McManaman smiles all the way to the bank

Real Madrid have put him on the transfer list, have frozen him out. The club have made it known that since the arrival of the world's most expensive player, Luis Figo, Steve McManaman is surplus to requirements. In case he missed the point, the manager has kept him off the pitch in the half-dozen pre-season friendlies Real have played so far.

Real Madrid have put him on the transfer list, have frozen him out. The club have made it known that since the arrival of the world's most expensive player, Luis Figo, Steve McManaman is surplus to requirements. In case he missed the point, the manager has kept him off the pitch in the half-dozen pre-season friendlies Real have played so far.

The natural response - the self-respecting response - might be for McManaman to move on, to accept one of the offers that have come from Middlesbrough and, it is said, Aston Villa. But no. McManaman just smiles and smiles, responding, when asked, that he intends to remain at Real Madrid, that he will keep plugging away until his chance comes along.

Why is this smart, when it seems so pig-headedly stupid? Here is why. McManaman is paid more - much more - than any player in the Premiership. He must have smiled at all the hullaballoo in England when Roy Keane received his big pay-rise last year. Keane gets £50,000 a week before tax; McManaman gets £60,000 a week after tax. Only three players at Real are paid more. The beauty of it, for McManaman, is that he still has four years to run on his contract and that, as the Real president, Florentino Perez, has acknowledged, without the player's consent there is nothing the club can legally do to get out of the deal.

McManaman could spend the next four years working - that is to say, training - little more than 12 hours a week and end up with £12m net in his bank. And McManaman knows it. But he also knows something else. He knows that the decision to sell him has more to do with the club's finances than with the quality of his game. He knows that if Vicente del Bosque does not play him in pre-season friendlies it is because Del Bosque is obeying orders from upstairs.

Because Real Madrid are a club seriously in debt, and Perez has judged not only that McManaman's wages represent far too heavy a drain on the treasure chest but that - having acquired him on a free transfer - he provides an opportunity to help balance the books with a clear £8m or so.

If it were up to Del Bosque, who has hinted in recent weeks at his dissatisfaction with some of the decisions of the money men, McManaman would remain in the squad. First, as Real insiders privately acknowledge, it is absurd for the club to say - as they repeatedly have - that the Englishman is only third in line behind Figo for the position on the right wing; that Albert Celades, a Barce-lona reject, and Julián Alvarez, a recently promoted youth player, are superior candidates.

Secondly, unlike the recently departed Nicolas Anelka, McManaman is much liked, both by Del Bosque and by his Real team-mates. Not only is he one of the most popular individuals in the squad, his performances towards the end of last season won him the esteem and respect of everyone connected with the club. Ivan Helguera, Real's excellent centre-half, was not alone in affirming after the European Cup final victory in Paris against Valencia that McMan-aman had been the best player on the pitch.

This is why when McManaman says, as he repeatedly did last week, that "it will be a long season with lots of competitions and many games and there will be opportunities, so I will wait for mine", he is not kidding himself, whatever Perez and other club officials might say.

Neither is he enduring any great humiliation, because he knows that he enjoys the esteem of his coach and his team-mates and that if Figo is injured or suspended, and if an important game comes up - against Barcelona, against Internazionale - it will be he who is picked on the right. Because it will be more than Perez's life is worth if he insists, for purely economic reasons, on the coach selecting an inferior player for a critical game.

So what is happening is that McManaman is engaged in a war of nerves with Perez. And the Englishman knows it is a war he could end up winning.

What would winning mean? Winning would mean not only seeing out his contract but starting maybe 12 out of 60 games a year, coming on as a substitute another dozen times.

Why would he prefer this to starting every game for Middlesbrough or Aston Villa? Apart from the money, which no English club could match, McManaman is clearly bowled over by the glamour of Real, charmed by the sun and fun of Spanish life. "Spain is a fantastic country," he says. "Madrid is a city I love."

Bryan Robson, they say, is going to try again today, when Boro play Real in a friendly, to see if he can lure McManaman to Teesside. Robson's conundrum is contained in the opening lines of a song popular among home-bound American soldiers at the end of the First World War: "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"