At the time of writing (early Friday morning as it goes, with the cat doing a figure of eight through my legs wanting her breakfast but I fear I’m now over-sharing) Kyle Walker is reportedly in Manchester undergoing a medical ahead of his big-money move to Manchester City.
It is entirely conceivable that an official announcement is imminent with City keen for their new signing to accompany them on a US tour starting this Monday.
This is a transfer that’s been on the cards for quite some time with Walker’s omission from the Spurs starting eleven late last season blamed on his head being turned by the constant hum of speculation.
Since then there has been an ever-increasing inevitability about the switch with the pertinent aspects of the deal widely accepted as gospel by one and all. Spurs were reluctantly willing to sell for somewhere in the region of fifty million pounds and City were reluctantly willing to pay the somewhat inflated figure.
There would be the usual brinksmanship of course from both parties but ultimately it was simply a case of waiting for these two facts to knit together.
It appears that we’ve now reached this juncture with the BBC presently reporting that “Manchester City are close to signing Tottenham and England right-back Kyle Walker in a deal worth £45m plus add-ons”. The fee is to be paid in instalments and – it is said at least – that the add-ons total £5m factoring in all manner of variables including City winning the Champions League in the not-too-distant future.
On initial inspection the figure seems steep but considering City’s desperate need for a top class right-back, the ‘premium’ imposed on English talent, and that it weakens a serious rival then in this crazy current climate £45m – £50m is a perfectly reasonable range.
In the days to come Everton are expected to come extremely close to this to secure the services of Swansea’s Gylfi Sigurdsson, a very decent midfielder who has previously failed to establish himself at a ‘top six’ club. This will be perfectly reasonable too. It’s supply and demand in an era where clubs have more money than sense.
With Manchester City’s urgent requirement for full-backs becoming one of the stories of this close season and given that I predominantly write about the club I planned to use this forum today to consider how the addition of Kyle Walker would improve Pep Guardiola’s revised revolution. Last term they were horribly undone by having four aging full-backs who were unable to execute the exacting demands of Guardiola’s masterplan and the necessary compromises that followed cost the team dear.
I intended to write about this, I really did; perhaps with a sentence or two on the fee because it is admittedly worthy of note. But then I saw the back page below, a game-changer if ever I saw one.
Maybe the Daily Mirror believed that its readers might be immune now to the £50m fee that has been bandied around for months. The same logic can even be applied to Walker’s actual signing because ‘Footballer does something we said he was going to do’ is hardly a shelf emptier.
Or maybe – and forgive my cynicism here – the tabloid newspaper couldn’t resist yet another opportunity to dog-whistle that City are ‘ruining football’ with their ‘oil money’. That, after all, is always a seller.
Whatever their intention, to lump together the player’s fee, full add-ons, wages for his five year contract, plus nebulous bonuses – stopping just short of the fiver Maria from reception might one day borrow him on the occasion he leaves his wallet at home – really is a revolutionary act; it’s an entirely new way of reporting transfer fees and one I’m personally looking forward to them replicating many times over for the other big-money transfers set to take place between now and September 1st. If they don’t; if they revert to reporting the actual fee like they used to do in the good old days of yesterday then we have to question why this particular transfer was marked out for very special, very peculiar treatment indeed.
According to the Mirror Walker’s transfer is a ‘world record deal’ which is odd considering that last summer Manchester United paid a pretty sum for Paul Pogba that really should have caught their attention. Hell only a matter of days ago United paid a full third more for Romelu Lukaku.
That though is discounting the Mirror’s system, their brand new holistic accounting that factors in absolutely everything including bonuses and wages. Simply by virtue of being the first player under that spotlight Walker is indeed a record amount.
Yet you can’t help feeling that the paper missed a trick here. A little late to their own party. According to a poster on the Bluemoon forum had they applied the same maths to Lukaku’s deal earlier this week they’d have smashed the £100m barrier by a colossal distance while Pogba’s ‘fee’ amounts to £164.7m. Arsenal’s ‘free’ swoop for Sead Kolasinac cost £39m while United’s £187.1m purchase of teenager Wayne Rooney back in 2004 would be closer to £500m in today’s money.
Intentional or otherwise the Mirror really has opened up a can of worms. Let’s see where they go from here.
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