world tour soccer challenge edition

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World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition

Game description.

World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition (known as World Tour Soccer in the United States) is an association football video game, part of the This Is Football series, created by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe London Studio and released in 2005. World Tour Soccer sold over half a million copies in PAL territories. A sequel was developed by SCEE and released as World Tour Soccer 06 in 2006.

Download World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition

We might have the game available for more than one platform. World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition is currently available on these platforms:

PlayStation Portable (2005)

World_Tour_Soccer_Challenge_Edition_PSP_ISO_EN.zip (159.6MB)

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World tour soccer: challenge edition screenshots.

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World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition

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World Tour Soccer Challenge Edition is a PSP game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment London Studio. It was published by Sony in North America and Europe.

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World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition Review

Although far from perfect, World Tour Soccer is still worth a shot if you’re hungry for PSP footy thrills.

The crisp graphics and opportunity to play as classic teams such as 1966 England will be enough to convince most fans to squander 30 quid, but devotees of console kickabouts such as Konami’s International Superstar Soccer may feel frustrated by the players’ shallow selection of moves and robotic movement around the pitch.

The intelligence of your computer-controlled teammates also leaves a lot to be desired – occasionally they’ll just stand and stare at the crowd when the ball rolls to their feet – but WTS still has an old-school charm that will keep most gamers happy until FIFA 2006 shoots for PSP glory in November.

World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition

• PlayStation Portable

World Tour Soccer Challenge Edition is a PSP game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment London Studio. It was published by Sony in North America and Europe.

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World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition

World Tour Soccer Challenge Edition is a PSP game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment London Studio. It was published by Sony in North America and Europe.

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World Tour Soccer : Challenge Edition

World Tour Soccer: Challenge Edition offers you the chance to prove you've got the skills to match the world's best. Choose from over 200 club and international teams each with fully licensed player names and likenesses, and attempt to take them to cup glory. The better you get, the more chance you have of unlocking new club sides, special teams, extra stadia and cup competitions by achieving success in various game modes.

The photo displayed is purely for illustrative purposes, a UMD ONLY game will arrive either in the original casing or one of our personalised UMDs.

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World Tour Soccer

Featuring Tim Howard in a nappy, oddly.

Order yours now from Simply Games.

Historically, the football isn't meant to wind up in your hands. Unless of course you're Tiago defending a forty-yard cross-field pass at Anfield. The same is true of handheld football games. There just aren't very many good ones. A quick straw poll of the footy fans here couldn't even come up with one convincing candidate. My old flatmate Rich used to have a soft spot for a couple of Game Boy football games, but I honestly can't remember what they were, so they clearly weren't that good.

But, as we've already noted a couple of times recently, the PlayStation Portable is starting to give us "3D games done properly on a handheld", so it was inevitable that sooner or later we'd see a handheld football game to end the drought once and for all. What's slightly surprising is that we seem to have found one sooner rather than later.

Okay, realistically we may have to wait a bit longer for the "once and for all" part to come true, but World Tour Soccer - developed by the folks behind Sony's increasingly capable This Is Football series - kicks off proceedings with the sort of flair that Jose Reyes demonstrated during the first 50 seconds of Arsenal's game against Spurs last Monday. In other words, it races up the pitch, rounds the keeper, and seven times out of ten you'd back it to score with its weaker foot. That it actually hits the side netting in some cases isn't enough to stop your heart pounding. World Tour Soccer isn't a Pro Evolution Soccer-style simulation, which is usually enough to put me off, but it certainly gets the spectacle right.

The key to its success is that it knows it's an arcade football game and makes the most of it. The ball physics and control precision can't compete with PES (though FIFA, despite its heightened realism, isn't exactly miles ahead) and players don't manoeuvre as convincingly, but what it lacks there it makes up for with accessibility, sensible balance, canny reward structure, and some very strong animation.

Indeed, graphically it's not that far shy of Sony's most recent PS2 offering. There are some lovely dig-the-ball-out-from-between-the-legs passes, dainty toe pokes and convincing slide-tackles. It looks like the feet are kicking the ball properly - an illusion aided, presumably, by the smaller scale, but a convincing one nonetheless. It doesn't always look convincing in terms of backswing and animation blending, mind, but in the final third it manages classier strikes than PES or FIFA generally offer. The scissor kick is an obvious favourite, but in general the body shapes on shots are particularly satisfying; watching the ball sweep across the box and Robert Pires line it up and get his head over it to half-volley into the bottom corner is emphatic, and flowing moves that end in a goal look really nice. Speaking of Pires, he could pay attention to the way players shape up to side-foot the ball in WTS, then perhaps he'd score against Chelsea instead of screwing it wide.

