It is worth noting that the Spanish players still retained the runner-up after losing in the final. It shouldn't.

Among all the photos, one remains unchanged. In some photos, the Spanish players stared at the ground, distraught, chewing on their loss to France in the National League final. Among others, they were interviewed with lead-colored faces and a little lonely. One of them, their coach, Luis Enrique, gave the conquerors of his team a lofty applause.

But among all these players, the Spanish players have a thin navy blue ribbon around their necks. After the final at San Siro in Milan on Sunday, every player walked to the hastily built high platform on the pitch. Each of them took the medal offered to him. Each of them hung it around his neck carefully.

Of course, this should not be particularly noteworthy. In most sports, the second-placed athlete or team regards its silver medal as a source of pride. Sometimes, it may be bursting into tears. Sometimes, it is through gritted teeth. Usually, it carries a lingering regret, a feeling of what might happen. And the pain always takes a while to subside. Second-off, but no cigar-the most hurtful.

But only in football matches, the silver medal will be considered burnt. Players and coaches often give the impression that they would rather not touch them at all. Last summer, most England players refused to wear the medals they won for second place in the European Championships.

A few weeks ago, most of Manchester City and Manchester United’s opponents apparently refused to wear the tokens they received after losing the Champions League and Europa League finals. José Mourinho has developed a habit of dealing with any reminder that he has lost a major final.

Roughly speaking, this is a phenomenon that rarely occurs outside of football. The finalist who was defeated in a professional tennis match did not give the fans any prizes he or she won in front of the audience. Olympians will not often refuse to stand on the podium with silver or bronze medals hanging around their necks, nor will they throw them when they leave the stadium/swimming pool/racing track/whatever the place where Madisco takes place Call into the crowd.

In fact, contempt for silver medals is not even a feature of all football. In 2019, the Dutch player who had just lost to the United States in the Women's World Cup finals kept their medals. Many people came out of the locker room to be interviewed by the news media. Their eyes were still a bit jerky, and their necks were hung with the bittersweet spoils of the wonderful and exhilarating summer.

However, men's football seems to have accepted the idea of ​​"second to last" and turned it into a dogma. Perhaps this is because of the message it conveys: there is no doubt that the performance itself is somewhat performative, it is a short drama, a kind of prosperity for fans, to prove that only a complete victory can do it.

Or maybe it's because absolutism drives many defining roles in men's games. Many of the most successful managers of the sport have clearly told their players that they should not even taste the winner's medal. Alex Ferguson, like his predecessors Bryan Clough and Bill Shankly, used to tell his team that they should almost immediately forget to win a league or cup championship, which is only used as a springboard for further success. Football has long been swallowed by such a strong desire to dominate that it is just a bit crazy to watch it during the cold day.

Although Mourinho often and too easily blame him for all the ills of modern football, it is not difficult to find a line from his more open rejection of anything other than gold to a wider acceptance of this approach. I believe that once he makes it clear that he cannot accept silver, others will almost inevitably follow suit. After all, a coach who cherishes No. 2 seems a bit indifferent in comparison.

However, why it appears may not be as important as it implies.

It is curious how unrelated loose narratives come together. Last week, there was a small commotion in Norwich City, this team is rooted at the feet of the Premier League. A former player wanted to know if Norwich added a lot of money to the league. The club insisted on stability, wiseness and caution, all of these characteristics are synonymous with "boring" in the hyperbolic soap operas of England's top league. A few days later, Newcastle was acquired by Saudi Arabia. Oh no, sorry: provided by Saudi Arabia's sovereign investment fund. There is no connection between the two. not completely.

Newcastle fans see the club’s new owner as the savior. Their attraction lies not only in separating the annoying former club Mike Ashley from the club, but also in the promise of what the new club might do: provide the team with a lot of money to promote it to the Premier League. The pinnacle of the league, the realization of the ambitions and dreams of all long-suffering people-for a given value of suffering-the fan base.

