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      When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone

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

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      The Premier League Crucible Produces Something New: Ideas

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

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      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

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

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      The New A.C. Milan Picks Up Where the Old One Left Off

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      Is there muscle memory to Champions League success? An Italian giant, no longer fallen, is hoping to draw on its own.Stefano Pioli could feel it, even if he could not quite define it.In the nicest possible way, Pioli has made several journeys around the block as a soccer manager. At 57, he has been coaching in the volatile, capricious world of the Italian game for two decades. His current job, at A.C. Milan, is the 13th of his career. There is very little, these days, that counts as new to him.The couple of weeks leading up to and surrounding Milan’s Champions League quarterfinal against Napoli last month, though, were different. Quite what it was is difficult for him to identify. It manifested not just in the atmosphere in the stadium — unique, Pioli called it — but in an energy that infused the club’s inner sanctums, too.He came to understand it, eventually, as a sort of institutional muscle memory. For a long time, Milan’s present has felt just a little unworthy of the club’s past. Milan has felt, in recent years, like a club diminished, almost a relic of another age. Only Real Madrid has won more European Cups than A.C. Milan, but for 16 years Milan had not so much as made a semifinal. That is, technically, not quite a generation. In soccer time, it may as well be the Pleistocene.The mere promise of a return, though, brought everything flooding back. For Pioli, as for most of his players, it was virgin territory. For the fans, for the staff, for the directors — among their number the likes of Paolo Maldini, seemingly barely aged from his playing days — it was reassuringly familiar.“This club is used to these moments, these emotions,” Milan Manager Stefano Pioli said.Luca Bruno/Associated PressIt manifested not as a mass, Pioli said, but a force. For those games against Napoli, he said, the pressure of history “gave us more faith, more strength, more conviction.” The idea that a soccer club, with its ever-rotating cast of characters, might have some sort of vestigial memory baked into its bedrock is not poetic fantasy. “It exists,” Pioli said. “This club is used to these moments, these emotions. It knows how to be a protagonist.”For Milan, this is the stage on which it belongs. Its return represents a revival, a restoration of its grandeur, blurred but never quite lost in the tumult of the last decade or so. Even the opponent that lies in wait — its city rival and current San Siro housemate, Inter — brings the memories of how things used to be flooding back.The clubs have been here before: They were paired together in the semifinals in 2003, and again in the quarterfinals in 2007. (The auguries are good for Milan — on both previous occasions, it progressed — but not great for neutral observers: none of the four games, all home and away and yet held on precisely the same turf, could be described as a classic.)And yet the rivalry’s return is not testament to how little has changed, but how much. The Milan that took the field in 2007, on its way to winning its seventh European Cup in Athens, was the last incarnation of the club’s imperial phase: Maldini and Alessandro Nesta in defense, Andrea Pirlo in midfield, Kaká and Filippo Inzaghi upfront. It was still, recognizably, the team that Silvio Berlusconi had built, the fruits of the first modern superclub: experienced, authoritative, impossibly glamorous.The Milan that will face Inter at San Siro on Wednesday, and then again six days later, is quite different. Milan’s time in the doldrums — the years in which it was sold by Berlusconi, bought by a mysterious Chinese investor, salvaged by an activist hedge fund, and eventually purchased by an American consortium — have necessitated a complete change of approach.Where once Milanello, the club’s training facility, was famous for its ability to eke a few more years out of aging stars, the focus is now on youth. It is with great pride that Pioli points out — more than once — that his Italian championship-winning team of 2021 was “the youngest squad in history” to claim the title. That Milan returned to the pinnacle is the most important thing. But how it got there matters, too.The modern Milan is a blend of old (forward Olivier Giroud) …Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images… and new (forward Rafael Leão).Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter, notably, has refused to countenance such a switch of focus, rejecting the idea of abandoning its long-held status as one of Europe’s handful of destination clubs. “Inter is a very strong club, which rarely sells its best players,” Inter’s chief executive, Giuseppe Marotta, said last year, seemingly affronted by the idea that players might use it as a way station on their journeys to Real Madrid, Paris St.-Germain or the Premier League.Milan, by contrast, has bowed to reality, and sought to use its new place in the pecking order to its advantage. Under successive owners — first Elliott Investment Management, the activist fund, and now Red Bird Capital, backed by Gerry Cardinale — it has adopted a data-infused approach, based around locating the underappreciated and overlooked and burnishing them to a sheen.The midfielder Brahim Díaz came from the ranks of Real Madrid’s stand-ins. The versatile Malick Thiaw was plucked from Germany’s second tier. The defender Pierre Kalulu was playing for the French club Lyon’s second team. Milan has accepted that the world has changed. “A club has to have a project,” Pioli said. “Ours was very clear: to invest in young players with talent, and then give them time to grow.”A sprinkling of stardust remains, a ghost of the old glamour, in the form of Zlatan Ibrahimovic — now largely an immaculately-dressed cheerleader — and the ageless Olivier Giroud, but they have been scattered judiciously through the squad, given a role that is, at least in part, pastoral.“The club was smart in making sure there was a mix,” Pioli said. “That’s why we have been able to get such good results in such a short space of time. Sometimes, a coach can say something and it has an impact. But sometimes, when it is a teammate, a champion, it helps, too. It is all done with the same aim in mind.”Milan’s San Siro has two home teams in the Champions League semifinals. Only one can advance to next month’s final in Istanbul.Daniele Mascolo/ReutersThat aim has, broadly speaking, been an act of restoration. For most clubs, winning the championship would have been enough. Milan, though, belongs to that slim category of teams — along with Real, Bayern Munich, and to some extent Liverpool — that draw their identity less from domestic affairs and more from continental triumphs. The semifinals of the Champions League, and beyond, is where Milan, historically, feels at home.The place looks very different these days, of course. For all the mounting frenzy, the churning anxiety in Milan at the prospect of a winner-takes-all derby unspooling over the next week, received wisdom has it that both are playing for a silver medal. Whoever wins, the overwhelming favorite for the final will be whichever team emerges from the meeting of Real Madrid and Manchester City in the other semifinal. Unfeasible as it would have seemed in 2003, Italian soccer is an underdog now.Pioli, though, is undaunted. Economically, the teams of Serie A can no longer compete with even the small fry of the Premier League: Milan found itself outbid by Bournemouth, no less, when both were chasing the Italian midfielder Nicolo Zaniolo in January. Italy’s shine has faded, and its power has dimmed. This Milan is not a reprise of the glory days when Serie A towered over the world, but something closer to a requiem for them.“But when that is true, you have to be innovative,” Pioli said. “With ideas, with quality of work.” Necessity, he said, has been the mother of invention. “It has become an undervalued championship, in my mind,” he said. “There are lots of different ideas, different styles, lots of confrontations with teams and coaches who have different systems of play or how they interpret games.”That, in turn, has helped the new breed of Italian teams — their squads diminished, perhaps, from the days when they acted as a roll-call of global superstars — to begin to make up for the financial shortfall.They may not have the best players any more. They may not have the luster they once did. In the bright, harsh light, a team as grand as A.C. Milan might even come to look like a minnow. But they have, Pioli said, a “knowledge” rooted in the variety of challenges they encounter domestically, one that means they are “prepared” for whatever Europe can muster.“Calcio has suffered for a few years,” he said. “But now it is ready to be a protagonist again.” More