It's pretty flashy and responsive throughout. There's little of the lag in the menus (which you can even re-skin) that we've seen people complain about in FIFA's PSP offering, even with the requisite "boys' indie rock soundtrack" buzzing over the top, and although load times can be a little testing, they're generally only that way the first time. Restarting the same match several times in succession in Challenge mode is almost instantaneous.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. You want to know more about how the football works. Well... On the surface the controls are quite similar to Pro Evolution, and it's easy to pick up in that sense, with functions sensibly laid out across the face and shoulder buttons, and double-tap shots (like the aforementioned scissor kicks) easy to perform once you've moved into the right position.

There's depth here too. There are several different skill moves and shimmies (as well as the 'deliberate dive' function we always found entertaining, even if it is hard to use effectively) and all manner of one-twos and set-play options. For example, you can choose to drive a ball into the area from a corner by filling up a power bar, or you can tap the left shoulder button to be given a choice of zones to play the ball into. And when you lose possession, you can chase back yourself or hold the left shoulder button to have one of your computer-controlled team-mates move in to tackle the player with the ball.

Movement is a bit squirrelly compared to PES or FIFA, as you'd expect from a TIF-derived title, and turnover is a lot less frequent than it is in PES because the ball seems to be stuck to feet rather than fully simulated - at least to a certain extent. That takes a bit of getting used to. However the general dynamic is quite rewarding. Passing moves are fluid and impressive, and as you learn to eke more out of the offensive side of the game you can string together some lovely moves culminating in great strikes. There are also some quite effective pre-set strategies to work through.

Less work seems to have gone into the defensive side of the game, but this is forgivable in most circumstances, and certainly adds an edge to finely poised encounters between two similarly skilled players, or the player and computer-controlled teams on higher skill settings, as a striker weaves his way toward the box and tackles start flying in. World Tour Soccer can certainly be a game of high scores.

And, moving on to the way it keeps you playing it, at times it's certainly a high scores game. It knows that it's an arcade game, and there are carefully layered rewards sprinkled throughout that tumble into your lap as you achieve certain feats - in a similar way to the bonuses you unlock by getting a hole-in-one or hitting every green in the regulation number of strokes in a Tiger Woods golf game. Score a hat trick, or keep three consecutive clean sheets, or something along those lines, and you can unlock classic teams and other trinkets. As you crack through the game's various cups and tournaments, you collect tokens which can be spent unlocking better teams.

Probably the game's finest achievement in this regard is Challenge mode, which is about playing as fluidly and spectacularly as possible against increasing tough teams in order to earn points. You gain small totals for passes, slightly bigger ones for tricks and clever moves, and obviously a lot more for goals. These points translate into (well, yes, prizes, but wait for it) medals. You get bonuses for things like avoiding yellow cards, and although the first few challenges are pretty easy the latter ones require a much greater mastery of the game.

The only pity is that there aren't more of them; this is an idea we'd like to see explored to a much greater degree than it is here. It's fun while it lasts though, and keeps you coming back again and again. Hence all the restarting; the same sort of "nope, screwed up the first section, must restart" mentality that's kept the Start button in work as I've ploughed hours into everything from SSX to Mercury over the years.

Admittedly over time there are things you'll find irritating in WTS. The way the ball sometimes bounces oddly or the computer-controlled players behave oddly, the occasional-lottery of shooting, and the repetition of the commentary, for example. And yes, it is a bit silly when the ball comes loose in the six-yard box and the goalkeeper leaps over it, knocking over the incoming striker and leaving the ball to gently trickle over the line, or when you get knocked over, everyone stops, and you get up, dust yourself off and pick up the ball and start moving again.

But there are usually upsides, or there's enough going on elsewhere to compensate. World Tour Soccer may not be a fantastic football game, and shouldn't end up being the PSP's best, but it's the best it has at the moment, and there are moments when it comes close to being fantastically fun and compelling. It gets enough right. It doesn't have all the official tournament licensing, for example, but it has all the player names down right - and its fixture listings, even as tournaments advance, are spookily consistent with recent events like World Cup 2002.

