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      The Instant Legend of Napoli’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia

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      BATUMI, Georgia — They used to worry that the Adjarabet Arena, with its sinuous arches and illuminated exterior, would turn into something of a white elephant. Batumi, after all, is a quaint resort town; it had little need for a 20,000-capacity stadium. Dinamo, the soccer team that was to call it home, generally required seating for only half that number.And then, at the start of April, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia arrived.“The city lived from one match to the next,” Tariel Varshanidze, a prominent voice in Dinamo’s fan scene, said. “The atmosphere changed radically.” Matches in the Erovnuli Liga, Georgia’s top division, suddenly had the same air as “top Champions League games,” he said. “It was fantastic.”In the three months Kvaratskhelia spent in Batumi, every seat was taken. Tourists who flocked to the beaches of the Black Sea added a game to their itineraries. Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances all started to ask regular attendees for spare tickets, whether they supported Dinamo, someone else, or nobody at all.During games, Varshanidze said, the whole stadium cheered Kvaratskhelia’s every touch, even those fans who had theoretically come along to support the opposition. And it was not just in Batumi. “We had full stadiums in almost every city,” George Geguchadze, Dinamo’s coach, said. All of Georgia wanted a glimpse. Even games in the country’s backwaters, at stadiums that in normal times might attract only a few hundred spectators, were sold out.That was hardly a shock. Kvaratskhelia (pronounced kuh-varats-kell-eeya) had arrived in Batumi as an established national icon. He had blossomed as a 16-year-old sensation at Dinamo Tbilisi, Georgia’s biggest club. By the time he made his debut for his country, barely two years later, he had outgrown the Georgian league, moving to Russia to join Lokomotiv Moscow and then Rubin Kazan. The brief, unexpected chance to see him in the flesh again — after he was freed to void his contract after Russia invaded Ukraine — was too good an opportunity to miss.Kvaratskhelia’s coach at Napoli, Luciano Spalletti, has described him as “stratospheric.” Arrigo Sacchi, the former Italy and A.C. Milan manager, prefers the word “devastating.”Alessandro Garofalo/LaPresse, via Associated PressWhat few could have anticipated was how fast, and how far, that mania would spread. Scarcely six months later, the 21-year-old winger’s fame has spread far from Georgia. In a matter of weeks, he has enthralled Italian soccer and emerged as the breakout star of the Champions League.“Georgian fans expected him to play at a high level,” Geguchadze said. “But nobody could have imagined he would have such good results in such a short period of time.”Those fans who flooded to the 11 games he played in Batumi’s colors, it turned out, were getting a sneak preview. The man who filled the Adjarabet Arena was about to become the best player to watch in Europe.The Rarity of AnarchyThe raw numbers are these: Since joining Napoli for around $10 million this summer, Kvaratskhelia has scored five goals in the Italian league, where his team has established a two-point lead at the top, and two more in the Champions League, helping Napoli qualify with ease from an intimidating group featuring Liverpool and Ajax. The totals are good, no doubt. But they do not even begin to explain the phenomenon.His coach at Napoli, Luciano Spalletti, has described Kvaratskhelia as “stratospheric.” Arrigo Sacchi, the former Italy and A.C. Milan coach, prefers the word “devastating.” A World Cup winner, Alessandro Del Piero, who is not unqualified to gauge the quality of attacking players, suggested he looked like he was “made to play in Europe.”Napoli’s fans granted him their highest honor, nicknaming him Kvaradona, after the most beloved playmaker in the club’s history.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPerhaps the most telling testimony, though, belonged to Fabrizio Ravanelli, the former Juventus striker. After Napoli beat Milan last month, Ravanelli admitted he had been captivated by Kvaratskhelia and Milan’s Rafael Leão. “In the world,” he said, “there are fewer and fewer players like them.”That sense of rarity is the root of Kvaratskhelia’s appeal. He is the sort of player that modern soccer — with its industrialized youth systems and stylistic templates — does not produce anymore: mercurial and intuitive, faintly maverick, somehow untamed.Willy Sagnol, the Georgia national team coach, has suggested that his closest parallel is a young Franck Ribéry, the former Bayern Munich wing, but it is not an exact match.Kvaratskhelia is taller, more languid, less easily categorized. Ribéry was a player of menace and purpose who wanted, much of the time, to cut inside. Kvaratskhelia might do that. Or he might not. He might play as a No. 10 for a few minutes.Or he might, as he did in a game against Lazio a few weeks ago, ignore three safe passes, pirouette amid three defenders and then arrow a shot against the post from 30 yards.His strength, to Levan Kobiashvili, the president of the Georgian soccer federation, is his “unpredictability.”“There are a lot of wingers who are technically gifted and very quick,” Kobiashvili said. “But Khvicha offers something completely different. I don’t think we have seen many players who have such a relentless attacking style, who do everything at such speed, not only in Georgia but in Europe. Everything is through his instincts. That is what makes him so exciting.”Kobiashvili demurs at the idea that Kvaratskhelia is the “continuation of any process.” Georgia might have a rich history of producing virtuosic attacking players — most notably the former Manchester City and Ajax winger Georgi Kinkladze — but Kvaratskhelia, he said, is a product only of his own talent.Others are not quite so sure. “He has some aspects that are very Georgian,” said Andrés Carrasco, the Spanish head of youth development at Dinamo Tbilisi, the club that unearthed Kvaratskhelia. “He tends not to worry if something does not work. He does not think about the negative consequences. That is true of a lot of attacking players here. They are daring. They’re bold. They’re a little bit anarchic.”And there are, Carrasco said, more to come.Kvaratskhelia and a group of other young stars have lifted the fortunes of Georgia’s national team alongside their own stock.Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe BoomIn Batumi, as in Georgia as a whole, soccer fans have followed Kvaratskhelia’s starburst as avidly as they did when he was briefly a player at Dinamo Batumi, living in a hotel not far from the stadium. Now it is Napoli’s games that grind the country to a halt. “Everyone is gathered around televisions,” said Kobiashvili, himself one of the most decorated players in Georgian history. “I can’t remember anything like it.”But he, like Carrasco, is keen to emphasize that Kvaratskhelia is not alone. Georgian soccer is on the rise. When Kobiashvili took up his post as Georgian soccer federation president in 2015, the country was languishing “around 150th in FIFA’s rankings,” he said. It currently stands 78th.Even more impressive, though, have been its performances in the Nations League. Georgia has been promoted twice — initially from the competition’s lowest tier to its third and then, this summer, to the second division — meaning that in the next edition of the tournament, it will play at the same level as England.“We have numerous talented players, and they are contributing collectively to this euphoria,” Kobiashvili said. He pointed, in particular, to Giorgi Mamardashvili, an imposing goalkeeper now shining at the Spanish club Valencia, but he could have named Zuriko Davitashvili, too, a teammate of Kvaratskhelia’s at Batumi who now plays for the French team Bordeaux.Their emergence has not gone unnoticed. But Kvaratskhelia did not spring from the ether: There are no secrets in European soccer, and a host of major teams across the continent had been aware of his gifts while he was in Russia, if not before. Juventus and Tottenham had watched him. Napoli had been tracking him for two years.Kvaratskhelia with his teammates at the Dinamo Tblisi academy. He may be Georgia’s brightest young star, but he is not the only one.Dinamo Tbilisi“A few years ago, kids in Georgia aspired to be the next Lionel Messi, the next Cristiano Ronaldo,” one official said. “Now it is Khvicha.”Dinamo Tbilisi“He was a little bit of a victim, in a way,” Oleg Yarovinski, Rubin Kazan’s general manager, said. “They liked him, but maybe they did not need him.” Rubin Kazan, he said, never received a single offer.When he hit the open market in March, after FIFA granted all foreign players in Russian soccer the right to cancel their contracts unilaterally, Sagnol, the Georgia national team coach, began working his network of contacts to try to get him a move to western Europe. He said he was met largely with skepticism.“All I heard was that he was a player who was tired after the 70th minute,” Sagnol told the French radio station RMC Sport. “They said: ‘You know, Willy, he’s just a Georgian, he’s not Brazilian. It’s less glamorous’.” So Kvaratskhelia decided to return home, to Batumi, to bide his time.His successors are not likely to have the same problem. Next year, Luka Parkadze, a 17-year-old winger who came through the Dinamo Tbilisi academy, will join Bayern Munich, after being sent there for a successful trial earlier this year. “We do not get a lot of scouts in Georgia,” Carrasco said. “So we have to make the effort to help them know our players.”Carrasco describes Parkadze as “very attacking, unafraid, who understands individual play, he appears in big games.” It sounds familiar.“Only a few years ago, kids in Georgia aspired to be the next Lionel Messi, the next Cristiano Ronaldo,” Kobiashvili said. “Now it is Khvicha and Mamardashvili. They have transformed the whole soccer culture in Georgia.”Nowhere is that truer than in Batumi. When Kvaratskhelia eventually moved on, leaving the Adjarabet Arena behind for the grandest stages in Europe, Dinamo Batumi found itself with a problem. Attendance at the stadium reverted to normal. Many of the tourists and the sudden converts disappeared.The club’s academy, though, was overwhelmed. It had received 10 times the usual number of applications. It now has 800 players.“We have to build two new pitches, find new coaches,” Varshanidze, the Dinamo Batumi fan, said. For years to come it will be living with, and benefiting from, those three gilded months when it was home to the most exciting player in Europe. More

