Hannah Mckay/Reuters
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The start of soccer’s modern era can be dated precisely: Jan. 9, 2011. It can be located exactly, too: to the Twitter feed of Ryan Babel, the Dutch forward then playing for a stuttering Liverpool team. That was when, and where, everything changed, when the old world blended, instantly, into the new.
In case you have forgotten: on that day, Liverpool lost (as it did, often, back at the start of the decade) an F.