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Old 03-09-2014, 03:07 PM   #5
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Radamel Falcao and Angel di Maria transfers show Manchester United are panic buying with silly money

* Louis van Gaal has brought in a number of new faces at Old Trafford
* Angel di Maria signed from Real Madrid for £60million
* £14million Daley Blind arrived on deadline day from Ajax
* Juan Mata may struggle to hold down a place at United
* Luke Shaw cost £30million and isn't yet proven


It was May 14, 2012, the day after Manchester United had conceded the title to their neighbours down the road. Sir Alex Ferguson was in bullish mood.

‘We invest in young players,’ he told the gathering at the Player of the Year dinner. ‘That is what we are good at — we’re not like other clubs who can spend fortunes on proven goods. We know that Manchester City are going to pay stupid money, pay silly salaries and all that. We can’t do anything about it.

‘We concentrate on what we can do to try to bring players in for the right reasons. We invest in those who will be with the club for a long time, who will create the character of the club, who will create excitement for our fans. We are very proud of that and we are going to continue that way.’

Fair to say, then, that what we have witnessed this last year rather constitutes Plan B. Paying silly money, silly salaries, sometimes for players who shape the character of the club for little more than six months in the case of Juan Mata, currently unsure of his place in the starting line-up as forwards form an orderly queue around the block.

Youth is no longer a priority, either, and United are very much in the market for proven goods. Even when they are not, the size of the bill does not change in the case of £30million Luke Shaw, now the world’s most expensive teenager. As for the right reasons, a desperate fear of failure seems as good as any. At least United are trying to arrest their slide. It is the rhyme, the reason, that is missing.

Quote:
HOW CAN UNITED AFFORD TO PAY FOR THEIR £200M SPENDING SPREE?

Q United’s spending is up to £200m. How can they afford it?
A When the dust settles it won’t be quite as big as that. The combined transfer fees for Angel di Maria, Ander Herrera, Luke Shaw, Marcos Rojo, Vanja Milinkovic, Daley Blind and the loan fee for Radamel Falcao will total around £160m. But a few sales, including Alex Buttner, Bebe and Shinji Kagawa, will bring net spend closer to £120m.

Q Fine, but £120m is still a gob-smacking sum . . .
A United are, by far, the biggest earners in English football. The latest available full accounts, for 2012-13, showed income of £363m, and gross profit £146m, albeit before debt servicing had been applied. For 2013-14, United’s income will have been around £430m, with big profits. In 2014-15, they are expected to have total income of £500m or more, by which time they should have recaptured their title of the richest club in the world, by income, from Real Madrid and Barcelona.

Q Why has their income grown so quickly?
A Of three main revenue streams — matchday income, commercial and broadcasting — the first is stable and the other two are soaring. New deals with Chevrolet and Adidas alone will boost United’s income by £80m a year. Global commercial deals with everyone from noodle suppliers, paint manufacturers and mobile firms are booming. If it can be monetised, United are doing it. And TV cash is growing, for United more than most.

Q Aren’t profits wiped out by loan repayments for the club’s debt?
A Only to an extent. The last set of financial accounts showed annual debt-related payments were an eye-watering £71m for the year in interest, debt restructuring and repayments. That’s £1.37m a week, or £195,000 a day, or £8,127 every hour. But that still leaves tens of millions spare. That ‘spare’ sum is growing by the year. Total debt is down from around £550m back then to ‘only’ £389m and falling. United’s accounts also show there has been a ‘spare’ pot of cash of around £100m in the bank for the past few years, available to be spent. It’s being spent now.

Q Can they keep spending like this?
A They won’t be able to spend £120m net every year. The point of doing it this time is they have needed to redress the under-spending of the past few years. They also need to get back into the Champions League, which plugs them back into another revenue stream, worth £50m a year, give or take. In some ways spending now is an attempt to guarantee bigger future income.
The acquisition of Radamel Falcao, a loan deal that is anything but cheap — and anything but a loan, according to the briefings of his advisors — is further confirmation that the ambitious ethos espoused by Ferguson, even in his darkest hour, has been abandoned, maybe for good.

