A blind man came to see Lionel Messi. He had his white-and-red cane in one hand, his other arm locked in a companion’s as they walked along the black cement of the concourse amongst the myriad concessions stands at halftime. Was she a fan, and he just came along? Or was he here to let the oceanic roar of the expectant New York crowd wash over him — to bear witness in his own way?

After all, Gretzky was in town. The Michael Jordan of our moment. Messi brought his merry band of La Liga legends to Queens, and they did not disappoint. Sighted or not, everyone here glimpsed something special — and increasingly fleeting — as NYCFC were condemned to sporting destruction by Inter Miami. Messi inevitably played judge, jury, and executioner, and many of the New Yorkers here had come to Citi Field hoping to see exactly that kind of punishment handed down to their hometown team. Not everybody, though.

“Oh yeah? You brought ya kids?” said a wide-set man in NYCFC sky blue as he trundled down the steps towards his seat a few minutes before kickoff, eyeing everybody in pink and black. “Fuck outta here.”

This section to the left behind one goal, down the third-base line if the New York Mets were playing, was about half NYCFC stalwarts. I could hear folks chattering about the season so far, or complaining that the double gin-and-tonic they’d ordered here was weaker than a single at Yankee Stadium, the club’s more regular home court.1 As the stadium announcer read the starting lineups, they shouted out every name and booed the Miami ones. Diagonal across the field, in the right-field stands, fan groups like The Third Rail banged on constantly throughout the game, singing songs about their players and the club.

But there was a whole row of 10 or 11-year-old kids behind me in black or pink Miami shirts crying, “Messi! Messi! Messi!” even before kickoff. At one point, while I was taking in the scene before the match from higher up on the concourse, a grown man behind me went, “Messi! Messi! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!” He was almost pleading for the great man to come out and for the match to start and for it to all be really real. A crew of five more grown men, all together in matching black Messi #10 kits, were lined up at security when I arrived at the stadium gates.

To be fair, the walk there from the Long Island Rail Road stop was nothing like all that. There were just a couple of Miami shirts sprinkled in with the NYCFCs and the rest of us unaffiliateds. I’m a native New Yorker, but I find it hard to connect with either of the city’s pro teams in this sport. An energy drink in New Jersey or a team linked to Manchester City? It’s not much to choose from.

I’m very much affiliated with New York, however, and it gave me joy to walk the wood slats of the boardwalk-style elevated walkway from train station to stadium, past the vendors selling “Cold beer!” and water out of coolers on the ground in front of them, others hawking Messi kits that were surely 100% authentic. Some of the accents I heard were absolutely the genuine article, and things only improved once I got inside the stadium and the pregame DJ served up a regular diet of Ja Rule and Fat Joe. And when Miami finally came out for their pregame warmup, long after their opponents had taken the field, the villainous out-of-towners were greeted with an eruption of boos.

After the pregame festivities finished and the “LIBERTY OVER VICE” tifo unfurled out in right field2, the match kicked off, and NYCFC had more than a foothold in the first half. Miami rarely troubled the home team’s U.S. international goalkeeper, Matt Freese, and it was the #7 in blue, Nicolás Fernández Mercau, who went crashing in behind the Miami backline on 29 minutes. He turned a defender inside-out and smacked the post.

But even on the back foot, Miami showed their class. Jordi Alba was motoring up and down the left, and Messi nearly found him in behind the NYCFC defense with some glorious touch on a chipped pass. Sergio Busquets3 was peerless in midfield, demonstrating in real time the difference between professional players and the all-time greats. Watching him waltz through the blue shirts, scarcely breaking a sweat, I was reminded of sitting in a high-school gym in Latvia while reporting a story on Kristaps Porzingis, watching his NBA friends scrimmage with his old buddies from Spanish pro ball and seeing the levels. No wonder Riqui Puig, a star in Major League Soccer, once told me, “I’m going to explain to my sons that I played with Busi.” He’d turn away from two or three markers at a time with a trademark drag-back or chop-turn before spraying the ball to the outside or through the lines.

It was one of the latter line-splitters that opened up the scoring, except it came from the #10 in black after Busquets found him in a pocket of space between New York’s midfield and defensive line. Messi took it and turned in one motion, letting it zip across his body onto his left foot as he swiveled to face a defender who’d left the line to confront him in space. That turned out to be a poor decision: Before Thiago Martins could get set, a through ball was through his legs into the gap he’d left for Miami’s Baltasar Rodríguez to run into. The 22-year-old Argentine latched onto his compatriot’s perfectly weighted ball and slotted it past Freese.

It was a couple of minutes before halftime, and Citi Field blasted off, though it wasn’t all raucous applause. There were plenty of boos, too, and earlier in the half, there were some mocking cheers — the kind of “Heeeey”s you hear from English fans — when Messi’s poor touch near the sideline sent the ball out of play. At times, the rising chants of, “Messi! Messi!” were met in vocal battle by, “NYC! NYC!”

There clearly was a real fandom here. Every stadium announcement was bilingual in a nod to the nature of the NYCFC supporter base, and the stadium camera — transmitted to possibly the largest screen I’ve ever seen out in the center-field stands — seemed at pains to avoid showing the man himself, as if to declare this was about more than just him. But the proof is in the numbers: 21,764 was the average NYCFC attendance in 2024, per Hudson River Blue. 40,845 were in the building for this one.

There were the masses in Messi Miami shirts, of course, but others committed the cardinal sin of American soccer fandom: the random kit. Thomas Müller may be in MLS these days, but his Bayern Munich jersey was hardly appropriate for this occasion. I love Martin Ødegaard as much as the next guy, ma’am, but come on now. As cringe as those vestments might have been, though, they were testaments to the sports-historical character of the event: It was a night for football fans. It was a night for anybody who wants to bear witness to something, to say they were there.

In his golden years, Lionel Messi mostly has a languid stroll around the center circle when his team are forced to defend their own box. When an opponent ventures near him with the ball, he manages to put in just enough effort in his challenges that he’s not mailing it in — but not enough to put himself in harm’s way. That’s not what he’s here for. He’s here to put on a show, and even when he’s scarcely moving, the head is on a swivel. He’s mapping and re-mapping the field, his teammates, his foes, the space, the opportunity.

On 60 minutes, it began to rain down thoroughly. Not a downpour, but certainly a drench job. It was 1-0 already, but only now was the stage truly set.

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The 2025/26 Champions League season kicks off next week, and here in the United States, that means Kate Scott will be back on our screens leading the most dynamic and unpredictable crew in sports broadcasting outside of Inside the NBA. (In fact, when I did a story on how the show came together over the course of just 28 days, folks involved were frank that TNT’s renowned NBA studio show was an inspiration.) Scott and the panel of ex-pros — Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Micah Richards — jump from goofy gags to tactical analysis and back again, all season long.

The four of them got on a CBS Sports/Paramount+ media call with a group of journalists this week to preview this year’s competition and their plans for how to cover it, starting with the opening matches on Tuesday, September 16.

The Football Weekend was there to take it all in as Richards nearly agreed to go to Kazakhstan for FC Kairat’s group-phase fixture with Real Madrid — until he learned how long the flight is from London. Then the three former internationals reflected on their relationships with their national team coaches, and everybody offered their strongest contenders to win the Champions League this season. (PSG, Barcelona, Liverpool — unanimously). Plus, Richards admitted he used to “look after himself” going into challenges in games when he knew he had a far bigger fixture on the horizon.

Here are a few highlights, edited for length and clarity. For some of these, multiple people answered but I chose one response to include. Each journo got a question — can you guess which one’s TFW?

On Liverpool’s ambition…

JAMIE: I do feel when I see the signings Liverpool have made, of course they will want to retain the Premier League. But I think when you make those types of signings, for that amount of money, the names Liverpool have signed — they're not signing projects, if you like. They're signing ready-made stars in Wirtz and Isak, certainly. You make those signings to win the Champions League, for me.

I'm not trying to put extra pressure on them in any way, but it almost feels like the type of signings that Real Madrid would make, or certainly make most summers. They’ll bring the biggest names they can bring in. It's not something we're really used to at Liverpool as such, but no, Liverpool have to be there or thereabouts with the players that they’ve brought in.

Do you have Man City as outsiders? Is it weird to say that?

THIERRY: Pep has done a tremendous job, we all know that. And one thing that he did, year after year after vear, that we took for granted, is that he alwavs made you forget who left the club, whatever it was. Doesn't matter. Not [just] legends of City, but legends of the Premier League. Legend, by the way, in everything in the world. You never remembered, or you were not thinking that those guys left the team from last year.

And since the beginning of this season, which is still early, and it's something that he has to deal with for the very first time, you are remembering evervbodv that was in the team that used to win before. When that happens, that starts to creep [into the] fans, and you can see there is a bit of doubt, which is normal, because it doesn't happen often to Pep to be in this type of situation. That's something that he has to deal with.

But it is the first time, and it looks like since the beginning of the season, that we're thinking about Mahrez, we're thinking about De Bruyne. Even people I saw, Man City fans, they said, “We lost Aguero.” I said, “That was five years ago. What are you talking about?” They never lost Aguero before because it wasn't in their head, because you're still winning. And now he's going to have to face something that he never faced before. But like Micah said, it’s still early.

Are Bayern Munich second-tier contenders at this point?

