If The Sportsman were to ever get the opportunity to pose Carlos Tevez one single question, we’d probably ask him if he hates goodbyes. Because he was never very good at them when moving from club to club as a player.
Two of his former sides come head-to-head on Sunday when Manchester United host West Ham United at Old Trafford, and the occasion brings to mind two of the many messy endings that seemed to plague the Argentine during his career.
Tevez arrived in the Premier League with the Hammers in 2006 alongside compatriot Javier Mascherano in a deal questioned by many opponents since the players’ rights were seemingly owned by management group Media Sports Investment (MSI).
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Having turned in a Player of the Season campaign as West Ham stayed up on the final day of the campaign, Tevez was at the centre of a furore as it was found that the club had breached rules on third-party ownership to sign him and Mascherano. Moreover, there were arguments as to where he would spend the 2007-08 campaign.
While MSI claimed West Ham had agreed to allow Tevez to leave for Man Utd, West Ham themselves insisted they would block any move for which they didn’t receive the vast majority of the transfer fee. The whole thing very nearly ended up in court, with the striker eventually rocking up at Old Trafford but the Irons only getting around £2 million for their efforts. It left a bitter taste in mouths across east London.
United had managed to get their man only by agreeing to a two-year loan deal, and while Tevez was a key part of the side which won the Premier League and Champions League double in 2008, and then came within one game of repeating the trick 12 months later, the small matter of his ownership was about to cause ructions once more.
Sir Alex Ferguson wanted to keep Tevez in the summer of 2009, and was willing to pay £26m to make it happen. But MSI claimed that it would take far more to persuade them to drop all their rights over the player, and the new money of Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi-based owners was about to make its biggest impact on English football.
With MSI holding out for around £47m, plus a contract worth around £50m in total to the player himself, United were priced out of the running. And so Tevez swapped the red side of Manchester for the “noisy neighbours” across town. It sparked the unveiling of a now-infamous hoarding at the end of Deansgate in the city centre ‘welcoming’ the striker to Manchester and resulted in further recrimination about the rights and wrongs of MSI making decisions over the player’s future.
At City he burnt many of his bridges when refusing to come on as a substitute in the Champions League clash with Bayern Munich in September 2011, being placed on gardening leave as a result and only returning to the squad six months later as the momentum gathered for the club’s first league title win in 44 years.
When he eventually left the Etihad Stadium he did so in a much less fractious way than had happened at West Ham and Man Utd, sloping off in the summer of 2013 to spend two years with Juventus. But having proclaimed during his summer break in 2011 that he wouldn’t even want to return to Manchester on holiday, let alone to play for City again, then almost quit the game completely during his six months out after the Bayern incident, few at Eastlands missed him when he’d gone.
There was still time for him to spend 18 months with hometown club Boca Juniors before heading to China to sign a mega-money deal with Shanghai Shenhua. But that was another spell which ended badly, with Tevez being criticised for spending too much time overweight and unfit to play. He even claimed later that his year in China was little other than a holiday.
Back at Boca he won two league titles in a three-year spell before calling time on his career. He’d claimed 10 domestic league winner’s medals in total, five of them in Argentina and three in the Premier League, but rather than being remembered as a multiple champion he is recalled more for his various messy arrivals and equally questionable departures.
West Ham stayed up thanks to Tevez. Man Utd won the Champions League with him. But ask any fan from either side of the stadium at Old Trafford on Sunday and they’ll tell you the bitter aftertaste took something away from the memories he made on the pitch
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