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      Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema Wins Ballon d’Or

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      The Real Madrid forward won the voting after a season when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were nowhere in sight. Barcelona’s Alexia Putellas repeated as the women’s winner.At last, the eternal understudy has taken center stage. Karim Benzema spent much of his career as a glittering supporting act for Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo and, more recently, Kylian Mbappé. Now, two months short of his 35th birthday, he has the trinket that marks him as a star in his own right: a Ballon d’Or.Benzema, for months regarded as the overwhelming favorite to win the 2022 edition of the award given to the world’s best soccer player, collected his prize on Monday at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Sadio Mané, who led Senegal to victory in the Africa Cup of Nations, finished second, with Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne third. Benzema had described winning one as his “dream since childhood”; he has had to wait a little longer than he might have anticipated to see it come true.Here is the image you’ve all been waiting for! Karim Benzema! #ballondor with @adidasFR pic.twitter.com/TJze0Km1s6— Ballon d’Or #ballondor (@francefootball) October 17, 2022
      France Football, the magazine that has awarded the Ballon d’Or, the most illustrious individual prize in soccer since 1956, had announced that the voting for this year’s edition would be subject to what Pascal Ferré, the publication’s editor, referred to as a “little makeover” in order to retain its relevance and burnish its accuracy.Rather than offering 176 journalists from around the world a vote on the final winners, only those from the top 100 nations in FIFA’s global rankings would decide the men’s award, and the top 50 the women’s prize. (Ferré, more than a little disparagingly, said this new “elite” panel represented the “real connoisseurs” of the game.)Perhaps most significantly, the voting criteria were clarified: The magazine instructed its jurors that individual attainment over the previous season should outweigh team success, and that a player’s broader career should not be relevant at all. Ferré hoped that measure — clearly directed at what might be regarded as legacy voters for Messi and Ronaldo — would make the Ballon d’Or an “open competition, rather than a preserve.”At first glance, of course, it is possible to believe that those changes made a difference in determining the outcome. It is, after all, only the second time since 2008 that a player other than Messi or Ronaldo has been anointed as the best on the planet. (Benzema’s Real Madrid teammate Luka Modric was the other exception, in 2018.) It is the first time since 2006 that neither man has at least been on the podium. Ronaldo, after a disappointing year at Manchester United, finished 10th. Messi, last year’s winner, did not even make the shortlist.Lionel Messi after winning a record sixth Ballon d’Or award in 2019. He added a seventh last year.Christian Hartmann/ReutersAnd yet that assessment risks not only turning Benzema’s triumph into a subplot in a story of Messi and Ronaldo’s fall, but also ignoring the context for his victory. Whatever changes France Football had announced, whatever criteria it had emphasized, so remarkable was Benzema’s season that it is hard to imagine a way in which he might not have won.The blunt measures, of course, are the trophies — his fifth Champions League, another Spanish title — and the goals: 27 in La Liga, 15 in just a dozen games in Europe. Even those numbers do not, though, capture his impact. Benzema may not have been the decisive player in the Champions League final, an honor that fell to his teammate Vinícius Júnior, but he had unquestionably been the defining figure in Real’s journey to the final in Paris.It was Benzema who scored a quick-fire hat trick in the competition’s round of 16 to send Real Madrid through at the expense of Paris St.-Germain, and it was Benzema who scored another in the first leg of the quarterfinal with Chelsea. When that advantage seemed to have been wasted in the return fixture, it was Benzema who lifted Real Madrid once more, scoring the extra-time goal that sealed its place in the semifinal.Benzema won his fifth Champions League title with Real Madrid this year. Next month, he will try to help France retain the World Cup.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere, he not only scored twice in a dizzying first encounter with Manchester City, but nervelessly converted the penalty that completed yet another extraordinary Real comeback at the Santiago Bernabéu. Benzema did not win the Ballon d’Or because Messi and Ronaldo finally fell to earth. He did so because, over the last year or so, he has reached their celestial level.Even with Ferré’s changes, the Ballon d’Or remains an inherently curious phenomenon, most clearly illustrated by the absence of the best player in the summer’s women’s European Championship, England’s Keira Walsh, even from the shortlist for the women’s award, won instead by Barcelona’s injured star Alexia Putellas for the second year in a row.But Benzema’s victory is warranted, and perhaps overdue, recognition for a player who gave much of his peak career in the service of an even brighter star.Benzema joined Real Madrid in the same summer as Ronaldo, though to rather less fanfare. In his first decade at the club, the Frenchman’s role was essentially subordinate to the Portuguese; he was present in order to furnish Ronaldo with the space, and the ammunition, he required to maintain his staggering effectiveness.It was only when Ronaldo left, in the summer of 2018, that Benzema was finally able to take center stage, blossoming into the headline act that his talent had always suggested he would become. That he has had to wait so long to flourish on his own accord is a measure of the height of the bar set by Messi and Ronaldo, and of the challenge of thriving in an era marked by twin greats.Benzema’s victory, coupled with the absence from the top three of the two players who have traded this award between them for more than a decade, suggests that era is now over, although an unexpected World Cup win for either might allow them one last hurrah.It does not, though, herald the dawn of a new age. Benzema will be 35 in December. His has been a glorious autumn, but it is an autumn nonetheless. The future lies with the other names on the list, with Erling Haaland and Mbappé and Phil Foden and Vinicíus. Their time will come, and soon. For now, though, today belongs, at last, to Benzema. More

