Stan: I got a $100 cheque from my grandma, and my dad said I need to put it in a bank so it can grow over the years.
Banker: A really smart decision, young man, we can put that cheque in a money-market mutual fund and (tapping computer) we’ll reinvest the earnings into a foreign currency account with compounding interest, and . . . it’s gone.
South Park, season 13, episode 3, Margaritaville
Pretty much like running Manchester United, then. We’ll just take this £90 million, invest it in a French midfielder we let go for nothing some years previously, and . . . it’s gone. We’ll take this Brazilian in pretty much the same position, even if the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi thinks the market’s too expensive, and . . . it’s gone. We’ll buy Arsenal’s centre forward who’s been in a strop for several years and nothing’s ever his fault and . . . it’s gone.
Across ten years, just over £1 billion. Gone. And this doesn’t include bonuses for the Glazers, or their lieutenants so expertly presiding over the expenditure. The biggest net spend in football, down the tubes. In that period, more than Paris Saint-Germain, more than Chelsea, more than Barcelona. And, look, United have got it and they’ve flaunted it, and good luck to them for that. No club have spent money quite like they have since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson, but those numbers really aren’t the problem. Nor is the return, from an outsider’s perspective. Yet what do the numbers represent? That matters. Run well, United should have dominated English football through the sheer size of their revenue streams, the money they can then afford to spend and the limitations imposed around them by Financial Fair Play. That’s what the rules were intended to do. Keep the biggest on top, stifle the upstarts. When critics say United haven’t got a plan, they are talking on the field. Off the field, they’ve got a great one. They just didn’t execute it well enough.
The bang for the buck at Old Trafford has been distinctly underwhelming. Certainly, ten digits down, they would have expected to be more than the decent cup team they were when Ron Atkinson was in charge. The FA Cup; the League Cup, twice; the Europa League, across ten years. These are all decent trophies and days for celebration and Tottenham Hotspur, and many below, would certainly have settled for it. But even so: £1 billion, net. Where has it all gone? They would have wished for a few league titles, surely, or the biggest European trophy, rather than winning its feeder tournament. They would have hoped to be sitting where Manchester City are now.
And that will be the argument, while City linger in the Premier League’s dock. United spent a billion and still couldn’t keep pace with City, or their accountants. We’ll see. Yet this also ignores the fact that Leicester City, Liverpool and Chelsea won the league, and Bayern Munich won the Champions League, all in years when City fell short. Teams passed City; just not United. There was no focus, no project, no philosophy. United spent £1 billion on players. Some worked, some didn’t. Some went together, some came apart. It is hard to look at United’s squad at any time, even now, and see a strategy.
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And aren’t we lucky for that? Imagine if United had been coherently run. Imagine if that £1 billion had been put to efficient use. United would have dominated perhaps more surely than they did in Ferguson’s time. They would have swept the field aside. No one could have kept up with them. So there was a plan. It just wasn’t a plan that necessarily involved smart recruitment. It was a political plan. Financial regulation was always going to give United more money than any other club in English football but, from there, they messed up. They could spend £1 billion without falling foul of Financial Fair Play, but spent it so haphazardly they still couldn’t win the league.
United spent big on Alexis Sánchez, left, and Pogba but saw little return on investment on or off the pitch
SIMON STACPOOLE/OFFSIDE/GETTY IMAGES
It’s a near-miss for the rest, have no doubt of that. That £1 billion demonstrates the colossal power of United, and how far ahead they could be, if capably directed. They genuinely have £1 billion to waste. It has been absorbed into their numbers and only recently has there been a murmur about making the balance sheet compliant. Yet even in a summer when outlay has been restricted, United have still spent more than £160 million. And the suitors vying to buy the club know what they are getting too. The expanded Club World Cup will aid globalisation, a World Cup in the US will direct even more eyeballs towards the sport. No one contemplating football’s future envisions United getting smaller. If the Premier League ever allows clubs to negotiate individual television rights, United should run away with the league each year, as Bayern have in Germany. If they ever get it right, watch out.
Yet the plan hasn’t worked to here. Veering erratically on managers, personnel, styles of play — we are now supposed to laud a United team who barely leave their own half away from home — this enormous sum has been squandered. Fred, £52 million; Ángel Di María, £59.7 million; Jadon Sancho, £73 million; Romelu Lukaku, £75 million; Harry Maguire, £80 million; Paul Pogba, £89 million. And . . . it’s gone. Fortunately, they can afford it.