The player likenesses, too, are convincing enough. They're not distinctive in terms of the way they play as they are in PES, but then that's the whole thing about World Tour Soccer, really: it's not really simulating foot ball ; it's emulating football spectacle, and with the addition of Challenge mode and a clever reward structure on top of an accessible and plainly enjoyable arcade experience it does that effectively enough to be a worthy purchase for footy lovers who want to, as the yanks would have it, punch a hole in the score bag. So then. Jose Reyes hits the side netting out of ten. Breathe.

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World Tour Soccer

• Screenshots

• Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.
• SCEE Studio London
• #185 on PSP

Description

World Tour Soccer was one of the first licensed soccer games, alongside FIFA Soccer , to be released on the PSP. Players can choose from 128 different clubs as well as 86 international teams, nine classic clubs and international teams, seven former all-star league teams as well as six international superstar teams. It has most of the major players at the time, with lesser know ones having more of a generic look.

The game features a season mode, exhibition, quick start, cups and challenge modes as well as multiplayer capability for friends to compete head-to-head using the Ad Hoc. It has four different languages to choose from: English, French, Italian and Spanish and has detailed animations, weather effects and eight different stadiums to compete in.

• This is Football / World Tour Soccer series

Credits (PSP version)

119 People (114 developers, 5 thanks) · View all

Average score: 72% (based on 35 ratings)

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 4 ratings with 0 reviews)

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• MobyGames ID: 35043

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Big John WV .

Additional contributors: Starbuck the Third .

Game added August 25, 2008. Last modified February 22, 2023.

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Taylor Swift Reveals ‘The Tortured Poets Department’s First Single & Drops Fan Challenge

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We’re no longer a fortnight away from the release of The Tortured Poets Department , which means it’s the perfect time for Taylor Swift to confirm the set’s lead single. The pop superstar revealed Thursday (April 18) on Instagram that the Post Malone -assisted “Fortnight” will serve as the lead single from her forthcoming album.

“The first single from The Tortured Poets Department is…………. Fortnight featuring [Post Malone],” Swift wrote in the caption of a post that appears to be the single’s cover art. “I’ve been such a huge fan of Post because of the writer he is, his musical experimentation and those melodies he creates that just stick in your head forever. I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight.”

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In the photo, which follows the same grayscale aesthetic as the rest of the Tortured Poets Department promotional images, Swift poses with her cheek resting on a closed fist, while Posty gazes into the camera with hands clasped.

“Fortnight” is one of two collaborations on The Tortured Poets Department . Grammy-nominated alt-rock act Florence + the Machine appears on the album’s eighth track, “Florida!!!” The new single also marks the first collaboration between Swift and Malone. No stranger to collaborating with pop’s biggest icons, Malone recently appeared on “Levii’s Jeans” — which debuted and peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 — from Beyoncé ‘s Billboard 200 -topping Cowboy Carter LP.

At the end of her caption, Swift also revealed that she “honestly can’t wait” for the world to see the official music video for “Fortnight” on Friday, April 19, at 8 p.m. ET. Swift also shared the post to her Instagram Story, attaching a link that directs fans to her official webstore , where they can purchase an exclusive “Fortnight” CD single until April 18 at 8 p.m. ET, while supplies last.

On the same site page, Swift also embedded a new YouTube Short announcing a mysterious “For a Fortnight Challenge,” which has left fans both excited and perplexed. “I really need to know what the challenge is,” wrote one user. “I can’t take the suspense any more. Consider this poet well & truly tortured!”

The Tortured Poets Department arrives on all digital streaming platforms at midnight (April 19).

Check out Taylor’s lead single and challenge announcements below.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

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As schedule anxiety grows in the NWSL, NJ/NY Gotham FC begin to fill in women's soccer high-performance gap

Gotham are one of a few nwsl clubs expected to have a lengthy and unprecedented season.

The day before the San Diego Wave opened their 2024 season with a win over NJ/NY Gotham FC in the NWSL Challenge Cup, Alex Morgan and Jaedyn Shaw fielded a seemingly innocuous question: What would it take for their team to improve upon last season's finish, when they won the NWSL Shield and made it to the semifinals of the playoffs?

Morgan said it would require a further embrace of the club's ethos since a winning culture has essentially been in place since the team's first game in 2022. Shaw agreed but had an additional comment. 

"That, and staying healthy," she told CBS Sports. "We all gotta stay healthy."

Shaw, and players like her, are not just worried that her team's ambitions will be derailed by the bad luck of injuries, in large part because a spell on the sidelines no longer feels like it's up to chance. Women's soccer players have started to notice the increasing demands as the game rapidly evolves, chiefly through the addition of new competitions, raising concerns that their teams -- and the sport as a whole -- are not structured properly for them to successfully bear the load.

