Vinicius Jr (2000- )

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares129 Views

    Dortmund, Bayern Munich and the Chance of a Lifetime

    by

    A Dortmund victory on Saturday will end Bayern Munich’s streak of 10 straight titles. The prospect of a new champion should be a cause of celebration beyond a single city.The requests had started to flow almost as soon as the final whistle blew last Sunday. All through Monday, they came in great torrents to members of the Borussia Dortmund staff, to the club’s executives, to the players themselves. They came from family, of course, and from friends, and from friends of friends, and acquaintances and colleagues and that guy you met in that restaurant.Pretty quickly, Dortmund officials realized the club had to do something or, in a week where nothing is quite so precious as serenity, the situation risked spiraling into a source of stress. The team called the players together and advised them to get all their ticket requests in by the end of Tuesday, and allow the executives to take care of everything from there. After that, nobody else would be able to come to the place where everyone wants to be.That knowledge, they hoped, would allow the players to focus on the task at hand. Officially, there will be 81,365 people inside Signal Iduna Park on Saturday to watch Dortmund play Mainz in the final game of the season, but demand has been so high that Sebastian Kehl, Dortmund’s sporting director, was probably only exaggerating a little when he said it could have sold “half a million tickets.”Those in attendance will cherish the rare, beautiful simplicity of the equation. If Dortmund wins, it will be the champion of Germany for the first time since 2012: The length of the waiting list is reflective of the length of the wait. “There is no better place to celebrate winning something than Dortmund,” Kehl said. He should know: He was a player at the club the last time it claimed the title.If Dortmund can win on Saturday, it will claim its first German title since winning consecutive championships in 2011 and 2012.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDortmund’s triumph, though, would not just be a cause of jubilation in the city itself. No team other than Bayern Munich has lifted the German championship in the past decade; every spring since Dortmund’s last win, the title has headed without fail to Allianz Arena. With a few notable exceptions — Schalke, Dortmund’s fierce rival, in particular — German soccer as a whole will toast the breaking of that stranglehold.“It is not to say anything against Bayern, because they work pretty hard and perhaps they deserved to be champion in the last 10 years,” Kehl said. “But of course it is good for everyone that the competition in our league is still there, and that maybe on Saturday there is a different champion.”Until relatively recently, this season did not look especially likely to end with that particular conclusion. Dortmund had sold Erling Haaland last summer, a year after losing Jadon Sancho. Once again, the model that had made the club such a financial success — buying bright young talent and selling it at a vast profit — would hold it back on the field.When the Bundesliga broke for the World Cup in November, Dortmund was adrift in sixth place, and Bayern appeared to be set to overtake Union Berlin and Freiburg — the two improbable early pacesetters — to take its 11th consecutive title. That seeming inevitability would further compound the impression that the Bundesliga had become little more than Bayern’s private fief.Dortmund improved, markedly, in January and February — winning nine games in a row to move into Bayern’s slipstream — but when the teams met on April 1, Bayern swatted aside its challenger. “The stories were already done,” Kehl said. “That once again it was Bayern Munich that destroyed our dream.”Bayern’s sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic, left, and its chief executive, Oliver Kahn, not enjoying themselves.Matthias Hangst/Getty ImagesIn the weeks since, the temptation has been to ascribe the drastic swing in the clubs’ fortunes more to Bayern’s missteps than to Dortmund’s merits. Dismissing Julian Nagelsmann and appointing Thomas Tuchel has backfired on Bayern, laying bare the flaws in its squad planning. Civil war, as it tends to do in the face of disappointment, is brewing in Munich.But to attribute agency to Bayern and Bayern alone ignores the fact that something has changed in Dortmund, too. It has, for the last 10 years, generally been Bayern’s closest contender, its successor-in-waiting, the team that would benefit from any slip-up. The difference this year is not that Bayern has erred — it has done that every so often over the past decade — but that Dortmund has been able to take advantage.Manager Edin Terzic deserves credit for that, of course, and so do his players. “If you’d seen the coach after the game in Munich, or the squad, you would know that we still believed we could win it,” Kehl said.But it is testament, too, to a slight change in focus in Dortmund’s approach. The club invested not only in promise last summer, as it always does, but in the likes of Sébastian Haller, Niklas Süle and Salih Ozcan, too — players with just a little more experience, a touch more grit, veterans who saw the club not as a showroom but as the ultimate stage.Jude Bellingham is expected to leave Dortmund this summer, as most of its most valuable young players regularly do.