Post by QPR Report on Jul 19, 2009 6:58:09 GMT
Sick. Sick. Sick.
Of course putting it in dollars, does make it sound more dramatic!
Sunday Times - Jonathan Northcroft
Manchester City's billion-dollar team still work in progress
There seems no end to the costliest splurge in football from the wealthy Arab owners of the Premier League side
He had no accreditation and claimed to work for an obscure south Manchester paper. The game was up when he produced his camera phone and snapped himself hugging Carlos Tevez’s unctuous adviser, Kia Joorabchian. The fan who gatecrashed Tevez’s unveiling as a Manchester City player was ejected, though not before he hit Mark Hughes with the question City supporters are now daring to ask: “Are we going to challenge the top four?”
The entire Premier League will be interested in the answer to that one and Hughes’s response — “we will aim to do as well as possible” — was a futile attempt to leaven expectation. Sheikh Mansour could plug one of his oil wells with his finger more easily than Hughes can staunch the hype gushing around his club with a few words. Mansour’s takeover last August had City hailed as “the new force in football”; two transfer windows on, they look ready to meet that billing.
Does Tevez feel he can add further Premier League and Champions League winners’ medals to his collection? “If I didn’t think City would win titles, I could have stayed at home with my daughters,” growled the Argentinian.
Should Hughes succeed in his bold yet shrewdly conducted pursuit of John Terry, that would blow all else out of the water but, so far, amid the manager’s fantasy football transfer spree, the capture of Tevez has excited City’s following most.
And that is down to more than the striker choosing their club over Manchester United. When the chauffeured saloon delivering Tevez pulled up outside Eastlands, mobbing fans beat on its roof and danced in its wake as if they were jihadists. Tevez is a player who signifies fight, the guerrilla spirit, the battle. He shirks from nothing, not even an argument with Sir Alex Ferguson.
The United manager complained that Tevez did not answer his calls when he sought to persuade the player to stay. “My phone was off. I was on holiday,” said Tevez with a sardonic chuckle. “I left United because he didn’t want me. Everyone knows that. I didn’t leave United because I wanted to, Alex gave me all the reasons to leave.”
And they were? “Many reasons. After I scored against Liverpool [in United’s 2-1 defeat at Anfield last September], a lot of things changed. I didn’t play any more, no derbies, no classicos. That goal was the last time I played an important role. I was there for two years and Alex never gave me an explanation for taking me out of the first XI so after Rome [the Champions League final] it was too late. You’re not going to get interested after two years.”
Will he shake Ferguson’s hand when they meet at the first Manchester derby of the season? “I don’t know.”
Hughes needed fighters. The personalities of the players he has recruited, as much as their (undoubted) abilities and (exorbitant) costs, mean City should now be taken seriously as a football force. Initially, after Mansour’s buyout, they were like a trifle, rich but wobbly. Hughes has set about changing that, buying types who will give his team a proper foundation. He said upon signing Gareth Barry, to kick off his summer transfer business, that City had made “too many mistakes” down the years in signing the wrong characters and from now on “due diligence” would be done. Shaun Wright-Phillips brought up the issue last season when trying to explain how City were winners of the second-highest number of home games in the Premier League and yet possessors of the worst away record of all the non-relegated sides. “The basis of everything is hard work. That’s the side of things we’re trying to get right,” he said.
Barry is a mature, determined footballer, officer material. Roque Santa Cruz, his mettle already tested by Hughes at Blackburn, is tough mentally and physically, even if, like a Paraguayan Duncan Ferguson, those attributes do not prevent him being prone to injuries.
The anger of Arsenal fans towards Emmanuel Adebayor is understandable, for he let them down badly last season, but his move to Eastlands, confirmed yesterday, could prove an important signing. When his head is right, the Togolese forward can take the game to the very best defences (as his Champions League record suggests) with impressive bravery and force. Hughes, the only manager to find the key to Craig Bellamy, is a specialist at getting the heads of strikers right.
You do not, though, go from feckless to fearless overnight. Under Sven-Göran Eriksson and stretching back through the decades, City have been a soft-centred team. Hughes needed time to change that. He began last summer by hiring Wright-Phillips, Vincent Kompany and Tevez’s feisty compatriot, Pablo Zabaleta, and later added Bellamy, Shay Given and Wayne Bridge, seasoned Premier League pros, as well as the combative and team-oriented Nigel De Jong. Terry would boost City’s “cojones” quotient further and Joleon Lescott, for whom a £15m bid was rejected by Everton on Friday, is also made of the right stuff. Even if Hughes gets neither, what he next wants is known: two centre-backs of Terry and Lescott’s standard and type.