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      The Champions League Ventures Down Memory Lane

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      Real Madrid-Manchester City is the headliner. A.C. Milan-Inter is the classic.The blockbuster matchup, no question, is the one that pits the establishment against the insurgent, the old guard against the new wave, the incomparable past against the inevitable future.Real Madrid against Manchester City has Pep Guardiola, Luka Modric, Erling Haaland, Karim Benzema. It is the team with more European Cups than anyone else against the team that wants a European Cup more than anyone else. It is a sequel, of course, but the Champions League — like Hollywood — loves a sequel. It is pure box office.It might, then, seem both distinctly counterintuitive and obviously pretentious to suggest that the other Champions League semifinal might somehow be more alluring. A.C. Milan against Inter Milan is very much the art-house offering, the feature directed at a niche, self-selecting audience. (Unless you are, of course, Italian.)It will not, make no mistake, have quite the production values of the show on offer at the Bernabéu and the Etihad. The cast list is not quite as glittering. And despite featuring two rivals so local they share a stadium, it does not offer quite such a straightforward, compelling narrative.Real Madrid against Manchester City, at heart, is about revenge and it is about power. It offers an insight into the ever-mutable nature of the Champions League, and by extension European soccer. There are conclusions to be drawn from its outcome.Diego Milito and Inter won the 2010 Champions League final.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInter versus Milan, on the other hand, has just kind of happened. It is not to diminish their achievements to suggest that neither team expected, realistically, to be here. Their presence in the final four is not a consequence of rich form or stellar seasons; both have performed modestly in Serie A this season.It cannot even be read in good faith as proof of the resurgence of Italian soccer, which remains mired in debt, hidebound by bureaucracy and hamstrung by grinding conservatism. As the magazine Rivista Undici pointed out this week, nobody seriously believes that Serie A is now the best domestic competition in Europe because it provided three of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists this season. The successes of Inter, Milan and Napoli belong to the clubs themselves, not to the league as a whole.But for all that, the matchup’s appeal is undeniable. First and foremost, of course, it is a derby, one being played out over two of the biggest games of the club season. It is what was described, the last time it happened, as the “longest derby in the world,” a week of worry and stress and hope from which both heroes and villains will emerge.That it is fresh helps, too. No Italian team has reached the semifinals since Roma’s equally unanticipated surge in 2018. Neither Milanese side has made it this far since the last time they won the competition: Inter in 2010, Milan in 2007.Inter is the last Italian team to win the trophy.Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Champions League has long felt like a private club. The two sides of this rivalry, the Derby della Madonnina, make unlikely interlopers. Milan, with seven titles, has won the European Cup more than anyone except Real Madrid; Inter is eighth on the list, with three. Neither would accept the role of underdog either naturally or willingly, even as their presence is an infusion of new blood that the tournament needed.But most of all, for a certain vintage of fan, it has to do with memory. It was 2003, the last time these two teams were drawn together at this stage of this competition. (They would meet again, in the 2005 quarterfinal, a tie that A.C. Milan won with ease.)Back then, it was far closer to a curiosity than a miracle. Serie A, after all, was regarded as the finest league on the planet, and had been for 20 years or so. Milan — or at least the combined geography of Piedmont and Lombardy — was Italian soccer’s capital, and by extension the mistress of the world. That Inter and A.C. Milan might stand in each other’s way was only a matter of time, part of the natural order of things. A.C. Milan scraped through, that time. It beat another Italian team, Juventus, in the final.It is hard to pinpoint, precisely, when that world ended. Eras, in soccer, do not divide as neatly as journalists, historians and the subset of fans who think about these things like to pretend. Italian clubs won the Champions League three times in the first decade of this century: Milan twice, in 2003 and 2007, and Inter in 2010. Juventus made the final in 2003, too, and Milan in 2005.Filippo Inzaghi scored when Milan last won the Champions League, against Liverpool in 2007 in Athens.