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      Portrait of an Artist, Still Just a Young Man

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      Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has become a star in nine months at Napoli. With his transcendent talent, things may only get better.NAPLES, Italy — European soccer’s breakout star looks briefly uneasy. It is not the setting. That is just about perfect: He is leaning on a wrought-iron railing on the terrace of the Grand Hotel Parker’s, all cut-glass, belle epoque elegance, the city of Naples spilling out to the sea beneath him. At his back lurks Mount Vesuvius, wreathed in clouds.No, it is the pose that has perplexed Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. He cannot decide what to do with his arms. If he pulls them too close, he looks stiff, tense. If he allows them to slide too far away, he is drawn into a slouch. He cannot find a compromise that makes him happy. For a moment, he is flummoxed. And in that moment, he is just a little outside his comfort zone.In a way, that is quite reassuring. For the better part of the last nine months, after all, it has not been immediately clear that there exists anything at all that can throw Kvaratskhelia off balance. Everything has gone so blissfully, so impossibly smoothly for him that even he has been taken aback at times.“Ever since I arrived,” he said, “it has felt like being in a dream.”Often, it has felt like watching one, too. Trajectories like Kvaratskhelia’s do not happen anymore. There are no overnight sensations in modern soccer. The game’s next big things, its greats-in-waiting, are picked up and pored over before they are in their teens.They have agents at 10, shoe deals at 12 and millions of YouTube views before they hit 14. They are summoned by the sport’s great clubs long before they turn 16, legends paraded in front of them by teams squabbling desperately over their affection and signature. The sort of talent that can illuminate one of Europe’s major leagues is identified and cultivated while it is still germinating.It is not — repeat: not — found showing quiet promise at age 21 while playing for Rubin Kazan, a middling Russian team in what traditionally ranks as one of Europe’s second-tier competitions. Those are not circumstances in which it is possible to procure a player who will immediately turn out to be among the most devastating attacking forces in the world.Except that is precisely what happened.Kvaratskhelia’s first season at Napoli could end with the club’s first Italian title in more than three decades. Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersKvaratskhelia arrived at Napoli for a little more than $10 million last summer (from Dinamo Batumi, in his homeland, Georgia, after having canceled his contract in Kazan). The Italian side had, by all accounts, been tracking him for two years.Within a couple of months, his new club’s fans had taken to calling him either Kvaradona or, more erudite, Kvaravaggio. One company in Georgia began arranging charter flights to Naples to coincide with Napoli’s home games, ensuring that every time he takes the field at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, one small corner of the stadium is marked by Georgian flags and contains a couple hundred countrymen there specifically to see him.By Christmas, his agent was having to dampen talk on a reasonably regular basis that Manchester City was busy riffling through its bottomless wallet to find the $100 million or so that might persuade Napoli to cash in on its budding phenom.None of it appears to have fazed him in the slightest. “The start was so smooth that it did feel like a dream,” he said. “But at some point, early on, I had to collect myself, remind myself that it was not a dream, that it was reality, and I had to find the strength in myself to live through it.”Nine months later, Kvaratskhelia still does not possess the glossy veneer of the ascendant superstar. His hair is tousled: not artfully or deliberately, but absent-mindedly. His beard is thick but patchy enough that another nickname, Che Kvara, has caught on, too. He looks like a tortured love poet or an eager politics student.He speaks perfectly passable English — good enough to expound, in reasonable detail, on the health-giving qualities of Georgian wine — but preferred his first major interview since moving to Italy to run through an interpreter back in Tbilisi. A friend of his girlfriend’s mother works in the country’s parliament, he explained. “She normally works with important people,” he said, without a hint of irony.Napoli’s coach sold Kvaratskhelia not with an offer of freedom, but a demand to fit in with his team.Roberto Salomone for The New York TimesIt is typical of how lightly he has worn his new status, of how easily he has carried the weight of expectation that has rapidly coalesced around him. “I tend to default to gratitude,” he said. “I am grateful for every piece of love and affection people show me. I know it is praise, but it is also motivation and inspiration. It is a huge responsibility. I have to prove every game that I can do as I have promised.”At no point has it looked as if that might be a problem. In 21 games in his debut season in Serie A, Kvaratskhelia has scored 10 goals and created 11 more. The last of them came on Saturday, a storybook goal that involved slaloming between three defenders and then cannoning a fierce, rising shot past three more, as well as the goalkeeper.It set his team on a course to a victory that extended its lead over second-place Inter Milan at the top of Serie A to 18 points. Napoli is on its way to its first Italian title in 33 years, and common consensus has identified Kvaratskhelia as the reason.The Champions League has proved no more daunting. His first contribution in that competition was to instill an identity crisis — as yet unresolved — in Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool and England right back. His most recent was a moderately unrealistic back-heeled assist in Napoli’s win against Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of its last 16 tie.That virtuosic streak — the sense that his greatest asset is an untamed imagination — has become Kvaratskhelia’s calling card. “That freedom is my signature,” he said. “It is something I recognize in myself. It is because I love what I do. When I am playing, it kind of carries me away.”A Georgian company arranges flights for every Napoli home game so fans can watch their favorite son. Ciro De Luca/ReutersIt is not, though, what he would attribute as the root of his sudden success. Before he joined Napoli, he had a long phone call with Luciano Spalletti, the club’s wily, experienced coach. Spalletti, as is normal in these situations, was simultaneously trying to sell him on the club and warn him as to the nature of his duties.“It was a good talk,” Kvaratskhelia said. The coach did not promise him carte blanche to express himself. “He told me what I would be expected to do for the team. We talked a lot about focusing on defensive work, about being part of team play and the importance of team spirit. That is what is really important to him: the spirit.”That is not necessarily, of course, what a player of Kvaratskhelia’s gifts — spontaneous, off-the-cuff, proudly improvisational — might be expected to want to hear, that he was being introduced not as a soloist but as part of an ensemble. And yet it made perfect sense to him. Partly, he recognized that Spalletti’s approach might round out his skill set. “Italian coaches are famous,” he said. “They know how to make players perform.”Mainly, though, it fit with the way he saw his talent. “You play with your heart, with passion, but you also play with your conscious brain,” he said. “It is more a conscious thing than anything else, based on what you have learned in training, on the mistakes you have made previously, on the options that are there.”What looks like the work of impromptu genius is, to Kvaratskhelia, actually nothing more than a constructed pattern of lived experience. “The way I play is both heart and conscious thought,” he said, chewing it over a little more. “But if you don’t use your brain, you would never improve.”“Freedom is my signature,” he said. “It is something I recognize in myself. It is because I love what I do.”Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockHe knows that is his next challenge.He has, he acknowledged, detected that teams — particularly in Italy — have started to defend him a little differently. He may not act like a star, and he may not feel like a star, but he is starting to be treated like one. “I feel like my factor has been built in to the way teams set up against us,” he said.He is not troubled by that. If anything, he sees it as a compliment. Nine months since his arrival, every team that faces Napoli knows that if it is to stand any chance at all, it has to succeed where so many others have failed. It has to find a way of taking Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the overnight sensation with Naples, the star with Italy and Europe in the palm of his hands, out of his comfort zone. More