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      At Ajax, the Future Is Always Now

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      Ajax sold the bulk of its Champions League-ready squad over the summer and never looked back. It can’t afford to.THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — As a rule, Arco Gnocchi regards himself as too old to buy a replica jersey with his favorite Ajax player’s name emblazoned across the back. Such displays of hero worship, he feels, are not entirely becoming of a person ticking through their early 40s. “Generally,” he said, “it’s for kids.”This summer, though, for the first time in roughly a decade, Gnocchi made an exception. The jersey he bought for the new season bears the No. 9 and, above it, the surname of Brian Brobbey, Ajax’s bullish, bustling 20-year-old forward. Brobbey struck him as the perfect choice. “He exemplifies everything Ajax embodies at the moment,” he said.That includes the fact that, in a couple of years at most, Gnocchi expects Brobbey to render his jersey obsolete. Brobbey has already left Ajax once — as a teenager, for an unhappy spell at the German club RB Leipzig — and, if things go to plan, he will leave again soon enough. “He is massively talented,” Gnocchi said. “He’ll be gone by the time he’s 23.”That is how business has worked at Ajax for as long as anyone can remember. It has long been a place players come from, perhaps the most prolific, reliable, high-caliber talent factory in world soccer. Ajax has seen Johan Cruyff and Marco van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp and Wesley Sneijder and Frenkie de Jong and countless others come. And, for half a century, it has watched them all go, too.In that sense, this summer was no different. The transfer window began with Edwin van der Sar, the club’s former goalkeeper who is now its chief executive, fondly bidding farewell to the goalkeeper André Onana — who departed for Inter Milan — and the right back Noussair Mazraoui, who was destined for Bayern Munich. He did not even seem especially fazed by the prospective loss of Ryan Gravenberch, a gifted 20-year-old midfielder, who soon followed Mazraoui to Munich. “He has a wish to leave,” van der Sar said.His serenity was no surprise. Ajax does not operate under any illusions. It expects players to leave. It budgets for it, plans for it and to some extent relies on it. “It’s a steppingstone team,” said Gnocchi, host of the “Pak Schaal” podcast, the most popular Ajax podcast in the Netherlands. “That can be difficult to accept, but if we’re a steppingstone team, at least we’re the best steppingstone team.”By the end of August, though, the mood among the club’s hierarchy had shifted. The departures had not stopped with Mazraoui, Onana and Gravenberch. Sébastien Haller, the focal point of Ajax’s forward line, had gone to Borussia Dortmund. The defender Perr Schuurs had joined Torino in Italy. Nicolàs Tagliafico, the long-serving left back, had left for Lyon.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockMatteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockRyan Gravenberch, top left, and Noussair Mazraoui went to Bayern Munich, and goalkeeper André Onana now backstops Inter Milan. Antony’s move to Manchester United, though, extracted a higher price.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe two that hurt, though, were Antony — a vibrant, virtuoso Brazilian wing — and Lisandro Martínez, a gritty, combative Argentine defender, an undoubted fan favorite. “He’s the sort of player who plays with his teeth bared,” said Marcel Stephan, a writer who has been watching Ajax since the late 1970s. Both Antony and Martínez ended up at Manchester United, where they were reunited with the other significant figure Ajax had lost this summer: Coach Erik ten Hag.They were not, it is safe to say, sent on their way with the club’s best wishes. Antony had to refused to train to force his move — and even then, Ajax held out sufficiently to force United to pay $101 million for his signature — while Martínez reportedly confronted the sporting director Gerry Hamstra over the club’s perceived unwillingness to let him leave.Even as Antony’s departure loomed, ten Hag’s replacement as coach, Alfred Schreuder, had already made clear that he felt there had been too much change. “We’ve already let a lot of players go,” he said as he faced up to the prospect of losing the Brazilian. “We want to keep a strong squad. New players have arrived, and we have told them what our plans are.”The solace, for the club, is obvious. Ajax’s annual budget stands in the region of $170 million. The sales of Martínez and Antony alone generated around $150 million. That money allowed Ajax not only to break the Dutch transfer record to sign Steven Bergwijn from Tottenham, but to afford a wage bill that far outstrips any of its domestic rivals. That financial advantage has helped Ajax win every Eredivisie title that was awarded since 2019.Every Ajax squad is a calculated mix of past, present and future. The current version opened its Champions League campaign with a 4-0 win over Rangers last week. On Tuesday, it will visit Liverpool.Piroschka Van De Wouw/ReutersThe impact on Ajax’s fans is more complex, an almost perfect distillation of all the benefits, blessings, imbalances and iniquities of modern soccer; it is, indeed, hard to think of a club that has been more exposed to the consequences of the sport’s willing obeisance to a ruthless free market.There is, of course, a sadness, an awareness that — as Gnocchi put it — Ajax’s “success is also its downfall,” a knowledge that the better it is at producing players, the more certain it is that those players will leave.There is a sense of if only, too: if only Gravenberch could have played alongside de Jong, rather than instead of him; if only Antony had stayed one more year; if only the club was not engaged in what is, inherently, a Sisyphean task. “It is always painful when a player leaves,” said Marjan Olfers, a professor of sport and law at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former member of Ajax’s supervisory board. “You cannot build a team for five years. You always have to start again.”Occasionally, perhaps increasingly, there are grumbles. “Anyone who remembers the 2000s and the 2010s is thankful for what we have now,” said Gnocchi, referring to a period when Ajax spent fortunes on mediocrities. “We’re very appreciative of good business, because we know it is possible to buy rubbish in return. But there are fans who feel the club is starting to feel more like a trading company than a soccer team.”And, certainly, there is plenty of resignation. “We’re used to it,” Stephan said. At 58, he said, after a half-century of following the team, the constant change is nothing new.Menno Pot, author of “The New Ajax,” a book that examined the club’s transformation in recent years, noted that — until relatively recently — any player leaving the club would be granted an emotional farewell. “We’d let off fireworks, fan groups would present players with presents,” he said. “We figured out a while ago there was no need. The players were going to leave. These are short-term relationships.”That, more than anything else, is what has been lost: the connection to Ajax’s role as a club that “educates young players, rather than acquires them,” as Olfers put it. Ajax fans, in general, “find it harder to identify with individual players,” she said. “It is more about the club.”Brian Brobbey: 20 years old, Amsterdam-reared and coming soon to a transfer rumor mill near you.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse, via Anp/Afp Via Getty ImagesGnocchi might have gone for Brobbey on the back of his jersey, but he believes the most popular shirt in the stands at Ajax’s stadium is not that of a budding homegrown superstar but Dusan Tadic, the club’s veteran playmaker. Tadic is 33 now. He is contracted to the club until he is 36. He is that rarest of things: a safe bet.But there is also a pride in knowing that Ajax is producing, in vast quantities, a raw material that the world’s richest clubs crave. “There is a beauty to it,” Pot said. There is hope, too, in great abundance, a confidence that tomorrow will be no worse than today, and might even be better.Most crucially, there is a sense of identity. The names on the jerseys may be fleeting, but the club itself stands for something that it once feared it had lost forever. That, more than anything, gives fans something to cling on to when everything else is in permanent flux.“I think, after the Bosman ruling in 1995, Ajax went through an identity crisis,” Pot said. “We did not know how to be Ajax any more. You heard it said that we could never compete in Europe again, that winning the Champions League just was not possible. And people were mostly OK with that.“But over the last few years, they have found the answer to that question. They have figured out how to be Ajax in the modern world. We have to rebuild completely every three years, and every once in a while we get a truly great team, one that could just go all the way. And when we do, it is something that is completely our own.”Peter Dejong/Associated Press More

