When it comes to winning the Champions League, Ferran Soriano says Manchester City “are not obsessed”. Well, they should be.
Soriano, the club’s widely-acclaimed chief executive, says the Premier League is the club’s “bread and butter” and that is fair enough. But you should not be spending caviar wages to pay for bread and butter only. The signing of Erling Haaland and the arrival of Kalvin Phillips will be dressed up as good business.
After all, the combined fee is something not too much above the mark paid for Jack Grealish and will be offset by the decent payment for Gabriel Jesus and the possible departure of Raheem Sterling. But the bottom line is that the City have acquired two of the most sought-after talents in football when they already had an embarrassment of riches.
His appointment, back in 2016, was such a brilliant coup that City’s outlandish spending - and we are talking about wages as much as actual fee - has, to some extent, been camouflaged by Pep Guardiola’s brilliant football. It won’t be any more. If City win the Premier League again, they will get no more than perfunctory congratulations.
The acclaim could well be begrudging. How can you not win it when you follow up a fourth triumph in five years by collecting yet more blue chip talent? Phillips is taking a risk by joining a club at which he is unlikely to get more than two dozen starts in a Premier League season.
The England midfielder only has to look at Grealish’s numbers in his first season if he wants a reminder of how few players can even think about an automatic starting place under Pep. And it is hard to envisage too many games when the manager will want to start Rodri AND Phillips. But the risk is also Guardiola’s. His football is sublime but there is no risk in taking on one of the game’s best goal scorers and one of the most highly-rated defensive midfielders in the game.
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With his style, Guardiola takes risks - with their recruitment, City take none. The signing of Phillips, along with the signing of Haaland and last summer’s £100m purchase of Grealish, smacks as much as of City stopping talent going elsewhere as it does of thinking it will improve their team. City are cutting teams to ribbons with Pep’s beautiful football and bludgeoning them with financial might.
When the latter becomes more significant than the former, Guardiola has an issue. Despite Soriano’s protestations, Guardiola will get little credit for winning a fifth Premier League title in six seasons, only criticism if he fails to do so. And that is why they have to be obsessed with winning the Champions League. Because anything else next season will be a failure.
