Vesper

Barca up 2 nil Lewa

lol its so true all pace and poor end product ususally

damn, missed a goal 2 1 KK

1 1 Désiré Doué ANOTHER winger I begged to buy, lolol

another player I was begging us to buy sigh

nil 1 Villa Rogers

Barca up 1 nil Raphinha (25')

Trump blinked because the most braindead, gaslit of his supporters finally are figuring out, despite Trump's pure lies to the contrary, that THEY have to pay the tarrifs, not the other nations and their companies. That and the billionaires and centimillionaires in unison are going after Trump as he has wiped out trillions in market values. Dairy farmer surprised that he has to pay tariff and not his Canadian supplier. Did he forget that Mexico did not pay for the wall? Here Are the Places Where the Recession Has Already Begun Towns near the Canadian border are suffering. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/recession-tariffs-canada-trump/682297/

https://www.vipleague.pm/champions-league/barcelona-vs-borussia-dortmund-1-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/champions-league/barcelona-vs-borussia-dortmund-2-live-streaming https://redditsoccerstreams.org/event/fc-barcelona-borussia-dortmund/1510109 https://soccer-100.com/event/uefa-champions/dortmund-vs-barcelona-live-soccer-stats/733610

https://www.vipleague.pm/champions-league/paris-saint-germain-vs-aston-villa-1-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/champions-league/paris-saint-germain-vs-aston-villa-2-live-streaming https://redditsoccerstreams.org/event/paris-saint-germain-aston-villa/1510107 https://soccer-100.com/event/uefa-champions/aston-villa-vs-psg-live-soccer-stats/733609

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/jadon-sancho-Chelsea-man-utd-35017630 Chelsea are ready to pay Manchester United to get out of their obligation to sign Jadon Sancho, it has been claimed. The on-loan star made a fast start to life at Stamford Bridge, but his output in recent months had put a permanent deal in jeopardy. Under the terms of their loan deal for the winger, a Premier League finish of 14th or higher would require the Blues to fork out up to £25million to sign Sancho permanently. However, the agreement included a clause whereby they could pay United a seven-figure sum to back out. Sancho has three goals and five assists for Chelsea this season, but none of either since January 4. He also set up two goals in a Conference League win against Heidenheim in November, but wasn't able to contribute a goal or assist in the 83 minutes he played across two knockout legs against FC Copenhagen.

Chelsea winning the Conference League would give them a financial and footballing safety net https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6263960/2025/04/09/Chelsea-conference-league-importance/ The final stretch of Chelsea’s season is here and, in contrast to their extremely challenging Premier League run-in, the road to Wroclaw for the Conference League final on May 28 continues to look highly favourable. Chelsea’s massive financial advantage over the rest of the Conference League field has been well documented, and it is readily translatable to the strength of quality on the pitch. Quarter-final opponents Legia Warsaw lie fifth in the Polish Ekstraklasa this season and sit 71st in UEFA’s club coefficient rankings. Overcoming them would set up a semi-final date with either Rapid Vienna (fifth in the Austrian league and 69th in UEFA’s club rankings) or Djurgarden of Sweden (68th). Fiorentina are the only other club in the competition ranked as one of UEFA’s top 40 clubs (36th), and Chelsea (ninth) cannot meet them until the final. Winning this competition would therefore occupy a strange place in the Chelsea psyche. Becoming the first club (again) to complete the set of major domestic and European trophies has real meaning to many supporters. Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly are eager to lift their first silverware since purchasing the club from Roman Abramovich three years ago, and it would also be an important milestone for head coach Enzo Maresca and his young squad. Maresca could win the Conference League in his first season (Warren Little/Getty Images) All that said, it is difficult to imagine much appetite inside or outside Chelsea for an open-top bus parade from Stamford Bridge to Eel Brook Common if Maresca’s team go all the way, and anything less would be widely regarded as a significant embarrassment as well as a failure. Regardless of how it ends, Chelsea’s maiden run in UEFA’s third-tier competition will not move the needle financially, relative to their all-important pursuit of Champions League qualification, which will be decided no later than three days before the Conference League final when Maresca’s team wrap up their 2024-25 Premier League campaign away at Nottingham Forest. Champions League football was worth around £80million ($102m) to Chelsea in 2021-22 and 2022-23; the financial rewards of the Conference League are paltry in comparison. “If we take a look at West Ham, when they won it in 2022-23, they got €22million (£18.8million) in prize money,” football finance expert Kieran Maguire tells The Athletic. “Plus they had the benefit of seven home games. They wouldn’t have been able to charge full price because of the quality of the opposition, but they probably grossed €30m (£25.7m). “Then you factor in spending to improve the quality of the squad (to cope with more games). You’ve also got transportation costs, accommodation costs. You could also argue that it cost them as far as their league position was concerned (West Ham finished 14th in 2022-23), and that’s worth £3m per place. “Then the players would have had bonuses for winning the competition. So by the time you factor in all your costs, you’re talking, in my view, low single millions of profit (at best).” Chelsea are not quite in the same position. Their relentlessly high transfer spend always accounts for regular European football to a degree that other Premier League clubs do not. Their squad has not been stressed by this Conference League run — Maresca was able to employ wholesale rotation for the league phase — and, at least to date, their domestic league position has not suffered as a result of progressing to the knockout rounds. But the most tangible benefit to Chelsea of winning the Conference League would be the automatic passage it carries into next season’s Europa League. That will not matter if Maresca delivers the top-five finish in the Premier League that is almost certain to be enough to bring Champions League football back to Stamford Bridge in 2025-26, but it will be a valuable insurance policy if they end up missing out. Opta currently projects Chelsea as having a 43.4 per cent chance of finishing this season somewhere in the Premier League’s top five, but their likeliest final league position is sixth (27.2 per cent chance). If they were to slip even further to seventh (19 per cent chance), it opens up the nightmare potential scenario of Aston Villa or Crystal Palace winning the FA Cup and bumping them back into the Conference League, as Manchester United did to them last season. Europa League participation in 2025-26 would not be a thrilling prospect either, but it would be a clear and important step up for Chelsea in financial terms. Chelsea want to qualify for the Champions League (Clive Rose/Getty Images) “Manchester United grossed €32m (£27.4m) in 2022-23 and they were knocked out in the quarter-finals, so by the time you factor in the additional matches, the additional prize money, for winning it, you’re likely to be somewhere in the region of €45m (£38.6m) to €50m (£42.8m) as a big Premier League club,” Maguire adds. “Plus you’ve got your home matches, so if you add six of those in, you’re probably looking in the region of €60m (£51.4m). You’ve got additional operating costs, but the net benefit from a good year in the Europa League for a club with the status of Chelsea is around €25m (£21.4m) to €30m (£25.7m).” The significance of that increase in revenue is underlined by the last two years of Chelsea’s published accounts, in which the controversial internal sales of the two hotels outside Stamford Bridge and Chelsea Women were required to offset huge operating losses and keep the club on the right side of the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules. A punishment for failing to stay within UEFA’s financial limits — which do not allow such transactions to be factored into compliance calculations — is currently being discussed. That is more likely to be a fine than a sporting penalty, allowing Chelsea to embark on a new European adventure next season. Ownership and supporters would very much like it to be back in the Champions League, but lifting the Conference League in May would at least guarantee Europa League football and prevent them from being a giant among relative minnows again.