JAMIE: No, I think by just the name, the history of the club, and I think even in the last few years — the point I'm trying to make is, they'll always be a contender. And even in the last few years under Thomas Tuchel — I'm just watching his England team in the background here — but they always feel like they get really close. Thomas Tuchel's Bayern Munich only a couple of years ago, I think were one minute away from getting to the final, in the Bernabeu.

So I always think Bayern Munich are little bit like Liverpool. Even when they're not at their best, there's something about the Champions League where you always feel like they have a chance. They're still Bayern Munich. It carries huge weight. So, I don't think Bayern Munich would ever be classed as in a second tier of names. I know the guys just mentioned who they think are favourites, and Bayern Munich weren't mentioned, but funny enough, Real Madrid weren’t either.

There was the league phase format change last year, but a few years ago there was another change when they got rid of the away goals rule. With a couple of years to reflect, how do you feel about it now?

JAMIE: When it got changed, I was totally against it. I thought it was a great thing of European football. It was just different. That rule was not in any other game. It could take a team who were losing into winning, rather than — more often than not in a game, if you're losing, you score a goal, you’re drawing. And I just felt one goal could completely change a tie. So I was disappointed it went, I must say.

But I think there's pros and cons to it. You can look at certain games and think, “If that was an away goal, it would have killed the tie.” Or vice versa, in different situations. But I was always a fan of the away goals rule. I thought it brought something to this, to European football, that we didn't have in any other type of football.

How much did your national team coaches communicate with vou between camps, between FIFA windows, while you were with your clubs? Were they constantly checking in on you, or just kind of letting you do your thing and focus on club football?

MICAH: I think it depends how valued you are to the team, basically. So when I was first coming on, bursting on the scene, 18, I had Steve McClaren giving me my debut. He would ring me, I'm not exaggerating, very month. How’re you doing, what's it like there, anything I can do for you? But by the end, when [Fabio] Capello come in...I never had a call from him. He sent me back down to the 21s.

So it just depends on your relationship. I know football's moved on since then, but if you’re Thierry Henry, the manager’s gonna call you every month. Same with Jamie Carragher, to be fair, because although with you, Jamie, you wouldn't start every week, you were still a valued member of the squad. So I had it at the start, but by the end, I didn't have no communication whatsoever.

JAMIE: I didn't even have communication when I was with England in the squads.

MICAH: Did you not?

JAMIE: No! I don’t even think that Sven-Göran Eriksson knew who I was. Honestly. I don't think I ever had a conversation with Sven, really. Never had a conversation with Capello, really, and this is when we were in camp.

Steve McLaren, I think he was manager for maybe 12 months while I was in, and then I said I didn't want to plav anymore. I moved on from international football. So, Steve McLaren spoke to me when I said I didn't want to plav anymore. He was almost begging me to stay, because he knew what he had coming through and he wasn't too happy with it. It was like Micah Richards, Joleon Lescott, people like that. [Laughs] He was on the phone a lot more then.

But no, I had no relationship at all with any England manager, no. And to be honest, by the way, I'm not criticizing them for it. I'm not the type of person who expects people to call them. I just get on with it. I'm very low-maintenance.

THIERRY: Well, I was very old school. You speak when you're in the national team. You have time. When you arrive, it's not like now — before we had a week before we play. Now you see they have two games in a week and they go back quick to their team. You concentrate on your team, and when you're in the national team, you arrive on the Monday, you have a lot of time to talk about what's happening, how the 10 days are going to be. So it was just, stuff was done in the national team.

On the expanded World Cup format in 2026…

JAMIE: I think obviously, the larger a tournament is, probably you lose a little bit of the quality. But then I think with the World Cup, when I was a kid watching it, it felt like it was the cream of the crop. I think now it's more a festival of football, and it's trying to bring as many people in to enjoy the World Cup and participate in the World Cup. And of course, the cream will rise to the top as you get to the knockout stages.

But I think the group stage, there's going to be a lot of group stage games where vou'll feel that mavbe the quality isn't quite where you'd maybe like it to be. Or there's not as much riding on the game, because I think so many teams can qualify from the group stage anyway. So, it'll be interesting to see how it feels watching the group stage in the World Cup because of that factor.

But it is what it is. We want to try and bring as many people along the journey with the game, and this is what's happening right now.

We’ve talked about the U.S. having issues as a host country. What was it like for the French team in 1997-98 leading up to the World Cup?

THIERRY: We arrived in almost the same situation [as the U.S. currently], getting criticized a lot throughout the friendly games. A lot, actually. People wanted the coach to leave. It was actually — the press was very against him. And if you fast forward, the rest is history. We managed to win it. Some of the press had to apologize to him for the treatment that they gave him for more than two years.

So that's how it is. It's always on vou to make sure that you can convince people that you can win. Once vou do that, people came together with us, they supported us, and we managed to win it. But right from the start, yeah, it wasn't easv. But we stayed strong together and we managed to win it as you saw.

With the World Cup looming at the end of the season, and an increasingly busy calendar, do you think this could have an impact on the standard of the Champions League this season?

MICAH: In terms of the Champions League and the quality, no.

I think if we’re being honest, when you’re a footballer, you always do look a little bit down the line. This is me, I can’t speak for Jamie and I can’t speak for Thierry. But you’re always looking ahead, and if you’re an American player, and you’re the host, you will go into certain games trying to protect yourself. And I’ve done the exact same thing — if I had a game for Man City early on and I was going to play for England, I would just make sure I was looked after, whether that would be not going in for the challenge at 60-40 — you just look after yourself.

However, the Champions League is so big, I don’t think the players will be doing that. They might do it in their domestic league, if they’re playing a team in the bottom five or whatever it may be, in the relegation zone. But in terms of the Champions League, no, I think the quality will be exactly the same. Like, the Champions League — Jamie and I have been going back and forth on this for a while now, in terms of, I always say the Premier League, and Jamie says Champions League. The moments that you get in the Champions League are just ridiculous, and I think he’s just won me over. So in terms of the players, they’ll be right up for it. I don’t think we have to worry about them not giving it 100%.

Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Kate Abdo now goes by Kate Scott. Apologies for the error!

Roberto Carlos launched a long throw into the box, and Valencia defender Miroslav Đukić craned his neck to pop it out to the edge of the area. The Serbian in bright orange didn’t get the distance required on the header, though, and it fell to the #8 in Real Madrid black that night in Paris, May 2000, the Champions League final.

Steve McManaman stepped onto it at the top of the penalty area. He hitched his left leg up as he hopped and struck the ball with his right boot, a karate kick, lacing it into the bottom corner on the bounce. It was 2-0, game won. Madrid were European champions for the eighth time. Little did McManaman and his teammates know that so much at the club was about to change.

Real Madrid president Lorenzo Sanz was promptly turfed out of office that summer despite delivering the Champions League twice in three years, because Florentino Pérez was running on the promise that he’d take Luís Figo away from eternal rivals FC Barcelona. Pérez won the election, he got Figo, and thus was born the Galácticos era, when Madrid signed a steady stream of superstars each summer and McManaman continually encountered famous new faces in the dressing room.

What was that like? And how did it all go wrong, to the point that this grand revolution was ultimately considered a sporting failure?

Los Blancos will kick off their 2025/26 season on Tuesday when they host Osasuna at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu. At an ESPN event last week in New York to launch the network’s coverage of La Liga in the U.S. this season, I spoke with McManaman — now a co-commentator calling the biggest games in Spanish football for ESPN — about his time amongst the Galácticos.

You went to Madrid before the Galáctico era. Was there a moment when you looked around the dressing room and realized things had changed, that the galaxy of stars had arrived? Did it feel different?

No, you know what? Weirdly enough, it only felt different right at the end, when David1 came in. Because we brought in Luís2, and it was fine, because he had to — because he was only one, he had to integrate himself into our group, because we had just won the Champions League. The year after that, we won the league and got knocked out in the semifinals.

Then Zizou3 came in, and again, because there wasn't a plethora of new signings, he had to integrate himself, and nothing much changed. Same manager, same preseasons.

And then — it wasn’t David’s fault, of course — but David came in. A couple of weeks before the end of the season, they announced the signing. Then we won the league. Then [manager] Vicente del Bosque got unceremoniously sacked, and then they reneged on Fernando Hierro’s contract, which was awful. And that’s when you felt it had changed. It wasn’t a player thing, because of a new signing. It was that.

And then our preseason when Carlos Queiroz came in, instead of going to the Alps or going to Austria — two weeks in a training camp, running and working hard — we had our preseason training in Kunming, China, which was bananas. And then we went to Bangkok, and we shook hands with people. And then we went to Hong Kong, and we did exactly the same. And we had players in our team, experienced players, multiple-Champions League-winners, saying, “We need to train. We need to work hard.”

And that's when you felt that it had gone. That was the start of the end of that particular era. Because a lot of us left. I left, Morientes4 left, I think Makélélé5 left. And that’s when they had the superstars, but they didn’t win anything for four or five years, and you knew why. You knew why. They went the other way with it, commercially trying to make a lot of money instead of looking after the team.

But I didn’t think it was a specific player. It was what was happening upstairs and around, and this, “We need to generate as much money as we possibly can.” They came out with that “Zidanes y Pavones” statement at the time, where the president thought he could buy a superstar, not really have many middle people, but have the academy players coming through. And it was just ridiculous, because it was never, ever going to work. And you see now, everybody in their team now is an international, and that's when they've been the most successful.

In training in those days, it was Roberto Carlos and Zidane — you must have seen some incredible stuff.

