Has the world gone totally Kakas?
So where’s the credit crunch now? According to today’s papers, Manchester City are willing to pay double the world transfer record and pay £100 million to bring Brazilian international Kaka to Eastlands. That would rate one player as costing more than every other Premiership club’s squad and indeed more than over half the squads added together. Has the football world gone mad?
What does this do for English football? Does money bring success? Certainly Russian millions took Chelsea from being better than average to almost world beaters. But the advantages of Roman’s roubles haven’t beaten Sir Alex’s wiles, nor shown an overwhelming advantage over Arsene’s development policies (this season excepted). City manager Mark Hughes has seen the squad boosted by the arrival of Robinho, Jo, Shaun Wright-Phillips and this week Wayne Bridge for a total of over £70 million. Sheikh Mansour’s City takeover at the end of August brought delight to the blue side of Manchester, as their years of playing poor cousin to their Old Trafford neighbours seemed to be coming to an end. Yet they are languishing just above the Premier League’s relegation places. There must be fears in Eastlands that far from being the next Chelsea, City may become the next Leeds United.
Italian Prime Minister and AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi isn’t short of a bob or two, but he’s hardly in the same financial league as the consortium that bought City. Berlusconi sees Kaka as a trophy in his own right for Milan, although that must have taken a knock when he saw Kaka finish behind the Premiership’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Fenando Torres in FIFA’s World Player of the Year earlier this week. Allowing Kaka to leave the San Siro would be a real blow to the ego of Berlusconi and would prove that even a man with his level of arrogance and pride has his price.
If Berlusconi were to feel the loss of his talisman as a kick in a painful place, such a transfer would leave Mark Hughes fearing the traditional vote of support from City’s chairman, followed by the customary knife in the back. For anyone spending almost £200 million in one year, only to see the team knocked out of both Cups and still battling for Premiership survival come April would be sure to feel as sick as the proverbial parrot. And that can only be bad news for Hughes.
However Hughes’ misfortune would be good news for the game. It would prove that a club is more than just the wealth of the chairman and his friends and that a team cannot be substituted by an All-Stars 11. Bad news for billionaires, but good news for the game.
Related posts:
- England beat Germany to win World Cup – and on penalties too!
- Infidelity is the new metatarsal
- Paddy looking for a mirage in the sand of the sheikh
Comments
14 January 2009, 5:43 pm
“That would rate one player as costing more than every other Premiership club’s squad and indeed more than over half the squads added together.
Hmm, citation please (!) – especially for the first part. ManUSA’s squad cost far, far more than £100m. To name but some of the current squad:
Rooney – £27m
Rio – £30m
Ronaldo – £13m
Nani & Anderson – £30m
Hargreaves – £25m+
Berbatov – £30m
Carrick – £17m
By my poor mental arithmatic that makes £172m on just eight players. Tevez (if they ever sign him) would take them over £200m.
Dodgy billionaire playboys buying English clubs does, in the short run at least, place English football at an advantage – in so much as clubs located in England subsequently do better in pan-European competitions.
The negative effects are that these clubs cease to be clubs – and instead become playthings of kleptocrats. There is no Chelsea club anymore – there are no shareholders, no supporters’ trust – decision-making is entirely concentrated in one man. It’s his toy, he can do what he want (such as sack Mourinho).
I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep us in shared ownership.
(Regarding Mark Hughes, I wrote this post a week or so ago)