Financial fair play driving City to build global empire

China’s Sichuan Jiuniu are the latest and seventh club in a diverse network which embodies chief executive Soriano’s strategy for joining the world elite

Finally, more than three years since the Chinese investment arrived, comes the big China play from City Football Group (CFG), the giant mother ship that owns Manchester City and appears in major world cities launching football clubs on unsuspecting local populations.

Sichuan Jiuniu FC are the latest acquisition for the Manchester City family, a third-tier Chinese entity from a city 1,300 miles west of Shanghai who are seventh on the roster of clubs either owned by or affiliated to CFG.

City’s six affiliates make an unlikely collection that encompasses, at the high end, the Major League Soccer franchise New York City and the Australian A-league side Melbourne City. The latter previously languished under the name Melbourne Heart, which sounded like it might have been signed on a free from local radio.

As for Sichuan Jiuniu, they have been bought by CFG in partnership with China Media Capital (CMC), which itself acquired 13 per cent of CFG in 2015.

There is also a third investor, Ubtech, which describes itself as a “global leader in AI and humanoid robotics” in a press release that reads like it might have been written by a humanoid robot. No mention of how close Ubtech might be from being able to clone an army of Fernandinhos to deploy at CFG’S various interests around the world, but in the meantime this spate of acquisitions is driven by an ideological fervour.

The expansionism from Manchester outwards is the gamble of chief executive Ferran Soriano, who has convinced his Abu Dhabi superiors that this is the future of football, and a way of stabilising Manchester City in the elite in the long-term.

It is there in his book on the business of football, which might not have set alight the literary genre of management memoirs but is being rigorously adhered to by the author himself. Goal – The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance – Management Ideas From The World Of Football sounds like it needed the third title in order to explain what the other two meant. In it, Soriano preaches the strategic advantage of having skin in the game right across world football, and it is that route which CFG has followed under its chief executive.

Alone, City do not have the commercial clout that Manchester United’s fan base gives them when negotiating global sponsorship deals. The Football Leaks disclosures last year, that alleged value was artificially inflated in City’s partnerships with Abu Dhabi commercial partners such as Etihad Airlines, demonstrated how much City and CFG need that growth to keep pace with their own ambitions.

They are under pressure to generate money that is clean in terms of financial fair play (FFP), and Soriano sees the multiclub ownership as one way of achieving it.

Through this loose affiliation of clubs, some of which share the same football identity as City – all of which aspire to play football like Pep Guardiola’s Premier League champions – there is a belief that City will ultimately benefit. As a club trying to become a world power after the FFP door was shut, there has to be another way to raise the global profile – although it can be hard to see how owning a third division Chinese club or another in the second-tier of the Uruguayan league is going to make much short-term difference.

This is, nevertheless, the plan that Soriano laid out in his chief executive’s manifesto, and after the clubs in Manchester, New York and Melbourne, the CFG affiliates all have a different relationship with the centre.

In the case of Yokohoma F Marinos, the J-league team affiliated to CFG, it was a commercial deal taken up by the club’s majority shareholder Nissan, which wanted to use CFG’S services department. In that case CFG acts as a consultant, hired to turn around a club from the first team to the academy, and as part of the deal it took a 20 per cent share.

The acquisition of Girona, now in the top tier in Spain, was perceived as a way of cementing the relationship with Guardiola, whose brother Pere owned a controlling stake, and it certainly will have done no harm in that regard.

Nevertheless, CFG, which is run by managing director Brian Marwood, regard them as a good club to develop loan players and Girona’s promotion to La Liga in 2017 came after the

CFG deal