£54m Walker fee is crazy, but at least City didn’t play the loan system
Don’t look back in anger over Mo
KYLE WALKER is, by popular consent, nobody’s idea of the world’s best defender. When Danny rose was fit, Walker probably wasn’t even the best full back at Tottenham. Nor is he the finest footballer this country has produced. Walker wouldn’t make the top 500 on most lists and, in previous eras, wouldn’t have been england’s regular right back. He wouldn’t have got in ahead of Gary Neville or Phil Neal in recent years, that’s for certain.
His transfer fee, however, suggests greatness. Unsurprisingly, then, his £54million transfer to Manchester City is being interpreted as a sign of the madness at the heart of the english game. There is another way of looking at it. That, as ludicrous as Walker’s fee may be, at least City paid it. at least the owners pulled out a chequebook and made Walker their player, permanently. They didn’t balk at the transfer outlay, the wages, the signingon fee or an agent’s dues.
They didn’t attempt to get Walker on the cheap or on hire. They stumped up, and smiled politely as the rest of football mocked them. and some will say it is easy to look big when the owner is one of the richest men on the planet. Sheik Mansour’s patronage means City can always afford to go the extra million or 10.
yet that is true of the rest of the Premier league’s elite, too. Nobody can plead poverty anymore, not with the new television deal.
even so, when West Ham went to Manchester City to negotiate a deal for Joe Hart, they did not want permanence. They wanted a loan. a year or so, and then see. and Hart is not a young player whose career path could go either way.
He’s a 30-year-old with 71 england caps. There is nothing about Hart that a buyer cannot know. So, as West Ham want a goalkeeper and City want to sell, why a temporary move? Doing it this way takes Hart out of West Ham’s team for two matches, minimum, this season.
Why would any ambitious club suffer that? Because it’s cheap. West Ham want City to pick up some of Hart’s salary, and they don’t want to pay a loan fee. But loans were not supposed to be about bargain basement trading.
loans were introduced to provide emergency cover in unique situations. Injuries to every striker at the club, for instance.
loans were a way of showing mercy and avoiding the financial waste of buying a permanent player to cover a temporary situation. loans were a compromise solution.
Over time, loans have evolved to be a way of giving young players experience — although this has stunted development as much as encouraged it, and led to clubs such as Chelsea using their academy as little more than an additional revenue stream. CRYSTAL PALACE, Huddersfield and Swansea are among those who will benefit from Chelsea’s largesse in leasing them players this season, while Watford and Bournemouth have now gone on to buy players that were previously on loan from Stamford Bridge.
It is a trading arm of the business, helping to finance a first team that is wholly imported. Without the loan system, Chelsea would have to give their young players experience themselves.
So it is flawed, but at least there is some benefit from the policy.
young players might no longer get a break at Chelsea, but at least they do somewhere. romelu lukaku has ended up at Manchester United, having first made a significant impression as a Chelsea player on loan at West Bromwich and later everton.
yet, as the Hart transfer demonstrates, the loan system has morphed into something more. emergency cover or youth development are no longer the motivations. We have been hoodwinked into thinking this is how small clubs catch a break, but look at the size and wealth of some of the clubs in the loan market.
any Premier league club is among the top 50 brands in football. They shouldn’t need loans to survive.
Not that it is greatly better in europe. Moussa Sissoko, previously Walker’s team-mate at Tottenham, is in limbo because Daniel levy wants him off the books — having paid Newcastle £30m last season — but Marseille want a loan deal.
This is a big club, or certainly a club that considers itself big. and they can’t afford a Tottenham reserve?
Without doubt, loans add to the feeling of intransigence in the modern game. The idea that players, managers, even some owners and executives, are little more than passing through. and what chance do young players have when a club can simply hire internationals?
last week Bayern Munich, one of the richest clubs in the world, took James rodriguez (below) from real Madrid on a two-season loan.
They immediately put shirts with his name and number 11 on sale, and they sold out within two days. Munich confirmed they reserve the right to buy him when his loan ends. yet, why not now? One look at Munich’s commercial partners is a clue to their size. T- Mobile, adidas, audi, lufthansa, allianz, Siemens, DHl. This is the power
house football club
in the powerhouse european economy and they will only get bigger now Munich have helped ensure the traditional elite get an even bigger slice of champions League earnings.
Yet, despite this, they can’t buy a player who was the star of the 2014 world cup, and whose transfer to Madrid was the fourth biggest in history. They can’t afford that pedigree, or perhaps they prefer to cleverly work around what remains of financial fair play — a carve-up they helped create.
Munich are quite possibly the biggest snobs in europe, much given to lecturing their rivals — particularly the newly rich — on business ethics.
Yet when it comes to James, they are quite happy to run their shop with another club’s stock. They’re working the system, or maybe they’re just not as big as they think; or as big as Manchester city. SIR MO FARAH went to a U2 gig last week and, as often happens in the world of celebrity, felt the need to tweet a photograph of himself with a person he’d clearly never met before, simply because they are both famous. ‘Chilling with my boy Liam Gallagher,’ wrote Farah. Except, as the picture clearly showed, his ‘boy’ wasn’t Liam Gallagher, but his brother Noel. Now, we can all laugh at what was simply a case of mistaken identity, but imagine a slightly different scenario. Say the athlete was a white guy and his ‘boy’ was a black pop star. Say he got him confused with another black pop star, maybe even his brother. Hey presto, race storm. All manner of significance would be read into the failure to distinguish between two black faces, not to mention the unfortunate use of the word ‘boy’. In January 2015, Charlie Nicholas confused Fernando and Fernandinho of Manchester City while describing a goal live on air. He confessed he couldn’t see the shirt number of the scorer and it was hard, in real time, to tell them apart. Social media erupted — when doesn’t it — and Sky buckled and apologised. Fernando and Fernandinho are tall, slim, black men, with close cropped hair, playing in central midfield and wearing identical kit. In action, they’re hard to call. So were Thomas Gravesen and Lee Carsley at Everton. So are the Brownlee brothers. We need to lighten up about this stuff. Fortunately, Farah got away with nothing more than looking a little daft. We all need room to make innocent mistakes.