I Love You, Yaya Toure – Please Never Leave

On the pitch, the Manchester City hammer is as close to a FIFA cheat code as you can get. Off-field, he's got a weird Russian agent and he "respects money". The athletic enigma that is Yaya Touré.

by Ben Machell

March 20, 2015, 1:43pm

At the end of this season there is a good chance that Manchester City will sell Yaya Touré. He is not, according to reports, the only player the club are hoping to shift following their failure to make the Panzer-like progress in Europe that their owners crave, but his departure would certainly be the most symbolic.

I mean, just think back. Do you remember that period between City having money and City actually winning stuff? Do you remember Robinho? Elano? Jo? Benjani? It was weird. Actually, it was kind of awkward. Not just awkward for City fans but awkward for every neutral watching. They were trying so hard to hit the jackpot but it wasn't happening. If you've ever been in a pub and seen a man start punching a fruit machine, you will know the feeling.

Only then they went and got Yaya Touré and in fairly short order they were shitting on everyone. Obviously they bought a load of other top ballers too, but Touré is the one they decided to make the highest-paid player in Premier League history and Touré is the one who, for better or worse, became totemic of the new, flash, flush Man City. The brick shithouse Ivorian may not have single-handedly changed the power dynamic of the Premier League over the past five seasons, but there have been times when it's felt like it. He scored the goal that won them the 2011 FA Cup, kickstarting a run of silverware that also includes two league titles, a League Cup and – if you insist – the Community Shield. Last season, from midfield, he beasted 20 goals in 35 league appearances, making him his club's top scorer in the Prem, which isn't bad going when your teammates include players like Sergio Aguero. And although the cool thing to do right now is to stand on your cyber-soapbox and go on about how awful modern football is, the thing that you have to accept about Yaya Touré is that he is modern football. Literally everything about him is a reflection of where the game is in 2015. And the more I look at him, the more I think, 'Hmmm, hang on… maybe modern football is actually fucking great.'

So there's Yaya the player. And let's have it right. He is brilliant. He has just about everything. I'm not going to sit here and teach you how to suck eggs because you know why he is so good: his strength, technique, passing, shooting and energy. His total unpredictability. Plus – and I'm not entirely sure how to describe this – but has anyone else ever had that weird feeling you get watching him run from deep and then it dawns on you he's actually getting faster and faster with every stride and you half expect there to be a flash of white light and him to then change into a burning phoenix? You don't get that with Michael Carrick. The only time I've ever seen another player remotely like him was 12 years ago when one of my flatmates secretly created a custom player on ProEvo, made him as physically big as the game would allow and then raised all his stats to max. My flatmate named this player "Josh" (he was also called Josh), but it was only after we'd discovered this and duly shamed him for it that we all had a go and realised it was actually kind of cool to have a team with a huge player in the middle of the park who could swat away the opposition and score 30-yard screamers more or less at will.

And if there's one moment that totally nails what Touré is about, it's the 2009 Copa del Rey final. He was forced to fill-in at centre-back for Barcelona as they took on Athletic Bilbao and his club were trailing 1-0 after eight minutes. So, with half an hour gone, Touré picks up the ball in his own half, and it's like you can almost see a thought bubble containing the words "fuck this" appear over his head. He steps into the opposition half, accelerates, beats three defenders and then drills the ball past the keeper from about 10 yards outside the box. Boom. It was the action of a man who had suddenly realised that he'd rather be the best paid player in the Premier League than a makeshift stopper.

So yeah, Touré is a great player. But that's just one aspect of the magnificent package he represents. If you're the kind of person who has a kink for unconventional career paths, then he is your Christian Grey. From the academy of ASEC Mimoas in his native Ivory Coast to Beveren in Belgium, then onto Metalurh Donetsk in Ukraine followed by single seasons in Greece (Olympiakos) and France (Monaco) before his spell at Barcelona. It's impossible to review his career prior to arriving at City without getting The Littlest Hobo theme stuck in your head. It's like his agent only knew how to arrange travel with an InterRail ticket.

Oh yeah, his agent. Again, one of the orthodoxies we're now all meant to recite is that football agents are partly responsible for the ruin of the modern game. But then I look at Touré's agent – a bald, jowly Russian called Dimitry Seluk who has a thing for horrible clothes – and I can't help sort of… liking him. He's just this massive fucking shit-stirrer, as shrill and easily outraged as any old Coronation Street actress. And who doesn't like Corrie? He's the guy, remember, who told the BBC that his player was "very upset" that Man City hadn't got him a 31st birthday cake last year. Only it turned out that they had. So Seluk back-pedalled and said that none of the club's billionaire owners had wished him well personally. "None of them shook his hand on his birthday," he said, quite possibly trembling as he did so. "It's really sick."

Why does Touré employ this guy? I'd say it was pretty fucking obvious. His methods, blunt though they may be, are eye-wateringly effective. His client takes home a reported £230,000 a week in a contract that will see him almost to his mid-thirties. And this is the other thing we have to keep in mind when talking about why Touré is modern football made flesh. He is all about money. There's a ZZ Top song called "I Gotsta Get Paid" that would work perfectly well as the soundtrack to any Yaya Touré highlight reel on YouTube. This sounds like a diss but it's actually not meant to be. It's not just that he grew up dirt poor as one of nine siblings – including older brother Kolo, currently at Liverpool – but that, to Touré, money is almost an elemental force, something with the power to edify. "You must respect people and you must respect money," he has stated. "My father said to me 'When you respect money, money will respect you.'"

This might be bullshit, but I dunno, it sounds nice. It's like, "No, no, no: I'm not greedy, I just respect money loads. Now, isn't it your round?" Maybe if more footballers respected money as much as he does, there'd be fewer Sunderland players (allegedly) spunking £20,000 on massive bottles of champagne at the weekends, or Man Utd reserve team players (allegedly) offering women £10,000 for threesomes with teammates. My favourite image of him sort of sums this up. He tweeted a picture of him posing in traditional white Islamic dress and holding a falcon on his arm, a gift, he explains cryptically, from "my Qatari friend". He looks amazing, kind of like a modern day Mansa Musa. You know who Mansa Musa is: the 14th century King of Mali who is estimated to have been the richest human being in history who spent so much gold in Egypt while en-route to Mecca that he totally fucked up their economy for a generation. Yaya Touré could probably do that to the entire North West in one trip to The Trafford Centre if the mood took him.

But whether he stays in the Premier League or not, the last thing to keep in mind about Touré is that, no matter how much money he has and no matter how many birthday cakes do or do not get presented to him, he is no cold-eyed mercenary. He cares. He cares about how he – and how African footballers in general – are perceived by world football. When Seluk questioned why he hadn't won any formal acclaim, such as the PFA or FWA player of the year awards, he actually had a point. "If he was white, 100 percent he would have won one of these top awards. I don't want to talk too much about racism or the politics of football," Seluk said, in the manner of someone who was about to talk at length about racism and the politics of football, "but he does not get the praise he should get. Yaya has three times in a row won the African Player of the Year. But it is different with the other awards."

I hope Man City hang on to him for another year. I'm not a City fan but I'd still kind of miss him if he went. And while I'm not going to pretend I know him as a man, I do feel I know him a little bit better off the back of all this. In fact, I just came across an Instagram picture that his international teammate and former Chelsea forward Salomon Kalou posted, and which showed the two of them as boys in the same Ivorian youth academy. And the message that accompanied it is probably worth keeping in mind the next time you see Touré play.

"We started from the bottom now we here," writes Kalou. "I'm glad we went for everything they said we couldn't have. And it was just a dream not long ago. Bravo."

@ben_machell