Tijjani Reijnders’ fleeting time at Manchester City is almost over. The Dutch international is expected to join Saudi Arabian club Al Qadsiah in a transfer worth around £55m. Will he lift the “Pride of the Eastern Province” to Saudi Pro League glory? Who knows. Also: who cares.
Amid the summer transfer churn, perhaps it is not a particularly noteworthy deal. City will make a small profit on a player they bought for £45m last summer. City fans won’t shed many tears. Reijnders is far from the first Premier League player to accept Saudi Arabian riches and he won’t be the last.
But there is something jarring and a little bleak about Reijnders’ road from AC Milan’s marauding midfielder to Al Qadsiah’s flagship signing in little over a year. No doubt it is a journey that nourishes the bank account for those who choose it. But in football terms, Reijnders’ trajectory cannot be seen as anything other than a decline, a step down after competing for major European trophies, and a shocking waste of his undoubted talent.
In his last season in Milan, at one of Europe’s greatest clubs, Reijnders scored 15 goals and was named Serie A’s midfielder of the season. He signed a five-year contract at City with the ambition of helping to fill the void left by Kevin De Bruyne and Ilkay Gundogan, and called it “a boy’s dream” to play in the Premier League. “Tijjani is the type of midfielder that every team would like to have,” said director of football Hugo Viana on his signing. Well, not City, as it turns out.
We don’t know to what extend Reijnders was pushed to the door. He was a little suspect defensively when playing deeper in City’s midfield. He was also a victim of Pep Guardiola’s mid-season tactical evolution to become more direct and “vertical”, built around the arrival of Antoine Semenyo in January. Now Guardiola’s successor, Enzo Maresca, has led City to pursue new targets such as Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez.
But step back and his story is part of a wider trend of increasing decadence, particularly at the richest end of the Premier League. More so than ever before, the most powerful clubs repeatedly buy new players, often for large fees, and barely use them, only to discard them after a season or two.
At City, Savinho is being sold to Spurs after making only seven league starts last season. Jack Grealish has no transfer offers on the horizon and is set to return to Everton on loan, stuck in mid-table purgatory. Kalvin Phillips is on loan at Sheffield United and still on City’s books. Chelsea are prolific in buying and soon selling players they have no use for. Manchester United have proved positively wasteful in recent years.
Player churn is gradually increasing, yet half of new transfers fail. At the top of the Premier League’s machine, players come and go with an almost casual abandon. Academy products are increasingly viewed as sellable property in the age of financial fair play. One-club players barely exist in the modern game. And it all means that deep, meaningful connections between players and their clubs – those ones that bind a fanbase to their team – are harder to find.
Perhaps this is partly a consequence of a sport which has industrialised the science of talent identification. Where City were once at the forefront of recruitment, now every club has a sophisticated system in place, buying by committee, with endless wells of data at their fingertips. Finding a replacement is easier now. Marc Cucurella wants to leave Chelsea? Filter for technical left-backs in their mid-20s who make very few errors, create chances in the final third and look like they are being permanently chased by a swarm of bees, and you’ll have a ready-made list of replacements.
Certainly, this is a consequence of a league of clubs increasingly owned by Gulf states and American venture capitalists, who naturally treat players like shares to be traded. Which is not to say modern players have no power or stake in their destiny, far from it. But the modern Premier League is one where players rarely have time to cultivate lasting bonds, and that is one of football’s essential emotive layers that cannot be quantified.
So Reijnders will simply be replaced in the Manchester City squad, the No 4 reassigned. The remaining four years on his contract will be forgotten. This is the fragile life cycle of the modern Premier League star: an asset to be quietly shipped out, more disposable and replaceable than ever.