  Accretion of debris seems to be the natural mechanism to power the radiation
emitted during a tidal disruption event (TDE), in which a supermassive black
hole tears apart a star. However, this requires the prompt formation of a
compact accretion disk. Here, using a fully relativistic global simulation for
the long-term evolution of debris in a TDE with realistic initial conditions,
we show that at most a tiny fraction of the bound mass enters such a disk on
the timescale of observed flares. To "circularize" most of the bound mass
entails an increase in the binding energy of that mass by a factor $\sim 30$;
we find at most an order unity change. Our simulation suggests it would take a
time scale comparable to a few tens of the characteristic mass fallback time to
dissipate enough energy for "circularization". Instead, the bound debris forms
an extended eccentric accretion flow with eccentricity $\simeq 0.4-0.5$ by
$\sim 2$ fallback times. Although the energy dissipated in shocks in this
large-scale flow is much smaller than the "circularization" energy, it matches
the observed radiated energy very well. Nonetheless, the impact of shocks is
not strong enough to unbind initially bound debris into an outflow.