Look no further than the schedule Gotham are poised to face in 2024. In addition to the 26 regular season games on the schedule, they took part in the Challenge Cup and could face three additional matches in the playoffs should they make a second successive run to the NWSL Championship. They could also play anywhere from three to five games in the first edition of the NWSL x Liga MX Femenil Summer Cup and another five to seven games in the inaugural Concacaf W Champions Cup, to which they are expected to be invited as the reigning NWSL champions.

The possibility of a 42-game load, coupled with the plethora of games players will play for their national teams during an Olympics year, is a sizable increase from the 31 Gotham played last season. The increased load is a stark reminder of the inequities of women's sports, to the point that athletes like Morgan have spotlighted disparities in medical resources and travel arrangements to high-ranking people like Douglas Emhoff, the Second Gentlemen of the United States . It's also why Gotham's biggest project this offseason was not actually their stunning free agency sweep in which they landed four U.S. women's national team players , but rather an attempt to ramp up the standards at the club.

"We have put a tremendous amount of work in the offseason to make sure we have the correct systems and processes in place and support to make sure these players are their very best," general manager Yael Averbuch West said at a press conference in January. (Disclosure: Averbuch West is the wife of CBS Sports Golazo Network host Aaron West.) "Making sure we're understanding that, catering to that and then able to get the players back on the field as quickly as possible has been a huge focus of ours. Actually, most of the work I've been doing this offseason has been in the offices with the staff, with the medical staff, with the performance staff, the operations staff, making sure we have the correct structure set up, recovery and all the things that these athletes need to be successful."

Gotham's hiring spree

Gotham's ambitious roster building over the offseason was not matched by the hires they made coming into 2024, which covers several different categories in caring for the players. New additions to the club's staff include a high-performance director with a staff of around 10 working alongside him, a chef, a dietician, a sports psychologist, a mental skills coach, a head of player care, a head of player safety and security operations and other hospitality staff.

It has dramatically altered the day-to-day experience at Gotham from last year to this year, something Averbuch West said allows players to "just show up and not worry about much else other than performing at their best."

"We share training fields with the New York Red Bulls and around the corner from there, we opened an office and a space that we've built out into a medical area, locker room and gym for the players," as well as a film analysis room, Averbuch West told CBS Sports in a recent interview. "The day, for everyone, begins in this new space where we've set everything up so they can come in, eat breakfast, they can get their treatment there, they have their morning meeting there … After, they can take meetings from there, they can do recovery, sit in the recovery booth, get additional treatment, meet with the coaches."

It is not all that different from the setup at a top-tier men's soccer club, but the reason Gotham needed to make such a transformation is because this structure is fairly new to the women's game, which has historically been underfunded.

"I think a lot of it is more just the amount of time that the two leagues have been around," Julian Haigh, Gotham's new high-performance director, told CBS Sports. " Take MLS as an example, I think they still have a long way to go as well but in terms of, they've had the resources for a lot longer, and like I say, these things just take time to build and to improve."

Haigh joined Gotham in October after a stint with MLS' Inter Miami but has been in and around the NWSL for the better part of a decade. He has had a front-row seat to the NWSL's quick progression in terms of resources available to players to ensure they are at peak fitness.

"Historically in the NWSL," he said, "it was the classic one-person band. You had one person that would sort of do everything -- the GPS, the strength and conditioning, the return to play [plans] whereas now you'll see more and more across the league, in every club, in every department that there's now multiple people."

Haigh credited a high level of investment that's being poured into different areas of the women's game, particularly in player fitness, and applauded Gotham's commitment to doing the same.

"Before I joined last year, I certainly had my fair share of questions given Sky Blue's history," he said about the club under its old name when it had a reputation for poor conditions , including no showers at their home stadiums and one-time forcing players to bring their own water to training. "I can't speak highly enough about Yael and the staff here and about their dedication to doing things properly and doing things the right way … Winning is expensive and to do this right is going to take time, effort, money. It doesn't just happen overnight and they've met every single challenge full on and I've been so impressed by it all."

Averbuch West attributed the league-wide updates to the NWSL's unique ownership model. Most of the league's teams are not under the umbrella of an MLS club, Gotham included, which poses its own challenges but also allows the NWSL clubs to build structures that suit their specific needs -- and avoids needing to share with a potentially unwilling partner. The general manager cited the Kansas City Current as a team leading the way in the NWSL after opening an $18 million facility in 2022, the first specifically designed for a team in the league.

