THIS BAN SPELLS END OF BIG-BUCKS CITY
The Guardiola legacy and players’ mega wages are on the way out
The hope, of course, was that Pep Guardiola would be in Manchester for a generation. That his rounds of golf in the distinctly unfashionable east Manchester district of Audenshaw might become as much a part of the fabric of his life as the Catalan restaurant Tast, in which he has a financial share.
It is almost certainly not to be. Lingering late in the Shakhtar Donetsk press room in happier times last autumn, Guardiola told a Ukrainian journalist that he would be happy to manage a more impoverished team. ‘I could do that, yes.’ But the straitened new world of Manchester City seems unlikely to have him in it.
The dust has settled on UeFA’s announcement last Friday that City manipulated their accounts and the damage looks monumental. Just a single season’s absence from the Champions League would cost the club £100million in revenue, a study of their most recent financial results reveals. That would restrict their ability to buy and pay new players and bring an almost inevitable decline in the value of their squad.
Gone are some of the opaque wage packages which deliver Kevin De Bruyne £350,000 a week, give or take. Gone, you have to suppose, will be executives such as Ferran Soriano whose sheer recklessness — fuelled by the bombast of the Abu Dhabis’ adviser Simon Pearce, who declared ‘we can do what we want’ when it came to the book-keeping — have brought City to this.
But the silver lining is that a new kind of club can emerge. The foundations are there already, because nothing can subtract from what has been built. Best training complex, best academy facilities, best player acquisition system, best digital output.
The practical changes will come in the acquisition of players, which for City currently seems to carry no risk. There was the £ 60m splashed on Joao Cancelo, who made seven Premier League starts. The £62.8m on Rodri, who is yet to convince he is worth it.
There have been good buys, of course. But judgments, poor in the past two years, will have to become sharper. We may see the emergence of homegrown players, still conspicuous by their absence at City, which populate the Tottenham, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool teams. Less becomes more when money is tighter.
A new kind of City may also emerge after Guardiola. The way the club have built their entire structure around him has not seemed so healthy at times and not always made City seem a terribly joyful place. even Soriano and sporting director Txiki Begiristain were hired in the knowledge that Pep, their friend, might be next in.
City insisted after the departure of Roberto Mancini and his vast entourage in 2013 that there would be no more managerial fiefdoms — but that’s not how it has turned out. Guardiola’s arrival presaged the departure of several popular english members of the backroom staff. entire departments were upended.
Guardiola’s trusted team of Carles Planchart, Domenec
Torrent and fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura moved in.
Guardiola’s right- hand man Manuel estiarte wields major control. There has become a statewithin-a-state at the club. ‘Catalan-chester City’ some call it.
There was a sense from the start that Guardiola was merely passing through. ‘I have come to learn,
that’s why I move on. If I was building legacies then I would have stayed in Barcelona,’ he said at the public event City laid on to introduce him in July 2016.
Although it is assumed Guardiola will not stay if there is no Champions League to contest, should that be a necessity? Jurgen Klopp — a finalist with Dortmund in 2013 — required no such attraction when he arrived in October 2015 at Liverpool, who had finished sixth in the previous Premier League season.
The marketing line that City came up with to build the buzz around Guardiola’s arrival was ‘It begins’, although that begged the question of what went before.
It was Manchester City, actually. A club which had a very clear and proud identity before the Abu Dhabi takeover.
The overwhelming, if highly improbable hope is that City might also come to an awareness of how unattractive they have looked in their fight with UEFA, whose rules they signed up to when playing Champions League football.
Their backlash at the weekend against the lawyers who have concluded that they were in breach of FFP has been one of unbridled and ferocious aggression.
Lawyers such as Charles Flint QC, a member of UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber which ruled on City, have been accused of wilful prejudice and malfeasance in their decision-making. That is the same
Charles Flint QC, listed in the Legal 500 for legal excellence in two of the past three years.
Within City’s attempts to avoid an FFP breach, an internal message by their lawyer Simon Cliff joked about the death of Jean-Luc Dehaene, twice Prime Minister of Belgium, who was one of seven FFP overseers. ‘1 down, 6 to go,’ Cliff said.
That is the same Jean- Luc Dehaene remembered as one of Belgium’s great parliamentarians. At no point have Cliff or City offered Dehaene’s family a word of public apology. Where on earth, you have to ask, is the sense of perspective for owners who supposedly bought City to enhance their nation’s reputation around the globe?
A legal struggle will now unfold. The aggression will not abate. No quarter will be spared by a club who feel so wronged. But when the sound and fury subside, there will have to be changes and new faces.
It might just be that a more transparent, humble, joyful Manchester City emerge from the wreckage.