EPL Talk » Gareth Barry

Talk Of Manchester City Making A Top Five Is Premature

Paul Bestall — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:55:02 +0000

If I was an Arsenal fan, I’d be fed up already listening to people saying that Manchester City were obviously going to usurp them as one of the “Big Four” sides. It’s amazing what spending money does to peoples judgement when it comes to football and Manchester City have certainly caught more than their fair share of attention over the summer. To all intents and purposes, Manchester City will easily outstrip Arsenal on the pitch and leapfrog them in the Premiership.

So since last summer City have spent over £160 million pounds, but have they really bought the required players to turn them into a major force in the Premiership. In my honest opinion, no they haven’t. It’s easy to simply look at the figures they’ve spent and it all becomes an addiction to money rather than talent. For some, Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson have suddenly lost the managerial skills they’ve earned over one summer due to players going to Manchester City.

How has Ferguson lost his abilities by not signing Carlos Tevez? Whilst the vocal United fans tried to convince Ferguson to sign him up, Ferguson would not be budged. He was quite right to question how a striker who only scored 5 goals in the Premiership was worth £25 million. He consistently failed to deliver in big games time and again, yet because he ran around like a dog chasing a rabbit, he was “world class”. It is such an over rated term, that is consistently trotted out all the time as to make it almost redundant. Would you honestly say he’s a better striker than Wayne Rooney? Really? Even the most blinkered City fan can surely see the stupidity of that comparison.

Not one of Manchester City’s new signings is World Class, that’s a fact. Not one of them. Honestly, seriously, none of them. With the exception of Gareth Barry, Shay Given and Wayne Bridge, there isn’t one player who would be at Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea. Adebayor, Toure and Tevez have all been let go because they aren’t good enough for a top 4 side. City had clean run at every one of the targets they’ve signed because the clubs that owned the players were happy to see them leave, Barry and Given apart.

Craig Bellamy, over rated, over paid and has never, ever delivered consistently. A temper that causes more problems than he’s worth, I witnessed one of his strops at Norwich. Refused a decision by the referee, little Craig stomped his feet and jumped up and down on the spot for almost a minute. Pathetic. I wonder how long it will be before he starts texting his team mates spiteful messages?

Roque Santa Cruz, so good that when he left Bayern Munich, he joined Blackburn, no offence Rovers fans. If every major club in Europe wasn’t interested, how has he become such a brilliant striker after one good season and then moping around for a year hoping for a move. In 8 years at Bayern, he scored 38 goals playing for one of the biggest sides in Europe and one that consistently challenged for trophies at home and in Europe. That’s a dreadful record for someone allegedly so good.

Robinho joined Manchester City, then forgot who he’d signed for. Chelsea to be fair, wouldn’t pay over £27.5 million for him and by Christmas, they were probably glad they hadn’t. Another one touted as “world class”, laughably so if you’ve watched him regularly at Real Madrid. A good player, almost really good, but wildly inconsistent, prone to having hissy fits and a strike rate that doesn’t match the amount of chances he gets.

As for the two signings from Arsenal, Toure and Adebayor, Wenger must be laughing all the way the bank with his £40 million transfer kitty. He has, thanks to Manchester City, made a fortune from Arsenal’s two biggest troublemakers who were simply not at the races last season. If anything, Arsenal are stronger without spending a penny. The issues that those two caused in the dressing room and on the training ground had caused fractures through out Wengers squad in the last two seasons. Arsenal are better without those two at the Emirates, no question.

Adebayor famously attacked a team mate during a match because he didn’t pass to him, Toure got his gang to ignore William Gallas because he couldn’t be captain. Once again, childish, immature and bringing tons of baggage with them.Good riddance, I don’t know one Arsenal fan who is sad to see them leave. Not one. That tells you everything you need to know about those two.

This rag tag bunch of egotistical, money driven mercenaries are now all nicely tied up on 4 and 5 year contracts, earning more money than they ever believed they possibly could. Do you really think they’ve come to win trophies or count their cash? All this talk of “ being excited by the project” makes me laugh, it’s jibberish. It’s all about the money, nothing more, nothing less. Now somehow this team will be bonded and formed into one the best teams in England within weeks? It’s crazy to expect such results so soon.

