ALL YOURS, JOSE

City pull out of Sanchez bidding war

Manchester city have pulled out of signing alexis sanchez, leaving the way clear for him to join Manchester United on a deal worth £350,000 a week.

city’s top brass discussed the deal yesterday and decided the arsenal striker wanted too much money. his demands would have made him city’s highest paid player. Pep Guardiola supports the decision to withdraw.

United will have to pay £20million to arsenal plus £15m to sanchez’s agent.

chelsea have also asked about his terms and cannot be ruled out, although they are behind United. they are looking for a striker but can’t agree a fee for West ham’s andy carroll. sanchez has told friends he expects to join Jose Mourinho’s United, where the no 7 shirt has been earmarked for him.

arsenal are keen on taking a player from United, but henrikh Mkhitaryan is reluctant to accept the move and United refuse to sell anthony Martial.

arsenal are also trying to sign Bordeaux winger Malcom for £45m.

IF AleXIS SAnCHeZ signs for Manchester United, his agent is believed to receive upwards of £10million. And fair enough, he deserves it. Seriously, he does.

There is a lot of unwarranted equivalency in football. Agent bonuses set against the paltry £ 200,000 it will take to keep Hartlepool afloat this month. Yet Sanchez’s adviser isn’t the reason Hartlepool are going skint.

We all know why Hartlepool are going skint. If Fernando Felicevich delivers his client to Old Trafford, however, he will be worth every cent of United’s generous reward.

Consider it. He will have made a transfer happen that few believed possible. He will have diverted a player from the club of his choice to a presently inferior rival. He will have persuaded him not to reunite with a coach he plainly admires to sign for one whose reputation is of difficulty. He will have earned Arsenal more than they expected this January; he will have beaten Manchester City in the transfer market.

Of course he is worth 10 million. He has brought genuine value to his role in this transaction. It wouldn’t have been possible without him.

Middle man Felicevich is an Argentine with a background in advertising and a long-standing relationship with Sanchez, whom he met as a teenager with Cobreloa, in the Chilean mining town, Calama.

He has done all of Sanchez’s deals to date and Forbes estimated his earnings in 2017 as roughly £13.5m.

So this is the big one. Some sources have Felicevich’s cut of Sanchez to United as nearer £15m. Again, it is earned. When United first entered the Sanchez race it was thought an exercise in futility. A late, doomed attempt to prevent City’s superiority increasing. Already 12 points clear in the title race, already win- ners at Old Trafford this season, City were now going to embarrass United in the arena it was thought they owned: the marketplace.

Say United outbid them, offered a better contract, and Sanchez just smiled politely and declined, what would that say about the balance of power in Manchester? Sir Alex Ferguson won the last head-to-head for another Arsenal forward, Robin van Persie — the transfer that ultimately precipitated the exit of Roberto Mancini at City — but to lose this one now would confirm Jose Mourinho’s worst fears about the diminishing status of the club.

If Felicevich gave Sanchez (right) the slightest encouragement to sign for City, there is no doubt what would happen. The player trusts him after conducting his transfers to Udinese,

Barcelona and Arsenal. Were Felicevich to advise him just to wait until he is a free agent in the summer, and sign for Pep Guardiola, he would.

Even after Sunday’s defeat, City remains the place to be. They are still the likely champions, Guardiola still coaching the most ambitious football in the country. And while others have questioned where Sanchez would fit in, Guardiola clearly has plans for him.

WHETHER forcing a move to City now, or waiting patiently for the door to open later, the current state of English football makes it a very attractive move.

By contrast, United need to be sold to players, certainly more than previously. They are second in the league, but the margin to the top is significant.

In a recent head-to-head meeting with City, United appeared markedly inferior — and the position of the manager is not as stable, with frequent speculation about Mourinho’s future and that famously difficult third season ahead.

Meanwhile, if City’s front line is crowded, United’s is even more so: Romelu Lukaku, Anthony Martial, Marcus Rashford and Zlatan Ibrahimovic all battling for No 9, Juan Mata, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Jesse Lingard and even Paul Pogba or Marouane Fellaini with claims to be played just behind.

Sanchez is a great player — but nobody just breezes into this United team. It is very strong. Mourinho cannot make any more promises than Guardiola. This is where Felicevich comes in.

If he gets Sanchez to accept plan B, if he succeeds in making the deal about money and the instant gratification of a January exit from Arsenal — the two aces in United’s hand — then he has done an excellent job for the buyer, just as Mino Raiola did, when persuading Pogba to sign for a club offering only Europa League football in his first season.

Raiola’s cut of that deal was £41.39m — £ 22.8m from the transfer fee, £16.39m in other fees and £ 2.2m from Pogba — but again, from United’s point of view, whatever they paid Raiola was value. Pogba had other options, in France, in Spain, clubs that could as good as guarantee success and Champions League football. He steered his client towards United.

His slice may seem obscene, but so are a lot of business fees and bonuses, if context is removed.

Pogba is an athlete whose worth to his employer is measured in hundreds of millions; so what his employer will pay to facilitate his arrival is measured in tens. Put like that, it appears proportionate.

And yes, £200,000 needed at Hartlepool by Thursday week. Yet this is a club existing on average gates of 3,385, that first tried to persuade the council to buy their ground in 1977, and in the days before automatic relegation — so long before the rise of the agents — applied for re- election to the fourth tier a record 11 times, four more than any other club.

So let’s not pretend. If Sanchez signs for United, the millions that make up Felicevich’s bonus will be money well spent. Sadly, that is more than can be said for what slides slowly down the drain at places like

Hartlepool.