Rusty weights in the gym, the toilet door was hanging off, horses walked by as we trained — and the club couldn’t afford pens and pencils
IN exclusive extracts from a forthcoming book chronicling the Abu Dhabi United group’s 10-year ownership of Manchester City, key figures reveal the inside story of City’s remarkable rags-to-riches transformation.
‘I SIGNED my contract before I saw the training ground,’ recalls Vincent Kompany, who completed his paperwork a week before the takeover in an office piled high with boxes at the City of Manchester Stadium [now Etihad Stadium].
‘They would drive you out there when you signed your contract, but not before!’ he adds with a laugh.
City’s players from that period speak about Carrington, their former training ground, with a mix of nostalgia and disbelief that a Premier League side actually trained there.
‘I remember going to the toilet for the first time,’ says Kompany, ‘and it was two cubicles. One had a door and the other one had the door hanging off, almost. I thought, that’s pretty interesting in terms of intimacy.
‘There was a machine with weights where you couldn’t really lift it because there was so much rust on it. If you had a gym session you’d always be at your maximum because just to move that one little weight you first had to go through all the rust. There was a punching bag that was half cut through the middle as if someone came in with a samurai sword. You had one glove to punch it, so you could develop an anomaly on one side from working out that way.’ Kompany isn’t done. ‘And it was cold,’ he adds. According to Yaya Toure, who would join Manchester City from Barcelona in 2010 [after more than £500,000 had been spent on the Carrington facility], the state of the training ground was at odds with the club’s aspirations.
‘Carrington was looking like a second division facility,’ says Toure. ‘In the beginning, I was complaining to be honest. I was really concerned about it.
‘At first when I finished training, sometimes I didn’t take a shower there because I was not feeling myself, you know, and I wanted things to change.’
The midfielder was particularly struck by the sight of horses wandering past the training ground. ‘It was quite funny,’ he says, looking back. ‘I remember I told my brother [then City defender Kolo Toure], “The club wants to achieve things. Why is it like this? Things have to change. We have to be serious”.’
Long-serving Pete Bradshaw, City’s Director of Infrastructure and Estates, adds: ‘We had gone through periods where it was challenging to pay the staff. We could not order stationery. We’d bring pens and pencils from home for a while. There were hard times and the staff that went through it, that is what they got used to. It made them prudent as well. They had to think about what they were buying.’
All of the above was an indication of City’s perilous position in the build-up to the takeover.
‘In the weeks prior to this transaction we were on the way to a complete and utter shutdown,’ says then chief executive Garry Cook. ‘We were heading for a massive catastrophe. I had alerted everybody from the Premier League, to (former owner Thaksin) Shinawatra himself, to whoever would listen really. It was really quite a drastic time. The Premier League knew what was going on.’
Cook, who was unimpressed with what he found when he had arrived in 2008, says: ‘I always used the analogy that it’s like The Wizard of
Oz. There is a yellow brick road that everybody thinks is the pathway to utopia.
‘Along the way, though, you have got all these challenges and problems and when you finally arrive at your destination you pull back the curtain and there is an old bloke with a microphone.
‘This thing and this place was not what people thought it was because the product we see on television is a media product, and behind all of that, with all of the cash transferring and money that is around, it just brings out the worst of the worst and attracts some of the worst people.’
Suddenly everything changed.
‘We came back and they’d done one of those things you’d see on Extreme Makeovers or something,’ recalls Kompany. ‘They’d changed the whole training facility. It was all short-term, makeshift, but it looked a million dollars and it was literally two weeks, which was incredible.’
Then came the influx of new players but not everybody was impressed, as then football administrator Brian Marwood recalls.
‘I remember picking up Gareth Barry and we were in the car,’ he explains. ‘TalkSPORT was on and the story had broken that we were signing him.
‘They were absolutely caning him, saying things like, “He won’t win anything at Man City, he’s only going there for the money, plastic club, seen all this before, foreign owners coming in, killing the game, these guys are mercenaries”.
‘That was the narrative, and I said to him, “Do you want me to turn this off?” and he went “No, I want to listen to it”. He said: “I’m not bothered. I’m just going to remember this, because I want to show these people they are wrong”.
‘That’s when you know you’re getting the right people, and people like Gareth were so important to where we are now.’