Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund agree fee for Shinji Kagawa

Jun 5, 2012, 6:20 AM EDT

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It looks like it’s a done deal. Shinji Kagawa is on his way to Manchester United. The estimated price: £18 million ($27.5 million). The only aspects left to iron out are the player’s physical and securing a work permit. Neither should be an issue.

Kagawa is only 23 years old and fits a desperate need for Manchester United, whose midfield was inexplicably weak by title-contending standards. That they got Kagawa for a decent fee may allow United another midfield purchase, provided his wages aren’t unexpectedly insane (one report had his salary coming in at half of Eden Hazard’s). While United is set at nearly every other spot, central midfield could use at least one more signing.

We went into the pros of Kagawa last week, but one angle we held off on was the implications on the English Premier League. While it will be hard for Roberto Mancini to ask for more out of Manchester City than what he got last year, Manchester United’s team was highly flawed and highly unhealthy. Time will help with the health concerns, while the acquisition of Kagawa helps address the former.

Is it naive to think this acquisition pushes United past City given the teams ended with the same point total?

Should Manchester City respond? Or even better: How could Manchester City respond? When you look at their starting XI, there aren’t a lot of places where they can improve, and the improvements they’d need would be very expensive. Mancini may be left asking that hard question: Can you (the players) give me more?

For Borussia Dortmund, the loss isn’t that big of a deal. Mario Goetze was back by the end of the season, while Marco Reus will be joining the team from Borussia Moenchengladbach. They’ll have more than enough options in attack.

Kagawa wanted to move. Given Dortmund paid less then $500,000 to get him from Cerezo Ozaka, the sale is quite a coup for BVB. Everybody should be happy.

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4 Comments (Feed for Comments)

whordy - Jun 5, 2012 at 7:56 AM

Man, from the J League to Man U big name summer signing in 3 years. Why can’t an American do that? Why can countries like Japan produce talent like this?

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- mianfr - Jun 5, 2012 at 10:09 AM
  
  Because we teach our premier athletes to be basketball players.
  
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  - jbl1968 - Jun 5, 2012 at 10:34 PM
    
    Basketball players? Those are the kinds of comments that show why Americans don’t get it. Obviously you don’t watch much soccer, because if you did you’d realize that most all the best soccer players in the WORLD are under 6′ tall — hardly the types that can slam dunk. That should be a ginormous sign that having the biggest, fastest athletes is not the way to win at soccer. Look at Kagawa…one of the up and coming stars of the game…do you seriously think he would make it in the NBA? Soccer is about skill, quickness (of thought and body), creativity, and movement. The problem is that we don’t emphasize any of these traits at the youth levels. We only emphasize one thing…winning. That is fine until we actually go up against the international squads who do concentrate on the right things…
  - mianfr - Jun 5, 2012 at 11:03 PM
    
    And these are the kinds of comments that show people in whatever nation you’re from don’t really get it, either.
    
    The top athletes in the world are more or less professional soccer players and professional basketball players. In general, athletes tend to come from a more impoverished background.There are a whole lot of reasons for this that aren’t really worth getting into, and there are certainly exceptions as well, but, by and large, if soccer and basketball don’t exist, Wayne Rooney and Dwyane Wade aren’t doing much of anything with their lives.
    
    For most kids from struggling backgrounds who may have a choice between the two roads, they see ghastly wealth coming from NBA salaries and endorsement deals, a way to a free education, and so forth, against maybe some decent but definitively less MLS salary with perhaps knowledge of foreign soccer but less certainty of how to attain success in those top leagues, and probably no knowledge of how soccer would lead to a college education (and even if a boy were to know, he’d find that scholarships are mediocre at best).
    
    It’s also a lot easier to self-educate in basketball than soccer; soccer requires a role model, large teams, etc., while you only really need one other person to have a competitive basketball game and quite frankly you can do a lot of good by yourself as well.
    
    We breed our best athletes into basketball players for all of these reasons. America certainly produces enough elite athletes to be competitive on the upper fringes of most sports, but we allocate those resources away from soccer for historical and philosophical reasons.
    
    I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that we teach our premier athletes to be basketball players.
    
    And the height thing isn’t really here or there… LeBron James would not at all look lost on a soccer field in terms of fitness, just skill.