Giggs happy to fly in the face of custom
Wales manager Ryan Giggs, who spent his entire playing career at one of the richest football clubs in the world, has already demonstrated he understands the different financial situation in which he now operates.
Giggs’s first trip as Wales boss is to attend the draw tomorrow in lausanne for the new UeFa Nations league and the Fa of Wales had offered him a list of business class flight alternatives from which to choose to travel to switzerland.
But multi- millionaire Giggs, the former Manchester United great, said he was happy to take the budget airline easyJet flight from Manchester and did not need to go to the 55-country draw with a Welsh entourage in tow either.
YOU might have reasoned that when one of the other 20 cricketers outside the squad to have played 100 one-day internationals for England was there at the Sydney Cricket Ground last Sunday, he would have been the obvious choice to present Joe Root with his commemorative cap for reaching that landmark. However, when that person happens to be the banished Kevin Pietersen — working for Australia’s Channel Nine — the England management preferred to look elsewhere. Instead, they went outside the sport, opting for rugby league’s Sam Burgess (right), briefly a rugby union international too, to present Root with his 100th cap.
aRseNal’s reputation for not caving in to outrageous demands from agents is sure to be one of the reasons why the alexis sanchez-Henrikh Mkhitaryan swap deal took so long to finalise.
Mkhitaryan’s representative Mino Raiola will be looking to take around the same £10million plus as his own cut that sanchez’s agent Fernando Felicevich has received for his part in the move to Manchester United. But arsenal, who have had limited dealings with big foreign agents — probably because their most expensive buy is £52m for alexandre lacazette — will not want to pay Raiola an extortionate amount. This is the same agent who received a mind-boggling £41m when Paul Pogba joined Manchester United due to his sell-on agreement with Juventus.
Ironically, the only time arsenal are known to have agreed to excessive demands from an agent is when sanchez joined from Barcelona in 2014.
STAN KROENKE and Alisher Usmanov own 97 per cent of Arsenal between them. Nevertheless, an unknown investor yesterday paid more than £1.17million for 42 shares in the club at a cost of a record-equalling £28,000 each — a lot of money for what effectively is a vanity purchase. Kroenke paid an average £11,000 per share when he took a controlling interest in 2011 and is sitting on a £500m profit were he to sell.