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      Champions League Final Preview: Liverpool vs. Real Madrid

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      Real Madrid and Liverpool will square off on Saturday in Paris. The game is a rematch of the 2018 final.PARIS — As collisions of star power, pedigree and history go — and provided you don’t support one of their rivals — it would be hard to conjure a better Champions League final this season than Liverpool vs. Real Madrid.The teams meet Saturday in Paris to crown Europe’s club champion. Real Madrid, which won the Spanish league this year, is chasing a record 14th Champions League title after narrowly dodging elimination in the semifinals. Liverpool, the runner-up in the Premier League but holder of two cups already this spring, will be hoping to lift the Champions League trophy for the seventh time.Here’s what you should know.Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHow can I watch the game?Saturday’s final will be broadcast by CBS (English) and TUDN (Spanish) in the United States, and streamed on Paramount Plus. Coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time but — and this is critically important — the game will not start for another 90 minutes. Plan your day accordingly.Not in the United States? You can find your local viewing options — from Canal+ to Canal Dos to the wonderfully named Silknet and Wowow — on this list of UEFA’s television partners.What time is the final?The ball will roll off the spot at 9 p.m. in Paris, which is 3 p.m. Eastern. It will almost certainly travel backward, though that hasn’t been required by the rules for eight years now.Federico Valverde may start on Saturday. His son is not expected to play.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressWhat’s the vibe in Paris?Our correspondent Tariq Panja was on the streets on Friday, where he reports that it was oddly quiet compared with previous finals. His dispatch:France is the center for world sports this weekend, with the Champions League final at the Stade de France in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, the French Open across town at Roland Garros and Formula One’s Monaco Grand Prix on the south coast, if you prefer your sporting twists and turns in the literal sense.Paris was easily able to absorb the influx of fans, though in its usual tourist hot spots there was little sign that soccer’s biggest game was in town. That might have been owed to a warning issued to supporters of both teams that they risked fines of 135 euros (almost $150) if they turned up wearing club colors in places like the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Élysées, the grand avenue that is typically flooded with visitors.Instead, the tournament organizer, UEFA, and city officials hosted fans of the rival teams in separate venues closer to the city limits. That could be normal caution, fears of the coronavirus or the fact that France may not be entirely thrilled to have the game: It only got the hosting rights in February, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it untenable to go to the original host city, St. Petersburg.Still, the final — the first to be played in front of a full stadium since Liverpool last won the tournament in 2019 — did attract the well-heeled and well-connected, with UEFA’s luxury hotel a magnet for former players, high-ranking officials, politicians, agents and assorted extras.About a mile away, Real Madrid’s leadership, led by the club president, Florentino Pérez, gathered before heading in a convoy of buses to watch the team train at the Stade de France. Perez traveled to Paris with a security detail amid concerns his presence might be seen as provocative only a week after he failed in his efforts to lure Kylian Mbappé, the star player on France’s biggest team, Paris St. Germain, to Madrid.The final also was the first time that Pérez and the UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, met in person since a Pérez-led effort to create a European Super League failed spectacularly just over a year ago. Pérez, who is still suing UEFA over the Super League’s demise, and Ceferin, who called some of the plotters behind it “snakes” and “liars,” sat alongside one another at an official dinner at the Louvre on Friday night.Let’s hope the meal didn’t require sharp knives at each place setting.What kind of game can we expect?Luis Díaz, second from left, and his Liverpool teammates kept the mood light at their final training session on Friday. Frank Augstein/Associated PressOur soccer columnist Rory Smith offered a quick preview in his newsletter this week (sign up here):Paris St.-Germain almost looked as if it were waiting for the wave to crash. Chelsea seemed determined to resist, right up until the moment that the storm hit. Only then did Thomas Tuchel’s team realize its powerlessness. Manchester City, meanwhile, had almost made it to shore. Once it felt the tide change, though, it could do nothing but succumb.It is difficult, on the eve of the Champions League final, to avoid the suspicion that this Real Madrid story cannot possibly end in a dispiriting 2-1 defeat to Liverpool in Paris. There has been too much drama, too much magic, in the last two months for it to conclude in any way other than smoke and fire and white ticker tape drifting down from the sky.Indeed, the test for Liverpool on Saturday — more than technical or tactical or systemic — is psychological. Real Madrid has been able to snatch victory from defeat against three of the best-equipped opponents in Europe because its players believe in the club’s almost mystical refusal to wilt.But Madrid has been helped by the fact that the opposition are inclined to believe it, too. Particularly in the Bernabéu, there is a distinct, almost palpable edge to otherwise accomplished teams, a discernible awareness that at some point — almost entirely unannounced — Real Madrid is going to do something elemental and unfathomable, and nobody will be able to stop it.To win its seventh European Cup on Saturday, Liverpool will have to break that sequence. Its manager, Jürgen Klopp, said this week that he finds it more helpful to focus on preventing Real Madrid from getting into a position to wreak its particular brand of havoc — easier said than done, of course — than simply to watch the highlights of those two frenzied minutes against Manchester City, over and over again. “There are another 88 minutes in the game,” he said.In that sense, Liverpool is probably the toughest test Madrid could have faced in the final. Not necessarily because it is a better team than Manchester City — the Premier League table, indeed, rather suggests it is not — but because it will see in this Madrid an echo of its former self.Don’t worry: Marcelo is fine. Manu Fernandez/Associated PressThe Madrid players at Carlo Ancelotti’s disposal are of a higher quality, of course, and the experience of his squad — many of his stars are going for a fifth Champions League crown in nine years — is incomparable. But the nature of the way the team plays, conjuring those irresistible surges, is not.It was that sort of style, after all, that carried Liverpool to the final in 2018, the one it lost to Real Madrid in Kyiv: the ability to “finish” a game, as Klopp put it, in no more than a couple of 10- or 15-minute stretches. The roles have reversed completely now. Liverpool will seek to control events in Paris, while Madrid waits for its storm to gather from a cloudless sky. It will come. Liverpool will know that. The challenge is what you do when it breaks.Haven’t we seen this movie before?Liverpool and Real Madrid met in the 2018 final in Kyiv.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYes, in a way. Both teams have been regulars in the latter stages of the Champions League, and regular visitors to the final, over the last decade.Liverpool is playing for the trophy for the third time in five years, a stretch of some of the most thrilling — and most beautiful soccer — in its proud history. Real Madrid is in the final for the fifth time since 2014; in each of its previous four visits since 2014, its fans will quickly point out, it has left with the trophy.But despite their storied histories, Liverpool and Real Madrid have met in the final only twice.Liverpool beat Real Madrid, 1-0, in 1981, when the tournament was still known as the European Cup, and when it was Liverpool that was in the midst of a string of recent titles.Real Madrid won the rematch by 3-1 in 2018, continuing its own string of recent titles.That final still stings for Liverpool, which endured two horrible mistakes by goalkeeper Loris Karius that sealed its fate and lost forward Mohamed Salah to an ugly tackle from Real Madrid supervillain/legend (descriptions may vary) Sergio Ramos in the first half.Salah was forced from the game with a shoulder injury after the tackle, in which it appeared Ramos had hooked his arm as they fell. Ramos no longer plays for Madrid, but Salah does not appear to have forgotten.“We have a score to settle,” he said this week.Any injury concerns?It doesn’t look like it. Liverpool’s Thiago, who has been the precision-passing engine of its midfield, and Fabinho, who does a lot of the hard work behind him, were both back in training this week, Coach Jürgen Klopp said.I haven’t prepared. Tell me something I can say to sound smart.“The matchup between Vinícius Junior and Trent Alexander-Arnold on the wing should be fascinating, given how involved Alexander-Arnold usually is in Liverpool’s attack despite playing right back. If he gets caught forward too often, Vinícius can punish him.”My friends say I should skip the final because soccer is boring.Get better friends. More