Carney Chukwuemeka feels key to Borussia Dortmund’s future – but can they afford to keep him? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6263808/2025/04/09/chukwuemeka-dortmund-Chelsea-barcelona/ It is a sign of how strange Borussia Dortmund’s season has been that as they travel to Barcelona, and despite barely having played to date, Carney Chukwuemeka suddenly seems so important. Chukwuemeka arrived on loan from Chelsea in the winter transfer window but, owing to illness and injury, the 21-year-old midfielder has only been fit enough to play 135 Bundesliga minutes in the period since. He started his first game for the club on Saturday, playing 70 minutes of the 4-1 away win over Freiburg, and had a profound impact. In possession, he was cutting and purposeful with his passes, and typically bold with the ball at his feet. But he was rugged in the tackle, too, and physically commanding. Chukwuemeka created a flurry of first-half chances, scored with a deflected shot from the edge of the box in the second, then set Julian Brandt free to create Dortmund’s third goal for Serhou Guirassy. It was deeply impressive. At the end of the weekend, Chukwuemeka earned his first nomination to Kicker’s coveted Elf des Tages, their team of the weekend. Given that he has had so little chance to develop chemistry with his team-mates and that eighth-placed Dortmund are hardly enjoying a vintage season, that is quite the accolade. And this is a strange situation. Chukwuemeka scores his first goal for Dortmund against Freiburg (Alex Grimm/Getty Images) Chukwuemeka has been a virtual bystander since he arrived. But he has also played in short, rich doses that have shown his talent and pointed to a future direction for Dortmund. It helps that he so clearly fits the house style — that he is such a Dortmund player. The Westfalenstadion crowd wants to be moved by the football it sees on the pitch below and Chukwuemeka, as a blend of slashing technique, craft and ambition on the ball, suits that mood, conforming to all the local ideals while also helping the side to be much progressive — not to get stuck in second or third gear, but to play football at a pace that makes the terraces quiver. Tactically, as Saturday showed, many Dortmund players can profit from having Chukwuemeka in their midfield. Karim Adeyemi and Maximilian Beier both had first-half chances arising directly from the loanee’s ability to find gaps in Freiburg’s defensive and midfield lines. Brandt, who has suffered through an extremely difficult season, often appearing bereft of confidence, gave one of his best performances in recent months. Brandt showed improvement a week ago, in the 3-1 win over Mainz, but he seemed liberated by having Chukwuemeka alongside him and not compelled, as is so often his way and his weakness, to overplay. There is some overlap between their respective abilities and so taking some of the creative responsibility away from Brandt, particularly in deeper positions, splits the defensive attention he faces and focuses him more precisely. It was notable how often he received passes in space at Europa-Park Stadion and how he was regularly running towards Freiburg’s back four. Chukwuemeka has brought the best out of his Dortmund team-mates (Alex Grimm/Getty Images) Recently, Niko Kovac has moved away from the 4-2-3-1 he initially used upon taking charge, employing a 3-5-2 instead. Felix Nmecha has now recovered from the knee injury he suffered in January and is set to return to the No 6 role he was playing with such distinction in the late autumn. A central three of Nmecha, Chukwuemeka and Brandt certainly seems balanced and capable of extracting the best from each of those players. But perhaps nothing seems as valuable as Chukwuemeka’s personality. Prior to Freiburg, one of the characteristics of his impact across those cameo performances — particularly in the 20 minutes against Union Berlin and, a few weeks later, RB Leipzig — was his capacity to come on, demand the ball and simply play. It often felt like a tonic. That may sound like a vague virtue, but Dortmund have received a lot of criticism this season — rightly — and that has bred neuroses throughout their team. Kovac is dealing with fearful, inhibited players, some of whom seem preoccupied with not making mistakes. Whether because of his age, his personality or simply because he has not been at the club long enough, Chukwuemeka has not been infected by that willingness to hide in plain sight. After the Freiburg game, he told reporters with a shrug that he “hadn’t really thought about his performance in the first half” and that he had just played by feel. Also speaking in Breisgau, Adeyemi described his new team-mate as a “chilled out guy, a street footballer”, with Pascal Gross also praising Chukwuemeka as “a superb footballer” who “plays with great confidence”. Sebastian Kehl, Dortmund’s sporting director, admitted that while “Carney is still not at 100 per cent, he is always capable of making a difference”. Chukwuemeka tussles with Union Berlin’s Tim Skarke in February (Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images) Within this context, it’s easy to see Chukwuemeka less as a midfielder and more a heavy dose of vitamin B. Someone capable of jolting Dortmund to life with changes of rhythm, but also being more generally restorative and beneficial to the squad’s mood. Having a player to whom the game comes so easily rarely hurts. Especially not at Dortmund, where it has often looked so, so hard this season. Still: 135 minutes. These are big conclusions to draw from so little playing time. Furthermore, unless Dortmund requalify for the Champions League next season, it is difficult to imagine how they might afford the fee of around €50million (£42.9m; $54.7m) that would make Chukwuemeka’s loan permanent. At the moment, he is due to return to Chelsea even before the FIFA Club World Cup starts in June. Rather like the situation with Jadon Sancho and Ian Maatsen last season, who were so good on loan in the second half of the season but ultimately out of financial reach, it’s perfectly possible that Borussia Dortmund and Chukwuemeka will both be starting again in the summer. They work together and they seem to need each other. Whether they can stay together is another matter entirely.

