Man City,have got hold of a benefactor much bigger than the London Ruski,and in my opinion have always been a bigger club than Chelsea.Arsenal and Liverpool must be pooing their pants.Maybe not this season but as of next,serious possibility of one of them missing out on Champions League then the shit hits the fan.
0
Comments
Arab money starting to filter into the Premiership (ADUG will not be the only one):
Good for English football ?
Bad for English football ?
Instead, the investment just gets bigger.
Sterile, sterile, sterile, sacking managers every 6 months because financial outlay demands immediate success, they will all have superstars in their sides, attracting happy clappy newbies with no knowledge or feeling for the clubs history, traditions or culture.
The playing field will eventually level and it will then turn into franchises, the highest bidder gets to buy Man Utd and move them to the moon.
Good for Premiership as a spectacle as it will, if the stories are believed, smash aside the "big" four and make it a more open league
Bad for Sky as won't be able to have Grand Slam Sunday with five big clubs
Bad as it will be a "big" five unless it attracts other middle eastern investors
Bad for everyone one else as City pay inflated fees and drive up wage and transfer inflation
Bad as it just widens the gap between the very rich and everyone else.
IMHO just a more extreme version of what is happening already with the big investors at other clubs (eg QPR) and happened with Walker at Blackburn
For me personally i think it's great because there's now a club richer than Chelsea. Can't imagine Roman was too happy last night when he heard he'd been outbidded for Robinho. And as NSS said, it could mean one of Arsenal and Liverpool missing out on the Champions league so therefore puts their noses out of joint. It probably also means that Spurs have even less chance of gatecrashing the top 4 now which again is good.
Ok- you sold it to me....
:-)
Bad for English football ?
.............
Again it's about traditions, respecting the club it's fan base etc. Judging by some of the stories they want to make Man City a Champion's League team next season. If they can do this then it breaks the big four monopoly, but that means buying in success.
Where it's bad for British football is that a whole load of footballing mercanaries will now be queueing up to express their desire to play for Man City, despite never having heard of the team this time last week. Expect more Brazilians etc to arrive and we have to hope for the good of the game that maybe the owners will buy players from the lower leagues so some money can perculate through to the grass roots.
But going on experience with the likes of Chelsea and I think we'll see more reckless wage and transfer fee inflation. That isn't good for teams like Charlton who are struggling to live on a budget.
If I was a Liverpool fan I'd be rueing this too - ADUG were interested in buying Liverpool and things on Merseyside don't look too rosy - Hicks & Gillett have fallen out terminally and are struggling to find funding for the new stadium, ADUG won't be coming to their rescue.
All in all though I see their involvement as another nail in the coffin of English football and the increasing Wimbledonisation of the game - Wimbledon being the world's greatest tennis tournament, held in the UK but won by players who are not British, despite the odd plucky performance from a home grown player.
Where will it end? Last season saw Bournemouth, Luton and other teams go into administration, we and most other CCC sides have been forced to trim squads to make ends meet, while at the richer end of the table another team of billionaires has arrived to make things just that bit harder for us to compete if and when we do make it back into the EPL.
Don't ask me why, but something really doesn't stack up with this purchase. There is no doubting the credentials of the Abu Dhabi group, but why Man City ? They clearly wish to form the largest club in the land, and have the supposed financial strength to do that ten times over, so why then go for a middle ranking prem club who are in the direct catchment opposition with the current biggest club in the world ?
They have the financial power to buy one of the real big players, with an already established structure and worldwide fanbase, so i can't understand why they settled on this one.
Buying a club for 150m and building it up to a 600m club is better than buying a 600m club (Man U?) and only building it up to a 800m club surely?
To be honest - how much bigger can Man U/Liverpool get in terms of support etc?
I can see a case for Arsenal possibly and agree with the point of Man City next door to Man U seems like an oversight.
It was for sale...?
Seriously- it was prime for a takeover- this has been going on for a while now- Mark Hughes admitted that on SSN, They do have a loyal large fan base and in a part of the UK that will be attractive to the (mercenary) type of player who they want to attract...
The income received will be so much smaller. Man City have a decent, working class fanbase, and i'm sure if successful it can be built up. But they are not going to be able to get away with high ticket prices there like you can with the London clubs etc, or the worldwide merchandising success they could of had with a Liverpool, Real Madrid etc.
