Is Adebayor the answer for Real Madrid?

It is clear that if Real Madrid are going to mount a serious challenge for La Liga or the Champions League they need another striker at the club. Gonzalo Higuain has been out for a while and may miss the rest of the season and rightly or wrongly Jose Mourinho seems to have little or no faith in Karim Benzema.

Problem

You may question whether goalscoring really is a problem for Real Madrid as they have scored an impressive forty-eight goals in their twenty games. However, the league’s top scorer, Cristiano Ronaldo, has scored almost half of those and it is still fourteen goals less than Barcelona have scored in the same number of games.

Mourinho’s lack of faith in Benzema has seen him put out a side without a recognised striker at all and to play Ronaldo on his own up front. Whilst he is more than capable of doing that, he doesn’t always look comfortable and he is far more deadly coming from the wide positions.

Striker

Mourinho was given the go-ahead to bring in a striker and with all sorts of names being linked to the club it seemed sure that a world class striker would be on his way to the Bernabeu in order to take Real Madrid one step closer to being where they feel they should be. Not many people expected that striker to be Emmanuel Adebayor.

The twenty-six year old Togo international has not been in Roberto Mancini’s plans at Manchester City and has earned a majority of his £165,000 per week sitting on the bench. That salary has been a stumbling block for the loan deal going through, but it does appear that Real will be paying a vast majority of it. Whether his loan deal until the end of the season becomes a permanent deal at anything like that salary remains to be seen.

Investment

So what will Real Madrid be getting for their £165,000 per week investment? The answer is that they will be getting a talented but complicated player to throw into their dressing room.

Having played his early football in his homeland Adebayor moved to France to play for Metz as a youngster. He impressed at the club and made his way from youth team to second team and eventually the first team. In all, he made forty-four appearances for them and scored fifteen goals.

Chance

That record was enough to persuade Monaco that they should take a chance on him. He stayed at the club for two and a half years and scored just eighteen goals in seventy-nine league appearances. He also only managed two goals in Europe in twenty-one appearances, but those goals did help his club to the Champions League final.

In January 2006 Arsene Wenger paid £3 million to take him to Arsenal. It proved to be a good investment as he stayed for three and a half seasons and improved his scoring rate, hitting the net sixty-two times in one hundred and forty-three games.

Repay

Not only did he repay Arsenal’s faith in him he also made them a huge profit when Manchester City paid £25 million for him in July 2009.

His first season at City saw him score fourteen times in thirty-one games but also saw him immersed in controversy for his antics when City played his old club Arsenal. Amidst rumours of falling out with other players and more seriously, with the manager, Adebayor has played just eight league games this season and managed to find the net only once. He has been used mainly in the Europa League where he did become the first City player to score a hat-trick in a European game.

Traumatic

Adebayor has had a traumatic international career that has seen him having many rows with the team manager, dropped, suspended and booed by his own fans. He has scored sixteen international goals and picked up thirty-eight caps, but it has been a roller-coaster ride. He was one of the Togo players involved in the awful ambush of their team coach at the African Cup of Nations in Angola in which three people died. As a result of that incident Adebayor has subsequently retired from international football.

I am far from convinced that Adebayor is the man that Real Madrid need to fire their assault on two titles but on his day, with his strength, power, size and pace, he can be unplayable. The big question is whether he can settle into a dressing room of big egos and whether he can get on with Mourinho.