If it’s integrity they’re after, we must hear from Soriano
THERE was something intoxicatingly joyful about Manchester City in the days when the Abu Dhabi money first rolled in. Things didn’t always work. Chief executive Garry Cook, whose sales pitch to the Emiratis secured their petro-dollars in the first place, attempted to negotiate with Kaka’s people under his own steam, minus a middle man. He emerged from the room to say that one of the world’s best players had ‘bottled it’.
Cook’s claim to City fans in the New York Mad Hatters bar that the club would become ‘without doubt, the biggest and best football club in the world’ was ridiculous. United beat them to the title by 11 points a few years later.
Yet there was a transparency about City back then. Cook did not disguise the fact that he would have to spend at an unsustainable level to get a seat at football’s top table. ‘Accelerated spending,’ he called it, sitting around a table with us in Pretoria during a City pre-season tour in 2009.
John Terry was flirting with
City to win an improved Chelsea contract at that time. That is the kind of thing Cook and his staff were up against. But they established a player acquisition which is a model for all the rest, created Britain’s best training complex, revived a post-industrial desert in east Manchester and looked after fans like no other.
It was after Cook departed that things changed. He made enemies of the wrong people, an excruciating email from him about Nedum Onuoha’s mother came to light and his successor Ferran Soriano, whose CV included an inside track to Pep Guardiola, entered the picture.
It has presaged eight years in which the corporate structures of City have reached a complexity beyond imagination, with a global group of eight clubs all falling under their ownerships, all paying the ‘City Football Group’ for their services.
Following the money has become extremely complicated. Looking way adrift of FFP spending rules, they sold their ‘image rights’ for £24.5million to a third party, which they insisted for years had ‘no link’ to the club but turned out to be very-much related. They were paid £22.45m for selling their ‘intellectual property’ to unspecified ‘related parties’. Subsidiaries had their names changed. Registered offices moved. Behind the scenes, City amassed expertise in everything. Alex Byars and Martyn Hawkins joined from the Deloitte business, which had helped UEFA set up the FFP legislation.
Soriano, the individual you wanted to ask about all this, has remained obscure and opaque in the background, reluctant to talk in the way that Cook had done. He has agreed to only one substantive interview in eight years, given in a New York hotel at a time when the club were looking to promote their new MLS team there.
There were few disclosures of interest. Soriano described New York as ‘the greatest city in the world,’ momentarily leaving Manchester out of the mental equation. He said Joe Hart epitomised the kind of players he wanted, ‘who love the club and can be the core of the squad.’ And he concluded that day: ‘Our revenues will increase and we are not worried about FFP at all.’
ALL the talking since then has been done by the chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the wealthy Emirati whose evangelising about the club generally arrives via videos from City’s in-house digital operation. He is clearly very busy, running an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, sitting on Abu
Dhabi’s executive council and, according to Bloomberg, ‘building a $229 billion fund for Abu Dhabi’s post-oil era.’
Soriano is the one at the hub of the complex entity that is Manchester City. He is the one who has presided over what befell the club on Friday and he is the one with the answers.
The club consider themselves victims in all of this, suffering the collateral damage of a flawed spending system. So Soriano should have no difficulty in explaining. If City want to demonstrate integrity, let’s hear him from, unfiltered.