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      FIFA Has a Plan for Africa. But Who Does It Serve?

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      Our experts separate fact from fiction in the talk about an African super league. Plus, a Champions League update, World Cup qualifying upsets and Erling Haaland’s next move.A couple of weeks ago, a tweet caught my eye. It seemed, unexpectedly, to reveal that a continentwide African Super League was under construction. Cross-border leagues, as regular readers will know, are something that this newsletter generally supports: They are the most readily available way of addressing soccer’s chronic financial imbalance.On the surface, notwithstanding the complex logistics, Africa is a prime candidate for such a venture. Many of the continent’s domestic leagues struggle to find investment, to retain talent, to compete for interest with the European tournaments beamed onto their television sets. Africa’s major clubs would, I think, be stronger together.There is, though, always a below the surface. As a rule, whenever I want to know what it is, I ask my colleague Tariq Panja, who spends so much time in the depths that he could be a submarine. For the last week or so, we’ve been exchanging emails on the subject. This conversation is the result.Rory Smith: Something strange has happened, Tariq. A few weeks ago, someone drew my attention to a tweet from Barbara Gonzalez, the chief executive at Simba, one of the biggest clubs in Tanzania, that seemed to reveal a plan that would change the face of African soccer: a pan-continental super league.But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is that it turns out it’s the brainchild of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president. As a general rule, making sure you’re on the opposite side of any argument from Infantino is a solid strategy. But in this case my instinct is to say that, at least as an idea, this kind of makes sense.Please explain to me why I am wrong, so that the world can be restored to its axis.Tariq Panja: As with everything when it comes to FIFA — and typically FIFA under Gianni Infantino — the devil is in the detail. Or, in this case, the lack of detail.Infantino first announced his big idea for Africa in 2019, but it had been dormant until this random tweet (more on that in a minute). But when Infantino first went public, people inside FIFA say there was no business plan: just Gianni firing from the hip, claiming it could generate $200 million in revenue. That’s a big number as far as African club football is concerned, but there is no evidence of where it came from.To be clear: African already has a continental competition, the Champions League. Egypt’s Al Ahly won its record ninth title last year.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersIt reminds me of the time Gianni walked into a FIFA Council meeting and told the board to sign a document that would allow him to sell the Club World Cup to private investors (who turned out to be SoftBank). The members, led by European officials, wanted details. An internal audit found the event was worth considerably less than Gianni had suggested.Now, back to the tweet: It turns out FIFA officials were surprised, too. Barbara González walked up to Gianni at the Confederation of African Football Congress and asked to have her photo taken with him. Five minutes later, she sent out the tweet. Now I’m not saying a league in Africa is a bad idea, but surely there must be a robust plan before such a major project is undertaken?RS: If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of that, not least because Infantino strikes me as precisely the sort of person who would fall for the old “as you were saying” ruse.There does, as you say, have to be a robust plan: economically, of course, but in a sporting sense, too. The basic idea strikes me as sound. Certainly south of the Sahara, African club soccer struggles horribly for investment. That means that the vast majority of nations that produce a constant stream of players for European clubs rarely see any of that talent on show in domestic leagues. That, in turn, hardly entices fans to go and watch games live. And that completes a neat but vicious circle, because it means that, yes, clubs struggle horribly for investment.A Super League would address some of those issues. A better television deal, if nothing else, would enable clubs to invest in infrastructure. That might help nurture young talent and keep it for a little longer. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that a Pan-African league might be able to rival one of the talent-generating leagues in Europe — the Netherlands or Portugal, say — for quality in a relatively short space of time.Of course, there is one thorny issue that I haven’t yet had the nerve to bring up. I reckon I could come up with a fairly cogent list of 20 or so African teams that would have a good case for inclusion, thanks to history or support or location. But I am guessing that Infantino and CAF, which is now run by a staunch ally of his, might have a different system in mind?Infantino recently helped an ally, Patrice Motsepe, win the top job in African soccer.Themba Hadebe/Associated PressTP: The little we know so far is that there is an expectation that participating teams would have to invest at least $20 million per season, for five seasons. For clubs in Africa, that is a significant outlay, and it suggests it would not be the most popular teams, so much as the ones that have the backing of wealthy benefactors. But again: Beyond the odd tweet and Gianni’s off-the-cuff remarks, we have nothing concrete.There are other ways of trying to come up with likely participants. You could use the CAF club coefficient, which is essentially a points system for clubs in the region based on their historic success. But that would mean a league dominated by clubs from wealthier North African countries, with only a dozen or so of the continent’s 54 countries likely to be represented.RS: That lack of representation would, I think, ultimately be unavoidable. For a tournament like this to be valid, there are certain clubs that would have to be included. Al Ahly and Zamalek from Cairo, would be names one and two. Both Raja and Wydad from Casablanca, and Esperance and Étoile du Sahel, the twin totems of Tunisian soccer.You would certainly need South Africa’s Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. And you could throw Mamelodi Sundowns in there, too: It is owned by Patrice Motsepe, Infantino’s ally and the new CAF president. Simba, of Tanzania, clearly expect to be involved. TP Mazembe, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, would have to be.Congo’s TP Mazembe, in black, and Morocco’s Raja Casablanca would both merit places in any pan-African super league.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond that, the continent’s powerhouse nations — Cameroon, Senegal, Algeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and, particularly, Nigeria — would command at least one place each. Suddenly, the whole thing looks pretty full, even before thinking about Angola, Sudan and Ethiopia.TP: If there was a method to wrap this league into the existing pyramid, there would probably be far more buy-in. The idea that teams from across the region would have — at least in theory — a shot at one day making it into the competition would make the proposition far more palatable to those, even among the larger clubs, who are not enthused about it.Even then, there are the logistics of it: not only to create a level playing field, but a sensible calendar and schedule, given the enormous differences in weather and transport infrastructure across the region. Given the uncertainty and sense of unease among the African football community, there needs to be an urgent and transparent discussion about what this is, and what this is not. A series of clandestine meetings followed by a high-profile announcement that does not stand up to scrutiny is not enough.RS: There is, definitely, a back-of-a-cigarette-packet air to the idea. And worse still, it has the feel of something that is being imposed on Africa, rather than generated from within it. The problem of representation bears that out: this sort of thing is much easier to conceive if, deep down, you regard Africa as a single, homogeneous entity, grateful for your interest.And that — given Infantino’s apparent passion for the idea — makes you wonder what the purpose of it all is. Has it been suggested in an attempt to make African domestic soccer stronger, a challenging but essentially admirable aim? Or is there something else at play here?TP: There’s a suspicion that Gianni’s motivations may be less to do with securing the future of African soccer and more his hopes of creating a club competition that can rival and, eventually, overtake the Champions League. For that to happen, the expanded Club World Cup needs teams from all over the world who can compete with the powerhouses of Europe.Bayern Munich won the most recent Club World Cup. FIFA has plans to expand the event.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersIn that light, Africa might just be the start, the canary in the coal mine. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but those involved should be clear about their intentions. And a defining project for the future of African soccer should be guided by those with skin in the game, no question, rather than a Swiss bureaucrat intent on a legacy project.RS: Ah, that’s a relief. I feel as though I am on much more solid ground now: the idea might have some merit, but the rationale behind it may not. That may not be good news for African soccer, which finds itself being used as a pawn in a broader power game, but it’s good news for my personal moral compass, because it means I don’t have to worry about being on the same side of an argument as Gianni Infantino.Pushing Back Another Bad IdeaNo one has proposed melting down the Champions League trophy to sell the silver. Yet.via ReutersThere was, just as there was always going to be, one last hurdle to clear. Most European soccer executives were expecting a blueprint for a new vision of the Champions League to be approved — both by UEFA, the competition’s organizer, and the European Clubs Association, Andrea Agnelli’s bad-idea factory — and announced this week.That had to be pushed back, though, when several of the continent’s major teams blew up the deal at the 11th hour: It turns out that actually they want to have final say on the competition’s commercial rights, too. Suddenly, it seems as if the new-look Champions League may end up being the lesser of two evils.Quite how that revamped competition will work is laid out clearly and concisely — and, crucially, in the form of a graphic — here. So clearly and concisely, in fact, that for the first time it is possible to say without fear of having missed something that this iteration of the Champions League will make the tournament immeasurably worse.Not, though, for the reasons so often given. Yes, there will be more meetings between the game’s superpowers, and for lower stakes. Yes, the whole thing is bloated. Yes, it will starve domestic competitions of oxygen. And yes, it still might serve to entrench the financial inequality that is the real enemy of the game’s ongoing health.But the main problem is much simpler: The redesign reduces the Champions League’s competitive integrity. It is, essentially, invalid to draw up a league table in which all of the teams play different opponents. It renders it meaningless. And it is quite likely that fans, who are not as stupid as they are taken to be, will notice.The Week the Tables TurnedNorth Macedonia’s Eljif Elmas, right, with Stefan Spirovski, after scoring the winning goal in a World Cup qualifier at Germany.Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via ShutterstockA few days ago, as England threatened to run up the score in a World Cup qualifier against San Marino, the poacher-turned-pundit Gary Lineker suggested it was time to admit that these mismatches — which characterize a substantial amount of international soccer — were of benefit and interest to precisely nobody.Instead, he said, perhaps it would be in everyone’s interests for some of Europe’s smaller nations to engage in a prequalifying tournament, playing one another for the right to face the continent’s elite, and England. The reaction — Do I really need to say this? You know what the reaction is, because it’s always the same reaction — was furious.To Lineker’s critics, those who accused him of trying to ghettoize soccer’s underdogs, what followed was karmic retribution. Luxembourg won at Ireland. Spain needed a late goal to avoid a draw with Georgia. Latvia tied Turkey. And, best of all, North Macedonia beat Germany, the country’s first loss in a World Cup qualifier for 20 years.It goes without saying that all of these results were welcome, impressive, and hilarious. But it does not mean that the idea Lineker espoused — one that has been around for years — should be dismissed.First of all: That is how qualifying works in Africa, Asia and North and Central America. It helps to thin the calendar a little, something that matters at a time when players are being run into the ground by all of the teams they represent. Second: The success of the Nations League has shown that games between smaller nations are more competitive, and therefore both more entertaining and more educational, than watching the same teams be steamrollered by the giants.And third: At the same time as all those shocks were rumbling through Europe, England was scoring five against San Marino, the Czechs ran in six in Estonia, and both Belgium and Denmark scored eight, against Belarus and Moldova. Worse still, a team managed by Frank de Boer scored seven against Gibraltar. Some of soccer’s lesser lights are competitive. Some are not. If only there was a way of selecting which teams fell into which categories.The Haaland ShakeDortmund, like everyone else, may have trouble holding on to Erling Haaland.Pool photo by Marius BeckerWe have been here before. On Thursday, it emerged that Mino Raiola and Alfie Haaland — respectively the agent and the father of Erling Haaland, the goal cyborg — were in Catalonia for a meeting with Joan Laporta, the freshly-minted president of Barcelona. The race for the hottest property in European soccer is, it seems, on.It is a move straight from the playbook that eventually led the younger Haaland to Borussia Dortmund, his current home, about 15 months ago. Expect Raiola and Haaland’s father to turn up in relatively short order in Madrid, too. They will almost certainly stop off in London after that: Chelsea harbors hopes of signing the 20-year-old Haaland. They may need two days in Manchester; they would not want to rush United or City.The fact that they are doing their due diligence on their client/son’s next home is, then, no surprise. More eye-catching is the fact that they feel Barcelona’s hopes of signing Haaland are valid, given that Dortmund has made it plain that it will not sell him for less than $150 million, and because Barcelona is, well, currently about $1 billion in debt.Laporta, clearly, feels he can make a deal work. Perhaps he can. Perhaps there is some way of shifting the money around enough for Barcelona to remain a viable candidate. The appeal is obvious: Signing Haaland would, almost at a stroke, turn Barcelona into major players again. But then so, too, is the problem: After all the club has been through, would it really be a good idea?The Final SprintAside from the virgin hope of opening day — and possibly the breathless frenzy of Christmas — this is the best part of the soccer season. The end of the March international break heralds not only the arrival of spring, but the start of European club soccer’s race to the summit. Over the next two months, closure will arrive.Better yet, this time around, we hit the ground running. The top two in both France and Germany will meet on Saturday: first, Lille visits Paris St.-Germain, the two of them level on points, and only a nose ahead of Lyon and Monaco. (I’ll have a story on Lille posting in a few hours.) No sooner has that finished, though, than RB Leipzig hosts a Bayern Munich deprived of Robert Lewandowski, and knowing that a win would close the gap at the top of the Bundesliga to a single point.RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich: back at it on Saturday.Pool photo by Alexander HassensteinIn England, meanwhile, the ultimate prize is off the table: It is a matter of when, not if, Manchester City claims a third title in four years. But the battle to finish second, third and fourth — and therefore obtain a place in next season’s not-yet-ruined Champions League — promises to be enthralling. My money would be on Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester, in that order, but it’s so close that it wouldn’t be much of my money.CorrespondenceOnly space for one, this week, from Charles Knights. “I’m trying to figure out how much disappointment is warranted right now as a supporter of the United States,” he wrote. “How do you rate the U.S.A. men’s team’s failed attempts to qualify for Tokyo? There’s a lot of talk about the Olympics as a training ground for the next generation, but when I look at the U.S. squad, the next generation is playing senior friendlies in Europe.”This is only a personal perspective, Charles, and it is a distinctly European one: My view would, I think, be different if I was South American or African. But in the narrow context of soccer, I’m not convinced the Olympics matter particularly.The United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. Honduras is going to its fourth in a row.Refugio Ruiz/Getty ImagesIt is special for the players to win a gold medal, of course, particularly when it at least rivals the high-point of that country’s soccer achievements thus far (Nigeria in 1996, Cameroon in 2000, Mexico in 2012) or when it is Argentina (2004 and 2008), and the World Cup brings nothing but misery.But in terms of being used a signpost for greater things to come? In men’s soccer, no, not really. Put it this way: I had to check who won the gold at Rio in 2016. Turns out it was Brazil! They must have enjoyed that. It probably didn’t make up for what happened in a different tournament on home soil a couple of years earlier.Women’s soccer, of course, has historically placed much more importance on it — the cover of Abby Wambach’s autobiography describes her as a gold medalist, rather than a World Cup winner — but I wonder if that, too, will change with the increased focus on the Women’s World Cup. More

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      Facing P.S.G., Lille Clings to First Place as the Bottom Falls Out

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      Lille will play its deep-pocketed rival Paris St.-Germain for the league lead on Saturday. But not even a title may spare it from a financial reckoning.On the surface, the pitch was a convincing one. Last year, the owners of Lille O.S.C. commissioned a graphic designer to produce a glossy prospectus, one intended to entice an investor into buying out their stake in the French soccer club.There are dozens of these documents swirling around soccer’s financial netherworld at any given time, passed around by the army of bankers, lawyers, private equity investors, deal-makers and middlemen who serve as gatekeepers to the handful of individuals both wealthy and foolhardy enough to buy and sell teams.Generally, pitches like the one about Lille are treated with both caution and cynicism, but this one probably would have been worth a second glance. The club’s infrastructure was sound: It had a large training facility at Luchin, and a capacious, modern stadium. Its location, too, was fertile ground for an ambitious, dynamic sort of a team: at the center of a transport nexus connecting London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, in the center of a part of northern France that contains the headquarters of dozens of corporations and a population of two million people, almost a third of them younger than 20.The centerpiece of the sales document, though, was Lille’s squad itself. The club’s real value, the prospectus claimed, lay in its talent. Every year, the club had invested substantial sums in crops of bright, young prospects, thanks in no small part to the work of Luis Campos, the Portuguese recruitment guru who oversaw the team’s transfer activity.Each influx of players was referred to as an “acquisition vintage”; as with wine, the idea was that the prospects would get better with age. The club estimated that its squad, at the time, had a cumulative transfer value of around $420 million. Its ceiling, though, was much higher: If all the players developed as they should, the club claimed it was sitting on a pool of talent worth as much as $1 billion.In ordinary circumstances, this weekend would be the moment that Lille’s approach was vindicated. On Saturday, Lille travels to Paris St.-Germain for the most significant game of the Ligue 1 season: The teams are tied atop the standings, with the P.S.G. side built for hundreds of million of dollars, the one that can call on Neymar and Kylian Mbappé and the rest, ahead of Lille only on goal difference.But for Lille, the season when everything came together is also the season it all fell apart.A Lille fan last fall. Stadium closures have added to the team’s financial problems.Pascal Rossignol/ReutersThe Gathering StormGérard López, Lille’s former owner, used to boast that if his team was not “the best in the world in trading players, we’re probably in the top three, four or five.” This season should have been his proof.But if anything — and through no fault of their own — the market value of Lille’s players has not only fallen this season, but it has also dropped to such an extent that, in December, López had no choice but to cede control of the club.The end game arrived just before Christmas. López was summoned to London to meet with Lille’s two main creditors, JP Morgan Chase and Elliott Management, the activist investment firm founded and run by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.In that meeting, the French sports newspaper L’Equipe reported, López tried everything he could to broker a deal to pay back the loans — worth around $140 million — that were set to come due this summer. He suggested a five-year financial restructuring, and proposed bringing on board an investor from the Middle East. He did not, it seems, want to give up Lille easily.Whenever he could, he found time to call Christophe Galtier, Lille’s coach, to update him on the progress of the talks. “He kept me informed of the situation last night,” Galtier said in December. “We talked a lot, when it was possible to talk.” Galtier was clearly touched: He dedicated the team’s win against Dijon the next day to the man who had brought him on board in 2017.Lille’s manager, Christophe Galtier, in an empty stadium last month.