Sadio Mane claims, ‘classiest club’ Man Utd and more…

Sarah Winterburn

Fixture list
‘IT’S FOOTBALL v COVID-19’ might just be the most facile headline we have ever seen.

A few days after Premier League footballers were decried as ‘social pariahs’ in The Sun, they are hailed as heroes for pledging £4m in total to the NHS.

To put that number into context, the average salary for a Premier League player is now over £3m.

If it really is ‘FOOTBALL v COVID-19’ then we are predicting a convincing away win.

 

Not adding up
 Is it £4m, though? While The Sun say ‘Premier League captains have created a Players Together fund to give £4m to the NHS’, the Daily Mail’s back page trumpets that they ‘could raise more than £20million to aid the fight against coronavirus’.

But what’s £16m between friends?

 

Dummy run
In the inside pages of the Daily Mail, Martin Samuel writes again that footballers should take pay cuts to help out their clubs. It is an argument he has made several times already this week.

He is entitled to his opinion but why does he have to be so bloody patronising? As if footballers are so stupid that they cannot possibly understand economics…

‘Footballers are not being asked to fund the National Health Service, despite the decency of Henderson’s intentions. Right now, we have the Government and many existing charities to do that.

‘The request to footballers is from their clubs and, if anything, it is more readily resolved than any charitable donation.

”The first thing to say is that if Derby County needed me to take a pay cut to save the club I would understand and look to support them in whatever way I could,’ wrote Wayne Rooney at the weekend.

‘There is a lot of this emotion about.

”You cannot prescribe a blanket approach,’ Ryan Bertrand, of Southampton, told The Guardian. ‘You might need a 19 per cent cut at one of the smaller clubs and 36 per cent at the larger Champions League ones. I’m sure if you did 40 per cent here, 20 per cent there and 16 per cent there, you’d get to the overall 30 per cent.’

‘He called it ‘maths for dummies’, which is appropriate as that model works out at 25.3 per cent, not 30.’

Oh do sod off. We’re pretty sure that Bertrand was not advocating that the 40 per cent, 20 per cent and 16 per cent cuts were spread equally, so working out the average and basically calling a grown man a ‘dummy’ is pretty low.

 

The Stupid One
While The Sun and Mail focus on that act of charity, the Daily Mirror’s back page tells us that ‘JOSE MOURINHO has issued a humbling apology over his Tottenham public fitness session’.

Erm. No he bloody didn’t. Not once did he say the word ‘sorry’ or the word ‘apologise’. He merely ‘accepted’ he was wrong; the man clearly does not do ‘humble’ and we should not pretend otherwise.

 

I-Spy
This is Tabloid-land. Anybody who uses statistics is a ‘boffin’ and anybody who uses technology is a ‘nerd’. Oh and anybody who uses GPS is a ‘spy’. For some reason, football reporters love a ‘spy’.

Which is how we get here on The Sun website

‘THE SPY WHO TAGGED ME: Arteta spying on Arsenal stars using hi-tech GPS systems during lockdown to ensure fitness levels don’t drop’

Alternatively, Arsenal are one of many football clubs using monitors to keep track of the fitness of their employees. Which sounds less like ‘spying’ and more like a ‘sensible way of using the technology available’.

The only thing missing is a mocked-up image of Arteta as James Bond; maybe the ‘art’ department has been furloughed.

 

Point-scoring
‘Manchester United have left Liverpool FC and Premier League rivals embarrassed’ – Manchester Evening News.

Apparently, ‘United continue to show they are arguably the classiest and most dignified club in the Premier League – if not the best on the pitch just yet’.

Not sure why they keep misspelling Southampton.

 

Dream scenario
Quite how Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s glee that Manchester United are in a strong position to “exploit” financial problems at other clubs fits in with this narrative of them being ‘the classiest and most dignified club in the Premier League’ is unclear.

The Daily Mirror helpfully bring us a potential Manchester United XI if they buy all their targets.

Mediawatch is not sure what’s more ridiculous; that United ‘plan to buy big this summer’ but would still end it with a midfield of Fred and Scott McTominay. Or that somebody still believes that Marcus Rashford is a striker.

 

Valueless
We know times are hard but do we really have to plumb these kinds of depths?

Now transfermarkt is one of our favourite website for statistics but nobody in their right mind pays any real attention to their transfer ‘values’; best of luck with buying Marcus Rashford for £57.6m, for example.

Until there is a football ‘news’ shortage when we see headlines such as this: ‘Sadio Mane has ‘devalued more than’ Phil Foden amid coronavirus pandemic’.

Sorry what? Of course it is an absolute load of bollocks. Mane has only been ‘devalued more’ than Foden because he is a) worth more in the first place and b) transfermarkt have arbitrarily decided that players born after 1998 have devalued 10% while everyone else has devalued 20%.

So every player who is over the age of 22 has ‘devalued more’ than every player under the age of 22. According to a website and their algorithms.

To try to turn this into some kind of Liverpool-Manchester City rivalry nonsense is nothing less than pretty bloody shitty.

 

Claim of the day
‘Liverpool news and transfers LIVE – Gini Wijnaldum exit, Virgil van Dijk slammed, Manchester United star makes Sadio Mane claim’ –Liverpool Echo.

And what is this ‘Sadio Mane claim’? That he’s ‘not all that’? That actually he is a rotter? That his value has devalued more than Phil Foden?

No, the ‘Sadio Mane claim’ is that Aaron Wan-Bissaka already has his shirt.

Definitely headline material.