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      The True Cost of Kylian Mbappé’s New Deal

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      It is easy to be dazzled by money in soccer, especially as the figures blur into incomprehension. But the numbers matter because of what comes next.It was not, Kylian Mbappé would like you to know, about the money. True, it might look — to the childlike, the innocent, the uninformed — as if he has spent the last year or so playing Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain off one another in order to drive up his value and elicit the most lucrative contract possible. But that, rest assured, is just an illusion.Money, in fact, barely came into the negotiations, certainly with P.S.G. In Mbappé’s telling, that particular subject appeared only at the end: There were a “few minutes” of discussions about how much he would be paid, he said, but there were many months picking over the precise nature of P.S.G.’s “sporting project.”Quite what shape that project takes is not yet clear, of course. Mbappé has denied that the three-year deal he signed last week includes a set of clauses that guarantee he has a veto, in effect, over various appointments at the club, ranging from managers to sporting directors to players.Whether the clauses are written down hardly matters. It is inconceivable that any club would make the sort of financial commitment P.S.G. has made to the 23-year-old Mbappé and not run crucial decisions past him. Lionel Messi enjoyed similar influence in his later years at Barcelona. That is the privilege afforded to the world’s best players.Mbappé and the P.S.G. president Nasser al-Khelaifi both declared themselves thrilled with the player’s new contract.Michel Spingler/Associated PressIt does not, though, indicate that there has been quite so much of a shift in P.S.G.’s “sporting project” as Mbappé might want to believe. For the past 10 years, P.S.G.’s policy has been to hire extravagantly gifted superstars at eye-watering costs and cater to their whims. There are countless stories about Neymar’s occasionally laissez-faire approach to training. At least one coach found that his squad did not, deep down, agree with him that it might need to press its opponents.P.S.G. has fostered an indulgent, individualistic ethos, with little or no thought for structure or system, and that has, ultimately, prevented the club realizing its greatest ambition: winning the Champions League. To break with that, P.S.G.’s plan appears to be to retain an extravagantly gifted superstar at an eye-watering cost and cater to his whims.And the cost is eye-watering. Mbappé will pick up at least $75 million in salary over the course of his contract, after taxes. There is a $125 million golden handshake to sign on. Factor in the roughly $200 million P.S.G. turned down from Real Madrid last summer, and the deal has cost P.S.G. $400 million or so.It is easy, now, to be dazzled by money in soccer, to feel inoculated against the sport’s excess. There are after all just so many zeros. After a while, the numbers cease to offend, creeping higher and higher until it seems arbitrary to draw a line — why is $25 million-a-year too much, but $15 million-a-year acceptable? — and the figures start to blur into incomprehension.But they do matter in the end, and they matter because of what follows in their wake. Money in soccer is not really about money. The players do not genuinely believe that they require those extra few hundred thousand dollars because otherwise they will be bereft. Yes, they generally (and understandably) want to maximize their earnings from a brief career, but their motivations are often more rooted in power, and status, and worth.P.S.G.’s star power may be unmatched. But does it have a plan?Michel Spingler/Associated PressThe parable about Ashley Cole, the former Arsenal defender, nearly swerving off the road because his club had offered him $63,000-a-week, rather than the $69,000-a-week he believed he was due, is not about a man appalled by the prospect of looming penury. There is almost nothing, after all, that $3.5 million-a-year can buy you that $3.2 million-a-year cannot.No, what upset Cole was the sense that Arsenal did not value him as much as his teammates or — worse — his peers. Other players of his quality were earning far more than him, he knew, and if Arsenal was not prepared to offer the going rate, then perhaps the club did not value his contributions quite as much as he thought it should.That is the problem with the Mbappé deal. Every time the salaries of the superstars rise, they slowly but surely drag everyone else’s with them, pulling the sport’s Overton window further and further into the stratosphere.P.S.G. will be able to cope with that, of course, when Mbappé’s teammates appear asking for improved terms in light of the new normal. Even $400 million is not a figure that will rattle the nation state of Qatar. And perhaps its peers among Europe’s elite will be fine, too, when Mohamed Salah or Kevin De Bruyne or Vinícius Junior or Pedri start their next set of negotiations by using Mbappé as a starting point.But further down the food chain, there will be a problem. Some clubs will swallow the extra cost of retaining talent, with all the risk that entails. Others will choose to cash in and sell on, further entrenching the divide between the aristocrats and everyone else.The statement released in the aftermath of Mbappé’s decision by Javier Tebas, the outspoken president of La Liga, was a strange one, fermented almost entirely from sour grapes. His central tenet — that the best way to protect everyone from competitive imbalance was to introduce more of it to the competition he runs — fell somewhere between craven and hypocritical.And yet, under all of that, Tebas has a point. It is dangerous for salaries to be artificially inflated by clubs with no constraints whatsoever on their finances. It does pose a threat to the health of soccer as a whole. It is, in certain lights, not entirely dissimilar to the basic problem of the Super League.The issue, of course, is that there is nobody, nobody at all, who is prepared to do anything about it. Tebas was not the only executive to be provoked by Mbappé’s signing into making a slightly odd statement. His Ligue 1 counterpart, Vincent Labrune, responded to Tebas by reminding everyone that both Real Madrid and Barcelona have been found to have benefited from illegal state aid.Al-Khelaifi himself took the unusual stance of suggesting Tebas was concerned that Ligue 1 might catch La Liga, simultaneously misunderstanding that worrying about that sort of thing is the essence of Tebas’s job, and apparently denigrating the league that both his club and his broadcast network, beIN Sports, have done so much to subsidize in recent years.(None of this was quite so strange as Emmanuel Macron, the French president, intervening to persuade Mbappé to stay in Paris: Macron is a sincere and passionate Marseille fan, and should presumably love nothing more than to see Mbappé disappear to Spain, along with most of his teammates.)That all of them could see no further than their own agendas was neither surprising nor outrageous. Tebas’s role is to promote and protect La Liga, just as al-Khelaifi’s role — or one of them, at any rate — is to act in the best interests of P.S.G. And it is, without question, in the best interests of P.S.G. not only to hoard as much talent as possible, but to make it incrementally more difficult for all of its rivals to keep up.What is more disappointing is that there is nobody, anywhere, who appears willing or able to confront these issues, not from the perspective of an individual club or a specific league but with the interests of the sport — the industry — in mind. What is good for P.S.G. or Real Madrid is not necessarily in the best interests of the game as a whole; soccer is crying out for someone in a position of influence to say that, but they remain conspicuous by their absence.La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, criticized the deal that kept Mbappé in France but not the offer that might have brought him to Madrid.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe most obvious candidate, UEFA, has recused itself of its responsibilities, confounded by its twin role as weighty ultimate authority and callow competition organizer. It is UEFA that has allowed the self-interest to fester and the venal to prosper. It is UEFA that has forgotten that for soccer to function in good health, it has to be treated as a collective endeavor.If it is not, it risks being fractured beyond repair, the golden goose trussed and quartered, sold off to the highest bidder in a market contorted beyond all reason by a handful of teams — and that description fits both Real Madrid and P.S.G. — and, now, by a single deal, one act of vanity and bravado by a club that refuses to allow anything to stand in its way, whose vision for the future is that everywhere should be Paris, for whom it really is not about the money. Because when you have enough of it, money is meaningless, and there are so many zeros that it loses all sense at all.CorrespondenceChelsea: champions of England six times, but never Europe.Matthew Childs/Action Images Via ReutersWilliam Ireland, clearly, has been picking through this column with a fine-toothed comb. “I have seen it said that England’s Women’s Super League is the strongest in the world and I don’t understand why,” he wrote.“Chelsea has been humbled in the Champions League in the last two years. Arsenal looked well off the pace this year. When teams from Europe have played teams from the N.W.S.L., Lyon and Barcelona Femení have been matched. The W.S.L. has been getting more publicity and more fans, and that’s great, but right now it seems it’s not the best in Europe, much less the world.”This is a great point, and there are a few factors that go into it. First, of course, is your general English exceptionalism. Second, soccer’s innate Eurocentrism. Third, a degree of hyperbole that is linked, deep down, to the W.S.L.’s rapid rise.But most interesting is the fourth, something noted by at least a couple of Barcelona players: television. A lot of soccer from the Spanish women’s top flight, for example, is not broadcast. That makes it hard for people to know how high the standard is; much of what we see is Barcelona winning games, 8-0, and it is natural, to some extent, to assume that many of its opponents are substandard.Domestic dominance can make it hard to take the measure of Lyon and Barcelona. Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe view of Barcelona’s Norwegian wing Caroline Graham Hansen, certainly, is that it is not the case; she argues that the ease with which Barcelona wins games is testament to its ability, rather than an indictment of its opponents. Until fans can judge that with their own eyes, though, the tendency will be to assume that the league we see most — the W.S.L., say, or the N.W.S.L. — is the strongest.Bob Honig, meanwhile, wonders whether the presence of the (men’s) World Cup in the middle of next season might “make club teams that are not so reliant on national team players more competitive?”This is a logical conclusion, of course. Those teams whose players are given a rest halfway through next season should benefit from that break; the skill gap should, to some extent, be closed by a greater degree of freshness. I think we can all hope that is the case, but let’s not forget the golden rule of modern soccer: Whatever happens, the big teams win. More

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      Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez Is More Powerful Than Ever

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      A year after the Super League debacle, Florentino Pérez is back in the Champions League final, having turned a club owned by its members into his personal kingdom.MADRID — Florentino Pérez strode onto the television set looking somber. Though he knew his questioner would be a little more informal — open-necked shirt, blazer — the Real Madrid president had chosen a straightforward black suit for the occasion. He even wore a tie. This was business, not pleasure, serious, not trivial, and Pérez wanted to project that.On the screens behind him, a lurid orange logo depicted a cartoon soccer ball with flames jetting out of its rotating crown.In England, in Italy and particularly in the United States, an assortment of financiers, tycoons and magnates of various stripes — all of them, like Pérez, among the dozen founding members of what would come to be known as the Super League — watched along in horror.The 12 clubs had struggled, in the weeks before going public, to find someone to act as the frontman for their idea. It was a complex, delicate project, one that needed careful presentation. But while none of the American owners of England’s most illustrious teams wanted to take center stage, nor did they believe Pérez, the architect of much of the idea, would come across as authoritative, weighty, persuasive.Pérez was an imperfect spokesman for the Super League, even though he was largely responsible for its creation.Rodrigo Jimenez/EPA, via ShutterstockPérez might occupy an almost unrivaled position of power at home — president of Real Madrid, chairman of one of the world’s largest construction firms, his box at the Santiago Bernabéu a magnet for the great and the good — but abroad he was often seen as bombastic, hubristic, faintly ridiculous. His appearance on “El Chiringuito” — a late-night, low-rent talk show — seemed to confirm his partners’ fears.Within days, the entire project collapsed. And then, only a little more than 12 months later, it all happened again.For four years, Pérez had been trumpeting the idea that Real Madrid would sign Kylian Mbappé, doing everything he could to court the French striker, a boyhood Real fan. The club had squirreled away a considerable portion of its transfer income for Mbappé’s signing-on fee and his salary, and as recently as March, Pérez was making not especially cryptic remarks to the news media suggesting an agreement was imminent.Then, late last week, Mbappé messaged Pérez to thank him for his offer, and inform him that he had chosen to stay at Paris St.-Germain. Pérez had just enough time to alert his team to Mbappé’s change of heart before the 23-year-old Frenchman appeared on the field at the Parc des Princes to celebrate his new three-year contract.Ordinarily, at a club as proud and demanding as Real Madrid, those twin embarrassments would be enough to spark some sense of mutiny. Pérez, though, remains as powerful, as unassailable as ever.Madrid’s fans are accustomed to a certain level of success. David Ramos/Getty ImagesIn part, of course, that can be attributed to the one aspect of the club not under his direct control. Pérez, ultimately, stands or falls on the fortunes of the team. Despite only cosmetic changes to the squad last summer — the additions of Eduardo Camavinga, a young midfielder; the versatile David Alaba; and the reinstatement of Carlo Ancelotti as coach — this has proved, a touch unexpectedly, to be a vintage season for Real Madrid.A team beaten to the Spanish title last season by its in-city rival, Atlético, has been restored — with ease — to its domestic perch. A team that had been knocked out of the Champions League with little fuss by Ajax, Manchester City and Chelsea in the last three years has returned, imperiously, to the final. Only Liverpool, on Saturday in Paris, stands between Real Madrid and a record 14th European Cup.In Karim Benzema, the last man standing from that first wave of signings that heralded Pérez’s return to the Real Madrid presidency in 2009, the club may possess the world’s standout player. In the likes of Vinicius Junior, Camavinga and Rodrygo, there are the green shoots of a new generation starting to sprout. Pérez has overseen it all while reconstructing the Bernabéu, turning it into a slick, state-of-the-art venue, complete with extensive corporate areas and a retractable turf field.Real Madrid beat Liverpool, its opponent on Saturday, in the 2018 Champions League final.Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut Pérez, 75, is not as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of form and fate as might be expected of a democratically elected president. Real Madrid is owned by its members, after all, but increasingly it feels like Pérez’s personal kingdom.Last summer, one of the few figures at the club who served as a counterweight to Pérez, the Galáctico player turned Galáctico coach Zinedine Zidane, resigned, claiming the club was “no longer giving me the trust I need.” On his way out the door, Zidane suggested he had not been “valued” as a “human being.”At much the same time, the club captain, Sergio Ramos, was leaving, too. Ramos broke down in tears at the news conference held to confirm his departure, revealing that the club had reneged on the promise of a one-year contract extension. “They never communicated to me that the offer had an expiry date,” Ramos said. “Maybe I misunderstood it.”They are not the only defining figures in Madrid’s modern incarnation to feel a little alienated by Pérez. His relationships with the earlier-era stars Iker Casillas and Raúl Gonzalez, too, have been strained at times (though both have since returned to the club).Pérez, though, is no longer troubled by the risks of crossing revered former players, not now that his dominion over Real Madrid is essentially unassailable, both officially and conceptually.In 2012, he changed the club’s statutes to decree that any candidate for the presidency must have been a member for at least 20 years, and possess a personal fortune equivalent to 15 percent of the team’s revenue.Pérez is the center of attention in his box at the Bernabéu alongside friends, politicians and business associates.Javier Barbancho/ReutersHe claimed, at the time, that it was a necessary measure to prevent Real Madrid from being sold to an overseas investor, but the joke has run, ever since, that candidates for the presidency also must work in construction, have three children and wear size nine shoes. Pérez has contested three presidential elections since. No rival has been able to meet the statutory criteria.More significant, though, he has quashed almost any outlet for criticism. It has been instructive, for example, to read the accounts in much of Madrid’s news media of the Mbappé deal. Rather than a defeat for Madrid, Mbappé’s decision has been cast as that of a mercenary and a traitor, a turncoat who gave his word to Pérez and then betrayed him.Mbappé’s family has been so distressed by that depiction that his mother moved to correct it publicly, asserting on Twitter that her son had never “given his word” to Real Madrid.That he chose “El Chiringuito” for his first appearance to discuss the Super League was not an accident, either. The show regularly features prominent Madrid-supporting journalists who have been known to break down in tears over the club’s successes, or rail against those — Gareth Bale, Eden Hazard — who are deemed to have dishonored the club.The show is not, in that, an outlier. Pérez oversees a vast network of pliant news media, dependent not only on his grace and favor for information and access but cowed, too, by the sheer scale and heft of his business interests. Pérez has always claimed that he is powerful only because he is president of Real Madrid, but that is not quite true. He is powerful in many other ways, too.That has allowed him to run Real Madrid as he sees fit. Despite its size, the club’s hierarchy is relatively tightknit, with many recruitment decisions overseen by Pérez; his chief executive, José Ángel Sanchez; and his chief scout, Juni Calafat. Real Madrid is, in that sense, something of an outlier, almost a throwback, in an era when most of its peers have diversified and deepened their staffs.Pérez would argue, of course, that it works: five Champions League finals in nine years is all the evidence he needs. That, perhaps, is his greatest gift. No matter what he does, no matter how unlikely it seems, Pérez has a remarkable ability to emerge triumphant.This might have been the year that destabilized the kingdom he has so painstakingly built. It may, instead, prove to be the year that cemented it for good. More

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      Kylian Mbappé Will Stay at P.S.G., Rejecting Real Madrid

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      The battle to sign the world’s best young player produced dueling offers worth more than $200 million. Mbappé picked the one that will keep him in Paris.Paris St.-Germain has persuaded Kylian Mbappé to sign a new contract, one of the richest in soccer history, that will keep the French striker at the club for the next three years while he pursues a second consecutive World Cup with France and attempts to end the club’s string of failures in the Champions League.His decision, announced by the club Saturday, ended Real Madrid’s hopes of luring Mbappé, arguably the best young player in the world, to the most successful team in European soccer.Real Madrid, a 13-time European champion, had given Mbappé a contract offer that would have made the 23-year-old forward the highest paid player in its history. Its offer included a signing bonus of almost $140 million, a net salary of more than $26 million every season and complete control over his image rights.But P.S.G., the perennial French champion that is bankrolled by gas-rich Qatar, prevented him from leaving as a free agent by offering even better terms. P.S.G. offered a similar fee but a far higher base salary (also after taxes), keeping him on a team that already includes the Argentine star Lionel Messi and the Brazilian forward Neymar, who was acquired by P.S.G. for a world-record fee of $263 million in 2017.The saga surrounding Mbappé’s future had gripped France, and was considered a matter of such national importance that last month the French president, Emmanuel Macron, told a news conference he would do whatever he could to keep Mbappé, considered a national treasure, in the country.P.S.G.’s success in persuading Mbappé to stay is the latest sign that the dominance of global soccer that once rested in the hands of legacy clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United has now shifted to a few deep-pocketed, Gulf-backed teams.The Spanish league La Liga in a statement called the deal “scandalous,” given P.S.G. had reported large financial losses last season, and said it would file a complaint with European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, as well as other authorities, including the European Union.P.S.G.’s confirmation that it had retained Mbappé came just over a week after Manchester City, owned by the brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, confirmed that it had acquired Erling Haaland — a prolific Norwegian goal-scorer whose signature was considered by many an acquisition as highly sought-after as Mbappé’s.But unlike Haaland, whose contract had to be acquired by Manchester City for an eight-figure transfer fee, Mbappé’s expiring contract in Paris made him a free agent, effectively able to choose from among the highest bidders for his prodigious talents. The unusually brief length of his new contract at P.S.G. — three years — suggests he could already be planning his move, and his next payday.Amid an economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, few teams but the wealthiest elite have been able to make the type of marquee signings that were once a staple of every soccer off-season. But Mbappé had made no secret of his desire to move to Real Madrid from P.S.G., and the Spanish powerhouse went all out to recruit him. His expiring contract in Paris also meant he was a free agent, available without a multimillion-dollar transfer fee.In addition to the nine-figure signing bonus and the stunning annual salary — a huge offer even by Real Madrid’s standards — the club also was said to have offered Mbappé complete control over his image rights, a lucrative revenue stream that Real Madrid typically shares with its roster of stars.But P.S.G. and its Qatari owners managed to offer an even better deal in a transfer soap opera that has dragged on for more than a year, ever since Real Madrid first tried to extract Mbappé from Paris with the offer of a record transfer fee.Last summer, Real Madrid and its president, Florentino Pérez, were so intent in making Mbappé the centerpiece of the club’s efforts to return to the top of domestic and European soccer that they committed to pay more than $212 million for the forward, even though he would have been available as a free agent again this summer.For P.S.G., retaining Mbappé provides a welcome highlight in a season that has been played against a backdrop of uncertainty after yet another failure in the Champions League. The club was eliminated early in the knockout stages — ironically by Real Madrid, which will face Liverpool for the trophy