He will continue to play less because of the arrival of Edin Dzeko.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/sports/soccer/19iht-SOCCER19.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=yJanuary 18, 2011
For Manchester City, $43 Million Looks Like a Bargain
By ROB HUGHES
LONDON — The January sales are generally regarded as a gambler’s market.
Teams that buy in midseason are either paying above the odds to correct a fault in their lineup or taking some other club’s discards.
Manchester City’s purchase of Edin Dzeko looks like the exception.
The biggest-spending club in the world, already holding the contracts of eight forwards, all from different nations, has just spent £27 million, or $43 million, to buy the Bosnian striker from Wolfsburg in Germany.
Take his salary over a 41/2-year contract into account, and you more than double the price that City’s Abu Dhabi owner is willing to pay for just one element to the team.
First impressions are that it is not madness at all. Dzeko is a towering physical specimen with a presence about him that suggests he knows where he is going in life, and how to get there.
On the field, of course, we know his pedigree. Goals are not everything in his game, but he arrives from the Bundesliga, where he scored 66 goals in 111 appearances and where he ended up captaining Wolfsburg after it took a €4 million, or $5.4 million, chance on his raw potential in 2007.
“I had three and a half beautiful years with Wolfsburg,” he said, in near flawless English. “I was part of history there because Wolfsburg had never won the Bundesliga title before.
“Now, I am here. It’s something different. The fans are different, and the game is different. It’s more harder than in Germany, but I saw something else in Manchester City. They have a very big ambition, and I am ambitious also. Everybody says it’s the best league; we’ll see.”
Dzeko plays as he speaks. He has a calm assurance about him, a hint of control. It comes not from his looming 1.92-meter, or almost 6-foot-4, height, but the way that he moves. He has presence, and you see it the moment he walks into his new surroundings.
At the City training fields, he is first to walk forward, to offer his handshake. The City players are a multitude of nationalities, but armed with four languages — Bosnian, Czech, German and English — there is not much he cannot say to any of them.
His English is already more fluent than that of City’s coach, Roberto Mancini, or the team captain, Carlos Tévez. It is his fourth language in a career that has moved from Bosnia to the Czech Republic, to Germany and now England.
But it is the openness of Dzeko that stands apart. The news media ask him about his childhood. “I had a difficult growing up,” he replies. “What happened in my life happened because I work hard. I have no pressure because I know what I can do. Outside of football, my family is the most important, because I never had success without my family.” Unmarried, at 24, his family is his father, Midhat; mother, Belma; and sister, Merima. The Dzekos are Muslims from Doboj, in northern Bosnia. “I had a very sad childhood in the midst of the siege,” Dzeko said in City’s official program from his first game in the United Kingdom, last Saturday. “Our home was destroyed so we had to move in with our grandparents in Sarajevo.
“The whole family — maybe 15 people — were crammed into an apartment of 35 square meters. I was only young, and I cried often. Every day, you could hear guns firing. We lost friends and some relatives. The memory does not leave you.” When the war was over, Dzeko says, there was not much that could intimidate or frighten him.
There was, in this traumatized boy’s mind, a famous image. He adored Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian striker of A.C. Milan.
The dream was there, the talent in Dzeko was not initially apparent. His father took him daily to the Sarajevo team FK Zeljenicar. But the growing lad played as a midfielder and seemed too tall, too awkward, in that role.
He laughs today at the memory of one Zeljenicar official boasting that the club had won the lottery the day that it received €25,000 from the Czech team Teplice for his transfer. From there, Felix Magath, the coach of Wolfsburg, took him to Germany.
Wolfsburg’s rise to the title was built on Bosniak and Brazilian lines.
Dzeko and Grafite scored the goals; Zvjezdan Misimovic and Josué fed them the passes.
Among the growing admirers, the respected coach Ivica Osim, a veteran and much travelled tactician, called Dzeko “a striker of the future.”
That future is taking shape now in Manchester. Dezko arrived without having played a game for 30 days because of the winter break in Germany, but he was pitched straight into the City lineup last Saturday.
He did not score, but he did lay on a goal with the deftest of passes for Yaya Touré. He did not excel, as Carlos Tévez did, with a fantastic solo goal as the Argentine slalomed his way past three Wolverhampton defenders inside the penalty box.
But Dzeko kept £109 million of surplus Manchester City talents on the bench, watching him play. His performance gave hints of the ability and awareness — and above all the presence — he has as a leader of the attack.
To emerge as the regular partner to the smart, industrious, diminutive Tévez, the new player will have to see off the challenges for that role.
They include Mario Balotelli, the volatile Italian favored by his coach, Mancini.
They include the tall Togo international Emmanuel Adebayor, the Brazilian Jo, and a trio of others already sent out on loan to play for other teams.
Manchester City’s ruthless recruitment, spending beyond the means of even Chelsea or Real Madrid or Manchester United, has its new attacking cornerstone.
Edin Dzeko, a child of war, a youngster discarded by his home club, looks and sounds the man to take on that mantle. A Unicef ambassador who visits children traumatized by conflict in his homeland, he has no fear for his future.
“If I can help, it’s something special,” he says of his Unicef mission. “If I can help, I’m there.” Millions of City’s fortune rides on him being the same man on the field.
