Inside the Guehi deal...
We did this as a pilot but a lot of it seemed very relevant when we put it out last week, and still does. Hope you enjoy it. Definitely worth listening to for Christian Purslow’s take on Manchester City’s spending…
We did this as a pilot but a lot of it seemed very relevant when we put it out last week, and still does. Hope you enjoy it. Definitely worth listening to for Christian Purslow’s take on Manchester City’s spending…
Great stuff Henry. I appreciate the insider’s perception (not opinion) of Christian. It is incredibly informative and enlightening. Gives us that ‘fly on the wall’ experience. However, it is delivered with such ‘sang froid’ as if to be immutable. In private conversation I wonder if you ever get a, ‘Yep, I know this is absolutely bonkers Henry but it’s the way of the football world,’ or does he believe it is all entirely good? The sequence where he sets out the inescapable logic and maths of paying this much for Marc Guéhi - transfer fee this, signing on fee that, agent’s fee the other (although the latter wasn’t mentioned 😏😏) - but it doesn’t matter how much because winning the Premier League, and going deep in the Champions League (just going deep, mind, not necessarily winning it) would mean this and they will be millions in front.
Do these people (I don’t mean Christian - in this case he’s the messenger) know what they are doing to the game? I think about watching incredibly skilful people play a game/sport at the top level - oh, I don’t know - tennis, snooker, darts - and observing, ‘If these blokes are playing snooker then I must be playing something else’ - their talent is so accomplished and consistently so that it seems other worldly. But … football is not like that. We all know that the lowly team can beat the very highest ranked team on a given day - not 11 tyros vs 8 Man City milionarios, but 11 v 11 of each. This, we might declaim, is football ladies and gentlemen. On a man for man level - Messi can step up and miss a penalty (it has been known), yet we know we can drag an amateur off a park pitch and he can blast the kick high into the top corner (Donnarumma groping thin air).
It seems to me that what Christian describes is a cohort of people who want to take the game to a place where it is ‘another world’. A place where we might say, ‘If they are playing football then I am playing something else.’ What sacrilege that would be?!