Manchester City’s transfer business has long been regarded as the celebrity of the footballing world.
People want to read about it, people want to scrutinise it, and people want to celebrate when it fails. Eliaquim Mangala’s unsteady start to life in Manchester has attracted flies like an odoriferous dollop of muck, but City’s latest big-money signing shouldn’t invite similar criticism.
Earlier this week, Begiristain and his boys parted with £28 million to secure the services of Swansea City striker Wilfried Bony – a quirky fee for a player who boasts no European experience, one might remark.
But the demand for experience in Europe and a certain number of goals outside of the box and all the rest of the ridiculously precise criteria is becoming outrageous. The respective transfer policies of Europe’s ‘bigger’ clubs no longer include a risk-taking factor and as a result, under-performing players in teams at the higher end of the table are being preferred to over-achieving players in teams at the lower end of the table.
What makes Fernando Torres a more attractive buy than Charlie Austin? His name, his outdated record and his club history, probably.
That’s what renders City’s latest piece of business particularly refreshing. Bony may not carry around the flashiest CV in Europe, but he has shown over the course of the last two seasons that he can score goals in the Premier League on a consistent basis. And the second part of that sentence should be enough; he scores goals in the Premier League, and he does it consistently.
If you didn’t already know, Bony, who is six months younger than Sergio Agüero, scored more goals (20) than any other Premier League player in 2014 and owns an impressive record of just over one goal in every two games. He has scored just over a third (9) of Swansea’s 26 goals so far this season and has a shot accuracy rate of 56%.
I’m failing to see why there’s any doubt….
Álvaro Negredo’s departure from the Etihad Stadium will be confirmed in the summer and the club have replaced him with a younger, stronger and similarly technically gifted footballer.
The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ partnership that glistened in the beginning of City’s 2013/2014 campaign was cruelly and prematurely taken away from us, but a new little and large duo has the potential to reinvigorate our attacking play in the second half of the season.
It would be difficult to suggest the money spent on Bony could be the best £28m the club have ever spent, (David Silva and Yaya Touré were bought for less, after all), but the Ivorian certainly has the credentials needed to strengthen City’s pursuit of silverware.
