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      Euro 2024 Final: Spain Beats England to Claim Fourth Title

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      A 2-1 victory in the Euro 2024 final extended England’s suffering but crowned a generational star in Spain’s teenage forward, Lamine Yamal.First, Spain’s players had to perform the rituals of celebration. They communed with their fans. They draped themselves with a selection of flags, national and regional. They commiserated with their bereft English opponents. Once those were completed, they gathered by the podium hastily constructed on the field at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.Most of the players took that moment to compose themselves, to share an embrace, to try to absorb the scale of their achievement over the past month: At the start of Euro 2024, Spain stood in the second rank of continental powers. Now, after a flawless tournament and a 2-1 triumph over England in the final on Sunday, the country sits at the pinnacle once more.Lamine Yamal, though, could not contain himself. He danced and bounced, unable to stop moving. He knew, though not from firsthand experience, that each and every player would get chance to lift the trophy, so he made sure to practice his technique, heaving an imaginary cup three times.When Spain’s players were eventually summoned to receive their prize, Yamal went a little too early. The assembled dignitaries were not yet in place when he scampered onstage. He had to be called back by his teammates, greeted not with censure but an affectionate, somewhat paternal, ruffle of the hair.It has been easy, over the past few weeks, to forget quite how young Yamal is. Only 16 years old for most of the tournament, he is so young that German law requires that he have special dispensation to work late in the evening. He is so young that he has had a designated guardian with him at all times. He is so young that, standing by the podium, he could probably taste the cake he was given to celebrate his 17th birthday on Saturday.And yet, despite his youth, Yamal can claim a large portion of the credit for taking a relatively unheralded Spanish side to a largely unanticipated glory. It was his goal that turned the semifinal with France on Tuesday. It was his pass that created Spain’s opening strike in Sunday’s final, turned home by Nico Williams.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 Bleak View of Soccer’s Future Misses the Full Picture

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      Uruguay Coach Marcelo Bielsa lamented that the sport was surrendering its appeal in service to its business. He’s right. And also wrong.Barely lifting his eyes from the floor, Marcelo Bielsa started out with an elegy for what had been lost and ended with a lament for all that is to come. Lesser managers than Bielsa, Uruguay’s philosopher-coach, might have been preoccupied by the looming material reality of a Copa América quarterfinal with Brazil. Bielsa has always been more concerned by the ethereal.The picture he painted was emotional, heartfelt and midnight black. Soccer’s glory, he said, is that it was always free, a “popular property,” one of the few pleasures available even “to the poorest people.” Now, “the business” that has swallowed the game whole has wrenched it brutally from their grasp.“Soccer has more and more spectators but it is becoming less and less attractive,” he said. “What made this the best game in the world is not prioritized today. No matter how many people watch, if you do not make what they are watching pleasant, it will only benefit the business.”Bielsa’s vision of the future is more than bleak; it is ever so slightly apocalyptic. There will, he predicted, be fewer players who “deserve to be watched.” In turn, the game will be “less enjoyable.” As the spectacle diminishes, the “artificial” boom in spectators that has turned soccer into the global cultural phenomenon it has become will start to wither and fade.So forlorn, so dystopian was his worldview that it is only really possible to conclude one thing: As well as guiding a thrilling, and apparently extremely hands-on Uruguay team to the semifinals of the Copa América, Marcelo Bielsa has probably been watching a little too much of the European Championship.Marcelo Bielsa didn’t like what he saw from his sport this summer.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockWe 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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      Euro 2024 Tournament Runs Smoothly in Germany, but the Trains Do Not

