‘Dark clouds’ Yaya Toure and Dimitri Seluk cast grim shadow over Manchester City
Casting some kind of shadow in football is inevitable but there are good shadows and bad shadows.
Ian Wright’s shadow helped to inspire Thierry Henry to break the all-time goalscoring record for Arsenal that Wright had held for all of ten minutes.
And during the first season after retirement, the shadow of Sir Alex Ferguson loomed down from the stands at Old Trafford like an albatross and, ultimately, became too much for his Manchester United successor, David Moyes, to cope with.
This week, Yaya Toure and his insufferable agent, Dimitri Seluk, continued to cloud the skies over Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium following another round of self-serving comments.
“Some people at City are trying to blame Yaya for what has happened this season,” Seluk said. “But those people aren’t taking responsibility for their own mistakes.
“I am talking about executives who have bought players for a lot of money – and then put those players on the bench.
“Executives who spend a lot of money on Stevan Jovetic and then drop him from the Champions League squad. I feel sorry for [Manuel] Pellegrini. He’s a good coach but a weak manager.”
Whenever the storm clouds gather over the Etihad, Toure and Seluk shield themselves under the only umbrella in town.
They keep dry by issuing threats. They talk about not being loved, not being respected, being persecuted in the media more than other players at the club. They talk about former managers who they love and respect.
They never talk about what they are going to do to help the club out of the situation. Ever. They never talk about giving more or stepping up. They only talk about what they can take away.
I think that, at his best, Toure is a fantastic footballer, but there is a caveat to that. Success during Toure’s City career has, to my mind, come on his own terms.
Surround the 31-year-old with world-class talent and he finds it easy to stand out, covering blade after blade of grass and scoring goals from nothing.
But if one or two players around him should suffer a loss of form, and the form of the team dips as a result, then Toure struggles to step up to the plate, preferring instead to turn to his agent – who, in turn, goes to the Press to point fingers at others. That is not the mark of a true champion.
As if to prove the point, Toure offered the following comment when quizzed by a journalist as to his options this summer.
“For the future, I don’t know more than you do because I will always go where I am offered new challenges,” he said. “That is in my nature. When things are not necessarily going well in a club, the key players take the fall.”
The challenges for City next season don’t come any bigger. The club needs to find a way to wrest the Premier League title back from Chelsea while trying to improve on an unremarkable history in the Champions League.
Personally, I hope that Toure does go, even if it’s to Paris Saint-Germain – to my mind, a sideways step at best – because I’ve had my fill of hearing from Toure and his agent at how aggrieved they are with having everything that a player could ever want.
In terms of the players and their agents who I have seen in the game who have shown a lack of respect to a club and the people who work there, Toure and Seluk are right up there.
I find the contrived feel of their comments, which are always in perfect harmony, particularly nauseating.
I read the paragraph above to a friend of mine who knows Toure and, while he didn’t entirely disagree, he was quick to offer his own take. “Yaya is first and foremost a lovely, lovely person and a fucking great player,” my friend said. “He just gets led by his agent, maybe a bit too much at times.”
Good point. So let’s deal with that in more detail because Seluk is certainly a major factor in all this.
I remember only too well the comments that he made in which he’d claimed that Toure felt unloved at City, shortly before the player signed a mammoth new contract offer. It’s worked once, could it work again?
Seluk said this week: “Two of the biggest clubs have already asked me if he is available and I know that if City would sell, another ten would call me inside 24 hours.” He added: “If City want Yaya to leave, they should come out and say so.”
Leaving to one side for a moment the fact that that quote incriminates at least two clubs by virtue of tapping up a contracted player, Seluk is of course playing a clever little game that agents like to play in these situations…
The City executives who Seluk has openly mocked know that if the club asks Toure to leave, then City will have to pay the Ivorian, by law, every penny remaining on his contract. With two years left on a contract worth around £240,000 a week, that’s the best part of £25 million.
And those same executives know that if Seluk requests that his player be allowed to leave City, then Toure will forfeit every penny remaining on his contract.
Seluk is calling out the City executives in an attempt to get one of them to say something publicly that could cost the club millions of pounds.
If any one of them makes a comment in public that sounds remotely along the lines that the club want Toure to leave, then you can guarantee that Seluk will try to hold them to what they’ve said in the most public way possible.
Right now, not one of them has taken the bait. And, take it from me, they won’t because they’re not stupid.
At 31, Toure certainly has one big move left in him if that is what he truly desires, but he has no need for any more money – he said so himself.
And even if he were the greediest player on earth, PSG still can’t top the £45 million contract that he signed with City two years ago.
Even if City paid Toure something to go before he walked into another contract, it wouldn’t be a sum that would be hugely significant in his decision to leave.
So, with that in mind, where is the pay day should Toure switch clubs?
It will be for the agent who moves him. One last big move – £10 million-worth of agency fees would be my guess – and just a change of badge on the shirt for Toure and a possible stain on his character back in Manchester. Is it worth it?
Clearly, for one man it is. The worst outcome for Seluk is that his client signs a new deal at City and he gets only £5 million. If that is, City even want him.
Personally, I think they’ve already made it known privately to the relevant parties that, beyond the two years left on Toure’s contract, they don’t want him.
The shadow across the blue half of Manchester right now isn’t that of another rain cloud floating inevitably toward the Etihad Stadium.
It’s just Dimitri Seluk opening his wallet to see if there’s any room left.
