Champions League finalists bought Fernando Torres

transfer

Yesterday the most expensive transfer of the current off-season in European football took place. Liverpool acquired from Atlético Madrid for an amount estimated by British sources at £26.5 million, one of the most promising forwards in the world, Fernando Torres. Liverpudlian coach Rafael Benitez hopes that he will help his team compete in the English championship with Chelsea and Manchester United.

Fernando Torres has become the most expensive football player this off-season so far, at a price significantly surpassing the talented South Americans Anderson and Nani acquired by Manchester United, and Owen Hargreaves purchased by the same Manchesterers, and the leader of the French national team Franck Ribery acquired by Bayern, and Thierry Henry, who moved from Arsenal to Barcelona. It is quite possible that 23-year-old Torres will retain first place until the transfer window closes. In any case, after the conversations started by Silvio Berlusconi about the return of Andrei Shevchenko to Milan died down, and the Milanese refused to sell Kaka, there are no players available for purchase on the market who could beat the price paid for the Spaniard.

Fernando Torres actually had a chance to get into the top ten most expensive football players in history. If Liverpool had paid just £1.5m more for him, Torres's transfer would have been as expensive as tenth-placed Juan Sebastian Veron's transfer from Lazio to Manchester United in 2001. But in any case, the numbers look impressive. If you don’t take the period of the late 90s - early 2000s, when clubs in general were much more generous than now, only one player was worth more than Torres. This is Andrei Shevchenko, who moved from Milan to Chelsea last year for £31.8 million. In short, with this deal, the American owners of Liverpool, David Gillett and Tom Hicks, convincingly demonstrated that in terms of financial investments they are ready to compete with any of rivals.

From a sporting point of view, the purchase of Fernando Torres looks absolutely logical. After the Champions League final lost to Milan, Liverpool head coach Rafael Benitez complained about the lack of top-class footballers in the team, without whom it would be difficult to compete with the European giants in the League, and in the English Championship to fight for the championship with Manchester United and Chelsea ". The most deficient role seemed to be the forward. Peter Crouch and Dirk Kuyt, whom Benitez relied on last season, are after all strikers who are much more effective in play-by-play rather than at the forefront of attack. And Ukrainian Andrei Voronin, acquired from Bayer Leverkusen, is also more of a midfielder than a forward.

The statistics perfectly speak about the skill of Fernando Torres: 82 goals in 214 official matches for Atlético, 14 goals in 40 games for the national team. Yesterday, as Torres, who has played for the club's various age teams since he was 11, gave his farewell press conference in Madrid, some 75 fans demonstrated against his sale. Angry fans, unwilling to come to terms with the loss of the captain, demanded the resignation of Atlético President Enrique Cerezo, and the club's owner, Miguel Angel Gil Marin, was called a traitor. However, could someone in their place resist the amount offered by Liverpool for Torres?

Alexey Kommersant-Dospehov

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