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Standing on a concrete jetty in the sea of green and white and maroon, a man was FaceTiming with his wife and kid. He switched his phone to the front camera, facing outward. On the screen, his young son’s eyes went wide, his mouth gaped open.

He saw all the tricolor striped shirts bouncing up and down, all the tricolor flags waving in the foreground while the kaleidoscopic digital displays and boldface billboards for Broadway shows rose up behind them. They were dancing and singing in this valley between the glass skyscrapers like some joyous army who’d conquered the capital of the world. Theirs looked like Hungarian flags, but these belonged to football fans. They were flown by the Fluminense faithful as they took over Times Square at 11 a.m. on a Saturday.

The Tricolor had come from Rio de Janeiro to New York for a Club World Cup match with Ulsan of South Korea. Well, the match was at MetLife Stadium out in New Jersey’s “Meadowlands,” a euphemistic name to say the least, and I never had any intent to go. But I did want to see the Fluzão take over Times Square, which a local supporters’ group called NY FLU had promised they’d do for a good hour and a half on Saturday morning.

There were whole families there together, little kids sitting on parental shoulders as they bounced up and down as a unit, and there were 20-something dudes with Modelos in brown paper bags. (With the match still seven hours away, this had the look of a serious day out. Suddenly, I wished I was going to the Meadowlands.) The sound of drums was constant, the choruses unstoppable even as the concentration of the crowd drifted back and forth across 46th street. Nobody was deterred by the passing cement trucks or the eight-foot Bumblebee from Transformers, one of the area’s bizarre (and occasionally infamous) street performers trading picture poses for tourist dollars.

It takes a lot to get a New Yorker to Times Square, but I’d been leaning towards coming even before I watched my first 30 minutes of Club World Cup football the night before. I’d tuned in just in time to see Miguel Merentiel score a glorious equalizing goal for Boca Juniors against Bayern Munich. He’d scampered in behind Jonathan Tah to latch onto a through ball, tapped it smartly around Josip Stanišić to get 1-on-1 with the keeper, and smacked it over Manuel Neuer with aplomb. Then I watched the Boca fans turn the Hard Rock Stadium into the Bombonera.

The South American teams have been the redemption for this tournament, even if you don’t buy that they’ve made some grand statement about where they stand in relation to the European outfits. (Brazil, it should be said, has four teams in the Round of 16.) The breathtaking cynicism and superficiality of this whole thing has been offset just a bit by what the Argentines and Brazilians have brought to the table, if only because these fans have been showing Americans what this game is all about.

How many young kids are seeing up close what it means for supporters to generate their own atmosphere, without any orchestration from the announcer or the Jumbotron? How many are feeling what it is to be in a crowd of people singing the same songs they and their fathers have for generations? These are not things you get from preseason friendlies. There have been some wonderful videos of bewildered Yanks getting drawn into crowd scenes on the street.

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I made the mistake of getting in the concessions line about five minutes into the second half, thinking I could dodge the halftime crowds and get myself a plastic cup of beer — OK, two — without missing much. And then came the roar.

Dashing out to the concrete landing two thirds of the way up the stand, I arrived just in time to witness a festival of passion, skyward fist pumps and cries of “Dai!” all around, and two men — one to the left, one to the right — who’d clambered up onto the piped railings in front of them to howl their approval. The one on the left had torn off his shirt. Bologna FC 1909 had just equalized in a critical match with Juventus to determine who would play Champions League football next season. Now, if Bologna could get another, they’d leapfrog the Old Lady and find themselves in pole position with three matches left to play in Serie A.

From high up in the “Distinti” stand, to the left of the famous tower lodged in it that sets the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara apart, the sound seemed to erupt upward volcanically from the three open-top grandstands: the Curva San Luca to the left; the Curva Bulgarelli to the right, past the tower; and Distinti. Only the Tribuna on the far side, with its owners’ boxes and hospitality seating, is covered with a roof.

Off diagonally to the left, the away support was packed into a narrow section between the Curva San Luca and the Tribuna, and the black-and-whites of Juve were making a right old racket throughout, a constant drumbeat across the 90 minutes that occasionally gave way to soaring choirs of defiant voices singing as one. They were well-marshaled, relentless, proud. Tricky times these may be for the club, but this is still Juventus: 36 times champions of Italy, 15-time Coppa Italia winners, the regal zebras of the peninsula.

They were loud indeed, but in the big moments they were matched by the Curva Bulgarelli. This stand is home to the ultras, an array of groups that includes the Vecchia Guardia — “The Old Guard” — and they had enough flares going to reassure you that you were, indeed, watching Serie A. I was too far away to hear for myself, but I was told they act as conductors for the whole stadium’s orchestra: “Just the Curva, just the Curva,” they might say to give their section a solo. Then: “Tutto il Stadio!” In April, after he laced in a scissor kick deep in stoppage time to defeat top-of-the-table Inter Milan, Bologna forward Riccardo Orsolini jumped all kinds of obstacles to celebrate in front of this stand as the stadium exploded. Even with a six-lane running track ringing the pitch and keeping supporters at a distance, the place gets thunderous.

“The energy of the last couple seasons, it's gorgeous,” said Marco Graziani, who sits with the ultras in the Bulgarelli. Well, he calls it something else. More on that later. But these are fine times for Bologna, glorious even.

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Mehdi Taremi won the ball just inside his own half and carried it down the sideline to burn off a few seconds of extra time, and the man upstairs went ballistic. He was banging walls, stomping his feet, shouting his approval over and over: “Dai! Dai! Dai!”

We were both watching Sky Sports Italia from a hotel in Bologna, about 140 miles from the San Siro in Milan, and he was making enough noise that it felt like we were sharing a room. To be fair, he was watching Inter and Barcelona fight out a punch-drunk, end-to-end, back-and-forth Champions League semifinal that might just go down as the greatest cup tie there ever was.

They came into this decisive second leg with three goals apiece, the product of a sensational opening round where Marcus Thuram started the scoring with an audacious backheel 30 seconds in. Denzel Dumfries made it 2-0 with a leaping scissor kick before Lamine Yamal went intergalactic to flip the match on its head. Still, Inter came again, then Barcelona matched them once more through an outrageous strike from Raphinha, and all that turned out to be a mere preview of coming attractions.

The anticipation for Tuesday’s Part Two was stratospheric. The myth-makers were sharpening their tools, preparing to carve this one into stone before it began. But when Inter went into halftime 2-0 up, you’d have been forgiven for thinking they were already on their way to the final. The Italian outfit were at home, in front of a raucous and gloriously partisan Nerazzuri crowd, and they’ve been a top team for three seasons now.

But you could tell it wasn’t over in the early minutes of the second half by the only slightly less partisan commentary on Sky Sports Italia. The play-by-play man was absolutely relentless — he scarcely took a breath even when the ball went out of bounds — but as Barcelona seized a grip on things, fear and trepidation began to creep into his voice.

When Lamine Yamal corralled the ball into his orbit to begin terrorizing the Inter backline, it was, “Sinistro! Sinistro!”

When Eric Garcia struck on 54 minutes to get Barcelona back into the game, it was, “Gol, Bar-che-llona.” Quiet, dejected, wholly concerned. You’d hardly have known that a centerback by trade had crept into the box and adjusted his body so cleverly to bonk a volley into the back of the net.

And then we were off. The shooting starlets from Catalunya took over the game in the second half, and their onslaught on the Inter goal was unrelenting. The hosts were struggling to get out and get up the field as Barça coach Hansi Flick’s halftime tweaks came good. Inter were on the rack, and Garcia nearly had another himself after a lightning counterattack from the visitors. It was a maze of passes forward, left, and right that twisted Inter inside-out, but the defender put his shot far too close to Yann Sommer, who still had to react with incredible speed to claw it away.

The Swiss goalkeeper could not keep the door padlocked for long, though, and soon Gerard Martín sent a swooping cross in from deep on the left for Dani Olmo to head home. For the second time in the same semifinal, Barça had come back from two goals behind, and they didn’t stop there.

They laid siege to their hosts’ 18-yard box, Yamal testing Sommer again on 76 minutes before Pedri set up the killer move. Inter, truly reeling now, turned it over far too close to their own goal with three minutes left in the 90. Raphinha stole in down the left, took on the pass, and struck once with his left — saved by Sommer. It came back to him, though, and there was no mistake about the Brazilian’s second effort. He buried it in the far bottom corner with his right foot for 3-2. From 2-0 down in enemy lands, Barcelona suddenly had one foot in the Champions League final.

To his credit, the man upstairs took all this in stride, perhaps the George Michael Bluth kind. Nary a hoot nor holler came down through the ceiling of the old Bolognese hotel. The minutes ticked on — 89, 90, 91 — and only an Inter player losing possession or putting one in the stands got a cry or crash from upstairs, as if only his team was playing and Barcelona were some kind of alien force over which he had no control, no grasp.

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I had two and a half pints on the day, because I spilled the third one all over a guy’s back. I apologized; he didn’t care in the slightest. After all, Bukayo Saka had just scored at the Bernabeu to destroy the European champions.

By then, it was euphoria in O’Hanlon’s. Bedlam. It was bouncing from the start, to be fair. When I left my house an hour before kickoff, my girlfriend asked why so early. “How many people could be there at 3pm on a Wednesday?” 25 minutes before showtime, the folks in red and white were piled up outside the Irish pub on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan. At capacity. You could see them through the doorway up the stairs, past the mass of humanity packed in under the low-slung pressed-tin ceiling. Covering the entire three windows to the left of the doorway was a giant red cannon-clad flag. Inside, the songs rang out.

