Yes but I think you're overestimating it all. Sure, I agree that CMC will give City some extra coverage, but how much do you think they'll really give them? I know it's China but I can't see them, say, running PL highlight programs where the City game gets half of the running order and all the rest fight for scraps. Similarly, they aren't going to suddenly start producing tons of MCFC programming because there's not enough audience for it right now. The CMC chiefs are not going to suddenly lose their business acumen just because they signed a deal with us - they are still going to recognise that the way you make money is buy tailoring your content around what your audience are actually interested in. If you ram something down their throats they simply respond by not watching it. This can do wonders for us, yes, but not in an immediate way. Chinese football, and therefore Chinese football programming on TV, needs to build up in the same way that the Premier League TV revenue did not reach the level it is currently at within a single season of the league's inception.
As for other companies wanting to sign on in order to access the Chinese market - yes, and no. For sure there will be more interest, but do you really think that the average discerning Chinese fan is going to even notice that we have a new partnership with Virgin trains or Malmaison or Bet365 or whoever? The only real sponsorships we can sell which will be truly valuable will be the kit manufacturing deal and the shirt sponsorship. The kit manufacturing deal, however, is complex and wrapped up in the fact that manufacturers have very specific ideas of what they think the commercial value of clubs are. We are definitely lagging behind and due a decent step up, and even before this deal I thought the rumoured increase to £12m under Nike was underselling us, but I suspect that even after this deal Nike and other brands will be waiting for us to realise our potential at least in part. By all means call me out on this when I'm wrong, because I will be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect that our next kit deal will still not be for more than £20m - maybe £25m at an absolute push but I reckon it will be sub-£20m simply because the manufacturers are snobs and have not warmed to our potential yet. Even £25m will still put us below the scum, Chelsea, Arsenal and only on a level with Liverpool though.
It is big. I never said it wasn't big. You're jumping to conclusions about when it will truly become big, though. I've read the majority of those articles, and aside from that they seemed to be waiting for Martin Samuel's lead to jump on the bandwagon, the articles worth the most time of day were the ones which talked about this being so big as it helps facilitate China's attempt at leaping to the top of the footballing pile and ultimately winning a World Cup. How quickly do you expect that to happen? It's not going to be in the next five years, I'll tell you that. At an optimistic rate, I'd say the Chinese can pull it off in perhaps 20 years' time, once they have had a chance to bring an entire generation through new style academies and then inculcate into those players a sense of tradition and belonging, and then use those players to bring through the next generation - the ones born believing it is their destiny to win the WC. But throughout the whole period, China will be slowly growing in football prowess. It won't just be terrible-terrible-terrible-terrible-BOOM wins the World Cup. Their football will naturally progressively get better. In the same way, this is huge for us, but we will have to slowly work our way up to the point when we truly capitalise in a serious way.
We are ideally positioned to benefit from this as the CFG model lets us focus on a worldwide network of development, success and fan growth, but it's going to take time before CFG fans outside of Manchester are willing to support the rest of CFG. Only when that happens will it truly allow us to benefit in a big, big way because only then will those fans combined with the local first-generation fans create a big enough demographic which A - buys merchandise in large quantities and more importantly B - has enough spending power to persuade big companies in those countries to chase the money by splashing out on big CFG sponsorships. No other team is placed to follow us right now because no other team really is willing to take the resources away from their home base to focus on foreign growth, so we should at the very least have a huge headstart if not total monopoly on this sort of endeavour when it truly starts paying off, but simply put this is not going to happen overnight.