Adnan Januzaj is not English, but he typified the progression of which Ferguson was so proud. Yet where is he at this new United? How can he be accommodated when Falcao, Mata, Wayne Rooney, Robin van Persie and Angel di Maria are already competing for Louis Van Gaal’s attention?

Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman who has overseen the frantic dash to reinvigorate a moribund group, negotiated for several months to secure Januzaj’s new contract. Why bother if the plan all along was to front-load the team, at any cost, with some of the highest paid forwards in Europe?


No laughing matter! United would invest in youngsters when Sir Alex Ferguson was in charge

Perhaps because that wasn’t the plan all along. That has become the plan of a club now terrified of entering the wilderness once occupied by Liverpool. There is no discernible logic to Manchester United’s spending this summer.

Unless Van Persie’s injury problems have surfaced again, they did not need another marquee striker, yet have agreed a quite incredible deal to secure Falcao. One figure close to the auction that has been conducted in the last weeks of the window said that there was a premium to pay by any club that could not offer the player Champions League, or at least European, football.

If Falcao was to take what was perceived as a step down, his wages would have to rise to £18m gross per year. If United have agreed anything close to that demand, Falcao will earn in the region of £300,000 a week, if he passes a medical. And nobody was saying they needed a striker.

Clearly, players like Falcao and Di Maria represent an upgrade. Yet on what? Players who were bought, or had their futures secured, in the last two years. Where does Mata fit in if Falcao and Van Persie play up front, with Rooney behind? In a three-man midfield that includes Di Maria?

Van Gaal insisted at the weekend that he still believed in 3-5-2. Are Rooney and Mata now operating as central midfield players? Van Gaal may be a tactical genius but he would have to be a wizard to make this work. United do not have room for all these recent acquisitions. Van Gaal is going to have to disappoint some of his biggest names; and, in doing so, the club will be as good as admitting to some major, and costly, blunders.


Grins: Ed Woodward has been busy conducting business for United throughout a hectic August

Ferguson was wrong when dismissing Manchester City’s stupid money and silly salaries. The club may have spent lavishly to muscle their way into the elite before UEFA president Michel Platini upped the drawbridge with financial fair play, but looking back, their targets were in no way indiscriminate.

Eight of the players who were involved on the last day of the season in 2012 — Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, Pablo Zabaleta, Yaya Toure, David Silva, Samir Nasri, Edin Dzeko and Sergio Aguero — were also present in City’s final game of last season, clinching the title against West Ham. Aleksandar Kolarov was an unused sub in 2012, but played in 2014; Joleon Lescott and Gael Clichy played in 2012 but were unused subs in 2014. City’s improvement came at a cost, but there was nothing scattergun about it. Those transfers have stood the test of time.

Indeed, Manchester United may now have a greater understanding of the pressure on City back then, forced to sell their project to players, without the carrot of Champions League football. That is United’s predicament now. They are paying through the nose because it turns out in the modern game a club is only as big as its fixture list.

For all United’s wealth, prestige and history, without the pull of those wonderful European occasions at Old Trafford, and on the back of a desperately ordinary season and a seventh-placed finish, they are just another club with a big ground, a lot of money and a keen sense of entitlement. Just as they were in the 1970s, really. Like City, they are having to over-compensate, break transfer records, promise the earth.

Right now, however, it is harder to locate United’s grand vision amid the flurry of expensive activity. Even their defensive improvements seem concentrated on one side of the pitch. Luke Shaw is a left back, or a left wing-back under Van Gaal; Daley Blind is a left back or left-sided defensive midfielder; Marcos Rojo is a left centre back, who played five games for Argentina in the World Cup, three times as a left back, twice as a left wing-back.

Stupid money, silly salaries, and players piling up in the same position. It is fair to say if United have had a plan in this transfer window, it has come out of left field.

Code:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2740088/Radamel-Falcao-Angel-di-Maria-Manchester-United-panic-buying.html
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