Pep Guardiola knows what he likes in a goalkeeper. The Manchester City manager has changed the way football looks at the art of keeping. It’s now about more than just making saves, punching clear corners and screaming instructions at dim-witted centre backs. Just ask Claudio Bravo, who lost his starting place just one season after a high-profile move from Barcelona, Ederson, who is almost as good with his feet as he is with his hands, now holds the position, and he is often higher up the pitch than most defenders.
Is this what led Guardiola – or should we say City Football Group (CFG) - to Zack Steffen? The Columbus Crew goalkeeper will leave MLS for City in July 2019. CFG expect a certain standard for their teams and so it makes sense that they want to sign Steffen, who was named the 2018 Goalkeeper of the Year in MLS. He might be raw and prone to the odd blunder, but the 23-year-old possesses a level of technical ability that conforms to Guardiola’s philosophy. He’s not a bad shot-stopper either. Steffen is expected to follow the likes of Kasey Keller, Tim Howard and Brad Guzan as America’s next great goalkeeper.
In truth, though, Steffen has signed for a team he will likely never play for. If he was in Guardiola’s plans, he’d be making the move to the Etihad Stadium this January, not in the summer. After all, Man City are rather light in the goalkeeping department right now, with Bravo sidelined for the foreseeable future through injury. They could really use Steffen as a body on the bench for the hectic winter period.
Instead, it seems more likely that Steffen will be loaned out, just as so many have by CFG in the last few years. They have Patrick Roberts at Girona, they have Manu Garcia at Toulouse, they have Brandon Barker at Preston and Jack Harrison at Leeds. In total, City have 28 senior players out on loan, whether it’s at CFG clubs or elsewhere.
Of course, Harrison remained under the CFG umbrella by making the move from New York City FC in MLS to Man City earlier in the year. He was a star for NYC FC, becoming a key figure alongside David Villa under Patrick Vieira. The English winger, who made the move to the States while still in school, could have chosen to join a whole host of clubs, with several in the Championship linked, but he couldn’t resist the lure of Manchester City, despite the reality of a transfer there.
Even more peculiar was City’s move for Mix Diskerud, a solid but unspectacular semi-regular USA international who had been deemed not good enough for NYC FC. Diskerud was then loaned out to IFK Goteborg before joining Ulsan Hyundai in South Korea until this summer. There’s not a chance that he will ever turn out for Guardiola, unless Guardiola one day needs someone with an in-depth knowledge of Gothenburg’s best restaurants.
This sort of thing isn’t uncommon at the top of the European game. Chelsea have done this for years, adding promising, young players to their youth academy stable before loaning them out and ultimately selling them on for a profit. In September, Chelsea had no fewer than 40 players out on loan with only a handful of senior appearances between them.
Man City are doing things slightly different in the way they are signing players not just at academy level. Diskerud is 28. Harrison is 22. As already mentioned, Steffen is 23. This is why CFG’s ploy seems even more cynical than Chelsea’s. At least Chelsea can point to the number of young players who have used the club’s academy as a springboard. What can City point to other than a series of loans at Championship level?
NYC FC has become an outpost for Man City, not just in the two-way traffic between the two teams (see Vieira, Harrison and now Domenec Torrent), but in the scouting of talent. The club surely played a part in Steffen’s move to the Etihad. Look at how CFG also signed Aaron Mooy from Western Sydney Wanderers – after they’d seen him play against Melbourne City in the A-League – before moving him under the Man City umbrella, loaning him out and ultimately selling him to Huddersfield. These sister clubs are flags in the sand.
The whole model could come crashing down in the not so distant future, with Fifa putting forward proposals that would limit the number of players on loan to between six and eight. That would hit a number of elite clubs, but particularly Chelsea and City. “We are going to adapt to the rules,” Guardiola said when the proposition was put to him. “We’re going to see the situation about loan players and see what we can do. If we cannot loan them, they are going to come back. If we don’t believe they are going to play, if we cannot loan them, we are going to sell them.”
Steffen’s move is so peculiar because at 23 and as a key part of the US national team’s future, he is ready to take the next step in his career. On first impressions, a transfer (for between £7.5m and £10m, the highest fee for a keeper in MLS history) to Manchester City, arguably the best team in Europe right now, represents this. But are MLS players doing more harm than good to their career by joining a club without a clear pathway, at least for them, to the top?
The Guardian Sport
