CITY SPECIAL Blues needed to spend big on full-backs
A MYTH has grown up around City’s summer transfer spending.
If you spend any time on social media – and I don’t recommend it – you might be left with the impression that the Blues have vacuumed up every available full-back on the planet, in some shadowy, Smershstyle scheme to deprive everyone else of a complete defence.
The purchase of Benjamin Mendy, Kyle Walker and Danilo has come at a big price – around £125m – but it was a price that needed to be paid to make the Blues title contenders once more.
And you might be forgiven for thinking that City now have a vast, unwieldy squad, an impression aided by the insistence of hosting clubs to list, on the back of their matchday programmes, every player who has actually seen the inside of the Etihad Stadium.
But the fact is that the Blues, if you don’t include the under-21 fringe players who swell the ranks of every club, have a basic 23 players from which they are choosing matchday squads – or 24 if you accept that Eliaquim Mangala has worked his way back into contention.
And when you look at the fullback position, they have just three, which is one less than they had three months ago!
With just two weeks to go until they have to submit their 25-man squads for the Premier League and Champions League, City have two vacant slots in their overseas quota.
That is not including Mangala, Samir Nasri, Jason Denayer and Wilfried Bony, all of whom have been priced up and ready to be shipped out since the start of the summer window.
In terms of numbers, City have brought in five players for the first team squad, and moved out NINE this summer.
If they can still off-load Mangala, Nasri, Bony, Denayer and homegrown Fabian Delph, it will represent a considerable reduction on their expenditure on salaries – and free up more cash for any moves for Alexis Sanchez or Kylian Mbappe.
The club has consistently driven down its basic wage bills over the last five years, introducing bonusbased salaries in 2014.
Such relative parsimony does not fit with the consensus of opinion about “oil-rich” and “mega-bucks” City, who actually have the fourth highest wage bill in the Premier League, behind United, Chelsea and Liverpool, and are only a few million ahead of prudent old Arsenal.
That trend towards cutting their cloth appears to have continued this summer, with Pep Guardiola apparently happy to work with just three full-backs, having got Pablo Zabaleta, Bacary Sagna, Aleks Kolarov and Gael Clichy off the payroll.
With Yaya Toure – who had been the top earner alongside Sergio Aguero – also seemingly accepting a sizeable pay cut when he agreed a new one-year deal, the bar has also been lowered.
That consistent trimming of the wage bill is one factor behind City’s ability to spend such a large sum this summer – although Guardiola has described that world record spend as exceptional, and only necessary due to the fact that the club had not invested money in their full-backs for six years.