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is that blend that has enabled Dortmund to stay the course, to cling on and now to take advantage. It is that blend that, in Kehl’s eyes, will kick-start a virtuous circle. Dortmund will sell again this summer — not least Jude Bellingham, the most coveted player in Europe — but the proposition it can offer to reinforcements and replacements is now more convincing than ever.“It shows that we do not just develop players, produce high potential, but we can also win trophies,” Kehl said. “We want to be ambitious, but at some point you have to deliver. The capacity to win titles is massively important for me as a sporting director, to bring players to Dortmund, to convince their families, their agents, the players themselves.”That, in turn, will allow Dortmund to keep Bayern within its sights. “I am optimistic that we can now be much closer,” Kehl said. “That Bayern will not be so clearly champion all the time.”And that, of course, would be something for everyone to celebrate, not just those fortunate enough to have tickets for Signal Iduna Park on Saturday. Dortmund would not be the only unexpected champion in Europe this season: Napoli ended a 33-year wait for a title in Italy. Feyenoord swept past Ajax (and PSV Eindhoven) to win the league in the Netherlands.Both of those titles were greeted with a fervor, a euphoria that seeing another trophy added to an ever-growing pile could not possibly match. Dortmund, come Saturday evening, hopes to be in a position to do the same. Everyone wants to be there, to be part of the celebrations, because they know, deep down, that these things do not happen every day.Antiracism Is Not Just a Job for Black PlayersCarlo Ancelotti and Vinícius Júnior at Valencia on Sunday.Pablo Morano/ReutersCarlo Ancelotti did all the right things in the moment, and then, in its aftermath. He said all the right things, too. All, that is, except the one that might actually have made a difference.After 70 minutes of Real Madrid’s defeat in Valencia last week, Vinícius Júnior — certainly Real Madrid’s best player, and quite possibly the finest talent in La Liga — approached the referee and pointed out a handful of the members of the home crowd who were clearly and audibly racially abusing him, and had been for some time.The referee, as dictated by Spanish soccer’s antiracism protocols, ordered an announcement to be made to the crowd, warning that the game would be terminated if the abuse continued. Ancelotti, an astute, caring and principled sort of a coach, asked Vinícius if he felt he could continue.The Brazilian said he did. The game duly resumed, though only as a prelude to what came afterward. Real Madrid described the abuse, correctly, as a hate crime. Vinícius, clearly at his limit, having faced this kind of invective repeatedly in recent months, said that “La Liga belongs to racists.” His teammates, like his coach, offered him their resolute support. Javier Tebas, the league’s president, for some reason chose to pick a fight with Vinícius on social media, before hurriedly backtracking.The whole episode raises countless questions, though at least some of them have obvious answers. Does Spanish soccer take racism seriously enough? (No.) Are its protocols up to the job? (No.) Is Tebas’s position untenable? (Yes.) Is Valencia’s punishment, in the form of a moderate fine and a partial stadium closure, sufficient? (Obviously not.)One question that did not feature quite so much as it should have is why the decision as to whether the game should continue fell on Vinícius. Ancelotti felt the game should have been abandoned. Thibaut Courtois, the Real Madrid goalkeeper, hinted afterward that he was of the same mind. So why didn’t either of them walk off? Or the rest of the team? Or, more powerful still, why didn’t Valencia’s players?Ancelotti, doubtless, checked in on Vinícius’s state of mind with the best intentions. But he placed Vinícius in an invidious position, too, where his only two choices were to play on — and expose himself to the possibility of more abuse — or walk off, which may well have