How long before the cracks appear at Eastlands and the dressing room becomes a pit of ego clashes and cliques. If they’re not in the top 7 come Christmas, the pressure will be really on Mark Hughes. Rome was not built in a day and Manchester City could end up being more like Sodom and Gomorrah than the Eternal City next season. They will have all to do to keep up with Everton, Tottenham, Villa and Fulham, never mind crack the top 4 and worry Arsenal.

Is Mark Hughes Building a Barcelona Clone at Eastlands?

Dave Warner — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:56:12 +0000

Say what you will about the obscene amount of money being spent by Manchester City this summer, but you have to admit that there’s a certain perverse pleasure in watching someone build a real-life club lineup in much the same way that most regular joes would create their starting XI in a video game.

Okay, let’s take West Brom out and put Sealand FC into the Premier League. I’ll build a giant floating stadium in the North Sea for them. Awesome. Let’s drop Kaká in the middle here, and David Villa up front with Jozy Altidore… ooh, gotta bump his numbers up a bit… Cool. Hey, let’s make a Kevin Garnett character and put him in goal. He seems like he could have been good at that…

Man City manager Mark Hughes hasn’t gone quite that crazy, of course, but at first glance, he appears to be making the same mistake most novice video gamers might make when building a team: loading up on strikers. At some point, a gamer realizes that Fernando Torres, Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi, Kun Aguero and an injury-free Michael Owen — who seems to exist only in computers and preseasons — can’t all play together at once. Someone has to win the ball and control it in the midfield.

Of course, Hughes hasn’t forgotten this. That’s why he spent £17M on Nigel de Jong in January and another £12M on Gareth Barry this summer. Still, Manchester City has thrown a whopping £129M at forwards since being taken over by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan last August, and the projected front line of Robinho, Emmanuel Adebayor and Carlos Tevez alone cost more than £82M.

Throw Stephen Ireland in with Barry, de Jong and that forward trio, however, and Hughes’ plan begins to come into focus. Man City is attempting to emulate FC Barcelona.

And why not? Barcelona used their 4-1-2-3 formation to shatter opponents and win a convincing triple last year, so it’s practically destined to become imitated widely. It’s entirely possible that Sheikh Mansour, like the rest of us, watched Barca break down Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League Final and asked Hughes to build a side exactly like that. He’s also put Hughes in the unique position to do that with just about any players he wants.

The parallels are obvious. Adebayor is the big striker in the middle, a la Samuel Eto’o, while Robinho and Tevez are set wide like Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi. Barry and Ireland are there to control the midfield like Xavi and Iniesta and feed the forwards, while de Jong sits back and provides cover like Yaya Toure. Sort out the central defense, and Sparky could find himself managing a contender.

Plenty of questions remain, though. For starters, can Hughes rotate his strikers enough to keep everyone happy? Craig Bellamy, Roque Santa Cruz, Benjani, Valeri Bojinov, Felipe Caicedo and Ched Evans are all fighting for spots, too, and some of them won’t be satisfied playing just cup ties. Does Elano see any playing time in this midfield, which would suit his skills well, or is safe to assume he’ll be gone come August? And what happens to pure wingers like Shaun Wright-Phillips and Martin Petrov? Do they become square pegs in this triangular front six?

Ah, but that’s the fun thing about building a video game roster. When you’ve got the right players, you can experiment with just about any formation you want. Perhaps Hughes can revert back to the familiar 4-4-2 when the situation calls for it. It would be far more interesting, though, to see if that Barca-style 4-1-2-3 could succeed at Eastlands over a full season. In fact, I might just recreate that lineup myself in Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 this weekend and see how well it works.

Is John Terry Really Going To Join Manchester City?

Paul Bestall — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:38:05 +0000

The rumours first started in January that Manchester City were interested in landing John Terry, but nothing seemed too concrete and I, perhaps along with a lot of people, just dismissed it as paper talk. Why on earth would Terry leave the Blues to take a risk on Manchester City. Now though, its official, City are chasing Terry and they’ve made two offers.

Friday’s offer of £30 million plus the agreement to pull out of the arbitration process over Daniel Sturridge’s compensation certainly raised eyebrows, but Terry has been very quiet. Whilst the club and new manager, Carlo Ancelotti have both stated that Terry isn’t for sale, it just strikes me as odd that they’ve decided to make it public knowledge. If someone comes in for your club captain, you reject it out of hand and leave it at that don’t you?

