Oh, and by the way, why doesn’t David Beckham mind his own business! The Kaka deal was said to be structured financially in an almost identical way to Beckham’s at L.A. Galaxy, and nobody batted an eyelid when the world learned that he would be fleecing American Soccer to the tune of £125m over five seasons (nearly £500,000 a week), about the same amount that Kaka might have earned at City. The only difference was the world record transfer fee, oh and the fact that one of the two players has proved that money isn’t his biggest motivator!
Which side of the story do you believe?
Click here to read the full article
In the article Executive Chairman Garry Cook is quoted as saying:
“We are extremely proud that we have a seat at football’s top table. There are many clubs who would have liked to have been in our position trying to bring Kaka here on our terms - and it had to be our terms. Contrary to many an opinion it is harder for us to do business because the expectations are so high. People look at our financial resources as the ticket to success but that is truly not the ticket to success. Of course there is a mixture of disappointment and frustration that the Kaka deal did not go through.
“I think the initial intention from AC Milan was clearly to sell their player and Manchester City’s intention was clearly to bring him here. There are only a few clubs who could even attempt to bring a player like Kaka to their football team. Milan wanted to do the deal and they were ready to do the deal, but they were under political pressure from the owner and the media. You could see it, you could smell it and to be honest they were scared. I think they bottled it, simple as that.
“We chose not to say anything about our interactions with Milan whilst the Italian club chose a very different plan. Interestingly Milan say that Kaka turned us down and what I would say is that it is very difficult to turn down something that you’ve not been offered. We’ve heard everything that has been said in Milan and there’s been a bit of mud-slinging, but we’re going to choose not to get into that. It would have been great to have had Kaka at this football club, the Premier League would have benefitted, football would have benefitted and we were willing to make that investment on rational terms. Unfortunately, the behaviour that they showed was not what we had expected nor had we anticipated.
“We visited Milan four times and the delegation on Monday involved three lawyers that represent the legal counsel for Manchester City football club. It also involved a board member who had flown half way around the world from Abu Dhabi, me and one other senior executive. We were confined to a room, with no food or drink, and we asked some questions of Milan and more importantly we asked some questions of the representatives of the player and they simple could not answer the questions. What they wanted to talk about was; `how much are you going to pay him?’ We chose not to get into that and we didn’t make an offer to the player.
“People perhaps don’t understand the complexity of deals like this. There are all kinds of stages to deals with when it comes to players of the stature of Kaka. One is the transfer fee, the second is the commercial terms and Kaka has seven separate sponsors who all have clauses in their agreement with regard to where he plays football. You have to work through all that before you even get to personal terms. When those start they are related to basics and bonuses and all three stages are complex in their own right. They require legal and financial counsel and they require counsel from executives of the club. In some cases you can phone up a club, ask if a player is for sale, meet with him and his agent put in an offer, agree terms and it can all be done in 24 hours. When you are talking about players of Kaka’s ilk it doesn’t work like that. I think what has disappointed us that the circus that took place around this deal was created by AC Milan.
“That is the disappointing part, but we have always said we will walk away from deals that are not right and we are not anybody’s fool.â€
