If it sounded like the admission of a battle lost, then David Gill's acknowledgement yesterday that Manchester United would not be competing with the salaries on offer at Manchester City was not meant to be one.
United's chief executive avoided the issue of whether the Premier League champions had the capability to match the dizzying figures on offer across town but the sobering truth for City is that they do not need to.
The figure waved under Samuel Eto's nose in June was £200,000 a week but he asked for more — effectively a £12.7 sign-on fee — then let it be known that he would still have signed for United for measurably less. When the £170,000 a week deal which took Emmanuel Adebayor to City was sealed, his people made inquiries as to United's interest.
Carlos Tevez only jumped ship because he couldn't face another year with the same Scottish manager. Such is the appeal of a side which has its place in football's pantheon, and doesn't just crave one.
City won't argue with that point. Mark Hughes has admitted several times in the past few weeks that values change when you're Manchester City.
Not only because the clubs selling to them drive the price up but because City are in a hurry and they can't afford Ferguson's luxury of buying the 18-year-old Da Silva twins (£3m) or even a 17-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo (£12.2m in 2003) and enjoy watching them developing on a relatively modest wage. It is what Gill was alluding to yesterday when he said stagflation wages like City's were not necessary when you are looking to “the medium and long term.” For United, the short term is sorted.
But the medium term is not. Estimates of how City will take to enter title contention differ greatly from player to player — Adebayor hopes a few years, Nigel de Jong suggested five in Durban this week — but there is no doubt that City will eventually come to the top table and offer stature as well as salaries.
That is when the essential difference in ownership will come to bear. United 's vast external debt — estimated at £666m — might be serviceable but interest payments of £43.3m a year don't lend themselves to paying John Terry monopoly money wages.
City's Abu Dhabi owners, meantime, are in this game for the long term and won't be going away. Their ambition is to build a brand which imbues the emiracy with honour and that fact is reflected in way they have been overhauling every aspect of City this summer — from the club's website to its training pitches and press facilities.
“With the sheer volume of our turnover, we can then attract the best players and retain our current players and pay them very good salaries,” Gill said yesterday. But will that still apply if the Ferguson succession proves difficult in a year or two? By which time Sheikh Mansour al Nahyan will have truly established a new kind of City salaries and the level of wage expectations from players has continued to rise as a result.
So while there is presently something vaguely vulgar in the arriviste City becoming the big spenders — deliverers, to be precise, of the largest annual wage bill for a first team squad in English football history, reaching £120m plus if they manage to sign John Terry (£200,000 a week) and Joleon Lescott (£120,000), surprisingly close to the £121m United laid out last season — it will not be considered as such in the future.
City's announcement yesterday of a friendly with Barcelona four games into the Premier League season underlines the elite side they already see themselves as — one which will have spent more than £619m on players this year if you throw in transfer fees. (Even with Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka, Real Madrid will spend about £500m on the same, between this summer and next.)
For a sense of the clubs and individuals who keep Ferguson awake at night, observe those for whom he reserves his venom. Rafael Benitez was last season's target, increasingly so as the season went on and Liverpool loomed over his shoulder like some plague. Expect serious vitriol from him for Manchester City in weeks to come.
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