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd yet, by the time of Inter’s victory, few would have pronounced Serie A the best domestic competition on the planet. That title had passed first to the Premier League, and then, thanks to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, to La Liga.(It would return to the Premier League, by common consensus, no later than 2016. But again: In that time, English sides have won the Champions League twice. Real Madrid has delivered four more trophies for Spain. These things are unhelpfully messy.)Likewise, there is no single explanation for why or how it happened. Serie A lost its primacy in the same way that Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The stadiums started to look a little outdated, and then the style of play did as well. The debts piled up. The television product grew stale, the revenues dwarfed by those on offer in the Premier League.The players, as players do, gravitated to where the money was, and the money was in England and in parts of Spain. Violence flared with ever greater frequency in the stands. Attendances started to fall. Patches of empty seats appeared on screens.And against that backdrop came Calciopoli, the great referee-influencing scandal of 2006, dripping poison and doubt into Italian soccer’s bloodstream. Juventus was disgraced. Others were stained. Everyone suffered. Serie A was faded and diminished and now it was tarnished, too. It has never really recovered.That there is a Milan derby in the semifinals of the Champions League — that, for the first time since 2017, there will be an Italian team in the final in Istanbul — is not a remedy for that decline.Only Real Madrid (14) has more Champions League titles than A.C. Milan (7).Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Serie A that has emerged from the ashes of its past has plenty of attractive qualities. It is on course for a fourth winner in four years. It has a competitive balance that few of its peers can match. It is home to bold, intelligent coaches, giving rise to an enticing heterogeneity of style, and it has more than a few owners seeking to introduce a degree of innovation.But it is not on the cusp of reclaiming its place at the summit of world soccer; that crown is awarded not by artistic merit or even by popular acclamation but by brute economic power. Serie A was not king in the 1990s or 2000s because of the weather, or the food, or some innate cultural supremacy. It just paid more. Now the deepest pockets are in the Premier League, and that is not going to change anytime soon.It is there, though, that lies the appeal of Milan against Inter, twice in six days, for a place in the biggest game of the year. It is a break from the present, a chance to drift just a little in a past that has disappeared. There was no notice issued when Serie A slipped — or stepped off — its pedestal. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. Now, two decades later, there is an unexpected reminder of how the world used to be, before things moved and shifted and changed forever, when the light in Italy just seemed a little brighter than anywhere else.Details, DetailsAt Bayern Munich, it’s back to the drawing board.Leonhard Simon/ReutersBayern Munich will not take this well. It is less than a month since the club fired Julian Nagelsmann, a manager it had paid more than $25 million to hire, at least in part because he went skiing at a time deemed inappropriate. The club is unlikely to shrug its shoulders at being eliminated from not only the Champions League but the German cup, too, in the space of a few days.Thomas Tuchel, freshly installed as Nagelsmann’s replacement, should be safe for now, but all around him will be a blur of change. Oliver Kahn, the iconic goalkeeper turned chief executive, is under scrutiny. Hasan Salihamidzic, another former player and now Bayern’s sporting director, will not be resting easy. Herbert Hainer, the club’s president, already has hinted that there will be churn in the squad, too.Whether any of this will have the desired effect is a different matter. There was a sense, watching Manchester City hold Bayern at bay on Wednesday evening, of two clubs moving in opposite directions. An era that belongs to City, and to its fellow avatars of the new soccer, is doubtless beginning. The one dominated by Bayern and its ilk is slipping into the past.And yet the whole picture is much more complex, and substantially simpler, than that.No, Bayern cannot compete with City, not in the long term: The combined forces of Bavarian corporate culture are no match for that particular blend of Premier League wealth and nation-state resources. The days when Bayern could function essentially as a Bundesliga All-Star team — plucking the finest players from its rivals to perpetuate its domestic dominance and its European relevance — are over. Like Juventus and Barcelona before it, Bayern Munich will at some point bow to, or be bowed by, England’s economic primacy.But decade-spanning macroeconomic trends are not easily distilled into roughly two hours of soccer. Even in a game that seemed to define the direction of the whole sport, the margins were impossibly fine. In this case, it came down to the fact that City has a fearsome goal scorer — Erling Haaland, you may have heard him mentioned — and Bayern, essentially, does not. Tuchel’s team created half a dozen good chances before Haaland scored in Munich. It just did not take any of them.And, frustrating though that might be, it is also a significantly easier problem to solve than the imbalance in financial prowess between the European continent and the acquisitive, swashbuckling utopia that sits shimmering just off its shores. (The Premier League, that is. Other adjectives are available for the current state of Britain.)Should Bayern secure the services of Victor Osimhen or Randal Kolo Muani this summer — or even, the club’s ultimate dream, Harry Kane — it will certainly be back in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next season, and there is a better than even chance the outcome will be different. Long term, big picture, Bayern cannot keep up with the wealth of the Premier League in general, and Manchester City in particular. But then it does not need to, not really. It just needs to be able to overcome it for 90 minutes at a time.Correspondence: Your Ideas, RatedThe good news: Many, many of you have been in touch to pitch ideas for how soccer might follow baseball’s example and tweak its rules to make the game more engaging for idle teenagers. Not quite as many as got in touch to tell me about why banning the shift in baseball is a good thing, but still, a lot.The bad news: None of you got the correct answer, which was Extra Time Sudden Death Multi-Ball, so nobody wins the special prize of an afternoon of blue-sky thinking with Gerard Piqué.There were, alas, too many emails to address every suggestion, so here is a fairly representative selection, each condensed into a pearl of wisdom and then assessed by an expert panel — me, talking to my dog — who considers the suggestion’s merit and then makes a slightly condescending remark about its viability.Paul Kassel: “Shrink the field. It would compel tighter passing, fewer over-the-top balls that go nowhere, a bit more chaos. It would speed up the game, and likely increase scoring.”I like the theory, but if anything I’d go the other way: Teams are too well-organized now, so let’s space them out a bit. Grade: B.Charles Kelly: “The most obvious way to restore any modicum of sanity to the offside and handball rules is to restore their enforcement to the judgment of the referee. Accept that such calls are a judgment. Will some judgments be wrong? Of course. That’s the nature of judgment, and reasonable people know and accept that.”Thoroughly sensible, certainly for offside. Handball would be better served if there had to be deliberate motion toward the ball, as was the case at some point, I think. All of this falls down on relying on people to be “reasonable,” obviously. Grade: A for idea, F for execution.The referee will hear your complaints in order. Please take a number.Azael Rodriguez/Getty ImagesKirk Farmer: “I would change the offside rule so that a player is onside if any part of his/her body is even with the defender.”Wouldn’t we all, Kirk? Well, you, me and Arsène Wenger, which is not a bad group to be in, unless you’re Wenger. Grade: ASteve Elliott: “Some league somewhere should stop awarding points just for showing up, and say to get points in the table, you need to score goals on the field. No points for a goal-less draw.”Hard pass, I’m afraid, Steve, but there is the kernel of an idea here. Could an away draw earn more points than a home draw? Could scoring three goals or more earn a bonus point? Grade: C for you, D for me.Gregory Crouch: “Punish time-wasting by adding all those extra minutes like they did at the World Cup. Punish intentional tactical fouling more harshly.”Yes to both. But you lose points for the third suggestion, omitted here, of making refereeing more consistent. Too vague. Grade: BLaura Goldin: “How about enforcing the six-second rule that is supposed to be how long the keeper can handle the ball?”This was the rule for at least a decade, and as far as I know, still is. We just seem to have stopped enforcing it. Grade: A, with an asterisk because it already exists.Fred D’Ambrosi: “The solution to soccer’s problems is the salary cap. It will never happen, but leveling the playing field solves many more problems than cutting the game time by 30 minutes.”A salary cap or some other alternative that bridges the massive, yawning rift between the rich and everyone else and that we have, for some reason, all decided is actually great? If anything, this idea is insufficiently outrageous. Grade: A More