Are Chelsea laying the ground for Terry’s exit by allowing the bid to come out in to the public domain? By playing to the fans in this way, saying that they don’t want him to go, it seems designed to get Terry to commit to the club publicly. Surely Terry wouldn’t forgo Champions League football for £300,000 a week would he?

If I’m honest, I wouldn’t be that surprised if Terry does request a transfer. After seeing Kaka state at 10am that he was sick of the speculation of him leaving AC Milan and he wasn’t going anywhere, then 6 hours later agreeing terms with Real Madrid, nothing would shock me this summer. Apparently Terry hasn’t closed the door on Manchester City, but then again maybe he’s using that as a leverage tool to renegotiate his contract.

He’s currently on around £140,000 a week at Chelsea and knows he could at least double that if he did join Mark Hughes outfit. At 28, he’s hardly over the hill but City would offer him at least a 5 year contract worth a total of £75 million if he were to join them. That is a frightening amount of money in anyone’s book and perhaps that’s why Terry has yet to come out and state his intention to stay at Chelsea. Would an increased bid of £40 million see Chelsea let him go?

The crucial factor here is the fans response and Terry will have noted the ridicule and insults that Gareth Barry has had to suffer since he agreed to leave Aston Villa to move to Manchester City. Barry’s comments from last summer, when he stated that he wanted to leave purely for Champions League football, became an empty gesture when he went to Manchester City in June. Of course, football fans and commentators forget that in the real world when someone offers you twice the money you earn to do the same job somewhere else, you bite their hands off.

The emotional attachment that we all have as fans blinds us to reality sometimes, we love the clubs we support and don’t understand it when we see players we feel don’t share the emotional attachment. Terry has already crossed the line once in his career, walking out on his boyhood team, West Ham, to join Chelsea as a fourteen year old, so emotional attachment is not too strong a tie for him. He may be club captain but is he a Chelsea fan or a professional footballer?

Manchester City: The Next Chelsea FC?

Ethan Armstrong — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:11:56 +0000

It wasn’t so long ago, I was completely outraged by Chelsea FC’s spending. 16.6m for Mekelele. 24.4m for Essien. 19.8m for Carvalho. 24m for Drogba. As a business, the club could sustain a 140m loss on a year because Roman Abramovich was there to bankroll the transfers. This was bad for football. The value of players skyrocketed. The old high water marks were obliterated. Bayern Munich chairman Karl-Heinze Rummenigge lamented the damage Chelsea spending was doing to European football. Wrecking the balance. Hogging the resources.

Now, with Manchester City as the new fat cat in town, I almost can’t remember why I was so mad at Abramovich.

Last winter rumors of Kaka coming to City abounded. The press figured City’s transfer offer to be as high as 130m. Thankfully it was turned down and Kaka stayed at Madrid Milan, but the fact City were willing to splash that much out on one player is scary.

City have already set a new British record when they spent 32.5m to buy Robinho from Real Madrid last summer. And they were reportedly talking about shelling out 60m to secure David Villa’s services from Valencia last winter. Villa made it clear then he wanted to stay. Now that Valencia is in serious financial trouble, one wonders if an expensive move may be made after all.

With all the money City are willing to spend it is almost refreshing to see them only pay 12m for Gareth Barry (the remainder of his contract was estimated at about 10m when I last wrote about him potentially leaving Aston Villa), but of course the fact they can offer him a meaty salary factors heavily into his move.

As when City coaxed West Ham’s prolific Craig Bellamy away for 14m, the promise of City’s future has its lure for players like Barry.

City are not looking to merely follow the Abramovich model. They are looking to crumple it up into a ball and leave it behind them in the dust, while the rest of us wonder… what were we so mad about c. 2006?

Abramovich’s past transfer coups are dwarfed by the prospects of 130m for Kaka and 60m for Villa. At some point City will make good on such offers. At some point a club is going to succumb to the lure of big money and sell the top class player for the outrageous sum and the glass ceiling (already raised so high by Chelsea) will come a’ tumblin’ down.

With the Abu Dhabi United Group behind City and with Abramovich’s wealth hurt by the global economic crunch, the Russian oligarch is slipping from his status as wealthy arch-villain into a role of, well, normal owner. He is not expected to spend anything near the amounts he dropped on the market in his first years at the helm. As Chelsea’s stars age, they seem like a club again. Not a superclub.

