Blue moon rising Ten years on from takeover that changed history
Ten years after their Abu Dhabi buyout, James Ducker charts how City became English football’s dominant force
‘Ialways tell the Gareth Barry story,” says Brian Marwood, as his mind drifts back to June 2009 and what were still the early days of overseeing the recruitment process for Manchester City’s new Abu Dhabi owners.
“Gareth had been courted by Liverpool the summer before and didn’t get him. But that summer they came back in for him and were actually offering him more than we were. People probably still don’t realise that because everybody was saying, ‘Oh, he’s going to City for the money’.
“Anyway, I picked him up from the Grove in Watford, where he was with the England squad, to take him for his medical. We’re in the car and Talksport is on the radio and Adrian Durham and Ian Wright were absolutely caning him. ‘He’s only going there for the money. Plastic club, plastic owners, what are they ever going to win, I thought more of Gareth Barry than that’.
“I looked at Gareth and said, ‘Do you want me to turn this off?’ And he turned and said, ‘No, I want to listen to it’. But why? ‘Because I am going to prove them wrong. Because I know what I’ve bought into here’.”
Barry had turned down Liverpool and the offer of Champions League football for a club who had just finished 12 points and four places worse off than the Aston Villa team he was leaving behind, primarily in the belief that something special was dawning in the blue half of Manchester, for so long the city’s poor relation in football terms.
It is 10 years today since City were bought by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-nahyan and had their fortunes transformed by one of the world’s richest men. But even nine months into the most ambitious takeover project in English football history, there were still plenty who seemed unconvinced by the legitimacy of it all.
United had just won a Premier League and Champions League double and Pep Guardiola was still at Barcelona. There was no Catalan brains trust at City then. No record-breaking centurions. No material evidence of a Barcelona-style playing philosophy. No stunning £200million training ground, no culture of winning, no bulging trophy cabinet, no global network of feeder clubs, no stadium naming-rights deal, no soaring income streams. The Etihad was still known as Eastlands, City were still a club associated with cock-ups and that defining “Aguerooooo” moment was still several years from happening.
City were in a tailspin under the dysfunctional ownership of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former
Thai prime minister.
“So many takeovers had ended in tears, so why should City have been regarded any differently?”
Marwood acknowledged.
It was into this maelstrom of cynicism and mistrust that the
Abu Dhabi United Group walked on Sept 1, 2008 and instantly wrote a deadline-day cheque for £32.5million for Real Madrid’s Brazil forward Robinho (pictured below). It was an extraordinary statement of intent, the first signing of what, over time, would become a near £1.4billion expenditure on players, and yet the first staff and players heard about it was on Sky Sports as they watched the news unfold in sheer disbelief.
A week or so earlier City’s chief executive, Garry Cook, who had been brought in by Thaksin from his role heading up the Nike Jordan Brand, invited scorn by declaring the club could be as big as United and win the Premier League. It all seems so obvious now but, then, City were selling little more than a dream with the help of the deepest pockets football had ever seen.
It would have been largely unthinkable then for City to walk away from a player such as Alexis Sanchez, as they did this January. But it is a reflection of how far they have come that they were happy for the Chile striker to join United amid fears his £500,000-a-week wage demands would obliterate their wage structure and compromise dressing-room harmony.
Whereas salaries accounted for 114 per cent of turnover in 2010-11 – when City posted English football’s biggest-ever losses of £197million and faced relentless attacks about ruining football with irrational spending – wages now equate to 56 per cent of annual revenues nearing £500 million.
Marwood likens the changing landscape at the club to the one he encountered at Nike, where he previously worked as a marketing executive with Cook. “When Nike were really trying to break into football in the late Nineties, we overpaid to get assets because we didn’t have the product,” the former Arsenal midfielder said. “Ten years later, they were actually paying less for players because those people wanted to come to the brand for the right reasons and I think that’s what’s happened at City.”
City certainly had to swallow situations in those early years that they would not even contemplate entertaining now. Take the signing of Emmanuel Adebayor from Arsenal, for example. Mark Hughes, the manager, was desperate for the deal to be done. But there was never much belief at City that Adebayor wanted to come and those opinions hardened after an executive was dispatched to the Togo striker’s house, a palatial flat at the top of a Victorian mansion in Hampstead, in a bid to convince the player to join.
Doubts immediately set in when City were told Adebayor had had “a really hard day” and would not be able to meet them until 10pm. By the time the City official arrived, the striker was fast asleep and did not awake until 1.30am, at which point he ambled out of his bedroom to be served an enormous plate of chicken, rice and peas by his girlfriend and wearing a look on his face that said, “Who is this in my living room?”, as he stared vacantly at the man who had just spent the past 3½ hours twiddling his thumbs.
In the first year alone, City spent £200 million on just 10 players. The arrival of Robinho was quickly followed by Craig Bellamy, Nigel De Jong, Wayne Bridge and Shay Given in the January and the following summer Joleon Lescott, Roque Santa Cruz, Barry, Adebayor and, most famously, Carlos Tevez, prised away from United for an eye-watering £47 million in what would prove the catalyst for an explosive rivalry.