in the final next Saturday — even though it had added several A-list talents in the preseason, including Messi, who joined from Barcelona on a rich contract of his own.P.S.G.’s strategy of bringing the most exciting talents, whatever the cost, has had mixed results. The team continued its dominance of the French league, the weakest of the five major European competitions, with yet another title this season, but success on the continental stage has continued to elude it, raising questions about the team’s durability in the toughest games.It remains unclear if anything more than an enormous salary increase convinced Mbappé to remain in Paris. He was reported to have been frustrated when P.S.G. rejected Real Madrid’s offers last season, with the P.S.G. sporting director Leonardo saying at the time that Mbappé wanted out.Mbappe has continued to flourish this season, however, leading the French league in goals (25) and assists (17). All the while, Real Madrid had continued to court him, and until late this week the Spanish club was convinced it had finally managed to persuade a player coveted by its president, Florentino Pérez. News media reports in Spain at the start of the week even suggested a deal was done.In recent days, though, that confidence began to evaporate as Mbappé delayed on putting pen to paper. Then, on Friday, Mbappe’s mother, who has been involved in the negotiations, said her son was weighing two offers. Real Madrid’s worst fears were confirmed on Saturday, when Pérez, in Belgrade to follow Real Madrid’s basketball team in a European final, received a message telling him Mbappé had decided to stay at P.S.G.For Mbappé, the deal comes amid major efforts to build his brand away from the field. The striker has spent months in talks with the United States-based talent agency Endeavor to create his own media company that will be modeled on one similar to a business built by the basketball star LeBron James. That new company could lift Mbappé profile, and his wealth, into the same ranks as Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, superstars whose global stardom now outstrips the sport they play.With both Messi and Ronaldo now in their 30s, it is players like Mbappé and Haaland who will look to dominate soccer’s biggest prizes, including individual honors like the Ballon D’Or, awarded to the world’s best player, and competitions like the Champions League, a trophy both P.S.G. and Manchester City covet, but which neither has won. More

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      Andrea Pirlo Is Timeless

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      With elite soccer increasingly driven by coaches and systems, Pirlo feels as if he belongs to another era. But can a classic ever go out of style?Officially, whenever Andrea Pirlo has watched soccer over the course of the last year or so, it has been for work, rather than merely for pleasure. It might be almost a year since his first foray into management was ended, abruptly and unceremoniously, by Juventus, but being a manager is less a job and more a lifestyle choice, like being a monk, or a double agent. It cannot be switched off.He does not watch passively, losing himself in the thrill of the game. Instead, he tries to distill from what he is seeing some idea, some concept, some notion that might come in useful somewhere down the line. His appetite for coaching remains undimmed by his experience in Turin; he will, he knows, return at some point. Everything is research, revision, for that moment. “Anything that might help me do my job,” he said.But while Pirlo is now a manager by trade, he remains every inch an aesthete by inclination. That does not come with an off button, either. And so, he admits, he finds it intensely difficult, if not impossible, to watch a game if it does not bring him pleasure. “I want to see teams doing something positive,” he said. “They can do it well, or not so well, but I want them to try. But if there is not something interesting to see, I find a new game to watch.”For more than a decade, Pirlo served as elite European soccer’s version of Petronius, the sport’s appointed arbiter of good taste. He came to embody élan and panache and easy, timeless style. He made the deep-lying playmaker the game’s must-have accessory, for a while, at least. He single-handedly popularized the Panenka. He wrote a soccer autobiography that should not have immediately been pulped.It is intriguing, then, to know quite what, in Pirlo’s mind, qualifies as “interesting.” It is, after all, only five years since he retired — and only seven since he left Europe, where soccer’s searchlight shines brightest, for Major League Soccer — but, in that time, the game he left behind has changed considerably.The best measure of that, perhaps, is that Pirlo already feels as if he belongs to another era, another time, despite the fact that he has played in the Champions League final as recently as Lionel Messi. The last time either one graced that stage, the grandest that club soccer has to offer, was in Berlin in 2015, when Messi and Neymar and Luis Suárez swept Barcelona past Pirlo’s Juventus.That is not simply because soccer has a tendency toward instant amnesia. It is not just because, in the years in between his retirement as a player and his short-lived managerial tenure at Juventus he faded, just a little, from view. Nor can it be attributed, entirely, to the fact that many of the moments with which he is most indelibly associated are from what might politely be referred to as “some time ago.”Pirlo at Euro 2012. Maurizio Brambatti/European Pressphoto AgencyPirlo has spent the last few months designing and curating an NFT collection, like almost everyone else with a little time on their hands; it has taken as its theme his most treasured, most iconic memories. His first Champions League final, in 2003, when Babe Ruth’s curse still held. Winning the World Cup in 2006, something that occurred before the invention of the iPhone. His effortless, unfazed Panenka against England at Euro 2012, when Lance Armstrong was still a hero. These are all moments from a past so distant, both in a sporting and a cultural context, that it may as well be frozen in amber.And yet it is not that, or at least not only that, which makes Pirlo feel like an emissary from a different age. It is that players like him do not exist any more, not really. It is no surprise that, when asked which individuals he most likes to watch now, he picks out Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong, Marco Verratti, Jorginho.They all contain trace elements of Pirlo, in different ways — position or technique or role or poise — but none are quite cut from his cloth. De Jong is too industrious, Busquets too defensive, Verratti too chaotic, Jorginho too busy. Pirlo was the last of his line. Modern soccer does not produce, does not tolerate, players as languid as him, not in his position; nor, increasingly, does it have room for the sort of unhurried imagination that was always Pirlo’s hallmark.It has become, instead, a game of “automatisms,” as another of Pirlo’s peers, Cesc Fàbregas, put it earlier this year. “The manager basically tells you where you have to pass the ball in every moment,” Fàbregas said. “The player has to be positioned in their exact place. It’s becoming a robotic game. I’ve had various managers and it’s not just happened with one or two. It’s happened with four or five. This thing is here to stay.”It has drifted, in other words, from being a game defined by players to one designed by managers. Pirlo has noted the same shift. “Before, there were maybe not as many coaches who were so prepared, so obsessed with their work, so dedicated to finding the smallest detail so that they could improve,” he said. “It was simpler, in that way, but it was also more difficult: There was less data, fewer ways to study.”The game has changed. Pirlo says he has not.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockWhere, then, would that have left him? Would Pirlo, had he been born a decade or two later, have been forced to adapt to a different role? Would he have been molded into an unwilling defensive midfield linchpin? Would he have been asked to press relentlessly from the front, devoting his energies to restricting space, rather than expanding it? Would he, perhaps, have been disregarded completely, rather than enjoying one of the most decorated careers of his generation?He has an answer for that. No. “Maybe I would have done even better,” he said, with a smile. His logic is based on more than unflappable self-confidence. “It was a little more technical when I was playing,” he said. “Now maybe it is more physical. But there were a lot of players in my generation, a lot of teams with technical players of the highest level.