"The original model for NWSL, I think when it first started, is that most teams are following the paths of men's teams and sharing with men's facilities and that's great because the infrastructure's already there," she said. "I think there is a new vision for how teams can succeed independently of that and to have your own spaces, your own facilities, your own brand, all of it in-house just for a women's club."

Challenges persist

The increased resources are not just needed to reduce soccer's inequities, but because a worrying trend is emerging in the women's game. According to a report published in December by FIFPRO , the union representing all soccer players, more matches, less rest and longer travel led to an increase in ACL tears for women's soccer players. It has led several vocal figures in the game to criticize the load on players, including Gotham head coach Juan Carlos Amoros. He spent much of the last few months criticizing the timing of the Concacaf W Gold Cup , which took place weeks before the NWSL season started and also expressed his disdain after Midge Purce tore her ACL in their regular season opener at the Portland Thorns last month.

Women's soccer is currently caught in a balancing act amidst the rise in investment and attention. While adding more matches to the calendar would help meet increased demand and help to professionalize the women's game in a way that resembles its men's counterpart, those changes might be happening too fast.

"We, as players, understand people want to see us play. If fans can have a chance to watch us play more than the [26] games that are scheduled," Gotham's Crystal Dunn said last month. "I think players also want to be protected … I am always going to be on the side of supporting the players and making sure it is done in such and protected way where people can walk out of that moment and still be able to have enough in the tank to give to the season when it starts back up."

For Haigh and the staff around him, the job is to mitigate as much risk as possible. He argues the increased demand on players is an opportunity to push women's soccer in the right direction as it pertains to player care.

"We have our entire season planned, from start to finish and as we receive more information about these games, we put them in and say, 'How does this change our rhythm?,'" he said. "For us, this is just part of the job …  I certainly don't look at it as a negative. I think it's an exciting opportunity to really keep pushing standards and keep pushing the level of the professionalism of the league."

One particular sticking point continues to be travel arrangements. Dunn brutally acknowledged that "the reality is, we're not flying on private jets. We're literally flying commercial," a commonality in women's sports but not in men's sports. Gotham are working on solutions to those problems, including extensive plans about player travel for club and country.

"We have a whole document to our internationals where we look at flight times, airports, number of changes, number of time zone changes," he said. "All of these pieces are then factored into the players recovery plans. We have travel kits prepared for those that are traveling back and forth from Europe or over multiple time zones to help them with jet lag."

Averbuch West added that the NWSL has several avenues for people around the league to discuss issues around player fitness as they try to strike the balancing act.

"The league has been very open to conversation," she said. "We connect frequently with the [NWSL] sporting director [Tatjana Haenni] and we have these calls -- I'm on a technical task force and we have calls with the team GMs. I know the head coaches have calls, business staff have calls so there are a lot of calls and forums for conversations like this where the league presents, we can ask questions. There's definitely a good avenue and a lot of conversations at this point."

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On Soccer With Rory Smith

Is soccer’s model club actually … real madrid.

The club is strutting into a future different from the one envisioned by its president, Florentino Pérez. But its prospects are as bright as ever.

By Rory Smith

Florentino Pérez had a contented smile on his face, and with good reason. He had just watched Spain and Brazil share a thrilling, freewheeling draw at the stadium he has expensively, lavishly, reappointed. Now, Pérez, Real Madrid’s all-powerful president, found himself in a whitewashed tunnel, presented — completely by chance, obviously — with his favorite kind of photo opportunity.

To one side stood Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid’s standard-bearer and main event, dutifully introducing the man who pays his wages to his Brazil teammates. A little further along the corridor, hurrying to pay obeisance, was Rodrygo, another of Pérez’s employees.

But Pérez’s focus was on Endrick, the 17-year-old star-in-waiting who will complete his long-awaited move to the Santiago Bernabéu this summer. To say the two of them shared a conversation would be pushing it: In footage of their brief meeting , Endrick does not appear to speak. After a handshake, Pérez utters only one line, but it is perfect. “We’re waiting for you here,” he said.

Real Madrid has had Endrick lined up for some time: The club announced that it had reached an agreement to sign him from Palmeiras three days before the final of the 2022 World Cup. He would, as FIFA’s rules dictate, remain in Brazil, with the club that has sculpted him into the most coveted prospect in world soccer, until he turns 18 this July.