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Joe Biden’s Final Days: Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State—or Was It Group Delusion? Revelations from within the Biden bubble—detailed in the new book Uncharted—show how the reelection team persevered despite alarming signs of decline. Asked one top Democratic insider, “How are they letting this f---ing thing go on?” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/joe-bidens-final-days In late June 2024, just a few days after Joe Biden’s implosion in his televised debate with Donald Trump, one of the president’s best friends got a call on his iPhone. The familiar baritone voice on the other end, much stronger than it had been during the debate, was unmistakable. “It’s Joe,” he said. There was a pause. “Joe Biden.” His friend replied: “Yeah, no shit.” Biden burst out laughing. “Hey, thanks for talking Valerie off the ledge,” the president said. Just after midnight on the evening of that disastrous debate, the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, weeping and distraught, had called her brother’s friend looking for answers and blasted the debate-prep team. Biden’s friend had calmed her down. “No problem,” he told the president. “You don’t have to thank me.” Biden paused and then said, “What do you think?” His friend couldn’t resist this softball. “About what?” he said. Biden cracked up again. The president laughed for four or five seconds. And then, “in a very strong voice filled with timbre,” his friend recalled, “he said, ‘Hey man, that’s why I love you. You’re a fucking wise guy.’ And as he said it, I thought to myself, ‘Where did that voice go? Where did that guy with that voice go? What the fuck happened to this guy?’” What the fuck happened to Joe Biden during the final days of his presidency is a subject of increasingly contentious debate. Angered by his last-minute abdication from the race, Democrats have blamed the president for putting Kamala Harris in a no-win situation, with too short a runway to mount a successful campaign against Trump. Biden’s advisers, it is said, engaged in a cover-up of his deteriorating mental condition, which was dramatically and publicly exposed during the debate. In this version of events, Biden’s inner circle knew the president was non compos mentis and hid this fact from the American public. In fact, it was stranger--and in a way, more troubling--than that. A cover-up, as we’ve understood the term to mean since Watergate, involves deliberately hiding something you know to be true. Biden’s closest advisers, however, were operating in a fog of delusion and denial; they refused to believe what they could see with their own eyes. Despite the president’s obvious cognitive decline, they had convinced themselves that he was fine. Their failure to recognize, up close, what everyone else could see from afar—that Biden was too feeble to run for reelection at the age of 82—led to a political disaster. And a relatively unproven national candidate, his vice president, was thrown into the race at the eleventh-hour against an emboldened Donald Trump. Biden had stepped aside on July 21—eight days after the GOP nominee had survived an assassination attempt. Anyone who’s ever had to persuade an octogenarian grandfather to give up the car keys knew that it was time for the president to step aside. (Seventy-seven percent of Americans and 69 percent of Democrats opposed Biden running for a second term. A goodly share didn’t want Trump either.) But in the summer of 2024, Joe Biden was having none of it. And neither were many of his family, friends, and advisers. Despite months of public opinion polling that showed Biden potentially losing to Trump in critical battleground states, they were all-in on his bid for reelection. Their reasons were both understandable--and delusional. Biden’s naysayers, some of his advisers reasoned, had been wrong in 2020 when they’d pronounced him politically dead after he placed fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. Biden had gone on to win the nomination and beat Trump in the general election by seven million votes. Come 2024, Bidenworld believed the doubters were wrong again. But as George Clooney wrote in a blunt New York Times op-ed piece in the summer of 2024, Biden could not win the battle against time. His advisers should have known this but refused to face the fact, head on. Bill Daley watched this spectacle unfold in disbelief. Scion of the legendary Chicago Democratic family, Daley, who served as Barack Obama’s second White House chief of staff, says there’s a kind of myopia that comes with proximity to the president. “You’re in the bubble,” he told me. “You’ve crossed the Rubicon.” Something in the air of the West Wing clouds the vision of those who work there, particularly those who’ve been with the president for decades. “Everybody bought into it,” said Daley of the notion that Biden should run for reelection. “And once they crossed the Rubicon, they bullshitted everybody to stay out of the race.” Jack Watson, chief of staff in Jimmy Carter’s White House, compares working there to being in a magnetic force field. The gravitational pull to protect the president--at almost any cost--is immense. I had my own reasons for wondering if Biden’s White House staff was hiding him. As far back as September of 2022, when I asked for an interview with the president for my book on the first two years of his administration, The Fight of His Life, it was granted on one condition: I would send my questions by email and Biden would answer them in writing. It was clear, in hindsight, that the commander-in-chief’s aides didn’t want to risk having him interact in real time with a reporter. When I complained about getting emailed answers, I was told, “If it’s any consolation, we’re not even doing this for [Bob] Woodward.” And yet Joe Biden was no Woodrow Wilson. In 1919, the 28th president suffered a serious stroke; a cover-up ensued; and Wilson’s second wife, Edith, allegedly performed many of her incapacitated husband’s presidential duties. By contrast, whatever you may think of his policies, Biden governed competently behind closed doors. Visitors can attest that during meetings, he commanded every detail and nuance of Middle East policy. On the morning he stepped aside, when senior staffers arrived to hammer out the announcement of his abdication, the president was on the phone, parsing the details of a complex, multi-nation prisoner swap. Mike Donilon, Biden’s senior adviser and confidant, who was with him more than almost anyone, swears he never saw the president mentally diminished. So unless someone produces a failed neurological exam--or a deep-sixed Parkinson’s diagnosis--this was not a classic cover-up but a case of collective denial among Biden, first lady Jill Biden, and the president’s closest aides. Out of a desire to cling to power or just wishful thinking, they believed what they wanted to believe. Still, Biden’s team knew it had a problem: the president was a shadow of himself on the stump. That’s one of the reasons why, in 2020, they effectively arranged for Biden to run his campaign from his basement. In March 2024, a veteran Democratic operative interviewed for a top campaign job with Biden and his aides in the Oval Office. The job interview took a surprisingly candid turn. “Part of their discussion on the strategy of the [reelection] campaign,” she told me, “was ‘Hey, in 2020 we had this great excuse of the basement, of COVID, to keep him out of the public eye. We no longer have that excuse. What do we do?’” Over Saint Patrick’s Day weekend 2024, at a small White House party, Biden spoke to guests using a teleprompter. Daley (who, on a dozen visits to the White House, was never invited to drop in on Biden) couldn’t believe it. If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? “How are they letting this thing go on?” he thought. “This is crazy.” Daley ran into his friend Tom Donilon, a long-time national security expert and brother of Biden’s adviser Mike. Why hadn’t anyone spoken to the president about stepping aside and giving someone else a chance to beat Trump? “How are they letting this fucking thing go on?” Daley asked him. Donilon