“Maybe now there are not quite so many, so a bit of quality goes a long way. It would be just as valuable in this sort of soccer, maybe more so. Those kinds of players, the ones who are a little smarter, or a little more technical, are harder to find now. In all that speed, all that haste, there are certain situations where the most important thing is a little intelligence, a little technique.”Besides, Pirlo is adamant that certain truths about soccer hold, regardless of how the game’s fashions, its tastes, ebb and flow. He might watch it now with a manager’s eye, scouring what he sees for some strategic insight, some tactical maneuver, but he remains a player at heart. “You have to work within systems now more than you did,” he said. “But it always comes down to the players.” A coach, he knows from personal experience, is never in complete control of events. Even the finest strategies, the most complex schemes, hinge on the humans tasked with implementing them.“Everything can change,” he said. “It can be quicker or slower, it can have one style or another, but it is always the players that make things happen on the field.”In that, to Pirlo, it always remains the same, familiar, recognizable, as appealing as it has always been. “You can ask if it was more beautiful before, or more beautiful now,” he said. “But it is always beautiful.”A Straight SprintManchester City and Liverpool are separated by a point in the league, but by little else.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe question this weekend is the same as it is every weekend. Will this be the moment the Premier League title race takes its twist? Will Liverpool’s exertions on four fronts, its pursuit of the impossible, finally catch up with its players? Or will Manchester City, so smooth and so relentless, stumble and fall, offering Jürgen Klopp’s team a gap, a glimmer, an edge?The answer, thus far, has been just as consistent: No. A deafening, resounding no. There is a curious lack of drama to what should, by rights, be the most compelling denouement imaginable to the English season. City and Liverpool, two modern greats, are separated by a single point. Neither has the slightest room for error. Neither would grant its rival any mercy for even a single slip.And yet it all feels just a little bloodless. Liverpool wins. City wins. City wins. Liverpool wins. It is a straight road, with no blind corners or switchbacks or chicanes. Not just in terms of results, but in the nature of the games. City has not trailed in a Premier League game since February 19. Liverpool was behind for 17 minutes, in total, against City when the teams met in early April; other than that, Klopp’s team has not had a game to chase since conceding first against Norwich the same February day. Other than in their encounters with one another, there has been a distinct lack of this column’s favorite quality: jeopardy.Perhaps this is the weekend that changes. Tottenham, certainly, presents the most formidable opposition Liverpool has met since its visit to the Etihad. City must overcome the exhaustion, physical and spiritual, that comes from prolonged exposure to the madness of Real Madrid. Maybe this is when the twist comes, when Liverpool falls away, or when City stutters. Experience suggests it is not. All we can do is hope.Timing Is EverythingImmortality, Garth Lagerwey called it, in those heady, breathless minutes after the Seattle Sounders team he has spent years shaping into a true Major League Soccer dynasty had become the first American team to break Mexico’s stranglehold on the Concacaf Champions League.Whether this proves to be a watershed or not will only become clear in time, for both the league and for Seattle itself. Lagerwey has expressed his hope that the Sounders might now become a “global” team, the first real international breakout brand M.L.S. has produced, and he may be right. He will worry, though, that the timing has hardly been ideal.Alex Roldan and the Sounders are the first U.S. team to qualify for FIFA’s Club World Cup.Steph Chambers/Getty ImagesIt is, frankly, baffling that the Champions League final was scheduled on the same night as a (European) Champions League semifinal. Seattle’s achievement might have resonated a little more outside North America had it not been overshadowed by events in Madrid. The time difference mitigates against attracting a considerable television audience, but that is not the only route to exposure. There are, though, other ways to attract attention in our fractured media age.More unfortunately, it is not yet clear when Seattle may get its chance to — as Lagerwey put it — face “Real Madrid or Liverpool” for a trophy (a claim the champions of South America and Africa might suggest is premature).This was supposed to be the year that FIFA’s much-vaunted Club World Cup expansion took place. That has been postponed, seemingly indefinitely. There is no word, as yet, on when or where the more traditional competition — the one featuring the six regional champions and a nominee from the host nation — will take place. That is a rather more complex issue than normal, of course, because there is a great big World Cup slap-bang in the middle of next season.FIFA will, doubtless, find a fix — most likely a late, unsatisfactory one — at some point. Seattle, certainly, has earned its moment on the international stage, to claim another first, becoming the first American team to have the chance to become world champion.CorrespondenceThe great thing about this newsletter is that it serves as an education to me, too. “I was confused by your expression ‘dopamine-soaked reverie,’” wrote Jim Goldman. “I’m a practicing endocrinologist — and a Tottenham fan — and this phrase didn’t make sense to me.”Now, I cannot claim to be an endocrinologist, not even a lapsed one, so I will bow to Jim’s wisdom on this. I was under the impression that dopamine was the chemical released during pleasurable situations, such as a reverie or when you encounter a really good sandwich. Further research suggests the reality may be a little more complex. I stand (partly) corrected.Line of the week, meanwhile, goes to Brian Marx. Or, more accurately, his daughter, Natalie. “She wondered why there is so much noise about finding a new owner for Chelsea, when it is clear the club is owned by Karim Benzema,” Bob wrote, doing the decent thing and not claiming the punchline as his own.Well played, Natalie.Juan Medina/ReutersJavier Cortés, on the other hand, forces me to issue a clarification that the views expressed in this section do not necessarily reflect my own; a mention is not, by any means, an endorsement. “I agree with your definition of fandom in Europe and Latin America,” he wrote. “It is part of a person’s cultural background.” In the United States, Javier — not me — believes, “most fans are just followers of commercial brands. That explains why, if people move from one city to another, they change teams.”He does, it should be pointed out, make an exception for baseball, where the existence of teams with more than a century of history possess “a real fandom.”There are, I will admit, elements to American sporting culture that are oblique to me, in particular the ability to disregard a team after a lifetime of support, even to disavow it completely, should it pack up and leave. (I understand why fans would take that measure; I just do not understand how.)My instinct, though, is not to decry those differences as evidence of inauthenticity, but rather to chalk them up to a different cultural reality. That is the authentic experience of supporting a team in the United States. It may not follow the same patterns and mores as fandom in Europe, but that does not make it any less sincere, any less genuine, or any less real.That’s all for this week. All thoughts, as ever, are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com; we take note of and appreciate them all. Well, most of them. Certainly more than 50 percent. You can find my thoughts on the gnawing tension of the Premier League title race on Twitter, too, if you’re that way inclined.Have a great weekend,Rory More

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      How Real Madrid Beat Manchester City