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesElliott and JP Morgan, though, were unmoved. López’s reign was over. The director Marc Ingla soon followed him out the door. Eventually, so would Campos. In their stead, almost immediately, came a company called Callisto Sporting SARL, a subsidiary of an investment firm called Merlyn Partners.Both companies are registered in Luxembourg. Both are linked to Maarten Petermann, a former European head of special situations at JP Morgan. Olivier Létang, a veteran soccer executive, was named Lille’s president. The creditors’ decision, and the swiftness of their action, was rooted in the unavoidable fact that the financial reality of French soccer had shifted too much for López to be able to meet his commitments.Like every club in Ligue 1 — with the exception of Qatar-funded P.S.G. — Lille was facing a cash-flow crisis. The league’s decision to cancel last season meant it had forfeited a tranche of broadcast revenue. Stadiums had been empty, at that stage, for almost nine months, and there was no sign that fans would be permitted to return any time soon. And, most pernicious of all, the league’s new television deal had collapsed; if a replacement could not be found, French domestic soccer was facing ruin.Lille’s circumstances, though, were particularly perilous. López’s tenure had always been something of a roller coaster; the club had been sanctioned on several occasions by the D.N.C.G., the body that oversees the economic health of France’s soccer teams, and at one point was threatened with relegation because of its precarious finances.Its release valve was always Campos’s seemingly never-ending pipeline of talent. In the summer of 2019, Lille had sold players — including the wing Nicolas Pépé, to Arsenal — for almost $180 million. A year later, even at the height of the pandemic, it had managed to turn a profit of $71 million in the transfer market.Despite those impressive returns, the club was barely keeping its head above water. Quite how it burned through so much money is not entirely clear, although the considerable running cost of its stadium is generally regarded as a significant factor. In 2018-19, the club posted an operating loss of $77 million. The year before, that deficit was $120 million.In a bull market, the club’s creditors had been prepared to tolerate those figures. That changed as 2020 became 2021, as revenues cratered, and as French soccer teetered on the brink. The club was heading for “bankruptcy in January,” according to Létang. This time, Lille could not sell its way out of trouble.Lille’s American forward, Timothy Weah, with his Canadian teammate, Jonathan David.Stephane Mahe/ReutersThe Midas TouchThe squad that has brought Lille into contention for its first French title since 2011 — and, more impressively, its first since the Qatari investment in P.S.G. fundamentally altered Ligue 1’s competitive balance — is testament not only to the deft and astute management of Galtier, but also to the keen eye of Campos.There is a reason that even José Mourinho, not a man given to complimenting other humans, is happy to talk about his friend’s “great career.” Campos, after all, is the technical director who pieced together the Monaco team that made the semifinals of the Champions League in 2017 and was then sold across the Continent for the better part of a billion euros.His work at Lille was, quietly, no less impressive, even if he was never, technically, an employee of the club. Instead, he was employed by a company called Scoutly, which was wholly owned by Victory Soccer, the vehicle through which López and Ingla owned Lille.López insisted that this Byzantine approach was necessary so that Campos could operate with “independence” in the market. Regardless, Lille benefited from the arrangement. Its squad is replete with the fruits of Campos’s labor: Boubakary Soumaré and Jonathan Ikoné, spotted in the reserve ranks at P.S.G.; Zeki Celik, plucked from the obscurity of the Turkish second division; Renato Sanches, offered a shot at rejuvenation after four years in the wilderness; and the two crown jewels, the most salable assets, the Dutch defender Sven Botman and the Canadian forward Jonathan David.The belief that they might, together, one day be worth as much as that Monaco team of Mbappé and Bernardo Silva and Fabinho and the rest was, of course, overstated. That assumption rested on the idea that every single player would reach his maximum value, but it was, for a while, an explicable delusion.That changed as soon as the pandemic struck, and it calcified as the scale of French soccer’s financial crisis was laid bare. Ligue 1 expects to sign a new television deal in the coming weeks, almost certainly with Canal Plus, the broadcaster it ditched last summer.Lille’s team has always been its biggest asset.Michel Spingler/Associated PressBroadcast money will bring some respite for the country’s clubs, but it will not fill the hole left by the empty promises of Mediapro. The teams of Ligue 1, then, are hurriedly trying to cut their budgets accordingly. Several already have agreed to pay cuts with their players. Lyon has offered a reduction in exchange for stock options.Most, though, will still need to sell players, trading on Ligue 1’s self-styled reputation as the “league of talents.” The problem is not only that prices will be depressed by the fact that so many teams in France need to raise funds, but also that few clubs in Europe retain their purchasing power.It was that, ultimately, that forced the hand of Lille’s creditors: Campos might still have provided players who can be sold, but in a market likely to be saturated by cut-price deals, Lille can no longer rely on premium fees.What happens next — what happens this summer — is not yet clear. Létang has said little beyond an insistence that the club cannot rely on qualification for next season’s Champions League for its financial health. Stability, he said, will be his watchword. The players have, as yet, not been alerted to a looming fire sale.A place in Europe would go some way, of course, to boosting the club’s finances. A French title, combined with a good showing in Europe next season, might help increase demand for some of the more recent acquisition vintages. Like wine, they will get better with age. The problem, now, is that what is inside the bottle matters rather less than the amount someone is prepared — or able — to pay for it. More

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      The Premier League Race Is Over. The Champions League Lottery Is Here.

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      Everyone knows who will win the Premier League. Most can guess who will be relegated. All of the drama is in the race for a spot in the Champions League.Here, then, is the home straight of the Premier League season, the final quarter of a campaign that was heralded as the most chaotic, and least predictable, of them all.At times, throughout autumn and into winter, the combination of empty stadiums, a packed schedule and a frantic pace seemed destined to usurp the established order. Contenders seemed to rise and fall every week. Earnest conversations were held about whether Aston Villa could win the league or if Arsenal was in danger of relegation.It did not, it turns out, quite come to pass. It soon became clear that Manchester City — the team with the best and biggest squad, the side with the brightest coach — would be champion while spring was still fresh in the air. Pep Guardiola’s team sits 14 points clear of Manchester United, its fingers already brushing a third crown in four years.Relegation, too, is largely settled. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion will be playing in the Championship next season; all that remains to be decided is whether Fulham can muster enough momentum to condemn Newcastle, drifting and directionless, to a place alongside them.In that relative certainty, the Premier League is something of an outlier across Europe’s major leagues. Elsewhere, the curious circumstances of the pandemic season do seem to have had an effect. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid are slowly reeling in a stuttering Atlético Madrid. In Italy, Inter Milan has six points on its city rival, A.C. Milan, and 10 on Juventus and Atalanta. But with at least one fairly spectacular choke in fans’ relatively recent memory, that is not yet a gap broad enough to permit any comfort.In Germany, the title race may effectively be decided this weekend, when Bayern Munich travels to RB Leipzig on Saturday knowing that victory will all but see off its last remaining challenger. A couple hours earlier, the top two teams in France will meet, though neither Lille nor Paris St.-Germain is in a position to deliver a decisive blow. Lyon and a resurgent Monaco are within touching distance of both, four teams separated by four points.In the absence of questions at the top and bottom of the table, the Premier League has concentrated all of its drama, jeopardy and intrigue into the jostling for position immediately below Manchester City. There are three more spots available in the Champions League for next season and seven teams with a realistic shot at one of them.Some are fallen giants, teams desperate to salvage something from a bitterly disappointing season. Others are surprise packages, those teams that have best adapted to the strangeness of this season. It is at this point that the consequences of all the chaos and unpredictability of the last seven months are made flesh, and it is a race that is all but impossible to sort — at least not yet. “It will go until the last day,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Everton manager, said last month. The challenge, he said, is to make sure you are still in contention by then.Jamie Vardy and Leicester City enter the homestretch with a lead on the teams chasing them.Pool photo by Alex PantlingHead Starts and Tough RoadsA glance at the table would indicate that two of the seven Champions League contenders — Manchester United and Leicester City — have a considerable advantage. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United has an eight-point lead on West Ham, currently the first team outside the places in fifth. Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester side has a seven-point cushion.But in Leicester’s case, certainly, that head start could yet be canceled out by the fact that its remaining schedule is considerably steeper than some of its rivals’. Leicester faces Manchester City this weekend before traveling to West Ham. Three of its final four games are against direct rivals for a spot in the top four: trips to Manchester United and Chelsea, and a home game against Tottenham. Rodgers’s team surrendered a place in the top four on the final day last season; this year’s calendar brings with it the ghost of past regrets.No other team has quite such an arduous finish to the campaign, though Chelsea is close. The extent of Thomas Tuchel’s impact at Stamford Bridge will be gauged by visits to West Ham and Manchester City, and looming home games against Arsenal and Leicester.If the calendar is kindest to anyone, it is Liverpool, marooned in seventh after a dismal run since late December. That may prove scant solace for a team that has spent the last three months losing at home to Fulham, Brighton and Burnley, but it at least gives Jürgen Klopp’s side a slim chance of returning to Europe.The Price of DistractionsTottenham’s Europa League elimination had a silver lining: fewer games this spring.Darko Bandic/Associated PressIf anything has marked this season, it is the capriciousness of crisis. It is barely two weeks since José Mourinho accused his Tottenham players of being unable to display “the basics of football and the basics of life” during a humiliation at the hands of Dinamo Zagreb in the Europa League. Now he may wonder if being out of that competition is not such a bad thing.Nine league games remain of Spurs’ season, and Mourinho must also make room for the Carabao Cup final on April 24. But, that aside, he has a clear run. So, too, do West Ham and Everton. Leicester has one extra game than its rivals — an F.A. Cup semifinal — but the rest have more demanding commitments to juggle.Chelsea, for one, is still fighting on three fronts: An F.A. Cup semifinal against Manchester City beckons, as well as a two-legged Champions League quarterfinal with F.C. Porto. Should Chelsea reach the final of both competitions, it would have to play almost twice as many games as some of its rivals.Liverpool has a Champions League quarterfinal, too — a more arduous pairing, against Real Madrid — and Manchester United will be expected to reach the final of the Europa League, adding another five games to its schedule. At the end of a season that has been particularly demanding, the strain of any added workload to tired legs may prove crucial.The Fatigue FactorNo Premier League player has logged as many minutes as Harry Maguire.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsThat injury has proved a defining factor in the outcome of this Premier League season is neither surprising nor particularly debatable. The root of Liverpool’s collapse lies in its loss of its central defense; Leicester’s form stuttered with the absence, at various times, of Jamie Vardy, James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, among others; Everton’s results dipped when James Rodríguez was missing.It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the next two months will be decided by which teams sustain the fewest injuries, particularly to their key players. Liverpool, of course, is still missing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Tottenham is without Son Heung-min. Leicester is without Barnes, Maddison and James Justin, while Manchester United is sweating on Marcus Rashford, Mason Greenwood and Anthony Martial.Injuries can, of course, be sheer misfortune — a bad tackle, a mistimed movement — but they can also be cumulative, the effect of a player pushed too far into what Arsène Wenger used to call the “red zone.” But that is not the only consequence of fatigue. Even if injury is avoided, performance can dip.It is this, more than anything, that should give Solskjaer and Manchester United pause. United’s captain, Harry Maguire, has played 3,946 minutes this season, an order of magnitude greater than every other outfield player in England. He has played the equivalent of five full games more this season than his nearest rival, Leicester’s Youri Tielemans.But Maguire is not alone. United has seven players who have played more than 2,700 minutes this season. Leicester and Everton have only one, Chelsea two, and Spurs and West Ham three. Even Liverpool, its options reduced because of all those injuries, has only five. If fatigue does prove to be a factor, the core of United’s side is more likely to be afflicted in the final stretch than anyone else.To some extent, of course, that is offset by its resources: Solskjaer has options should any of his key players be sidelined or suffer an alarming drop in form. Having to play Donny van de Beek because Bruno Fernandes needs a rest should be no great sacrifice.Indeed, that may well be the formula, more than any other, that comes to define the next two months, that serves to find the signal in the noise of this season. More than in any other season, the final prize on offer in the Premier League will go to the teams that can best minimize the effects of fatigue, thanks to a reduced workload or by possessing the strength in depth to ride it out. In all the chaos, in the end, there will be some sort of order. More

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      The Champions League Is Changing. Here’s How It Will Work.

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      European soccer’s premier club competition, the Champions League, is remaking itself. After more than a generation in its current form, the Champions League is about to become an actual league for the first time. Organizers say the changes will produce better matchups, fewer meaningless games, and more drama. Critics say it’s about what these kinds […] More

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      Hazard, Griezmann and the Summers We Won't See Again

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      The 2019 signings of Eden Hazard (by Real Madrid) and Antoine Griezmann (by Barcelona) already feel like they’re from another era. It’s one that might be gone for good.All was right with the world. There were 50,000 or so Real Madrid fans packed into the Santiago Bernabéu, all there to catch a glimpse of the latest gift bestowed upon them by Florentino Pérez, their club’s president. Out on the field, Eden Hazard was juggling a ball from one foot to another as the cameras flashed and the crowd cooed its approval.The ritual of presenting a new signing to the public like this — a tradition not unique to, but certainly pioneered and popularized by, Real Madrid — is one of those familiar, unquestioned parts of soccer’s landscape that grows more curious the more you examine it.What is the appeal of seeing someone stand on a field? What is that simple juggling exhibition meant to demonstrate? That the player is real? That the asset a club has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire because of his proven ability with a soccer ball can — yes, look, you can see for yourself — control one?The answer, of course, is power. Those showcases — particularly those held at the Bernabéu or Barcelona’s Camp Nou — were designed to send a message. One is for the fans in attendance: a conspicuous display of the largess and wealth and general virility of the owner who acquired the player now performing tricks on demand out on the field.And the other is broadcast to the world outside, a declaration of status. The sight of Hazard — like Kaká and Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo and all the others before them — on the field at the Bernabéu was intended to show to soccer as a whole that this place, this club, sat at the very summit of the sport’s global pyramid. Hazard had been the best player in the Premier League for some years. And now he was here, because everything else is, at root, nothing more than audition for a place on this stage, the inevitable destination for greatness.Hazard’s presentation was only two summers ago, and yet, in hindsight, much about the scene — beyond the fact that 50,000 people gathering in the same place is a strange, uneasy and, in a substantial portion of the world, currently illegal concept — seems to belong to another life.Hazard’s time at Real Madrid has been bitterly disappointing. This week, the club confirmed that he had sustained yet another muscle injury — he seems, and this is not an attempt to make light of his travails, to be injuring muscles he probably did not know he had — and faces another few weeks on the sidelines.Since that day when the Bernabéu thrilled at the mere sight of him, he has played only 36 times, across two seasons. Hazard had dreamed of joining Real Madrid to work under his idol, Zinedine Zidane, but he has scarcely been able to play for him. He has scored only three goals in La Liga.His story is, deep down, a sorrowful one. It feels somehow uncomfortable to describe his transfer as a failure, or his Real Madrid career as a letdown, when he has been so assailed by injury.Soccer is a cutthroat sort of business, though, and so the conclusion and the impression are inevitable: At 30, it appears that Hazard has been betrayed by his body, which has been ravaged by more than a decade at the very pinnacle of the game. Real Madrid has had to get used to life without him; his presence, rather than his absence, is now the noteworthy event. The days when he was mentioned as a peer of Neymar and Kevin De Bruyne, in that cohort of players who seemed destined to inherit the mantle of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, are far gone. His time has passed.Hazard’s time in Madrid has been characterized by more injuries than goals.Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA, via ShutterstockNot quite a month after Hazard was wheeled out at the Bernabéu, Barcelona — as it always must — responded in kind, forcing Antoine Griezmann to prove that he, too, could juggle a ball, before going one better and asking him to pass it around with a few children.Griezmann, like Hazard, was 28. Griezmann, like Hazard, had cost more than $130 million. Griezmann, like Hazard, saw his move to one of Spain’s Big Two as the culmination of his career. “My Dad always told me that sometimes a train only comes once,” he said after his presentation. This was not a train he could afford to miss.And Griezmann’s star, like Hazard’s, has waned since that day. He has played — and scored — far more frequently. His injury record is infinitely better. He is closing in on 100 appearances for Barcelona and has managed 28 goals.It is a respectable, but hardly spectacular, return for a player who was hired to solve Barcelona’s on-field problems but whose transfer stands now as a cipher for its off-field troubles: Griezmann was not just exorbitantly expensive; he was indicative of the club’s failure to think in the long term, to invest wisely, to place what it might need tomorrow ahead of what it wanted today.The two Spanish giants were not the only clubs that were guilty of that sort of thinking at the time. Juventus had spent heavily in previous seasons on Gonzalo Higuaín and Cristiano Ronaldo, players whose moves were predicated on the idea of their delivering immediate success. For much the same reason, Manchester United had agreed to pay Alexis Sánchez an eye-watering sum of money to join from Arsenal.Antoine Griezmann with the man who brought him to Barcelona, Josep Maria Bartomeu.Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressAll of those deals now seem to belong to another era. It is unthinkable, as soccer comes to terms with the long-term economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, that clubs would invest so heavily in players already at — or in some cases beyond — their peaks.Even before last March, though, the sport was moving away from these grand, short-term statement signings. Most clubs had started to consider things like resale price before committing funds on transfers. Where clubs still decided to spend heavily, it was generally on players under the age of 24, those who might yet appreciate in value.In that light, those two days in 2019 represent not only the passing of a moment — the final two deals from another age — but a warning from history. Both stand as proof of why it is wiser to invest in youth, of the rectitude of the approach that favors the future over the now. Proven talent comes not only at a financial cost but at considerable risk.And so, now, Real Madrid has no choice but to hope that Hazard can recover his fitness and then his form. Barcelona must rebuild itself around Griezmann’s onerous contract or accept a sizable financial hit by selling him at a discount — if it can find a buyer. In the meantime, both clubs can only watch as soccer’s center of power shifts inexorably away from them, to Manchester and Munich, in particular, and to Paris and Liverpool and London, to the clubs where players used to hold their auditions, to the places where they thought about tomorrow, while they were glorying in today.A Merger That Makes SensePlaying in a league with Belgium’s top clubs can only help PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord improve. The reverse is true, too.Maurice Van Steen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd just in the nick of time, along comes a faintly revolutionary idea — albeit one that has been whispered for some time — for the sort of change that might actually benefit soccer. As detailed in this newsletter last week, the sport has no dearth of ideas at this point. It is good ideas that have been sadly lacking.Kudos, then, to the clubs of the Belgian Pro League, which on Tuesday unanimously backed an agreement in principle to merge with the league next door, the Dutch Eredivisie. Assuming the Dutch are as open-minded, the new competition — the BeNeLiga, or some such — would most likely start in 2025, when the current television deals for both existing competitions expire.This seems, on the surface, an obvious win. Independently, neither league can possibly hope to command the sort of broadcast rights that Europe’s big five domestic championships do. Together, they are a more attractive proposition: a combined market of more than 28 million people, with a roster of clubs that would include Ajax, PSV Eindhoven, Feyenoord, AZ Alkmaar, Anderlecht, Club Brugge, Standard Liege, K.R.C. Genk and K.A.A. Gent, among others. The league would feature some of Europe’s brightest young talent.The clubs themselves believe the unified league could earn an annual $476 million in television and marketing deals — not a patch on what Serie A or La Liga makes each year, but more than double what the leagues currently bring in on their own.There are, of course, valid questions here, and potential victims, too. What happens to those clubs that are locked out of the combined league? How much of that newfound wealth will flow down to clubs outside the top flight? Will there be a promotion and relegation system to allow a way back to the respective national divisions, to maintain the integrity of those lower-tier competitions?None of those questions, though, should prevent this idea’s being explored further. There are two ways to alter the dominance of the big five leagues — both in a financial and a sporting sense — and to make European soccer a more level playing field.One is to reduce the power of the elite — a valid, but inherently utopian, idea. The other is to increase the power of those locked out by the status quo. They might be heresy to tradition, but cross-border leagues are the first, most immediately apparent, route to doing precisely that.Mr. ZeroThomas Tuchel has started his rebuilding of Chelsea at the back.Pool photo by Mike HewittIt has been 13 games since Thomas Tuchel replaced Frank Lampard as Chelsea’s manager. In those 13 games — a run that has included two meetings with Atlético Madrid and encounters with Manchester United, Tottenham and Everton, as well as the admittedly guaranteed three points that now come to anyone traveling to Anfield — Chelsea has conceded two goals.One of those was a freakish, and hilarious, own goal from Antonio Rüdiger at Sheffield United, which makes Takumi Minamino the only opposition player to have scored against Tuchel’s Chelsea in almost two months.This is not, of course, necessarily what Tuchel was hired to do. In time, he will be expected to turn Chelsea into a slick, adventurous attacking team, playing the sort of cutting-edge high-pressing style that is now de rigueur among Europe’s elite. But, for now, it is a more than useful trick.Manchester City is running away with the Premier League, in part, because of the obduracy of its defense. It is too late for Chelsea to derail that particular juggernaut — though it has the air of the most likely challenger next season — but defensive improvement makes Tuchel’s team a clear and present threat in the Champions League.Friday’s draw only served to strengthen that perception. Chelsea’s quarterfinal pairing with F.C. Porto will not, most likely, be festooned with goals, but it offers Tuchel and his team a smooth path to the semifinals. There, Chelsea would encounter either a Real Madrid that is a shadow of its former self, or a Liverpool team that has collapsed since Christmas. On the other side of the draw, Bayern Munich, Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City will be busy eliminating each other.As recently as January, Chelsea looked like nothing more than makeweights in the Champions League. All of a sudden, though, Tuchel has turned the club into a credible contender to win it. That he has done so with precisely the same resources Lampard had reflects well on him, and poorly on his predecessor.It also rather neatly encapsulates the value of a truly elite manager.CorrespondenceLet’s get this over with: It turns out that the crossover between “Readers of This Newsletter” and “People Who Like Ballet” is greater than I was expecting. “Ballet leaves you cold?” Charlie Henley asked, incredulously, echoing the sentiments of several others. “Have you seen ABT or the Royal Ballet perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’? All by itself, Prokofiev’s score covers the entire landscape of human emotions. The dancers put faces to those emotions, and their movement and bodies are wonders to behold.”I can only apologize for my lack of sophistication. If it’s any consolation, I understand the skill involved. I appreciate that it is, clearly, something of great beauty. But there is, alas, no accounting for taste. And that’s before we even get on to my views on Shakespeare.Lazio tried everything to stay in the Champions League, but Bayern Munich showed it the door anyway.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressOn much more comfortable ground, James Armstrong wonders if the Champions League might be improved by “eliminating the league part.”“You play 96 games in the group phase to eliminate 16 teams,” James notes. “In the old European Cup, you played 32 games to eliminate 16 teams. When each pair of games is an elimination pair, excitement is raised.”For a long time, I’ve found this argument unconvincing. The straight knockout format of the old European Cup has a pared-back, unadulterated simplicity, of course, but it also emphasized the random a little too much. The nostalgia it inspires is, I have always thought, a little deceptive. Do you really want Manchester United and Real Madrid meeting in the first round?In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve started to soften. As Jonathan Wilson wrote in The Observer last week, Andrea Agnelli and those who pull his strings seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what we, as fans, want from games: not endless showpiece encounters between famous clubs, but genuine jeopardy. That is what lifts a fixture from mundane to compelling, whoever is involved: when there is something riding on it. Look at the success of the Nations League for proof.There are enough glamorous teams that the latter stages would still feel heavyweight even if a couple fell by the wayside early on; the idea of an Olympiacos or a Zenit St. Petersburg or a Benfica reaching the semifinals would enliven a tournament, rather than detract from it. Still, it will never happen, so to an extent the whole idea is moot anyway.And in the regular correspondence slot that I may start calling “Good Idea, I Agree,” we have Steve Marron. “Why does the attacking team have to wait until the defenders are ready before they can take a free kick? The defending team conceded the free kick, usually to stop an immediate threat, so why give them all the time in the world to regroup, set up a wall, lie someone on the ground behind it, get a handle on the player they are supposed to mark?”In theory, they don’t — the referee can give permission to the attacking team to take the free kick quickly — but most often, that is precisely how it works, and it probably should not. More

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      Don’t Reject the Champions League’s Changes Out of Hand

