[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="Pep Guardiola and Yaya Toure"]
Ivory Coast international midfielder, Yaya Toure has been told his Manchester City career is over unless he apologises for comments made by his agent.
Manchester City coach, Pep Guardiola, has vowed on Tuesday that 33-year-old Ivory Coast midfielder, Yaya Toure will not play again for the EPL club until the player’s camp apologises for comments made by his agent.
According to reports, Toure’s agent and manager, Dimitri Seluk had accused the City coach of humiliating Toure, by leaving him out of the club’s Champions League squad at the start of this month.
Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Guardiola said;
“The day after that, his agent (manager) spoke and in that moment, Yaya is out. Unless Mr Dimitri Seluk comes back to the press or to his friends in the media – because he hasn’t the courage to call me, he goes to the media – and apologises to Manchester City first of all, then his team-mates and afterwards the trainer. When that happens, Yaya will be part of the group and he will have the chance to play.”
Guardiola added: “I cannot accept as a coach that every agent, when his player doesn’t play, goes to the media and speaks. I know how much Dimitri Seluk loves Yaya Toure. If he loves him, show me by apologising to Manchester City for what he said in the papers.”
Guardiola said that, as a player at Barcelona in the early 1990s, he would never have dared to allow his agent to speak out against Dutch legend Johan Cruyff, then the club’s manager.
“I cannot imagine in my day when a player’s agent would go to the media and speak against Johan Cruyff. Maybe it’s the new era, but I’m from the old generation, and an old-generation agent has to make his players his job and the coach his job.
“Today agents believe they are more than they are. If you have a problem, we can talk. Until he speaks, Yaya isn’t going to play.”
Guardiola said the decision to omit Toure from his Champions League squad had not been an easy one. “It was so difficult for me to leave him out of the Champions League squad. So difficult. I know him and I know he’s a good guy. It was difficult as well for Aleix Garcia.”
The Ivorian midfielder, who announced his retirement from international duty on Tuesday, is in the final year of his contract at the Etihad Stadium, and has featured just once for City since Guardiola’s arrival, and has not figured in a single City match-day squad since then.
No comments:
Post a Comment