Coming to City? Photo umbrofootball CCANC
The Manchester City transfer bandwagon continued apace this week with the rumour that Raul, the Real Madrid captain, top scorer, and one-club man, was about to trade it all in for a career at Eastlands. If a man who is as about as unlikely to move to another club as anyone in the world. Raul said it was crazy, and Hughes said they’d never approached him anyway, offering an interesting explanation:
“What everyone has to understand is that there are a lot of people out there who profess to have mandates to work for Manchester City and who are approaching players, apparently on our behalf telling players they can get deals for them and asking if they are interested,” he said.
“Some players then react and some don’t but it is a situation that has happened time and time again this year and that is why there is so much speculation about players that we supposedly approach. There are a lot of people who are out there who would like to manufacture deals and situations where they would in turn become part of a big money move for a player to come to City.”
So who are these people, and how on earth do they manage to pull the wool over the eyes of big name players and the agents who are supposed to represent them? If someone made you an offer that sounded too good to be true, wouldn’t you do a little research first? How hard would it be to establish some credentials? Don’t you have to be licensed by the FA to be an agent working in England?
Perhaps the problem is that nobody wants these approaches to stop enough. Players and their agents can use these approaches, regardless of their legitimacy, in order to leverage better deals for their players, raise their profile in the press, or let the club they believe is approaching them know that such a deal would interest them if it were for real. The ‘agents’ representing Manchester City every once in a while, should they manage to convince both sides to do a deal, may tie themselves up a generous fee. It only has to happen once in a Blue Moon for it to have been worth their while financially.
The media seem to judge that there is more interest in publishing the rumours, however risible, rather than in exposing them - that’s cracking journalism by the way - and so the situation continues.
Of course, the flip side of this is that it’s also a mighty convenient excuse for Hughes to do some preliminary enquiries with major players without destabilising the existing team members with open pursuit of new players. So who knows who is telling the truth (or even how much of the truth any party is telling in any given rumour)? Sadly, the waters are usually too murky for us to find out.
