jon Clegg, encapsulates the Premier League era.I’d also recommend the James Montague canon: “When Friday Comes,” “Thirty-One Nil” and particularly his most recent, “1312: Among the Ultras,” all of which are fantastic. My favorite soccer book of all, though, remains “This Love Is Not for Cowards,” by Robert Andrew Powell.Mark Gromko, meanwhile, takes me to task for my “evident disregard for Manchester City. You are tired of the money, the organization, the style of play. Some of us, however, find watching the skill of the players, the coordination and precision of the teamwork, the depth of the squad, and the brilliance of the coach wonderful to watch.”There is no argument from me on any of that — though I’d contest that I’m tired of any of it; not emotionally stimulated is probably a better description — but I would hold off on any particularly ardent criticism. City will, of course, come much more into focus as they pursue all four major trophies — starting in a couple of weeks, in the Carabao Cup final — and we will be covering them in the detail they deserve. More

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    Champions League: Talent From Paris Leaks Away From P.S.G.

    A deep-pocketed club’s Champions League ambitions run up against a familiar obstacle: opposing rosters studded with stars who got away.Paris St.-Germain could not, in the end, have sped Tanguy Nianzou along much quicker than it did. He was captain of the club’s under-19 side when he was only 16. He was called up to the first team at 17, training alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and the rest, and soon made his debut. He even started a game in the Champions League.And still, despite all those opportunities, he left. Nianzou had just turned 18 when, on July 1 last year, he was presented as a Bayern Munich player. P.S.G. did not even have the solace of being able to pocket a premium fee for a player it had nurtured. Nianzou’s contract was expiring. He walked out of his hometown club for nothing.His departure stung. It stung sufficiently that Leonardo, P.S.G.’s sporting director, was citing it as a sort of parable as recently as February, long before the teams were drawn to meet in the Champions League quarterfinals this week.“He played with us in the Champions League, and he has spent almost a year at Bayern without playing,” Leonardo said, undeterred by the fact that injuries — not a lack of quality — have limited Nianzou to 21 competitive minutes at Bayern. “The problem is thinking that there is paradise elsewhere. They say that P.S.G. lost a youngster, but sometimes I think it is not P.S.G. who loses, but the youngsters who leave.”P.S.G. had high hopes for Tanguy Nianzou, but when he turned 18 he signed with Bayern Munich.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLeonardo’s sensitivity — and his club’s — to Nianzou’s departure is only partially explained by the teenager’s talent. It is also because Nianzou is not the only prodigy P.S.G. has allowed to slip through its fingers. He is not even the only one at Bayern.Kingsley Coman became the youngest player to play for P.S.G. when he made his debut for the club in February 2013. He was the jewel of the team’s youth system, the standard-bearer for its future. A year later, he left on a free transfer. Last August, he scored the goal that won the Champions League for Bayern, against P.S.G.There are plenty of others like them. There are 11 players left in this year’s Champions League who either grew up in Paris or spent some time in P.S.G.’s youth academy. Only three play for the reigning French champion: Colin Dagba, Presnel Kimpembe and Mbappé, though of course he had to be restored to his hometown at great expense.Some of the others — Chelsea’s N’golo Kanté, Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez and Benjamin Mendy, Borussia Dortmund’s Raphaël Guerreiro — grew up in the sprawling suburbs surrounding Paris but never caught the club’s attention. A few did: Like Coman and Nianzou, Dortmund’s Dan-Axel Zagadou and Real Madrid’s Ferland Mendy spent time at P.S.G.’s academy before leaving to make their names elsewhere.That would be galling enough; in reality, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Eleven more players born in P.S.G.’s backyard were eliminated from the Champions League in the round of 16, including Christopher Nkunku, Ibrahima Konaté and Nordi Mukiele at RB Leipzig and Jules Koundé of Sevilla.Dozens more can be found in Ligue 1 and across Europe, from Paul Pogba on down. P.S.G. is sitting on what is generally regarded as the richest gold mine of talent in world soccer, and yet it is allowing prospectors to spirit its treasure away by the truckload. Most of the time it receives nothing in return but the lingering, bitter taste of regret.It is understandable that Leonardo, for one, should have tried to blame the speculators. Scouts for rival French clubs have long trawled the Paris suburbs looking for the next big thing. In recent years, they have been joined by representatives of German teams and, before Brexit, Premier League clubs hoping to cut out the middleman.P.S.G. is not without Parisian stars: Kylian Mbappé returned from Monaco, and Presnel Kimpembe never left.Benoit Tessier/Reuters“The German clubs, mainly Bayern, Leipzig and Dortmund, attack young people and threaten French development,” Leonardo told Le