felt like giving in to the racists.Ideally, of course, this is a stain on Spanish soccer that the authorities would handle. Clubs and fans would know, in no uncertain terms, that racist abuse would be met with the most severe sanctions: docked points, games forfeited, fixtures voided. Until that happens, sadly, the burden of objection falls on the players. All the players, that is. Not just some of them.One for the RoadJosé Mourinho has not gotten better with age. Not in any practical sense, anyway: He is still just as mischievous, just as bombastic, just as provocative now as he was in his halcyon days. He hit 60 earlier this year, and so it is probably fair to assume at this point that he is never going to enter his elder statesman phase.Perhaps it is nostalgia, then, a yearning for an era when the lines were crisper and clearer than they are now — a time that is both recent and distant — that makes the prospect of Mourinho’s guiding his Roma team to victory in the Europa League next week seem surprisingly appealing.It helps that it is Roma, of course, a club of considerable scale and sweep but without the trophies to match. It helps, too, that all of these twilight victories for Mourinho feel just a little like hubris: the manager who was so dismissive of anything but the game’s biggest prizes now discovering that, as it turns out, achievement really was relative all along.José Mourinho and Tammy Abraham, Champions League winners now chasing the Europa League trophy.Lars Baron/Getty ImagesA decade ago, Mourinho scoffed at the very notion that he would ever be competing in the Europa League, let alone care about winning it. And yet here we are. He would doubtless have laughed heartily at seeing one of his peers in the Europa Conference League, too. He celebrated picking up that trophy last year by getting an image of it tattooed on his right arm.Mostly, though, it is that time has softened not Mourinho himself but the perception of him. His recidivist fire-starting, his absolute refusal to mature or mellow in the slightest, now has a charm that it lacked when he was at the game’s peak.It has the effect, now, of hearing a familiar, forgotten song, and serves as a reminder of lost innocence, youth passed, a memory of the days when the bad guys looked and talked and acted like bad guys, rather than convincing themselves and their fellow travelers that they are, in fact, the plucky heroes of the tale.CorrespondenceA contender for best question ever received by this mailbox, courtesy of Gary Karr. “By dint of some inexplicable rule, you are forced to be a beat writer covering one nation’s professional league,” he wrote, deftly providing me with an opportunity to discuss every journalist’s favorite subject: themselves. “It cannot be the Premier League. What league would provide you, and your readers, with the most interesting stories and games?”I have spent some time considering this, Gary, and I think the answer is Italy: major teams, iconic stadiums, fallen giants, feisty underdogs, plentiful gelato. But there are cases to be made for Argentina and Brazil — largely for the way the game is threaded into the culture — and, from a different angle, the Netherlands, too. Dutch soccer has always been a sort of laboratory for ideas and approaches. And a nod to Turkey, home of a league that provides endless goals, scandal, crisis and internecine wrangling.“I have a question that can’t be answered,” Bob Foltman told me, portentously. “How should we measure the quality of a coach? I ask this thinking about Pep Guardiola: I don’t doubt his greatness, but I also can’t dismiss the fact that every place he’s been, he’s had resources that 95 percent of coaches could only dream of.”This is also an excellent question, and it’s one that I think is not given enough weight in coverage of the sport. I liked Vincent Kompany’s definition, alluded to in our interview with him: Success, for a coach, comes in two forms — making the players better, and outperforming your resources. “If you have the fifth-biggest budget, and you come fourth, you have won,” he told me.Taking names in M.L.S.Dan Hamilton/Usa Today Sports, via Reuters ConShawn Donnelly is a reliable interrogator of the game’s major issues, and he is back with what looks suspiciously like vengeance. “Why do referees still scribble down the names of yellow card recipients on the back of the yellow card itself with a small pen or pencil? In 2023, isn’t there a better way? A digital assistant or voice recorder or app or something?”There are doubtless more technologically sophisticated ways, Shawn, obviously, but there’s a key question here: Would any of them be better? Would any of them actually improve on the effect of writing something down with a tiny pencil? Or would they just be … different? More