shook his head. “I don’t believe there’s anyone who’s had the conversation with him about not running, including my brother,” he said. If Mike Donilon, Biden’s alter ego, hadn’t spoken to the president about his age, it was almost certain that no one had. Nor did Democrats dare talk about Biden’s age—at least in public. “Everyone ignored it,” said Daley. Challenging the incumbent president could be a political death wish. “Every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.” The depth of denial among Biden’s advisers became clear when they challenged Trump to an early debate, in June. For a campaign covering up for a doddering uncle, this would have been a crazy risk to take. Why would Biden’s handlers, knowing that he’d lost his verbal fastball, send him out to pitch against Trump? They could have held out for a later debate in the fall, effectively running out the clock. (If Biden then fell on his face, it would be too late to replace him as the nominee.) The answer is that Biden’s top aides—campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, Donilon, and senior adviser Anita Dunn—must have believed, erroneously, that he could go toe-to-toe with Trump. When Daley heard that Biden’s aides were considering a June debate, he was aghast. It was pure hubris. “They were so cocky,” he said. “They got CNN, they got the moderators, they got the rules—no audience. They were telling[people]: ‘We got everything we wanted.’” Daley foresaw disaster. He called up Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients. “Jeff, I know you’re debating whether to debate,” he told him. “Do not do this. I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’m just telling you, come up with something, but do not do it.” On Friday, June 21, 2024, Joe Biden arrived at Camp David to prepare for the debate. Just six days away, it might well decide the outcome of the 2024 election. The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warning light. At his first meeting with Biden, Ron Klain, his former White House chief of staff, who was in charge of debate prep, was startled. He’d never seen Biden so exhausted and out of it. He seemed unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. The president appeared obsessed with foreign policy and uninterested in his second-term plans. During one prep session in Aspen Lodge, the presidential cabin, Biden suddenly got up, walked out to the pool, collapsed on a lounge chair, and fell sound asleep. Yet his advisers were undaunted. With unintended irony, one of them explained their strategy to me: “An early debate would quiet fears that the president was infirm.” That evening, Biden met again with Klain, Donilon, senior adviser Steve Ricchetti, and deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed. “We sat around the table,” said Klain. “He had answers on cards and I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.” The first of two mock debates was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the general subjects that might come up during the debate. “All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs,” said Klain. Biden had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term. Klain prodded him: “Look, sir, you’re not really telling people what you’re going to do if they reelect you.” “I’m not going to make more promises,” the president snapped. “I made too many promises in 2020 and I delivered on most of them, and all people remember are the things I didn’t deliver on.” Klain retorted: “Well, you have to make some promises to get reelected, sir.” In hopes of piquing his interest in a forward-thinking agenda, Klain arranged a phone call with Melinda French Gates, a persuasive childcare advocate. Biden perked up briefly but soon lost interest again. At one point, Biden had an idea. If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was the one whose answers were batty or half-baked.. Klain replied: “Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.” Twenty-five minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. “I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,” he said. “I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.” He went off to bed. Klain tried to remind himself that Biden had always been a game-day player. Maybe the president would rise to the occasion as he had often done before. On June 27, debate night, Biden arrived at CNN headquarters just before the 9 p.m. start. He was offered a “walk-through”—a chance to check out the camera angles from the podium—but he waved it off. Minutes later, the president and Trump took the stage. Twelve minutes later came disaster. Asked about the deficit, Biden froze, his expression vacant; he seemed unaware of where he was. Some observers wondered if he was having a ministroke. Then he said: “We finally beat Medicare.” From behind the stage, in a green room, Trump’s campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita looked at his colleague Susie Wiles and Tony Fabrizio, their pollster, and said: “He’s dead. He’s not going to stay.” As Biden continued to flail, Trump recognized what was happening and let his opponent self-destruct. After an incomprehensible jumble of words from Biden, Trump parried: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence and I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” Klain, Donilon, Ricchetti, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and other Biden staffers were watching the debacle from a room below the CNN stage. On a Zoom monitor they could see O’Malley Dillon at a separate location, monitoring “dial groups”—focus groups of voters who turned a dial up or down to register their approval or disapproval in real time. The Biden dials were headed south. It was possibly the most disastrous performance ever delivered in a presidential debate—and a fatal blow to Biden’s hopes for reelection. Any objective viewer could see that the president was incapable of waging an effective campaign against Trump. But Biden’s team didn’t see it that way. Ricchetti contended that he thought the president had just had a bad night—like Barack Obama’s lackluster first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. Dunn argued that the president had actually won the faceoff with the undecided voters who mattered. Like O’Malley Dillon, she’d been watching voter dial groups during the debate and noted that as it wore on, they’d disliked Trump even more than Biden. “It’s a good illustration of the difference between voters and elites,” she said. “Voters experience this differently. They hated Donald Trump. We actually picked up a few votes in the group.” Even the normally clear-eyed O’Malley Dillon grasped for a silver lining. Her first thought wasn’t “How can we talk to the president about stepping aside?” It was: not that many people had actually seen the debate. (Yet an estimated 51 million people were watching.) Biden’s key advisers were among the best and the brightest, adept at managing policy, politics, and public relations at the presidential level. But now they were the blind leading the blind. Some had spent decades rallying around Biden whenever he came under attack; their instinct was to adopt a defensive crouch. Nearly four months later, when I spoke with Reed and Ricchetti at the White House, they were still trapped in that force field of denial. The problem, they insisted, wasn’t Biden’s condition, it was three weeks of Democratic infighting and the media’s obsession with his debate performance. The weekend of July 20–21, 2024, would prove to be seminal, a hinge of American history. As Joe Biden convalesced with a case of COVID at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Maryland, the cries for him to give up his reelection campaign grew louder. On Friday, July 19, Klain called the president. They talked about the growing pressure on him to withdraw. Klain urged Biden to resist it. “That’s my intention,” he replied. For the next 48 hours, there was radio silence. Other than Biden’s Secret Service detail, the only people at the Rehoboth house were Jill Biden and his “body people,” deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s senior adviser. No one knew if Biden was considering throwing