It is hard to see Jadon Sancho as anything but done at Manchester United. How can there be a way back if the sticking point for his transfer to Al-Ettifaq in Saudi Arabia was United’s wish to make the deal permanent? Steven Gerrard’s club hoped to take Sancho on loan, after his fall-out with Erik ten Hag, but United demanded a £50 million obligation to buy when that loan ended.
If this was just a deal to allow a cooling off period between player and manager, that wouldn’t happen. United wanted Sancho out, for good, and a decision like that is not made without Ten Hag’s blessing.
So this awkwardness continues, at least until January. The latest return of fire from Sancho’s side is that Ten Hag did not seek permission before talking about the player’s mental struggles during his five-month absence last season. It is plainly an attempt to overturn the narrative that Ten Hag has displayed great kindness and understanding towards Sancho during his time there. The ricochet is the leaked suggestion that team-mates had tired of Sancho’s attitude, too. This is an escalation even from the weekend when Sancho accused Ten Hag of making him a scapegoat by criticising his performances in training. That, too, was aimed at a weak spot — the belief that Ten Hag favours familiar faces from former clubs, such as Antony.
It would be wrong to say this is going to get messy, because it already has. If Sancho was willing to fly east, United should have done the temporary deal and worried about permanence later. They might have feared he wouldn’t be worth £50 million after a year in Saudi; but it’s not as if he was coming back.
If the Gary Lineker furore has forced Barbara Slater to step down from her role as the BBC’s director of sport after 14 years, it truly is a disgrace. There were so many better reasons for her to go, and so much sooner.
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Losing the rights to the Grand National; losing the rights to the Open; losing the rights to the Masters; losing the rights to Formula One; losing exclusive deals for Wimbledon, the Six Nations and, coming soon, the Olympics. Missing out on the 2019 Cricket World Cup final, which England won, the 2021 US Open women’s final, which Emma Raducanu won, and the climax of the 2021 F1 season, when Lewis Hamilton was robbed of the title — Channel 4 got its hands on all of them. In mitigation, Channel 4 could offer a cut of advertising revenue to the rights holders, which the BBC couldn’t. But isn’t that what a skilled administrator is there for: to negotiate, to surmount obstacles? Slater’s BBC is no longer seen as the natural home for sport, as it always was.
Even when the BBC did contrive to show a big event — usually the ones gifted to it by government as the “crown jewels” — Slater has presided over the rise of the studio cheerleaders, with commentators and analysts so one-eyed it is better with the sound muted. This all proliferated on her watch: the 2014 Winter Olympics snowboard event when the BBC expert’s microphone was turned off for cheering when the Austrian competitor fell and Jenny Jones of Great Britain won bronze; the 5 Live correspondent covering the women’s World Cup in 2015, who breathlessly reported: “The England team have just arrived to a big cheer — from me.”
The shift happened in Slater’s early days, having taken over the post in 2009. It has culminated in the BBC’s pitchside reporters shamelessly wearing England shirts while reporting the women’s World Cup. The Lineker debacle made the biggest headlines, but it really was the least of it.
There is a clip doing the rounds of the VAR conversation after Nathan Aké’s goal for Manchester City against Fulham last week. A bright spark has juxtaposed it with some YouTube footage of gamers playing Call of Duty. It’s strikingly similar. The same frenzy of heightened excitement, panic, voices all speaking at once, with carnage the end result. No wonder officials are getting so many big calls wrong. It would be hard to think straight in that environment, let alone make a correct judgment.
Howard Webb is admirably committed to publicly explaining some of the more contentious decisions each month, in a programme called Match Officials: Mic’d Up. Match Officials: F***ed Up would be more appropriate, and Webb is going to tire of it very soon at this rate. It isn’t so much an explainer as a catalogue of apologies. They’d call it Sorry! but Ronnie Corbett got there first.
Aké’s header was allowed to stand after a VAR check, even though Akanji appeared to be interfering with play
MIKE EGERTON/PA
Webb has an insurmountable problem because this present batch of officials isn’t good enough. Indeed, it is hard to remember a less talented bunch. How can Tony Harrington, the VAR at the City-Fulham game, not see on review that Manuel Akanji is two yards offside and his movements plainly interfere with the goalkeeper Bernd Leno’s ability to deal with Aké’s header?