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      Real Madrid a Great Test for Celtic’s Champions League Model

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      Under its well-traveled Australian coach, the Scottish champion has become a gateway to Europe for Japanese players, and a model for clubs trying to punch above their financial weight.Ange Postecoglou did not have much time. The Australian coach was not Celtic’s first choice as manager: The Glasgow club had, instead, spent weeks last summer trying to persuade the Englishman Eddie Howe to take the post. By the time Postecoglou was hired in June 2021 — and served out his mandatory quarantine upon arrival in Scotland — he had little more than a month before his first competitive game.Time was not the only thing he was lacking. The situation at Celtic Park, as the 57-year-old Postecoglou would later admit, was faintly “chaotic.” Celtic’s team, recently beaten to the Scottish title by Rangers for the first time in a decade, was in dire need of an overhaul, a squad so lacking in both quality and quantity that Postecoglou was reduced to drafting in youth players to pad out his early training sessions.There was also nobody to tell him when reinforcements might be coming. Celtic had appointed a new chief executive only a couple of months earlier, but it was still searching for someone to serve as technical director. Postecoglou, who had never worked in Europe before, was on his own.His response to that challenge did more than simply restore Celtic to the pinnacle of Scottish soccer, wrenching the title back from the other side of Glasgow at the first opportunity and immediately transforming Postecoglou — whose arrival had been greeted with a skepticism that bordered on suspicion — into a wildly popular figure.It also did more than merely return the team, for the first time since the fall of 2017, to the group stages of the Champions League. The club begins its campaign on Tuesday evening by welcoming Real Madrid, the reigning European champion, to the place its fans call Paradise.Instead, Postecoglou’s approach laid down what amounts to a blueprint, showing how Celtic can ensure it does not have to endure such a prolonged absence from the continent’s elite again. And it might help the dozens of clubs caught in the same quandary — the brightest lights in the lesser leagues, the big fish in the small ponds — thrive in European soccer’s hopelessly skewed financial ecosystem.Celtic Manager Ange Postecoglou. He has turned his knowledge of Asian players into an advantage in Scotland. Russell Cheyne/ReutersPostecoglou, as he sought to revive Celtic, identified two key “points of difference.” The first was his style of play, a percussive, expansive approach best encapsulated by the slogan that became something of a mantra for the club last season: “We never stop.” It is easy, Postecoglou said this month, for a manager to claim they intend to play attacking soccer. He prides himself on delivering it.The second point, though, was arguably more immediately significant. One brief sojourn in Greece apart, Postecoglou had spent his entire career in Australia and Asia; Celtic hired him on the back of three successful years at Yokohama F. Marinos, Manchester City’s cousin club in Japan. There, Postecoglou thought, was an edge. “I could tap into some transfer markets that were a little bit unknown,” he said.Celtic already had a longstanding connection with Japan — the playmaker Shunsuke Nakamura spent four years at the club in the first decade of the century. But, in the absence of a settled structure at the club, Postecoglou leaned in to it, making Kyogo Furuhashi, a bright, prolific forward who had risen to prominence with Vissel Kobe, the first high-profile signing of his reign.Postecoglou was aware he was taking a risk. There was, as he said, plenty of doubt as to whether Furuhashi would be able to shine in Scotland.: Few fans would have known that, in the words of a scout at another Scottish club, the “standard of the J League is higher than the standard in Scotland.” Even fewer would have had a chance to see Furuhashi play.“Maybe if I hadn’t managed on that side of the world, I might have had the same skepticism,” Postecoglou said. The lack of time, though, meant he did not have much choice. He gave Furuhashi his debut before he had even trained with his new teammates. “He’d only had lunch with them once,” Postecoglou said.The risk, though, paid off so well — Furuhashi would end his first season in Scotland with 12 goals in 20 league games — that by December, Postecoglou was happy to go back. This time, he returned with three players: Reo Hatate, Yosuke Ideguchi and Daizen Maeda, a former charge from his time at Yokohama. All but Ideguchi are likely to start against Real Madrid on Tuesday.Postecoglou has been keen to stress that, though all four players are Japanese, they should not be grouped together. “They are different people; they are different players,” he said earlier this year. “They are all totally different. They all have different personalities. They have had different careers so far, and they offer something different to the club.”They are all, though, proof that Postecoglou was correct to identify his knowledge of the Japanese market as a potential advantage.Furuhashi has six goals in six games for Celtic this season. Russell Cheyne/ReutersThough there are sufficient Japanese players in Europe — primarily clustered in Germany, Belgium and Portugal — that earlier this year Hajime Moriyasu, the national team coach, could name an entire squad without a single J League player, few European teams employ permanent scouts in Japan.Indeed, until relatively recently, even those who sent representatives to scour the J League for players found it was not particularly easy. This was not just because of the cost and distance of travel, but because all of the league’s games tended to kick off at the same time, meaning a week’s trip might yield the chance to take in only one or two matches.Likewise, few European agencies have a footprint in Japan, disconnecting the country from the networks that can play a vital role in player recruitment. Those difficulties disincentivized European teams from looking too closely at the Japanese market. Celtic engaged only because of Postecoglou’s firsthand knowledge: “I’ve got that added advantage of knowing the market,” he said. “When I took over I was definitely going to use that expertise.”In doing so, he has helped to make Celtic a paradigm. Thanks to Postecoglou’s connections, Celtic has been able to retool its squad for a fraction of the cost it would have taken to acquire equivalent players from Europe, enabling the club to overcome at least a little of the financial disadvantage it experiences simply by virtue of calling a relatively small country — and by extension television market — home.It is an approach the club has started to build on. It has appointed Mark Lawwell, another alumnus of Yokohama — and the City Football Group network that runs the club — to oversee its recruitment division. Even before his official appointment, Postecoglou was bringing in players not just from England’s lower leagues, the traditional hunting ground for Scottish clubs, but from Russia and Argentina, Poland and Israel.The approach also makes the Celtic Postecoglou has built an example other clubs in its station — the champions cut adrift by the gathering of power and wealth by Europe’s major leagues — can follow. Those teams do not always have the time, or resources, that the continent’s true giants can match. By using a little knowledge, though, by finding something where scarcely anybody else has looked, they can level the playing field, just a little. More