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      P.S.G.’s Star System Has Run Its Course

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      Even with Messi, Mbappé and Neymar, the French champion is a Champions League also-ran once again. Is buying local the way forward?Nobody at Paris St.-Germain seemed particularly upset at being knocked out of the Champions League. Christophe Galtier, the coach, made all the right noises, of course. It was a terrible disappointment, he said. A great shame, because this is a competition that really means a lot to the club. Very sad for all concerned.Kylian Mbappé, meanwhile, came across so phlegmatic that he seemed almost detached, as if the whole thing had happened only in the abstract. He had promised that P.S.G. would do the best it could in the Champions League, he said. So it must logically follow that being eliminated by Bayern Munich in the round of 16 was the best it could do. “That is our maximum,” Mbappé said.Certainly, there was none of the fury or frustration that has typically greeted P.S.G.’s shortfalls in this competition over the last decade. None of the club’s executives tried to barge into the referees’ room to complain about a decision. There was no boiling indignation or bubbling sense of injustice. Just as it had on the field, P.S.G. slipped from view without rage or rancor.It would be easy to attribute that meekness to familiarity. After all, failing in the last 16 of the Champions League is kind of what P.S.G. does: Writing in L’Equipe, Vincent Duluc referred to it as the club’s “culture.” It has lost at this stage in eight of the last 10 seasons. It still hurts, of course, but it does not hurt as much, not when you are steeled for the blow.New cast, same ending.Andreas Schaad/Associated PressThere is, though, a kinder diagnosis. After a decade in which they have spent an obscene amount of state-supplied money putting together one of the most expensive, star-spangled squads ever conceived — gathering immense, unchecked political power and dangerously distorting the financial landscape of European soccer in the process — the power brokers at P.S.G. have, belatedly, started to wonder if they are doing this whole thing wrong.The club’s Qatari leaders have realized that what they would call their “squad-building model” has left the club with an unbalanced, ill-fitting sort of a team, one that any manager would struggle to forge into a cogent unit.They have heard the long, consistent complaints from the club’s fans that they cannot identify with a motley collection of superstars, picked up and plucked down with little apparent rhyme or reason beyond how many followers they have on Instagram. And they have, at last, decided to do something about it.There is, within the club, a desire to repurpose the squad this summer so that it has not just a more French flavor, but a more distinctly Parisian one. The French capital has, after all, been the most fertile proving ground in world soccer for years. It has long been absurd that it has had only the dimmest reflection in the city’s only top-flight team, not least because a team stocked with local talent is effectively a shortcut to a genuine identity, one that fans appreciate and cherish.That will mean, as the plan runs, more opportunities for players from the club’s youth system. It was telling that P.S.G. finished Wednesday’s game with two teenage prospects on the field in Munich: defender El Chadaille Bitshiabu and midfielder Warren Zaïre-Emery, neither of whom is old enough to rent a car.El Chadaille Bitshiabu, a 17-year-old defender from the Paris suburbs, made his Champions League debut on Wednesday.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that kind of reconstruction will also require the club to repatriate some of the prospects who eluded its grasp in the recent past, the players whose successes elsewhere effectively function as an ongoing rebuke of P.S.G.’s failure to make the most of the talent on its doorstep.That will not be a cheap endeavor. Marcus Thuram, the Borussia Mönchengladbach forward, may be out of contract this summer, but his club teammate Manu Koné is not. Neither is Randal Kolo Muani, the France international currently with Eintracht Frankfurt. Koné and Kolo Muani have been identified as prospective recruits for this new-look P.S.G. The club cannot expect a discount for buying local.That is not the only point at which the theory — logically sound though it may be — collides with an unhelpful reality. It is not really possible to “overhaul” a squad, not in the way that the news media presents it, fans understand it and executives tend to mean it.It is all very well that P.S.G. wants to add more Parisian players to its ranks, but what does that mean for the squad that is currently in situ, the one made up of highly decorated internationals on generous, legally enforceable contracts?While it is vaguely feasible that Lionel Messi will take one decision, at least, out of P.S.G.’s hands by electing to move back to Barcelona, or back to Argentina, or by deciding to fill the only gap on his glistening résumé and spend a couple of years being taught the finer points of the game by Phil Neville in Miami. (The fact that P.S.G. would ideally like both to rip up its squad and start again and extend Messi’s contract is an irony the club appears not to have noticed.)Kylian Mbappé, Neymar and Lionel Messi remain, for now, the centerpieces of an imperfect team.Sarah Meyssonnier/ReutersBut while Messi, like Neymar, draws much of the focus, they are not really the problem. Far more complex are their teammates, the ones earning P.S.G. money and playing Champions League soccer who would have to be persuaded to forgo at least one of those things to allow the club to accommodate the reinforcements.How many teams are there, for example, who would both be willing and able to match Marco Verratti’s salary? And how many of those clubs would Marco Verratti actually want to join? Or would P.S.G. find itself with a squad caught between two eras: half-stocked with young Parisian players, restored to the hometown club that scorned them, and half-filled with the remnants of its flawed, futile past?That is the issue, of course, with trying to impose an identity on a team, rather than allowing one to develop organically. And regardless of the provenance of the players, that is precisely what P.S.G. would be trying to do: turn the club, overnight, into a sort of high-status Athletic Bilbao, just as it has spent a decade trying to craft an image of Barcelona-en-Seine.It would not be authentic, not in any real sense. It would simply be an identity that can be assumed for a while and then discarded whenever it is convenient, just as all the others have been. It would, effectively, be nothing but a rebranding. And it is difficult to believe that it would lead to any other destination to the one that P.S.G. knows so well: the one where the disappointment is so familiar that it no longer hurts the way it once did, where defeat is borne not with anger but weary resignation, where everything has to change but nothing really will.Two Bad OptionsPhilippe Diallo said he was left with no choice except to fire France’s coach, Corinne Diacre.Jean-Francois Monier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCorinne Diacre can take pride, really, in lasting this long. She was, eventually, dismissed from her post as coach of the French women’s team on Thursday. But her position had been untenable for the better part of a year, if not more.Senior players had complained about her methods, her managerial style, her selection choices, her approach to communications — basically anything and everything you could possibly think of — before last summer’s European Championship. An ever-growing number of her squad had publicly