Culture
Antony: From a €95m Man Utd signing to a low-key loan exit in under three years
For INEOS, a regime intending to get to grips with Manchester United’s status as a loss-making enterprise, the potential €100million deal to bring Antony to Old Trafford stands out as a particularly acute example of the kind of lavish spending that has put the club in a precarious financial position.
With the Brazilian now in the Spanish city of Seville, having joined La Liga’s Real Betis on loan until the end of the season, United fans will be left contemplating how a player with such a price tag — £84.1million/$105.1m at the current exchange rate, the second-most expensive transfer in club history behind the re-signing of Paul Pogba in summer 2016 — could deliver just 12 goals and five assists in two and a half seasons.
The truth is United knew they were paying over the odds even at the time, according to sources familiar with the matter, speaking to The Athletic on condition of anonymity to protect relationships.
That awareness can be seen in Antony’s salary, which is akin to that of a mid-ranking member of the squad rather than a star signing. Antony agreed terms worth £140,000 per week for seasons when United are in the Champions League, plus bonuses based on individual performances, but because they are only competing in the second-tier Europa League this term, thus invoking the standard 25 per cent cut for their players, his salary has been around £105,000 a week.
Antony’s representatives had, when negotiating his deal, pitched at £250,000 per week, which would typically be commensurate with a transfer involving such a fee. Securing that would have represented a five-fold rise on what he had been earning at his previous club, Ajax of the Netherlands.
But his leverage in talks with United was weakened because he had told Ajax he wanted the move and, in his attempts to secure it, he stopped turning up for training in the closing days of that summer 2022 window. Figures at United were able to push back in contract talks in the knowledge Antony was desperate to join the Premier League club and they intimated improved terms could be on the cards if he did well, but that he would have to accept entry-level terms at first.
Antony scored on his United debut against Arsenal in September 2022 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Sticking to a relatively modest salary for a club of their revenue meant United had options when surveying the market for Antony this window. Betis, whose median salary is around £40,000 per week, according to Capology, could afford to push the boat out a little for the 24-year-old. They will cover 84 per cent of his wage at a minimum, plus potential bonuses based on achievements, with only former Real Madrid and Spain forward Isco thought to be earning more than him in their squad.
But the disparity in Antony’s wage compared to his transfer fee, which is still the 18th highest in football history, is evidence of United appreciating that they were paying an excessive amount to Amsterdam-based Ajax even while signing the paperwork.
There was internal pushback over the money involved from people minded to protect the club’s finances and the decision on confirming the move was not unanimous, but senior figures decided they could live with the transfer premium given the circumstances, partly because the salary was not that high. Financial fair play (FFP) regulations and the club’s cash levels were a consideration, but they did not dominate thoughts in 2022 the way they do at present.
Antony was intended to be a starting winger, which would have made the overall cost more palatable, but his status on the periphery of the side for the majority of his time at United has accentuated his enormous cost.
How United got to that point is a case study of everything those now in charge of the club are determined to avoid.
Erik ten Hag’s first summer as Manchester United manager, in 2022, was overshadowed by the failed pursuit of Frenkie de Jong, which coloured conversations for months. The €85million set aside for midfielder De Jong’s proposed move from Barcelona caused a blockage on spending in other areas, with United only freeing up major funds for Ajax defender Lisandro Martinez (in a deal worth £57m) by the time Ten Hag went off on pre-season (Christian Eriksen, a free agent, and Feyenoord full-back Tyrell Malacia were the other signings).
Ten Hag wanted Martinez and Antony from his previous club, but at that stage, Ajax would only sell one and the manager prioritised the Argentina international centre-back.
United had scouted Antony since his days at Sao Paulo’s academy, when he was only 15 years old. Reports to the club at that time said he had very good pace and technique but strongly favoured his left foot and had predictable decision-making. It was proposed he would need to get stronger and develop his weaker right side to succeed in the Premier League.
Antony’s summer 2020 move to Ajax saw United’s European scouts track his progress in the Netherlands, but during Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s time as manager, some staff still valued him at only around £25million.
His record in the 2021-22 season of 12 goals and 10 assists in 33 games, including the Champions League, put him on the radars of Premier League sides looking for right-wingers the following summer. Liverpool, with Mohamed Salah’s contract up for renewal, had Antony on a list, as did Tottenham Hotspur. The anticipated fee at that stage was regarded as between £40million to £50m. He was also a full Brazil international, having made 11 senior appearances for his country to that point.
Antony had played under Erik ten Hag at Ajax before joining United (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Midway through that window, United cut off talks with Ajax on Antony and privately communicated they would not pay more than £60million.
United had alternatives for the right-wing role, most prominently his fellow Brazilian Raphinha, who had scored 11 goals in 35 Premier League games to save Leeds United from relegation, but the Old Trafford recruitment team, together with Ten Hag’s personal influence, rated Antony as the better signing, partly due to him being three years younger. In any case, Raphinha indicated he preferred Barcelona and his £55million transfer to the Camp Nou was sealed in mid-July.
Cody Gakpo was another alternative to Antony, albeit he typically operated on the left or up front for another Dutch club, Eindhoven’s PSV. At one point, United looked to bring in both players, as doubts about Cristiano Ronaldo’s future back at the club continued (he would eventually leave in the November).
United agreed personal terms with Gakpo but, in the final days of the window, stopped short of making a bid to PSV as the rising cost of Antony became clear. The following January, Gakpo joined Liverpool in a deal worth up to £44million.
