The Olympics may be a major championship for women’s teams, but they remain an afterthought for the men.
By Rory Smith
Daniel Alves has seen it all, done it all. He has won league titles in three countries, picked up nine cups, conquered Europe with his club and South America with his country. He has 41 major honors to his name, officially making him the most decorated player in history. But still, when André Jardine asked him to take on one last job, his eyes lit up.
Jardine, the manager of Brazil’s Olympic men’s soccer team, had framed his pitch smartly. There was, he told Alves, still one thing missing from his career. For all that he had achieved, he had never been to an Olympic Games, much less won a medal. “Let’s complete your résumé,” Jardine said. At 38, entering a third decade as a professional, Alves could not resist.
The appeal, for Jardine — only three years older than the player he has appointed as captain for Brazil’s campaign in Tokyo — is obvious. Men’s soccer at the Olympics is, essentially, an under-23 affair: A majority of each team’s squad in Japan can have been born no earlier than Jan. 1, 1997. But there are spaces reserved for three “overage” players.
Jardine had been considering how best to fill those spots on Brazil’s roster when it emerged that injury would rule Alves out of the Copa América. Here, he felt, was the chance to draft a figure who is “respected by all Brazilian players, a leader, a winner,” a player not only with “lots of charisma” but with a wealth of experience to help guide his younger teammates. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. If anything, it felt like a sign. “The universe wanted it this way,” Jardine said.
It is easy to understand why it struck such a chord with Alves, too. “Challenges like this really motivate me,” he said. “The Olympics are magical: You get emotional thinking about them. To represent my country, my people, in a competition as important as the Olympics is really, really incredible.”
And yet — setting aside the warming, rosy glow of the idea of Alves’s adding yet another trophy to his personal palmarès, all in the name of defending his country’s honor — his presence at the tournament does not necessarily feed into the idea that men’s soccer at the Olympics is especially important at all.
That is not to question his motives: Alves is in Tokyo to perform, and to win. His “ultimate ambition,” he has said, is to compete for Brazil in the World Cup next summer; only injury denied him a place in Tite’s squad for the Copa América this summer. This is a chance for him to stake a claim, to prove he can still cut it when surrounded by players a decade and a half his junior. He is not, by any stretch of the imagination, just along for the ride.
But the sight of Alves, one of the finest players of his generation, in a cobbled-together under-23 team serves to highlight the inescapable sense that Olympic men’s soccer is something of a novelty act, simultaneously a major international tournament and an inconvenient afterthought, an honor with no clear meaning, a trophy with an asterisk.
A glance at the other overage players joining Alves in Tokyo illustrates the issue. New Zealand has selected arguably its best player, in the burly shape of the Burnley striker Chris Wood, to give it the best chance of securing a medal. France, on the other hand, has chosen André-Pierre Gignac and Florian Thauvin, currently playing for Tigres, in Mexico, and the Montpellier midfielder Téji Savanier, none of whom might be regarded as their country’s best player.
Argentina and Romania, meanwhile, have named only one overage player each. One is a goalkeeper, and the other is a defender who does not currently have a club. Neither country has been tempted to send anyone who might count as a star. Or, rather, neither has been able to, because clubs are not mandated to release their players for the Olympics, because the Games do not feature on men’s soccer’s official, sanctioned calendar.
Despite that, Spain seems to be taking the whole thing seriously: A clutch of players fresh from the semifinals of Euro 2020 have traveled to Japan, including Pau Torres, Dani Olmo and Pedri. Germany’s 22-man delegation, on the other hand, contains not a single player knocked out of the European Championship in the round of 16.
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All of the players in Japan will, of course, regard being at an Olympics — even in Tokyo’s diminished circumstances — as a rare privilege. Those who have competed in previous Games, even established stars of Europe’s major leagues, have been awed by the atmosphere (and, to an extent, the abandon) of the athletes’ village, star-struck by their sudden proximity to the biggest names in track and field.
But exactly what success — or failure — means in a soccer sense is less obvious. It is only a few weeks since Lionel Messi was celebrating winning his first major international honor with Argentina at the Copa América. At last, Messi had ended not only his long wait to achieve something with his country, but Argentina’s restless purgatory in the international wilderness. It was, all the stories said, the nation’s first major trophy since 1993.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. Argentina won gold in the Olympics in both 2004 and 2008. Messi was part of the latter team. That neither was mentioned highlighted the stark, and perhaps unfair, truth about Olympic men’s soccer: Ultimately it does not count, not really, not properly. It exists in an uneasy, liminal sort of zone, somewhere between a youth competition and an adult one, between authentic and ersatz.
In the women’s game, of course, that is not the case. Or, at least, it has not traditionally been the case. The Olympics have at times been the most high-profile event in the women’s calendar, the grandest stage that the game could offer.
When Abby Wambach, the former U.S. striker, released a book on leadership in 2019, she was trailed on the front cover not as a World Cup winner but as a “two-time Olympic gold medalist.” To some extent, that may have been an attempt to market her work to a non-soccer-specific audience, of course, but still: The choice of honor felt significant.
The team that the United States sent for its opening game of the Olympic tournament on Wednesday — a 3-0 defeat to Sweden, in which Megan Rapinoe suggested that the team had done some “dumb” things — contained only two changes from the side that started the World Cup final two years ago. So many of the biggest names in the women’s game are in Tokyo, in fact, that the tournament has the air of an all-star competition.
The temptation is to believe that the event’s status will wane as the World Cup continues to grow, that the adage — that the Olympics is the pinnacle for sports that do not have one of their own — will hold, that no sport, ultimately, can have two pinnacles.
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That is not necessarily true. Golf and tennis have both embraced their relatively new status as Olympic disciplines. Winning gold at the Olympics — competing at the Olympics — always means something. What it means, though — how much it means — is not fixed. Alves sees it as a step on a journey. Messi saw it as a road to nowhere. Rapinoe may well see it as a destination in itself. But all of that can change. The value of gold, after all, can rise and fall.
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A frankly unlikely claim of clairvoyance from Carl Lennertz as regards to Lionel Messi’s signing a new contract with Barcelona. “I knew he’d re-up when his kids cried last year at the thought of leaving,” he writes. “I’m glad he chose family happiness.”
Carl’s prescience is not without foundation, as it happens. It is rarely discussed in the context of transfers — which we tend to assume are determined by money and ambition and status, probably in that order, and nothing else — but family deserves to be in that mix, too. It is often why players choose one country, or one city, over another; or why, as in Messi’s case, staying is easier than going.
That does not apply to only the finest players, either: One player I spoke with in the past few months wanted to sign a new contract, ignoring a potential Premier League move, because his daughter had just started school and he did not want to force her to make new friends. Footballers, in other words, are humans, too.
Shawn Donnelly, meanwhile, has his finger on the pulse of all the major issues of the day. “If we are going to keep calling it a ‘back heel’, then we should start calling a toe poke a ‘front toe,’” he wrote. I am currently trying to teach my son the back heel, with considerable success: He now uses it as his default passing option, like some louche South American playmaker. And it has, in the course of that educational process, occurred to me that it does border on tautologous.
And it falls to Mark Hornish to make the semiregular plea for some coverage of Major League Soccer in this newsletter. “It may surprise you to learn that the United States has a domestic league,” he wrote, with a healthy slice of sarcasm. “It would be great if you could turn your gaze on it in these coming weeks.” I will do my best, Mark. Leave it with me.
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