We won the league at Anfield,
We won it at the Lane,
Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford,
No one can say the same…

It’s a great tune, the best that Arsenal fans have cooked up in years, and yet it’s always concentrated the mind — at least for me — on the “past” bit of “past glories” and how I missed them. I came on board as a supporter in 2006, in that autumn after the World Cup, still just months after this club featured in the Champions League final. They’d won the league without losing a match two years before that. Surely, it was only a matter of time until the North Londoners returned to the mountaintop. And then the next 18 years happened.

On Wednesday, I marveled at how many Yankee Gooners I met that had lived similar experiences to mine: fans of 12 years, 15, enough to have been dragged through the misery of the nearly seasons and others nowhere close, the slow decline of the Wenger years and the eighth-place nadir, the time when Arsenal became a kind of high-class laughingstock. Considering when the game really took off on these shores, it’s been something like the median, the average, the default experience for the American Arsenal fan, and it still echoes even in this new era of title races and £100 million signings. The banter merchants and professional trolls often talk about the club as if it’s a joke to finish second in the Premier League and — last season — lose to Bayern Munich in a Champions League quarterfinal. They almost need the Arsenal to be a punchline.

And then came this quarterfinal, and Real Madrid, and the 3-0. And then came Wednesday’s second leg.

The festivities at O’Hanlon’s began with a raucous rendition of “North London Forever,” as Cristiano behind the bar leapt on top of it brandishing a giant flag with Saka’s face on it. When it was done and the game feed came on, everybody around me started bouncing in place, on the knife edge, minds filled with “the black magic of the Bernabeu” and all that talk of remontada from the Madridistas in the lead-up. (Boy, did they talk.) Even at 3-0 up on aggregate, it was tough to sit still.

But this is a different team now, a different club. “Mikel Arteta’s army” isn’t just the supporters. There are hard-nosed, well-drilled warriors on the pitch. It’s a team in the steely Spaniard’s image. They aren’t pushovers anymore, they won’t be bullied, and with nights like these they add mental strength to their undeniable physical dominance.

They managed the game through the first half, when the only points of stress were two questionable penalty incidents. As Saka went up to take the first, we all chittered in the dark of the subterranean pub in mid-afternoon: Shouldn’t Martin take it? Shouldn’t Declan? When Bukayo missed, things went quiet for the first time, and the queasiness really set in when Madrid were awarded a soft penalty of their own. But once it was scratched off and the specter of the black magic faded, normal service resumed. And then came the glory.

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The songs came rolling down the Kop in waves, the ones you can make out through the television — “Li-VER-pool, Li-VER-pool” — and others with distinct verses of their own, winding tales that tell the story of what it means to follow one of Europe’s great clubs from a city in the North West of England that thinks of itself as a place apart.

We had dreams and songs to sing, of the glory ‘round the fields of Anfield Road.

The hymns began at the very top of the most famous stand in football, where the floodlights don’t shine and the figures loom in dark silhouettes, leaning forward just slightly each time they launched a chorus into the winter mist. A day of rain had given way to a mild night, but the dewy fog still rolled off the River Mersey to hang over the city of Liverpool and this grand old stadium. The piercing lights high above each stand — the Kop End and the Anfield Road Stand on the short sides, the Main Stand and the Kenny Dalglish down the lengths — cut through the long winter’s night to illuminate the red all around and the emerald green in the middle.

It was Tuesday night. It was the Champions League. It was Anfield.

French opposition had come to town for the occasion, though it wasn’t the Parisians who would ultimately end Liverpool’s European campaign in the Round of 16. This was the league phase, Matchday 7, and Lille of Ligue 1 had drawn the short straw. They journeyed up to this citadel to face the most formidable team in Europe at that moment, Arne Slot’s Red army that would soon finish top of the new-look Champions League standings. They were barreling towards a Premier League title, too. Some might have figured that Liverpool would roll Les Dogues —The Mastiffs — and march on, but the French side had other ideas.

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This story is part of the CATHEDRALS series covering the world’s great stadiums. Check out the feature on Goodison Park as Everton prepare to leave their home since 1892.

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Just after midday, I’d run into some Lille supporters at The Winslow, the famous Everton haunt, and eight hours later they were loud, proud, and ready. From our seats almost exactly diagonal from them, their melodies streamed across the rangy pitch, the entirety of the away support rising for just about the full 90 minutes to belt out their own songs of belonging. The flares came out early in the first half, and the smoke wafted across the 18-yard box and over the goal to their left, catching the stadium lights to add new minerals to the fog and the mist.

The French were boisterous indeed, proof that this place can bring the best out of the visitors. “Anfield under the lights remains one of the bucket-list experiences for any football fan,” would later say on the U.S. broadcast when Liverpool met PSG in March. In the week that followed, though, the legendary commentator published a column on Substack suggesting that “Anfield is not the same anymore” because “our relationship with our football heroes has changed…even Liverpool heroes. It’s now up to them to give us something to get excited about.”

On last week’s episode of The Football Weekend, I asked Liverpool fan Laurence McKenna whether the symbiosis between the Anfield crowd and the players has changed, half-expecting him to say — and not without reason — that tourists like me in the crowd were costing regulars their chance to sing and shout and build the mighty Anfield sound. But he didn’t.

“I’ve been at Anfield for really special nights,” McKenna said, like “when we had the comeback against Dortmund in the Europa League. It’s the stuff that, if you’re a football fan, dreams are made of. I was there when we beat Man City 3-0 in the Champions League, and Anfield was a huge part of that.

“But the difference on a night like the PSG night is not so much the actual crowd, the regulars. The regulars are always there. The regulars are regular for a reason. It’s the fact that the ticket resellers had resold to a majority of PSG fans…and you can look around the stadium and see it. I said to two friends I was there with, ‘This is not all Liverpool fans.’ You could see it even in our row….and it deflates the atmosphere by that 10, 15 percent. You just can’t get chants going in the same way. You can’t get that symbiosis.”

In line for a drink at halftime, he said he spotted five PSG fans behind him and two in front. “I’m there thinking, as friendly as we are, ‘I don’t want you here’….I think what’s deflating Anfield is the resellers. A lot of people blame the tourists, but broadly, it’s not. It’s the resellers. Tourists will sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and they’ll get involved with the chants.”

Maybe there was less of that away-fan infiltration for a group stage match, or maybe it was just the sweet innocence of Anfield virginity, but I found the place plenty lively. There were lulls, sure, and the away fans did take over here and there, but the Kop was at the heart of things and often sprung into action when the French folk started to dominate the atmosphere. It was just off to the left from where we were sat, on the other side of the corner flag, and the left end of the Kenny Dalglish Stand proved to be the perfect place to feel the waves of song come tumbling down the steep hill of standing supporters.

Liverpool’s is not the only “Spion Kop” that popped up at stadiums all around England in the early 20th century — nor, writes Simon Inglis in Football Grounds of Great Britain, was it the first. That was the one at Arsenal’s old Manor Ground in South East London, before they made the move across the Thames, where veterans of the Second Boer War working at the nearby Royal Arsenal saw “an embankment formed by a huge overground pipe” next to the pitch that reminded them of a colossal hill near Ladysmith, South Africa, where a particularly unnecessary and deadly battle was fought during the war.

The nickname stuck, and at first, Inglis writes, it was a convenient place to watch Arsenal matches without paying for a ticket. Then the club built a bank of terracing on it, two years before Liverpool built their own stand and an editor at the Liverpool Echo christened it the “Spion Kop.”

But there surely is no terrace or stand — at Arsenal or anywhere — with quite the heritage, the tradition, the noise of the Kop at Anfield with the lights shining brightly through the night. On this, my first visit, I could only wonder: Just how much have things really changed?

In 1964, the BBC’s Panorama went to Anfield to see how “LIVERPOOL FANS bring POP to the KOP.” In grainy black-and-white footage, they follow the players as they climb the steps in the tunnel and take “the field of praise.”

Those are the words of the presenter, John Morgan, who proceeds to station himself in front of the Kop, then standing-room only. It’s something more than that, actually. It’s a great swaying mass of humanity, with waves running through it from left to right and right to left and occasionally back to front, as someone loses their footing on the terracing and brings everyone around them spilling forward. You can see, in that moment, that they’re all leaning on each other for support, not so much standing as drifting together, one big molecular ocean. They are singing the Beatles and Cilla Black, grinning wildly for the camera. After all, they’re bashing Arsenal 5-0 to win the league:

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By the time Iliman Ndiaye played a smart one-two with Idrissa Gueye and scampered in behind the Tottenham midfield, driving at their backline until he hit a swift stepover at the top of the box and smacked one high in the net to make it 2-0, the Gwladys Street End was bouncing. The roar of the Everton faithful caromed off the ancient girders and wood and concrete, just as it had when Dominic Calvert-Lewin turned the Spurs defence inside-out and slotted home the opener in the 13th minute.

On both occasions, I had to crane my head around a royal blue pillar—and the cresting waves of others’ heads and limbs in front of me—to see what happened. From a seat deep in the stand behind the goal, under the overhang of the second tier above, you could still just about see events at the far end—where Everton were banging in their first-half goals—if you found that sweet spot, that letterbox window through the madness. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

This is life in the back of the Gwladys Street, the beating heart of Everton Football Club’s home support. And it’s life at Goodison Park, their idiosyncratic base since 1892 where around 10 percent of the seats have Obstructed Views, and where time is running out.

