Manchester City would have had familiar headlines if they had been spending £105m on Declan Rice
Except they won’t be signing Declan Rice. Or Jude Bellingham, or Marc Cucrella, or a number of players who either the selling club wanted more than Pep Guardiola’s side were willing to pay or another bidder presented a better offer.
Manchester City just stockpile players and ruin the Premier League’. Except they won the title last year using the smallest number of players, not least because they had sold three players to rivals Arsenal and Chelsea and then not just signed who they wanted to replace them.
‘Manchester City have ruined the Premier League by turning it into the Bundesliga’. Admittedly, five titles in six years, a core group of squad members that have played in Germany does give a whiff of truth to that, but that is not why the argument is made.
City are accused of creating another Bundesliga or Ligue 1 by being cast as Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain – not just the best teams in the division but the ones with such staggering financial supremacy that they can bully every other club in the division with signings and win the league even when they are far from the best. Bayern sacking Julian Nagelsmann in March and still winning the league and then signing Dortmund full-back Raphael Guerreiro on a free transfer is a handy reminder.
Had City spent £100m on a player for the second time in three years to once again break the transfer record for a British player there would have been more of a comparison, but Rice and Arsenal are handy reminders of why this too is a nonsense claim. Having sold two players to Arsenal last summer that helped their title challenge, the Blues have been outbid by them for one this year.
The completion of that deal will mean both Arsenal and Chelsea have paid more for a player than City have, while the Blues feature just once in the list of the top ten most expensive transfers in the Premier League; Liverpool and Arsenal are also on there, with Chelsea on it twice and United on it a whopping five times. To contrast, Dortmund’s record signing in Germany would not make it into Bayern’s top ten – even before the prospect of Harry Kane adding to that.
That also ties into another complaint: that ‘Manchester City winning the Premier League is inevitable (and therefore boring) because they spend more than anyone else’. Guardiola himself admits that money has helped the Blues to where they are, but all of their rivals are spending heavily as well and Arsenal’s tilt at the title looks less of a fairytale when you look at their spending.
There is a reason City’s chairman wants to talk about net spend and that is because it shows things such as Arsenal’s being more than £300m more than City’s over the last five years. Even talking gross spend, Arsenal have spent £67m less than City in that time but with splurges on Rice, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber this summer it is not inconceivable that they could exceed the Blues in that regard as well.
City spending that money on Rice would have brought the familiar village idiots out, declaring the season and football as we know it to be over. Arsenal spending that money should allow for more factual takes about the level of competition in the Premier League that indicate it will be harder than ever for City to win the league next year.
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