The opposition between the two is curious. It was the Newcastle team, a team now owned by non-sports purposes, definitely not a financial institution of a nation-state, and it was portrayed as living in a certain fantasy. It is Norwich, a team with long-term plans, clear vision and deep feelings, that has to justify its existence in the Premier League.

Of course, these are all wrong methods. Norwich should be seen as an ideal model-conceptually, if not in terms of results-rather than Newcastle. But this is a sport that despises silver medals. It is not an industry or an ecosystem. It is good at measuring relative success. It understands that there is not only a winner, but also many, many losers, and many teams can win or lose based on their own vision. It is not a place to fully understand the importance of the journey—giving or receiving—thoughts that are as important as the destination.

Spain is likely to be more likely to get some fun from the souvenirs the team got in Milan, because they have already obtained these souvenirs: in the finals of the National League, a tournament than an exhibition. All athletes are competitive, but Luis Enrique and his team are unlikely to experience the same sadness as the English players at Wembley this summer.

But even so, perhaps it also implies a subtle change in the pattern, getting rid of the cruel zero-sum belief that victory can only take one form, so everything else must be failure, despicable, and shameful. Sometimes, getting second is an achievement in itself. Grasping this, you will feel that as a whole, the sport may be a little healthier and happier.

Lionel Messi may be trying to save his friend's feelings. He has known Sergio Aguero for many years, so when Aguero asked why he never won the Ballon d'Or, Messi cleverly chose his path. For example, he did not say, “You did not win the game because I existed, and so did Cristiano Ronaldo.” Instead, he was more diplomatic. According to the latter, Messi told Aguero that you won the Ballon d'Or if you won the Champions League. His failure is related to the failure of his team.

According to Messi's logic-Messi knows one or two things about winning the Ballon d'Or-there is only one winner left this year. Four members of the Chelsea team were nominated last season, but only one member won the European championship. By extension, this should be Jorginho's year. (The honor of women can be awarded to any of the five candidates for the omnipotent Barcelona team that won the Champions League, but Alexia Putras, as the captain, seems to be the consensus choice.)

It is interesting to think about what this will look like after the fact. A special rabbit hole appeared on Twitter this week, where fans discussed the merits of the 2003 award winner: Juventus midfielder Pavel Nedved. (What caused these unreasonable mouths of hell, and what attracts you, is still a mystery to me, but it doesn’t matter.) Nedved is, it’s destined, it’s not worth it, especially in Tie Eric Henry scored 32 goals in the Arsenal game in '56.

Of course, this parallelism is irrelevant-Nedved is a midfielder, not a forward, so it doesn't really match Henry's numbers-and it ignores the context: Nedved will play Juventus Tusla reached the Champions League final and won the Serie A title. That season, Henry's talent did not win Arsenal a trophy.

At the time, it was not shocking that Henry did not win it. If there is a more qualified player than Nedved-considered one of the best players of his generation-it is Andrei Shevchenko, the AC Milan striker scored to win the Champions League Penalty kick.

Of course, it looks unusual now, which proves the cultural advantage of the Premier League. Compared with Nedved, Henry is more lasting and great; perhaps there is the essence of our memory. Assessing individual contributions to team sports can be difficult-of course, Messi and Ronaldo are not involved-so as time goes by and memory fades, the numbers are persistent. However, as Aguero and Henry proved, these numbers do not tell the whole story.

Now, this painting is beginning to become the focus. We have confirmed the first two qualifiers for next year’s World Cup; we express our foreseeable but sincere congratulations to the German team. The German team always advances easily and respectfully raises an eyebrow to the Danish team, which now looks invincible. of. At the same time, the rest of the field began to take shape.

In Asia, it is difficult to imagine Saudi Arabia — four games, four victories — would not qualify. In South America, Brazil and Argentina can almost be taken for granted, but the identities of the two countries that will join them as direct qualifiers are even more interesting. In North America, there is only a slight gap between Mexico, the United States, and Canada and all other countries.