That kind of long-term planning feels just a little out of step with Real Madrid’s traditional modus operandi. The club identifies, correctly, as a titan, and — under Pérez’s stewardship, in particular — it has taken great pride in living the values associated with the classical definition of that term: impetuous, impulsive, irascible.

It fires coaches for failing to win the Champions League , signs players on the back of a stellar World Cup and airs a regular feature on its in-house television channel that has been interpreted as a pre-emptive attempt to influence and/or intimidate referees. Real Madrid has always been the sort of place that eats its own sons .

All of that remains hard-wired into the club’s fibers. In the past three years, Pérez has not only helped to concoct a Super League that was intended to reshape world soccer more to his liking, but defended it on a gaudy late-night talk show — a little like going on “Judge Judy” to announce the abolition of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — and then continued to promote it even after it was savaged by, well, just about everyone else.

But there is little question that there is something different about the current incarnation of Real Madrid. The club has always regarded itself as being the biggest, most powerful, most glamorous, most famous team not just in soccer, but in sports as a whole. Now, it is possible to make the case that it should be regarded as the best run, too.

Its mildly absurd record in the Champions League bears that out. In the last decade, it has won the tournament the club cherishes most five times. Should Carlo Ancelotti’s team fall to Manchester City over the next two weeks, it would mark only the third time since 2010 that Real Madrid has not reached at least the semifinals of Europe’s showpiece competition.

A better gauge, though, is what will happen this summer. As well as Endrick, already anointed as the finest player of soccer’s new generation, Real Madrid is expected (at last) to sign Kylian Mbappé, the standout of the current one. They should be joined, too, by Alphonso Davies, the Bayern Munich and Canada left back.

All three deals showcase how adroitly Real Madrid now navigates the transfer market. Endrick is another special from Juni Calafat, the club’s recruitment chief, who has long been tasked with bringing the brightest prospects from around the world — and from South America in particular — to Madrid.

Mbappé has been a case study in patience, with Real Madrid by turns seducing the player and biding its time, slowly and carefully positioning itself as his only realistic route out of Paris St.-Germain, waiting until the economic conditions were right to sign a player currently employed by a club that is in effect an arm of a nation state.

Davies, too, is a masterpiece of patience: Real Madrid will present Bayern Munich with the choice of losing him for a fee this summer, or for nothing when his contract expires in 2025. Bayern will resent it, of course. But it is familiar enough with that sort of strong-arm method that it might, privately, applaud just a little, too.

It would not be the first club to admire — however begrudgingly — how well Real Madrid has adapted to a financial landscape that, as the Super League project demonstrated, seemed to have shifted against Europe’s old aristocrats.

Real Madrid does not have the money, for example, to bully Premier League teams into selling players, and so instead it signed Antonio Rüdiger from Chelsea on a free transfer. It retains an impressively productive academy — according to the analysis firm CIES, 97 of its graduates are playing professionally in Europe — but has also moved quickly to gobble up players like Eduardo Camavinga, Jude Bellingham and Aurelién Tchouaméni before they fall into English clutches.

The result is a club that, almost alone among the grand old teams of the continent, can look to the future with relish. Barcelona has mortgaged many tomorrows to pay for the sins of yesterday. Bayern Munich is about to hire its fourth coach in three years. Juventus is still reeling from the mass resignation of its board in 2022 amid allegations of fraudulent accounting.

Real Madrid, on the other hand, should next season be able to name a midfield of Camavinga, Tchouaméni and Bellingham, and a forward line of Rodrygo, Vinícius and Endrick. Quite where Federico Valverde fits in is anyone’s guess. It certainly does not feel like the club’s destiny rests on whatever Mbappé decides to do.

It may, in many ways, remain an old-fashioned club, run as a personal fief by an omnipotent president. It does not pretend to be as data-driven, as avowedly modern, as Manchester City or Liverpool or Brighton, and it most definitely does not, at any point, feel any need whatsoever to tell anyone how clever it is.

But it is difficult to escape the impression that of all the game’s traditional elite, Real Madrid is now the one that needs a Super League the least. It is true that this is not the reality Florentino Pérez hoped to occupy in the spring of 2024. He wanted it to change, irrevocably, to suit his club. The converse, though, seems to have worked just as well. He has his modern stadium. He has his cluster of stars. The world remains, as it always was, much to Real Madrid’s liking.