But the Chelsea spending model was largely a means to launch the club as a global brand. This has worked. Even if Abramovich curtails his upside-down business model and allows Chelsea to climb back into the positive in the books without his cash injections, the club is in a position to thrive and remain a force in domestic and continental football do to the exposure of the talent they brought in and the trophies they won since Abramovich took over.

This is now City’s aim. Using big name players and the potential marketing power of having the name “Manchester” at their disposal, City can make their way into a higher level of global recognition.

With no spending ceilings in place, there’s no need for pragmatism for business or concern for the damage the outrageous transfer fees can do to the sport.

The scary question is: what other investors will follow this absurd model? What other clubs will raise the bar beyond belief? And how high will the bids go?

In five years 32.5 for Robinho may not seem so crazy when the figure has been eclipsed by the next Chelsea FC or the next Manchester City. I cringe at the prospect.

Gareth Barry Proves He’s A Hypocrite

Paul Bestall — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:23:20 +0000

When we had to put up with the on/off Gareth Barry transfer saga all last season, one of the key facts throughout the drama was that Barry wanted to play Champions League football. It was a purely football based decision to want to leave Aston Villa, though the fact that his best mate Steven Gerrard was at Anfield would certainly have increased the pull to Liverpool. Ultimately though, Liverpool couldn’t get the money together and Barry stayed at Villa Park.

So imagine my surprise when I heard Manchester City had put in a £12 million bid today which was accepted and Barry has announced that he’s joined them. So I checked the league table again, saw Manchester City were still tenth and hadn’t even qualified for Europe. Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that all Gareth Barry cares about is money. What a hypocrite, proving once again that some footballers talk utter rubbish when they want to move.

How is moving from Aston Villa a better footballing move? It smacks purely of lining his pocket over any “footballing reasons” Barry can offer as an excuse. He’s apparently excited about the prospect of what City can achieve next season, but honestly, are they even going to brush the top 7 never mind the top 4? Villa fans must be utterly perplexed by Barry’s decision to leave them for a less successful club. By all means, they didn’t want him to leave but they’d understand if he went to Liverpool or Arsenal, hell even Spurs as he’s fan of Tottenham but Manchester City?

Barry has simply shown that he’s got an ego the size of an elephant by joining a side that are going to pay him £80,000 a week and guarantee him a starting place. The only motivations here are greed and ego stroking for poor little Gareth Barry, clearly underpaid and not loved at Aston Villa obviously. The Holte End will be scratching their collective heads over this transfer that simply doesn’t make logical sense after his whining all last summer that almost topped the Ronaldo saga for sheer boredom.

City fans will be delighted to have captured his signing, but the warning signs are there for the type of player that Hughes will be attracting to Eastlands now. Money talks, but when a player turns down Champions League football for an extra 20 grand a week, you finally see the real man hiding behind the facade that the fans are presented with. With a decision like this, Barry has made himself look rather stupid and only interested in money. With Newcastle now leaving the market for overpaid mercenaries, it seems like Manchester City can fill the gap.

If, and it’s highly unlikely that they will, City qualify for the Champions League, then of course we can all hold our hands up and say Gareth Barry is obviously psychic. The reality is that it’s doubtful that they will crack it within 3 years never mind the next 12 months, it’s just a decision that I find frankly astounding. I’ve nothing against Manchester City, if anything, through friends who support them, I’ve always had a soft spot for them but even the most optimistic fan has to question if they can sign any of the top 50 players in the world over this summer.

Don’t bore me with tales of Robinho being one of the world’s best, he clearly isn’t anywhere near the level of Ronaldo, Rooney, Messi, Eto’o, Ribery etc etc. He is only motivated by money, nothing more, nothing less and earns thousands to not play top level European football. Barry is the same, by turning his back on European football to count his cash and he was hardly struggling on the £52,000 a week, plus a new offer of £65,000, he was on at Villa, he’s shown that common sense and trophies mean nothing to players whose ego is all that matters when cash is involved.

Barry’s mantra all through last summer was about wanting to play Champions League football and win trophies, but it turned out to be a hollow statement. At least he’ll have lots of money to make up for the lack of trophies he’ll have when he retires.