in the towel—but back at the White House, one aide thought the president’s silence was telling. “He’s somebody who checks in pretty frequently and wants to know what’s going on and wants to talk things through,” he said. “When things went quiet, I think we knew he was seriously thinking about it.” On Saturday morning, July 20, Donilon and Ricchetti arrived at the president’s beach house. With more than 60 years of service to Biden between them, they’d been at his side through innumerable political and personal crises. But the president’s men had never faced a situation with such grave stakes for the country and the world. Ricchetti, bearing polling data, went first. He told the president that while he was down by a few points nationally, and more in the battleground states, he was within the historical margin to come back and win. Public opinion wasn’t the obstacle; the party was. Most of its leaders were against him. “There’s a path for you to win the nomination and the presidency,” Ricchetti told the president, “but it will be brutal, and you will have to wage a fierce, lonely fight against your own party. This could hurt your reputation for being a unifying commander-in-chief that is core to you.” But if Biden wanted to run again, Ricchetti was all-in. In fact, the path to a Biden victory was almost nonexistent; Trump’s polling lead in the battleground states was essentially insurmountable. But even at this late hour Ricchetti and Donilon were soft-pedaling this hard reality. What the president’s aides could not sugarcoat was the fact that the party’s leaders were about to lower the boom on him. “They knew the honeymoon was over that weekend,” a source close to the leadership told me. “Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries would have all been publicly calling for him to get out.” As the walls closed in, Biden felt abandoned. It was his perceived betrayal by Barack Obama that stung most of all. What hurt was that Obama hadn’t picked up the phone and called him. “The one thing that still gnaws at him,” one of Biden’s close friends told me, “is the fact that Obama never called him to have misgivings about his candidacy—to say, ‘You know, Jeez, Joe, are you sure you’re up to it?’” Biden wasn’t even sure his White House staff had his back. “He was like ‘What happened here?’” said a confidant. “‘Why was there no one on my side?’ And he got very focused on whether or not people were being loyal to him inside the building. I think he lost confidence in the people right around him.” But Biden’s major players were still with him; Donilon, Ricchetti, and Klain were committed to his reelection; they would have died on that hill. The president turned to Donilon, his longtime wordsmith “If I were to drop out,” he said, “what would it look like and sound like?” Donilon said he’d knock out a draft of a withdrawal statement. Biden told him, “I want to sleep on it.” At about noon the next day, Sunday, Jeff Zients was in his West Wing office when his phone lit up. “I’ve decided not to run,” Biden told his White House chief of staff. Zients tried to engage him. “That lasted about a minute,” Zients recalled, “because he said, ‘What I really want to talk about is how do we have as productive a six-month period—that’s how much time was left—as we’ve had in the first three and a half years.’” Who, if anyone, should Biden endorse as his successor? It was a momentous question. Indeed, everything was riding on Biden’s successor—not only the outcome of the 2024 presidential election but the fate of Biden’s agenda, his historical legacy, and the future of the party. The decision was Biden’s alone to make. Just after he spoke to Zients, Biden called Kamala Harris. Within 48 hours, working the phones with her staff from her dining room at the Naval Observatory, Harris had all but clinched the nomination against all potential Democratic challengers. But there were only 107 days until the election. The runway was short to mount an effective campaign against the Trump juggernaut. Democrats had been saddled with the last-minute candidacy of an untested nominee. And for one reason: No one in Biden’s inner circle had leveled with the president about the folly of running at his advanced age and uncertain state. History will likely judge harshly the men and women who served him. Leon Panetta, 86, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff and Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary, was blunt. “I think they were living in an isolated world,” he told me. “Everybody was marching to the same tune. And there was nobody there to say, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ They just never had a grown-up in the room who could look Joe Biden in the eye and say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” In February 2025, more than three months after Harris’s defeat, Mike Donilon appeared at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Biden’s confidant was more convinced than ever, he told the audience, that the Democrats had made a terrible mistake by forcing the president to leave the ticket. Just four years earlier, the man had won 81 million votes. “I thought it was crazy they would walk away from the single greatest vote-getter in American history,” Donilon said. “I thought it was insane. I think the party lost its mind.” Biden’s old friend—the one he calls a wise guy, who’d talked his sister Valerie off the ledge after that horrible debate—had a different view. Joe Biden, he told me, has yet to accept the way his presidency ended. “Depending on what day of the week it is, depending on whether he sees Trump on a video replay at night, he’ll say, ‘I could have beat that fucking guy.’ But he couldn’t have. I don’t know if in his lifetime he’ll ever really come to that conclusion. But that debate was it for him. You cannot erase that image in the minds of millions of voters.” From the forthcoming book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple. Copyright © 2025 by CCWhip Productions. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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centrist view on things https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/how-partisanship-killed-effective For decades now, populist forces in America and other western nations have been pining for the end of “neoliberalism.” What this means exactly is open to interpretation depending on your ideological persuasion. For leftists here, it’s means breaking the power of Wall Street and multinational corporations through stricter regulation and anti-trust measures, higher taxes on the rich, “rebalancing” of international trade to meet labor and environmental standards, ending military interventions and cutting defense budgets, labor union rights, and far more government spending on things like health care, housing, education, and climate change. For those on the populist right, it means socking it to the “globalists” and “cultural elites” through some of these same measures on trade and overseas interventions with far less enthusiasm for taxation, spending, and regulation and much more fervor for immigration restrictions and non-traditional, anti-elite politics. In the center, there are a dwindling number of pro-business neoliberal advocates and libertarians who ardently defend free markets and trade, globalization, wealth accumulation, deregulation, decentralized government, and open movement of people across borders. There are also more moderate Clinton-Blair “Third Way” types who are less strident neoliberals than in the past but still defend the U.S.