Emma Hayes and the Last Word

The end, for Emma Hayes, is in sight. Next weekend, her Chelsea team will take on Manchester United in the semifinal of the F.A. Cup. A few days later, it has a Champions League semifinal with Barcelona to contemplate. There are five games left in England’s Women’s Super League; if Chelsea wins them all, Hayes may depart for her new job, as coach of the United States, with a valedictory championship.

One, two or three of those trophies would be a fitting way for Hayes, the W.S.L.’s greatest-ever coach, to wave goodbye to a league she has done much to build. Over the last few weeks, though, the 47-year-old Hayes’s farewell tour has taken on a decidedly, but unexpectedly, contentious aspect.

First, she suggested that — from a coaching point of view — it might be less than ideal for teammates to be romantic partners. She quickly rowed back from those comments after it appeared they had stoked resentment both inside and outside her squad.

Then, last week, she shoved Jonas Eidevall , her Arsenal counterpart, and then accused him of exhibiting “ male aggression ” in confronting a Chelsea player during the Blues’ defeat in the Women’s League Cup final. There, a retraction — or even a clarification — seems less forthcoming, something that may be explained by the fact that Hayes is not the first coach to find Eidevall’s touchline demeanor a little abrasive.

Hayes is habitually frank. She is eloquent and unafraid in equal measure. That is, in part, what has allowed her to develop a profile beyond women’s soccer. In these past few weeks, though, she has exhibited an openness that borders on straight-shooting. The overriding impression is that she does not want to leave England without setting a few things straight.

If We’re Taking Ideas From America

Curious to note, this week, that the idea of a luxury tax is being floated by certain Premier League teams as a more palatable alternative to all these infernal points deductions. Well, that is how it is being dressed up, anyway: What is actually happening is that some of the league’s clubs are trying to find a method, effectively, to abolish financial regulation.

This is an increasingly popular stance, because the Premier League has allowed the idea that cost controls are in some way “unfair” to fester. It is, though, a disingenuous one.

Those clubs who want to allow the market to run riot do not want to level the playing field. They want, instead, to take one unpopular elite and replace it with another. The primary difference, of course, would be that this new one includes and favors them. Nobody is thinking in the slightest about collective fairness.

Still, the idea is out there, so let’s debunk it. A luxury tax has benefits in American sports. It would not work in England, partly because there is no salary cap, and partly because some of the teams are owned by nation states, making the idea of a financial penalty pretty laughable. They would pay it and go on their merry way, driving other clubs to the wall as they do.

If you want a truly “fair” Premier League, you need more financial regulation, not less. And, as discussed a little while ago, if you are to take inspiration from the U.S., the best place to start would be with a commissioner, complete with both office and powers, who can enforce those rules in real time.

Rory Smith is a global sports correspondent, based in the north of England. He also writes the “ On Soccer With Rory Smith ” newsletter. More about Rory Smith

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‘Danger to our democracy’: fears over Trump allies’ summit with far-right sheriffs

Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell and others to attend event on election fraud by Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association

A group of far-right sheriffs is set to meet Donald Trump allies in Las Vegas on Wednesday for talks with dozens of Republican state officials and candidates focused partly on potential election fraud by non-citizens, which experts say is wildly overblown.

The far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which the former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack founded in 2011 and which boasts hundreds of members nationwide, is hosting the day-long event, which it bills as a “training session”. The group is known for attacks on Covid mask mandates and gun control measures.

The Vegas confab is slated to feature talks by Mack and several conspiracy-minded Trump allies who have been major election denialists including the retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn, the MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell and the multimillionaire Patrick Byrne.

The event’s agenda and crew of Trump allies participating in it underscores how Trump’s campaign to return to the White House harbors extremist ties and beliefs, running from conspiracy theories around election fraud and the January 6 insurrection to Christian nationalism.

Mack, an ex-board member of the extremist Oath Keepers, told the Guardian that a key focus of the training session for sheriffs and others will be on the “chaos at the border” and the threat of voting fraud by non-citizens.

“Election fraud and the border go hand in hand,” said Mack. Dozens of candidates and elected officials including sheriffs from states such as Arizona and Nevada are expected to attend the gathering, Mack added.

The Brennan Center for Justice and other experts have revealed that the amount of voting by non-citizens is minuscule.

One Brennan Center study that focused on the 2016 election showed that only 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with a total of 23.5 million votes, were suspected to involve non-citizens voting, or 30 incidents in total.