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      The latest proposals to reallocate European soccer’s riches show that there may be sense even in dumb ideas.Say what you like about Andrea Agnelli, but at least he is not afraid of a bad idea. Even by the standards of Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, this has been a fairly spectacular week, a seemingly never-ending stream of free-form thoughts about the future of soccer, each one somehow worse than the last.There was, first, a stout defense of the coming reform of the Champions League, the so-called Swiss Model, which would see 36 teams qualify for the tournament and then play 10 group games, rather than six, all of them against different opponents.That was just Agnelli getting started, though. It is perhaps easiest to think of him as soccer’s equivalent to Stewart Pearson, the policy strategist/vapid marketing guru skewered so perfectly in “The Thick of It,” the British political satire. Legacy places in the Champions League? Banning elite clubs from buying each other’s players? Selling a subscription to the last 15 minutes of games? Yes, and ho (Parental Guidance: R).The reaction to all of these suggestions, of course, was what even Agnelli, presumably, has come to expect: a panoply of derision and disdain, the sort that in a strange sort of way unites soccer’s various warring tribes in hostility to the machinations of a smart, urbane businessman who seems determined to play the role of cartoonish supervillain.That so many of his ideas emerged in a week in which Agnelli’s Juventus was unexpectedly and dramatically eliminated from the Champions League by F.C. Porto simply served to underline his hubris. This, after all, was the sort of drama he wants to negate, inflicted by the sort of team he wants to disenfranchise. He got, in short, what he deserved.But while that reaction is both understandable and largely justified, it is not desperately constructive. Just as with Project Big Picture — the set of ideas tossed around by the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool for reform of the Premier League and leaked late last year — the immediate rush to outrage means that the islands of common sense in Agnelli’s thought torrent are swept away before they can be properly explored.Take, for example, the last of his suggestions. Why would it be bad, precisely, to sell the rights to watch the last 15 minutes of games? Of course the clubs would benefit from the tapping of another revenue stream, but who suffers?Those who wanted to watch the full match could still do so, through whatever subscription package they currently enjoy. But maybe others — those not able to afford it, those without the time to benefit from it, those who do not wish to watch an entire game — could use a cheaper, shorter, more ad hoc alternative.There will have been plenty, for example, who might have wanted to watch the denouement to Juventus’s game with Porto, once it became clear that it might prove more compelling than anticipated. So why not let them?Porto isn’t in a Big Five league, but it deserves nights to celebrate, too.Valerio Pennicino/Getty ImagesThat the idea could be dismissed out of hand is, in part, down to the fact that it was Agnelli who proposed it. He is, after all, not only the chairman of Juventus, but the president of the European Club Association, too, a body that is designed to represent the interests of all of its members but — in the popular imagination — is largely deployed to lobby for the game’s established elite.As such, it is assumed that everything that is in Agnelli’s interests is automatically tinged with not just self-interest, but also greed. The expansion of the Champions League, according to that argument, is designed to enable a handful of clubs to make more money, at the expense of everyone else, furthering the financial chasm that yawns between teams in the major leagues, and between the major leagues and the minor ones.The idea of legacy places — allowing teams with more European pedigree to leapfrog those with less, ensuring that the traditional powers always have access to the Champions League, regardless of where they finish in their domestic leagues — is seen as offering them a backstop, inuring them from the consequences of failure, breaking the contract that sport should be in some way meritocratic, ensuring their money keeps flowing.This is, doubtless, true. Agnelli is not advocating anything that would damage his, his club’s or his collaborators’ interests. But it does not follow that those who stand in his way are acting out of some sort of higher purpose. This week, several clubs — most notably Crystal Palace and Aston Villa — led the resistance to the reform of the Champions League, insisting that it would irrevocably damage domestic competitions.That Andrea Agnelli is largely looking out for the interests of Juventus does not mean every one of his ideas must be rejected out of hand.Denis Balibouse/ReutersAnd they are right, but their motivations are no purer than Agnelli’s. Crystal Palace and Aston Villa benefit very nicely, thank you very much, from the status quo. They have been made immeasurably rich by their mere presence in the Premier League; they will reject any move that endangers their place on that particular gravy train.It is here that the problem becomes broader, more pernicious. There is a reason Agnelli — and John W. Henry, the owner of Liverpool, and Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, and the powers-that-be at Bayern Munich and Juventus and all the rest — keeps having bad ideas, and it is one that cannot be put entirely (though that is relevant) to the big clubs’ greed for trophies and for profit.It is that on some fundamental level, the economics of soccer as they stand do not work, and they did not work even before the coronavirus hit, creating a colossal hole in the accounts of (almost) every club across Europe, rich and poor alike.Ideally, at this juncture, it would be possible to pinpoint just one problem — the spending of Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City, the wealth of the Premier League or the growing gap between haves and have-nots — and then to identify a panacea that would make it all better But that is not how it works. Fairness in top-flight European soccer is a vast and unwieldy and complicated issue, and one without an obvious solution.For the grand houses of continental Europe, the issue is the relentless march of the Premier League. For the big clubs of the Premier League, it is being expected to win an arms race against teams backed by nation states. For those teams, it is trying to crack a cartel that is arranged against them.For all its financial might, P.S.G. is still chasing its first Champions League title with Kylian Mbappé. For all its struggles, Barcelona has won four with Lionel Messi.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersFor the teams that fill out the five major leagues of Western Europe, it is finding a way to overcome the enormous financial advantages of their opponents. For those leagues that are not considered the major powers, it is identifying a way to compete with the Big Five, and to deal with the deleterious effect on competitive balance of the Champions League itself.And that is before we get further down the pyramid, to the teams struggling to breathe away from the continent’s top divisions. It is this that makes it too hard to sympathize with the plight of Crystal Palace, which currently makes more money than A.C. Milan and Feyenoord and Legia Warsaw and Panathinaikos and all but a couple of dozen other teams in the world. It is this that means it is dangerous to assume that what is good for Crystal Palace is good for soccer as a whole.There are, unfortunately, no easy answers. But that should not dictate that all suggestions for change are shot down, or that the underlying assumption should be that they are all rooted in bad faith, or even that self-interest itself precludes an idea’s having merit.The people who own clubs are within their rights to want steadier, more predictable incomes, or more restricted spending. It is not feasible to demand, as we currently do, that they just throw as much money against the wall as possible in pursuit of short-term success. Fans, above all, should know by now that such an approach rarely ends well.Will an expanded Champions League still have room for past winners like Ajax and Feyenoord?Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via ShutterstockThat is not to say that Agnelli has yet hit upon the answer. Legacy places for historic teams defeat the purpose of sport, though they are not exactly unprecedented: In South America, there have been various experiments — rarely for good reasons — to make relegation a punishment for years of underperformance, not just a single bad season.Expanding the Champions League — though not something that is personally appealing — has more positives, should the extra places go to national champions from lesser leagues, expanding the horizons of the competition, though even that might then have a distorting effect on those domestic tournaments. (Banning transfers between elite clubs makes no sense: How else would Agnelli, for one, have unloaded Miralem Pjanic’s contract?)But none of this should disguise the need both to talk about and institute change. The status quo might work for a handful of teams — the ones, largely, that finish in the top 15 of the Premier League pretty regularly, and possibly Bayern Munich — but it locks out the vast majority; according to a report this week from Football Supporters Europe, fans* are finding it increasingly off-putting.[*This is a subject for another column, but the issue with these sorts of surveys is that they represent a specific cohort of fans, not a broad spectrum.]It is incumbent on everyone, then, to have the courage to have ideas: not objections rooted in tradition, not utopian daydreams, but concrete, considered suggestions. Would cross-border leagues help teams from smaller nations compete? Should elite teams be allowed to sign strategic deals with partner clubs? Is there a way to make the Champions League more compelling? How do you address competitive balance within and between domestic tournaments? (Answers below.)All of them will have drawbacks. All of them will elicit criticism. But it is a conversation we must be prepared to have, not one that should be shut down just because someone, somewhere, finds it does not align with his interests. Partly because that is the only way anything will change. And partly because if we do not, one of Agnelli’s ideas might just stick.a) Yes, it’s obvious; b) yes, so is that; c) you’d start by changing the seeding; and d) squad and spending limits, and a combination of a) and b).A Year OnA packed house and one mask at Anfield in March 11, 2020, hours before sports called time.Phil Noble/ReutersThe news seeped through as Jürgen Klopp was licking his wounds and Diego Simeone was basking in glory. It had been one of those electric Champions League nights: Atlético Madrid had eliminated Liverpool, the reigning champion, last March, storming what was supposed to be fortress Anfield with that distinctively Cholísta mix of strategy and steel.And then, as the managers were picking over the bones of what had happened, as 56,000 people were drifting into the night, the news flickered through from Italy. Daniele Rugani, the Juventus defender, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The club was sending its squad into isolation for 14 days. Its opponent the previous weekend, Inter Milan, quickly did the same.That was March 11, 2020, a year and a day ago. Even in the slightly frantic, vaguely frazzled surroundings of a press box, it was apparent that what had played out in front of us was not the story. It seemed obvious, even then, that the night’s theme was not just Liverpool’s facing up to an immediate future with no European competition.The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic. Across the Atlantic, Rudy Gobert had tested positive, bringing the virus into the N.B.A. Sports in the United