-led international order they argue has yielded huge wealth and influence for America while reducing global poverty. The animating concept linking both left- and right-populist opponents of neoliberalism, and splintering centrist factions, is concern about the effects of economic inequality on working-class Americans (both economically and culturally) and the unchecked rise of China and subsequent decline of traditional American manufacturing power with good-paying jobs for workers. Both groups of populists oppose these developments and want policies to counteract these trends, while centrists are divided on the importance of economic inequality as an issue and split on how, if at all, to respond to the rise of China and declining domestic production. Various factions of the left, right, and center have been feuding intensely over the future of neoliberalism since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Because of America’s two-party system, the political contours of this fight are mainly delineated within the voter coalitions and organized interest groups of Democrats and Republicans. Progressive, anti-neoliberal Democrats (and some independents) united within the Occupy Wall Street movement to oppose the “one percent” and later organized through the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their attendant policy institutions. On the other side, national populist, anti-neoliberal Republicans (and some independents) united within the MAGA movement and through Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, his administrations, and supportive media operations. The primary goal of these anti-neoliberal forces has been to dislodge or co-opt the perceived establishments in both parties—directly or indirectly. This played out differently for Democrats and Republicans. For example, progressives could not directly take over the Democratic Party through either the Sanders or Warren wings given a strong mainstream centrist faction among elected officials and voters, but they did manage to take control of much of the policy apparatus during Joe Biden’s presidency. In comparison, national populists under Trump completely took over the Republican Party and chased out all the establishment types or bludgeoned them into submission. The fight against neoliberalism has always been hampered by partisan politics. Despite a lot of talk in journals and philanthropic circles, there was never any serious effort to create a truly independent “post-neoliberal” movement that would work across party divides to advance a vision of resurgent economic nationalism and better represent American working-class interests regardless of party affiliation. Again, populist forces on the left and right were more interested in attacking the elite policy development and personnel infrastructures in their respective parties than they were in building a dynamic new movement with steadily growing public support and policy successes across presidential administrations—just as neoliberal forces developed during the 1980s and 1990s. For a brief moment during the first Trump and Biden presidencies, there was a possibility of creating a genuinely bipartisan, cross-ideological movement in Congress to advance economic nationalism (with public backing) as an alternative to the perceived neoliberal consensus in both parties. The focus of various economic nationalist policy groups and congressional committees was mainly on combatting China and restoring American economic might for the benefit of a hollowed out working-class and struggling towns and regions across America. There was bipartisan work to advance strategic tariffs on China to help protect key industries in tech and defense, as well as to advance tax incentives for new manufacturing and energy development in both red states and blue states. New investments in basic infrastructure and technological research and innovation also received broad endorsements, as did cross-party policies to bolster working-class families through income and child supports. But this promising moment for effective economic nationalism blew up entirely due to the internal logic of America’s tribal politics, particularly during short two-year periods of unified party control of the federal government. Looking back at 2021-2022, it's obvious that Republicans would never fully commit to Democratic ideas about government investment as part of an economic nationalist agenda—and especially their mobilization to combat climate change and advance clean energy. This came to a head with Biden’s response to the Covid pandemic and his party’s multi-year struggle to pass expansive climate and social spending through reconciliation (with no Republican votes at all, although a smattering of House Republicans have recently argued against repeal). During this period, Biden did work with a pool of Republicans to pass smart bipartisan legislation on infrastructure, R&D spending, strategic checks on China, and energy production. But these efforts were overshadowed by the outcomes of his party’s massive Covid spending, the subsequent spike in household costs, and the deceptively named “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) that had more to do with climate than inflation—the most important issue on voters’ minds. Not surprisingly, President Trump now wants Republicans to repeal the semiconductor subsidies in the CHIPS Act and reverse or kill most of the clean energy components in the IRA. In turn, looking at Trump’s first term and his early months in office a second time, it’s clear that Democrats did not and will likely never commit to his divide-and-conquer nationalist politics or to his tariff, tax cut, and deregulation agenda carried out through constitutionally dubious executive actions and through the same one-party reconciliation process used by Democrats under Biden. Any hope Trump had of building a larger public majority after his successful 2024 presidential campaign and popular early steps on immigration and cultural issues has all but evaporated within the first three months of his second term as he moved aggressively on the economy. Democrats blame Trump’s erratic behavior with allies and his unilateral steps on tariffs and DOGE cuts as reasons for opposing his agenda, while Republicans counter that it is blind “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that precludes Democrats from backing Trump’s MAGA economic approach. Either way, the prospect for bipartisanship in support of Trumps’s nationalist vision seems remote to nonexistent now. So, both parties attempted to do economic nationalism primarily through their own party lenses thus ensuring that it would engender widespread opposition from the other side and elevate the worst aspects of each party’s agenda to center of political debate. For Democrats it was a monomaniacal focus on climate change and leftist social spending that ignored governmental bottlenecks and wasted money (see the “abundance” discussion for why this is the case). For Republicans it was Trump’s lifelong obsession with tariffs and his right-wing attacks on government bureaucracy, public investments, and international alliances that have limited appeal outside of his MAGA base. The net result of this partisan standoff is that economic nationalism is now widely discredited and increasingly impossible to advance in a smart manner with bipartisan legislation and broad public support behind clearly articulated and well understood national goals. China and other nations hostile to the United States have surely taken note and adjusted their own approaches to take advantage of America’s political dysfunction. Neoliberalism won the ideological battle with its opponents by default. America’s partisan politics ensured that an effective, broadly backed approach to advancing national interests and rebuilding the working class would fail. Huge government spending in areas unrelated to strategic industrial policy coupled with high inflation and a refusal to fix the regulations that prevent new building and manufacturing limited the appeal of the Biden and Democratic approach to economic nationalism with many voters. Chaotic, made-up “reciprocal tariffs” and attacks on America’s allies that threaten to raise prices, slow growth, decrease wealth, and harm U.S. interests over the long-term have likewise discredited the Trump and Republican approach with many Americans. Neoliberalism didn’t win because it is popular. It won because the economic nationalist alternatives presented by partisans on both sides ended up looking far worse and more impractical than the status quo, while much of the neoliberal vision (warts and all) remained grounded in macroeconomic reality and voters’ desire for abundant goods and services, low prices, and economic stability—not partisan command-and-control revolution.

