Arrivistes will have their way, for now

October 25, 2011 at 7:27 am · Filed under Football

I got involved yesterday in a minor twitter debate with @Arsbiswas and @WonderGunner about the relative costs of the two teams in Man Utd 1 v 6 Man City at the weekend. My minimal input was to suggest that the real issue was not how much money each team cost but when the money had been spent. It seemed the least I could do to find out.

Courtesy of date from Soccerbase, this table shows how much each player cost, when he signed and how many months’ service the club has got from him.

Player	£m	Signed	Months
MUFC
De Gea	18.9	6/11	4
Evra	5.5	1/6	69
Ferdinand	30	7/2	110
Evans	0	1/6	70
Smalling	10	1/10	21
Anderson	27	7/7	51
Nani	25.5	7/7	51
Young	17	1/11	9
Fletcher	0	8/0	123
Rooney	20	8/4	86
Welbeck	0	7/7	51
	153.9		646
Lindegaard	3.5	1/11	9
Jones	16.5	6/11	4
Fabio	0	7/6	63
Park	4	7/5	75
Valencia	16	6/9	28
Berbatov	30.7	9/8	37
Hernandez	0	7/10	15
	70.7		231
Total	224.6		877
MCFC
Hart	6	5/6	66
Richards	0	7/5	75
Kompany	6	8/8	38
Lescott	22	8/9	26
Clichy	7	7/11	3
Milner	26	8/10	14
Barry	12	7/9	27
Silva	26	6/10	16
Y Toure	24.4	7/10	15
Aguero	38	7/11	3
Balotelli	24	7/10	15
	191.4		298
Pantilon	0	7/11	3
Zabaleta	6.4	8/8	38
Kolarov	19	7/10	15
K Toure	16	7/9	27
Nasri	24	7/11	3
De Jong	18	1/9	33
Dzeko	27	1/11	9
	110.4		128
Total	301.8		426

The overall costs of the squads (£224.6m for MUFC, £301.8m for MCFC) is not that marked, especially at today’s prices, it’s but the length of service differential (Utd’s players have spent more than twice as long at their club that have City’s) that demonstrates the difference between the clubs and approaches.

Some fairly crude maths shows that Utd have only had to spend £256,100 for each month of service their players have given them, whereas City have had to fork out £708,450 to get a month out of one of their squad.

But those numbers neatly take us onto the £s we can’t measure – salaries. Impossible to gather data on, it’s the salaries that marks out the clubs who don’t have to work inside the confines of any sort of business model from the ones that do.

Of course we have no way of knowing how long City will decide to hang onto their current crop of players for and so the comparison may be an unfair one, but what tier bottomless pit of free money does remove is any sort of dynamic for players to be kept for long enough to provide any sort of return on the investment their purchase price and salary represents. If Utd spend want £20m on a player that’s £20m (plus probably the same amount in salary over, say, four years) added onto their debts, which are debts that have to be paid back. City can cheerfully offer £30m and probably £40m in salary over the same four years, without having to worry about repaying a penny of that because it’s been “lent” to them by someone who doesn’t want it back.

Until UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations kick in – and that’s assuming that Man City, whose most recent “losses” are a mere £120m a year, don’t find a way to work outside them – this is the reality of Premier League football. The ability of a club to spend money on both transfers and salaries that they neither have to earn nor pay back means only  it can realistically expect to win the title, and the rest have to just make do with the scraps.

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