Paying Sanchez a fortune to play elsewhere sums up United’s folly
Such has been the Chilean’s decline that his wages while on loan at Inter Milan will be subsided by £175,000 a week from a club short of senior strikers
Alexis Sanchez’s best moment at Manchester United? Hard to say, but coming in from the left side and then finishing with a flourish on the piano the club put at his disposal shortly after his arrival stands out as arguably his most memorable performance. His five goals for United may, over time, fade from the collective mind, but it will be difficult to forget the expression of a man sitting in his football kit pretending to play a piano and rightly wondering whether this might one day come back to haunt him.
It will cost United £175,000 a week this season for Sanchez not to play for them. Sanchez-not-playing would be the highest earner at just about every club outside the Premier League’s top six. To reiterate: that is £175,000 a week, supplementing his Inter Milan salary for the next 10 months, to
have him in another league, in another country, rather than at a club who have already sold one senior striker without replacing him.
It is more than the combined wages of Aaron Wan-bissaka and Daniel James to get Sanchez out of the picture. £175,000 is enough to buy a top-of-the range, concertstandard Steinway Model D grand piano every week, with some left over. It makes you wonder: how bad has it got?
There has been no steeper falling away of form, confidence and general effectiveness than that which has beset Sanchez in the months after his move to United from Arsenal in January last year. Jamie Carragher’s comparison with Chelsea’s £50 million splurge of Fernando Torres in January 2011 comes to mind, when the senior players in the Anfield dressing room wondered whether the striker’s new club had been paying attention to his form in the previous 12 months. Sanchez did not end his Arsenal days in peak form but, even so, this crash has been huge.
Torres’s dwindling form was a problem at Chelsea for a long time. It was among the first questions Jose Mourinho was asked when he returned to the club more than two years later in 2013. Torres did, however, play 172 games for Chelsea, score 45 goals and win the Champions League, Europa League and the FA Cup, even if he played a less central role in those successes than was first anticipated.
Sanchez scored more goals for Chile last season than he did for United. He has barely won a corner for them, let alone a trophy.
Injuries, confidence, something else in his life – one day, the picture will be much clearer as to why – but for now it is hard not to stand and stare in disbelief at the gigantic folly of it all. What happened to him? The highest wage-earner in United’s history shifted out in the last week of the transfer window at extraordinary cost by a club who would rather take the chance on three strikers with 65 career Premier League goals between them. Which is only two more than Sanchez has scored in six seasons in England.
That January of last year, with Manchester City unwilling to commit to Sanchez’s demands and Ed Woodward, United’s executive vice-chairman, approaching a familiar Mourinho third-season death spiral, prompted some wild decisions at Old Trafford.
The temptation must have been the player-swap with Henrikh Mkhitaryan that spared them a transfer fee and then they swallowed hard and signed up to Sanchez’s wages. How much more of the three years will they be paying at least part of them? How many monthly salary spreadsheets with the line: £700,000 for Sanchez-not-playing?
The “untransferables”. There are more of them about than in recent years, those for whom the contract has long outlasted the effectiveness. Wages too large for anyone but the most big-name hungry of Chinese Super League teams to countenance, a contractual misjudgment in a pair of football boots. You might say the same of Mesut Ozil at Arsenal, not even on the bench against Liverpool on Saturday, and one half of the double act with Sanchez that held the former regime at the Emirates to ransom two seasons ago.
It could have been worse for Arsenal: their offer of a new deal to Sanchez could have been accepted.
As it is, they have Mkhitaryan, another of the untransferables, contracted until the end of next season and also gradually fading out of the first-team picture at Arsenal.
At Chelsea, it is Danny Drinkwater, on loan at Burnley, where his wages are being supplemented, and Tiemoue Bakayoko, soon to be similarly outsourced to Monaco, from where Chelsea signed him two years ago. There is a place for these players lower down the hierarchy, but their wages and the fees paid for them make any transfer unrealistic, so they are obliged to exist between the two worlds, a mid-table footballer on Champions League wages.
One wonders how soon the same fate will befall United’s Brazilian midfielder Fred, a £55 million signing one year ago and sufficiently mediocre to be the subject this week of an
£18 million bid from Fiorentina.
United cannot be seen to entertain bids that low. Another year and they might change their minds.
At Liverpool, Daniel Sturridge sat out the last years of his contract long after he had lost the first-choice status he had when he signed it in October 2014. By the time he reached the end, the market-value correction was huge: European champions to Trabzonspor, fourth in the Turkish Super Lig last season. It is a long way down.
Perhaps it is why Daniel Levy may hesitate to offer Christian Eriksen another deal at 27 as his Tottenham Hotspur contract runs down. It may yet be better to lose him for nothing than pay for five more years of a player whom, for all his talents, has so far not tempted a single top European club to pay what Spurs are asking. It is one thing to pay huge salaries to fading talents, it is – as United are discovering – quite another to spend years paying someone else to get a tune out of them.