In Europe, people are worried about whether France, Belgium, and England will not qualify for the competition — they will all; don’t worry — but a few other popular teams face moderate pressure in November: Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are by no means guaranteed Automatically play.

The rest of Africa-the structure of the qualifying makes the whole process unsatisfactory, but undeniably dramatic-and Oceania, where the championship is only more than a year away, and the qualifying has not even started.

It has been postponed twice due to the logistical challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic; the latest plan is to hold a qualifying match in Qatar next spring, but in what form—and whether the club will release players to participate in the game— -not sure yet.

In the friendly match against Bahrain and Curaçao in this international window, the heavyweight players in this region of New Zealand have not played a game in the past two years. How the country’s coach, Danny Hay, should build a team that can not only beat the rest of Oceania, but also win the playoffs with a team from another league in June next year. Not completely clear. The sea has not lost hope. He said that the friendly match in the last window was the "beginning of the road to the World Cup" for his team. Given this situation, it is hard to believe that this road will end in Qatar.

The traditional mix of serious and trivial in the emails this week, because this newsletter has carefully planned its light and dark tones. We have received dozens of communiqués about the new ownership of Newcastle United, including one by Bob Lowenger, who wondered "is England worse than other countries in terms of the role of funding the team?" "

What's worse—because it applies to the moral value of ownership groups—is a value judgment, not a fair judgment. But in a sense, the term definitely applies to England: especially the Premier League, which has always clearly stated that it is "ownership neutral" and is proud of it.

The league basically doesn't care who invests in its clubs, as long as they have not committed any particularly obvious crimes recently and have money in their pockets. If you are even vaguely worried about protecting—and what we are told—valuable social institutions, that is not the best policy in my opinion.

At the same time, KL attracted me with a clear and sharp opening statement, “The important idea is that sports are not so much about actual winning as about creating an infrastructure that allows hope to flourish, no matter how impossible silverware is. You You may be writing a novel, but if it is a novel that your fans can trust, then you have done your job."

But KL lost me, just a touch, and the subsequent assertion was about Newcastle's abolition of ambitions under Mike Ashley's leadership. "If the alternative to not getting 15th is being relegated, then getting 15th in the Premier League is objectively more important than winning the England Domestic Cup."

Of course, this is indisputable. This is largely the logic used by Ashley, but it always makes me feel that it is the wrong parallel. As far as I know, there is no conclusive evidence that teams that take domestic cups seriously are relegated more frequently. There is even no convincing evidence that it will inevitably lead to a difference between 15th and 16th.

Paul Bauer (Paul Bauer) put forward an interesting point: "I suspect that the Premier League will find a solution to the Saudi ownership dispute, thinking that if they do not allow, the Saudis may use their money to go to other leagues."

This idea has been proposed elsewhere, especially a lawyer involved in the acquisition, but I am not sure if it reflects the idea of ​​the Premier League. Compared with the major European football leagues, the major American leagues seem-at least from the outside-to think strategically and collectively more naturally and more frequently. Many Premier League members unfortunately tend to confuse the best interests of the league with their own best interests.

That is a serious matter; the trivial matter is a lot of inquiries about the correct pronunciation of my name. It's Roar-Ee-so spelling might actually be better-but as close as possible.

There are some suggestions that this might not be the best similarity-my name is obviously quite common, although I'm not sure if the kids in Leeds in the 1980s think so-and using it shows my own privilege. First of all: this is not necessarily a serious example. However, after thinking about it, I am not sure if I purchased the idea of ​​this privilege.

Some names are difficult for some people to say. That is universal; it cuts across faith, skin color, nationality, and everything else. I would think that it is universal to accept this. Of course, we should all work hard; I am proud to put my accent in the right place. But we should also try to understand whether people sometimes fail to meet the requirements.

The last sentence of the week was said by Joe Bellavance. "When you sign as'Greg,' I am going to fall off my chair and laugh," he wrote, reminding us all of another universal truth: the best jokes are those you forgot to tell joke.