After the Merseyside derby on Wednesday, Everton have just six more games to play in this famous old ground where Pelé and Garrincha and Franz Beckenbauer scored World Cup goals in 1966, where Eusébio scored four to help the Portuguese storm back from 3-0 down against North Korea, where Dixie Dean scored his 60th goal in a single season of top-flight football, where Everton staged eight campaigns that ended with English first division titles. This summer, the Blues are moving house.

“For me, Everton will always be Goodison Park,” said Rob Sawyer of the Everton F.C. Heritage Society. “But I recognize that for the younger people in particular, we've got to move to somewhere fit for the 21st century.”

That somewhere is the Bramley Moore Dock, where the shiny new Everton Stadium now lies in wait, just about finished after years of development that began with purchase of the land in 2017 and planning permission approval in 2021. With a capacity of close to 53,000, the club’s hierarchy—and its fans—hope it will deliver the revenue and the grandeur to make Everton a major European club again. They want to stage European tournament finals, perhaps the Europa League or the Conference League to start. Fans of their mostly amicable local rivals, Liverpool, may have to watch superstar musicians play concerts at Everton. The blue side of Merseyside want to be somebody in this brave new world of football, but it will come at a cost.

Goodison Park is in a church’s backyard. Back in the day, fans would climb up on the roof of the worship house to earn a free ticket to watch the Blues play. It’s called St. Luke’s Church, and on matchdays, upstairs before kickoff, you’ll find a collective shrine to Everton Football Club. There’s a cast of characters who operate different stalls featuring classic kits, old match programs, historic memorabilia, and—in their proprietors—a whole lot of knowledge.

Richard Gillham, who goes by Richie, operates a stall in the back right corner. He is secretary of the EFC Heritage Society. He stands behind a table arrayed with books with names like Goodison Glory. Above him to the left, there are baseball jerseys from the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox, who once played America’s pastime at Everton’s ground back in 1924. Everton players got involved in a baseball league during the Second World War, he mentioned, and Goodison also played host to an American football game featuring sailors who were stationed in Liverpool. Among them on the USS Leviathan was Humphrey Bogart, though it’s not confirmed he took part in the game. What is for sure is the final score.

“Only Everton could have a nil-nil American football game,” Richie said.

When he was a kid, he used to go to the enclosure at the front of the Main Stand with his dad, and a friend of his dad’s would bring along “the bottom three rungs of an aluminum ladder” for him to stand on so he could see. The enclosure was terracing then, all-standing, and young Richie needed a leg up over the adults.

So did Roger Bennett, the Evertonian romantic at the heart of the Men in Blazers. Over the phone after my visit to Liverpool, I asked him if he remembered his first match at Goodison. “Yeah,” he said. “April 1, 1978. Everton 2, Derby County 1.”

His dad waited until he was six and brought him to a morning kickoff for “a safer, more prudent introduction,” Bennett said. “It was a freezing day, and it was a slightly more violent era. I was just a kid, I didn't really realize what was going on, but I would say it was quite an energetic walk from the car to the stadium.”

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There wasn’t much live football on back then, and Match of the Day was on late, so Rog grew up listening to Everton games on the radio. He’d scarcely seen the Goodison pitch outside of newspaper photographs.

“I just remember it being so green, and so startlingly beautiful,” he said. “And the amazing thing is now, when you look at football pitches in the 1970s and 80s, they weren't that green. They were mud piles. But, like, genuinely, it was like the greenest dale I had ever seen. It was stunning and it was beautiful and it was freezing and I couldn't see.

“Everyone stood up around me, grown men, so I couldn't see anything. And the memory I have is that the stranger to my left saw that I couldn't see a thing, and he just lifted me up with one hand, took off a giant jacket that he had on with the other, turned it into a bundle and just plopped me back down on top of his coat. And he goes, ‘Oh, we’re one big family here at Goodison.’ And he stood there in the freezing cold in his T-shirt for the whole game.”

A day out at Goodison was a rougher one in those years. Going to the football was a harsh—occasionally terrifying—experience. But there was warmth in it, too, and Everton were good. Richie was there for the famous Cup Winners’ Cup victory over Bayern Munich in 1985, “one of the greatest nights ever for atmosphere” at Goodison. Back in the day, the attendance could top 60,000—the record was 78,299 for a Merseyside derby in 1948—but then there was Hillsborough, and the Taylor Report in 1990 mandating that English grounds become all-seater.

“I prefer standing, because I think it creates more atmosphere,” Richie said. When I met up with him downstairs at St. Luke’s, Rob Sawyer said the same when I mentioned my seat was in the Gwladys. “In all stadia, it's lost a little something. But you'll enjoy it. You'll feel the history in the wooden beams, the concrete. You’ll love it in there.”

Down Gwladys Street, there’s a row of houses on one side that’s typical of the blocks all around Everton’s castle, a line of modest rowhouses in an array of colors: pale blue, red, gray, your occasional yellow. At the end of the street, it’s Stanley Park, the sweeping greenspace that separates the Evertonians from the Reds at Anfield. And on the other side of the road, across from the rowhouses, there are the many numbered entrances to the Gwladys Street End.

With a scan of your ticket, you crank through the ancient turnstiles—clank-clank—and arrive in the concourse under the soaring ceilings supported by still more blue beams. This is where the faithful gather at halftime in groups of two or three or four, slugging a pint or two before the 15 minutes are done. They might lean up against a wall or a girder, blue-and-white-scarves peaking out from beneath black winter jackets as they chat about the triumphant return of manager David Moyes and the old-new-boss’s tactics, or stories (and complaints) from the past week at work, or—in the case of this Tottenham match—whether Ange Postecoglou could lose his job over this. After all, he’s losing 3-0 to Everton at the half.

But before that, before it all kicked off, we headed up the short staircase and popped out into the grand landscape of Goodison. The Gwladys Street End is one of two stands designed by Archibald Leitch, the Scotsman who traveled England and Scotland in the first half of the 20th century building spectator enclosures at many of those nations’ greatest grounds: Highbury, Stamford Bridge, Celtic Park, Ibrox, Villa Park, Craven Cottage, Hampden Park, Old Trafford, and Anfield. When you head down to the bottom of the Gwladys, near the pitch, you can get a clear view of the Bullens Road Stand with its famous crisscross pattern on the second tier, a Leitch trademark. That’s where both Richie and Rob sit now, though for a long time, Rob stood here in the Gwladys Street.

“That was where I'd go in the 80s, when Everton were winning stuff,” he said.

While that’s certainly changed, and the terracing on the Gwladys lower has given way to seating, one thing hasn’t: Everybody stays standing the whole time. In our seats near the back, where the overhang hung low and the thick blue beam rose in front of us to meet it, the pitch was obscured entirely when the players were first walking out on the pitch and the Premier League anthem played. A collection of tifos in white and blue and yellow descended over the letterbox window for the duration of the opening ceremonies. All around, they began to sing the old hymns of the Gwladys and some newer ones, too. Soon enough, the other stands joined in.

Over to the right looking out from the Gwladys is the Goodison Road Stand—the Main Stand—with its skinny white pillars rising up to support it, finished in 1971 after the original double-decker designed by Archibald Leitch was knocked down to make room.

Across from that is the Bullens Road, which will be one year short of the century mark when the club abandons Goodison this summer. The stand was there when Dixie Dean scored his 60th goal back in 1928, and it has witnessed every triumph and disaster on the Goodison pitch since. It was first built in 1905 for a total cost of £3,000, then redesigned by Leitch in the ‘20s. The seats in the Paddock, at the foot of the stand, are in timeworn wood, the royal blue paint fading in places even with generations of touch-ups. The floorboards throughout the stand are wooden, and the thunking stomp of supporters on them is a sound that will soon be lost to football history.

And finally, there’s the Park End, opposite the Gwladys on the far side behind the other goal. Originally named for Stanley Park, which is across the road behind it, it was built new in 1994 following the Taylor Report in a cantilever style that means it’s the only one of the four without obstructed views. It’s also the only stand that’s a single tier, rather than the doubles everywhere else.

In sum, it’s four different stands built at four different times in four different designs.

“That is the piecemeal approach to football architecture that we’re used to,” Jon Champion, the acclaimed commentator for NBC and ESPN, said on The Football Weekend podcast last year. “It’s only really in the last 35 years that we’ve had brand-new stadiums built complete from scratch. One by one, the [old ones] are disappearing, and one of my sad days coming up will be the last game at Goodison Park.”

Because, as the commentators well know, Goodison’s idiosyncrasies go beyond wooden floors and obstructed views.

“There is video on social media of the climb to the gantry at Goodison Park,” Champion said, “which involves: walking up the inside of the old Bullens Road Stand, through a little door that’s about four feet high at the back, up a vertical ladder on the outside of the stand, onto the roof, right across the roof, and then through a hatch—doorway—down a vertical ladder onto a suspended steel platform beneath the roof. It’s the most magnificent view when you get there….It’s all about the view. It doesn’t matter about the inherent dangers in getting there.”

The only issue, Champion said, is that there’s no toilet. “When I was in my 20s, it didn’t really bother me. Now I’m in my 50s, it’s a little bit more of a concern, particularly on a cold day.” It proved a disastrous feature for one of Champion’s old colleagues in broadcasting, the since-departed Gerald Sinstadt.