A squad is taking shape based not around trophy acquisitions but solid talents with solid personalities, which is not what we expected when their spree began with the arrival of Robinho during Mansour’s first few hours as owner and then continued with the quixotic pursuit of Kaka. Brilliant as the Brazilian midfielder is, City were proposing to spend £240m in fees and wages to get him and Hughes’s subsequent use of that money seems much more suitable for a club in the building process: Tevez, Barry and Santa Cruz cost £140m in fees and wages; Bridge, De Jong and Given £100m the window before. Tevez, Barry, De Jong, Given, Wright-Phillips, Bridge, Kompany, Zabaleta — and, when fit, Santa Cruz and Bellamy — these are players guaranteed to stand toe-to-toe against United and to stride out at Anfield, Stamford Bridge and the Emirates stadium without fear. They will also sweat for the jersey on tough away days at Portsmouth and Stoke.
Top four? Well, City have a deeper squad than that of Arsenal, the member of the Premier League’s oligarchy they would be most likely to supplant. We will know more once Hughes’s defensive signings are made. Without improving at the back, City will gain only limited yields from their new battery of forwards.
Goals, indeed, were not last season’s problem. In the League, City’s scoring total was the best outside the top four but they conceded 50 times, distinctly bottom-half-of-the-table material.
Some have wondered why Hughes wants Santa Cruz and Adebayor, Tevez and Robinho. They miss the point United ought to have hammered into everyone — that the best squads win the biggest prizes in football. Hughes wants alternatives in each position within a system that is starting to take shape: back four, two holding players, big striker, three other attacking players deployed according to requirements.
That blueprint has benefited Chelsea since Jose Mourinho produced it and Mourinho’s revolution remains the example for Hughes to follow. Chelsea, after a false start to the Abramovich era in which fripperies such as Hernan Crespo, Juan Veron and Adrian Mutu were acquired, knuckled down under Mourinho with players combining toughness and talent. Hughes is taking City in that direction and the journey can take them right to the top.
Changing faces
Stephen Ireland is the only player from a year ago who is likely to make City’s starting line-up next month
v EB Streymur
First game of 2008-09 season (4-4-2): Hart; Onuoha, Dunne, Richards, Ball; Johnson, Hamann, Ireland, Petrov; Jo, Vassell
v Blackburn
Possible team to start 2009-10 campaign (4-2-3-1) Given; Zabaleta, Terry, Lescott, Bridge; De Jong, Barry; Ireland, Tevez, Robinho; Santa Cruz
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article6719010.ece
From The Sunday Times July 19, 2009
Manchester City set to break wage record Nick Harris
MANCHESTER CITY’S Middle Eastern owners are ready to spend more than a billion dollars (£610m) on transfer fees and wage commitments in their first year in control. The expenditure will be the biggest one-year spend on new players by any sports club in the world.
City are also prepared to saddle themselves with the largest annual wage bill for a first-team squad in English football history, reaching £120m-plus if they sign all their top targets this summer.
The combined transfer fees of the 14 players signed by the manager, Mark Hughes, since the Abu Dhabi United Group arrived at Eastlands last summer, plus the potential outlay in wages over the lengths of those players’ contracts, already amount to £455m. That is certain to increase, perhaps by as much as £200m, within weeks.
City’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, has said the club will buy up to six players this summer. With Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor and Carlos Tevez signed, City’s wish list comprises the defenders John Terry and Joleon Lescott. They could cost between £20m and £40m each, plus £20m to £75m per man in wage commitments. If City fail to sign them, other high-class players will be considered.
City’s spending should comfortably outstrip the spree under way at Real Madrid, which has included the capture of Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka. The Spanish giants are expected to spend about £500m between this summer and next on players and wages. The previous one-year spending record in English football was by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea in the Russian’s first year in charge between July 2003 and June 2004.
The biggest wage bill recorded so far in English football was Chelsea’s for 2007-08. The headline figure was £172m but after deductions for managerial payoffs (£23m) and non-first-team staff (about £30m), the first-team squad bill was £119m. City’s wage bill is about £101m and can be expected to rise above £120m with more expensive signings imminent.
1 Manchester City 08/08 to 07/09
Top three signings
Robinho fee £32.5m, wages £41.6m, total £74.1m
Carlos Tevez £25m, £39m, £64m
Roque Santa Cruz £17.5m, £20.8m, £38.3m
Spending so far £455m
Projected £600m-plus
2 Chelsea 07/03 to 06/04
Hernan Crespo £16.8m, £18.7m, £35.5m
Damien Duff £17m, £18.2m, £35.2m
Juan Veron £15m, £18.7m, £33.7m
Spending £400m
3 Real Madrid 06/09 to 05/10
Cristiano Ronaldo £80m, £110m, £190m
Kaka £56m, £60m, £116m
Karim Benzema £30m, £40m, £70m
Spending so far £376m
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/manchester_city/article6719024.ece
Of course putting it in dollars, does make it sound more dramatic!