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      What the Champions League Is Lacking

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      Europe’s richest competition offers the best of what soccer can deliver. But the World Cup still has something it can’t match.PARIS — There will be stories, of course. There are always stories. The Champions League delivers them so frequently and so reliably that it is impossible to dismiss the nagging suspicion that all of this might just be scripted, the product of some complex simulation being run from a secret lair in Nyon.Robert Lewandowski, clad in the blue and red of Barcelona, will return to Bayern Munich, only a few weeks after forcing his exit. Manchester City’s visit to Borussia Dortmund will see Erling Haaland standing once more before its Yellow Wall, that great force of nature no longer at his back but marshaled in his face.And there will be scenes, too. Real Madrid, the reigning and apparently perennial European champion, will walk out at Celtic Park and wince at the roar of a place that impressed Lionel Messi so much that he keeps a Celtic jersey at home as a memento, an atmosphere described by Xavi Hernández as “incomparable,” an arena where the host’s winning so much as a corner generated a noise that made Antonio Conte think “the stadium was falling down.”That is what the Champions League does best, after all. Like its great contemporary, the Premier League, the competition is as much an iconographical phenomenon as a sporting one. Even in those years — not so long ago, even now — when its product was more noted for its caution, its risk aversion, its brutalist cynicism, its appeal endured because of the way it was packaged.The searing lights, the swelling music and the packed stands across Europe all serve as immediately comprehensible prompts to observers and participants alike. They denote that what is unfolding is the pinnacle of the sport, the only thing that matters, the indisputable main event.Real Madrid, last year’s champion, and Manchester City are back where both feel they belong.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockAnd yet, for the first time in three decades, that may not be true this year. This season’s Champions League will be a staccato one. The first two months of the tournament will bring a great rush of fixtures, six rounds of games played in nine breathless weeks, the only breather coming in the form of an unwelcome and, on some level, somewhat greedy international break.Then the competition that has spent 30 years establishing itself as the unquestioned and unrivaled summit of the game — the place where the sport’s cutting edge is sharpened, where new ideas bubble and sizzle, where players put their talent to the ultimate test — will be suspended in uneasy hibernation, put begrudgingly on hold from November until February.Reluctantly, the Champions League — and the constellation of Europe’s great clubs who have come to regard it as their objective and birthright — will cede the limelight to the World Cup: five prime weeks in the middle of the season handed over to international soccer, that anachronism of a bygone age, glossy club soccer’s unwelcome, ugly cousin.There is no shortage of reasons for club soccer to resent this intrusion: the financial ramifications of losing those weeks of television real estate; the potential risk of injury to players paid not by their national associations but by the clubs; the sense that the engine of the sport is being forced to stall so that the hood can be polished.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.But greater than all those, perhaps, is the unhappy reminder that, while the Champions League is the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet, it is only the most glamorous and most exclusive club competition on the planet. The qualifier — “club” — tells a story of its own. For all the money, for all the power, for all the stories and the scenes, the World Cup is still the biggest show in town.It is worth pausing to reflect on why that might be; after all, it does not fit neatly with what we assume modern consumers — sorry, fans — want from sports. As discussed in this space a couple of weeks ago, audiences are drawn to soccer games by two factors in particular: the familiarity of the brands — sorry, teams — involved, and the stakes for which they are playing.The World Cup, like the Champions League, delivers both in spades. There is no brand recognition quite like being a nation state, with your own seat at the United Nations and history of governmental corruption and fully equipped army, obviously. And there is no tournament quite so doused in risk as the World Cup, in which one misstep can waste four years’ work.In every other aspect, though, the World Cup comes up short. It cannot match the Champions League for prize money, or for star power — Haaland, like Mohamed Salah and the noted nation state of Italy, will be absent from Qatar — or, most crucial, for quality. The Champions League, now, is where the finest soccer in the world is played. The World Cup, by contrast, is pockmarked by flaws.That is unavoidable, of course. If Manchester City lacks a striker, it can go out and buy the best one it can find. Spain, as it has helpfully proved over the last several years, does not have that luxury. Like everyone else, it has to make do and mend. Its coach does not have the opportunity of endless training sessions to hone a system that might accentuate the team’s strengths and disguise its weaknesses; a few days is all that is available.And yet, still, the World Cup possesses the quality of a Black Hole; it draws in the light from even the brightest stars around it. The first phase of the Champions League, like the early rounds of domestic soccer, will have the feel of an appetizer, for fans and players. Games will be played with an awareness that nobody wants to miss the main course.Qatar, where World Cup grass and World Cup anticipation are growing.Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat, perhaps, suggests the World Cup has something that the Champions League does not. That could be rarity: the fact that even the finest players might get only three shots at going to a World Cup when they can reasonably expect a dozen or so tilts at the Champions League trophy. It could be the jeopardy that is, for now, threaded into its structure. It could be good, old-fashioned patriotic fervor.Or it might be mystery. It may be the flaws themselves that make the World Cup so appealing. It could be that the tournament’s appeal is linked to the fact that Spain could turn up and win it or be eliminated in the group stage; that France, despite the quantity of its quality, could be eliminated on penalties by Switzerland; that South Korea can beat Germany and still not qualify for the knockout rounds.The Champions League has, over the years, lost all of that uncertainty. Every year, it feels more like a parade of the inevitable. There will be stories and there will be scenes this season, as there are every season, but they will be rooted in the same inequality that means it is already possible to be pretty certain of the identity of at least a dozen or so of the teams that will make the round of 16.The same cannot be said of the World Cup. None of the teams are perfect — none of them can be — and so the playing field is more level. The teams that do benefit from a disparity of resources do not have the safety net of five more group games, or a second leg, or the prospect of the transfer market.It is the flaws of the teams in the World Cup that make its appeal unrivaled. It is the uncertainty that they bring that make it the main event. It is the unpredictability that generates what the Champions League lacks, and what it might like to consider trying to capture once more.The Death of the Group of DeathThe Champions League groups for 2022-23.Emrah Gurel/Associated PressThere are, now, two types of Champions League groups. One features two heavy favorites, two teams whose seasons will be defined by how deep they can advance into the competition — Paris St.-Germain and Juventus, for example — and two comparative makeweights, in the form of Benfica, say, and Maccabi Haifa.These groups are something of a tease. The way UEFA draws the groups means that the eye is drawn to those first two names. P.S.G. and Juventus, you think: a clash of the titans. There will be genuine jeopardy here. This sensation lasts as long as it takes the observer to remember that two teams qualify from each pool, and so the games between the two resident superpowers may, in fact, mean nothing at all.The second sort of group is more interesting. Thanks to the quirks of the seeding system, these feature just one putative contender — Liverpool, despite its early-season form, or Chelsea, say — and three relatively evenly matched opponents: Ajax, Napoli and Rangers, or A.C. Milan, Red Bull Salzburg and (at a push) Dinamo Zagreb.Welcome to the big stage (for now), Viktoria Plzen.Martin Divisek/EPA, via ShutterstockIn this scenario, too, the superpower invariably makes it through — that is the nature of the modern Champions League, in which we all spend an awful lot of time making sure that the thing that always happens will, in fact, happen again — but it is generally with a lower points total and a degree of gratitude that their rivals all managed to beat each other.The sole exception to this rule of two groups comes on those occasions when there is a third kind: when one team in a group is notably weaker than all three of its opponents. That dubious honor, this year, falls to Viktoria Plzen, the Czech champion, drawn to face Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Inter Milan.There are eight groups in this year’s Champions League. This is the only one that does not fit the pattern. This is the only one that is not wholly predictable, that might just about be described as a Group of Death, and even that is only because it is impossible to be entirely sure how secure in itself this new vision of Barcelona might be. In ordinary years, even a club as famous as Inter would find itself succumbing to the inevitable, and European soccer would be facing up to the prospect of a fall without any jeopardy at all.CorrespondenceThanks to Jon Gilbert, first of all, for performing that most valuable of services: holding me to account for my attempt last week to hold Gary Neville to account.“Neville was railing against Glazer parsimony,” Jon wrote. “But that was nothing to do with buying players. Neville was apoplectic at the complete lack of investment in club infrastructure. He was hugely upset about the state of Old Trafford, now a leaky rust bucket. The club lacks a leading training facility, the lack of a sporting director has stifled progress and a soccer-competent leadership team is desperately needed.”The last couple of points were, I think, raised by last week’s newsletter, but I’ll concede the former: Neville was speaking more broadly than simply complaining that United should lavish more money in the transfer market. The decline of Old Trafford, in fact, is a pretty handy metaphor for the club as a whole: It still draws the crowds and rakes in the cash, but it is trading on memory.Manchester United beat Liverpool on Monday, righting its ship for a day.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA question, too, from Phil Friedman, soliciting an expansion to the suggestion that some revised version of the European Super League makes more sense for other teams from the continent than it does for the denizens of the Premier League. “Not sure I understand this thought,” Phil noted, which indicates a failure on my part to communicate with sufficient clarity.My logic — which may, caveat emptor, be faulty — is that the Premier League’s supremacy is now ensconced; its broadcasting income will continue to spiral, and so its teams essentially have no need to seek a more glamorous competition elsewhere. Indeed, you could argue that the Premier League will become a sort of de facto Super League anyway, with every other domestic competition in Europe feeding into it.For the elites of Germany, Spain, Italy and France (and potentially others) the only conceivable challenge to that hegemony is to join forces. A league not just boasting Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris St.-Germain and Juventus but also drawing on the combined populations of the countries they call home would, I suspect, be able to generate revenues that can match those on offer in England, allowing those clubs to gain access to the fortunes they so evidently believe they deserve.That is certainly not to say its advent would be welcome, of course. Regional leagues are an idea I can get behind; losing the variety offered by each domestic tournament would be a shame. It is just that, from my vantage point, it has a certain inevitability about it, even allowing for the fatal flaw in any proposed Super League: the fact that someone would have to finish bottom. More

