From The Telegraph:
Manchester United's tour of the Far East played to 160,000 people in four stadiums with each game generating £1.6 million, figures the rock group U2 would happily accept.
Unlike Real Madrid, they did not order that a shopping centre be closed to enable their players to enjoy quality time with their credit cards, they did not keep a studio audience waiting for four hours and then cancel the programme, and they played hard, competitive football. The tour was a success but one that became lost in translation.
Sometimes the small touches were missing. After Saturday's final match of the tour, against Urawa Red Diamonds, had been won by a goal from Wayne Rooney
that was both technically brilliant and extraordinarily imaginative, the Japanese media, usually the most deferential on earth, were surprised to learn that neither Rooney nor anyone else would speak to them.There were good reasons. The players were about to endure a 12-hour flight to Manchester and were having massages and meals, but the Japanese journalists were mildly annoyed.
China's market is huge but much of it is unreachable by the usual means. One United official described their time in Beijing as "a sobering experience".
Here, there was simply not the money to buy a replica shirt, much less spend up to £90 for a premium ticket to watch United play Beijing Hyundai. Madrid had attracted double United's crowd but some 20,000 of their tickets had been given away.
Peter Draper, United's head of marketing, remarked that it took Motorola 10 years to make any impact at all in the country, which they did by funding hospitals, and said they would have to explore other methods of forcing the Chinese market, whether it be putting players' faces on Pepsi cans or via United's Chinese language website.
United's players had reason to be grateful to their manager for shortening the tour from the original 15 days to 10. The experience was sometimes a draining one. The sight of Gary Neville attempting vainly to think of an anecdote when asked in a vast banqueting hall in Beijing if he could tell a funny story from his time at Old Trafford was painful.
Darren Fletcher described how in Saitama's shattering humidity, sweat was pouring from him as he stood in the tunnel, while after five minutes his shirt was soaked.
For Van Nistelrooy, the tour was a litany of missed chances, public rows and some ugly fouls. He ended it with an upset stomach and you wondered what this great centre-forward really gained from the tour.
Certainly, Rio Ferdinand must realise that if he could not escape the attentions of the barrackers in Tokyo, he has no chance of respite when facing the Stretford End. His choice is now to make peace with the club by signing a contract or find his position at United untenable.
Arsene Wenger said that his time in Japan managing Nagoya Grampus Eight taught him the value of silence and his own company. Significantly, the Arsenal manager has shown no real desire to take his club to the Far East, a market he knows well, and as he travelled through the endless space of Asia, Ferguson might realise why.