States was shutting down. Over the next 36 hours, Europe reached the same conclusion. The patchwork solutions that had tried to hold back the tide — games in empty stadiums, games being postponed — gave way.In England, at least, the tipping point was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive. The Premier League, until then content to stick its fingers in its ears and blunder through, called an emergency meeting. A few hours after insisting the show, that weekend, would go on, the league confirmed it would be mothballed. Nobody could be quite sure that it would come back.Two things now stand out about those few days. One is specific to Britain. It is important to remember that, at the time of Arteta’s positive test, the British government was dallying. The country was still almost two weeks from being locked down. Officials were encouraging people to go to work. Some 56,000 people had been allowed to go to Anfield, including some who flew in from Madrid for the privilege. A quarter of a million had been admitted to horse racing’s Cheltenham Festival.Looking back, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that it was the abandonment of the Premier League that concentrated a few minds and forced a few hands. Its elite soccer league is, deep down, one of England’s most high-profile institutions. Its sudden absence denoted, in the most incontrovertible tone, that the pandemic had arrived.The other, broader thing is that for all the criticism, for all the missteps and the arguments and the questionable motives, soccer deserves credit for finding its way back: its players for enduring the schedule; its executives for conjuring solutions; the countless, unheralded staff members at clubs and leagues and broadcasters for making it work. Soccer is not perfect. Sometimes, it is not even good. But in what has been an inordinately difficult year for so many, it has, in some small way, helped.CorrespondenceManchester City and ballet, you say? Set this photo to music.Pool photo by Clive BrunskillLast week’s column on Manchester City — a team that inspires an intellectual response, more than an emotional one, at least in my eyes — prompted many of you to get in touch to set me straight. Matt Noel highlighted not only that Pep Guardiola has been able to “make some tweaks and reunite” his squad, but also the “style in which City plays … is nothing short of miraculous, delicate and ephemeral.”I have no arguments there and, of course, it is not for me to dictate your responses to any team. I was, as the vernacular goes, simply offering you my truth. “I love watching City,” Charlotte Mehrtens wrote. “The skill is such a joy. You claim this football lacks soul? That’s like saying a choreographed ballet lacks soul.”This is a great parallel, because there is something inherently balletic about City, and also I find that ballet leaves me a bit cold, too. I appreciate the art and the skill, but I could do with a bit of talking. The issue here, then, may be that I am a philistine.David Ittah took exception with the idea that Guardiola has invented a new position for João Cancelo. “Marcelo has been playing exactly that role for many years at Real Madrid,” he wrote. He has indeed: Nobody loves Marcelo, pound for pound the greatest signing of all time, more than me. But Cancelo’s role is much more structured, much more part of the tactical blueprint, than the freestyle approach that makes Marcelo a joy.And a wonderful idea from Ian Greig. “Why not try to make a virtue out of the loss by holding games on out-of-the-way unknown pitches in remote places. Pitches without stands, or fans in beautiful places, rural Scotland, Georgia. Years ago I watched a game near Syanky in Poland, a lovely site surrounded by pines. I hold the memory dear.”Consider me on board. Let’s play the Champions League final in Lofoten. Or Qeqertarsuaq. More

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      Weston McKennie Is Right Where He Belongs at Juventus

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      Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesWeston McKennie Is Right Where He BelongsWhat is most surprising about the American’s path to Juventus is not how far he has come, but how effortless he has made the journey look.Credit…Marco Canoniero/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 8, 2021, 10:30 a.m. ETAs he sat down for lunch, Weston McKennie slipped his cellphone out of his pocket and onto the chair in front of him, hiding it beneath his legs. He was breaking the rules — he and his Schalke teammates were strictly forbidden from taking their phones into the cafeteria — but he was prepared to take the risk. There are some calls you do not want to miss.McKennie found himself glancing down every few seconds, checking his screen as surreptitiously as he could. Midway through his meal, it arrived. His screen lit up and his chair buzzed. McKennie grabbed his phone, stood and walked out of the room. “I was just like: ‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this,’” he said. You do not, after all, keep Andrea Pirlo waiting.The last few months have been full of moments like that for McKennie, instances in which the surreal somehow feels quotidian. His career, and his prospects, have undergone the sort of whirlwind transformation that can be difficult to process: the rise is so dizzyingly rapid and the curve so precipitously steep that after a while, the scale and speed of the journey as a whole is difficult to gauge.Signed to help Juventus in midfield, McKennie has instead become a ball-winning, goal-scoring fixture alongside stars like Cristiano Ronaldo.Credit…Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is only in fleeting vignettes — little scenes from his last six months — that McKennie can catch a reflection of his new reality. Last summer, he was a 22-year-old midfielder from Little Elm, Texas, who had been a rare ray of sunlight in the otherwise stormy sky looming over Schalke, the troubled Bundesliga team where he had spent all of his professional career.His most recent season had been conflicted. Personally, McKennie had found it satisfying: He had made 28 Bundesliga appearances in a campaign interrupted by the pandemic, and had established himself as a mainstay of the United States national team. Collectively, it had been difficult. Schalke had collapsed in the second half of the season. It did not win a single league game between January and the summer.Even in that context, his performances had been good enough to catch the attention of the likes of Southampton and Newcastle, steady performers from the middle reaches of the Premier League. He was one of the few assets Schalke possessed that it could sell. He most likely knew the club needed money. He most definitely knew that cash was scarce in a pandemic-afflicted market.But then his agent mentioned that another team had inquired about his services. “It didn’t seem super-realistic,” McKennie said. “So I kind of brushed it off.” A couple of weeks later, though, the same suitor returned, the interest more concrete this time. “We have to make it happen,” McKennie instructed his agent, as he prepared to join Schalke’s preseason training camp. He was told to expect a call from Juventus, the grand old lady of Italian soccer, coached by Pirlo and home of Cristiano Ronaldo. Precisely, in other words, the sort of call you do not want to miss.McKennie made a name for himself in Europe at Schalke in the Bundesliga. But when the club fell on hard times financially, it cashed in on McKennie by loaning him to Juventus.Credit…Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conversation went well. Pirlo outlined why he wanted McKennie: There would be lots of games this season, plenty of chances for an energetic, dynamic, ball-hungry player to shine. McKennie did not need a hard sell. “It was more a case of me selling myself to him,” he said. “If that’s what he wanted, then that’s what I’d do.”And so McKennie finds himself where he is now: still a 22-year-old from Little Elm, Texas, but one that has made such an impression in the midfield of the biggest club in Italy — one not battling relegation but competing to win Serie A and the Champions League — that last week it exercised its option to turn his initial one-season loan into a permanent deal, paying $21.5 million for the privilege.It is the final seal of “approval” of his coach, Pirlo, who just so happens to be one of the finest exponents of the midfield art in recent history. “A legend,” McKennie calls him.Sometimes, he said, he overhears one of his teammates expressing disbelief at finding themselves playing in such rarefied air, competing with the heroes of their childhood. “They can’t believe how far they’ve come, that they’re playing in the Champions League,” he said. “And I think that, when I was a kid, I had never even heard of the Champions League.” McKennie is not fulfilling his dreams: Somehow, it is bigger than that, as if he is stretching the bounds of reality.McKennie has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of seven in the Champions League.Credit…Massimo Pinca/ReutersIt is in those little moments that he can glimpse it. Sometimes, it is something grand that triggers it. When he was younger, he and his family, then living in Germany, where his father’s Air Force career had taken them, went to Camp Nou while on vacation. They explored a lot, he said, during the years they lived near Kaiserslautern, where they moved when McKennie was 6.“The stadium was closed that day,” he remembered. “But we persuaded the security guard to let us in. The team was training: all of those players, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho.” They stood and watched for a while. When a loose ball flew into the stands, McKennie scurried down to retrieve it and throw it back. That was their cue to leave.He had not been back to Barcelona until December. “It was strange that it was empty, just the players on the field, when I first went, and it was empty again now,” he said. This time, McKennie did not have to plead with security to let him in. He belonged not only in the stadium, but on the field. He scored that night.Sometimes, though, the realizations come in more intimate, more private settings. Those are the ones that catch McKennie by surprise. “I was sitting with Alvaro Morata after training the other day,” he said. “We were just watching Cristiano practicing his free kicks. And we turned to each other and said what a privilege it is, just to be able to do that: to watch him take free kick after free kick.”But while McKennie feels fortunate to find himself where he is, that should not be mistaken for luck. He is no mere tourist at Juventus, passing through, savoring these snapshots of life in the elite, an American on some sort of year abroad in Serie A.The perception, when he joined, was that he was destined to be an option of first reserve: that he would spend much of his time riding the bench, and when he was not, he would be a “hard six,” there to win the ball back and give it to someone with, well, more talent.Juventus made its acquisition of McKennie permanent last week. He may be there a while.Credit…Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse, via Associated PressIn reality, even McKennie is a little “surprised” at how important he has become. He has appeared in 22 of Juventus’s 25 games in Serie A, and six of its seven — so far — in the Champions League. He has emerged, too, as a creative, offensive force: He has scored at Camp Nou, in that rout of Barcelona, and at San Siro, in a win against A.C. Milan. He is comfortable enough in his surroundings to joke that Ronaldo, Aaron Ramsey and Dejan Kulusevski take turns acting as his translator (though his Italian is now good enough, he said, to understand most of what is going on.)At first, he said, he worried about living up to expectations, wondering “why they chose me.” It has taken only a few months for those anxieties to dissipate entirely, quietly shed as his rise gathered speed and height, as McKennie has proved that he belongs.That is what makes his transformation difficult to parse: that it has felt so smooth, so natural, that the line between remarkable and quotidian has blurred quite so readily, that it seems so obvious now not only why McKennie picked up, but why Pirlo called in the first place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Women's Team Won a Title. Weeks Later, Owners Shut It Down.