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      Champions League Holds Its Draw

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      Manchester City will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom it bought the star striker Erling Haaland.Real Madrid, the defending champion and winner of five of the last 10 Champions Leagues, will face RB Leipzig, Shakhtar Donetsk and Celtic in this year’s competition after the draw was held in Istanbul on Thursday evening.With the top two from each of the eight groups advancing to the round-of-16 knockout stage, most of the biggest teams in Europe seemed to be in strong position to advance. (The third-place teams drop into the second-tier Europa League; fourth-place teams are eliminated.)Big-spending Paris St.-Germain, with Neymar, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé, will continue its quest for a first Champions League title against Juventus, Benfica and Maccabi Haifa. While most of the field is made up of familiar names who return to the competition year after year, Maccabi Haifa of Israel is returning to the group stage for the first time since 2009-10.Manchester City, another big-spending team that is a favorite despite its lack of previous titles, will face Borussia Dortmund, from whom they bought the star striker Erling Haaland in June, along with Sevilla and F.C. Copenhagen.Barcelona is still spending plenty of cash despite its financial woes. One of the stars it signed over the summer was Robert Lewandowski, a striker for the perennial German champion Bayern Munich. Those teams will meet in the Champions League, in a group with Inter Milan and Viktoria Plzen.As for the three remaining English teams, they all look to have good chances to advance. Liverpool, last season’s runner-up, will face Ajax, Napoli and Rangers. The two big Glasgow teams, Celtic and Rangers, are in the group stage together for the first time since 2007.Chelsea will take on AC Milan, with Zlatan Ibrahimovic still seeking a first Champions League title in the twilight of his career, plus Red Bull Salzburg and Dinamo Zagreb.And Spurs will face Eintracht Frankfurt, Sporting Lisbon and Marseille.The final group, which many pundits saw as the weakest one, consists of Porto, Atlético Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen and Club Brugge.One wrinkle for Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine is that it is scheduled to play its home games in Poland because of the ongoing war. (Russian teams have been banned from European competition entirely.)The group stage will run on a compressed schedule from Sept. 6 to Nov. 2, covering nine weeks rather than the usual 13 or so because of the World Cup in Qatar in late November.The Champions League Final will be played on June 10 in Istanbul, which was to have hosted the 2020 and then the 2021 final, but lost both because of the coronavirus. More

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      P.S.G. President’s Roles Raise Conflict-of-Interest Concerns

