Emmanuel Adebayor: Worth the Trouble?

If Emmanuel keeps digging he’ll end up with an ironically large amount of oil. Maybe that’s why Manchester City’s owners wanted him in the first place. What more can one man do to upset the fans that once chanted his name in appreciation?

When Arsenal signed him in 2005 he was labelled a trouble maker. He showed some signs of promise in his first half-season. The following year he blossomed in partnership with Thierry Henry, but it was on his own that he really excelled, firing Arsenal to within touching distance of the title in 2008.

At this point his relationship with the Arsenal fans was at an all time high.

Predictably, offers from all over Europe flooded in, particularly from AC Milan and Barcelona. Adebayor never refuted any of these offers, in contrast he repeatedly fanned the flames by proclaiming what a fantastic honour it was to be linked with such giants as AC Milan and Barcelona, as if Arsenal weren’t big enough already. Arsenal had of course just beaten AC Milan 2-0 at the San Siro.

The real reason Adebayor and his agent were interested was the potentially higher wages on offer. This wasn’t acceptable to the Arsenal fans, who pay the most expensive seat prices in Europe that in turn pay the wages of the players they cheer on week in, week out.

At one stage Adebayor was pictured with a copy of El Mundo, the pro-Barcelona newspaper and quoted as saying, "If Barcelona made an offer to Arsenal and came to an agreement I would happy go to play there because Barcelona is one of the best clubs in the world. But today I am an Arsenal player. We have to wait for an offer and see what happens."

Wait for what offer? Cesc Fabregas is reportedly linked with Barcelona every week, but we never see him talking about offers that don’t yet exist, offers that are falsely created by propaganda machines such as El Mundo. Something that Adebayor failed to pick up on when he compared his situation with Fabregas', "nobody boos Cesc" he said.

This is because of the way Fabregas responds to these rumours, not by travelling to Spain to be pictured with a huge grin on his face reading a copy of El Mundo!

Of course, when Arsenal’s price tag of £30 million proved too much for prospective suitors, Adebayor found himself in a hole. Still at Arsenal for the coming season he did his best to appease the booing fans in a preseason friendly at the Emirates by kissing the club crest after scoring.

Now most fans know this means little, and so it proved the following summer with his move to Manchester City. A club not even playing in Europe the following season.

Lack of ambition? Money grabbing? He could have gone to Barcelona for less, now he is earning a whopping £170k per week and still he has demanded Arsenal owe him £2m because he did not demand a transfer request. Talk about rubbing salt into the wounds of the club he once "loved".

The first fixture on the card he would have looked for was the Arsenal-Manchester City game and he did not disappoint. Adebayor put in more effort for 90 minutes of this game than he did in the whole of last season wearing the red of Arsenal. His lack of commitment was a constant bug bear for the loyal Arsenal fans.

He won almost every header he went up for, dived into tackles like a man possessed and all this was done while playing up-front on his own, something he moaned about whilst playing under Wenger. Rather than show his quality on the pitch, in his effort to prove a point, he violently caught Fabregas on the ankle and Van Persie down the side of the face.

Is his grudge with the Arsenal fans, or his former team-mates? One would conclude from this evidence that it doesn’t really matter to Adebayor as long as he is getting his own way. The final nail in the coffin was his full length sprint to celebrate in front of the travelling fans after scoring City’s third goal.

A retched act of immaturity that saw one steward injured in the inevitable furore that followed.

Were the Arsenal fans right to react? Probably not, but were they within their right to taunt and boo Adebayor? Of course they were. It’s their money that paid his wages, which in the end were not enough for the disrespectful Adebayor, who greedily saw his future elsewhere.

City fans will quickly realise that Adebayor is a talented footballer, but when the going gets tough, he is little more than a spoilt child, just waiting to throw his toys out of his pram.