The Curtain Falls On Yaya Toure: Bidding Farewell To A Premier League Icon

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

Marlon Brando was one of the greatest actors of all time, but for the last decade of his life he barely acted at all. In 1996, he effectively sounded the death knell on his own career when he starred in The Island of Dr Moreau, a famously woeful film in which his second-rate performance, exorbitant pay cheque and open hostility on set left few in Hollywood wanting to hire him again. He lived out his final years in shame, rarely showing his face in public, battling miserably against obesity and appearing in only a handful of forgettable films.

Yaya Toure isn't quite the Marlon Brando of the Premier League (he's yet to set up his own island kingdom in the South Pacific, for a start) but he's not a million miles off: a figure of exalted greatness apparently destined to see out his final days in high-salaried exile, status eroded by public fall outs, reputation having nosedived from sporting god to professional liability.

Now, there are severe limits to the amount your heart can bleed for a man who collects £220,000 a week in exchange for a two-hour kickabout with Man City's reserves each morning. But there's still a strong element of tragedy to these latter days of Yaya Toure's existence in English football – not least because Toure himself has taken a silent, back-seat role as his reputation is torched in front of him.

Dimitri Seluk, as you may know by now, is Yaya Toure's agent, advisor and architect of this reputational destruction. He was the man who, in one fell swoop back in 2014, put Toure's public image on a par with that of Charlie Sheen or Richard Keys when he complained of Manchester City's failure to present his client with a birthday cake (a timelessly magnificent story made even better by the fact that the club had in fact done exactly that). More recently, he's responded to the non-selection of Toure by City manager and all-round footballing messiah Pep Guardiola by rubbishing the latter's coaching credentials. "If Guardiola wants a war, he can have one," Seluk said last month, digging a trench and bundling his client into it with him.

He's also gone on record to say that City's sporting director Txiki Begiristain "is very stupid and doesn't know his job," touting one Yaya Toure as the ideal candidate to replace him in the club's boardroom. There are plenty more of Seluk's bleatings out there, too, but those are the pick of the bunch.

In almost precise alignment with the cash pouring into football having skyrocketed, the character of the rent-a-quote superagent has become increasingly prominent in the modern game, his every appearance a reminder of that description in Rolling Stone magazine of Goldman Sachs: "A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

We've long accepted now that it's compulsory, in order to fulfil their role in the Big Football Pantomime, that these men must spout tedious macho bullshit on their clients' behalf. ("Arsenal have the money but do they have the balls to spend it?" was Mino Raiola's response last month to the club's unwillingness to part with ninety-odd million for Paul Pogba). But Seluk has taken the character to new levels of self-parodying inanity, a shambling Austin Powers to the 007s of Raiola and Jorge Mendes.

To what extent his madcap views on humanity are truly representative of Yaya Toure's own is anyone's guess, but the man who has taken the Katie Hopkins approach to winning the public's hearts and minds certainly appears to have burned every available bridge back to the first-team for his client, before building a concrete wall along both riverbanks. Guardiola, no stranger to a spot of petty belligerence himself, has responded to Seluk by planting his own genitals on the table, exiling Toure from first-team affairs until his agent delivers him a personal apology.

And so that, we can safely conclude, is pretty much that as far as Toure's City career is concerned, a one-way ticket to Palookaville signed and stamped by his agent. A sad exit but in some ways an apt one, because Toure's time in Manchester quite neatly showcases both sides of the Faustian pact with which the club shot themselves into football's stratosphere.

Back in the summer of 2010, City, two years into their new era of ownership and having just finished fifth in the league, were a club some way beneath the ambitions of a player who had been part of a treble-winning Barcelona side the previous year. So they lured him the only way they could – with unfathomable sums of money – and Toure duly took it upon himself to elevate the club from ambitious also-rans to two-time English champions, with an FA Cup thrown in for good measure.

And yet it's exactly the means by which they acquired Toure – the enormous contract – that have now left City saddled with an over-the-hill renegade they want rid of. This is a player who is tainting them by association, and yet they are obliged to employ him until June 2017 at the expense of £30m a year.

So the man who almost single-handedly turned Man City into heavyweights – and that's little exaggeration, considering that at least three pivotal games in their climb to the top of English football hinged on Toure's cinematic, match-winning interventions – looks set to see out his days watching on while a parasitic goon mouths off on his behalf, broadsheet headlines tell him to "pipe down" and his formerly Midas-like influence on the first-team is recast as toxic.

At which point it's perhaps worth returning to the example of Marlon Brando. Because while common wisdom would suggest that a sharp downturn in the latter stages of a career, however brief, is enough to taint a reputation for good – something the last two England managers would probably corroborate – Brando is proof that this isn't necessarily the case.

Despite his later indignities and misdeeds, the Marlon Brando that exists in the public imagination is still the cultural icon, civil rights activist, game-changing screen actor and all-round glorious maverick; his defining image has always remained the one of him looking ripped and unflappable in A Streetcar Named Desire rather than the bloated has-been waddling about in the half-light in one of his mediocre late-career movies.

Hope, then, that Yaya Toure's legacy can take a similar path. Because it's easy to forget these days what a riveting spectacle the peak-era Yaya was, when he turned on the gas and clanked his way down the field like the Iron Giant in full flow, opponents ricocheting pathetically off him at all angles.

There's a pretty sound argument, in fact, for Toure to be considered the most complete footballer to have played in the Premier League era. No others spring to mind as having married feathery footwork with rampaging physical powers in the way he has, and his technical repertoire – playmaking, goalscoring, ball-carrying, ball-winning, free kicks, penalties – is so exhaustive as to make the likes of Keane and Gerrard look like narrowly constrained specialists (it's always worth remembering that the man who elevated City to new heights as a goalscoring midfielder played at centre-back in the Champions League final for Guardiola's all-conquering Barca side). And if the acid test is to be able to do it all when it counts the most, then Toure passes with first-class honours, as his medal collection duly demonstrates. Enough, all things considered, to render any late-career ignominy as secondary to his years of heroics, and to make the undignified ramblings of his agent look like fish-and-chip-paper material.

Brando won over the public lamenting that he coulda been a contender, Toure did the same by turning his club into one. In both cases, their status as era-defining icons shouldn't be a matter for any sort of contention.

@A_Hess