Glenn Gibbons: Man City can buy best players, but not loyalty

Bob Dylan’s assertion that “money doesn’t talk, it swears” seems these days to grow in significance every time Manchester City enter the market. At a time of deeply wounding price hikes in transport, food and utilities, the Arab-financed plutocracy that has been established at Eastlands could be construed as an insult to the hard-pressed families who populate the club’s locality in the working-class heartland in the east of the city.

This summer’s captures of Sergio Aguero from Atletico Madrid and Samir Nasri from Arsenal for a combined fee of £60 million amount not only to a re-affirmation of City’s seemingly inexhaustible resources, but to a declaration that, in modern football, cash is powerful enough to blow away some of the game’s eternal verities.

The first of these is that City’s location in the rainy and chilly north-west of England would make it virtually impossible to tease players of the quality of Aguero and Nasri from such world-renowned playgrounds as Madrid and London.

It is no myth that expensive, high-calibre players, especially from abroad, have tended to be seduced by the irresistible lure of the capital, with its readily available delights. Alex Ferguson himself has often enough confessed his own difficulties through the years in trying to persuade top-class players to join Manchester United. Even the romantic pull of his club has, on occasion, not been enough of a draw. The power of City’s financial magnet is underlined by the fact that Aguero and Nasri were already domiciled in two of the world’s most desirable locations. Ironically, however, it is the club’s lucre which could prove to be the most awkward aspect of Roberto Mancini’s job – or that of his successors.

With annual income of upwards of £10 million, many of those celebrity players will almost certainly see no need to remain for more than a couple of seasons, having earned enough to make them financially independent from now to the grave. It is also likely to cause them itchy feet, a yearning to return to the continental mainland, most probably to Barcelona or Madrid. Cristiano Ronaldo and others like him have already demonstrated that even a club like Manchester United can no longer be considered a terminus.

When Eric Cantona was at the height of his extraordinary game at Old Trafford some years ago, Ferguson addressed rumours of the great French artist’s discontent and desire to leave because of his eight-month ban after attacking a Crystal Palace fan. He insisted he would stay because “he has found his spiritual home here”. It seems it will be a long time before anyone will be able to say that about United’s neighbours. Indeed, the greater probability is that the day will never actually dawn.