    More stories

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Soccer

      Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior Says Racism Is ‘Normal’ in Spain After Abuse at Valencia

      by

      After Valencia fans called the Real Madrid star a monkey, Spain’s top soccer official called racial abuse a stain on the entire country.Vinícius Júnior has had enough.The Real Madrid forward, a magnet for racist chants from the stands in Spanish stadiums for the past two seasons, took to social media after the latest attack against him on Sunday, when he was called a monkey by fans in Valencia. This time, he took aim not only at his abusers but also at Spain itself.“It wasn’t the first time, nor the second, nor the third,” Vinícius Júnior wrote in a post on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the federation does too and the opponents encourage it.” Spain, he said, was becoming known in his native Brazil “as a country of racists.”On Sunday, Vinícius Júnior was met by fans chanting the word “mono” — monkey — before he even stepped off the Real Madrid bus outside the Mestalla stadium in Valencia. The match was briefly halted in the 71st minute as he pointed out some of his abusers to the referee, and an antiracism statement — part of a league protocol for such incidents — was read to the crowd over the stadium loudspeakers. By the end, though, it was Vinícius Júnior who was cast as the villain: He received a red card in the dying minutes of injury time after scuffling with an opponent who had charged at him.The referee Ricardo de Burgos Bengoetxea trying to calm Vinícius Júnior as he protested that he was being racially abused.Aitor Alcalde/Getty ImagesReal Madrid said it believed the abuse directed at its player qualified as a hate crime under Spanish law, and the club said it had filed a complaint with the relevant authorities demanding an investigation. “We have a serious problem,” the president of Spain’s soccer federation acknowledged Monday, calling racism in the nation’s stadiums an issue “that stains an entire team, an entire fan base and an entire country.”Bouts of racial abuse echoing through the stands in Spanish soccer stadiums are not uncommon or new, but they have become particularly pointed toward Vinícius Júnior, who has emerged as one of the league’s marquee players since the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.In a statement announcing an investigation into the events on Sunday in Valencia, La Liga acknowledged it had reported nine separate incidents of racist abuse against Vinícius Júnior in the past two seasons alone. By then, the player had taken to social media, where he wrote that the attacks on him were tarnishing Spain’s image around the world.“A beautiful nation, which welcomed me and which I love, but which agreed to export the image of a racist country to the world,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for the Spaniards who don’t agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists.”He even suggested a failure to act against racism could drive him from the country.The reaction to what occurred at the Mestalla brought new scrutiny on Spanish soccer’s handling of racism inside stadiums. In a television interview immediately after the match, Real Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelloti, reacted incredulously when he was asked to talk about the game. “I don’t want to talk about football,” he said. “I want to talk about what happened here.”In a news conference that followed, local journalists tried to correct Ancelloti’s assessment that the entire stadium was responsible, telling him he had misheard the chanting. Then officials from Valencia issued denials of widespread racism in the stands, despite videos online appearing to show large sections of the crowd chanting “mono.” Some reporters suggested to Ancelloti that a majority of supporters had actually been chanting “tonto,” a word that means silly in Spanish. “Whether it was ‘mono’ or ‘tonto,’ the referee stopped the game to open the racism protocol,” Ancelotti replied. “He wouldn’t do that if they just chanted ‘tonto.’ Speak to the referee.”Within hours, La Liga’s chief executive, Javier Tebas, was engaged in a back-and-forth exchange with Vinícius Júnior on Twitter. In it, Tebas defended Spain, detailed the efforts the league had made to tackle racist behavior and scolded Vinícius for what Tebas said was a failure to show up to two meetings to discuss the abuse he had received.Tebas’s statement led to a furious response from the player.“Once again, instead of criticizing racists, the president of La Liga appears on social media to attack me,” Vinícius wrote. “As much as you talk and pretend not to read, the image of your championship has been hit by this. See the responses to your posts and you will have a surprise. Omitting yourself only makes you equal to racists.”The incident drew criticism, and messages of support, from around the world.Speaking at a news conference at the close of a G7 summit in Japan, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he wanted to send a message of solidarity to Vinícius, saying it was “unjust” that he “gets insulted at every stadium where he plays.”“It’s not possible, in the middle of the 21st century, to have such strong racial prejudice in so many football stadiums,” Lula said.Current and former players also rallied around Vinícius, taking aim at the authorities in Spain for not doing more to stamp out racism, which some commentators in the country have routinely described as merely an effort to gain an advantage on the field.Kylian Mbappé, who almost moved to Spain last season to join Vinícius in Madrid, posted a message of support on Instagram. He was joined by Neymar, a Brazilian star who also faced racial abuse when he played in Spain for Barcelona.La Liga issued a statement detailing what it said were its efforts to stamp out racism in its stadiums. The league said it was working with the authorities in Valencia to investigate what took place, and it vowed to take legal action if any hate crime was identified. Still, it is limited in the type of penalties it can levy against clubs. Stadium closures, for example, can be sanctioned only by the national soccer federation.The latest incident will mean new scrutiny on the federation, and Spanish soccer, at a time it is looking for global support to secure the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup as part of a joint effort with Portugal and Morocco.“We have a problem of behavior, of education, of racism,” the Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales told a news conference Monday. “And as long as there is one fan or one group of fans making insults based on someone’s sexual orientation or skin color or belief, then we have a serious problem.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      Manchester City and Real Madrid Will Eventually Have to Be Themselves

      by

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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Soccer