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      Sweltering train cars, frequent delays and regular cancellations: At the Euro 2024 men’s soccer tournament, Germany’s faltering rail system emerges as a tough opponent.Niclas Füllkrug arrived early at the Adidas campus just outside Herzogenaurach, a picture-postcard town in Bavaria that was to host the German national team before this summer’s European soccer championships. The staff had been told that players would start arriving on a Monday morning, a few days before their opening game. But Füllkrug, one of the team’s forwards, turned up on Sunday night.He had decided to make the 300-mile journey from his home in Hanover by high-speed train on Germany’s national railway carrier, Deutsche Bahn. The company was not just one of the tournament’s sponsors; it was also supposed to be a standard-bearer of the event’s ecological credentials.But years of failure to invest in rolling stock, upgrade railways and digitalize signal boxes have made Deutsche Bahn notorious for delays and cancellations. In a country that has long prided itself on its efficiency and punctuality, Germans — as well as fans — had been warning for months that the problems might mar the tournament.So Füllkrug was hardly surprised when he found himself crammed into a train car packed with high school students on a class trip. He spent the journey fielding their questions about life with the national team.By the time he made it to Herzogenaurach, he had been traveling for several hours longer than expected, hardly ideal preparation for an elite athlete on the eve of a major tournament. Still, the delays had at least vindicated his decision to build in extra time. In Germany, as Füllkrug said, it pays to “have a bit of respect for Deutsche Bahn.”Many of the hundreds of thousands of fans from across Europe — as well as a remarkable number from the United States — who have joined him in Germany will, after an often fraught opening week, doubtless understand what he means.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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      Euro 2024: Success of Albania and Others Yields Euros for All of Europe

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      Eastern European countries who have in recent years lagged behind their continent’s bigger names are having their day in the sun in Germany.Edi Rama’s best friend during the World Cup summer of 1982 just so happened to be the one person he knew who owned a color television. So every evening, Rama would find himself crammed into his kitchen with countless others, desperately hoping that the fuzzy, flickering signal would hold.Albania was an island back then, under the repressive, conspiracist rule of Enver Hoxha. Foreign travel was banned for all but a select few insiders. Even communication with the outside world, particularly the West, was limited. Rama and his friends could only follow that World Cup through what he has subsequently called a “dark network” operated by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster.In a recent interview with Italy’s Tuttosport, he said that he still remembers that month warmly. Italy served as Albania’s avatar for the tournament; the two countries, in Rama’s estimation, are “a people divided by the sea, but united in everything else, similar as two drops of water.” When Dino Zoff, the Italian captain, eventually lifted the trophy in Madrid, it felt like victory in Tirana, too. “We saw it in his hands, as if it were also in ours,” Rama said.Triumph, though, was really something of a bonus. More than anything, what stayed with Rama from that summer, decades before he would become prime minister of Albania, was the sensation that there was life outside of his country. The commentators’ words, he said, “had the indescribable effect on us of not feeling alone in that black hole.”At the opening of an exhibition earlier this year about the life of Paolo Rossi, one of the great Italian heroes of that tournament, Rama put it even more eloquently. “Soccer was not only the ball and the game for us, it was the image of another world,” he said. “It was the chance to see a moving mirror, a forbidden dream.”Nedim Bajrami gave Albania the lead after only 23 seconds against Italy, the fastest goal in the history of the Euros.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressWe 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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      Euro 2024 Shooting: Police in Hamburg Shoot Man With Ax

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      The shooting took place in Hamburg, in an area packed with soccer fans, and hours before the Netherlands and Poland were set to play in the city.A man wielding an ax on a street crowded with soccer fans was shot by the police on Sunday in Hamburg, Germany, only hours before the city was to host a game at the European Championship.The man threatened police officers with “a pickax and an incendiary device,” a police spokesman said on Sunday. When he did not respond to warnings, the police said, he was shot.The man was injured and was being treated, they confirmed. No fans nor police officers were injured.The incident took place in Hamburg’s entertainment district, a section of the city known as the Reeperbahn that is filled with restaurants and bars. At the time, the area was packed with thousands of fans who had arrived to see the Netherlands play Poland on Sunday afternoon.According to a spokeswoman for the Hamburg police and videos of the incident posted online, the man came out of a small restaurant with a small, double-bladed ax and a firebomb and threatened officers nearby.Standing behind a police barrier as fans watched only steps away, the man — dressed all in black — shouted and moved toward a group of about a dozen police officers, several of whom were pointing their weapons at him from either side of the barrier. He held the small ax in one hand and what appeared to be a bottle with a rag in its neck in the other.At the time of the incident, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn area was packed with thousands of fans who had arrived to see the Netherlands play Poland on Sunday afternoon.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesWhen a police officer sprayed pepper spray in the man’s direction, he turned and began running up the street as fans scattered out of his path. Officers moved to surround him a short distance up the narrow street, and soon after, at least four gunshots rang out and the man fell to the ground.The police said that the man had been injured, but they could not give further updates on his condition. He was placed in an ambulance and driven away.The gunshots, captured in several videos that were posted online, were a sudden and jarring intrusion into what had been a festive lunchtime atmosphere. Within minutes, scores of police officers had gathered and set up a cordon around the scene of the shooting, and loudspeaker announcements — and the looming kickoff — cleared the area.The site of the shooting was a 10-minute walk from the city’s official fan zone, which was thronged with many more thousands of fans at the time, and a short train ride from the 57,000-seat Volksparkstadion, where the Netherlands and Poland were to meet in the first of three tournament games set for Sunday.The shooting came on the third day of the monthlong tournament, which brings together the continent’s best 24 teams every four years, and amid a heightened police presence.The German authorities said last week that about 22,000 police officers would be working each day of the tournament, and that they would be supplemented by hundreds more from the participating countries. 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 We Should Have Nice Things

