“It’s not so smart to sign Mbappé,” comes from saying the new largest shareholder of Manchester United, the most honorable Sir Jim Ratcliffe, in an interview for the GT Cycling Club that, honestly, I don’t know what it is, but I respect it, it would be missing further. Let’s say that I like this type of risky approach originally, why not. The best discussions usually catch us when the starting point between the two or more parties present in a conversation seems very far away, almost unreachable, and if I could sit down to have tea with Mr. Ratcliffe, or wait for the bus, maybe Surely my first question would have to do, precisely, with the opposite statement: does it seem smarter not to sign him?
There is usually something pretentious in these business appearances that believe they know football in a way that no one would have ever noticed. Not even those who have spent a lifetime dedicated to him. And if you don’t have it, you immediately learn (or simply accumulate it, like the worst vices, or cholesterol), believing you are above the game and its history, its geniuses and its officials, individuals and their particularities, just because putting money on the table seems to grant you at least that: a certain intellectual daring that pushes you to say everything that anyone else, wisely or not, would keep silent about.
It is something that we witness from time to time without anyone being surprised by anything, not at least since the times of Berlusconi, to quote one of those who believed he was reinventing football. Not Arrigo Sacchi, no: him. Or from that very Spanish barbarism that the Movistar + colleagues baptized as The League of Extraordinary Men and that, to be honest with our own ghosts, the only thing extraordinary about it was the patience with which the taxpayers, penitents, partners, subscribers or simple fans we witnessed his almost daily display of an anointed redeeming businessman. “God wants them long,” I thought I heard one of them say on one occasion.
They say about this Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a billionaire with some credit in sports management after his work at the INEOS cycling team, formerly the all-powerful Sky, that his first big bet to revive Old Trafford involves putting Gareth Southgate on the bench. “My plan is to put the right people in the right positions,” says Ratcliffe in the same interview. And, for some reason that escapes me, placing Mbappé on the left wing of a hypothetical forward seems a worse idea than handing over the sporting baton to the current England coach, because that is how black magic must work when it is explained to you with an Excel .
We already heard in Barcelona a few years ago that investing in the biggest football star of the moment is not a good approach. Or something similar was suggested to us when, after selling Neymar Jr. for a million, they ended up investing that same money and a little more in Dembélé and Coutinho, less obvious signings, more intelligent, profitable and eco-sustainable than Mbappé’s, in our opinion. of the promoters of the idea. “The real challenge is to find the new Bellingham, the new Roy Keane,” Ratcliffe concludes. What a shot of optimism for a fan who has been waiting for the messiah for years while they watch Guardiola sow wheat in the field next door. Ratcliffe wouldn’t sign him either, I suppose: it seems that the smart thing is to look for the next entrepreneur in the Bages region.
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