Manchester United news and links

From the Guardian:

Did anybody notice, after Michael Owen turned up at St James’ Park for £16m and the final batch of players completed their moves, that football’s transfer window closed this time without the one chink we had come to rely on to shine some light inside? Manchester United, who had been publishing details of all payments they made to agents when signing players, have now, since Malcolm Glazer’s takeover, stopped doing it.

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The Glazers did not treat Sir Alex Ferguson to a rabidly acquisitive summer but on United’s major deals, the signing of the goalkeeper Edwin Van der Sar and the £4m midfielder Park Ji-sung, the club’s previous practice of revealing how much the players’ agents were paid - and, more importantly, for what - was missing. Where once the club’s website offered these nuggets of real information, its “Club News” portal is now cleansed with corporate froth.

“We used to publish the payments, partly to be answerable to shareholders,” a United spokesman said, “but we’re in a different position now.”

United began declaring the agents’ figures after the 99 pointed questions asked by the major Irish shareholders John Magnier and JP McManus - although the club say they were already considering doing it. Now the Glazers own almost all of United. “We’re not accountable in the same way now,” the spokesman said. “We may publish figures at a future date, such as in the accounts, but no decision has yet been made.”

This is quite a loss, because the statements, brief and bald as they were, could be tremendously revealing, the first rays of clarity ever into the murk of the transfer business. When United signed Louis Saha from Fulham in January 2004, the publication of the figures revealed that United paid Saha’s agent Branko Stoic £250,000 for negotiating Saha’s contract and paid Pini Zahavi, the Israeli “super-agent”, for work they did not define.

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