Likewise, the former federal judge John Jones said the suggestion that non-citizens are fueling voting fraud “seems to be an outrageous reach”. In his 19 years as a judge, Jones said, “I sentenced hundreds of people for illegal entry to the US and not one for illegal voting.”

Besides raising the specter of illegal immigrant voting, Mack made the sweeping claim that “sheriffs have the right and the responsibility to take action when they see other government corruption,” adding that the “proof of corruption with our elections is irrefutable”.

Mack indicated these themes are likely to be part of the keynote address he will deliver at the Vegas meeting.

Similarly, Mack’s group has taught that elected sheriffs ought to “protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government” and to refuse to enforce laws they regard as unconstitutional or “unjust”.

Some ex-sheriffs and experts voice strong concerns about the roles that Mack and his group, which boasts hundreds of members nationwide, are playing with their claims of extraordinary powers and conspiratorial rhetoric about election fraud by non-citizens.

“When you say ‘constitutional sheriff’, you’re giving yourself a moniker and status that ascends that of your ethical peer group,” said Paul Penzone, a former Maricopa county Arizona sheriff who now chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections. “Our job is to manage public safety and investigate crimes. It’s not to influence or impede the outcome of elections.”

Jones said Mack’s specter of voting fraud by non-citizens represents “an extension of the insurrectionist behavior we’ve seen, and just like the stolen election rhetoric it’s bereft of any facts, as is the contention that illegals are voting”.

“I fear this is an attempt to gin up certain segments of the electorate in anticipation of the presidential election in November,” Jones added.

The focus by Mack’s group on voting fraud by non-citizens comes as Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, held a joint press conference last Friday at Mar-a-Lago to promote a new bill that Johnson plans to introduce to ban non-citizens from voting, even though it is already illegal.

Further, the rightwing lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who runs an election integrity network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she is a senior legal fellow, has been fueling conspiracies about non-citizen voting.

According to NPR, Mitchell has circulated a two-page memo on “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”.

Mitchell also told an Illinois talk radio show this year: “I absolutely believe this is intentional, and one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country.”

Mitchell was on Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 when Trump pressed him hard to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn his defeat there.

Other Trump allies who have promoted baseless fraud claims about Trump’s 2020 loss and are scheduled to speak at the Vegas event seem to have embraced conspiratorial links between illegal immigrants and voting fraud.

Among them is Byrne, who Mack said has been a “regular” funder of his efforts for some time, and who in 2021 founded the America Project, which has been in the vanguard of promoting bogus charges of voting fraud in 2020.

Mack said Byrne’s talk in Las Vegas would focus on the “deep state”, the conspiratorial term that suggests Trump, Maga allies and others are targets of a vast plot by Democratic-allied law enforcement officers, intelligence agencies and other bureaucratic forces.

Similarly, Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, is said to have been fanning concerns about illegal voting by non-citizens while on a national tour promoting a new movie about his life, according to a person close to the Trump campaign. “I’ve heard that illegal immigrant voting has been discussed at recent Flynn events,” he said.

Flynn has for months been talking up the need for a broad “guard the vote” drive, which Trump has touted too.

On another election front that is expected to be part of the Vegas gathering, Mack echoed Lindell’s bogeyman of getting rid of electronic voting machines and replacing them with all-paper ballots that are hand-counted. Mack claimed without evidence that machines “guarantee the likelihood of cheating because they’re hackable. No one can guarantee the machines aren’t being hacked.”

The Vegas meeting is also slated to hear from the Arizona state senate candidate Mark Finchem, who lost his 2022 race to be secretary of state, which he charged was due to fraud, prompting a court to sanction him for making false claims.

Some ex-Republican House members have voiced strong worries about Mack’s mission and the Trump allies working in tandem with him to rev up fears of illegal non-citizen voting and other exaggerated claims of voting fraud

“This is a continuing effort to divide our country by Trump and his minions and to motivate and excite his base,” the ex-House Republican member Dave Trott told the Guardian. “They’re clearly trying to come up with additional arguments to challenge election results if Trump loses.”

Veteran prosecutors and election watchdogs share these fears.

“Mack and his group pose a clear and present danger in the upcoming 2024 election cycle,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at the justice department. “Mixing this false specter of voting fraud by non-citizens with private rightwing ‘vote enforcers’ will energize a toxic environment that puts all voters of color in danger, especially those in border states.”

American Oversight’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu, told the Guardian: “Nothing is more dangerous to our democracy than a movement based on election lies promoted by radical law enforcement officials who falsely believe they are the ultimate authority, including on matters of election administration.”

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