Within the corridors of power at Manchester City Yaya Toure is deemed unsellable.
As important as Lionel Messi is to Barcelona and Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid, Toure was City’s most consistent and best player last season.
With that in mind then, the club are going to have to get used to the frankly ridiculous antics of Toure’s manager, mentor and personal court jester: Dimitry Seluk.
Just over 13 months after City made Toure the club’s highest-paid player (then also the biggest contract in the league before Wayne Rooney’s renewal in February), Seluk is dangling out the bait to see if the Ivorian’s highly productive season is worth a few more thousand a week for his client.
Using his preferred medium, The Sun – as he did in 2013 – Seluk claimed Toure is “upset” because no one at City celebrated his birthday with him in Abu Dhabi, and is once again considering a return to Barcelona.
Bless him.
Seluk’s claims took an even more bizarre turn when he freely offered himself for interviews with the BBC and Sky Sports and reiterated his claims in increasingly comical fashion.
Meanwhile, a video emerged of Toure being presented a cake on his flight to Abu Dhabi and being sung happy birthday while sat in a chair watching a film, unaware what was happening.
What it all adds up to is Seluk playing the same game he’s played at every one of Toure’s six clubs. There is a reason the 31-year-old is a nomadic player – Belgium, Ukraine, Greece, France, Spain and now England – and it’s probably nothing to do with a love of travel.
Seluk has always looked to cut the best possible deal at any given opportunity and once that has become an impossibility, Toure has been moved on.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, it’s how the football business works and if you buy a player who uses such people you have to expect the potential consequences, regardless of how successful you may be.
With City’s Financial Fair Play punishment set to cut deep into their spending, meaning they are unlikely to be able to spend sufficiently this summer in strengthening the squad, holding onto their prime assets is a priority.
Toure is such an asset and Seluk is simply exploiting the situation.
It’s also a time of year where just after the season has finished and the World Cup is yet to start, there is a news vacuum that needs filling. These are precisely the sort of tales that get exposure and the story has the potential to run, theoretically putting pressure on City.
He may well want to play for Barcelona again (who wouldn’t?) but it seems improbable the Catalan club would even consider him a realistic acquisition in wages and transfer fee, let alone whether he fits in with new coach Luis Enrique’s ethos.
In reality the only club who can afford him is Paris Saint-Germain, another with the guillotine of FFP sanctions over them.
City would be wise to ignore Seluk’s latest rant, for all it has done is heap embarrassment upon himself and Toure.