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      When the Paris St.-Germain president avoided punishment in a UEFA investigation, some worried that his power and his friendships were producing special treatment.It had been an electric night of Champions League soccer at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium, with Real Madrid coming from behind to eliminate Paris St.-Germain. The game in March had been billed as a showdown of soccer’s new money against European aristocracy, and Real Madrid, representing the old guard, had triumphed. But only just.Now that it was over, though, the Paris St.-Germain president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, was furious. And almost as soon as the referee blew his whistle, al-Khelaifi was moving.He and the P.S.G. sporting director, Leonardo, headed straight for the changing rooms used by the referee Danny Makkelie and the match officials. It is not uncommon for members of the losing side to express their frustration over a defeat, or to seek answers. But Makkelie, a highly experienced official from the Netherlands, felt what happened in the tunnel area in Madrid went beyond all acceptable bounds.After the match, Makkelie wrote in a report reviewed by The New York Times, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “showed aggressive behavior and tried to enter the dressing room of the referee.” Even after Makkelie asked them to leave, he wrote, al-Khelaifi and Leonardo “blocked the door.” The president, he wrote, then “deliberately hit the flag of one of the assistants, breaking it.”The events created a crisis for European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. Al-Khelaifi is one of the most powerful men in the European game, an executive whose multiple roles — including a place on UEFA’s top board and a post as chairman of a media company that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars into European soccer through broadcast deals — have long aroused conflict-of-interest concerns.What happened next has only increased those worries among administrators and rivals. Within 24 hours of the incident, UEFA announced that it had opened a disciplinary investigation. And then it went silent.Weeks passed. Then months. Other incidents that had taken place at UEFA matches held after the game between Real Madrid and P.S.G. were investigated and adjudicated. But UEFA’s investigation into al-Khelaifi — who in addition to his role at P.S.G., one of Europe’s richest clubs, is also the chairman of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based company that is one of UEFA’s biggest partners — dragged on.Only in June, after the European soccer season had finished, after much of the attention on the incident had faded, did UEFA quietly publish a short paragraph. It appeared on Page 5 of a six-page document listing outcomes of recent disciplinary cases: UEFA said it would ban Leonardo — who had since left P.S.G. — for one game for violating “the basic rules of decent conduct.”Curiously, there was no mention of al-Khelaifi, who according to the referee’s report had engaged in behavior that was worse. UEFA declined to provide details of its investigation, or why al-Khelaifi had avoided punishment. It said the delay could be explained, too: It had simply prioritized investigations involving teams still competing in its competitions. P.S.G. declined to comment.The referee Danny Makkelie with Lionel Messi of P.S.G. during a Champions League game in March. Makkelie accused top P.S.G. officials of aggressive behavior after the match.Javier Soriano/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVeterans of disciplinary matters inside the organization, though, were not surprised in the outcome. Alex Phillips, a UEFA executive for almost two decades, most recently served as its head of governance and compliance until leaving the organization in 2019. He told The Times that the timing of the resolution alone felt intentional. “They would have waited to find a quiet time to bury it and hope people would have forgotten and it would blow over,” Phillips said.He suggested that UEFA’s disciplinary mechanism has been undermined in recent years. “The so-called independent judicial bodies are in reality far from independent, instead now being used as a power tool to ensure specific outcomes,” Phillips said. “We would tell the public that they are independent decisions when they really are not.”The al-Khelaifi case comes at a particularly sensitive time for UEFA. The European Court of Justice will rule next year after a group of clubs questioned UEFA’s role as a regulator and competition organizer. If it loses, its hegemony over how European soccer’s multibillion-dollar business can be organized, and by whom, may come under severe threat.The case of the tunnel fracas in Madrid is also not the first time P.S.G. has achieved a favorable outcome after being investigated by UEFA. In 2018, the club faced the possibility of being excluded from at least a season of Champions League soccer after being found to have breached UEFA’s financial control regulations. But P.S.G. was spared a humiliating — and expensive — punishment after UEFA’s administration sided with the team against its own investigators.Relations between al-Khelaifi and UEFA have only strengthened since then.He emerged as UEFA’s chief partner in early 2021, when the organization successfully fought off a bid by a group of European soccer’s biggest teams to create a breakaway Super League.But had the Super League succeeded, it would have at a stroke sabotaged the Champions League — UEFA’s chief financial engine and widely considered to be the top club event in global sports.Instead of signing up, though, al-Khelaifi said P.S.G. sided with UEFA, lobbying publicly and privately to help crush the revolt. That effort has been rewarded: Al-Khelaifi was soon elevated to chairman of the influential European Club Association, an umbrella group for more than 200 top clubs that is UEFA’s joint venture partner for selling rights to the Champions League and two other club competitions — and of which beIN Sports is one of the biggest customers.“There’s a clear conflict of interest,” said Miguel Maduro, the former head of governance at global soccer’s governing body, FIFA. “That he’s president of P.S.G. might not be a conflict, because clubs must be represented at UEFA. But the fact UEFA has serious economic interests with him and vice versa gives him undue influence. No one that has economic interests in terms of dealing with UEFA should be on its board.”Phillips, the former UEFA executive, said he had once tried to prevent al-Khelaifi’s elevation to UEFA’s executive committee but found little support among his colleagues.“You’ve got a conflict-of-interest article in the statutes,” Phillips said he told staff members. “You put it in, why don’t you apply it?”UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has long brushed aside such concerns, and he even insisted that al-Khelaifi, a Qatari who is a close confidante and occasional tennis partner of the Gulf country’s ruler, remain on its board as he fought a corruption case in Switzerland. (Al-Khelaifi was cleared in the case earlier this year.) This week, as European soccer’s top power brokers meet in Istanbul around the draw for this season’s Champions League, Ceferin and al-Khelaifi, in his role as E.C.A. head, are likely to hold bilateral talks on the future of the game.That influence has not gone unnoticed by rivals already wary of P.S.G.’s deep pockets. Another executive with a team in the Champions League this season, Joan Laporta of Barcelona, lamented in an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer that state-backed clubs like P.S.G. can offer double the amount teams like his can for players in the billion-dollar transfer market.Maduro, meanwhile, said that UEFA’s actions have “created suspicions” that P.S.G. operates under a different set of rules. He described the outcome of the 2018 financial fair play case as “incredible.”“You have the political leadership of UEFA siding with a club against its own independent body, undermining the enforcement of the rules,” he said. Most of the members of the commissions that investigated and ruled on P.S.G. in its financial compliance case have either quit or been replaced.Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, has brushed aside concerns about al-Khelaifi’s multiple roles.Kai Pfaffenbach/ReutersUEFA has since appointed Sunil Gulati, the former U.S. Soccer president, to lead its financial investigatory body. Gulati and Ceferin developed a friendship when both served on FIFA’s leadership council. It is Gulati who will be the one tasked with implementing the new financial control regulations that UEFA announced earlier this year. But those rules are more flexible than the previous regulations, and they have been renamed to highlight how UEFA is no longer reliant on them to promote a level playing field in its competitions. What had been known as the Financial Fair Play system now will be known as “financial stability” regulations.“Competitiveness cannot be addressed simply by financial regulations,” Andrea Traverso, the UEFA official responsible for establishing the rules, told reporters in April.The rules seem to have arrived at an opportune time for P.S.G., which has carried on spending lavishly even as the rest of the soccer industry was being buffeted by the financial impact of the pandemic. In this summer’s transfer window alone, the club has committed about 200 million euros on players, including a record new contract to retain the star striker Kylian Mbappé.At the same time, news media reports this week said the team was among two dozen that are likely to be fined, or agree to financial settlements with UEFA, for overspending under the new financial rules. Such a punishment is unlikely to hurt a team with the resources of P.S.G. or Manchester City, another club bankrolled by Gulf billions that has repeatedly challenged — and avoided — major sanctions from UEFA.“It seems that there could be some privilege for the clubs,” Laporta said this summer. “The state clubs that are close to UEFA.” More