“On one particular day in the depths of December, he was up there and he was caught short. He required toilet facilities,” Champion said. “There was still about 45 minutes of the game to go, and he suffered the ultimate indignity, because the Everton ground staff arranged for a bucket to be winched up onto the gantry in full view of the entire Goodison Park congregation, who then watched from afar whilst he filled this bucket, which was then painfully winched down.”

There will be no such architectural peculiarities, or the stories they spawn, in the new place. There couldn’t be even if they were wanted. It’s down to the very nature of Goodison’s story, spanning from the days before radio through the television revolution to the digital age, that jerry-rigged solutions became necessary. They didn’t have a gantry because they didn’t need a gantry, and then they needed one so they had to make it work somehow. This place was built in layers, like a street in an old quarter of Rome. The pieces were made to fit together because they just had to fit. And unlike other old football churches that might stick around, this one is big. This one is a cathedral.

“It holds nearly 40,000 people. It has staged World Cup semifinals,” Champion said. “It’s the last of the great signature old stadiums…It will be a sad day indeed when we walk out of there for the last time.”

Outside, the warmth of the stand melts away in the damp cold of Liverpool in January as the throngs drift down Gwladys Street and around the corner at St. Luke’s to head down Goodison Road. Across from the stadium are Chinese takeaways and a newsstand and even a hair salon.

But the main landmark across from the giant murals of Bob Latchford and Dixie Dean is the Winslow Hotel, the People’s Pub. Its red bricks are laced with lines of blue to match the stadium across the way, and when you walk in, the warmth comes washing over you. Your eyeglasses, if you’ve got ‘em, might even fog up with all the breath and chat and sheer humanity inside. You can see what draws people in from the dour days outside, when the sky hangs low over northern England and often, the sun never seems to rise through the cloud cover.

“I came over to take over the Winslow in 2014,” says Dave Bond, an Irishman who’s run the hotel for the last decade. “1st of March opening. That's the date that Dixie Dean died. 1 March 1980. He died of a heart attack in the ground watching Everton play Liverpool. And his image is over the door of the Winslow. It's been there for 100 years, on the signage.”

Built in 1886, the Winslow predates Goodison Park by six years. The signage has been there since the 1800s, which is why Dave says they’ve kept “The Winslow Hotel” as a trade name despite there no longer being rooms to stay in. “From the moment the first ball was kicked in 1892, right up until the end of this season when the last ball gets kicked by the senior team, Evertonians have been coming to the Winslow as part of their matchday ritual,” Dave said.

There was a period where the Winslow was lost following some poor management. From 2012 to 2014, it was shuttered, and before it reopened Dave and the ownership group gave the interior a “massive makeover”: New floors, paint and varnish, new bathroom tiles and toilets. There are murals of famous Evertonians and their greatest quotes about the club all over, painted by a local Evertonian artist. The tiling heading into one bathroom has “EFC” mosaiced in. Pretty much everywhere you look, it’s blue and white.

“I started supporting Everton as a nine year old in 1976. That’s where the love affair started for me,” Dave said. He rarely got to go to Goodison, though, until he moved back to Europe—following a stint in New York—in the 1990s. “I lived in Germany and I used to pop over to Goodison. Well, I popped over about five or six times. And the mad thing about that is I didn't know anything about the Winslow. I remember walking down Goodison Road and going, ‘Oh, this looks a good place. I’ll pop in here for a pint.’ Little did I know that all these years later I would end up running the place.”

He remembers the famous recent days in this sacred place for the Evertonians, like the win over Bournemouth to keep them up in 2023. “The atmosphere in the pub from when we opened in the morning was absolutely electric, and the game was on TV, so we were packed during the game,” Dave said. “People were coming in just to watch it, to be around the atmosphere.” For a 15-minute spell in the second half, when Leicester City took the lead elsewhere and Everton hadn’t, the Toffees were going down. The outpouring of relief when they survived, avoiding a first relegation since 1951, made for a raucous party in the Winslow.

But now Dave fears what days and nights at this place will look like. He acknowledges that Goodison isn’t big enough, and there’s nowhere to build around it in an area surrounded by housing blocks. “It's going to bring in that much more revenue for the club,” he said. “Which, sadly, in today's footballing world, it's all about revenue, isn't it?”

The ramifications for his business, though, could be catastrophic. They’re going to try running coaches from the Winslow to the new stadium to see if they can remain part of the matchday experience. It’s only a couple of miles away. “But hand on heart,” he says, “I think business is going to drop off by up to 70, 80 percent.”

The ownership group has put in an application for planning permission with the local authorities to convert the upstairs into guest rooms, which would return the Winslow Hotel to its roots. (The Hotel hasn’t hosted guests since the early 20th century, sometime around the First World War, though Dave says the timeline there is foggy.) Other businesses in the Goodison ecosystem, the civic and cultural habitat anchored around Everton Football Club—the chippies, the Chinese joints, the many other bars and pubs in the surrounding blocks—won’t have much of anything else to fall back on. They aren’t likely to survive when Everton move to the dock.

But for Dave and surely some of those business owners, it won’t be chiefly financial. “What I'm going to miss the most is the matchday experience. Everything else that goes around throughout the year is only just, for me, second fiddle. That adrenaline rush, that buzz of having 800 to 1,000 fans just bombard you, and the feel good factor when you get a win afterwards. It's just—I'm gonna miss all that.”

Tottenham’s Son Heung-min fluffed a chance to equalize in front of the Gwladys Street End after 25 minutes, and the whole section grimaced, winced, gasped. At the very beginning of 2025, the Evertonians held everything tenuously, from their membership in the world’s richest football league to a 1-0 lead at home. The 3-0 advantage that David Moyes and his team carried into halftime was almost incomprehensible to the blue-and-white crowds chatting and sipping out in the concourse. What happened after the second half kicked off was more familiar.

Everton drove down towards the Gwladys Street End a few times and pieced together some half-chances, but then the game started to run against them. James Maddison began to get involved for the visitors, pulling some strings, and then, on 77 minutes, Dejan Kulusevski latched onto a loose ball in the box with Everton stretched and stressed, lifting it deftly over everyone and into the net to get a goal back. The old Evertonian, Richarlison, got one late on to really get people worried. Hands were on heads throughout the final period. People shifted back and forth in place and groaned.

This is a fanbase that’s battered and bruised at this point. “Plenty of hard luck stories,” Richie said. “Plenty of them. But we still keep on coming though. Got to. It’s in our blood.” Forget those storied days of the ‘80s—they’re far away now even from David Moyes’ first tenure, when they were consistently competing for a place in the Top Six.

“My own son, he's 32 in November,” Richie said, “and he's not seen us win it. He was only a baby when we won the cup in ‘95. A lot of fans have not seen us pick silverware up. It took me 18 years. But that's what we need. Anything, any cup.”

And there is a growing belief—a consensus, really—that they must move to do that, even if they’re selling out every game now in a way they often didn’t when they were good.

“Everton cannot compete, Everton cannot ultimately exist, in that beautiful place,” Roger Bennett says of Goodison. “Every home game we have, we fall further and further behind any club that has a commercial infrastructure that Goodison Park can never match.

“It's a grand old place, a grand old home. It's also an old shack at this point. And it's almost a connection to a deep and rich history that is irreplaceable. It's a connection to a grander time when Everton really were a glorious team. That’s what I feel when I’m there.”

It’s about the personal heritage, too. Rob said that his father and grandfather and great-grandfather walked the same steps he does every time he goes to watch Everton. And it isn’t all history.

“That’s the thing with Goodison, it’s a lot of faces,” Richie said. “You might not know their names. I was just thinking, coming here this morning—the security guards, the bar staff in the Winslow, the people [selling] the scarves and the badges in the stalls outside. It's just—it's like a home. Like a sanctuary. This is our church.”

“It’s so iconic, it should really be listed,” he continued. “I'm surprised it's not listed, especially the Bullens Road.” But all that building and rebuilding across the four stands that’s lent the stadium its charm has also disqualified it from landmark status. “And look, land makes money, doesn’t it?” Richie said. “And money makes the world go around. And that's why we've got to move.”

With so much to sacrifice, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As you speak to Evertonians about the new ground on the river, you often hear the same phrase, a kind of prayer they speak to the football gods about what might happen at their new home on “the royal blue Mersey.”

Down at the Bramley Moore Dock, Everton’s new stadium rises up in the fog hanging over the River Mersey. The blue lighting that rings the structure below the roof glows in the damp night.

It’s behind slatted silver gates, newly installed between the old stone turrets of the docklands constructed here by Jesse Hartley and opened by John Bramley-Moore, then chairman of the Liverpool docks committee. The riverfront has been filled in to create the foundation for the stadium, and the whole area inside the gates has been generally transformed, but some vestigial structures still remain from a past life.

There’s a pub across the street, Regent Road, and on the sign outside it says, “FREE HOUSE — EST. 1758.” It’s called, aptly, the Bramley Moore. Inside, it’s a classic local: wood panels, dark blue carpet with a recurring gold and red medallion design. A couple of brown painted metal pillars rise up in the middle of the room. There’s a pool table in the back, and the seating is arranged in an arc of red-cushioned banquettes that shapes the heart of the space.

Behind the bar, Rachel Flood is chatting with regulars on the stools across. Her mom, Angela Burns, joined the Bramley Moore 33 years ago as a barmaid. Eventually, she came to own the place. For many decades, it was seamen from the big steamships that came in here, back when Liverpool was a force of nature in international shipping. Then it was the dockworkers and local craftsmen, Rachel said, once the major seafaring business went away from Liverpool and everything got more difficult. Still, the metalworkers and machinists and mechanics brought in enough business to just about keep the place going, to keep the Bramley Moore alive. It survived COVID-19, and now, Rachel said, they can scarcely believe it.

