Angel Di Maria: Why did record signing not work for Man Utd?

  

He was British football's most expensive signing, a World Cup finalist and regarded as one of the best players in the world at the peak of his powers.

His capture was supposed to be a show of power from Manchester United that they could still compete with Europe's elite for the best players.

But as Angel Di Maria looks set to leave Old Trafford for French champions Paris St-Germain after a single year in the Premier League, BBC Sport looks at why the £59.7m Argentina international has failed on the stage which seemed ready-made for his talents.

How did the deal come about?

It all seemed so perfect.

In the summer of 2013 Manchester United had been looking for a marquee signing with which to usher in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era.

Cristiano Ronaldo could not be lured back from Real Madrid. Gareth Bale was chased but his heart was set on joining Ronaldo at the Bernabeu.

Twelve months on, the need was more acute. Without the collective mental strength Ferguson so painstakingly forged, technical and physical deficiencies had been exposed during David Moyes' ill-fated tenure.

Glamour was not required purely to make United fans feel good. It was a necessity if they were to compete with Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool, who had taken their Champions League place.

Real, back in the 'Galactico' business of accumulating star names, had one man too many following the arrival of one of the 2014 World Cup's stand-out performers, Colombia's James Rodriguez.

Di Maria, man of the match in the Champions League final three months earlier, was deemed surplus to requirements and United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward swooped.

The Argentine signed a five-year contract on 26 August, 2014, for a British record fee of £59.7m.

Welcome to Manchester: Di Maria's early promise

Talk at the time suggested Di Maria would be paid in excess of £200,000 a week, with bonuses for winning the Premier League, Champions League and even the Ballon d'Or for the world's best player over the course of a five-year contract.

His early performances suggested such optimism was justified.

Di Maria scored a goal and claimed an assist in three of his first four games for United.

The stand-out effort was a magical chip at Leicester on 21 September to put the visitors two goals up in a game they were eventually to lose 5-3.

United fans were in thrall to their new number seven. Di Maria responded by saying moving to Old Trafford from Madrid represented a step up in his career.

Why things changed

Working out why good things turn bad is a precarious business. The facts are that after the victory over Everton on 5 October, Di Maria did not score another goal until 4 January, when United beat League One Yeovil in the FA Cup third round.

Did anything happen in between? Maybe not one seismic moment but a few events rolled up and made a big one seem all the more significant.

In October, Argentina lost a friendly match 2-0 against Brazil in Beijing. Di Maria played the full 90 minutes. The air quality was not great, the temperature was high. Three days later, Di Maria featured for the final 17 minutes of a friendly against the Hong Kong national side.

The round trip was approximately 12,000 miles. For a player who had not had much of a summer break because of his international commitments and had finished the World Cup with a thigh injury, the Far East trip must have been physically draining.

In addition, United manager Louis van Gaal's search for his best formation - and Di Maria's best position in it - meant there was little consistency to his role.

In the South American's first 16 United games, he played in six different positions,  including central midfield and striker.

As consistency continued to prove elusive, Di Maria's contribution seemed to be affected. As well as not scoring, he created only three goals in four months between 6 October, 2014 and 10 February, 2015.

A pelvic injury  kept him out for virtually all of December.

So a combination of likely fatigue, injury, lack of form and getting used to a new country and obvious language difficulties could all have been playing on his mind on 31 January, when thieves attempted to break into Di Maria's mansion in Cheshire.

Although the intruders did not gain entry, they did smash a glass door and the mental impact on Di Maria's wife, Jorgelina Cardoso, and their young daughter, was so great they are now living in a city-centre apartment, which, while luxurious, is hardly ideal for family life.

On the pitch, Di Maria's slide continued. Sent off in the FA Cup quarter-final defeat by Arsenal on 9 March , Di Maria was a substitute in six successive games following his return from suspension. He did start the final match of the campaign against Hull, only to limp off with a hamstring injury after 23 minutes.

Why United are willing to let him go

This combination of circumstances led to Di Maria becoming extremely unhappy and wanting a move. As recently as Sunday, Van Gaal said he hoped the Argentine would stay.

Yet the Dutchman has also stated at various times over the past year it is counterproductive trying to keep unhappy players.

The difference between this situation and goalkeeper David De Gea's possible move to Real Madrid, for instance, is that while the Spaniard is a relaxed presence around the United camp, Di Maria has not joined upwith the squad in the United States on their pre-season tour while his future is thrashed out.

Paris St-Germain were keen on taking him last year and are now offering a get-out.

For United, the bitterness of losing a player of such talent is eased by a transfer system which means, financially, they may not take the massive hit it first appears.

Because of the strength of the pound and the change in exchange rates in the past 12 months, plus the way the initial transfer fee was structured, if PSG agree to pay the reported 65m euros (£46.05m), United's overall loss would be less than £10m.