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      Manchester City Eliminates Bayern Munich in Champions League

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      City dispatched Bayern Munich to reach the Champions League semifinals. But, as usual, getting close won’t be good enough.MUNICH — Suddenly, quietly, improbably inconspicuously, Manchester City finds itself within touching distance once more of the thing it does not like to talk about but is never far from its thoughts, the one prize that has eluded Pep Guardiola at City, the ultimate victory that has long felt like the inevitable conclusion of all that the club has done, all that it has spent, all that it has wanted.It has never been an easy subject to broach with Guardiola, the team’s head coach. How he reacts tends to depend on his mood. Sometimes, it makes him irascible, sometimes weary. There are occasions when he plays it for laughs, and moments when he goes for playful indulgence, like a man talking to a dog, as if the very thought of one of the most expensive and ambitious sports-political projects of all time gobbling up trophies is risible.“Forget it, forget it,” he said last month. “When you start to talk about that, you start to lose competitions and drop competitions.”Familiarity lies at the root of his contempt, of course. He has been asked about the possibility of winning “The Treble” — when spoken, the phrase is always capitalized — in every single one of his seasons at City, with the possible exception of his fact-finding first. For a while, convention dictated it not be mentioned until at least springtime. These days it is broached when, jet-lagged, he first steps off the plane on some far-flung preseason tour.If anything, though, it is a curious and admittedly somewhat contorted form of flattery. The treble — victories in the league, the F.A. Cup and the Champions League — is held up as an almost mythical achievement in English soccer. It stands as the ultimate seal of greatness: It has, after all, only been achieved once, though Manchester United mentions it rarely, and only when prompted.Pep Guardiola, with Manuel Akanji and Bernado Silva.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockThat it seems to fit so readily in his purview is not just testament to soccer’s rapid-onset ossification into immutable hierarchies and to the irresistible power of money, but to the scale of dominion that Guardiola has established at Manchester City. He has already won the Premier League. He has retained it. Twice. He has broken the division’s points record. He has done a clean sweep of domestic honors. What other worlds are there left to conquer?(He might also like to direct a gentle admonishment in the general direction of his employer. In 2019, when City won the league and both domestic cups, Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, commanded that the team be hailed as the “Fourmidables.” It would, he believed, thus overshadow United’s treble. Guardiola’s staff pointed out that including the Community Shield, an exhibition game taken seriously only by the winner, might be technically correct but had the effect of cheapening the achievement. They were overruled.)This season, though, has brought a minor — but telling — shift. City’s quest to clear that final hurdle has bubbled along in the background, as it always does, but it has hardly been front and center.Partly, that has to do with a deference to logic: It would be a little bit gauche, after all, to discuss one team winning every competition in sight when another is several points clear at the top of the Premier League. And partly it has to do with the distracting presence of Erling Haaland, who has spent much of the year forcing people to wonder if there is a number big enough to capture his eventual goals tally.All of a sudden, though, it is the tail end of April and the stars once more seem to have aligned. If Manchester City wins all of its games, it will claim the Premier League trophy for the third year in a row: another item ticked off Guardiola’s bucket list. It is in the F.A. Cup semifinals, and an overwhelming favorite to reach the final. And here on Wednesday in Munich, City filled in the last administrative duty before taking its place in the final four of the Champions League.Aymeric Laporte bending soccer’s rules, and Bayern’s Kingsley Coman.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressBeating Bayern Munich handsomely eight days earlier had made this game seem like a formality, though in reality it did not always quite feel like that. There were moments, particularly in the first half, when Kingsley Coman or Leroy Sané were tearing at City’s flanks and it was possible, just about, to believe that it might not be over.But then Erling Haaland scored, and it was. Bayern equalized, late on, through a penalty by Joshua Kimmich, but by that stage the Allianz Arena had long since given up hope.Magnanimously, Guardiola suggested that the aggregate score of 4-1 did not reflect the true nature of the home-and-home — probably correctly — but then these games, as he said, are defined by details. And the details, in this case, were that Bayern could not take its chances. City, by contrast, grasped those that came its way with a cold certainty, an unforgiving inevitability.It is a useful trait to have, of course, as the season enters its final, defining stretch. The challenges that remain, the obstacles between the club and the achievement that represents the absolute, unavoidable culmination of Abu Dhabi’s vision for soccer, are hardly trifles.Guardiola’s team still has to play, and beat, Arsenal, the Premier League leader. Manchester United or Brighton might await in the F.A. Cup final. Most ominously, Real Madrid lurks in the semifinals of the Champions League, just as it did last year. Nobody at City will need reminding how that ended. Guardiola regards those sorts of fixtures as a “coin flip.” He knows as well as anyone that nobody calls it better than Real Madrid.With Bayern out of the way, City will line up against Real Madrid in the semifinals.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut then City has not so much as dropped a point in the Premier League since February. In March and April, it has so far scored 31 goals and conceded only four. It has the look of a team gathering momentum, a blend of speed and force and purpose. It has the feel of a storm brewing. All of a sudden, almost surreptitiously, City has crept closer to the summit of its own grand ambitions than it has ever been.Quite what that means for soccer as a whole is a subject that will, rightly, come under scrutiny in the coming weeks, as Guardiola steers his side on those last few steps, the most delicate, the most treacherous of all. For him, though, as for his team and for the people who took a club and turned it into something else entirely, spinning it out of whole, golden cloth, this is where the path has always led. All that is left, now, is to get there. More

