Post by Macmoish on Sept 1, 2010 7:28:40 GMT
Guardian/Paul Hayward
Manchester City pay for their expensive taste and excessive waste
Those Eastlands spendthrifts break the trend of a new realism as the Premier League transfer window closes
Robinho, Manchester City to Milan Robinho left no pool of perspiration at Eastlands when he moved from Manchester City to Italy. Photograph: Joe Giddens/Empics Sports
More compelling than Manchester City's lavish buys were the crashingly expensive errors they tried to correct in this transfer window: chiefly, that deadline-day thespian, Robinho, who has bounced between Real Madrid, City and now Milan inside two years, and left no pool of perspiration at Eastlands when he moved to Italy.
While the gaze was locked on David Silva, Jérôme Boateng, Yaya Touré, James Milner, Mario Balotelli and Aleksandar Kolarov as they pushed City's new wage commitments to £488m, the purge of other recent acquisitions pointed to a problem only the sky blue half of Manchester could afford to solve without recourse to Valium. In the downturn other Premier League high-spenders focused their energies on shedding players whose inflated transfer fees felt onerous and whose high wages have rendered them hard to move on.
Liverpool's Alberto Aquilani, bought for £20m to replace the superior Xabi Alonso, was dispatched on loan to Juventus to conceal the reality that he was the worst piece of business in the Rafa Benítez years. So frantic were Liverpool to correct that booboo that they rushed Aquilani off the wage bill for a year and will not know whether the £20m transfer fee is recoverable until the Old Lady of Turin has seen him play.
Across the league there is a platinum club of names who were big enough for long enough for agents to secure mega-deals that their clubs are still manacled to. Among those who might have been on the move at 6pm had their employers been able to persuade their rivals to assume the high salary costs were Newcastle's Xisco (a dud, reportedly on £55,000 a week), Nigel Reo-Coker (Aston Villa) and David Bentley, Robbie Keane and Roman Pavlyuchenko of Spurs. Bentley was wanted by Fulham, but only as a loanee.
These beneficiaries of the boom years pre-date the new realism, in which only Manchester City still embrace the rampant expansionism that turned the Premier League into the banking system's love child. But with each acquisition by the Abu Dhabi United Group comes the dumping of a player bought in previous years with the same ostentation that took Silva and Balotelli to the north-west, Robinho was Abu Dhabi's crash course in football's celebrity economics.
Hoping to sign for Chelsea in the final hours of 2008's deadline dash, he was presented by City as a "signal of our very real intent", which, if true, meant that Sheikh Mansour – who attended his first game at Eastlands only a week ago – was "intent" on doling out £34.2m for people who rather would have joined Chelsea and whose indolence in some matches must have tempted the coaching staff to check him for a pulse.
Emmanuel Adebayor remains at City by default, because Roberto Mancini failed in his reported mission to snatch Fernando Torres from Liverpool (City deny they pursued the striker) and needs him as back up to Carlos Tevez. But the Adebayor-City love affair was painfully brief. Cumulatively he and Robinho cost City £54m in transfer fees alone and Mancini would surely have ditched Adebayor had there been a suitor willing or able to match his "personal terms", aka exorbitant demands, a phrase that surfaced when Charles N'Zogbia's agreed move from Wigan to Birmingham fell through.
Fully driven out of City were Craig Bellamy, exiled to Cardiff City, a full division below, and Stephen Ireland, an academy boy who left complaining about the smashing of City's greenhouse. The club have pushed out figures showing a £4.5m spend on the first team's Carrington training ground, £3.7m invested at the Platt Lane academy and an 80-acre land purchase at Openshaw West, where the whole operation will end up. The party line is City will one day function like Arsenal or United, buying top young talent (Boateng is a prime example) and cultivating their own.
This summer, though, a trawler net was thrown over players one tier down from household name. City also hired a 16-year-old winger from Swindon Town (Alex Henshall) and an 18-year-old called Albert, who turns out not to be from Moss Side. Albert Rusnak is a Slovakian signed from MFK Kosice.
Acknowledging the futility of fighting a dollar-war with the boyish Sheikh Mansour, Chelsea, Arsenal and United turned inwards, to youth, to potential, and hoped that scattergun extravagance would be City's downfall.
Each made one big-ish buy to soothe the nerves of their own players and fans. Arsenal took Marouane Chamakh, Chelsea went for Ramires and United may have landed a peach in Javier Hernández. Under Roy Hodgson, Liverpool picked up Joe Cole, Christian Poulsen and Raul Meireles (for £11.5m) in a quest for the kind of value-for-money that eluded them with Aquilani.
Further down Aston Villa lost Milner, 12 months after Gareth Barry, Stoke City raised their game with Kenwyne Jones (£8m), Everton maintained their faith in lower-league talent (Jermaine Beckford) and Sunderland successfully chased Ghana's Asamoah Gyan all the way to the chimes. This was the most exciting and exotic of the last-day moves.
