If you had to pin the blame for the current state of the soccer economy on one man, you likely wouldn’t get much farther than Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez. He won his first tenure as president of the club on the back of a lopsided season that saw Madrid win the UEFA Champions League but finish a lowly seventh in Spain’s La Liga. During his campaign he promised to deliver a team comprised of world class (read: phenomenally expensive) talent, and he delivered the galácticos. As the term implies, it was a haphazard collection of all the best and brightest players available on the market, the type of team that could take on the universe.
He began his tenure with the controversial and expensive signing of Luís Figo from Barcelona, and most recently has broken some of his own records with the bank busting signings of Gareth Bale, Toni Kroos and James Rodríguez. The teams he helped mold have undoubtedly been successful. They’ve won the Champions League twice more and have, but for a couple of aberrations, traded league titles with Barcelona since 2000. By most metrics, Pérez’s investments would appear to have paid serious dividends.
On purely an intuitive level, the best players produce the best results. It makes sense for Madrid to dip into its large coffers to buy at whatever the price. The fact that you have to get down to 30th on a list of the most expensive transfers of all time before you could find one that took place prior to Pérez’s tenure began in 2000 only seems to add credence to the method. One or two failures aside, clubs that could afford to do so have reaped huge rewards following in Pérez’s footsteps. Chelsea and Manchester City, both backed by billionaire owners, are the favorites for the English Premier League title, stocked to the brim with expensive but effective talent. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that the shortcut between your team and a trophy is best ridden upon the back of a blank check.
Just below Chelsea and Manchester City in the table sits once-perennial contenders Manchester United. Unlike their upstart rivals, United has a long history of success that has brought them a reliable revenue stream along with trophies. Indeed, Manchester United are consistently ranked with Real Madrid among the most valuable sports franchises worldwide. They have enjoyed decades of superiority over the English game, but last season experienced a troubling decline in form. So it is no surprise then that United addressed this issue by taking several unsubtle dips into the transfer market. This past summer saw legitimate stars in the form of Ángel Di María and Radamel Falcao added to United’s ranks, and they will be joined by many others if the persistent transfer gossip is true. It would appear that we might be witness to a galácticos tribute act, one that might end up surpassing its predecessor.
No doubt this leaves United fans salivating, but it is worth considering what exactly this would mean, not just for United but for soccer as a whole. The first question that begs asking is whether or not the galácticos method actually worked for Madrid. There’s little doubt that the team improved from the season that allowed for Pérez’s rise to power, but it was not a team built solely by his spending. Academy products Iker Casillas and Raúl played huge roles in the ensuing success of the team, and Pérez oversaw the comings and goings of such legendary coaches as Vicente del Bosque, Fabio Capello and José Mourinho. These facts do little to discount the tremendous impact players like Cristiano Ronaldo have had on the team, but they at least suggest that spending splurges alone are not the key to success, and indeed might be counterproductive. One of the biggest criticisms of Pérez and his galácticos policy has been the preference for attacking stars over more utilitarian, defensively minded position players. This lopsided philosophy is mostly reflected on the wider transfer market, where defenders and deeper midfielders seem criminally undervalued compared to the more easily quantifiable talents of strikers and creators.
One would hope that United takes a more sensible approach to making their team world beaters. Already a preference for attacking players has caused United some difficulty; one could easily imagine them closer to the title fight if one or two quality centre-backs were brought in to supplement the thinning talent on defense. Instead they have an overabundance of attacking options. It’s a testament to Louis van Gaal’s immense skill that he has found a way to successfully position all of Robin Van Persie, Falcao, Juan Mata and Wayne Rooney into the starting XI. Bringing in Gareth Bale next summer, as rumored, would conceivably unbalance that delicate craftsmanship. It’s unlikely that Bale would be content with playing wingback, and playing him in his desired position either means a fundamental change in tactics or losing one of those other talented, and expensive, parts. It’s a problem Real Madrid face time and time again, and while they also mostly find a suitable balance, it usually means trading one world class talent for another, often at greater expense. Too often Madrid has succumb to such vanity, and at times they seem less a cohesive team than a collection of marketing ploys.
That might seem like a cynical take, especially considering Real Madrid won the Champions League just last season, but it strikes at the heart of the real problem with the galácticos experiment: a lack of sustainability. The price for the world’s best players has only grown since Pérez first took his seat in Madrid’s front office, and presumably there is a limit to how much monolithic clubs can artificially inflate the value of players. History tells us that every bubble bursts and, when it does, what becomes of those that made their fortunes within them. Certainly neither Madrid nor United are at any serious risk of bankrupting themselves over transfer fees, but it is unlikely either club would want to be overflowing with players they are unable to offload when the time comes to buy a new batch. How many teams – beyond United – have the ability or desire to take on Wayne Rooney’s hefty wages, for instance?
Manchester United would do well to take a realistic approach to their galácticos, buy the players they need instead of just the players they want and, perhaps most vitaly, continue to invest in youth. Barcelona is the most successful example, but other teams are catching on to the merits of this philosophy. Reigning champions Manchester City just unveiled a lavish new youth academy, and Southampton continues to balance strong performances with the ability to produce talented youngsters. Youth is a cheaper and arguably more reliable approach, but one that takes time. The galácticos experiment was, at its heart, reactionary. It was a necessary show of force for a team that felt its prestige slipping. United are in a similar situation. Fans might have booed any manager off the pitch who came into a crippled team and suggested a solution that might take five or more years to pay off. No, the purchase of the brightest stars is an aggressive but wise investment in the short term. Ultimately, the more prudent and remarkable decision could be to create, and not merely buy, the best team in the world. In the end, it might just be that a pound of fertile soil is worth ten times that in gold.