refused to represent their country as long as she was in charge.In the end, then, the only surprise was that the French soccer federation, the F.F.F., waited so long. “I was confronted by an unease that had already existed for several years,” said Philippe Diallo, the federation’s interim president. “It is up to me to decide it, but I did so by choosing between two bad options.”In speaking to the players, he said, he had been told of “a difficulty between the coach and a certain number” of the squad. He decided he had no choice but to “follow their recommendation,” not least because there is a World Cup in a few months and France would, presumably, want to have most of its best players available to play in it.But while the strength of the players’ feeling is not in doubt, what lies at the root of it is less clear. Diacre is known to be cold, brusque even. She gives the air, certainly, of being an unforgiving, vaguely old-school sort of a coach. She is not, in the words of one colleague, a “natural communicator.”Those are all flaws, of course, but flaws are not the same as fireable offenses. (There has never been a suggestion of anything more untoward at the heart of the French players’ complaints.) It is not necessarily the coach’s job, after all, to be liked by the players. It is not necessarily in the interests of the federation that the players feel empowered to remove any coach that they do not agree with professionally.Diallo, clearly, felt he had no choice but to remove Diacre in the hope of ending the impasse. He is probably right to worry, though, that the precedent is not an encouraging one. More

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      Chelsea Saves the Day; Saving the Season Can Come Later

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      Beating Dortmund in the Champions League will ease the pressure on Graham Potter and his team, but it won’t end the questions about where they are headed.LONDON — Just when Graham Potter needed it most, something may have stirred at Chelsea. All of those disparate, finely tuned parts, the expensively but randomly acquired fruits of the club’s lavish transfer-market abandon, slotted together enough to keep his team’s season alive. And they did so just in the nick of time.Potter, for the last few weeks, has had the air of a manager desperately trying to keep his head above water. Chelsea had won only twice all year. His team had not scored more than one goal in a game since December. First, it had lost ground in the race for a top-four finish in the Premier League, and then it had lost sight of it completely.As a rule, all of that ends only one way for a coach: not just at Chelsea but especially at Chelsea. The club’s fans had not quite turned on Potter, not en masse, but there has been for some time a definite sense that they are thinking about it. The club’s owners, meanwhile, have been assiduous in reiterating their ongoing faith in the 47-year-old Potter, but there comes a point where the frequency of those reassurances is itself reflective of a problem.Potter will know, of course, that edging past a somewhat depleted Borussia Dortmund, 2-0, on Tuesday to qualify for the quarterfinals of the Champions League is not a panacea. It will not make him immune to dark talk of crisis should Chelsea stutter in the Premier League. But it is preferable to the alternative: Winning this game was not conclusive, but losing it might have been.Raheem Sterling’s first-half goal had Chelsea ahead on the night and even over two legs.Hannah Mckay/ReutersIt was fitting, really, that the game, and the round-of-16 tie, hinged on a five-minute period in which nobody actually played any soccer. Chelsea had gone into halftime with the lead on the night and parity restored on aggregate, Raheem Sterling canceling out the advantage Dortmund had established three weeks ago in Germany.The circumstances in which Potter’s team went ahead, though, were not soul-stirring and blood-pumping; they were, instead, strange and disembodied and somehow remote, as if the whole event had been settled by decree elsewhere.It started with a handball from Marius Wolf, the Dortmund right back, one confirmed only after the intervention of the video assistant referee and a long gaze at the pitch-side monitor by the on-field official, Danny Makkelie. The players idled around as they waited to find out their fate.It would get stranger. Once the penalty had been awarded, Kai Havertz missed it, his effort clipping the post with his teammates already celebrating. A moment later, he had a reprieve. Three Dortmund players had encroached into the penalty area as he prepared to take the kick. After another V.A.R. check, Havertz was given another go. He got it right this time.Dortmund players surrounded the referee, Danny Makkelie, after he awarded Chelsea a second try at a missed penalty kick.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, it was apt, because even in victory it is not immediately possible to discern a clear, distinct pattern in this Chelsea team. There is nothing, as yet, that marks it out as characteristically Potter’s, no glowing signpost toward the future of this team as he has envisioned it, no particularly idiosyncratic stamp.Perhaps that is inevitable. After all, there has been continual upheaval at Stamford Bridge over the last year, a flood of new players arriving first in the summer and then, more eye-catching still, in January. Potter, it has to be assumed, has approved most of those signings, but fostering and nurturing a coherent team takes time and patience.And it is only natural, given the sheer number of players at his disposal, that Potter has been unable to resist the temptation to cycle through all of his options. As results and performances have waned, rather than waxed, he has tweaked his personnel and his formation and then his personnel again. He has not, yet, hit upon a formula that works reliably, or that he feels confident may work reliably.That can, of course, be a signifier of a creditable versatility, a chameleonic streak that he displayed in his previous job at Brighton and that will stand the club in good stead in the long term. But more immediately it can also betray an uncertainty, a restlessness and a lack of clarity, all of which have a habit of making the long term irrelevant.Nico Schlotterbeck and Dortmund pressed again and again for a goal that might have extended the two-legged tie.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse, via Ikimages/AFP, via Getty ImagesPotter may, in time, come to look back on this game as an educational experience. Maybe the front line of Sterling, Havertz and João Félix does offer the best balance of all the combinations available to him. Certainly, finding a way to empower Chelsea’s two raiding fullbacks, Ben Chilwell and Reece James, should be as much a priority for him as it was for Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel.Those notes of cautious optimism, though, will be offset by the fact that Dortmund had Chelsea on the ropes for periods of the first half; with a little more precision and composure, the German team might easily have punished Chelsea for its failure to take control of the game. This was not sweeping, serene progress into the land of Europe’s giants. It was nip and tuck, taut and tense, almost until the end.Still, for Chelsea, that will have to do. For now, at least. Far more important than how the team qualified was that it did so, that for a few more weeks, at least, the impending sense of doom can be lifted just a little, that there remains a purpose in a season that might otherwise have started to drift, that all is not yet lost. For Potter, in particular, that is what matters. It is better, of course, to win in the way you want to win. Until that can happen, though, any type of win will do.Kepa Arrizabalaga and his teammates will learn their quarterfinal opponent next week.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Reputation Meets Reality in the Champions League

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      The Premier League’s financial might should allow it to dominate Europe’s top soccer competition. So why hasn’t that happened?Everyone involved was taking the positives. In Dortmund, Chelsea’s Graham Potter was talking about a “step forward” in his efforts to solve the gilded thousand-piece puzzle he has been handed by his club’s new owners. In Milan, Tottenham’s Antonio Conte was happy his “trust” in a youthful emergency midfield pairing had been repaid.Both were doing all they could to project an air of calm assurance. Conte, a man who could never be accused of bottling up his emotions, even used the word “relaxed” to describe his state of mind. Sure, Chelsea and Tottenham had both lost the first legs of their Champions League round of 16 ties, but that was nothing to worry about. There are the home games to come in a few weeks. Things will be better then. Wrongs will be righted. Everything is breezy.Neither manager’s pose was particularly ludicrous. Neither team had played especially badly. Both sides might have felt just a little unfortunate to have lost. Chelsea, still feeling its way to a settled identity after its winter excess, created a raft of chances against Borussia Dortmund. Spurs, its squad winnowed by injury and suspension, had menaced A.C. Milan. Both had lost only by a single goal. Both remain firmly in contention to make the quarterfinals.And yet, for all the legitimacy of those mitigating circumstances, for all the fine margins that separate victory from defeat and one interpretation of history from another, it is hard not to feel as if this sort of thing should not happen to the moneyed elite of the Premier League any more.Kepa Arrizabalaga and Chelsea lost at Borussia Dortmund. But all is not lost. Yet.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesChelsea, in case you have forgotten, spent more on players in January than every club in France, Spain, Italy and Germany combined. A.C. Milan found itself unable to compete on salaries with Bournemouth, a team with a stadium that has a capacity of 11,379 people. Dortmund’s business model involves the annual sale of its best players to England.Here they were, though, not just standing up to two of the best that the Premier League can offer but beating them. It may have been with home-field advantage, the backing of 80,000 or so bellicose fans, and it may only have been by the skin of their teeth. And it may not, in the end, mean much at all, should Chelsea and Spurs assert themselves in the return legs.And yet still they beat them, the reality of England’s unassailable financial power not quite living up to the theory.Two games is far too small a sample, of course, to draw any firm conclusions, but those defeats are part of a broader, more established pattern.For years, as the Premier League’s wealth has grown — its television revenues more than twice that of its nearest competitor, its clubs the richest on the planet — the assumption among its clubs, and the fear among its competitors, has been that at some point it would be able to break the Champions League to its will. Its teams, stuffed with the choicest fruits the market has to offer, would leave the rest of Europe trailing in their wake.It has not, though, quite worked out like that, certainly not as definitively as might have been expected.Chelsea beat Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League final, one of two recent finals matching Premier League opponents.Pool photo by David RamosIn the last five years, the Champions League has taken on a distinctly English inflection. Two of the finals in that time have been all-Premier League affairs, and there has been at least one English side (mostly Liverpool) in every final but one since 2018. And yet the long-anticipated wholesale takeover of the tournament has failed to materialize.Perhaps it is no more than an accident of fate that no English team has won a Champions League final against a foreign opponent since Chelsea’s victory against Bayern Munich in 2012. But it feels significant that only once — in 2019 — has the full cohort of four Premier League teams all made it through safely to the quarterfinals.The likelihood that this year will break that trend is minimal. Chelsea and Spurs might both be at only a slender disadvantage — and the absence of the away goals rule works in their favor from here — but even if they both recover to make it through, the chances of Liverpool’s overcoming Real Madrid remain slim.There are a host of possible explanations for that. The most obvious is that money is not necessarily a measure of virtue: Just because England’s teams have cash to burn does not mean they always spend it well, as Chelsea is currently doing its best to illustrate.Harry Kane and Spurs have work to do in the second leg against Milan.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most appealing, certainly in England, is that the very competitiveness of the Premier League is in itself a disadvantage; teams are so exhausted from domestic combat that they are prone to fatigue when it comes to Europe.The most likely explanation, and the most simple, is that an unwillingness to succumb to economic logic is coded into the algorithm of a knockout competition. Financial might is likely to prove decisive over the course of a league season. Turn a competition into an arbitrary shootout, conducted over the course of 90 or 180 minutes, and what can seem like a chasm in terms of revenue streams suddenly manifests as nothing more than the difference in the technical and psychological capacity of two sets of players.And that, most often, is nothing more than a hairline crack. Dortmund and Milan and all the others might find the English clubs calling every year, seeking to extract another star from them ranks in exchange for a king’s ransom, but they know too that there will be another player along soon enough, that they will be able to replace and replenish. There are, after all, always more players.There is something to celebrate and to cherish in that, a relief and a pleasure in the fact that wealth does not make a team — or a set of teams — invulnerable to misfortune or immune to the vicissitudes of fate, that European soccer has proved just a little more resilient to the Premier League’s supremacy than even its own clubs anticipated, that even now, money is no guarantee of happiness.Red Letter DayHistoric English soccer club seeks new owner. Serious offers only. Inquire within.Molly Darlington/ReutersTime for another addition to English soccer’s ever-expanding calendar of high holidays: alongside Cup Final Day, League Cup Final Day and the two Transfer Deadline Days, we can now reliably celebrate Soft Deadline for Investors to Submit Bids for a Major Club Day.Like Easter, this one moves around. It fell in April last year, in the midst of the scramble to take Chelsea off the hands of Roman Abramovich. This time, Raine, the investment bank that plays the role of Hallmark for this particular holiday, has decreed that the Manchester United sequel should come as early as mid-February.As of Friday, only one contender had gone public: Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and one-time Chelsea suitor who seems to have remembered late in life that his real passion is for sports rather than chemicals, had confirmed he would bid. He was expected to face competition, though, from at least one “U.S.-based consortium,” as well as “private” bidders from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia.That last prospect, of course, might have been greeted with caution, or even concern. The questions are obvious. How “private” could any bid emanating from a tightly controlled autocracy ever really be? What would be the implication for the integrity of both the Premier League and the Champions League, given the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United and the Qatari control of Paris St.-Germain?Or it might have been greeted with a breathless frenzy, focusing exclusively on what Gulf ownership might buy for the club and its success “starved” fans: Kylian Mbappé, or Jude Bellingham, or (genuinely, inexplicably) a new monorail running directly from Manchester airport to a giant mall outside Old Trafford.There are no prizes at all for guessing which description best fits the tone of much of the coverage, because there are no winners here. That serious questions over the integrity of the sport — let alone the issue of whether it is ideal that the Premier League should be a stage on which global power games are played out — should be so easily ignored thanks to the specter of yet more consumption, yet more acquisition, makes you wonder if the spirit of the whole enterprise has been lost along the way. The way you celebrate your holidays, after all, says a lot about where you are as a culture.An Old Truth, RevisitedStop us if you’ve heard this before but P.S.G.’s star-studded experiment doesn’t seem to be working. Again.