Graphic: why Tevez said 'adios'

Manchester United said farewell yesterday to a second international striker in the space of 10 days. Following the confirmation that they would take Real Madrid’s £80m bid for Cristiano Ronaldo, they announced that Carlos Tevez would not be accepting the Premier League champions’ offer of a five-year contract to make him one of their “highest-paid” players after two years on loan.

The disappointment among United supporters will be considerable, and Possibly noisier than the weary shrugs that greeted the Ronaldo announcement. Tevez remained so popular that chants of of “Fergie, Fergie, sign him up!” were a feature of last season’s title run-in. The club did their best to sound piqued. “Disappointingly,” a United statement read, “his advisers informed the club that, despite the success he has enjoyed during one of the club’s most successful periods, he does not wish to continue playing for Manchester United.”

United let it be known they had been ready to commit £25.5m to Tevez’s owners, the Media Sport International (MSI) group, to turn his two-season loan into an orthodox contract. The inference their followers will take from that is that United now have more than £105m to spend, principally to cover the gap left by the depature of Ronaldo and Tevez. They leave a big gap, too. Sir Alex Ferguson operated last season with four front-rank strikers — Tevez, Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov. Now he’s down to two. For a team whose third consecutive Premier League title was widely credited to their having a more profound and varied squad than either Liverpool or Chelsea, United now look sparse up front. Between them, Ronaldo and Tevez scored more league goals last season than the combined efforts of Rooney and Berbatov — and that with Ronaldo injured for a significant period and Tevez complaining that he did “not feel part of the family”.

Tevez scored just five goals in the Premier League, but was valued for his industry and his unselfishness. It can be assumed United reached their threshold in negotiations with MSI confident that they can find better value up front. The market is lively, and while a serious, sustained bid for Liverpool’s Fernando Torres would make it quite explosive, that option must be considered a long shot, even with the money United will bank from the Ronaldo sale and save, as it were, for not going through with a Tevez deal.

More reachable may be Karim Benzema, the 21-year-old Lyons striker, who impressed Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, in the Champions League last year. He has been a goal-every-two-games striker in France for the past two seasons. Standards may be lower than in England but it is not a high-scoring league, and Benzema, powerful, fast and a tricky dribbler, scores from outside and inside the penalty area. He has something of Rooney’s thrust, though less of the Englishman’s flexibility. One thing the departure of Tevez and Ronaldo will do is allow Rooney more chance to come in off the left flank to establish himself in the centre. Benzema would need to work around that, as would Berbatov, whose first season at United was one of mixed success.

There are alternatives. Were United to enter, and win, the most competitive auction likely to develop over the coming weeks, Ferguson could expect as many goals, and probably more, than he got out of Tevez from Franck Ribery, even though the Frenchman attacks from deeper and wider positions. Ribery, of Bayern Munich, goes under the loose description of winger; he is no more confined by that than is Ronaldo. Ribery has pace, clever ball control, imagination and courage. Like Benzema, he would be raising the level of his week-in, week-out game by coming to England, but he is keen to move on somewhere, although the destination may well be Spain. Bayern will sell Ribery if the price exceeds £40m but the question they want to hear being asked around United, Chelsea and Barcelona is whether, or when, Real Madrid will gazump their best offer.

Beyond the French pair, the most consistently effective centre-forward in Europe, Barcelona’s Samuel Eto’o, is also available because he has his employers in an awkward position — the Cameroonian’s contract expires in June 2010. Eto’o wants to continue playing at a leading club but apart from huge pay demands there are strings attached. He will miss up to six weeks of next season for the African Cup of Nations.

Meanwhile, the possibility of David Villa, the Spain and Valencia striker, going somewhere other than Real Madrid has surfaced, chiefly because his club want to stimulate an auction to push up his price. They know Villa wants to stay in Spain.

United will be be patient, knowing that some steam has to escape from a market obsessed with Madrid money. Tevez’s people, meanwhile, claimed last night United had not been patient enough. Kia Joorabchian, the player’s adviser, responded to United’s claim that they “had offered Carlos a five-year contract which would have made him one of its highest paid players” by saying: “We didn’t actually reject the offer. Carlos needed time. We never ever at any time asked them for more money. We just asked for time to think about it.”

United, it can safely be assumed, were already thinking ahead.