News, Transfers NEWS

Manchester City Paid £47 million for Carlos Tevez

Published by admin on September 13, 2009

Manchester City are paying an astonishing £47 million fee to Carlos Tévez’s private “owners” in a move that obliterates the British transfer record. The deal makes the Argentina striker the fifth most expensive footballer of all time.

City’s billionaire Arab owners have agreed to pay almost twice the £25.5 million fee widely reported to have changed hands, The Times can reveal. An initial £15 million payment is to be followed by two additional sums of £16 million.

Another £3.5 million will be paid if City win the Champions League while Tévez is at the club — an improbable scenario, but Sheikh Mansour has already shown the lengths to which he is prepared to go to transform the club from perennial underachievers into contenders for the biggest prizes.

One of the Sheikh’s first moves when he took over 12 months ago was to smash the British transfer record by paying Real Madrid £34.2 million for Robinho, the Brazil forward.
But that fee is dwarfed by the £47 million deal for Tévez, which ranks behind only the signings of Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Kaká, and Zinédine Zidane, for £80 million, £60.7 million, £56.1 million and £47.2 million respectively, as the most expensive.

The revelation is the latest twist in the extraordinary saga surrounding Tévez, whose name has rarely been out of the headlines since he arrived at West Ham United in August 2006 and sparked huge controversy about third-party ownership.

And it deepens the mystery about where the money is going.

The Times understands that it is paid to two offshore companies but Kia Joorabchian, the businessman who fronts the consortium that owned the rights to Tévez until City bought the player outright in July, has never explained who the beneficiaries are.

Nonetheless, Tévez has represented a handsome bit of business. The investors stand to make an estimated profit of at least £50 million from an assortment of fees received for a player whose “economic rights” they originally bought from Boca Juniors for £14 million in 2004.

They are understood to include a fee of £4.5 million from West Ham, where Tévez spent the 2006-07 season, a £9 million payment from Manchester United to cover the cost of the player’s two-year “loan” at Old Trafford and now the sum from City.

City’s outlay does not end there, though. On top of the £47 million fee, the club are paying Tévez a salary of £7.5 million a year, or just under £145,000 a week. His wages over a five-year contract take City’s total projected outlay on the striker to £84.5 million, a staggering sum even by City’s inflated standards.

In all, City’s billionaire owner has committed £770.986 million, which includes the £200 million it cost to buy the club, the £342.786 million committed on players’ contracts and £10 million spent on improving the Carrington training headquarters, City of Manchester Stadium and the club’s academy. Mark Hughes, the City manager, has spent £140 million on six leading players this summer and £218.2 million in transfer fees in total since Sheikh Mansour’s takeover, during which time City’s annual wage bill has more than doubled to just under £95 million.

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