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf the misadventures of the Premier League’s moneyed elite in the Champions League this week served as a reminder of one of this newsletter’s mottos — that there are always more players, no matter how many of them you buy — then the starting teams at the Parc des Princes brought another to mind.On one side, of course, there was P.S.G., a team that is rapidly becoming a definition of insanity in and of itself. It is now perfectly apparent that building a team around Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé does not work, not at the elite level, not when all three of them essentially refuse to engage in any defensive effort. P.S.G. may yet recover from a first leg deficit to Bayern Munich, but this is not a side that can win the Champions League.On the other was a Bayern team, its attacking line led by Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting. The Cameroonian striker suffers, as many do, from the long shadow of the Premier League.He has spent the better part of a decade and a half as a professional. He has built a steady, respectable career, one crowned unusually late by trophy-laden spells at P.S.G. and Bayern. To many fans, though, he will always be a curiosity: Hey, look at that, it’s that guy who played for Stoke City, except that now he’s in the Champions League.That is a shame, because Choupo-Moting’s story is telling in a number of ways. It proves, as he discussed with the Times, the value of patience. The timing of his rise suggests a shift in what elite clubs want from forward players, and as a corollary perhaps highlights a deficiency in the academy system. That tends, after all, to produce what teams want now, rather than what they might need in the future.Most of all, though, it illustrates that Choupo-Moting did not fail to shine at Stoke because of a lack of talent. Ability is often not what determines whether a move is successful or not. More important is whether the team, the style, the environment is right for a player to thrive. Choupo-Moting is evidence of the old truth that there is no such thing as a bad player, only the wrong context. More

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      Real Madrid 5, Liverpool 2: Champions League Laugher at Anfield

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      That Real Madrid delivered another memorable Champions League victory was no surprise. It was the manner of Liverpool’s defeat that spoke volumes.LIVERPOOL, England — It took a while for the frustration, the anger and the hurt to bubble to the surface. For about an hour on Tuesday night, Liverpool’s fans had watched with grim forbearance as their team was expertly dismantled by Real Madrid.They urged on Jürgen Klopp’s players after they threw away a two-goal lead in the first half. They stood by them as Real Madrid made it 3-2 and then 4-2 and finally 5-2, a loss turning into a rout. They remained stoic as they witnessed the collapse of their season, as they endured the most chastening evening in Anfield’s illustrious European history.But then there was the passing: The passing was the final straw. As the game wound down, as the crowd started to thin out just a little, Real Madrid decided to indulge in a little game of keepaway. They slipped passes between, beside and around their bedraggled opponents. They offered them a glimpse of the ball and then spirited it away at the last moment.They maintained it for a minute or two, Liverpool’s players lolling and lagging as they dashed around in hopeless pursuit. It was an indignity too far. It is one thing being beaten — particularly by Real Madrid — and it is quite another being taunted. The crowd started to whistle, and then to jeer: at Real Madrid, at its own players, chasing at shadows, at this whole long, damned, miserable season.Andy Robertson and Liverpool won’t play their second leg in Madrid until March, but their Champions League is effectively over after Tuesday night.Phil Noble/ReutersThat Real Madrid won at Anfield does not count as a surprise of any sort. This is Real Madrid, after all, and this is the Champions League. A stirring Real Madrid recovery is part of the deal. To a large extent it is increasingly odd that anyone else bothers entering the competition.Carlo Ancelotti’s team has mastered the comeback, turned it into an art form, boiled it down to its very essence. En route to European glory last season, Real Madrid generally required the full span of a two-legged tie, up to and including extra time in the second leg, to stage the miraculous recovery that has become its calling card.The only change this season — on this evidence — is that it has streamlined the process to such an extent that it now takes no more than half an hour, with a break in the middle for a quick bite to eat.Far more striking than the fact of Liverpool’s defeat on Tuesday, then, was the manner of it. Somewhere deep inside this Liverpool team is the muscle memory of what it once was, and not all that long ago. It is only nine months, after all, since it played its third Champions League final in five years, Klopp sufficiently confident that the halcyon days would keep rolling that he advised his team’s fans — even in defeat — to book their hotel rooms for this year’s showpiece.For 15 minutes, it was possible to wonder if this stage, and this opponent, might be enough to stir those ghosts to life. Liverpool surged to an early lead, thanks to an inventive, audacious flick from Darwin Nuñez, and then doubled it when Thibaut Courtois forgot how to work his legs and presented the ball to Mohamed Salah. In between, Salah had wasted two more chances. Here, at last, were the flickers that Liverpool’s fans had been waiting months to see.Darwin Núñez’s goal after four minutes had the Anfield crowd on its feet.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd then the reverie suddenly evaporated and reality descended. Vinícius Júnior scored one goal, wonderfully, and then had a second presented to him by the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson. It had the effect of breaking the spell. The clock struck midnight. Éder Militão made it three. Karim Benzema had a shot deflected into the goal for four, and then danced through, his shoes soft and his touch sure, to make it five.Liverpool, suddenly, looked to be what it has been for much of the season: a mid-table Premier League team caught in the throes of an awkward, jarring transition. The difference, this time, was that it was being forced to play the European champion.Quite how Liverpool’s collapse has happened remains, even now, something of a mystery. Thousands of words have been dedicated in recent months in an attempt to understand how a team that was so painstakingly constructed, put together with such thought and expertise and precision, could come apart at the seams so quickly and so easily. How something so good could prove so ultimately fragile.There are concrete factors that certainly seem to have contributed. Injuries have not helped, of course, compounding a failure to upgrade the midfield. The effects of last season, in which Liverpool became the first English team to play every game in every competition for which it was eligible — winning two trophies, but neither of the prizes it most wanted — have lingered, both physically and psychologically.But then there are the intangible factors, the theoretical and the emotional strands, the charges that can only ever take the form of questions: Has Liverpool been too loyal to the core of Klopp’s team? Has upheaval behind the scenes, the departure of several key members of the staff, disrupted the harmony the club had worked so hard to foster? If so, has that had any effect on performances?Karim Benzema finished off Liverpool with goals 12 minutes apart.Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockWhatever the causes, the effects were all there, on the field, against a team that less than a year ago Liverpool could — largely rightly — consider its equal. When Klopp, upon reviewing last year’s final for the first time this week, commented that it was a game his team could have won, he was not simply presenting a brave face.Now, though, the gulf is wide. The temptation is to focus on the major mistakes — Alisson’s misjudgment for the second goal, the stationary marking for the third, Joe Gomez’s body shape for the fourth — but more telling are the little things.It is the speed with which Liverpool passes the ball, just a touch slower than before. It is the spaces between its players, a little too large, and the cohesion between its lines, now ever so slightly ragged. It is in the intensity of its press, somehow diluted and dimmed.Each element feeds on the others, eroding confidence and sapping purpose, until the whole system seems fractured beyond repair. And it was at that point that Real Madrid, with that air of total self-assurance, started to pass the ball around, Liverpool’s players powerless to stop them, their fall from the rarefied heights they once shared with these opponents complete. More

