A former player had wondered if Norwich added a vast amount to the league, what with the clubвЂ™s insistence on being stable and sensible and cautious, all traits that act as synonyms for вЂњboringвЂќ in the hyperbolic soap opera of EnglandвЂ™s top flight. Last week, there was a minor commotion over Norwich City, the team rooted to the foot of the Premier League. It is curious how unrelated strands of loose narrative can coalesce.

Why it came about, though, is perhaps less significant than what it implies. A coach who cherished second, after all, would seem somehow callow in comparison. Soccer has long been consumed by a desire for dominion so intense that it is, when looked at in the cold light of day, just a little deranged.ДЄnd as much as Mourinho is too often, too easily blamed for all of modern soccerвЂ™s ills, it would not be desperately difficult to trace a line from some of his more public rejections of anything short of gold to a wider embrace of the practice, to believe that once he had made it clear that silver was not acceptable to him, it made it almost inevitable that others would follow. Alex Ferguson, like Brian Clough and Bill Shankly before him, used to tell his squads that they should forget winning a league or a cup almost immediately, that it was to serve only as a springboard for further success. Plenty of the sportвЂ™s most successful managers have made a point of telling their players that they should not savor even their winnersвЂ™ medals. Or perhaps it is because of the absolutism that drives so many of the defining characters in the menвЂ™s game. Perhaps that is because of the message it sends: The act itself is, without question, somewhat performative, a little piece of theater, a flourish for the fans to demonstrate that nothing less than total victory will do. MenвЂ™s soccer, though, seems to have embraced the idea that second is just first last and turned it into a dogma. Many emerged from their locker room to speak to the news media, eyes still a little raw, with the bittersweet spoils of their wondrous, uplifting summer draped around their necks. In 2019, the Netherlands players who had just lost the WomenвЂ™s World Cup final to the United States kept their medals. In fact, the scorn for silver medals is not even a feature of all soccer. Olympians do not regularly refuse to stand on the podium without their silver or bronze medals around their necks, nor do they hurl them into the crowd on their way out of the stadium/pool/velodrome/whatever the place where the horse disco takes place is called. The beaten finalist at a tennis major does not make a point, in front of the watching world, of handing whatever prize he or she has been awarded to a fan. This is, at a rough guess, a phenomenon that manifests very rarely outside soccer. JosГ© Mourinho has made a habit of disposing of any reminder he might have that he ever lost a major final. Second - close, but no cigar - can hurt most of all.ДЄ few weeks earlier, most of their counterparts at both Manchester City and Manchester United had conspicuously refused to don the tokens they had received after losing the Champions League and Europa League finals. And it always takes the pain a little while to subside. Often, it is with a lingering air of regret, a sense of what might have been. Occasionally, it might be with eyes glazed with tears. In most sports, the athlete or the team that finishes second sees its silver medal as a source of pride. That should not, of course, be especially noteworthy. And each of them had carefully placed it around his neck.

Each of them had taken the medal offered to him. Each of the players had walked to the raised platform hastily constructed on the field after SundayвЂ™s final at San Siro in Milan. In one, Luis Enrique, their coach, offers respectful applause for his teamвЂ™s conquerors.Д«ut in all of them, SpainвЂ™s players have thin, navy blue ribbons draped around their necks. In others, they give interviews, lead-faced and faintly forlorn. In some of the images, SpainвЂ™s players stare at the ground, disconsolate, chewing over their loss to France in the final of the Nations League. In all the photographs, there is one constant.

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