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      All but beaten in its Champions League semifinal, Real Madrid scored once, then twice, then a third time to snatch a victory and add to its legend.MADRID — There was nothing. There was no noise. The Santiago Bernabéu stood silent, subdued, waiting for the bell to toll. There was no spark. Real Madrid had long since run out of ideas, and they were running low on hope, too. Most pressingly, there was no time. There were 30 seconds left, plus maybe a little extra purgatory, and then it would be over.Real Madrid’s campaign in the Champions League this season has run on magic and miracles. The comeback against the glittering array of Instagram influencers arranged in the vague shape of a team by Paris St.-Germain. The revival against Chelsea that hinged on a single, unstoppable pass from Luka Modric.But there comes a point when reality has to intrude, when the chaos has to give way to order. There are certain inevitabilities that even Real Madrid, soccer’s great self-actualizers, a team that runs exclusively on the power of its own imagination, have to acknowledge. This was one of them. This was the point where all of it came to an end.And then, in a single, blinding flash, it happened. There were no warning signs, no rumbles of thunder, no auguries, no harbingers. One minute Manchester City was in complete control of its semifinal, leading by a single goal on the night and by two, a yawning chasm, on aggregate. Jack Grealish had missed a couple of chances to add a little gloss to the score line, but nobody seemed overly concerned.Then, in a beat, the world turned upside down. With 89 minutes and 30 seconds played, Rodrygo reacted quickest to Karim Benzema’s knockdown and stabbed a shot past Éderson. He gobbled the ball from the back of the net, and sprinted straight back to the halfway line. The Bernabéu stirred to life. There was noise.Even Real Madrid fans thought it was over. Until it wasn’t.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersOn the sideline, the fourth official, Davide Massa, was fumbling with his electronic scoreboard. He lifted it above his head, the number six illuminated in bright, lively green: six more minutes. Now, suddenly, there was time, and it carried hope in its wake. Real Madrid, though, did not need it. It does not work like that. It swept up the field again. Dani Carvajal conjured a cross. There was Rodrygo again, his header flashing past Éderson.This time, he did not seek out the ball. This time, he raced off, sprinting to the edge of the field, careering as close to the stands as he could. His teammates followed him. The fans poured over each other, a liquid mass, in their delirium. This is exactly what they had been expecting when they had arrived at the stadium a few hours earlier, and still they could not quite conceive of how, exactly, Real Madrid had done it.Vinícius Júnior collected the ball after Rodrygo’s second, and for the first time Real Madrid felt victory was within reach.Juan Medina/ReutersNor, for that matter, could anyone else. It does not seem too florid, too ethereal, to suggest that Real Madrid does not so much beat teams at soccer as overwhelm them by harnessing some elemental force, something that naturally occurs in its environment. Its players spend a considerable portion of their time encouraging their fans to make more noise, whipping them into an ever-increasing Eleusinian frenzy, for that very purpose.At times, it resembles a form of alchemy, the transformation of a succession of base metals — a smattering of garlanded veterans, a couple of raw hopefuls, a coach with an expressive eyebrow and an easy charm, a team with no recognizable, cogent plan beyond a pervasive sense of its own destiny — into something precious.Here, though, it was something else, something more akin to a Big Bang. Real Madrid did not particularly like the turn the universe was taking. It did not have any great desire to exist in a dimension in which Manchester City was in the Champions League final and it was not. So it simply, in the blink of an eye, created a new one, one it found much more to its liking.That second goal, the one that sent the game to extra time, marked the moment that one reality ended and another came into being. Manchester City was now living in Real Madrid’s world, and the ending in Real Madrid’s world is always the same.A few minutes into extra time, Karim Benzema tumbled over Ruben Días’s outstretched leg. The referee, Daniele Orsato, pointed with a theatrical flourish to the penalty spot. Benzema, obviously, scored, because Benzema was always going to score. In the space of five minutes, with a break and a breather in between, Manchester City’s understanding of how things worked had been shattered.Benzema sent Ederson the wrong way and sent his penalty into the side netting in extra time.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPep Guardiola’s team is not the first to experience that, of course. It is hard to tell whether it is something about the Bernabéu that does it, or whether it is the effect of feeling like you are living in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this place has an unrivaled ability to unsettle even the greatest players, the smoothest teams. It scrambles the brain, jumbles the code, shorts the wiring.It happened to P.S.G., too, when Gianluigi Donnarumma stumbled on the ball and Neymar and Lionel Messi disappeared from view. It happened, too, to Chelsea at the last — or what seemed, until very recently, like the last — with the European champion seemingly coasting to victory and then, without ever really noticing, staring down the barrel of defeat.City, more than anyone, should have been immune. It is hard to imagine a team more versed in its ideas than Manchester City — though Liverpool would have a case — or a team better equipped to remain steadfast to its principles.And yet City, too, froze. Even before everything fell apart, it had seemed inhibited, cagey, troubled by something, a reduced version of the team that might — with a little more ruthlessness and a touch more luck — have scored six or seven in the first leg last week. It had only found a little composure after Riyad Mahrez had scored, when the prospect of a place in the final against Liverpool at the end of May was so tantalizingly close.That, ultimately, is the effect of Real Madrid’s belief. It believes it will win with such conviction that it proves contagious. That is the form its magic takes: it is a glamour, the power to dazzle an opponent, to convince it that the world should be as you see it, as you would want it to be.It cannot be explained. It does not require specific ingredients, or any ingredients at all, really. There can be no noise, no hope, no spark and no time, and yet Real Madrid can still conjure it from the air, from the sky, from something deep within. It is something that happens, something that happens to Real Madrid, and to whoever has the misfortune to be standing in its way. More

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      How Liverpool’s Dream Was Delivered, and Villarreal’s Dashed

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      Outplayed for a half, Liverpool scored three goals to reach its latest Champions League final. For Villarreal, though, all was not lost.VILLARREAL, Spain — In the corner of the Estadio de la Céramica, the one left totally at the mercy of the elements, the fans started to unfurl their scarves. On the scoreboard at their backs, the clock had ticked beyond 90 minutes. On the field in front of them, Villarreal was on borrowed time in the Champions League.It was then that they started to sing. As Liverpool enjoyed a rare moment of calm after a storm of an evening, and put the finishing touches on its 3-2 victory, the rest of the stadium noticed what was happening in the corner, and picked up the tune. They held their scarves aloft, too, a gesture of defiance, and loyalty, and gratitude.And then, when the whistle blew and it was all over, as Villareal’s players walked mournfully around the stadium, heads bowed and eyes raw, the tempo quickened. The scarves started to twist and to whirl, the mood shifting from regret at what had been snatched away to celebration of all that remained. In the pain, they found pride.Even in defeat, Villarreal’s fans filled Estadio de la Cerámica with noise, and pride.Biel Alino/EPA, via ShutterstockIndeed, quite how much it hurt was, perhaps, the best measure of quite how close Unai Emery’s Villarreal had come. This team was not supposed to be in the Champions League semifinals, not really; the very structure of European soccer’s elite competition is built to make it vanishingly unlikely that a team of its stature could travel this deep into the tournament.Villarreal was certainly not supposed to stand a chance going into the second leg. It had, by common consensus, been summarily dispatched at Anfield last week, its limitations exposed by the depth of Liverpool’s resources and the scope of its firepower and the sheer gravity of Jürgen Klopp’s team. The return