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      P.S.G.-Bayern: Choupo-Moting Shows Benefits of the Slow Burn

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      Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting was never a can’t-miss talent. But as he leads Bayern Munich against P.S.G., he has proved he belongs right where he is.There were always plenty of things about Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting that caught the eye. The scouts dispatched to watch him tended to find that his build grabbed their attention first: tall but not rangy; broad-shouldered and muscular but lean. What held it, though, was everything else.He was quick: quicker than might have been expected for a player of his size. Choupo-Moting could be a target man, a flag that a team might plant in the ground to claim surrounding territory, but he could move. He could hold his own, physically, but there was a delicacy and a refinement to his touch, too.“He had a lot of positives,” said Kevin Cruickshank, a scout who tracked Choupo-Moting in the player’s native Germany for several seasons before helping bring him to England. “He had a combination of things that you do not see too often.”His most valuable trait, though, would not have been visible even to the most careful observer. Of all his many and varied characteristics, the one that has defined Choupo-Moting’s career more than any other has been his patience.These days, Choupo-Moting, a 33-year-old forward, is an established part of Bayern Munich’s squad, a member of the glittering cast at one of Europe’s great powerhouse clubs. This week, the draw for the round of 16 of the Champions League takes him to another of his alma maters, Paris St.-Germain. Choupo-Moting has spent the last five years on the grandest stages the game has to offer.Choupo-Moting with Neymar in 2020. He scored a vital goal in P.S.G.’s run and later played in the final against Bayern.Pool photo by David RamosHe has won domestic titles in France and Germany. He has scored to propel his team into a Champions League semifinal and played in a final. He has called some of the best players of his generation and the next teammates: Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, Robert Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer.Unlike most of them, though, he had to wait for it all to come. Choupo-Moting’s career has followed the sort of slow-burn trajectory that has become increasingly rare in modern soccer, where major clubs trawl the planet chasing any scent of juvenile promise and talent that is expected to ignite upon arrival.Choupo-Moting did not emerge, fully formed, from some hothouse academy, a teenager anointed for greatness. He spent his formative years at Hamburg, his hometown club, Germany’s great comatose giant. He left, at the age of 22 — by which time the game’s leading players are expected to have established themselves as stars — with an expired contract, a few dozen appearances and five goals to his name.By the time he was in his mid-20s, Choupo-Moting had earned a reputation as a steady, reliable Bundesliga forward. At Mainz, working with the club’s youthful, progressive coach, Thomas Tuchel, he scored 22 goals across three seasons. His three campaigns at Schalke proved similarly productive.He did not, though, worry that time was passing him by. “As a player, of course you have goals,” Choupo-Moting said in an interview last week. “But I always try to be happy for what I have. The highest level of success is happiness. I was happy at Hamburg, at Mainz, at Schalke. I was never sitting at home thinking: I am 24 already, I should be playing at another level. What if I don’t sign for a ‘big club’ this summer?“I never had that fear. I never had those questions in my head. I knew, as long as I tried everything, I would be happy. That’s all I wanted: to go home and say I tried my best. I was at Schalke, and for me Schalke was a big club. We played Champions League. That was one of my dreams. I had that fighting spirit to play on the highest level, but my parents always taught me to be patient.”Choupo-Moting scored five goals in his only season at Stoke City. When the club was relegated, his teammates said the bigger surprise was where he went next: P.S.G.Darren Staples/ReutersHis next step, in retrospect, seemed a backward one. He had always been attracted to England, drawn by the magnetic pull of the Premier League. When his contract at Schalke expired, Cruickshank and his colleagues at Stoke City — hardly a destination of choice — made their move.It was a deal rooted in pragmatism. Stoke saw in him a player “who could come in and help us straightaway,” Cruickshank said, rather than someone who could be molded into a star. That assessment proved basically correct. His payoff in a struggling team was modest: five goals and five assists in 30 games. Respectable, but not spectacular. Stoke was relegated.It was at that point that Choupo-Moting signed for P.S.G. His Stoke teammates had not exactly seen it coming.Doubtless, it helped that his former coach at Mainz, Tuchel, was now in charge in Paris. “He knew me,” Choupo-Moting said. “He knew what I could do, he knew I could still improve, that I could help a big team.” Despite all those years of waiting, and now closer to his 30th birthday than his teenage promise, the striker felt exactly the same way.Looking back, the transition has not been an easy one. Choupo-Moting had spent a decade or so in the relative shadows; the lights shine brighter at P.S.G., and Bayern, than they do anywhere else. “You have big players in front of you, players with bigger names, players with a lot of quality,” he said. Both in Paris and more recently in Munich, he had to wait for his chance to come.When it did, he felt he belonged. “You hear people ask why this player is at that club or another player at another club,” he said. “But you have to remember: Big clubs have a lot of quality people observing players.“If a player gets there, they deserve to be there. After that, it is on you, on the player, to show your potential, to show you deserve to stay at that level. With time, the quality you have determines if you get the chance. Some players get that chance straightaway. Sometimes you have to work more. But if you work hard, success will come.”That is what Choupo-Moting has found. At both clubs, it was assumed he would be a deputy to the frontline stars. At both, he more than proved his own worth. He scored a 93rd-minute winner in a Champions League quarterfinal for P.S.G. Though he largely had to fill in around Robert Lewandowski at Bayern, his numbers were impressive, averaging nearly a goal in every 90 minutes of playing time in the Bundesliga last season, and closer to two goals per 90 in the Champions League. When Robert Lewandowski departed Bayern last summer, the club decided not to acquire a replacement, preferring instead to trust in Choupo-Moting.Choupo-Moting is surrounded by bigger names at Bayern. “If a player gets there, they deserve to be there,” he said. After that, he added, it is on the player “to show you deserve to stay.”Nacho Doce/Reuters“It is difficult, because when a striker scores goals, you have to be patient,” Choupo-Moting said of the two years he spent as Lewandowski’s understudy. When Lewandowski left for Barcelona, he said, “I knew I would have a more important role. I always knew I could help the team. I had no doubts. From the beginning, I always told the people upstairs, the bosses, that I knew I could.”That he has made it, at last, to where he always felt he belonged is testament not only to his perseverance, but perhaps to something of a shift in the game itself. Players of Choupo-Moting’s profile — technically smooth but physically imposing strikers — have always been rare, but as the role of the forward has changed in recent years, they have become rarer still.“Maybe there was a time, when Pep Guardiola was with Barcelona, teams wanted to play with a real, strong No. 9, and it worked out,” Choupo-Moting said. Since then, he wonders if the game has come full circle. “It has changed,” he added. “Nowadays it is more and more important to have a striker who is strong, good with the ball, has that combination.”Soccer itself, in other words, has moved toward Choupo-Moting. The most exclusive teams on the planet have, belatedly, seen what was there all along. They might have taken their time. It is fortunate, then, that Choupo-Moting never had a problem with being patient. More