“The team acceleration was like putting the roof on before we built any walls,” Marwood concedes. “We went very big, very early. In hindsight, we did the right thing. There needed to be a catch-up.”
City were characterised as vulgar nouveau riche, a view encouraged from the outset when the brash Sulaiman Al-fahim – who fronted the initial takeover bid before quickly being cast aside by the serious men actually running the show – talked about snaring Cristiano Ronaldo from United and spending their way to the title inside two seasons.
Cook’s declaration that AC Milan “bottled it” after a deal to sign Kaka from the Italian giants collapsed in January 2009 entrenched public perceptions of a club with a lot of cash but little class when, behind the scenes, a very different picture was emerging. “We went away for international games and when we came back they’d changed everything at the training ground,” reflected captain Vincent Kompany, who had signed 10 days before the takeover, unaware of what would materialise. “It was like one of those shows where they’re building stuff and next thing there’s a big reveal. The upgrades kind of tied into this attitude of, ‘We’re going to ask a lot from you, so before you come back with any excuses, we’re going to make sure we do our part’.”
City were still at their Carrington base then – the move to the City Football Academy would be another five years away – but the changes were about a lot more than bricks and mortar. It was about creating a culture and environment that fostered trust and togetherness, empowered people, encouraged best practice and strived for sustainability.
The City chairman, Khaldoon al-mubarak, who headed up Abu Dhabi’s Executive Affairs Authority and was given the task of driving the club’s transformation, had been shocked to discover there was only a four-line report to show for a £100million investment in transfers, wages and agent fees under Thaksin. No one could even put an exact number on how many people the club employed. Departments were overhauled, new ones created, budgets rapidly inflated. A multilingual four-man player care team was established and placed on 24-hour call, a valuable operation given the need to swiftly integrate a constant cycle of new signings.
No one required as much attention as Mario Balotelli, who joined in 2010 from Inter Milan at Roberto Mancini’s insistence. They organised trips to Knowsley Safari Park for the Italy striker after learning of his interest in wildlife, anything to limit the usual trail of destruction. By the end, as patience wore thin, they even found him a matriarchal housekeeper in a bid to keep a closer check on him.
A global scouting network was developed. Information would no longer be stored in people’s heads but on exhaustive databases. Dossiers were compiled on players under a rigorous 12-point plan. The file on Yaya Toure, who arrived in 2010, amounted to 30 pages but it was still six shorter than one the club had on a promising 15-yearold schoolboy at the time. And yet, for all the investment, by December 2009 results under Hughes remained disappointing.
Al-mubarak had actually let his heart rule his head since he had wanted to sack Hughes in the summer, unconvinced the Welshman had the personality to help City make the jump they wanted. It sounds minor but the chairman would like a quick phone call from the manager after games and Hughes seldom seemed to oblige. So, the decision was taken to appoint Mancini, who had recently led Inter to a third consecutive Serie A title.
Mancini met with City’s hierarchy a fortnight before Hughes went into his final game, a 4-3 victory at home to Sunderland, knowing the axe was about to swing. The backlash was furious and City’s unveiling of Mancini descended into farce, with the Italian contradicting Cook’s claims about when the first approach had been made. Yet there is little doubt, in hindsight, that it was the right move.
Mancini’s own reign ended in acrimony and bookended the most volatile period under Arab ownership. His indulgence of Balotelli, who even got away with smoking in the dressing-room showers, a feud with Tevez that sparked an extraordinary five-month stand-off between player and club and his autocratic, abrasive management alienated players and staff to such an extent that, even if City had not been humiliated by Wigan Athletic in the 2013 FA Cup final, the Italian would have been sacked.
But there is a strong case to say Mancini was as important to City as Guardiola has since become and certainly fundamental to creating the winning mindset that provided the cornerstone of the club’s first title success.
With Toure and David Silva joining from Barcelona and Valencia respectively in 2010, and Sergio Aguero following a year later from Atletico Madrid, City had assembled a formidable side. Mancini was high maintenance, though. Some of the most bizarre stories revolve around his many superstitions, not least about the colour purple. In one European game, City had to ask Uefa if they could wear the gold bibs the other team had been allocated to warm up in after Mancini’s horror at discovering his own players were being told to don purple ones. Any meetings he was involved in were prohibited from starting on the hour. At meal times, salt and pepper pots could not be passed hand to hand but had to be moved across the table, like a chess piece.
One tale, in particular, still tickles staff now. The players had eaten meatballs on the flight home from one European trip and then won their next league match. So, when the club’s next European away day paired them with Real Madrid, Mancini was adamant that his squad were to have meatballs on the flight home from Spain and wanted City’s chef to cook up a huge pot of the things that could then be transported on to the plane and had a very difficult time accepting that would not be possible.