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      Real Madrid Sends Chelsea Out of Champions League

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      Real Madrid advanced to the semifinals at the expense of a Chelsea team long on cash and talk but short, it seems, on ideas of how to succeed.LONDON — Todd Boehly was supposed to be the smartest man in the room. That was the pitch, anyway, when he first descended on Chelsea, on the Premier League and on European soccer almost a year ago. He was the guy who spoke to a hushed audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference. He was onstage at the SALT forum. Other people described him as a “thought leader.”His ideas, he knew, might be received by traditionalists as a little provocative. He suggested a Premier League all-star game — and a relegation playoff. He told soccer it could learn something from American sports, a longstanding euphemism for finding new ways to extricate more cash from fans. He evangelized the idea of buying a whole network of teams. It was 2022, so at some point he talked — rather more than hindsight would suggest was wise — about NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.Boehly did not seem to mind the criticism, the resistance. He was likely expecting it, the price to be paid for daring to disrupt an industry as fearful and staid and conservative as, um, English soccer. He had a “modern, data-driven approach.” He sought “structural advantages.” He had worked out that paying players for longer somehow made them cheaper. He was the cutting edge. And it would not be the cutting edge if it was comfortable.A quick status update on where Chelsea stands now, a year into the ownership tenure of Boehly and his less visible colleagues: 11th in the Premier League, having won only two of its last 12 games; employing its third manager of the campaign, and simultaneously searching for his replacement; $600 million poorer after embarking on the largest single-season transfer spending spree in history; and, as of Tuesday night, out of the Champions League, its last, distant shot at glory gone.Todd Boehly and Chelsea may not see the Champions League again for a while.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is, at least, no particular shame in that. In the end, this was as straightforward a quarterfinal as Real Madrid could have hoped for: a 2-0 win at home last week, and another 2-0 victory on Tuesday in London, a low bar confidently cleared. But Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s interim manager, was not clutching at straws when he suggested his team had “caused Real a lot of problems” for the first hour or so at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday.Chelsea had chivied and harried and unnerved Real Madrid, the reigning European champion. In patches, anyway. With better finishing, as Lampard observed, things might have been different. A portion of the credit for that should go to him: It was his deployment of N’Golo Kanté in a more advanced role that caused Real Madrid to “suffer” so much, as Carlo Ancelotti, Real’s coach, admitted. Chelsea went down, as it was always going to, but it did so with pride intact.That has not always been the case in the first year of what is probably best described as the Boehly experience. Chelsea has long nursed something of a soap opera streak, one that has provided a curiously accurate reflection of the shifting nature of the part of London it calls home.In the 1960s, the club was home to the Kings of the King’s Road, chic, hip and cool. In the 1970s, the freewheeling mavericks arrived, the club nursing a sort of alternative, pre-punk energy. By the 1990s, it was home to a set of impossibly stylish European imports. And then, from 2003 onward, Roman Abramovich turned it into a sort of gaudy monument to the power of the vast wells of new money pouring into the capital from across the globe, Russia in particular.Frank Lampard, still winless in his latest stint at Chelsea.Clive Rose/Getty ImagesThere have been various points, in all of those incarnations, when Chelsea has veered perilously close to lapsing into self-parody. Abramovich, in particular, appeared to have absolutely no interest in running a sensible, steady sort of a soccer team. He may or may not have been a Kremlin apparatchik, but he was most certainly thirsty for drama.He fired coaches for not winning titles. He fired coaches for not winning the right titles. He fired coaches when they had won titles. He appointed at least one manager whom the fans hated. He appointed another because he was his friend. There was one season when the players effectively ran the show. There was infighting and politicking and dark talk of plots, and all of that was just a quiet Tuesday for José Mourinho.Chelsea, in other words, has a relatively high tolerance for the unusual and even, at times, the absurd. But even by those standards, Boehly and his consortium have pushed it to the limit.Signing so many players that the locker room at the club’s training facility is not quite big enough to accommodate them all is not indicative of judicious planning. Likewise spending so much money that the club, in the absence of Champions League soccer and the income it brings, will not only have to indulge in a fire sale of players this summer but quite possibly breach the Premier League’s financial rules next season.Abramovich was not averse to dropping in on the players — sometimes literally: His helicopter regularly used to land at the Cobham training ground if the fancy took him — in order to inspire or encourage or perhaps just glare menacingly at them. But there are no known instances of him, as Boehly reportedly did, telling one of his expensively acquired stars that his performances had been “embarrassing.”There is a chance, of course, that all of these are just teething problems, a form of culture shock, the inevitable growing pains that come with some very rich, very clever — though it is worth noting that those two things are not as synonymous as is often assumed — people dipping their toes into an industry to which they are not native.It may well be, as Lampard loyally and hopefully suggested, that Chelsea is “back” sooner rather than later: guided by one of the half-dozen managerial candidates being considered by the four sporting directors, or equivalent, it employs, boasting a trimmed-down squad full of bright young things, the fat excised to make way for the lean.As Boehly himself said last year, the Premier League is designed in such a way as to give the “big brands” — oh, Todd — a number of his beloved structural advantages. One of those is the privilege of having money to solve problems. Another is a limit to how much it is possible to fail.From this vantage point, though, the ultimate vindication of Boehly and his group seems almost impossibly distant. Chelsea is out of the Champions League. It will not be back next season. Still, there is hope. It is up to Boehly to plot its way back, and he is, by all accounts, the smartest man in the room.Rodrygo, right, scored both goals as Real Madrid cruised into the semifinals, where it will face the Manchester City-Bayern Munich winner.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press More

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      Benfica, Enzo Fernández and a Champions League Question: What If?