Suddenly, a blue bolt in the fog: a brand new stadium across the street that will attract 50,000 people and more for so many weeks of the year. This has always been a bar that draws Evertonians—though not exclusively—but soon it will be a serious Everton haunt, at least on matchdays. They hope to keep their character as a good honest local for everyone, somewhere to come for a Guinness on a Tuesday, but there’s no denying it: the new stadium will change everything.

Other bars and restaurants will surely spring up around here, even if the stadium is set to feature tons of on-campus pubs and hospitality, but not much else is blue yet. It’s brown under the gray skies, old warehouses and industrial buildings weathered and beaten. Down the road from the Bramley Moore, a giant rectangular brick structure, once a storehouse or a factory space, sits with a gaping hole in the roof.

The regeneration along the docks is a freighted prospect for Liverpool, a port town that lost its ships and had to find a new way of being. So, too, will Everton.

“Ultimately, you're catching the club at an incredible time,” Roger Bennett said. “What’s old is new. David Moyes is back, and it's an amazing time to be alive. It's an amazing time to be a Blue. We are currently the Premier League team with the oldest stadium in club football and the newest stadium in club football. I'm grateful for the past, I'm grateful for the memories, and I can't wait to build new ones.” On the banks of the royal blue Mersey.⚽︎

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Photos by Jack Holmes (with the exception of the Bramley-Moore Dock aerial shot, from Getty)

Thanks to reader Dennis Stevens for pointing out that Everton won the first of their nine league titles while still at Anfield Road, before they moved to Goodison! The story has been updated.

I spoke with Clint Dempsey in December for a story in GQ covering the new CBS Sports and Paramount+ documentary on Christian Pulisic, but I also snuck in some questions about Dempsey’s own days in the Premier League (where he scored 57 goals for Fulham and Tottenham) and with the U.S. Men’s National Team.

The CBS Sports analyst shared his thoughts on how the trajectory of his playing career differed from Pulisic’s, a couple of famous goals he scored as a young man, and much more…

You went to college, you played in the MLS a few years, then you went over to Fulham. How do you think that changed your experience compared to the guys that were coming out of the academy system over in Europe?

I think that in an ideal world, I would have left after my freshman year of college and gone to a higher level. I think playing two more seasons there and leaving halfway through my junior year was a little bit of a waste. It would have been better to have gotten more top-level training at a younger age, or more competition to try to push yourself and to be the best that you could.

But at the end of the day, everybody has their own path, and you do whatever you can to make it work for you. So I guess I, in a sense, was lucky that I was able to make the U-20 [national] team, I went to Project-40, then was able to get drafted by New England Revolution, a team that didn't spend a lot of money on players. So if you were young and you were good enough, you got an opportunity, and I got my chance. And I'm grateful for Stevie Nicol and Paul Mariner for what they were able to teach me and give me that opportunity.

But, yeah, in an ideal world, you'd want to be playing at 18 years old in Europe and testing yourself against some of the best players in the world. It would have been dope to go to like, Ajax or something like that, somewhere in Holland and develop, you know, right out of high school.

Is that a difference-maker for Americans now if they want to play for clubs like A.C. Milan? To make the Champions League level, how key is the academy route? Or can you still go through the MLS route that you did?

I think you can still go through anything. If you're good enough, the cream will always rise to the top. But being at the highest level that you can be at, the younger you are is only going to help you, right? So if you're 18 years old, playing in one of the best leagues in the world, or playing on a team that's playing in the Champions League and playing against, you know, you're testing yourself against the best, it's only going to make you better.

It's like taking a more difficult class in school. You're just going to learn so much more. You're going to be on such a fast track of learning. So it's that balance, right, of being on that fast track of learning, but also to be playing. So as long as you feel somewhere that you're developing and you're getting opportunities. Because at the end of the day, if you're never playing, it doesn't do you really any good to be on the team unless you're getting significant minutes to try and do what you're being taught in the training sessions, in games.

But yeah, man, I think it helped [Christian Pulisic] to not have any fear at a young age. And it kind of makes you go, “What's the next challenge?” He did it in Germany, then it was the Premier League and he was able to do it there. He won a Champions League with Chelsea, then picked up some injuries that made it difficult for him because he missed the preseason. But there’s that saying, “Make your next move your best move,” in terms of going to AC Milan.

Look at how well he played last year and how he got off to a flying start this year. The difference I would say about him from what we've seen so far is he's a main player on a big team. We've had players that have been main players on good mid-table teams, but nobody who’s the main player on one of the biggest teams in Europe.

What do you think he's unlocked in his game that he has become the man for A.C. Milan?

I think confidence. You're one of the first names on the team sheet when they do the lineup, and the confidence that you get from that and from performing, you get in a good place. And he’s the type of person that he’s not just going to settle on the fact that, “Oh, I’ve scored a few goals.” He's like, “Well, shit, I want to be the best I can be. I want to do something that no one's ever done before. I don't want to be just the best American. Let me see if I can be the best player on A.C. Milan. Let me see if I can be the best player in this league.”

But what I think he's added to his game is just being able to not only get on the end of things, but create more chances for himself. He's always had the ability—wherever he was—with his pace, to get in positions where he can get on the end of things. Now you're seeing—like in the derby match—where he's able to just take players one-on-one, beat two or three players and score goals. So when you're doing those types of things, you're gonna be hard to stop. Because how do you stop someone that can get on the end of things but also create chances for himself?

You mentioned the mentality piece—when you went to Fulham, Brian McBride was there, Carlos Bocanegra. There were Americans doing it at a mid-table club, but what was the mentality? Were you guys saying, “We want to make it in this top league as an American and have a solid career?” Did you think to yourself, “I can be the best player in the world?”

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28 DAYS ‘TIL LISBON

CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus was visiting the Inside the NFL production team one day when he subtly broke some news. “In passing, he said to me, ‘We’re in the mix for the Champions League,’” remembers Pete Radovich, senior creative director for the network. “I said, ‘Don’t f- with me, Sean. For real?’” 

TNT had the rights to broadcast the Champions League in the United States in 2020 but exited their contract early, citing the pandemic. So CBS took over a year earlier than planned, when Europe’s highest-level football competition resumed in a special format in Lisbon, Portugal at the end of the summer. The way things shook out, the production team had 28 days to put a show together.

Things were closed up Stateside, but Radovich says he made some calls and found out they could do a studio show in London. That meant recruiting from the pool of local talent.

“We were meeting some of the greats of the sport on Zoom, day after day,” says Radovich, senior creative director at CBS Sports. “I had to go to London quickly, because I needed to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel room.” They soon settled on a strategy of recruiting talent that worked weekends covering the Premier League but had an opening on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to do American TV. 

“We were getting deals done in, like, three days,” he says. “Usually, it takes three weeks, three months.” The first recruit was host Kate Abdo, and you can get the full story on that in GQ this week.

But how did the rest of the crew come together?

JAMIE CARRAGHER: TONE DOWN THE SCOUSE!

“The only debate was whether or not the American public could understand him,” Radovich said of Jamie Carragher, the local lad who wore the red shirt of Liverpool for a decade and a half before he became a broadcaster. “So, the first question on Zoom was, “Can you dial back your Scouse?”

Carragher laughed and said he’d already done Danish TV (in English), where he’d had to dial his accent back. It wouldn’t be a problem. But Radovich and the two executives on the call, Jeff Gerttula and Ben Stauber, still weren’t quite convinced.

“I said, I'm going to find a clip of him,” Radovich remembers. “We'll show it to our wives tonight, and we'll ask our three wives, ‘Do you understand this man?’ And he won on a vote of 2 to 1.” 

Thus did one of Britain’s foremost football pundits secure a job on American TV.

“What Sky gives me and what CBS give me are almost completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of punditry,” Jamie Carragher said from an armchair in a makeshift living room under a tent. It was the green room for a special live broadcast of Champions League Today from Watson Island in Miami, Florida. A chunk of the city skyline served as the background of the set, while off to the right was backstage. “I love honing in on small details, analytical stuff that you get with Sky,” he added. “With CBS, it's more off-the-cuff, probably not as rehearsed. We just go with the flow, because we've got a relationship with each other. We can just bounce off each other.”

Carragher’s role alongside Gary Neville on Sky’s Monday Night Football has been massive in the football mediascape for years, but he says this gig with CBS has changed things for him. They still talk tactics here, but he gets to goof off a bit and mostly get a break from the highly serious debates. 

“I don’t think you could do this show in England,” he says. “The rivalries between football supporters are so tribal. It’s probably less so in America. And it’s the Champions League—not everybody’s team is involved. So we can be a little bit more lighthearted. But people actually see me with a smile on my face now.”

Radovich says Carragher is well aware of how he got the job, and whom he has to thank for this additional paycheck. “We joke about that all the time,” the producer adds. “He says that when he meets the wives—the two wives—he's going to buy them dinner.”

MICAH RICHARDS “WAS A QUICK NO”

“I mean, Miami, this is all me, baby,” Micah Richards said when I suggested Destination Miami was the kind of event he’d plan. He had on a straw panama hat and a cream blazer over a white shirt buttoned liberally, sitting on a couch in the tented living room next to Kate Abdo and Thierry Henry. Behind us, Clint Dempsey and Charlie Davies were tossing a football around that would eventually be a prop for a bit between Richards and Tyreek Hill of the Miami Dolphins.