Hit and miss? Manchester United's biggest buys
£59.7m - Angel Di Maria from Real Madrid
£37.1m - Juan Mata from Chelsea
£30.75m - Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham
£30m - Rio Ferdinand from Leeds
£29m - Ander Herrera from Athletic Bilbao
£28.1m - Juan Sebastian Veron from Lazio

The fans' view

United fans have been here before. Juan Sebastian Veron arrived with enormous fanfare - and a then British record £28.1m price tag - from Lazio in 2001 but lasted only two seasons before he left for Chelsea.

Sir Alex Ferguson also broke the club transfer record when he paid Tottenham £30.75m for Dimitar Berbatov in 2008. The Bulgarian did win the Golden Boot in 2010-11, but finished the campaign not able to get a place in United's Champions League final squad. Within six months he had left for Fulham.

Yet possibly more than those two, Di Maria's eventual exit will leave a sad sense of 'what might have been' purely because his talent has been so obvious in the past and his departure so swift.

"I don't understand it," said Ryan Chelva, a fan from Australia who sawUnited beat Barcelona 3-1 in Santa Clara, California, without Di Maria at the weekend.

"If you sign someone as good as him, you have to give him more than a single season.

"He played really well in his first couple of months. He proved he can play under Louis van Gaal. He proved he has the talent. Now it looks as though he is leaving. It is hugely disappointing."

How Di Maria compared with Chelsea's Eden Hazard in the 2014-15 Premier League season

‘Diego Costa would keep coming no matter how much you kicked him’

In an extract from Fran Guillén’s book Diego Costa: The Art of War, the Atlético Madrid striker has teething troubles in a season on loan in Spain’s second tier

In the summer of 2007, having just arrived at Atlético Madrid, Diego Costa was sent to the club’s summer training camp, just another young player honing his football skills. For Costa, though, this would be the first of many summers sweating in the rojiblanca jersey.

His presentation to the media on 10 July was memorable for two reasons. Firstly, the club’s president, Enrique Cerezo, boldly declared they had signed “the new Kaká” and the club took the unusual step of providing the media, who at that time knew little or nothing about the player, with a surprise extra in the official press pack. A journalist, Sergio Perela, who was at the event, explains: “He was such an unknown that as well as the usual press pack, they gave us a DVD showing some footage of him playing.”

That morning, speaking in a Portuguese not dissimilar to the Spanish he speaks today, Costa described himself as a “second striker, with a good burst of pace” and assured the packed VIP suite in the Vicente Calderón stadium that he had always dreamed of “playing for a great club like this” and hoped to prove to them “just what I’m made of”.

Atlético’s pre-season had kicked off the day before the press conference, on 9 July,when they played Manzanares. Ahead lay the qualifying ties of the Intertoto Cup, which would be their ticket into the Uefa Cup. It would prove a bumpy ride. A solitary goal from Atlético’s Diego Forlán in the second leg of the third round was needed to take them past Gloria Bistrita of Romania, on away goals. Costa, however, took no part in these early stages of Atlético’s European campaign.

“Costa had just come back from his injury and he used to come to training with his laces undone,” reflects García Pitarch, Atlético’s director of football, on the Brazilian’s early days in Spain.

“He also tended to be at the back of the pack whenever the squad was doing laps and clearly preferred to stick to the inside lane, where you end up covering a shorter distance. The first team coach, Javier Aguirre, came to see me one day and had a bit of a moan. ‘That lad’s a real pain in the arse and the sooner you loan him out and get him out of my hair, the better. He’s a disaster who runs around with his shoelaces undone.’

“I’m afraid I was a bit short with him. I said, ‘Javier, that’s what you’re here for – to teach him how to do things right. I bet it hasn’t even occurred to you he keeps his shoelaces undone because he’s just come back from a six-month injury and he’s still in pain. And maybe he takes the inside lane because he doesn’t know any better. It’s your job to educate the lad and explain this stuff to him. Don’t just assume he knows what he should be doing. We’re not talking about a 30-year-old pro here. This is an 18-year-old kid who is still learning.’

“Then two weeks later Javier comes back to me and says: ‘You were right. I had a chat with him and he’s taken it all on board. I’m delighted.’ Sometimes you have to give young players a bit of extra help to stop them messing up.”

It was decided Costa would be loaned out to Celta Vigo. “We all got together in the Goizeko restaurant in Madrid’s Wellington Hotel – Ramón Martínez, Manuel García Quilón, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín and I,” Pitarch recalls. “And we agreed to loan them Mario Suárez and Diego Costa. I told Ramón Martínez [at Celta] straight out they would need to keep on top of Diego because he still needed to learn how to behave like a professional. He had practically no club experience and didn’t really understand the code of conduct we expect in the dressing room. He was pretty much an ingénue in all of that. I told him: ‘If you leave him to his own devices it will be a disaster. It’ll cost you financially and deprive me of a potentially great player’.”