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      Unai Emery Is Back for More

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      NEW YORK — It has been more than three years now, but Unai Emery still remembers the moment as if he had just witnessed it. When he brings it up, all the frustration he felt on that day in March 2019 comes rushing back.Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has just claimed the ball, the clock has ticked beyond the 90th minute and the referee has brought calm to the chaos. Arsenal has won a penalty, a last-gasp opportunity to win the match. It is also a chance for Emery, in his first season as Arsenal’s coach, to drag his team into the Champions League at the expense of the club’s bitter North London neighbor, Tottenham Hotspur.But Aubameyang, usually a lock from the penalty spot, fails to score. That shot, that missed opportunity, was the moment, as far as Emery is concerned, that ended not only Arsenal’s hopes of playing alongside European soccer royalty, but also his hold on his job as Arsenal’s manager.“We played a good season, and we were very close, but this moment…,” Emery says, allowing the sentence to trail off. He has made his point.For Emery, now two seasons into what has been by most metrics a hugely successful effort to rebuild his career at the Spanish club Villarreal, it is not only soccer games that are defined by moments: a missed penalty or a late save, a blown lead or a match-winning goal. Entire careers, he knows as well as anyone, can also be upended — or sent off on new, unexpected trajectories — by a single moment here or there.Emery, 50, did not fall all the way down the ladder after his firing at Arsenal. He was out of work only months before he landed the next summer at Villarreal, where he has directed a golden run that he believes has once again established his credentials for one of the sport’s top jobs. At least one Premier League club has come calling. (He said no.) More big clubs will follow. Emery sounds like a man who is ready to listen.“I think I recovered my level to keep in future my challenge high, high, high,” he said, raising his hands above his head. “I am very ambitious.”Emery with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in 2019. Player, Coach and Arsenal fans know what happened next.David Klein/ReutersHe has already been to soccer’s heights, after all: victories in three European finals with Sevilla, two seasons coaching Paris St.-Germain in the Champions League, then that call to go to London to manage in the Premier League.In 2018, Emery was tasked with leading Arsenal into the future, with managing its transition from 24 years under Arsène Wenger. The Emery era started well enough, with 11 consecutive victories, the club’s best run of form in more than a decade. But then came the botched penalty, the failure to leapfrog Tottenham in the standings, the bitter loss to Chelsea in the Europa League final. Emery survived the summer, but in November, after an extended winless run, Arsenal showed him the door.His morale-sapping departure has been traded for a two-year adventure in western Spain, a thrill ride that has delivered Villarreal’s first major trophy, moments of glory against some of soccer’s mightiest teams and proof, at least to Emery, that he can still be considered one of the game’s finest coaches.His most eye-catching successes came last season, when he took his team — a mix of rugged veterans, big-club castoffs and promising youngsters — on an improbable jaunt through the Champions League. Villarreal eliminated Juventus and Bayern Munich before threatening a comeback of cinematic proportions against Liverpool in the semifinals.That journey, Emery said, was built on players who rose to the occasion when their moment came. Much of Villarreal’s success was forged on the training field, he said, by practicing set pieces and counterattacks, by drilling into players the idea that they had to dig in and stick to a plan.“That is the difference you can reduce with other teams,” Emery said. In his view, coaches can improve their players and their teams by 10 or 15 percent. The rest is up to them, to a blend of preparation, belief and poise in critical moments.“How can I explain it?” he said. “Last year, we were worse when we played against Arsenal in the semifinals of the Europa League. We were worse than them. They were better than us. But our work before arriving to play against them — we created a very good mentality, and that is when one coach could make his team better than one that has better players.”It was a formula he brought to bear again in the Champions League last spring. Before each two-legged tie in the knockout rounds, Emery said, he told his players that they should expect to suffer and be outplayed for large spells, but that they should believe their chance would come to unsettle the opponent, either defensively or offensively. “When they start to suffer,” Emery said, “is when you can win.”Villarreal’s Pau Torres scoring against Juventus in the Champions League.Antonio Calanni/Associated PressAfter beating Juventus, Villarreal went on to eliminate Bayern Munich, too.Massimo Pinca/ReutersThe moments were unforgettable. A 3-0 victory at Juventus. A stunning first-leg victory over Bayern Munich in Spain, and then an 88th-minute goal to eliminate the Germans on their home field. Against Liverpool, Villarreal overturned a 2-0 first-leg deficit within 41 minutes to leave its opponent shaken and its stadium rocking.Liverpool regained its footing and survived — other teams get to have their moments, too — but the Champions League run has raised the profile of Villarreal’s best players. Some will move on. Their coach admits he probably will as well one day.He has already knocked back the advances of some suitors, including an approach from Newcastle United after the Premier League club was acquired by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. “It was not the right moment,” Emery said of his decision last November. Newcastle, for all its new riches, was last in the table at the time, and Villarreal was in the Champions League.That competition, he and his players knew, could change perceptions in ways that success in the Spanish league could not.“I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” Emery said of his post at Villarreal. “And then, a new challenge.”Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the beginning of his tenure, Emery said, he had planned to focus on the league. “But when we beat Atalanta and when we played against Juventus, the Champions League was, for me, more important,” Emery said. The club was getting recognition for its successes, and for players and coaches alike the performances could catapult their careers in new directions. “I know I have individual challenges as well,” Emery said.Emery had arrived at Villarreal bruised by the nature of his Arsenal exit. Those wounds are not completely healed. He described the departure in Spanish as a golpe — a blow. By the time he was fired, Emery was facing criticism that at times felt more personal than professional: Long before the end, former players and parts of the news media had taken aim at his command of English.Those criticisms still smart: When a fan at a preseason match in England recently goaded Emery by asking him to say, “Good ebening,” the coach responded with an obscene gesture that went viral.At Villarreal, the team’s wealthy owners have provided Emery a platform to find balance in his life, as well as a space to rebuild a belief in his style of coaching. But Emery said he was certain that his success was not a case of a coach’s finding his level, of a leader most comfortable one rung below the elite. “I’m in a very good environment to feel strong, to feel confident again, adding confidence in my work,” he said. “And then, a new challenge.”His determination to return to the top is perhaps best demonstrated by his extracurricular activities: While he has been re-establishing his credentials in Spain, he has also been working hard on his English. He described his summer trip to New York as a learning opportunity as much as a vacation with his son, Lander. It is perhaps a tacit admission that not all of the criticism during his time at Arsenal was wide of the mark.He has been ruminating on those moments at Arsenal when he could not quite get his message across, or those crucial early conversations with key players when linguistic barriers made it hard to create the type of coach-player bond essential to winning teams.“The next time I will arrive with better English,” he said.That time may come soon. For now, though, Emery is prepared to bide his time, to wait for the right moment.Jackie Molloy for The New York Times More