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    Premier League Preview: Here We Go Again

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    The European soccer season is back. Here are the top story lines to watch this season.You will, in all likelihood, have heard the sentence already. You will certainly hear it on Friday, at least once, and then over and over again on Saturday and Sunday, delivered by every pearly toothed host and every red-faced pundit and every eager-voiced commentator. The Premier League, they will say, is back.This is not true, of course. It is an anachronism, a throwback to the days when soccer had the common decency to take the summer off and hand center stage over to other sports for a while. The Premier League — all club soccer, in fact — cannot be back, as detailed last week, because it never really goes away.Chelsea spent the Olympics signing vast quantities of South American teenagers for reasons that remain moderately opaque. Several of its domestic and European rivals used the European Championship and the Copa América as the perfect cover for hiring and firing sundry, essentially interchangeable managers.Soccer, club soccer, is a juggernaut, and the thing about juggernauts is that they do not stop rolling. They do not rest up for a few weeks, take the summer off, have a bit of a rest. That sense of permanence, that omnipresence, is what has turned soccer into less of a pastime and more of a lifestyle choice, a strikingly lucrative cultural touchstone.And yet, by some sleight of hand, those few days before a new campaign begins do somehow feel like the start of a different day. No matter how hard-boiled, how cynical, how self-aware an observer you have become, there is something about the prospect of the new season — new jerseys being worn and new signings being fielded in new stadiums, bright in summer sunshine — that captures the imagination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Premier League Fight Intrudes on Euro 2024

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      The European Championship starts in a week. So why are the headlines about Manchester City?In front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the street has been blanketed in artificial turf, and a set of gigantic goal posts has been erected. On the waterfront in Hamburg, two dozen shipping containers have been painted in the colors of the competing nations. Part of Leipzig’s zoo has been handed over for a program of cultural events, though presumably not the bit with the tigers.Across Germany, the flags are being draped, the marketing plans are being finalized and anything bearing the logo of something other than one of UEFA’s official sponsors is being unceremoniously hidden from view. After six years of planning, the European soccer championship — Euro 2024 — is just a week away. The teams will start arriving imminently. The fans, in the hundreds of thousands, will follow close behind them.For the rest of Europe, meanwhile, these are the glorious, hazy days before the carnival begins — a time filled with bunting and sticker albums, stirring television montages, speculative lineups and sweet nostalgia. Or, rather, they should be, because it is hard not to suspect that everyone is going through the motions.It’s not that there is no appetite for a tournament traditionally outshone only by the World Cup. But it is definitely of the muted variety. All of the emotions ordinarily associated with one of soccer’s showpieces — hope, excitement, fear, wonder about how England will sabotage itself — have been overshadowed by something else, something closer to ennui.It’s almost go time in Berlin.Annegret Hilse/ReutersThe most immediate explanation for why that might be probably lies in soccer’s calendar, which has fallen out of sync in the last four years. The men’s World Cup ended only 18 months ago. The last men’s European Championship was three years ago, not four. The game’s body clock has gone awry. It is as if the sport as a whole is suffering from jet lag.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Don’t More People Resent Manchester City?

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      Out of the Champions League but on top of the Premier League, Manchester City shows that it takes more than trophies to make a villain.Silence swept from one end of the Etihad Stadium to the other, a wave of dawning realization. The background noise that a crowd cannot help but generate — the rumble and murmur of 20,000 separate conversations — fell away. Calculations were made. Conclusions were drawn.For most of Wednesday evening, the natural operating assumption was that Manchester City would advance past Real Madrid and reach yet another Champions League semifinal. Pep Guardiola’s City team was creating so many chances that victory felt, really, like a statistical inevitability. Even as the tied game ticked into extra time, the match felt strangely nerveless. City went close with a chance again. No matter. The next one would be along soon.The idea that any other ending was available did not seem to have occurred to anyone, right up to the point when Bernardo Silva and Mateo Kovacic missed their penalties in quick succession, and all of a sudden City found itself on the brink. The possibility of elimination had felt so far-fetched that its arrival almost came as a surprise.A moment later, Antonio Rüdiger was hurling himself, topless, into a morass of delirious Real Madrid fans. Jude Bellingham was leading chants in his second language. And Guardiola’s hopes of retaining the Champions League trophy had been dashed. He stood in the center circle, looking just a little lost. “What more could we have done?” he would ask later.Pep Guardiola, on the rare day when it all went wrong.Darren Staples/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt has felt for a while as if Manchester City has achieved so much, so fast, that it has had to start inventing challenges to meet. Can Guardiola win titles without a striker? Yes. What about with central defenders who are actually midfielders? Also yes. Can he craft a team capable of collecting 100 points, or winning every domestic trophy, or doing a treble? Yes, yes, yes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Champions League: Security Increased After ISIS Threats

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      Online messages urged violent attacks on four matches, prompting the police in England, France and Spain to step up precautions.Public safety officials in England, France and Spain said Tuesday that they would step up security for matches this week in the Champions League, Europe’s marquee soccer competition, after ISIS-related groups called for violent attacks on the contests.The first of four quarterfinal matchups were scheduled in London and Madrid on Tuesday, and were to feature some of the top clubs in world soccer: Spain’s Real Madrid; the English giants Arsenal and Manchester City; and Germany’s Bayern Munich. Two other high-profile matches will take place on Wednesday in Paris and Madrid.“We don’t know what location might be particularly targeted, neither in what conditions,” the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told reporters in Paris. But he said he had spoken with police officials in Paris on Tuesday morning and had been assured that they “have considerably reinforced the security measures.”In Spain, the interior ministry said it had raised the country’s terrorist alert level after the appearance of a photo online carrying the message “Kill them all” and the names of the four stadiums where this week’s games are to be played, according to reports in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. The ministry said security measures at the matches in Madrid had been increased and additional agents deployed.At least one of the threats was accompanied by an image showing the main entrances to Arsenal’s stadium in London.“The U.K. terrorism threat level remains at ‘substantial,’ meaning an attack is likely,” said Ade Adelekan, the deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police in London. The Metropolitan Police said it would have a “robust” security plan in place for the Arsenal-Bayern Munich match at London’s Emirates Stadium.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More