Sunday Times - Jonathan Northcroft
Manchester City's billion-dollar team still work in progress
There seems no end to the costliest splurge in football from the wealthy Arab owners of the Premier League side
He had no accreditation and claimed to work for an obscure south Manchester paper. The game was up when he produced his camera phone and snapped himself hugging Carlos Tevez’s unctuous adviser, Kia Joorabchian. The fan who gatecrashed Tevez’s unveiling as a Manchester City player was ejected, though not before he hit Mark Hughes with the question City supporters are now daring to ask: “Are we going to challenge the top four?”
The entire Premier League will be interested in the answer to that one and Hughes’s response — “we will aim to do as well as possible” — was a futile attempt to leaven expectation. Sheikh Mansour could plug one of his oil wells with his finger more easily than Hughes can staunch the hype gushing around his club with a few words. Mansour’s takeover last August had City hailed as “the new force in football”; two transfer windows on, they look ready to meet that billing.
Does Tevez feel he can add further Premier League and Champions League winners’ medals to his collection? “If I didn’t think City would win titles, I could have stayed at home with my daughters,” growled the Argentinian.
Should Hughes succeed in his bold yet shrewdly conducted pursuit of John Terry, that would blow all else out of the water but, so far, amid the manager’s fantasy football transfer spree, the capture of Tevez has excited City’s following most.
And that is down to more than the striker choosing their club over Manchester United. When the chauffeured saloon delivering Tevez pulled up outside Eastlands, mobbing fans beat on its roof and danced in its wake as if they were jihadists. Tevez is a player who signifies fight, the guerrilla spirit, the battle. He shirks from nothing, not even an argument with Sir Alex Ferguson.
The United manager complained that Tevez did not answer his calls when he sought to persuade the player to stay. “My phone was off. I was on holiday,” said Tevez with a sardonic chuckle. “I left United because he didn’t want me. Everyone knows that. I didn’t leave United because I wanted to, Alex gave me all the reasons to leave.”
And they were? “Many reasons. After I scored against Liverpool [in United’s 2-1 defeat at Anfield last September], a lot of things changed. I didn’t play any more, no derbies, no classicos. That goal was the last time I played an important role. I was there for two years and Alex never gave me an explanation for taking me out of the first XI so after Rome [the Champions League final] it was too late. You’re not going to get interested after two years.”
Will he shake Ferguson’s hand when they meet at the first Manchester derby of the season? “I don’t know.”
Hughes needed fighters. The personalities of the players he has recruited, as much as their (undoubted) abilities and (exorbitant) costs, mean City should now be taken seriously as a football force. Initially, after Mansour’s buyout, they were like a trifle, rich but wobbly. Hughes has set about changing that, buying types who will give his team a proper foundation. He said upon signing Gareth Barry, to kick off his summer transfer business, that City had made “too many mistakes” down the years in signing the wrong characters and from now on “due diligence” would be done. Shaun Wright-Phillips brought up the issue last season when trying to explain how City were winners of the second-highest number of home games in the Premier League and yet possessors of the worst away record of all the non-relegated sides. “The basis of everything is hard work. That’s the side of things we’re trying to get right,” he said.
Barry is a mature, determined footballer, officer material. Roque Santa Cruz, his mettle already tested by Hughes at Blackburn, is tough mentally and physically, even if, like a Paraguayan Duncan Ferguson, those attributes do not prevent him being prone to injuries.
The anger of Arsenal fans towards Emmanuel Adebayor is understandable, for he let them down badly last season, but his move to Eastlands, confirmed yesterday, could prove an important signing. When his head is right, the Togolese forward can take the game to the very best defences (as his Champions League record suggests) with impressive bravery and force. Hughes, the only manager to find the key to Craig Bellamy, is a specialist at getting the heads of strikers right.
You do not, though, go from feckless to fearless overnight. Under Sven-Göran Eriksson and stretching back through the decades, City have been a soft-centred team. Hughes needed time to change that. He began last summer by hiring Wright-Phillips, Vincent Kompany and Tevez’s feisty compatriot, Pablo Zabaleta, and later added Bellamy, Shay Given and Wayne Bridge, seasoned Premier League pros, as well as the combative and team-oriented Nigel De Jong. Terry would boost City’s “cojones” quotient further and Joleon Lescott, for whom a £15m bid was rejected by Everton on Friday, is also made of the right stuff. Even if Hughes gets neither, what he next wants is known: two centre-backs of Terry and Lescott’s standard and type.