“I wouldn’t rather work with anyone else,” Richards says of his couchmates, prompting an, “Aww,” from Abdo. After a beat, Richards added: “—apart from my people at Sky, the BBC, A League of Their Own, [some] podcasts…”

When the CBS team was putting the show together over those manic 28 days, looking for talent, they came across Micah Richards’s tape. It was clips of his early television career on the BBC. “He fit the bill, because he was a defensive player who’d just retired, had a good name, hadn't been really overexposed to television,” Radovich says. “So we're taking a look. And it was just so, frankly, boring.”

It’s not something you’d expect to hear about Richards, the volcano of personality on-set. “He was just very robotic and very predictable,” Radovich continues, “buttoned up and not confident and not there yet. It was a quick no, and that was that.”

But it all changed just a few days later, when Radovich went deeper into the research and realized it was where Richards was, not who he was. “I stumbled on a podcast. I think it was Peter Crouch's podcast, and Micah was a guest. And I was just—jaw dropped. [He was] telling Mario Balotelli stories, cracking up, laughing, the whole thing. It was like a different person.

“So I called Ben back and was like, ‘Remember Micah Richards? We want to talk to him.”

And when they got on Zoom shortly thereafter, Radovich cut right to the chase: “I've seen you on the BBC. I've seen you on podcasts. We want the podcast Micah Richards. Can you do that on TV?

“And it was typical Micah,” Radovich says, popping into Richards’s boisterous, gleeful northern British delivery. “‘Pete, of course! They won’t let me do that on TV.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, we will.’ And that was it. If I don’t see that podcast clip of Micah, there’s no chance he’s here today.”

“Broadcasting has given me a new lease on life, it really has,” Richards says. He enjoyed a meteoric rise to his footballing career, the youngest defender to be capped for England at just 19. “I couldn't really go out in Manchester,” he says, remembering the crowds, but “it nosedived so quickly.” When his career was cut short at 31 because his knees wouldn’t allow him to play at his level, he just wanted to get away from the game. “I was lost in what I wanted to do. I really was lost.”

Now he’s found, with thick skin from the journey. “I've won the Premier League, I won the FA Cup, but I've also been relegated. I've also been shouted abuse at by fans—that I'm not good enough.” He can take a few jokes from Abdo and Carragher, in other words, and provide the laugh track with his booming chuckle.

“You can’t replace somebody like that,” Radovich says. “If he hears me say that now, I’m in trouble. He's going to ask for a long-term contract. [But] he's just such a human talent.”

THIERRY HENRY: SOME PEOPLE KNOW ME AS THE GUY FROM THAT SHOW!

“For me, I think it’s the best show I’ve been on by some distance,” Thierry Henry says from the couch next to Richards and Abdo, occasionally shifting forward to make a point. His double-breasted blazer tops a white turtleneck. “They give us the floor within the structure of what we need to do. We can be ourselves. There is a difference between fitting in—which is what I thought I was doing in some of the shows that I did before—and here I belong.”

“He’s like a poet, innt’he?” Richards says.

“Fitting in—you do what people want you to do in order to be where you are,” Henry continues. “We have rules, but to be able to express yourself on TV, it’s valuable. There is great energy. We can laugh, we can talk about war, we can talk about anything. At times it’s a bit edgy, also. That’s how a family is.”

Henry’s chair on the panel was initially occupied by Roberto Martinez, who left in 2021. When Abdo ran into Henry at an event and he told her he liked the show, it was a quick phone call and another deal swiftly signed. Now he’s in the crew.

“We’ve got a license from Pete over there to do what we want,” Richards adds, gesturing across the tent.

“Not to wear that hat,” Radovich replied.

Richards asks how the show is perceived by Americans. Like everybody else in the U.K., he and Carragher and Henry only see the CBS Sports Golazo social programming, where game tape is geo-blocked to respect local broadcast rights.

“You guys might see a great [tactics] piece that Thierry’s done, but it's not really going out in the U.K. as well,” Richards says. “So a lot of people come to us and say, ‘Oh, you lot just laugh and joke.’ Which we do, but we can do more than that as well.” 

For tactical insights, they’ve started to do more physical demonstrations around the studio set—including in Miami, where Henry showed how to post up a defender with Richards playing the part. 

“It’s different for me, because I see the game as a coach,” says Henry, who manages the French U-21s. “If you're the coach for Under-21s, you don't have scouts to watch games for you,” he says, so he watches nine or 10 matches every week to keep up with all his young national-teamers. And then there’s his prep for TV work. It’s a lot of football to keep track of, including the many simultaneous matches they all have to digest on Champions League nights.

But the core of the show is the interchange between the wildly different personalities on set. Later, I asked Richards what position each of the crew would play, offering that Abdo might be the Xavi, keeping the whole team ticking. His response served up quite the role reversal. “Thierry is the center half, the captain, leading by example,” he said. “Jamie’s midfield—attacking midfield, but he can do both.” And Richards, in his own estimation, is the striker: “I’m the one where people are waiting for me to do something—to do an overhead kick.”

“Knowing what we had in our group, personality-wise, the last thing I was going to do was tell them, you have 15 seconds, you have 15 seconds, and stay on script,” Radovich says. “We could have done that, and that's very safe. By and large, sports studio shows are very safe. There's no fun in that. I get bored very easily. So I wanted us to be authentic, I wanted us to be natural. I wanted us to just have a voice. 

“As predictable and structured as American sports television can be, English sports television is even worse. So those guys, coming out of that system into one where if you want to say something, say it,” Radovich says, “They felt like it was just a blessing for them. It was a get-out-of-jail moment for them. Jamie Carragher—you tell a guy from Liverpool that's got a wicked personality and a wicked sense of humor that he can be himself? Be careful what you wish for sometimes, but they really embraced it.”

“We didn't have a bunch of time to sit down and rehearse,” Abdo says, “So it all became very organic, very quickly.” Richards adds that they started this show from scratch, so it was never a question of fitting into a mold. They spend a lot of time together, so “you know what boundaries you can push and what you can get away with,” Carragher says. “Things that you say to each other. I know there’s things I can say to Micah that I can’t say to Thierry. I don't think there's many boundaries with me, Micah or Kate. I think with Thierry, maybe a little bit more, because he’s Thierry Henry.”

And balance is important, too. “Tonight, if Manchester United get knocked out, that's something that is to be looked at seriously,” Carragher says. “Me and Micah’ll probably laugh, because he’s Man City and I’m Liverpool. But in terms of analyzing it, I think that’s a time for serious chat.”

“It’s exactly like how you’d be in a room at home,” Henry says, “except without the swearing.”

At one point, it’s cacophony in the tent, as the social team shoots a video where members of staff try to match a piece of juggling skill Henry demonstrated. It would yield a post with 8.7 million views. It’s a reminder of how transformational this show has been for everybody involved. 

“They call me Big Meeks now!” Richards booms when I ask what that’s meant for him. “I wasn’t Big Meeks two or three years ago. CBS has changed my life, man. I’m not gonna lie.” 

That even goes for Thierry Henry, who scored 229 goals at the top level of club football across England, Spain, Italy, and France and won the World Cup in 1998.

“My career wasn’t shite, but I get as many compliments now [for this show] than for what I did on the field,” he says. “Sometimes people come up and say, ‘Thierry, can I take a picture?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ expecting, ‘I love Arsenal, Barcelona, the national team.’ And it’s, ‘Oh, I love your show on CBS.’”⚽︎

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This story was originally published in December 2023.

The MLS season kicks off this evening when Inter Miami hosts Real Salt Lake at the DRV PNK Stadium, and only silverware will suffice in 2024 for a Vice City squad featuring Lionel Messi, Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, and Luis Suárez. The ex-Barcelona quartet have won just about everything together except—yes—the MLS Cup. They’ve faced more fearsome Reals than this one, to be sure, and the opening match is really a prelude to the avalanche of fixtures this weekend that will signal the North American season has rumbled into life.

On Saturday night, Messi and Miami are in action again as they head out to Dignity Health Sports Park to take on the Los Angeles Galaxy and a onetime teammate from back in Catalunya. Riqui Puig joined Barcelona’s famed La Masia academy in 2013 and traced the path to the first team that Messi, Busquets, and many more traveled before him. But after nearly 60 appearances in the famous blue-and-red kit, Barça head coach Xavi—also a La Masia graduate—informed Puig in May 2022 that he was not part of his plans for the following season.

That August, a 22-year-old Puig sealed a move to Los Angeles to become a midfield lynchpin for the club that David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimović once called home. A decent first season was followed by a poor showing from the Galaxy in 2023, but the club are hoping for a fresh start this term and so is Puig. He’s taken the #10 shirt for this season and will pull it on for a first competitive match when his old Blaugrana teammates come to town wearing Miami pink.

I caught up with Puig earlier this month at Galaxy HQ to discuss that prospect and more in the interview below edited for length and clarity.

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La Masia—the culture there is legendary. Was there a moment where you realized what you were a part of? You arrived there when Xavi and Iniesta were doing their thing.

It’s true. Xavi, Iniesta, Messi—I think I grew up with the best Barcelona in history. When people here ask about La Masia and what type of feeling it was to play in that team, I always say I was lucky.

Around your age, a little younger, you had Pedri, Gavi, all these guys. There’s such a culture of attacking midfielders and that really technical game. What is it there [at La Masia] that they produce so many players—what is the magic sauce?

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