Why it seldom
pays to part with
a fortune for a
player in his prime
James Gheerbrant
Football Sport
the times | Saturday July 18 2020 2GS 14
In 1979 the film studio United Artists
gave Michael Cimino $11 million to
shoot Heaven’s Gate, a sprawling, epic
Western set in 19th century Wyoming.
By the sixth day of filming, the project
was already five days behind schedule.
Cimino’s imperial excesses stretched
to relocating individual trees and
having an irrigation system built under
the battlefield, and the cost spiralled to
$44 million. The film made $3.5 million.
The catastrophe put United Artists out
of business, and ended the era of the
director-driven vanity project, usher-
ing in an age of tighter studio control
and bankable blockbusters.
Occasionally, a folly comes along
which is so disastrously expensive, so
expensively disastrous, that it not only
resets the market, it changes an entire
industry’s way of doing things. Will
the signing of Antoine Griezmann be
remembered as football’s Heaven’s Gate
moment?
Barcelona’s luxury acquisition has
been a dismal failure: Griezmann, for-
merly of Atletico Madrid, has scored
only nine times in the league and is on
track for his lowest goals return in
seven seasons. He hasn’t assisted a goal
since December and the quest to shoe-
horn him into the attack has unbal-
anced a team who have seven fewer
goals, and seven fewer points, than at
this stage last season.
Even before the pandemic hit, the act
of paying £107 million for a 28-year-old
who did not fill a position of need felt
vaguely unconscionable. In the present
context, with big clubs pushing through
wage cuts and smaller clubs clinging on
for grim survival, it already seems like
an extravagance from another age, a
monument to a bygone era of ruinous
opulence, destined to linger like some
ghastly Ozymandias head in the finan-
cial wasteland of football’s post-Covid
future.
To put a particularly galling slant on
it, Barcelona spent about £15 million
more on Griezmann than Bayern
Munich spent on the combined acquisi-
tions of Kingsley Coman, Alphonso
Davies, Serge Gnabry, Leon Goretzka,
Joshua Kimmich, Benjamin Pavard and
Niklas Süle, all of whom are still 25 or
younger.
Sure, Barcelona could not have
known that the France forward would
have his worst slump in years, and Bay-
ern probably did not foresee that
Davies and Gnabry would turnfor an established star in their late
twenties are paying, in the best-case
scenario, for a relatively short window
of top-level production, and assuming,
in the worst-case scenario, the risk of
ending up with a distressed asset who is
impossible to shift.
The really interesting question is
why clubs have persisted in making
these kind of signings when the likes
of Bayern and Liverpool — who haven’t
bought an outfielder over the age
of 26 since Ragnar Klavan in 2016 —
provide such a salutary counter-
example.
The answer probably lies somewhere
in the nexus of sport and PR. In an era
when transfers have been as much
about brand-building as team-
building, older players come with
a fully formed reputation, their
own contours and connota-
tions in the public imagina-
tion.
Signing Griezmann or
Hazard is a statement of the
kind of club you want to be, a
show of power and prestige, in
a way that signing, say, Gnabry
or Andy Robertson never could be.
It is interesting to recall that not only
was each of these moves largely pop-
ular at the time — the re-signing of
Özil, in particular, was rapturously
received — but each was able to be
spun into a minor production, riff-
ing on the players’ established per-
sonas: from Griezmann’s televised
La Decisión saga to Sánchez’s infa-
mous ivory-tinkling.
Even now, as clubs prepare to tight-
en their belts, there is a seductive ap-
peal to the idea of capturing a proven
player at the peak of their powers. Liv-
erpool’s flirtation with Bayern’s
29-year-old midfield maestro Thiago
Alcântara was overwhelmingly popu-
lar with their fans on social media,
despite representing a departure
from the recruitment principles that
have underpinned the club’s recent
success.
Manchester City must decide
whether to proceed with a move for
Kalidou Koulibaly, the brilliant Napoli
centre back who is also 29. But as foot-
ball moves into an uncertain economic
climate, it feels ever more likely that the
new paradigm will be planting for the
future, not uprooting the biggest tree in
the forest.into superstars. But when you buy
young, you are getting potential and —
crucially in the modern game — tacti-
cal malleability. When you buy a player
at their peak, you are paying a premium
for the finished article.
Barcelona are certainly not the only
club to discover that it rarely pays to
shackle such a large part of your budget
to a player at the tail end of their prime.
Real Madrid’s marquee signing of last
summer, Eden Hazard, purchased for
£89 million at the age of 28, has been
beset by niggling injuries and has man-
aged only one goal and three assists this
season.
There have also been questions
about his focus, not entirely
dispelled by an utterance about
his lockdown regimen that
included the words “pantry”
and “buns”.
Meanwhile in the
Premier League, Man-
chester United’s deci-
sion to sign Alexis
Sánchez and Ar-
senal’s to award a
new contract to
Mesut Özil —both of whom were 29 at the time —
weigh on their young, upwardly mobile
teams like millstones.