Other cities like Milton Keynes, you mean ......?
Good point. Sinatra was obviously keen to sell as his assets in Thailand have been frozen so I assume that meant ADU got a good price but is money is no object then why not buy another, bigger, club.
All I can guess is that they tried for Liverpool and Arsenal (accroding to SSN last night) and got knocked back and weren't perpared to wait.
City are a bigger club than QPR, do have a good support base, history etc but really if ADU are going to throw money at a club then it doesn't matter which one. Just about any Prem club would be suitable.
Yeh. why didnt they pick us?? Feckers.
Man City are premier league, relatively cheap and have just moved into a new ground - no spending hundreds of millions on a shiny new house.
Of the major teams none are for sale or were for sale at the right price - Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Liverpool have recently been sold and the owners of Arsenal have hoisted up a sign saying they don't want Johhny Foreigners owning the club (but will allow a French manager and a squad of players from France, Brazil, Spain etc). As I say above Liverpool were allegedly talking to ADUG but given the planning problems and cost of the new stadium I can see why ADUG would have been put off, if Hicks & Gillett don't know how much they'll have to fork out for the new Anfield how can they make a reasonable assessment? And as Hicks & Gillett overpaid for Liverpool I can't see that they'd let the club go as cheaply as Thaksin did with Man City.
If they wanted to buy a big club that would leave Everton, Man City and maybe the likes of Blackburn, who are geographically on the periphery of the game. I'm guessing, but with Thaksin under some financial trouble the deal to sell was relatively quick and painless with no protracted negotiations and if you are going to spend a fortune on new players does it matter what club you buy? You just want to make the purchase of the club itself and a new ground is as cheap as possible.
It's all about return on investment. If the purchase price of £150 to £200m is correct then they can probably build a strong European team by spending around £100-150m meaning a total outlay of around £300m. They've already forked out £32m for Robinho. Compare that with Liverpool, Man U, Chelsea etc where to buy the clubs and ground etc would mean forking out at least £1 bn or more (including buying a new ground for Liverpool etc). Plus some of those clubs are saddled with ridiculous levels of debt which would have to be negotiated.
If they can get Man City into the Champion's League then that is relatively cheap.
It isn't Roman Abramovich who'll be upset by this - he can afford for Chelsea to miss out on the CL, but can Arsenal, Man U or Liverpool? They all need the TV revenues that the CL brings in - if City make the CL then there is likely to be one set of owners with an expensively bought squad who are going to see their TV revenues fall away by £10-20 million or more.
But yeah good luck to them will make a pleasant change
If man city can go to arguably the biggest club in the world and poach their best young player then that's got to have serious implications.Can see Blatter and co getting involved.
Bad for World football i reckon.
;o)
I wouldn't say he was poached. The player had already burnt his bridges, demanded a transfer and reportedly even said he'd go to Brazil and not come back! So Madrid had no option to accept the offer really. It'd be completely different if City managed to sign someone like Ramos or Casillas.
What can Blatter do? It's not illegal. And the big clubs would never sanction any change in transfers or salary capping.
And what Chelsea and City are doing is no different to when Madrid were buying Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo for exorbitant fees years ago.
They are amongst the most loyal in football.
They averaged 104,745 attendance even when in the 3rd tier.
For too long they have lived in the shadow of the other Manchester team.
There was uncontrolled celebrations last night throughout the streets of Stockport
LOL
In recent months, it had seemed that the likes of West Ham were at least trying to bring some financial sense back to the running of their clubs by reducing wage bills, but City certainly won't now be worrying about the credit crunch.
It will be entertaining to watch five clubs having to get one of the top four league places, but it will also make it even less of a meaningful competition and bring the whole idea of a European/World Super League a step closer.
Eventually one of these expensively assembled teams will come a cropper. Leeds over extended themselves in the anticipation that they could buy success and qualify for the CL - when they didn't and lost all that revenue they went on a slide that didn't stop until they reached League One and included two spells in administartion.
With Man City buying success they'll get into the CL in the next season or two - and that means one of the big four will miss out. Liverpool and Man U are heavily in debt and Arsenal have a massive mortgage to pay on their new ground. Losing CL revenue will cost one of those teams dearly.