It was a hot, lazy June lunchtime and most of the world was taking a momentary pause from football, yet there was the face of Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, on a TV screen, delivering his thoughts on what happens next.
‘Today I’m speaking to you but I’m already thinking about next year,’ he said, at the top of the news bulletin during an Ashes lunch break last week. ‘We’re always in growth mode. We’re never in contentment and pause. We’re never, “Let’s just milk the asset”.’
This hardly needed pointing out. The summer transfer window is entering its third week and there’s already been a Manchester City deal for Mateo Kovacic and a Manchester City drive to buy RB Leipzig’s Josko Gvardiol and a £90m Manchester City bid for Declan Rice.
These are the hallmarks of owners with an obsessive intent to make their club better. The same can be said of Liverpool‘s Fenway Sports Group, with Alexis Mac Allister through the Anfield door for a mere £35million.
But over at Manchester United it’s Groundhog Day. New transfer window, same old confusion. All brand, no substance. A club living in some vague hope that their hallowed name will eventually get them some players in, after their traditional midsummer game of whack-a-mole in the market.
Avram and Joel Glazer have shown they are only interested in squeezing a few more million out of Manchester United
United fans blocked the entrance to the megastore on Tuesday to coincide with the launch of the new kit as the club’s takeover drags on
United started the summer with a quality striker the obvious top priority but made their first move for… a midfielder. They went mid-range, for Mason Mount, because they’re up to their eyes in wage payments and their own vast revenues can no longer insulate them from the risk of a spending breach.
But wait. They’ve suddenly tacked to Moises Caicedo, a different type of player and price bracket. And they’re also looking at goalkeeper Andre Onana. So, where’s the money for that quality striker, with a total budget of £140million?
No-one knows. They’ve set values on many players they want to clear out and there’s actually a suggestion that West Ham will take £40million plus a few of those makeweights, for Rice. Other clubs just laugh. If United had proprietors who were ruthlessly focussed on the executive oversight of their club, as City and Liverpool’s owners are, then Erik ten Hag might have a fully-assembled new squad for the return to training on July 9. He won’t.
United are, of course, marooned with football’s ultimate speculators – the Glazers. A family who picked up a couple of ‘I love Man United’ T-shirts and an £18 plastic souvenir rucksack on their first ever visit to Old Trafford, sped away in a VW people carrier and haven’t looked back since. A family interested only in how they can squeeze more cash from the club, not how to keep up in a relentless competitive, strategic elite sports environment.
Man City owner Khaldoon Al Mubarak has shown the obsession and desire needed to run an elite sports team
Dragging out the sale of the club feels like an act of vengeance by the Glazers towards fans
Custodians with an ounce of care for one of our country’s greatest sporting institutions would also see that Old Trafford is an aged, careworn place, now, desperately needing renewal. A shadow of Arsenal’s and Tottenham’s modern arenas.
The lazy, semi-detached sloth of these chancers is more of a disgrace than ever this summer, given that they have their noses in the trough which has sustained them for so long – dragging out the interminable sale of United for a few million dollars more, to a point when the April deadline in that process long since became somewhere between an illusion and a practical joke.
That prospective sale, to either Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani or Jim Ratcliffe, belonged to the usual pre-summer optimism around United, just a few months back. The £5-6billion disposal would make the club the world’s richest. But, of course, it’s been torture – leaving the club in a state of limbo, top to bottom, with jobs, structures and to an extent even transfer strategy, uncertain – at a time when optimal clarity is needed.
The US trading website Benzinga reported that Sheikh Jassim is ahead of Ratcliffe in the race but without the remotest transparency or communication, Wall Street whispers are all United fans have to go on. There are doubts whether the sale of the club will be concluded before the window closes, let alone when the season starts.
British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe (left) and Qatari Sheikh Jassim (right) are the two front-runners in the process. The fact the initial deadline was April has become a practical joke
It all feels like the ultimate act of Glazer vengeance on a fanbase which manifestly detests them. The arrival of the new season’s replica kits should be a moment of optimism. It was the opportunity for fans to begin a new round of anti-Glazer protests at the club’s megastore on Tuesday.
United’s tendency to overpay for incoming players has obscured another chronic deficiency: their struggle to sell well. Highly-rated midfield prospect Zidane Iqbal has just gone to FC Utrecht for a mere £800,000. But the only sale that currently matters is the one that will rescue this benighted club from the hands of those who have bled it dry for so long.
Al-Mubarak’s observations about not ‘milking the asset’ were no coincidence amid the drawn-out annexation of Manchester United. It was manifestly clear which club’s owners he was talking about.
BEAUMONT AND CO DESERVE MORE TESTS
The images my daughter sent me from Trent Bridge on Saturday told their own story of what her first day watching Test cricket, seeing Tammy Beaumont make history, meant to her. Women’s cricket is making sure and steady progress but why is there only one women’s Ashes Test this summer?
It feels like there is the appetite for more.
A DEFENSIVE ENGLAND IS NOT BLASPHEMY
The England Test team’s proclivity to attack at all costs has become such an article of faith that to put the case for a modicum of defence seems to have become a blasphemy. As if the two are mutually exclusive.
Absolute nonsense, of course. Nasser Hussain’s compelling interview with Kevin Pietersen in these pages on Saturday was a reminder, from a player you wouldn’t exactly call a wall flower, that there is something that matters more than creeds and philosophies in sport. It’s called winning.
‘My issue is that it is an Ashes series,’ Pietersen told Hussain. ‘If we were playing against New Zealand or South Africa or India, it doesn’t mean as much to the fan as an Ashes series.’
It should be acceptable to demand a more defensive display from England after Zak Crawley boldly predicted his side would beat Australia by 150 runs in the second Test
No-one’s listening, though, because the bombast seems to have permeated all areas of the England realm. After defeat at Edgbaston, we were treated to this from Zak Crawley: ‘We’ll win the second Test. It will suit us a bit more, that Lord’s pitch. So I’m confident we’ll win by… I don’t know, 150 runs?’
If a player in the England football team had declared, ahead of a match against Germany or France, that the side would win ‘I don’t know, 3-0?’, it’s safe to assume Gareth Southgate would have taken him into a side room and robustly offered the benefit of his opinion about giving the opposition extra motivation. No-one blinked an eye at Crawley’s crass pronouncement.
That’s the current England for you — so wrapped up in their own methodology that humility and self-effacement seem to have gone out the window. ‘This England team are not about winning or losing, we’re about entertainment,’ Crawley concluded, contributing to the nonsensical orthodoxy that the urn is a mere incidental detail this summer.
