Puppet Master Silva
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<a class="postlink" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2972580/Manchester-City-s-ageing-squad-hopeless-Europe-reliant-Yaya-Toure.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... Toure.html</a>
Sheik Mansour was determined to do things differently to Roman Abramovich when he bought Manchester City. Now Chelsea have become everything City wanted to be.
City were supposed to dominate English and European football with a ‘holistic’ approach, bringing through young talent and not just spending the huge amounts Abramovich did when he arrived at Chelsea.
Instead, despite their obvious successes, they have an ageing squad, problems with Financial Fair Play and are making the same mistakes in the Champions League as when they first played in it.
Chelsea, by contrast, have some of Europe’s brightest players, buy and sell intelligently and are thriving on the pitch, too.
Sheik Mansour’s recruitment of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain from Barcelona was seen as crucial in helping transform City’s philosophy and standing in the game.
Yet have the changes gone to plan? I would strongly argue no. To have such riches but have one of the Premier League’s oldest squads and be so heavily reliant on one player - Yaya Toure - shows there has been mismanagement and poor decisions with the quality and age of signings.
Am I being too harsh? Four trophies since 2011 may say yes but for the £500million spent since 2008, who is the young star that is going to carry them forward? Who is City’s Eden Hazard or Thibaut Courtois?
Why are they so top-heavy with players in their late twenties? Watching Barcelona run rings around City for the second year in a row I struggled to understand why their squad needed such major surgery.
Not only that, is there another team in the Premier League so reliant on its main players? Every time Manuel Pellegrini makes changes for cup games, like against Middlesbrough, Wigan and Newcastle in the last 12 months, results have been appalling.
I thought Begiristain and Soriano would entice the best young talent across Europe and reinvigorate the squad.
City have been making big noises about the facilities for their new academy but so what? It all comes down to the coaching and youngsters being given a chance.
When City’s academy was based at Platt Lane, plenty of youngsters broke through but that stopped once the big money came in. Why were they so reluctant to give a young striker a chance, for example, when James Milner was forced to play out of position during Aguero’s absence?
City will have to spend big again this summer - I think they need five top players, which could cost beyond £150m - but how will they do that when UEFA have punished them already for breaking FFP rules?
They got into a position last summer, remember, where they could not replace Alvaro Negredo and when you look at the current squad, you wonder who Pellegrini could sell to generate transfer revenue.
This is similar to how Chelsea were until recently under Abramovich. They bought overpriced players in huge quantities, they sacked managers on a regular basis and had no youth players coming through. The difference is that they were competing in the Champions League all that time. Yes, they’ve won the competition only once but they reached several semi-finals and a final in 2008 and always looked like they had a chance of winning.
Tomorrow is their 11th major final since Abramovich became owner in 2003.
Chelsea should now be recognised as the best club at player-trading in the business, selling players such as David Luiz, Kevin de Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku and Andre Schurrle for big profits and using the income to buy the players they want, such as Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas.
In Europe, however, they have been woeful and the meeting with Barcelona illustrated how far they have to go.
To continually adopt the same naive tactics, deploying a 4-4-2 system two years running against the same opponents and expect a different outcome beggared belief.
It will not be lost on City’s hierarchy that their season could be over by the middle of March