      Neymar Is Still a Singular Star, but He Has More Help on Brazil

      by

      As Brazil begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, the team’s resources run deep — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.LE HAVRE, France — As the announcer at the Stade Océane cycled through Brazil’s team on Friday, before the squad dismantled Ghana, 3-0, a murmur of appreciation greeted each familiar, stellar name. Alisson was granted gentle applause. Thiago Silva earned a respectful, admiring cheer. Raphinha drew a sizzle of anticipation.And then, leaving just a hint of a dramatic pause, the announcer came to Neymar.There were, perhaps, mitigating circumstances. The 30-year-old Neymar was, after all, on home turf, or something very close to it. Le Havre, a sleepy port town on the Normandy coast, sits just a couple of hours northwest of Paris. The stands were dotted not just with jerseys in Brazil’s bright canary yellow but with the rich, deep blue of his Paris St.-Germain club team, too.But still, the contrast in his reception and those of his teammates felt telling. Brazil’s squad shimmers with stars. Alisson may be the finest goalkeeper on the planet. Thiago Silva is probably the best defender of his generation. Casemiro was part of the most dominant midfield in modern history.Even among their number, though, Neymar stands out. Their fame is not comparable to his, not really; the excitement he engenders, the adoration he receives and the wonder he instills are of a different order of magnitude. It was Neymar who was picked out on the big screen, again and again, during warm-ups. It was Neymar who had to sing his national anthem with a camera no more than six inches from his face. In a team full of headline acts, he remains the undisputed main event, the leading character, the center of gravity.For now, at least. As the roar that had met Neymar’s name subsided, the announcer still had one player left to introduce. “Numéro vingt,” he said — “Vinicius Junior.” The cheer that followed was not quite so loud as Neymar’s. It did not last quite as long. But the difference was not so stark as might have been expected.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.With two months to go before the World Cup, Tite, the Brazil coach, would not have it any other way. It has been 20 years since Brazil was declared champion of the world; miss out again in Qatar, and the wait for a sixth crown will match the lacuna between the third and fourth.More troublingly still, in the past four tournaments, it has not really gone close: beaten comfortably by the French in 2006, the Dutch in 2010 and the Belgians in Russia four years ago. The team made the semifinals on home soil in 2014, of course, but the less said about how that particular story ended, from a Brazilian point of view, the better.That defeat, though, highlighted the problem that has beset Brazil for the past decade. Neymar was missing with an injury as Germany etched a scar on the national psyche in the Maracana in 2014 (joined on the sidelines, not insignificantly, by Thiago Silva). In his absence, Brazil seemed bereft, adrift, unable to conceive of how to win the game without its leading man, the player to whom the team, as much as the country, was in thrall.He was present in Russia, but he was subdued, his legs weary and his inspiration dulled, easily corralled by Belgium in the stifling heat. Still, though, Brazil continued to look to him, to hope that he might somehow lift himself, and carry them with him. If he could not, they did not seem to know who might.This time around, things should be different. Vinicius, a few months on from scoring the winning goal in a Champions League final, is surging, European soccer’s breakout star. His teammates and his nation have rallied around him in the aftermath of the racist abuse he has received in Spain for having the temerity to celebrate his goals; several fans had made their way to the Stade Océane to urge him to keep dancing.He is not alone. Brazil’s attacking resources run so deep that Tite did not even have to call up Gabriel Jésus and Gabriel Martinelli, Arsenal’s forwards, for his squad; he could afford to introduce Rodrygo, Vinicius’s Real Madrid teammate, with just a couple of minutes to go. Roberto Firmino did not even make it off the bench. For what may be the first time in his international career, Neymar does not need to feel that everything hinges on him.Perhaps his performance, then, can be explained by a newfound sense of freedom. Perhaps he is playing unfettered by the suffocating pressure that he has carried for so long. Perhaps, on what may be the strongest team that Brazil has boasted since 2002 — a team, certainly, more than capable of ending the country’s wait — he feels more comfortable, more capable of expressing himself.Whatever the reason, his display against Ghana was that of a man neither willing nor ready to vacate center stage. It would have been enough that he created two of Brazil’s three goals, both of them finished off by Richarlíson — Marquinhos scored the other, a thunderous header from a corner — but that was the reward for, rather than the total of, everything he did.Neymar, it is fair to say, looks different this season. He has now registered 11 goals and 10 assists in 12 games for club and country, a streak of form that makes it feel somehow deeply strange that roughly two months ago, not only did P.S.G. appear willing to sell him, but nobody seemed desperately keen to buy the most expensive player in the sport’s history.The raw numbers, as ever, are merely an illustration. There has been a sharpness, a poise and, perhaps most encouraging of all, an invention to Neymar over the past couple of months. Tite has said that he is “flying,” his “speed and execution in perfection sync.” Even Thierry Henry, habitually unimpressed, feels he has “come to tell everyone: Don’t forget me.”Against Ghana, it was there in his delivery, whip-smart and inch-perfect. It was there in the moments he sped up, feinting and shifting his weight and accelerating away from his opponents. And, most of all, it was there in the moments he slowed down. More than once, he found himself with the ball at his feet, in the penalty area, and he seemed to stop, to pause, before picking the right pass, the perfect pass, the one that carved Ghana open.That has always been Neymar’s gift: picking his moments. As the World Cup hovers into view, as that sixth star starts to exert a gravity on Brazil, he seems to have done it again. More