Abroad, Zlatan Ibrahimovic's move to Milan was another attempt to correct a blunder, by Barcelona, who bought more scientifically this time, with David Villa and Liverpool's Javier Mascherano, while José Mourinho displayed a new taste for creativity when enticing Mesut Ozil to Real Madrid. Here in England consolidation beat conspicuous consumption, except at City, who bought into the myth of Robinho one summer, then bought their way out again two years later, not caring if anyone thought them decadent.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/aug/31/manchester-city-transfer-window
Manchester City pay for their expensive taste and excessive waste
Those Eastlands spendthrifts break the trend of a new realism as the Premier League transfer window closes
Robinho, Manchester City to Milan Robinho left no pool of perspiration at Eastlands when he moved from Manchester City to Italy. Photograph: Joe Giddens/Empics Sports
More compelling than Manchester City's lavish buys were the crashingly expensive errors they tried to correct in this transfer window: chiefly, that deadline-day thespian, Robinho, who has bounced between Real Madrid, City and now Milan inside two years, and left no pool of perspiration at Eastlands when he moved to Italy.
While the gaze was locked on David Silva, Jérôme Boateng, Yaya Touré, James Milner, Mario Balotelli and Aleksandar Kolarov as they pushed City's new wage commitments to £488m, the purge of other recent acquisitions pointed to a problem only the sky blue half of Manchester could afford to solve without recourse to Valium. In the downturn other Premier League high-spenders focused their energies on shedding players whose inflated transfer fees felt onerous and whose high wages have rendered them hard to move on.
Liverpool's Alberto Aquilani, bought for £20m to replace the superior Xabi Alonso, was dispatched on loan to Juventus to conceal the reality that he was the worst piece of business in the Rafa Benítez years. So frantic were Liverpool to correct that booboo that they rushed Aquilani off the wage bill for a year and will not know whether the £20m transfer fee is recoverable until the Old Lady of Turin has seen him play.
Across the league there is a platinum club of names who were big enough for long enough for agents to secure mega-deals that their clubs are still manacled to. Among those who might have been on the move at 6pm had their employers been able to persuade their rivals to assume the high salary costs were Newcastle's Xisco (a dud, reportedly on £55,000 a week), Nigel Reo-Coker (Aston Villa) and David Bentley, Robbie Keane and Roman Pavlyuchenko of Spurs. Bentley was wanted by Fulham, but only as a loanee.
These beneficiaries of the boom years pre-date the new realism, in which only Manchester City still embrace the rampant expansionism that turned the Premier League into the banking system's love child. But with each acquisition by the Abu Dhabi United Group comes the dumping of a player bought in previous years with the same ostentation that took Silva and Balotelli to the north-west, Robinho was Abu Dhabi's crash course in football's celebrity economics.
Hoping to sign for Chelsea in the final hours of 2008's deadline dash, he was presented by City as a "signal of our very real intent", which, if true, meant that Sheikh Mansour – who attended his first game at Eastlands only a week ago – was "intent" on doling out £34.2m for people who rather would have joined Chelsea and whose indolence in some matches must have tempted the coaching staff to check him for a pulse.
Emmanuel Adebayor remains at City by default, because Roberto Mancini failed in his reported mission to snatch Fernando Torres from Liverpool (City deny they pursued the striker) and needs him as back up to Carlos Tevez. But the Adebayor-City love affair was painfully brief. Cumulatively he and Robinho cost City £54m in transfer fees alone and Mancini would surely have ditched Adebayor had there been a suitor willing or able to match his "personal terms", aka exorbitant demands, a phrase that surfaced when Charles N'Zogbia's agreed move from Wigan to Birmingham fell through.
Fully driven out of City were Craig Bellamy, exiled to Cardiff City, a full division below, and Stephen Ireland, an academy boy who left complaining about the smashing of City's greenhouse. The club have pushed out figures showing a £4.5m spend on the first team's Carrington training ground, £3.7m invested at the Platt Lane academy and an 80-acre land purchase at Openshaw West, where the whole operation will end up. The party line is City will one day function like Arsenal or United, buying top young talent (Boateng is a prime example) and cultivating their own.
This summer, though, a trawler net was thrown over players one tier down from household name. City also hired a 16-year-old winger from Swindon Town (Alex Henshall) and an 18-year-old called Albert, who turns out not to be from Moss Side. Albert Rusnak is a Slovakian signed from MFK Kosice.
Acknowledging the futility of fighting a dollar-war with the boyish Sheikh Mansour, Chelsea, Arsenal and United turned inwards, to youth, to potential, and hoped that scattergun extravagance would be City's downfall.
Each made one big-ish buy to soothe the nerves of their own players and fans. Arsenal took Marouane Chamakh, Chelsea went for Ramires and United may have landed a peach in Javier Hernández. Under Roy Hodgson, Liverpool picked up Joe Cole, Christian Poulsen and Raul Meireles (for £11.5m) in a quest for the kind of value-for-money that eluded them with Aquilani.
Further down Aston Villa lost Milner, 12 months after Gareth Barry, Stoke City raised their game with Kenwyne Jones (£8m), Everton maintained their faith in lower-league talent (Jermaine Beckford) and Sunderland successfully chased Ghana's Asamoah Gyan all the way to the chimes. This was the most exciting and exotic of the last-day moves.
Abroad, Zlatan Ibrahimovic's move to Milan was another attempt to correct a blunder, by Barcelona, who bought more scientifically this time, with David Villa and Liverpool's Javier Mascherano, while José Mourinho displayed a new taste for creativity when enticing Mesut Ozil to Real Madrid. Here in England consolidation beat conspicuous consumption, except at City, who bought into the myth of Robinho one summer, then bought their way out again two years later, not caring if anyone thought them decadent.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/aug/31/manchester-city-transfer-window