Christopher Nkunku’s Chelsea ‘struggles’ not due to lack of effort – Enzo Maresca https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6259050/2025/04/06/christopher-nkunku-Chelsea/ Enzo Maresca has insisted that Christopher Nkunku’s struggles at Chelsea are not due to a lack of effort. Maresca selected Nkunku to play as a No 9 in Sunday’s goalless draw at Brentford, but the Frenchman failed to impact the game before being substituted for Nicolas Jackson at half-time. Nkunku is widely expect to depart Chelsea at the end of the season in search of more regular game time, but the club’s head coach does not believe his struggles are down to a lack of effort. “I don’t think it’s a lack of effort because at the end I can see Christo every day and he’s working well,” Maresca said after the match. “Sometimes probably he wants to give more during a game and he struggles a little bit, but for sure I don’t think it’s a lack of effort.” Maresca also said it was unfair Premier League required Chelsea to play Tottenham Hotspur on Thursday and Brentford three days later due to a lack of recovery time. Chelsea lined up against Brentford with Cole Palmer, Jackson, Marc Cucurella and Levi Colwill all on bench after all four played big minutes in a hard-fought 1-0 victory over Spurs at Stamford Bridge on Thursday, 24 hours after Brentford lost 2-1 against Newcastle United. What You Should Read Next Brentford 0 Chelsea 0 – Maresca’s bold starting XI, Nkunku’s struggle, is Sanchez fun? Enzo Maresca made a bold team selection against Brentford and it failed to pay off. The Athletic's Liam Twomey analyses the action Asked if he felt the scheduling was unfair, Maresca replied: “I think so, especially at this stage of the season, but we tried to adapt. “We said many times that when it’s a transition game, it’s demanding, physically demanding. So Tottenham was more transition than compared to (this game), for instance. But at this stage I think 24 hours make the difference (in terms of recovery). “The reason why first half we started in one way and the second half we finished in the other way is because of that. And probably if we decided to start the first half in the way we finish, probably after half an hour, 45 minutes, the team was not physically good enough to finish the game. So we tried to find a solution.”

