Expansion gathers pace, but why is still a mystery

CFG’S move into India continues to push back the frontiers of football on five continents

The next frontier in which Manchester City will plunge the flag will be Mumbai, and its Indian Super League club, currently seventh in a 10-team division, home crowds averaging fewer than 5,000 and about to join the biggest club football operation in the world.

Mumbai City Football Club already have the right football acronym, they even have Peter Reid among their four former managers, as well as another City old boy Nicolas Anelka, and no doubt there will be more changes to come. They are just five years old and there is no tradition too deep-seated that it cannot be tweaked by the new owners City Football Group, already active in seven clubs in seven countries across five continents and growing larger by the year.

For those sufficiently determined to read the boutique publication that is Ferran Soriano’s 2009 book, Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance – Management Ideas From The World Of Football none of this will come as a surprise. The CFG chief executive sees the world as a place where the “winners” are those “creative enough to come up with new ideas and brave enough to put their ideas into practice” and since selling his vision to his Abu Dhabi bosses, Soriano has certainly pursued his own version of the future.

In February CFG added Sichuan Jiuniu FC to the roster, a third-tier Chinese club, and since then City have become Premier League champions again and their Japanese partners, Yokohama F Marinos, are two wins from their first J-league title in 15 years. New York City won Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference. Melbourne City are top of the A-league. Atletico Torque have been promoted to Uruguay’s Primera Division. Girona, relegated from Spain’s top flight last season, and Sichuan Jiuniu are not quite so upwardly mobile but then this empire was not built overnight.

The CFG acquisition programme has no direct comparison in world football.

One might point to the Red Bull energy drinks football empire encompassing New York, Leipzig and Salzburg but, in terms of size and scope, CFG is a cut above everyone else, constructed with the energy levels of someone who drinks nothing other than highly ca ffei na ted fizzy drinks. What has changed this week is that the investment from the US private equity firm Silver Lake suggests that others see the value in it too.

For Soriano, CFG and those there when the Spaniard’s predecessor Garry Cook promised to conquer the world at the start of the Abu Dhabi revolution in 2008, the Silver Lake investment of £389 million for a 10 per cent stake, valuing CFG at £3.73billion, is vindication. It not only allows CFG to claim that it is the most valuable sports franchise property in the world but also it means that the investment by Sheikh Mansour of around £1.6billion to acquire and transform Manchester City, and the CFG affiliates, looks like it might pay for itself.

The bigger it grows the bigger the question: why are they doing it? We never see CFG’S majority nominal owner, and so the assumption is that it exists for the glory of a tiny Gulf state and its leaders, to enhance Abu Dhabi’s reputation and, by extension, its global security.

It is easier to explain from a football perspective. As a sporting and financial enterprise, this enormous Abu Dhabi investment project has acquired its partner clubs in different regions for often different reasons. In the US, India, Japan and Australia, the CFG clubs offer opportunities for the size of the Manchester City fan base to be increased at an accelerated rate by contact with a local entity and thus to enhance commercial value. So too in China although the Chinese market is much more complicated, hence the original equity sale of 12 per cent of CFG for £265million in 2015 to China Media Capital, which has since acted as a partner in the acquisition of Sichuan Jiuniu.

In Uruguay, where Torque cost around an annual £1 million to run, CFG has a foothold in the South American player market and already the Argentine midfielder Valentin Castellanos has made his way from Montevideo to New York City.

In Spain, Girona are a deal with Pep Guardiola’s brother Pere, a co-owner, which brings obvious benefits in cementing the relationship with their manager.

In Japan, Nissan, the co-owners of the F Marinos wanted a part of CFG’S football expertise to revitalise their club, while in India, where there is very little shortterm chance of a player being able to make the transition to European football, the relationship is different again.

Staff and players are moved around the group. CFG has always denied that there is any financial fair play benefit to be derived by Manchester City by spreading the wage bill among its satellite clubs. Only non-playing staff wages can be split across the group and that cost is minimal compared to that of playing talent.

Back in Manchester, there is a proposed new arena to be built on the Etihad Stadium site by an operator in which Silver Lake has also invested. CFG will not confirm the size of its Manchester portfolio, estimated in some quarters as greater than £300 million. It feels like the foundations of an empire being laid, something that will be expected to last for years. Its construction began in the final years of the one that preceded it, Manchester United’s era of dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson when it seemed improbable that their often calamitous, resolutely local city neighbours could ever exert a global reach.

Yet here go City, opening another new operation in India. They never had anything like the international fan base of United so they set about creating a network to make it happen by buying clubs that meant something to different people in different countries. They had no allies or connections in the world of football politics and yet on Tuesday night the Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin was at the Etihad Stadium, a personal guest of CFG chairman Khaldoon Al-mubarak.

So where does it all end? When Ferguson ruled at Old Trafford and United were the biggest club in the country it felt eternal, as these things always do. It needed a vast jolt of capital, and ambition, to move the dial and now, 11 years on, others are buying into the Abu Dhabi vision of Manchester City, of their affiliate partners and of the future of football. Yet still at the heart of this giant £4 billion entity is Abu Dhabi, the notably absent Sheikh Mansour and the lingering question: why?