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      The Portuguese giant knew selling Enzo Fernández would make it harder to win Europe’s richest prize. But cashing out early is a story the club knows well.On the night Enzo Fernández left Benfica, nobody mentioned his name. As they gathered in the changing room before their game on the last day of January, his soon-to-be-former teammates would have known roughly what was happening. The club was settling the finer points of Fernández’s $130 million transfer to Chelsea. The player was awaiting permission to fly to London.The silence, though, was not rooted in discomfort. Fernández’s absence did not weigh especially heavy on Benfica’s squad. They were not fretting about how they would cope without him, or lamenting the loss of a core part of their team and a starlet regarded as one of the finest midfield prospects of his generation.Their coach, Roger Schmidt, did not feel the need to take his players aside to discuss it with them, or to address it in his pregame talk. The 56-year-old Schmidt has always hewed to the legendary German coach Sepp Herberger’s rather gnomic adage: Der ball ist rund.Schmidt does not worry about what might lurk behind a silver lining. A crisis is just an opportunity in disguise. One player goes, another takes their place. The ball keeps rolling.Benfica’s players, of course, are used to it by now. No club has mastered the buy low, sell high dynamics of soccer’s transfer market quite like Benfica. Increasingly, in recent years, it has been held up as a paradigm of how a club outside the opulent halls of the game’s cash-soaked elite ought to be run.Across the Tagus River from Lisbon at Seixal, the club has built an academy that is the envy of Europe. On the sprawling, modern campus, Benfica has tapped an apparently bottomless seam of prodigies: Renato Sanches, Bernardo Silva, João Cancelo, Rúben Dias and João Félix all trace their rise to their early days at this cradle of greatness.And what the club cannot grow, it has shown a remarkable aptitude for obtaining. Benfica has established itself as a first port of call in Europe for players emerging from South America, in particular, serving as a showroom and a springboard for the likes of Ángel Di María, David Luiz, Éderson, Darwin Núñez and, of course, Fernández himself.Each has been plucked from comparative obscurity at competitive prices and later sent on their way to superstardom for a king’s ransom. Since the turn of the century, Benfica has made somewhere in the region of $1.5 billion from player sales. Since 2019 alone, the year it sold not just Félix but also the Mexican striker Raúl Jiménez and the Serbian forward Luka Jovic, it has brought in $575 million.That is a source of considerable pride inside the club. As a sports team, Benfica cherishes each of those alumni, especially those who started out at Seixal, basking just a little in their reflected glory. As a business, the club has set its target on ranking as “the first club in terms of total revenue outside of the big five leagues,” Benfica’s chief executive, Domingos Soares de Oliveira, said.Carl Recine/ReutersPeter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockFormer Benfica players in the Champions League this season include Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson, top left, Liverpool striker Darwin Núñez, above right, and Chelsea’s Enzo Fernández and João Félix.Hannah Mckay/ReutersAll of its achievements, though, are tinged with just a little regret.“Of course we do not like to do it,” Soares de Oliveira said. “The main purpose of a club is to win. Everything we do is to win, to meet the expectations of our members. If we had kept Dias, Cancelo, Félix, Enzo — we could have an ambition to win anything on an international level.”It is not that Benfica has not won, either, even as it has transformed itself into European soccer’s most prolific and most profitable trading post. The last decade alone has brought five more Portuguese titles — more than F.C. Porto and Sporting Lisbon, the club’s two greatest domestic rivals — and it has long been a fixture of the group stages of the Champions League. More recently, it has started to make inroads into the knockout phase.It is just that, if the economics of the game were less brutal, Benfica might have won so much more. This season provides a case in point. With Barcelona, Liverpool and Paris St.-Germain eliminated, there is a freshness to the Champions League for the first time in years.Benfica, once again, has made the quarterfinals. This time, though, it can see a comparatively clear path to glory. It faces Inter Milan over the next two weeks. Survive that and another Italian side — Napoli or A.C. Milan — will be all that separates Benfica from an eighth European Cup final, its first since 1990.That prospect would seem significantly closer if Schmidt was still able to call upon Fernández, a player plucked from the Argentine club River Plate for an initial $12 million last summer. Fernández had only made 29 appearances for the Portuguese team when he left for the World Cup in November. He came back from Qatar as one of the most coveted players on the planet.Benfica said it had little choice but to let Fernández walk away after his star turn at the World Cup sent his price soaring past $100 million.Bernadett Szabo/ReutersBenfica did not want to sell him in January. It did not “need” to sell him, either, according to Soares de Oliveira. The money from the sale of Nuñez to Liverpool last summer had bought Benfica some time. “I told Chelsea that,” he said. The club had hoped to hold on to Fernández for another six months, at least.At that point, though, the “will of the player is relevant,” Soares de Oliveira said. And Fernández wanted the move.“The Premier League generates so much money,” he said. “The salaries are several times higher. It makes it very difficult to retain a player.” Benfica, he said, has no interest in keeping hold of those who no longer wish to represent the club.The scale of the deal provided something of a solace, of course. Though Benfica had to pay a considerable fee to River Plate, thanks to a sell-on clause inserted into Fernández’s original contract, it still made something in the region of $70 million in profit in the Chelsea deal. It is yet another feather in the club’s cap. But that is not, really, the metric by which Benfica wants to be judged.“It is not about trading players or profit,” Soares de Oliveira said. “We would prefer to have the player six months later than have to sell him. But we cannot say no.”All it can do, instead, is chart a steady course through the churn. Schmidt has tried to be as phlegmatic as he can about the whole thing. He encouraged some players to use Fernández’s departure as a launchpad: The deal came too late in January for Benfica to source a replacement, so someone had to step up and take his place.So far, that honor has fallen to Chiquinho, a 27-year-old who has spent the last year or so out on loan. He was part of the team that helped Benfica navigate smoothly past Club Bruges in the round of 16 of the Champions League. He will, most likely, be present as it attempts to pick its way past Inter, and into the semifinals, to the foothills of the improbable.That is how it has to be, at Benfica. The ball keeps rolling. The club is used to players leaving. It tries not to let departures sidetrack them from all that it wants to achieve. But occasionally, Benfica wonders, too, if it might be a little better if it did not have to be this way.Tariq Panja contributed reporting from London. More