Ross Barkley to Manchester City: Manuel Pellegrini may pay £50m for Everton midfielder to boost English quota
IAN HERBERT
Manchester City are prepared to go back to Everton for Ross Barkley next summer and they may be willing to meet his £50m price tag because their supply line of young English players is still three years away from first-team standard.
The importance to City of 36-year-old Frank Lampard, one of only four England-developed players the club are realistically able to field, underlines the struggle they face as they wait for their academy work to bear fruit.
The pursuit of Barkley could establish a pattern of buying English players as City seek to ensure to renew their squad incrementally and avoid the kind of mass overhaul that Manchester United have needed. Yaya Touré will be 32 at the end of this season and City are not expecting to have developed his successor from within, despite intense investment which will include the academy being relocated to a state-of-the-art Etihad Campus neighbouring their stadium in three weeks.
City’s detailed scouting work on Barkley, leads them to value him at £20m, though the premium on English players meant they increased their offer to Everton to £30m in the summer.
The Goodison Park club refused to budge from £50m so City reluctantly walked away, though City’s £9m net spend this summer meant that they could have purchased the 20-year-old for £40m and still have fallen within the £49m spending restrictions imposed on them by Uefa for breaching Financial Fair Play rules. City could spend that £40m in January if their manager, Manuel Pellegrini, and director of football, Txiki Begiristain, feel that there is a major weakness in the squad. They are confident that their decision to enter the season with only three strikers was prudent, with Pellegrini’s habit of playing a loan striker in many games leading the club to conclude that four may be one too many.
City have only one home-grown player in their Champions league squad – Dedryck Boyata, and he is a Belgian – but are determined to learn from the mistake they made in 2010 and 2012 when they launched into the market with the express aim of buying English players without fully assessing whether they were good enough. Jack Rodwell, Scott Sinclair and Adam Johnson have all subsequently been sold on.
Barkley is of title-winning calibre, which is likely to push City into more purposeful negotiations with Everton than this summer, when the approach was more speculative. Barkley is six weeks away from a return to fitness from knee ligament damage.
The City hierarchy, who are understood to feel that Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho’s mockery of Pellegrini on Sunday night validates their reasons not to hire him, remain confident that they will be able to tie James Milner and Joe Hart to the club with new contracts.
There is no desire to let either go, though Milner’s willingness to sign the four-year deal City are offering will depend on whether he feels he can command enough starts for the club. This is more important to him than the money on offer, though his display against Chelsea will help him cement a starting place. Hart and Milner are both in the last year of their contracts.
City’s Abu Dhabi owners accept that developing home-grown players takes years. The Spaniard installed by the club to head their academy, former Liverpool academy head coach Rodolfo Borrell, has told the board that there are a number of real jewels, some of whom will become available to the first team in two to three years.
The former Barcelona executives Ferran Soriano and Begiristain feel that it is the quality of coaching, rather than a lack of talent, which has been England’s problem. The frustration for leading clubs is that there is no adequately competitive level of football from which the elite development squad players can spring into Premier League level.
The Premier League reserve division is not competitive enough and hopes are fading among those at the top of the game about FA chairman Greg Dyke’s proposal that top sides’ B-teams should play in the professional pyramid.
Loan deals to enlightened European clubs are the only way to prepare young talent for the Premier League. City are in Lille virtually every week to keep an eye on the development of their academy player Marcos “Rony” Lopes, who was described by the French club’s director of youth academy last week as a better prospect than Eden Hazard.
The Everton manager, Roberto Martinez, indicated last week that Barkley would undergo another scan on his knee this week. “Maybe he will be back a bit quicker than expected as long as the scan and everything goes well,” he said. “I think realistically we are talking between four and six weeks.”