Chelsea’s top Premier League scorer in 2025 is left-back Marc Cucurella. That is a problem https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6259252/2025/04/07/chelseas-top-scorer-in-the-premier-league-in-2025-is-left-back-marc-cucurella/ How long will the inquest into Chelsea’s latest Premier League slip-up against Brentford run before someone asks the big question: why did Enzo Maresca wait until the 77th minute to bring on his top Premier League goalscorer of 2025? No, not Cole Palmer, introduced for Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall just shy of the hour mark. Not Pedro Neto, brought on for Noni Madueke at the same time. Definitely not Nicolas Jackson, who made only his second Premier League appearance after a two-month injury layoff when he replaced Christopher Nkunku at half-time. The correct answer is, of course, Marc Cucurella. The roving left-back represented Maresca’s last attacking roll of the dice in the 0-0 draw when he came on for Reece James with 13 minutes left. Given that Chelsea have played 12 Premier League games in 2025, the Spaniard’s three goals since the turn of the year should be nowhere near enough to distinguish him as the most consistent attacking match-winner in the squad over that span, yet they are. Palmer has found the net only twice in 2025, the latest on January 14. His struggles have understandably garnered the most headlines but Chelsea’s attacking problems are far bigger. Madueke also has two Premier League goals to his name since the beginning of January, but none since tapping into an empty net in the third minute against Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium on January 25 (largely because of a significant injury absence). Pedro Neto and Enzo Fernandez are the only two other players in Maresca’s squad who have scored more than once since the turn of the year. Jackson’s failure to pass that threshold makes sense in light of his injury absence, though his scoring drought already stood at eight Premier League matches before his hamstring gave way in early February. Jackson failed to score against Brentford (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images) The inability of Jadon Sancho (goalless since December 😎 and Christopher Nkunku (one league goal in 2025) to clear such a low bar is harder to justify, but easy to explain when observing them on the pitch. Sancho, in fairness, has at least responded to the repeated urging of his team-mates and Maresca by trying to shoot more often in recent weeks. The problem is that on the relatively rare occasions when he manages to overcome his lack of explosive speed or overwhelming strength to create an advantage against his defender with skill, his attempts at goal lack conviction. At the Gtech Stadium, his only effort in the second half trickled well wide of Mark Flekken’s post. What more is there to say about Nkunku? Maresca’s post-match insistence that the Frenchman’s struggles are not down to a lack of effort felt as feeble and unconvincing as the sum of his contribution over 45 listless first-half minutes. Everyone knows that Nkunku is not a natural No 9, but his apparent limitations in recent months go well beyond that. Can he press? Can he make runs? Can he protect the ball from any level of physical pressure? Can he combine with others? Against Brentford, as for much of this season, the answer to all of the above was no, and the Frenchman’s limitations — whether due to a lack of effort or ability — caused visible frustration among his team-mates. Nkunku has always been an unusual footballer: not a true striker, winger or No 10, but a hybrid connector who does his best work somewhere in between. What You Should Read Next Chelsea’s accounts explained: Women’s team sold for £200m, profit posted, UEFA spending limit breached Chelsea's accounts make for very interesting reading - The Athletic breaks down the numbers and what it could mean going forward Last season’s pre-season injury that deprived him of the opportunity to become the hub of Mauricio Pochettino’s team will always be a sliding-doors moment, but it could not be clearer that his best position is away from Chelsea — and that in the meantime, Maresca cannot count on him to be a helpful force. That would be a significant problem for Chelsea even if their other attackers were producing in line with expectations, but as things stand Nkunku’s frequent disappearing acts form only part of a broader crisis of production across Maresca’s front line. Goals from Fernandez or Cucurella arriving late in the opposition box cannot save them forever, and did not against Brentford. Maresca’s response after the Brentford draw was to point out the fact that Chelsea are behind only Liverpool in expected goals (xG) this season. Their average xG of 1.7 in their 12 league matches in 2025 is only a marginal dip on their average of 1.9 xG per game this season, and against Brentford they had the most shot attempts (21) without scoring in a Premier League away game since December 2017 against Everton at Goodison Park. There is plenty of reason to believe that Chelsea’s numbers will rebound in a healthier direction now that Jackson and Madueke are fit enough to play around Palmer, and to make sure that Nkunku plays less. Maresca and Palmer after their draw with Brentford (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images) But they have only seven Premier League matches remaining, the final four of which are against Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester United and Nottingham Forest. That is a small and perilous enough sample size to fear a continuation of this collective attacking slump. If it continues, there will be plenty among the match-going Chelsea support who will lay the blame directly at the feet of Maresca and his insistence on patient, possession-focused football. Many of them could be heard chanting, “Attack, attack, attack” in the first half against Brentford and greeting a Madueke shot in the 34th minute with a sarcastic chorus of “We’ve had a shot”. Even more consequentially, Chelsea’s chronic lack of attacking punch in recent weeks belies the reality that their margin for error in the race for Champions League qualification is exhausted. Only time will tell if being held to a goalless draw by Brentford will be regarded as a disastrous point, but there is no world in which it is an encouraging one. Maresca will not care in the slightest who gets the goals in his team’s final seven Premier League games, as long as they arrive with frequency and volume. But if Cucurella is still Chelsea’s top league goalscorer of 2025 come the end of May, the club is highly unlikely to be returning to Europe’s elite club competition next season.

This is £88m in wages over 5 years .£124m in wages over 7 years hell no

even better troll in 140 seasons of football they have only 2 European trophies verus our 3 BEFORE Roman bought us and now we have 8, plus 1 global world championship