Sánchez is now on loan at Inter
Milan, where he has been somewhat
revitalised, but United are still paying
£150,000 a week into his bank account.
Özil, who is Arsenal’s highest earner on
£350,000 a week, appears to have faded
entirely from Mikel Arteta’s plans and
functions only as an unwelcome dis-
traction, a reminder of his own absence;
a player living out his days as a press
conference question rather than a com-
mentator’s exclamation.
Realistically, neither player is likely
to find a permanent buyer, and so they
sit on the books, draining positivity and
liquidity, restricting their team’s ability
to evolve. There are always exceptions
— Arsenal’s signing of Pierre-EmerickAubameyang, who was 28 when he
joined from Borussia Dortmund, has
been an unqualified success — but
Sánchez and Özil embody a reality that
Barcelona and Real are now reckoning
with. A team who open the chequebookCity will
need to pay
a premium
for Napoli’s
KoulibalyThe new paradigm will
be planting for the
future, not uprooting
the biggest tree...FA to interview BAME
coach for women’s role
The FA is set to interview at least
one black, Asian and minority ethnic
(BAME) candidate for the England
Women manager’s job as part of its
commitment to equal opportunities.
The governing body is committed
to having at least one BAME
candidate shortlisted for all England
coaching positions, subject to there
being an applicant with the right
qualifications. More than 142 people
have applied to succeed Phil Neville,
with at least 70 fulfilling the
qualifications criteria.
The FA is also under pressure to
change its rules so that Paul Elliott,
the former Chelsea defender, below,
who heads its Inclusion Advisory
Board, becomes a voting member of
the main FA board.SPORT NOTEBOOK
Martyn Ziegler
Chief Sports Reporter
From outcasts
to podcasts for
ex-BBC hosts
Some of the casualties of the BBC’s
policy of ditching older sports
presenters in favour of youth have
banded together to form a collective
to produce an “intelligent” series of
programmes.
John Inverdale, Mark Pougatch
and Jonathan Overend, who have all
been deemed surplus to
requirements by the BBC, are
launching a new podcast series next
week. They have teamed up with
Sonja McLaughlan, a freelancer
who still covers rugby union for
the BBC, and Marcus Buckland,
Amazon Prime’s tennis presenter,
and other names are expected to
join the group.The series, titled Sport and the
Feels, promises to appeal to “lovers of
intelligent, long-form sports
conversation” and the collective
hope the project will attract interest
from broadcast or digital platforms.
There will be 16 episodes each day
from next Saturday to mark what
would have been the start of the
Tokyo Olympics, and guests include
Sir Matthew Pinsent, Clare Balding
and Katharine Merry.
Overend, the former BBC tennis
correspondent and the driving force
behind the project, said: “We all have
huge Olympic experience and we
thought it would be a nice idea to get
together and go through some classic
Olympic moments. Sports coverage
is very stat-heavy, so our idea is to
convey the emotional pull of the
Olympics, and we are quite excited
to be bringing together all these
familiar voices. We will see where it
goes but we would love to build on it
and produce a second and third
series and expand it too.”‘Soft’ lump in throat
There was a touching moment on
BBC Radio 5 Live this week when
the football commentator Ian
Dennis’s emotion spoke louder than
words when he welcomed the Match
of the Day 2 presenter Mark
Chapman back to the airwaves, six
weeks after the death of his wife,
Sara, following a long illness.
“It’s great to have you back,”
Dennis said, with a wobbly voice.
“Have you got a frog in your throat?”
asked Chappers, who described his
colleague as “in the nicest possible
way, a great, big, soft lump”.Yorkshire plan axed
The RFU has pulled the plug on
funding for its academy in Yorkshire,
meaning that, as it stands, there is no
pathway for promising young players
in England’s biggest county.
The Yorkshire Carnegie club could
not afford to contribute to the
academy after they were relegated
from the Greene King IPA
Championship — having lost all 14 of
their games this season and finishing
with a points difference of minus-
— and the RFU’s Covid-related
cutbacks have included ending
support, leading to ten redundancies.No turning Bach
Thomas Bach, the IOC president,
this week ruled out the prospect of
the organisation re-evaluating the
role of Avery Brundage, who cosied
up to apartheid South Africa and
Rhodesia during his 20 years in
office.
A bust of Brundage, who was the
president of the IOC from 1952 to
1972, was last month removed from
the Asian Art Museum in San
Francisco because of his racist
attitudes.
“We will not rewrite history,” Bach,
who is standing for another four
years in office, said.Leeds owner may sell
Leeds United’s promotion to the
Premier League will now ensure that
attention will once more focus on
whether their ebullient Italian
owner, Andrea Radrizzani, decides to
sell a stake in the club to Qatar.
The 45-year-old, who has been
canny enough to hold on until Leeds
were guaranteed to be in the top
flight next season — knowing that
he can now set a much higher price
for the club — told The Times in
October that he was considering
selling a large stake to one of three
potential investors, including the
Qataris.