A squad is taking shape based not around trophy acquisitions but solid talents with solid personalities, which is not what we expected when their spree began with the arrival of Robinho during Mansour’s first few hours as owner and then continued with the quixotic pursuit of Kaka. Brilliant as the Brazilian midfielder is, City were proposing to spend £240m in fees and wages to get him and Hughes’s subsequent use of that money seems much more suitable for a club in the building process: Tevez, Barry and Santa Cruz cost £140m in fees and wages; Bridge, De Jong and Given £100m the window before. Tevez, Barry, De Jong, Given, Wright-Phillips, Bridge, Kompany, Zabaleta — and, when fit, Santa Cruz and Bellamy — these are players guaranteed to stand toe-to-toe against United and to stride out at Anfield, Stamford Bridge and the Emirates stadium without fear. They will also sweat for the jersey on tough away days at Portsmouth and Stoke.
Top four? Well, City have a deeper squad than that of Arsenal, the member of the Premier League’s oligarchy they would be most likely to supplant. We will know more once Hughes’s defensive signings are made. Without improving at the back, City will gain only limited yields from their new battery of forwards.
Goals, indeed, were not last season’s problem. In the League, City’s scoring total was the best outside the top four but they conceded 50 times, distinctly bottom-half-of-the-table material.
Some have wondered why Hughes wants Santa Cruz and Adebayor, Tevez and Robinho. They miss the point United ought to have hammered into everyone — that the best squads win the biggest prizes in football. Hughes wants alternatives in each position within a system that is starting to take shape: back four, two holding players, big striker, three other attacking players deployed according to requirements.
That blueprint has benefited Chelsea since Jose Mourinho produced it and Mourinho’s revolution remains the example for Hughes to follow. Chelsea, after a false start to the Abramovich era in which fripperies such as Hernan Crespo, Juan Veron and Adrian Mutu were acquired, knuckled down under Mourinho with players combining toughness and talent. Hughes is taking City in that direction and the journey can take them right to the top.
Changing faces
Stephen Ireland is the only player from a year ago who is likely to make City’s starting line-up next month
v EB Streymur
First game of 2008-09 season (4-4-2): Hart; Onuoha, Dunne, Richards, Ball; Johnson, Hamann, Ireland, Petrov; Jo, Vassell
v Blackburn
Possible team to start 2009-10 campaign (4-2-3-1) Given; Zabaleta, Terry, Lescott, Bridge; De Jong, Barry; Ireland, Tevez, Robinho; Santa Cruz
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article6719010.ece
From The Sunday Times July 19, 2009
Manchester City set to break wage record Nick Harris
MANCHESTER CITY’S Middle Eastern owners are ready to spend more than a billion dollars (£610m) on transfer fees and wage commitments in their first year in control. The expenditure will be the biggest one-year spend on new players by any sports club in the world.
City are also prepared to saddle themselves with the largest annual wage bill for a first-team squad in English football history, reaching £120m-plus if they sign all their top targets this summer.
The combined transfer fees of the 14 players signed by the manager, Mark Hughes, since the Abu Dhabi United Group arrived at Eastlands last summer, plus the potential outlay in wages over the lengths of those players’ contracts, already amount to £455m. That is certain to increase, perhaps by as much as £200m, within weeks.
City’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, has said the club will buy up to six players this summer. With Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor and Carlos Tevez signed, City’s wish list comprises the defenders John Terry and Joleon Lescott. They could cost between £20m and £40m each, plus £20m to £75m per man in wage commitments. If City fail to sign them, other high-class players will be considered.
City’s spending should comfortably outstrip the spree under way at Real Madrid, which has included the capture of Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka. The Spanish giants are expected to spend about £500m between this summer and next on players and wages. The previous one-year spending record in English football was by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea in the Russian’s first year in charge between July 2003 and June 2004.
The biggest wage bill recorded so far in English football was Chelsea’s for 2007-08. The headline figure was £172m but after deductions for managerial payoffs (£23m) and non-first-team staff (about £30m), the first-team squad bill was £119m. City’s wage bill is about £101m and can be expected to rise above £120m with more expensive signings imminent.
1 Manchester City 08/08 to 07/09
Top three signings
Robinho fee £32.5m, wages £41.6m, total £74.1m
Carlos Tevez £25m, £39m, £64m
Roque Santa Cruz £17.5m, £20.8m, £38.3m
Spending so far £455m
Projected £600m-plus
2 Chelsea 07/03 to 06/04
Hernan Crespo £16.8m, £18.7m, £35.5m
Damien Duff £17m, £18.2m, £35.2m
Juan Veron £15m, £18.7m, £33.7m
Spending £400m
3 Real Madrid 06/09 to 05/10
Cristiano Ronaldo £80m, £110m, £190m
Kaka £56m, £60m, £116m
Karim Benzema £30m, £40m, £70m
Spending so far £376m
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/manchester_city/article6719024.ece