What’s the deal with Anthony Cáceres?

During the winter transfer window, Manchester City’s transfer dealings were mostly just shuffling loaned players around. Only 1 player was actually purchased during the transfer window, Anthony Cáceres from the Australian side Central Coast Mariners for the paltry sum of £240k. From Manchester City’s perspective, the transfer is almost baffling, no way does Cáceres look like a player who would play a role at Manchester City. Why would the club’s only winter transfer involve him? If we look at this transfer from a different perspective, an Australian perspective to be exact

So first of all, who is Anthony Cáceres? The diminutive midfielder played for the Central Coast Mariners of the A-League, where he won the A-League title and the Mariners Medal (awarded to the best player on the Central Coast Mariners). The 23-year-old is described in scouting reports as a creative outlet and playmaker for his A-League club where he had an extremely prolific 2014-2015 season. Cáceres is one of the best players in the A-League. However, most scouting reports claim that he is far from being good enough to play for Manchester City, after all, the A-League’s standard of play is a far cry from the Premier League. At 23, it remains to be seen how much further could he develop, but from what we can see now, most pundits inside and outside Australia do not believe that Cáceres is going to develop into a player who can break into a top Premier League side.

So why did Manchester City sign him? Why would the club sign a player who doesn’t even look like he’d ever stand a chance in breaking into the first team? Well immediately after signing for Manchester City, Cáceres was loaned out to Melbourne City FC. As one of the clubs owned by the rapidly growing City Football Group, Melbourne City is a Manchester City “affiliate club” who share owners, resources, and much of the front office operations.

In the A-League, clubs are forbidden to purchase players from each other. The A-League has a complex set of transfer regulations that vastly differ from those in much of the world, mostly to preserve competitive balance and to lower operating expenses for Australian clubs. Manchester City buying Cáceres and immediately loaning him to Melbourne City looks like an obvious blatant disregard for these rules, hence why Cáceres’ transfer to Manchester City has sparked intense controversy in Australian football circles.

It is obvious that with City Football Group owning a large number of clubs around the world individual clubs under the CFG umbrella have significant amounts of leeway to get around roaster rules and financial restrictions. Manchester City would routinely loan players to NYCFC, getting around MLS transfer and salary cap rules. Even last season’s Frank Lampard stint arguably involved a degree of financial manipulation, Lampard was paid by NYCFC, therefore he did not factor into Manchester City’s financial fair play regulations.
In the current era of globalization and quite frankly, vertical integration in sports, City Football Group is leveraging its strengths to achieve what few other clubs can do. The individual clubs in this ownership group are able to share branding (notice the obviously similar names and sky blue color scheme), marketing, scouting knowledge, and players. To borrow some overused buzzwords, City Football Group is leveraging their “corporate synergy” to “vertically integrate”.

Of course, detractors of this strategy claim that this allows City Football Group to abuse competitive balance rules by leveraging their sprawling global empire. Others also believe that large global enterprises are in a sense against the spirit of football. I’m not really interested in diving into that can of worms, but many clubs around the world are doing it, and not leveraging these global networks would leave City lagging behind. The Red Bull family of clubs and the clubs owned by Giampaolo Pozzo (Watford, Udinese, Granada) are especially famous for using one club to help other clubs owned by the same ownership group. If Manchester City doesn’t keep up, it isn’t hard to see how the club would be left behind in the dust.