Costa was still an unknown quantity when he arrived at Vigo. “I had just come back from injury and people were perhaps not expecting a lot from me,” he says. Roberto Lago, who had just broken into the Celta first team, agrees. “None of us had heard of him when he arrived and we were all pretty surprised when he turned out to be such a good player.”

Ramón Martínez says: “We were delighted with his football from day one. That was when we started to believe that we had the squad we needed to move up.” Unfortunately Celta’s high hopes would, in the end, be dashed. Several of the squad which had crashed out of the Primera Division the previous season had remained with the club, including the manager Hristo Stoichkov, who had been rushed in to replace the unfortunate Fernando Vázquez towards the end of the disastrous 2006-07 campaign.

Costa’s game has since been compared to that of the feisty Bulgarian in his pomp, and he soon became a regular in the teams selected by the 1994 Ballon d’Or winner. The Brazilian, in white boots and rolled down socks over shin guards cut down especially by the Celta kit men, was soon scoring goals for his new side. He also quickly became the centre of attention for other, less laudable reasons.

In their seventh league match, Celta played Xerez at home and were dominating the match. Costa got his first goal in Spanish league football, diving into the six-yard box to finish with 15 minutes left. He raised his hands to the sky in a gesture that spoke as much of sheer relief as any religious devotion. But his celebration did not end there. His Celta team-mate Jesús Perera described it: “I remember he went to the corner and started fooling around with the ball, prancing about like a bull fighter.”

The Xerez players were quick to react and Costa, never one to back down from a confrontation, responded by laughing at them. All hell broke loose. Agus, a Celta defender that day, recalls: “Antoñito [a striker for Xerez] in particular took it badly but Brazilians can be like that and I don’t think he really intended to offend anyone.”

“He didn’t play in the return game at Xerez,” adds Fernando Sales, then of Celta. “It was just as well because no one there had forgotten him. We did explain to him after the match that you can’t behave like that in Spain.”

The referee showed Costa a yellow card, his second of the match, for his first sending-off since arriving in Spain. He apologised at the press conference later. “I messed up and I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but it was just a spur of the moment thing. It won’t happen again.”

When asked about rumours of more trouble in the tunnel after the match, Costa denied involvement in any incident but confirmed that, had anything happened, he most certainly would have been a part of it. “Nothing happened afterwards. You know, I’m no coward. I’m a man and I’m not scared of anything.” His public apology did not save him from his manager’s rebuke. “Stoichkov went absolutely apeshit,” remembers his team-mate Antonio Núñez.

Within days the Bulgarian had decided to resign, citing personal reasons. “I was waiting for a good result before I made the decision to leave,” explained Stoichkov. The news came as less of a surprise to everyone inside the club, where it was an open secret that assistant coach Antonio López had been taking all strategic and tactical decisions. Hristo packed his bags and was replaced by Juan Ramón López Caro.

Costa was faced with the challenge of adapting to life in a new city whilst maintaining a strong performance on the pitch. His main ally in this was Eugenio González, known as “Bosman” at the club because of his role in settling in foreign players. “We got on like a house on fire from the start and I was happy to help him find a place of his own,” recalls González.

“I remember how passionate he was about football. Training wasn’t enough for him and he used to play with his mates on the university pitches at 11pm. I said to him, ‘Diego, you can’t keep doing that. You’re going to do yourself an injury’. But he couldn’t help himself. Football was his life and he was either playing it himself or watching the Brazilian league on television.”

As it turned out, Bosman was wrong and the young Brazilian continued to enjoy his late night sorties under the Galician stars with no ill effect. Meanwhile, his game was winning Costa legions of fans. “Diego Costa, the new Celta sensation is more than ready for Sporting,” declared the Faro de Vigo newspaper before a visit to Real Sporting, which ended with him scoring the winning goal.

His new coach, Juan Ramón López Caro, was quick to see Costa’s potential but also had to endure the player’s idiosyncratic behaviour. During their 16th league game, against Sevilla Atlético, he was booked first for diving and then, 19 minutes later, for his almost continual protests at the referee’s decisions. Down to 10 men, Celta fought back from a goal down to draw, but the atmosphere in the Balaídos stadium had shifted. The fans who had applauded him as he left the pitch after his first red card were now murmuring in disapproval.

Costa’s appearances were frequently marred by disputes. The previous week, away at Málaga, he kneed the defender, Weligton, in the head, causing an injury which required six stitches. After the match, Weligton revealed this had not been his first experience of Costa, whom he had encountered in his League of Honour days with Penafiel in the Portuguese second division and warned referees they should keep an eye on the player.

