Returning superstar will certainly score goals, but his chief use to Old Trafford will be that most modern of roles: a celebrity content providerWelcome to Unitedland! With an array of nostalgic installations and familiar faces, there’s something for everyone to enjoy! Gawp at the scorer of the winning goal from the 1999 Champions League in his very own technical area! Gaze on the goalscorer from the 2008 Champions League final grazing just outside the penalty area! Even the roof has that retro feel! Season tickets start at just £532.There was a time when clubs found jobs for former players gladhanding in corporate hospitality. Manchester United have gone much further. With Ole Gunnar Solskjær installed as manager and Cristiano Ronaldo up...
Tottenham striker has been criticised but he has a right to be selfish – and to question the club’s inaction over past two yearsThe tendency always is to oversimplify, to try to find one person to blame: if only he had acted better, if only he had done his job properly. But it is rarely about that – or rarely just about that. The agency of individuals should not be denied. Harry Kane and Daniel Levy have played their parts in the continuing saga of the forward’s proposed move to Manchester City. But this is also about wider economic forces.Over the past week or so the majority of the focus has been on Kane. Already there is a sense his...
The January transfer window’s emptiness highlights the impending recession and a need to engineer financial solidarity We do not need a wise seer to understand the portents for football of a January transfer window whose dominant feature was an absence of transfers. Yes, West Ham, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Brighton did still splash out some millions, for Saïd Benrahma – a standout £20m trickle-down for Brentford – Amad Diallo, Morgan Sanson and Moisés Caicedo respectively; but the rest is a long tail of frees, loans, and battening down the hatches.Football at all levels, like every other normal social activity, is in a Covid-19 financial crisis that is being parked while the health emergency is faced. As with the bigger...
Chelsea’s big summer spree means there can be no excuses about the manager’s inexperience or the need to learn the jobLast summer, a host of clubs had begun to express an interest in Kai Havertz. He seemed the model of the modern German attacking midfielder: powerful, quick, intelligent and with a capacity for scoring goals. That a year later he has chosen Chelsea is significant, not just for what he may bring on the pitch but because of what it says about the developing project at Stamford Bridge – particularly given Havertz was so keen to join he waived his signing-on bonus. This feels like a statement signing in the best possible sense and with that will come expectation. Related:...
The Portuguese super-agent is busy closing deals this month, but is he starting to wield too much influence in football?When Jorge Mendes got married a few years back a story emerged that Cristiano Ronaldo had given football’s most potent agent a Greek island as a wedding present.It is hard to know the real truth of this. But it seems fitting, given Mendes’s deep-state mystique, that the legend of Ronaldo island has been recycled admiringly ever since, gaining resonance, layers, compound interest. Either way it seems likely Mendes would have enjoyed his Greek island in the expected style: loaning it to Lazio for five years, setting up a complex series of loans for its outlying archipelago, then selling it on to...