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      Modern soccer shouldn’t be set up to rob fans of their joy.All being well, Bayer Leverkusen will end this season with one record, two trophies and just three haunting, existential questions. They will all trace back to Wednesday, back to Dublin, back to the Europa League final, and they will all take exactly the same, baleful form: What if?What if Exequiel Palacios had seen Ademola Lookman coming? What if Granit Xhaka had not given the ball away? What if Edmond Tapsoba had stretched out his leg? Could the final have been different? Could Leverkusen have rallied to beat Atalanta? Could Leverkusen’s manager, Xabi Alonso, have steered his team to an unbeaten treble?It is cruel, of course, that it should be this way. Leverkusen has, after all, illuminated the European season like no other team. It has won its first German championship, after 120 years of trying. It should, this weekend, add the German cup to its trophy haul. It has overtaken Benfica as the owner of the longest unbeaten run in European soccer since World War I. And it has done it all, in case nobody has mentioned it, in Alonso’s first full season in management.That is how its season should be remembered. When Alonso, his players and his fans reflect on this campaign in years to come, they should focus on what the team achieved, not on where it fell short. It has outstripped even the most fanciful of its ambitions. But should is not the same as will. Nothing hurts as much as nearly. Leverkusen will, whether it wants to or not, always wonder.Even before it lifted the Bundesliga trophy, Bayer Leverkusen knew it wouldn’t lose Manager Xabi Alonso.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is, though, a silver lining. A couple of months ago, as both Liverpool and Bayern Munich began to search for a new coach, Alonso made it clear that he would not welcome an approach from either club. He was, he said, still honing his craft. He had made a long-term commitment to Leverkusen, and he did not intend to break it at the first available opportunity.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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      Investor’s Lawsuit Accuses 777 Partners of $600 Million Fraud

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      In a suit filed in federal court in New York, a firm that provided hundreds of millions of dollars to 777 accused the company of double-pledging its collateral to other investors.The American investment firm 777 Partners, whose bid to buy the English Premier League soccer team Everton has been on hold for months amid doubts about the company’s finances, was accused by one of its lenders on Friday of running a yearslong fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars.The accusation came in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in New York by Leadenhall Capital Partners, a London-based asset management company. It said that it had provided 777 Partners with more than $600 million in financing, only to discover that roughly $350 million in assets serving as collateral for the loans either were not in 777’s control or had already been pledged to other lenders.The lawsuit is the latest, most serious claim against 777 Partners, which has for years made bold assertions about its financial health — it has previously claimed $10 billion in assets — even as it was trailed a string of lawsuits, corporate failures and unpaid bills.The suit could have immediate implications for 777’s stalled bid to buy Everton: The Premier League has not approved the sale, and the financially strapped club recently said it was seeking alternate investors.But questions about the company’s balance sheet also carry the risk of contagion for the broader world soccer market, given that 777’s portfolio includes ownership stakes in teams in Australia, Brazil, Belgium, France and Germany, and because it owes debts at all of them.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