GO DEEPER
Antony, Manchester United’s €95million problem
Player recruitment is an inexact science and there are a multitude of reasons for how signings work out, but comparing Antony’s post-transfer impact with those of Raphinha and Gakpo, who cost their new clubs £14million more in combined fees, is a painful case of sliding doors for United fans. This season, Raphinha has 22 goals and 11 assists in 30 games for Barcelona and is currently ranked second top-scorer in the Champions League, while Gakpo has 14 goals and five assists in 32 games for Liverpool.
Back in August 2022, United returning to the bargaining table for Antony was partly triggered by the continued uncertainty over Mason Greenwood’s availability — on a football level, his absence took away a right-wing option — and more sharply the back-to-back defeats to Brighton and Brentford which kicked off Ten Hag’s reign.
United, with football director John Murtough leading the sporting department, did not want a manager they had chosen after a five-month process to fail. Meanwhile, chief executive Richard Arnold was alarmed at the prospect of missing out on Champions League revenues and the threat of kit manufacturer Adidas cutting payments due to a non-Champions League participation clause. United’s kit sponsorship deal at that time meant Adidas would shave 30 per cent off the £75million-per-year contract for a second season absent from Europe’s elite competition, equating to £22.5m.
Several sources reported a sense of panic at Carrington, the club’s training complex, during those days. Pressure was also being felt from supporters eager to see a new attacker, with Ten Hag pushing to sign a forward.
Antony celebrates scoring against fourth-tier Newport in the FA Cup in January 2024, ending a 31-game goal drought (Athena Pictures/Getty Images)
Arnold and Murtough held talks with Ajax chief executive Edwin van der Sar, bidding €80million, €90m, then €100m. In an interview with The Athletic in November 2022, Van der Sar said: “We would have liked to keep him here one year longer — there was not a dire need to sell him, we had money in the bank — but the fee got so high. We challenged United to go as far as possible. They have a potential world star.”
Ajax stood firm on their valuation, having let five other players leave that summer and being aware that another sale might seriously damage their new head coach Alfred Schreuder. Ten Hag’s replacement lost his job five months later.
Joel Glazer, then United’s co-chairman, was convinced to sanction the spending after seeing how much Antony wanted to join United.
The final terms were €95m guaranteed, with a potential €5m more in add-ons, which are not thought to have been realised.
Antony started well, scoring in each of his first three Premier League appearances, against Arsenal, Manchester City and Everton, and he delivered an excellent winner against Barcelona to crown a stirring European night at Old Trafford in February 2023. In the middle of that season, he started a group game for Brazil at the 2022 World Cup and came on in their quarter-final against Croatia. Ultimately, United qualified for the Champions League by finishing third in the Premier League, going some way to justifying his move.
In the summer of 2023, fellow winger Anthony Elanga was sold to Nottingham Forest for £15million, with his minutes at United restricted.
That September, Antony spent a month out of the squad after police launched an investigation due to his former partner, Gabriela Cavallin, making allegations of assault against him. Antony denied those allegations and similar ones by two other women — Rayssa de Freitas and Ingrid Lana — made in Brazilian media. The case in Brazil is now closed, but as of last week, Greater Manchester Police were still investigating the alleged incidents that are said to have occurred in the United Kingdom.
As previously reported by The Athletic, the potential police action did not show up on background checks made by United before signing Antony.
Antony scored the decisive goal as United beat Barcelona 4-3 on aggregate in the Europa League knockout round play-offs in 2023 (Alex Livesey – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
His form, which had undulated during his first season, hit the skids. He then fell out with Ten Hag over being asked to play left-back.
In February, Ten Hag overlooked Antony for the visit of Fulham, turning to Omari Forson, a 19-year-old academy graduate who was making his first senior start. The next month, Ten Hag gave Antony brutal criticism in the dressing room after his display from the bench in a 2-0 win against Everton, to the extent that the player looked affected.
Antony featured in around half of United’s Premier League games last season, totalling 1,323 minutes from a possible 3,420.
During an interview in pre-season in Los Angeles last August, Antony said that he had learnt from his issues and would look for self-improvement by writing himself notes. By the final stages of Ten Hag’s United tenure in the autumn, he was getting more minutes, notably being sent on ahead of Amad away to Fenerbahce in the Europa League on October 24.
On the sidelines that night, Amad appeared deeply frustrated. Ten Hag defended his decision by pointing to Antony’s performances in training. Given Amad’s emergence to prominence since Ruben Amorim’s November appointment as Ten Hag’s replacement, fans will see another link in the chain reaction of Antony’s arrival.
Amorim tried playing Antony as a wing-back, but his exit now will make room in his squad, and in the accounts, for a new arrival to more suitably fit the new head coach’s 3-4-2-1 system.
United are in talks with Italian club Lecce for 20-year-old Denmark international Patrick Dorgu and are considering triggering the buyback option on Alvaro Fernandez Carreras, 21, who has impressed since moving to Benfica last summer.
United will hope Antony can enjoy a productive loan at Betis to raise his value ahead of an expected permanent summer exit.
At a cost of £82million upon signing, his transfer fee can be spread over the length of his five-year contract, meaning a remaining book value of £34.2m. Getting a club to match that figure, allowing United to offset his price for the purposes of financial regulations, will still be a tough ask.
GO DEEPER
‘Good or bad, he tells us everything’ – Understanding Ruben Amorim’s brutal honesty
(Top photo: Yagiz Gurtug/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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