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Rising Tide Sinks One BoatA top women’s soccer team won its first league title last season. But as richer rivals pour money into the women’s game, Kopparbergs decided to fold rather than fight.A Champions League defeat against Manchester City turned out to be the final match for Kopparbergs/Gothenburg F.C.Credit…Jason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersFeb. 24, 2021, 12:05 a.m. ETAs far as Elin Rubensson knew, the call was about plans for the coming year, nothing more. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, she and her colleagues at Kopparbergs/Gothenburg F.C. were summoned for a remote team meeting. They dialed in expecting to hear details of the club’s ambitions for the new season.Things, after all, were looking good. A month earlier, Kopparbergs had been crowned Sweden’s women’s soccer champion for the first time; it had been only a couple of weeks since the team had played Manchester City, the English powerhouse, in the knockout rounds of the Women’s Champions League.Though Rubensson had not played at all in the 2020 league campaign — she opted out while expecting her first child — and had missed the celebrations of the title victory after testing positive for the coronavirus, she was excited. She had given birth to a son, Frans, just before the holidays. She was thinking about when she might start playing again.And then “a bolt from a clear blue sky.” It was over.On the call, the club’s executives told the players that Kopparbergs — on the back of the greatest season in its history — was being closed down, effective immediately. It would not defend its league title. It would forfeit its place in next season’s competitions. The Manchester City defeat would be its last game as a club.“It was a shock for all of us,” Rubensson said. “We did not expect it. Our son was only a week old, and suddenly I had no club to play for. We didn’t know what was going to happen or what to do.”Elin Rubensson, right, learned in a phone call that she did not have a club anymore.Credit…Adam Ihse/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the last decade or so, the landscape of women’s soccer in Europe has shifted so fundamentally as to be unrecognizable. As the game’s popularity has grown, as the broadcast deals and sponsorship money have poured in and more and more fans have come through the gates, it has attracted the attention of the continent’s history-laden — and cash-soaked — men’s teams.The Champions League has been dominated by the game’s hegemon, Olympique Lyonnais, with only the superheated rise of its national rival, Paris St.-Germain, providing any threat to Lyon’s primacy.The lavish spending of the clubs of the Women’s Super League in England has attracted players such as Tobin Heath, Rose Lavelle, Pernille Harder and Sam Kerr, turning it into what many regard as the strongest domestic women’s competition on the planet. Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus and Bayern Munich have all dedicated a portion of their considerable resources to trying to keep pace. Manchester United fielded its first women’s team in 2018; Real Madrid bought an existing one and rebranded it in its name last year.While that investment is welcome and overdue, it is not without cost. Across the continent, the teams that did so much to sustain and grow women’s soccer before the money arrived, the clubs that constitute so much of its history, have found it all but impossible to compete: England’s Doncaster Belles, Spain’s Rayo Vallecano, Italy’s A.S.D. Torres, even Turbine Potsdam of Germany, a two-time Champions League winner. Glasgow City, champion of Scotland for 13 years in a row, knows it can hold out for only so long now that Rangers and Celtic are showing an interest in the women’s game.It was that same current that forced Kopparbergs’s hand. The club had moved to Gothenburg a couple of decades before — it had previously played “on a bad pitch, close to the airport” in the satellite town of Landvetter, according to its official history — at the invitation of the local authorities, hoping to give the city’s women and girls a place to play and a chance to dream.But though it was backed by one of Sweden’s largest breweries — Kopparberg is one of the world’s largest producers of cider, and it shared a chairman, Peter Bronsman, with the soccer team — the women’s side was always a small-scale enterprise. “It was four friends doing this as a hobby, almost,” said Carl Fhager, a lawyer engaged to oversee the winding down of the club. “It was not a big organization. It did not have many members. In Swedish terms, it was a very small club.”After watching wealthy rivals like Manchester City pour money into women’s soccer, Gothenburg officials said they no longer saw a viable path to success.Credit…Matt McNulty – Manchester City/Manchester City FC, via Getty ImagesThat did not prevent it from enjoying remarkable success. It was able to sign Hope Solo, Christen Press and Yael Averbuch, all United States internationals. Though it had to wait until 2020 for its first championship, it had won the Swedish Cup three times and was a regular participant in the Champions League.It was those forays into Europe — those encounters with the new powers of the women’s game — that convinced Bronsman and his board that their club’s time was passing. A couple of years ago, they had opened discussions with I.F.K. Gothenburg, one of the city’s men’s teams, about folding the club into its operations.The idea was eventually vetoed by I.F.K.’s members — Swedish clubs are member-owned nonprofits, and the idea of one’s taking over another was too alien to be tolerable — but the more it ran into the likes of Manchester City, with its squad packed with international stars and its training facilities shared with the club’s men, the more Kopparbergs felt the writing was on the wall.“It became even clearer in the Champions League,” Fhager said. “The club knew it was not competitive anymore, and the difference in facilities was not fair on the players.” It was the same reasoning that would appear on the statement released by the club on Dec. 29, confirming its closure.By that time, Kopparbergs had contacted Fhager, tasking him with finding a new home for the players: either by identifying a larger club to assume the team wholesale — ideally one in Gothenburg — or finding new homes for as many members of the squad as possible. He contacted not only Gothenburg’s four men’s soccer teams, but its ice hockey clubs, too, anyone who he thought might have an interest in assuming the Kopparbergs players and the team’s place in Sweden’s top tier, the Damallsvenskan.One was particularly responsive. Marcus Jodin, the chief executive of BK Hacken, one of Gothenburg’s biggest men’s teams, had seen the news that Kopparbergs would be shuttered, but had not thought too much of it. “We were really busy,” he said. “We were trying to close a big transfer for the men’s team.”His phone, though, soon started pinging with messages from colleagues and friends. “They said this might be a chance for us,” he said. Hacken had a strategic plan to increase its investment in the women’s game — its women’s team was at the time playing in Sweden’s third tier — as part of an attempt to become a “fully balanced club between men’s and women’s sports.”When Fhager called Hacken on the afternoon of Dec. 29, Jodin was ready to listen. The next day, at a meeting of Hacken’s board, team officials discussed the idea. Though taking over another team was anathema, the appeal was clear.Part of Jodin’s argument was financial. “The economics of women’s soccer are moving really fast,” he said. “If it takes us five to seven years to make it to the top level in the normal way, then where are the economics then? Do we have the time and money to wait that long.”But part of it was moral, too. Without Kopparbergs, Gothenburg would not have an elite women’s team. “The club was founded to give girls in the city a chance to dream,” Jodin said. “And that dream can’t move to Malmo.”BK Hacken, now strengthened by some of the Kopparbergs players, will take the former champions’ place in the new league campaign.Credit…Mattias Ivarsson/BK HackenWith the backing of the board, he set about not just putting the idea to the club’s members, addressing all of their “questions and fears,” but making Hacken ready if they agreed. “We wanted the players to notice a change from Day 1,” Jodin said. “They had been through a nightmare, losing their jobs and income. If we had not been ready for them, we would have failed.”In late January, the merger went to a vote, as all decisions at all Swedish clubs must. Ninety-two percent of Hacken’s fans agreed to it: The club would take on Kopparbergs’s players, its commitments and its place in the league. The team would change its name and its jersey. All that would be left of a quarter-century of history was the nonprofit association number under which Kopparbergs was registered.For those involved, it is a happy ending. “There were only two alternatives,” Jodin said. “Either the club closed, and the players left, or they became part of Hacken.”Fhager said most of the fans he had spoken to were enthusiastic: “The idea of Kopparbergs was to give Gothenburg an elite team that girls can aim for. It still has that.”For Rubensson, “everything feels great.”“The size of the organization and the facilities are the main difference,” she added. “We’ve been very well welcomed. We feel like this will be a very good step for us, at a time when Swedish teams need to improve to be successful in Europe.”For her, as it is for everyone else, this is the future. Kopparbergs, and the teams like it, are the past.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More