Parisien this year. “They call parents, friends, family, the player himself, even with players under the age of 16. They turn their heads. Perhaps the rules should be changed to protect the French teams.”The problem, though, is not one that can be legislated away. Given the number of players emerging from Paris, it is unavoidable that P.S.G. should miss some of them, as it did with Kanté and Mahrez. What should concern Leonardo more is that — as Michael Zorc, Dortmund’s technical director, said — so many young players “see better permeability and greater potential for developing” away from P.S.G.A decade ago, when Qatar Sports Investments first invested in the French capital’s flagship club, it vowed not simply to acquire success; Nasser al-Khelaifi, the club’s president, spoke of wanting to find the next Lionel Messi, rather than buy the original. The owners put their money where their mouth was, investing tens of millions of dollars on the club’s youth system.But as P.S.G. has found in its pursuit of the Champions League trophy, the formula for success is rarely quite that simple. The club’s academy is regularly assessed as one of the best in France. In many ways, the amount of players it has produced for other teams is proof of its eye for talent and the quality of its coaching.All of that is irrelevant, though, if the leap from the academy to playing alongside Neymar and Mbappé is too great. It is here that P.S.G. has failed.What the stories of Coman and Nianzou and so many of the others have in common is that they made it to P.S.G., and all the way through the academy, only to find their path blocked at the last step: by a coach whose job was to focus on today; by an expensively acquired superstar brought in to win trophies; by a club moving too quickly to wait for youngsters to learn their trade.On one level, the loss of all that talent has delivered P.S.G. only a glancing blow. It has still established, with only one exception so far, an effective monopoly on the Ligue 1 title. It has made it to a Champions League final. It can call on some of the world’s finest players. Would Ferland Mendy or Guerreiro or Koundé have made much of a difference? Possibly not.But on another, more fundamental level, the impact has been considerable. Qatar has poured considerable time and resources into not only P.S.G. but French soccer as a whole, bankrolling the transformation of the club through Qatar Sports Investments at the same time it was effectively underwriting the league through broadcast deals with the Qatari broadcaster beIN Sports.It has always had a clear idea in its head of what it wanted P.S.G. to be — winner of the Champions League, mainly — but, 10 years since it arrived, it is not yet obvious that it knows how to get there. Coaches have come and gone, all of them different: the coaching superstar, the canny tactician, the pressing zealot, the former captain.The squad has a patchwork quality that suggests muddled thinking. Is it built around Neymar or Mbappé? Where do Moise Kean and Mauro Icardi fit in? Can any of these players do what the manager at the moment, Mauricio Pochettino, is likely to want them to do? Did they really suit Thomas Tuchel last season? P.S.G. is now, as it has been for a decade, a team in search of an identity.Coman, who had once dreamed of lifting the Champions League trophy with P.S.G., did it last year — with Bayern. The teams meet again in the Champions League on Wednesday.Pool photo by David RamosYet the easiest, most authentic identity has been at its fingertips all along: that of a team built around a Parisian core, young and dynamic and rooted to its location. Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, has spoken before about his ideal team being one that could compete for honors while being drawn exclusively from its own city. The pool of talent there, as almost everywhere else, renders that idea utopian. Everywhere, that is, except Paris.P.S.G. has failed to claim that birthright. As recently as 2018, coaches at teams in the banlieues expressed surprise at how disconnected the city’s biggest club was from the young players on its doorstep. Perhaps that can be blamed on conceit, a sense that Parisian prospects would always want to play for a Parisian team.Or perhaps it is representative of a broader failing at the club, one that places more weight on what Paris is seen to be than what the city actually is. In 2016, when P.S.G. revamped its stadium, it commissioned the architect Tom Sheehan to “breathe the identity of Paris into the Parc itself.” He drew a parallel between the new V.I.P. entrance at the stadium and the foyer of the Palais Garnier, the opera house.It is that tourist perception of Paris that Q.S.I. hoped would become the team’s identity: the celebrities in the stands, a soccer team as a glamorous boutique nightclub. But that is only one side of Paris. It has not engaged quite so willingly with the other side of Paris, the one that is found in the banlieues, the one that is not quite so easy to sell.Still, the talent keeps coming through. The club holds out great hope, in particular, for a 15-year-old central defender named el Chadaille Bitshiabu. French law prohibits him from signing a professional contract until he turns 16, on May 16, but all of the coaches who have worked with him are convinced he can make it. They can only hope it is with P.S.G. More