United count cost as Sanchez effect sends pay through the roof
Striker’s big-money deal raised salary bar and is seen as leverage by all the players in wage talks now
Manchester City could not have predicted the dizzying extent to which Alexis Sanchez’s star would plummet, but the Premier League champions did conclude that signing the Chile striker on the money he was asking for would have obliterated their wage structure and opened a very expensive can of worms.
It was a bullet they were determined to dodge and, as they now look on from a safe distance at precisely those problems being encountered across the road, City must doubtless view the move to withdraw from the race to sign Sanchez as one of their shrewder business decisions.
Manchester United’s most pressing problem with Sanchez has, of course, been on the pitch, where a player who was supposed to provide an immediate uplift has instead become a liability, to the extent where few will have considered his current absence through injury as any particular loss. Yet the repercussions of that signing are also being very keenly felt off the field as the club begin to count the destabilising cost of his £500,000-a-week wages, a double whammy that is quickly elevating it to among the worst pieces of transfer business by a Premier League side for years.
It is hard to know how much consideration United gave to that in the rush to land Sanchez – certainly a lot less than City – but they will have a very real understanding now of what their neighbours feared.
Players and their representatives used to have a clear idea of the different pay tiers at Old Trafford, but Sanchez’s arrival has effectively taken an axe to that structure and sparked a domino effect of players demanding vastly inflated salaries. The most obvious example of that is the contract stand-off between United and goalkeeper David de Gea, who is now seeking parity with Sanchez by asking for around double his existing £240,000-a-week wages.
But there is an impact right across the board and so United are now also involved in impasses with Ander Herrera and Juan Mata, who want more than the club are willing to pay, a lot more in Herrera’s case.
Yet in the cases of De Gea and Herrera, it is hard to see how United will not end up backing down. Finding replacements is never straightforward and would almost certainly involve large transfer fees and, in the case of De Gea, there are few goalkeepers available of comparable quality.
United ended up paying Anthony Martial more than they ever envisaged when they handed him a new five-year contract in January after months of protracted talks, but that was just the start of it and, as long as Sanchez remains on the wage bill, this is a problem that will not go away. And, as the Herrera case highlights, it is not a situation confined to the biggest names. All of those different pay tiers are being hiked up.
His arrival has taken an axe to all the different pay tiers and caused a domino effect
It may be one factor behind any plans to move Sanchez on this summer, but facilitating that without huge compromises on both sides is hard to see and, besides, the damage could already have been done by then.
If Sanchez moves but De Gea ends up signing a new deal on similar money before then, United will have retained arguably the world’s best goalkeeper, but the salary ceiling will remain unchanged.
“We looked carefully at the situation and felt that if we paid Sanchez what he was asking we would have had a queue of players demanding so much more, and that presented a risk to dressing-room harmony in addition to financial concerns,” one well-placed source at City said. United are now caught between that rock and a hard place, and it is not a situation that will easily be resolved.