For all his histrionics, though, he delivered landmark results that guarantee him lifelong affection from City fans. The 1-0 victory over United in the FA Cup semi-final in April 2011 was a game-changer that paved the way for the club’s first major trophy for 35 years and there was even better to follow the next season. The 6-1 drubbing of Sir Alex Ferguson’s side at Old Trafford in October 2011, less than 48 hours after Balotelli had set fire to his bathroom, and then a Kompany-inspired 1-0 win over United at the Etihad six months later would lay the foundations for an extraordinary title comeback and that most dramatic final day.
“That 1-0 win when Vinny scored, that was the only time the chairman stressed that we had to win,” Lescott recounted this week. City had irritated Ferguson when they tried to gazump United’s move for Dimitar Berbatov on the day of their takeover but it was the “Welcome to Manchester” poster to mark Tevez’s switch from Old Trafford, which lies just outside the city boundary, that really riled the Scot. It was an inspired piece of marketing that prompted Ferguson to deride City as a “small club with a small mentality”, an anger that was still
‘So many takeovers had ended in tears, so why should City have been regarded any differently?’
festering several months later when, after a thrilling 4-3 win for United at Old Trafford, Ferguson delivered his memorable “noisy neighbours” put down. The battle lines were drawn. Marwood was opposed to the billboard at the time. “Do I feel any different now? Maybe,” he said. “I think it got under their skin. I’m not convinced they ever saw us as a threat but obviously that’s changed now.”
It changed for good on May 13, 2012. United had boasted an eight-point lead with six matches to go only to implode and leave City needing to beat relegationthreatened Queens Park Rangers, managed by Hughes of all people, on the final day to secure their first title for 44 years. What could possibly go wrong?
As the game entered stoppage time, City were losing 2-1. News had filtered through that United had beaten Sunderland and, on the touchline at the Etihad, a frenetic Mancini appeared to be steadily losing the plot. Fortunately for the Italian, his players kept their heads. Edin Dzeko equalised and then, as the clock struck 93min 20sec, Aguero popped up to score that historic winner.
One of the remarkable things about that season is that the conflict with Tevez did not derail the campaign and the success in reintegrating him in the team was testament to the structures and people in place at the club. Tevez had submitted two transfer requests in the space of eight months the previous season, largely a consequence of a breakdown in relations between the player’s representative, Kia Joorabchian, and Cook.
But even that could not properly prepare the club for the storm that would soon await. After refusing to warm-up during a Champions League game away to Bayern Munich in September, Mancini declared Tevez “finished” at the club and the player ended up returning to Argentina without permission for three months.
City held a conference call every morning bar Christmas Day on the matter until, eventually, Tevez returned in late February and issued an unreserved apology. The odd thing about it all is that Tevez was well liked by many at the club. This was a guy who would buy all the laundry ladies wide-screen TVS for Christmas.
As for Mancini, even on the day of City’s greatest triumph, the seeds for his exit were being sown. For a club determined to create a sense of oneness, the sight of Mancini, who had battled with the medical department all season, choosing not to shake the hand of club doctor Phil Batty as he walked down a line-up of staff on the way to collecting the trophy appalled colleagues. It was clear the manager was spoiling for a fight, and after a summer in which City missed out to United on Robin van Persie, and relations with Marwood worsened, his behaviour became increasingly confrontational.
When Van Persie rubbed salt into the wounds by scoring a late free-kick to clinch a 3-2 win for United at the Etihad in December, Mancini tore into Joe Hart for not organising the wall properly, even though to most observers it was Samir Nasri’s fault for ducking out of the way of the ball. There was no way back from there.
“We had this volatility and tension around the club and I always saw my job as not to go to war with that but to make sure the whole club did not get fragmented,” Marwood reflects. The axis of power at City was already changing, though, to reflect the club’s move into a new era.
Ferran Soriano had arrived as chief executive in September 2012, a year after Cook resigned over an email he sent to the cancer-stricken mother of defender Nedum Onuoha, mocking her illness, an unsavoury end for a man loved by staff and who had put so many key building blocks in place. Soriano was followed eight weeks later by Txiki Begiristain, the new director of football. As colleagues at Barcelona, they had witnessed Guardiola redefine football and one of their first moves was to try to entice their fellow Catalan. “We went to talk to Pep because he was the best coach in the world,” Soriano recalled.
With Guardiola determined to enjoy a sabbatical year in New York, though, and then later keen to join Bayern Munich, City would have to wait. In the meantime, there was a vacancy to fill. Step forward Manuel Pellegrini. In the statement that accompanied Mancini’s sacking, City said they had “an identified need to develop a holistic approach to all aspects of football” but aside from wanting a calm, composed coach who would end the divisions and breed harmony, Soriano and Begiristain also demanded a more entertaining brand of football.
City, in their eyes, had become too functional under Mancini. No one can dispute that Guardiola’s football has brought about the “next level of tactical sophistication and intensity” Soriano predicted but, equally, no one should underestimate the entertainment value Pellegrini brought – on the pitch, if not off – in his title-winning debut season.
A dour man, the sadness was that his approach would tire and eventually breed a lethargy and indifference that, in its own way, was as damaging as the volatility Mancini spread.
Enter Guardiola and his brave new world. If the past decade at City is anything to go by, the possibilities over the next 10 years seem plentiful.