I know from my club contacts that the media strategy was to court certain journalists who the club thought were 'opinion formers'. Serious journalists who could write using a more sophisticated medium than a crayon. So probably people like (I'm guessing) Martin Samuel, Henry Winter, Martyn Ziegler, David Conn, Rory Smith, etc. I do know Nick Harris was one of that group. I talked to him and passed on stuff I knew, which the club seemingly had no issue with (I'd have certainly known if they had).
They shared information with them, the intention being that we'd get a more sympathetic and objective hearing in the media, rather than the shite spouted by the red-tops, which we knew we couldn't influence. But even that group of journalists are driven by clicks, and objective articles about City don't generate clicks. Oli Kay, who was at The Times, told me that so I've had it first hand.
But it's no secret that we accelerated investment in the squad before the FFP door was slammed shut in our face. Then, in 2012/13, facing FFP failure, we did as much as we could to bring forward income. We sold the image rights to Fordham, we called off sponsorship revenue early. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what we did by the way. If Etihad contracted to paying £600m over 10 years, we may have drawn down £300m in the first 3 years, say. That's not uncommon either. I seem to recall united front-loading either their Team Viewer or kit deal, so they got a big payment up-front. Nothing wrong with that. The accelerated investment is all public knowledge - Khaldoon openly said it - so Harris claiming it as a secret he'd been told as part of some inner-circle is complete nonsense.
At some point though, Harris's attitude changed dramatically. I know his wife had a brain tumour (and she died sadly about a year ago), they had two young girls and his mental heath suffered quite badly. That's a terrible thing to happen in anyone's book. But even knowing all this, the club were very puzzled about his 180 degree turn. His hatred of us is seemingly pathological.
Delaney was the same to a large degree. Up to us winning the league at Brighton in 2019 he was OK. By the time we'd beaten Watford at Wembley, just one week later, he'd turned.