leg was, more than anything, an administrative hurdle to be cleared, a form to be completed.Villarreal, the town, is a curious place to stage a game of this magnitude: a satellite of nearby Castéllon, more than anything, quiet and refined and, after a day spent under a torrential downpour, almost entirely deserted. Snatches of songs, in both English and Spanish, echoed around the streets.If the sense of occasion that ordinarily accompanies the most seismic games in Europe’s calendar was missing outside, it was palpable inside. For the first time, Villarreal had arranged a mosaic: a blue submarine against a yellow background, the club’s slogan, Endavant, picked out in giant letters. The public address announcer talked about believing in comebacks.Any doubters would have been converted within three minutes, as Boulaye Dia tapped home from Étienne Capoue’s not entirely intentional cross, and the Céramica seemed to melt. All of a sudden, everything felt possible. Liverpool, so seamless and so smooth in a 2-0 victory six days ago, struggled to complete a pass.Boulaye Dia got Villarreal off to the flying start with a goal in the third minute. Alberto Saiz/Associated PressBy halftime, its rhythm had been broken and its confidence sapped and then, just when it thought it might make it through, its advantage had disappeared completely. Capoue crossed, on purpose this time. Francis Coquelin headed home. Villarreal’s bench emptied onto the field, coaches and substitutes and sundry assistants all scarcely able to believe what they were seeing.At that moment, tied at 2-2 halfway through the second leg, Villarreal’s players stood within touching distance. The final was there, right there, and they could seize a place within it. Villarreal would be the smallest town, by some distance, to send a team to the biggest game in soccer.In an era defined and designed by Goliath, it would be this team, constructed on a shoestring, that did what Ajax and Monaco and RB Leipzig could not and made it all the way. And they could do it by etching their own entry in the Champions League’s ever-expanding book of eye-watering comebacks, a miracle to call its own, just like Barcelona (2017), Roma (2018), Liverpool (2019) and Real Madrid (passim).Hope and belief exist at different points on the same axis. Villarreal, in the space of 45 minutes, had traveled all the way along it.And then, just when it was there, within their grasp, it was taken away. Klopp took off one $45 million forward, Diogo Jota, and introduced another, Luis Díaz. The switch changed the momentum irrevocably. Trent Alexander-Arnold hit the bar. Díaz tried a spectacular overhead kick. And then Mohamed Salah slipped Fabinho through and his shot squirmed through Géronimo Rulli’s legs. In that moment, it was all over.Five minutes later, Díaz had scored, drifting in to head a cross under Rulli. Five minutes after that, Sadio Mané had put Liverpool ahead on the night, latching on to a pass from Alexander-Arnold, darting past Rulli as he charged out of his goal and into midfield, and then calmly rolling the ball into the net.Andrew Roberton, left, with Sadio Mané after Liverpool’s third goal.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesPerhaps, in hindsight, it would have been easier had Villarreal not heard that siren call of possibility. Perhaps it would have been easier to go quietly, to succumb to the inevitable. That might have hurt less. But then the journey is not defined by the destination.Villarreal beat Juventus in Turin in the round of 16. It silenced Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals. And it produced 45 minutes that saw Liverpool — a team now on its way to a third Champions League final in five years, a team pursuing an unprecedented and scarcely possible clean sweep of trophies — so scrambled that when Klopp asked his assistant, Peter Krawietz, to identify a “single instance” of good play from the first half and show it to the players for inspiration, he came back and told him there was nothing to be found.And it did it all on a budget that is a fraction of its rivals, in an ecosystem in which the big beasts consume most of the oxygen, and with a team patched together from the discarded and the dismissed. There was a common root to the pride and the pain: At times, an aching wound can feel like a badge of honor.“Soccer is beautiful,” Villarreal’s captain, Raúl Albiol, said. In time, he knows, what will matter is not that Villarreal fell 45 minutes short of a Champions League final, but that it came to be in a position to fall 45 minutes short of a Champions League final.“This was a defeat,” he said, “but we’ll always remember this run.”Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Russia Is Barred From Women’s Euros and 2023 World Cup

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      Russian soccer teams and clubs were barred from all European competitions, including the Champions League, for the 2022-23 season.Russia was ejected from this summer’s European women’s soccer championship and barred from qualifying for the 2023 Women’s World Cup on Monday, deepening a sporting isolation that resulted from the country’s invasion of Ukraine.UEFA, the governing body for soccer in Europe, announced its decisions Monday. In addition to barring Russia’s team from the two biggest competitions in women’s soccer, the governing body said it had suspended all Russian national teams and clubs from UEFA competitions until further notice.Russian clubs were also barred from all UEFA competitions — including the Champions League, the richest club competition in soccer — for the 2022-23 season.Russia will not participate in this summer’s UEFA Women’s EURO 2022. Portugal, the opponent defeated by Russia in the qualifying play-offs, will now participate in Group C.Additionally, Russian teams will not participate in UEFA club competitions next season.More info: ⬇️— UEFA (@UEFA) May 2, 2022
      The punishments had previously been applied most prominently to Russian men’s teams, tossing Russia out of qualifying for this year’s World Cup in Qatar when it needed only two more wins to earn a place in the field and ejecting a Russian club, Spartak Moscow, from the knockout rounds of the Europa League.Russia’s women had missed two World Cup qualifiers in April as a result of the earlier ban on its teams, but UEFA had postponed a decision on its participation at the women’s Euros, which open in July in England. Now, with the event approaching and many countries on record saying they would not play against a Russian team, it was left with little choice.Portugal will replace Russia at the European Championship, taking its place in a group that includes two of the tournament favorites — the Netherlands and Sweden — as well as Switzerland. Russia had defeated Portugal in a playoff to qualify for the event.Several international sports leagues and organizations have dropped Russia and Russian athletes from competition since the country’s invasion of Ukraine in February, in sports as varied as tennis, soccer, auto racing and track and field. Last week, Russia was stripped of the hosting rights for next year’s world ice hockey championships.Russia has vowed to fight some of the punishment against its teams and athletes at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, the body responsible for adjudicating disputes in sports. (It has nearly a dozen complaints filed with the court already.) And not everyone has agreed with blanket bans on Russian athletes.After Wimbledon, under pressure from the British government, confirmed that it would not allow Russian and Belarusian players to participate in the grass-court tennis tournament this summer, the governing bodies for the men’s and women’s tours both expressed concern about the decision.The ATP, which runs the men’s tour, called it “unfair” and said it had “the potential to set a damaging precedent for the game.”The WTA, which oversees the women’s tour, said: “Individual athletes should not be penalized or prevented from competing due to where they are from or the decisions made by the governments of their countries. Discrimination, and the decision to focus such discrimination against athletes competing on their own as individuals, is neither fair nor justified.”On Sunday, the top men’s players Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal added their voices to the criticism.“It’s not their fault what’s happening in this moment with the war,” Nadal, a 21-time Grand Slam winner, said in Spain, calling some of the affected players “my Russian teammates, my colleagues.”“I’m sorry for them,” Nadal said. “Wimbledon just took their decision. The government didn’t force them to do it.” More