Costa responded in no uncertain terms: “I wasn’t out to injure him but he was kicking me, Contreras and Quincy all over the pitch the whole game. He and their goalie were way over the top in their tackles on me but, just because I didn’t end up bleeding, no one’s talking about that. I don’t need to hit people in order to play good football. I’m not a boxer after all. But Weligton is happy to throw a few punches himself. It’s just that he’s dishonest about it. I don’t know what he’s snivelling about anyway. He’s such a big girl. Maybe he should take up volleyball instead.”

The next day the Málaga press led with: “Diego Costa raises hell in the second division.” In all likelihood the striker was more irritated by the hard tackles on the Dutchman, Quincy Owusu-Abeyie, who was his best friend at the time. “They were always together,” recalls Núñez. “The rest of us couldn’t understand how they communicated, because one of them could only speak Portuguese and the other stuck to English all the time.”

Team-mate Roberto Lago explains: “Diego told me how they did it: ‘I don’t speak English so we use sign language instead.’ We were actually worried that he would be led astray by Quincy, who was a bit of a rebel.” Ramón Martínez echoes this sentiment: “Quincy was a phenomenal player but totally unmanageable.”

Later in the season, the Celta board made Alejandro Menéndez, the youth team coach, the manager of the first team and their fourth of the season. He did not use Costa much, preferring to put the team’s fate in the hands of more experienced players. In the one match Costa did start, the striker earned his third red card of the season. His reaction took the coach aback.

Menéndez takes up the story: “We were playing Tenerife in Balaídos and were winning 2-0 in the 20th minute, by which time he had already got himself a yellow card. Then, as we tried to take a quick free-kick, Costa hauled an opponent away from the ball, got a second yellow and left us with 10 men. We ended up with a 2-2 draw and in the dressing room after the game he came up to me and with that almost childlike frankness of his said: ‘Mister, please forgive me. I’m still young and I know I have a lot to learn.’

“I was surprised and impressed that a player had the guts and honesty to recognise that he had messed up and damaged the team’s chances. It was the same with training. If he turned up late, he wouldn’t give you a load of bullshit. There would be none of the usual, ‘the alarm didn’t go off’ rubbish. He would be totally upfront and tell me he’d been up most of the night playing PlayStation. It made me really warm to him.”

Costa also apologised to the public: “This has taught me a hard lesson. I have to learn from it. I have to change. I have no idea why these things keep happening to me,” he said, his head bowed. Celta finished the season having saved themselves by the skin of their teeth, not much recompense for a team which had started the season with high hopes. “People ended up not thinking much of me. They saw me as a bit of a troublemaker,” reflected Costa. “It’s important to change people’s impressions. I always commit myself to the teams I play for and always want to win. I hate losing. It’s just that at times I go about things the wrong way and that created problems.”

His relationship with the fans had been bittersweet. Despite the fact he and the Uruguayan, Fabián Canobbio, were almost unanimously seen as the two best players in the squad, the fans disliked what they saw as his constant dissent on the pitch and his tendency to want too much time on the ball.

“He could lose it too easily back then, although in some of those games the referees and opposition players were kind of waiting to see if they could provoke him,” says Núñez.

“It was clear he was headed for bigger things,” adds Agus. “You could see in him things that most players don’t have. I loved how he played with his back to goal, held it up against even the toughest defence and then turned to run at goal with such ease. And he didn’t care who he went up against – whether it was an older, more experienced player or not. There are some strikers who back down if you give them a bit of a shove, but not him. He would keep coming no matter how much you kicked him. His development has been very similar to that of Álvaro Negredo, whom I’ve also played with. They have both worked to perfect their game and are now brilliant strikers.”

“He had almost everything you need to make a great forward,” Esteban Suárez, a Vigo team-mate, adds. “You could see how talented he was back then, although he wasn’t as good as he is now. He was brilliant up front and what really struck me was how well he played under pressure.”

Canobbio adds: “Perhaps back then it was his finishing he had to work on most.”

“Of all the players I’ve worked with he’s the one who can get away from three players in the tightest of spaces without any need to look particularly elegant doing it,” explains Lago. “There were games when he was out of sight. And he was amazing in training.”

His Celta team-mates are unanimous about Costa the man. Super-competitive and nasty on the park, off it he was the opposite. After overcoming initial shyness and the language barrier, the striker became a larger‑than‑life presence around the club. “He always arrived in his car with the music at full volume,” says Agus. “Always singing and dancing,” adds Fernando Sales.

Looking back at those early years, Costa said: “I grew up thinking a bit of pushing and shoving was completely normal. Then I suddenly learned that if you kick another player, you get in trouble. Nobody had ever reprimanded me for that before.”