Manchester United made an intriguing signing this week. Tactically smooth, financially rich and follically multi-layered, with shades of blond, brown and white mixed into his hair, I can’t be the only one to have noticed that Bastian Schweinsteiger is a footballing latte. Apparently coffee-shop culture has now become so pervasive that it has spilled into previously neutral venues such as footbll
That development, we can agree, was perhaps the main revelation to emerge from the signing of the German midfielder. More trivially, Schweinsteiger’s arrival at United serves to reaffirm a trend that began last summer or last January, depending on whether you count Juan Mata or not: Manchester United has begun to invest huge sums of money in ready-made star names and supposed safe-bets.
Here we have a clear departure from the past where, despite its spectacular wealth, even modern United has always been more of a risk-taker in the transfer market than a Galactico-collector. Whether it was attributed to the debt burden imposed by the Glazer family’s ruthless takeover of the club or whether it was attributed to Alex Ferguson’s preference for developing players in his own mould, the tendency, with a few non-sequential exceptions, was to consistently pick out players either on the rise or about to be. Now, not so much.
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Moves for players such as Angel Di Maria from Real Madrid, Radamel Falcao from Monaco and Schweinsteiger from Bayern Munich each come with the hope that these players will merely maintain their existing performance levels, rather than exceed them while at their new club. It’s a simultaneously more and less ambitious strategy: United isn’t looking for improvement, but the reason for that is because no improvement is really required from these players. They’re already great.
From a small sample, results have so far been a kind of subdued success. While none of the biggest names has managed to sustain their aura of untouchable brilliance once they’ve come into contact with Premier League reality—both Falcao and Di Maria were displaced in the United lineup at times by luminaries such as Ashley Young and James Wilson—as a part of a broader spending scheme, their presence has coincided with a rise from seventh to fourth in the division. More tellingly, you would expect this improvement to be a continuing theme, with teams tending to improve upon buying large quantities of known quality.
But United’s shift in emphasis isn’t just about efficacy. There’s more to sports than that and, outside of a point-by-point analysis this move towards signing players who everyone already rates comes with two further, intriguing—and contrasting—implications, one positive and one negative, as I see it.
The positive is that United and Premier League fans get to live out the fantasy of seeing great players, often from other leagues, turn up in their team and in their league. These are the kind of moves that play out in the imaginary context of video games and alcohol-fuelled conversations. It’s satisfying and fun and in some way reassuring to see these players turn up in red kits at the start of the season, bringing with them their own, pre-established myths and legends. Schweinsteiger is a World Cup winner: he can’t help but lend West Bromwich Albion away a winning sense of affirmation.
The corresponding negative is the same point but in reverse. These are all players who we’ve seen be brilliant before, which is all well and good, but it also means that even if they play brilliantly again there’s limited room for anything new. Of course there is the reinvention angle—the potential for a mid-to-late career rewrite for a player like Schweinsteiger—but there’s not the same sprawling potential as when United signed, say Javier Hernandez out of nowhere. Even if Schweinsteiger is completely magnificent this season he surely can’t match the mesmerising, incongruous spectacle of an unknown Mexican arriving at the club and scoring 20 goals in his first season.
When it comes down to it, the Schweinsteiger-paradigm at United is like watching all of your favourite old films again rather than trying out new stuff: enjoyable but also slightly limiting. Even including players such as Memphis Depay arriving from PSV Eindhoven, who still has room to improve (or not), there’s a sense that you might be missing out on the possibly miraculous in place of the probably bankable, embracing conservatism at the expense of invention.
For me that’s a slightly damp twist, more of a loss than a gain. I prefer the riskier business. But that’s me. How you prioritise the positives and negatives here comes down to personal preference. For a lot of United fans, including manager Louis Van Gaal, now is exactly the moment for star names and safe bets. And, to be fair, it’s difficult to blame them for that kind of thinking, even it involves signing a footballing latte.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter