A
lexis Sanchez’s
best moment at
Manchester United?
Hard to say, but
coming in from the
left side and then
finishing with a flourish on the
piano the club put at his disposal
shortly after his arrival stands out
as arguably his most memorable
performance. His five goals for
United may, over time, fade from
the collective mind, but it will be
difficult to forget the expression
of a man sitting in his football kit
pretending to play a piano and
rightly wondering whether this
might one day come back to
haunt him.
It will cost United £175,000 a
week this season for Sanchez not to
play for them. Sanchez-not-playing
would be the highest earner at just
about every club outside the
Premier League’s top six. To
reiterate: that is £175,000 a week,
supplementing his Inter Milan
salary for the next 10 months, tohave him in another league, in
another country, rather than at a
club who have already sold one
senior striker without replacing
him.
It is more than the combined
wages of Aaron Wan-Bissaka and
Daniel James to get Sanchez out of
the picture. £175,000 is enough to
buy a top-of-the range, concert-
standard Steinway Model D grand
piano every week, with some left
over. It makes you wonder: how bad
has it got?
There has been no steeper falling
away of form, confidence and
general effectiveness than that
which has beset Sanchez in the
months after his move to United
from Arsenal in January last year.
Jamie Carragher’s comparison with
Chelsea’s £50 million splurge of
Fernando Torres in January 2011
comes to mind, when the senior
players in the Anfield dressing room
wondered whether the striker’s
new club had been paying attention
to his form in the previous 12Paying Sanchez
a fortune to play
elsewhere sums
up United’s folly
Such has
been the
Chilean’s
decline that
his wages
while on
loan at
Inter Milan
will be
subsided by
£175,000 a
week from
a club short
of senior
strikers
months. Sanchez did not end his
Arsenal days in peak form but,
even so, this crash has been huge.
Torres’s dwindling form was a
problem at Chelsea for a long time.
It was among the first questions
Jose Mourinho was asked when he
returned to the club more than
two years later in 2013. Torres did,
however, play 172 games for
Chelsea, score 45 goals and win the
Champions League, Europa League
and the FA Cup, even if he played a
less central role in those successes
than was first anticipated.
Sanchez scored more goals for
Chile last season than he did for
United. He has barely won a corner
for them, let alone a trophy.
Injuries, confidence, something
else in his life – one day, the picture
will be much clearer as to why –
but for now it is hard not to stand
and stare in disbelief at the gigantic
folly of it all. What happened to
him? The highest wage-earner in
United’s history shifted out in the
last week of the transfer window at
extraordinary cost by a club who
would rather take the chance on
three strikers with 65 career
Premier League goals between
them. Which is only two more than
Sanchez has scored in six seasons
in England.
That January of last year, with
Manchester City unwilling to
commit to Sanchez’s demands and
Ed Woodward, United’s executive
vice-chairman, approaching a
familiar Mourinho third-season
death spiral, prompted some wild
decisions at Old Trafford.
The temptation must have been
the player-swap with Henrikh
Mkhitaryan that spared them a
transfer fee and then they
swallowed hard and signed up to
Sanchez’s wages. How much more
of the three years will they be
paying at least part of them? How
many monthly salary spreadsheets
with the line: £700,000 for
Sanchez-not-playing?
The “untransferables”. There are
more of them about than in recent
years, those for whom the contract
has long outlasted the effectiveness.
Wages too large for anyone but the
most big-name hungry of Chinese
Super League teams to
countenance, a contractual
misjudgment in a pair of football
boots. You might say the same of
Mesut Ozil at Arsenal, not even on
the bench against Liverpool on
Saturday, and one half of the double
act with Sanchez that held the
former regime at the Emirates to
ransom two seasons ago.
It could have been worse for
Arsenal: their offer of a new deal to
Sanchez could have been accepted.
As it is, they have Mkhitaryan,
another of the untransferables,
contracted until the end of next
season and also gradually fading
out of the first-team picture at
Arsenal.
At Chelsea, it is Danny
Drinkwater, on loan at Burnley,
where his wages are being
supplemented, and Tiemoue
Bakayoko, soon to be similarly
outsourced to Monaco, from where
Chelsea signed him two years ago.
There is a place for these players
lower down the hierarchy, but
their wages and the fees paid forthem make any transfer
unrealistic, so they are obliged to
exist between the two worlds, a
mid-table footballer on
Champions League wages.
One wonders how soon the
same fate will befall United’s
Brazilian midfielder Fred, a
£55 million signing one year ago
and sufficiently mediocre to be
the subject this week of an
£18 million bid from Fiorentina.
United cannot be seen to
entertain bids that low. Another
year and they might change their
minds.
At Liverpool, Daniel Sturridge
sat out the last years of his
contract long after he had lost the
first-choice status he had when
he signed it in October 2014. By
the time he reached the end, the
market-value correction was
huge: European champions to
Trabzonspor, fourth in the
Turkish Super Lig last season. It
is a long way down.
Perhaps it is why Daniel Levy
may hesitate to offer Christian
Eriksen another deal at 27 as his
Tottenham Hotspur contract runs
down. It may yet be better to lose
him for nothing than pay for five
more years of a player whom, for
all his talents, has so far not
tempted a single top European
club to pay what Spurs are asking.
It is one thing to pay huge salaries
to fading talents, it is – as United
are discovering – quite another to
spend years paying someone else
to get a tune out of them.Sealing the
deal: Alexis
Sanchez arrives
for his medical
in Milan prior to
his loan move
to InterPAT
he cost for Barcelona to
bring back Neymar looks
like it will include giving
Paris St-Germain Ousmane
Dembele, Ivan Rakitic and
€125 million (£113 million), which
will be hard to find for a club with
no cash in the accounts and a latest
set of financial results which are
long overdue publication. That is a
lot of ducks to line up, and who
knows what twists there are in the
tail before Monday’s European
transfer deadline.
Selling Neymar (right) two
years ago hurt Barcelona’s
prestige but put their finances
back in the black for a period.
Bringing him back may restore
some of that sense of
pride but it will put a
strain on a wage bill
that reached
€639 million across
the club’s multiple
sports teams,
including football,
in their last set of
accounts. At some
point, there will have to
be a reckoning for Barcelona.
Real Madrid could not afford
Neymar either but it is
Barcelona who look as
though they will take on the
burden nonetheless.High price for
Barca to restore
pride on Neymar
CHIEF FOOTBALL WRITER
SAM WALLACE
Chilean’s
damning
statistics
18
months at Old
Trafford45
appearances5
goals in total9
assists3
goals in the
Premier
League£9m
per Premier
League goal in
wages – and
they all came
at homeThe Daily Telegraph Thursday 29 August 2019 *** 7
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