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      Champions League Overcrowding Was a ‘Near Miss’ for UEFA

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      Independent investigators concluded it was only a “matter of chance” that the dangerous scenes at last year’s Liverpool-Real Madrid final did not lead to deaths.A monthslong independent investigation into the dangerous overcrowding that jeopardized the safety of thousands of fans at last year’s Champions League final in Paris has placed the blame squarely on European soccer’s governing body, which organized the game. That no lives were lost in the crushes outside the stadium gates, the investigators’ harshly critical report concluded, was only “a matter of chance.”The investigation, which included dozens of interviews and the review of hours of video shot by fans, concluded that senior officials of the governing body, UEFA, made numerous mistakes in preparations for the showcase final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, creating a situation in which planning flaws were neither detected nor quickly addressed, and then tried to shift responsibility onto fans for the congestion that had put their safety — and potentially their lives — at risk.While the report, which runs to more than 200 pages, assigned part of the responsibility for the chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France to various other bodies, including the French police and the French soccer federation, it said the event’s owner, UEFA, “bears primary responsibility for failures which almost led to disaster.”Liverpool fans bore the brunt of the danger as poor organization, in addition to local transport strikes, led to dangerous crushes in which thousands of fans were left penned inside fencing and with nowhere to go. The report said the danger was exacerbated by the indiscriminate and widespread use of tear gas by police officers before the game, the first Champions League final featuring full crowds after two years of pandemic restrictions.And the report left little doubt that the day could have turned deadly, drawing a direct comparison to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which policing mistakes produced a crush inside an English stadium that eventually led to the deaths of 97 people.“In the judgment of the panel,” the investigators wrote in comparing the two incidents, “the different outcomes were a matter of chance.”Yet, even as the scenes outside the Stade de France were still unfolding, investigators said, efforts were made to blame supporters for the chaos. Aware of the troubling scenes outside, UEFA announced the start of the game would be delayed because of the “late” arrival of supporters. “This claim was objectively untrue,” the report said.Later, French officials, including the interior minister Gérald Darmanin, blamed English fans for what Darmanin said was a “massive, industrial and organized fraud of fake tickets.” The report, commissioned by UEFA, found there was little evidence to back up the claim.UEFA and its most senior officials, notably Martin Kallen, the head of events, were singled out for overall responsibility for what one of the report’s main authors described as a “near miss.”UEFA blamed late-arriving fans when it delayed the kickoff of the final, a claim that the report found was “objectively untrue.”Getty Images“There was contributory fault from other stakeholders, but UEFA were at the wheel,” the report said.The publication of the final report came several months after it was anticipated; UEFA officials had first suggested it would be completed by September. The investigation involved hundreds of interviews and the analysis of footage, including many hours of video shot by supporters caught up in the crushes as they tried to enter the stadium. Dangerous bottlenecks, packed entrances and ramps, and tear gas employed by the police — sometimes sprayed indiscriminately at groups of supporters that included children and disabled fans — added to the chaos.“Unfortunately, the enthusiasm around the game rapidly turned into a real ‘near miss’ which was harmful to a significant number of fans from both clubs,” the report said. “This should never have happened at such an important sporting event, and it is unacceptable that it took place at the heart of the European continent.”The use of the term “near miss,” the panel said, was deliberate and agreed upon by all stakeholders interviewed to mean “an event almost turns into a mass-fatality catastrophe.”The report raised new concerns about security preparations for next year’s Summer Olympics in Paris, with its authors describing events around the Champions League final as a “wake-up call” for Olympic organizers. The panel said evidence collected from Michel Cadot, the French government official responsible for major sporting events, suggested there remained “a misconception about what actually happened and a complacency regarding what needs to change.”An earlier investigation into the Champions League final by two French parliamentary committees had also assigned blame to the authorities, labeling the dangerous overcrowding a “fiasco” caused by a combination of faulty coordination, bad planning and errors by the authorities responsible for organization and safety.The new report offers a fuller view of how the day unfolded, painting a picture of organizational chaos, with decisions taken by individuals without adequate knowledge of what was happening in real time. It said UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, was asked to make a call on delaying the kickoff even though he had not been in the match control room or in contact with security officials; he had been in a meeting with the King of Spain in a V.I.P. area.French policing came under scrutiny after the final. Paris will host next year’s Summer Olympics. Christophe Ena/Associated PressTaken in its totality, the report attempts to show how UEFA delegated or removed itself from any oversight of the security operation at the stadium to such an extent that it “marginalized” its own safety and security unit, headed by Zeljko Pavlica, a confidant of Ceferin’s.Fans arriving at the stadium were greeted by battalions of French riot police, dressed in protective clothing and with supplies that included batons, shields and pepper spray.“The police, unchallenged and accepted without question by other stakeholders, adopted a model aimed at a nonexistent threat from football hooligans,” the panel wrote, adding, “Ultimately the failures of this approach culminated in a policing operation that deployed tear gas and pepper spray: weaponry which has no place at a festival of football.”UEFA had faced criticism about the composition of its panel, with concerns raised about its neutrality after the appointment of a former education and sports minister in Portugal, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, as chairman. Brandão had previously worked closely with Tiago Craveiro, who was hired last year as a senior adviser to Ceferin.To counter those claims, UEFA added more members to its panel, including its former security head, Kenny Scott, and fan representatives, including Amanda Jacks, an official at the Britain-based Football Supporters Federation. Jacks informed Brandão on Monday that she had accepted an unspecified position at Liverpool and would be starting her new role in March.The report will make uncomfortable reading for UEFA, with some of its top officials now under scrutiny for their actions both on the day and in the planning for the biggest game on the European soccer calendar.“Senior officials at the top of UEFA allowed this to happen, even though the shortcomings of its model were widely known at senior management level,” the report said. More

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      Champions League or Super League? No One Wins.