Equally, two VARs, Michael Salisbury and Richard West, watched the Manchester United goalkeeper André Onana clean out Sasa Kalajdzic, of Wolverhampton Wanderers, in the area and did not see a penalty. Webb has already apologised in both instances.
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Last week Arsenal’s Kai Havertz went down under the pressure of two challenges by United players and a penalty was awarded. In the bundle it was hard to deduce the severity of the contact, but it most certainly was not a clear and obvious error, merely a debatable call. Mike Dean, on co-commentary, said so, Gary Neville agreed, yet as soon as we heard the words “VAR Jarred Gillett will have a look at it” there was the obvious potential for a random factor. So it proved. It was Gillett, at Bramall Lane the week before, who gave a very harsh penalty for handball against Sheffield United’s John Egan, which may have proved more controversial had Erling Haaland, of Manchester City, not missed it. Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, said he couldn’t understand why that was given and others very much like it were not. “We need a degree of consistency,” he argued. Yet Gillett is consistent. He’s a consistent menace, like too many of them.
Saudi Arabia’s transfer window is closed, so panic over for now. Yet next year it will pose the same threat, and every year while other countries, including Turkey and Portugal, have windows that stay open longer than ours.
And there is much debate about a solution. Persuading Fifa to align the windows globally is the main one. Yet how can that be when seasons, continent to continent, are unaligned.
Liverpool had feared that Salah would leave for Saudi Arabia after the English transfer window had closed
MATT MCNULTY/GETTY IMAGES
This year, for instance, Major League Soccer has a regular season that began on February 25 with a play-off final on December 9. How can that be adapted to a conventional European summer transfer window? The same with the J-League, which runs from February 17 to December 3. If any of these leagues took off on a European scale they would pose an enormous threat, mid-season.
Yet no one asks why we need to have a transfer window at all. It is as if memories of clubs existing quite happily before the introduction of a window in 2002-03 have been wiped from our minds.
Before then transfers could take place throughout the season until a cut-off at the start of April, to protect the integrity of the league. It stopped a club buying a competitor’s best player as the campaign reached its conclusion. And that made sense. This does not.
Why is football always so determined to embrace restraints of trade? In what other business can you not change an under-performing employee, or upgrade a department, whenever suits? The fear for Liverpool was that they could lose Mohamed Salah and, with the English window closed, would not be able to replace him. Yet that is only an issue because of self-imposed restrictions. If Liverpool had lost Salah 25 years ago, they could have sought his replacement from another club. And then that club might have bought from elsewhere. And on it went. It’s called business. There’s nothing wrong with it.
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And a club can always say no, as Liverpool did over Salah this time. No one has to sell. Not every transfer got done, pre-2002. There was still negotiation, brinkmanship and the ruses we see today, yet without a clock ticking to engender a feeling of panic, and rampant inflation. Nobody likes their best player getting poached, or having their best-laid plans disturbed, but it added to the drama and uncertainty of the season. And some managers were quite brilliant at it.
Harry Redknapp’s reputation as a wheeler-dealer was built on a pre-window penchant for starting the season with one line-up, then successfully refreshing it before Christmas once he had identified the flaws. Yet football loves red tape, and convinces itself that mere whims are irrefutable.
So no one questions the transfer window any more; even if it could have ruined Liverpool’s season the same as it might have with no restrictions at all.
“The Tories have lots to say about freedom of speech in Universities, but not in sport? I wonder why . . .” Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central posted this week.
Maybe, like her, they know which side the bread is buttered. NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing held a meeting last Tuesday, in the build up to two matches featuring Saudi Arabia’s national team being played at St James’ Park.
Lina Al-Hathloul spoke to a small group of dissenters, about the Saudi regime and her sister Loujain, a former political prisoner, who was tortured during detention and still lives under a travel ban.
Onwurah did not accept an invitation to the meeting, robustly exercising her freedom not to listen, and not to upset constituents with pesky questions about the ownership of their reborn football club.
Then Saudi Arabia’s manager, Roberto Mancini, and players were banned from speaking to the press after losing 3-1 to Costa Rica on Friday. No doubt Onwurah will be bringing up these important freedom of speech issues on her next visit to St James’ Park; or perhaps not.