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      Proponents of a European superleague do not lack for opposition. Those on the other side rarely have to explain why the status quo is worth saving.The feedback to the latest proposal for a European soccer superleague could not exactly be described as positive. On Thursday, the so-called sports development company that has spent much of the last two years pitching the idea produced its latest vision of what European soccer could — no, should — look like.The proposals were based on months of conversations with more than 50 clubs around Europe, according to the consultancy’s chief executive, Bernd Reichart. Those discussions, he said, had been boiled down into a set of 10 “principles,” most of them based on generic buzzwords like “sustainability” and “competitiveness” and “revenue distribution.”The central idea, though, was to replace the existing competitions run by European soccer’s governing body, UEFA — most notably the Champions League, which returns with its knockout stages this week — with a “multi-divisional” European competition comprising 60 to 80 teams and controlled, owned and operated by the clubs themselves.It did not, it is fair to say, go down well. Javier Tebas, the chief executive of La Liga and noted wallflower, described the superleague organizer as “a wolf disguising himself as a grandma.” The European Clubs Association called the latest ideas “distorted and misleading.” European Leagues, the umbrella body for the continent’s domestic tournaments, said that the game’s current model is “far from being broken and does not need to be fixed.”Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, railed on Twitter about the horrifying prospect of a competition dominated by a few big clubs.Susana Vera/ReutersThe prize for the best statement, though, went to the Football Supporters’ Association, a British organization representing fan interests. “The walking corpse that is the European Super League twitches again, with all the self-awareness one associates with a zombie,” its statement began. That was, as these things go, quite a strong start.Still, minor setbacks. Reichart, the Super League architect now flogging his company’s workshopped revisions, said the revised principles were intended as just a starting point, a way to begin a conversation with an even greater range of soccer’s “stakeholders.” It is, after all, one thing to knock down an idea. It is quite another to offer another in its place.In that spirit of openness and construction, then, here is another set of proposals, an alternative blueprint for soccer’s future that takes into account each of the newest superleague suggestions.1. MeritocracyThe same teams — four from England, two from Spain and one each from Germany and France — should make the Champions League quarterfinals every year. Entitled fans of these teams should complain that the group stages are “boring.” All other clubs should be locked out, in both a sporting and financial sense. Also the Europa League and Europa Conference League should happen.2. Domestic competitionsDomestic leagues should be won by the same teams, again and again, until those triumphs themselves become meaningless. England has special dispensation to have a maximum of three potential champions at any time.Common cause? The UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, with the Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly.Damir Sencar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images3. Stable resourcesThe big teams should take most of the money, and win all of the trophies. The Premier League should dominate the financial landscape, allowing every other domestic league to wither on the vine. Clubs should be encouraged to be as irresponsible as possible in order to cling on to its coattails.4. Player healthA variety of different organizations should insist on as many games as possible, paying only lip service to the idea of player health. The players must not, at any point, be consulted on this.5. Financial sustainabilityOwners should be welcomed with open arms, no matter how many people they have dismembered. Soccer should, effectively, become a competition decided by which investment banks steer which clients toward which clubs. Once in place, these princelings and private equity firms should be encouraged to spend as much as possible in the transfer market, forcing rivals to risk bankruptcy to keep up, distorting the idea of value and making their own clubs entirely dependent on their continued and limitless largesse.6. The world’s best competitionAll of the best players should play for the same handful of clubs, mainly in England. Whole leagues should be turned into informal feeder competitions. The most prestigious teams in those leagues should be converted into talent factories for clubs whose accidental wealth has made them lazy, and everyone else should be bought out as part of a network of teams that functions essentially as a holding pen for prospective transfers.7. fan experienceAny suggestion of mounting disinterest among fans should be put down to young people no longer having attention spans, rather than the fact that soccer’s existing structures have turned the vast majority of games into meaningless processions.8. Don’t forget the womenWe have to mention women’s soccer, though how low down the list it is indicates where it lies in our priorities. Women’s soccer should continue to be an afterthought, modeled entirely on the men’s game — regardless of whether the men’s game functions effectively or not — because who has the time to think about it more deeply than that?9. SolidarityAny team that slips in status should face financial ruin. The constituent clubs of the Champions League would, ideally, be indistinguishable from one year to the next. Teams relegated from the Premier League should be handed parachute payments that essentially ensure they return immediately, but everyone should continue to pretend there is a pyramid that allows for near-impossible organic growth.10. Respect for the lawTeams that break the flimsy financial rules we put in place should not be punished. Instead, craven organizations should let them off with piecemeal fines, subtly affirming that you can do what you want as long as you are rich enough. Clubs and leagues should claim to be self-policing, rejecting any oversight, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.These 10 alternative principles, of course, are the obstacle that a superleague — or anyone proposing radical change to the status quo — must overcome. Reichart has to explain his ideas. He has to put them into an action plan. He has to try to make them palatable. He has to persuade people to come over to his vision.Whether that vision has much merit is open to question. Its one concrete suggestion — a broad, league-based tournament sitting above the domestic competitions — is at best a matter of taste. Subjectively, a European superleague seems a downgrade on the Champions League’s current arrangement, but it is probably no worse than the so-called Swiss Model set to come into force next year. (It does, ironically, work far better as a paradigm for how to grow women’s soccer in Europe, even though it clearly cares little for that aspect of the game.)The problem with criticizing new proposals is that nobody ever has to outline the alternative. None of the alphabet soup of governing bodies and lobbying groups ever have to explain where they think the game is going; how they envision its future; how they plan to address the blindingly obvious flaws in the “model that is not broken and does not need to be fixed,” the ones that — as UEFA’s own financial report, released on Friday, noted — have made soccer increasingly reliant on capital injections from owners and turning a blind eye to mounting debts.The Super League’s ideas man, Bernd Reichart, with two of its biggest proponents, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid, left, and Joan Laporta of Barcelona.Mariscal/EPA, via ShutterstockSo long as they can avoid laying out their own plan for the future, the game’s current leaders can instead cast anyone proposing change as greedy and cynical and self-interested and hope that nobody points out the hypocrisy in those charges.They can rely on the fact that some fans yearn hopelessly for a return to a lost past, one in which the European Cup is a straight knockout tournament and Nottingham Forest is the champion of England, and that others, the ones whose teams either monopolize glory or happen to be in the Premier League, feel that things are working out quite nicely just as they are.They can depend on the understandable, and largely correct, suspicion of all fans that anyone suggesting something new has an ulterior motive, without ever being moved to wonder quite why all of these bodies are so furious at the very idea of their authority being challenged.There is no reason to believe that Reichart, and his consultancy, A22, have the best interests of European soccer at heart, just as there was no reason, in 2021, to buy into Florentino Pérez’s suggestion that he was trying to save anyone but Real Madrid.But, when taking up the cudgels, it is worth asking not only what your opponent wants but what your allies want, too. It is worth assessing the reality of what you are defending: a reality in which the gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe turns into a chasm, where the Champions League is a closed shop, where the rich have it all and still want more. That is what they are fighting for. They just never have to explain it. More