Re: City & FFP (continued)
John.des said:
This new partner program or brand program is really interesting around the world but doubt it was the idea of Mansour all along with the club.
I am pretty sure all this comes from the vision of Ferran Soriano as I read news about the very similar plans when he was at Barca that he wants to take it to the new level and build a whole Barca brand starting from creating an MLS team and maybe more in other parts of the world but his vision wasnt really supported at Barca at the time and anyway he was leaving later on so all this stopped but here at City he probably sold this idea to Mansour very well ad the sheikh liked it very much as it seems and now we see how it starts to work with New York City, Melbourne City etc.
With Barca all this would have been more straightforward as they already had a huge global fanbase with City its little bit harder as we just are buiding this fanbase, and also when people hear that the New York team or Australian team will have the same youth system that Man City that wont mean much to them as our youth development is so far nothing to the likes of Barca, all they see probably is that we spend fortunes on first team stars but not many people know we changed the youth system big time and we will probably produce some great youngsters in the future and they will get their chances in the first team too but for this the few first ones that will really come trough will be the real proof of it. Until that nearly zero credit will be given to City on this topic.
With Barca everyone knows La Masia, how they teach youngsters, how they became succesfull with their own style and generation of Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol then Fabregas, Pique, Fabregas, Messi, Valdes all youth players from Barca...
What we do trough Soriano and Txiki is copy the Barca style, 433, shortpassing, high possession style, well it could be argued that is it the best for us in the future in the PL which is a very different league from La Liga but thats the way we signed up for and probably still lot better than whatever went on before...
(Of course Barca themselves cant continue to bring trough high quality youngsters all the time, simply they had 1-2 very big generation of youngsters but since that mostly Bojan, Bartra, Pedro, Cuenca etc came trough and they are far from the level of earlier big youth products. Little bit like at United Giggs, Beckham, Scholes was a good era but the same system only gave them later the likes of OShea, Brown or Evans, Welbeck etc not the same class...etc )
Thats when tried to explain to one of my American friend all this about New York City he said "so the whole NYCFC will be more like a Barca than a current Man City in terms of philosophy?"
Most fans still have no idea that City is changing and already trying to be more like Barca with youth system and everything else but thats natural thats why Soriano and Txiki are here, they had big part building the modern Barca team, they know how they did that they try to create something similar but we are probably where Barca was around 2003/2004 just with lot worse youth talents around the first team as we clearly dont have the likes of Xavi/Iniesta/Messi fron the academy ready to be part of the first team.
What was the original plan of Mansour with the club I dont know but I think it was a lucky meeting with Soriano as his football visions are being put down even tho he wanted these at his previous job at Barca but he gets every financial help here for it.
I think you underestimate the difficulties facing Soriano when he became Vice-President of Barcelona in
2003. At that time Barcelona had none of the trappings of a club with a huge global fanbase. Indeed that fanbase was largely the creation of the work done after 2003, (in that any global fanbase was very much an untapped resource before 2003) and work done off the field as much as on it. In season 2002-3:-
* the club's revenue was 123m euros, only the 13th highest in the word and under half of the rags.
* the club made a loss of 73m euros
* players salaries were 88% of the club's income
* the club were 186m euros in debt, costs were rising, revenue was not
* the club had not won a trophy for over 4 seasons
* attendances at the Camp Nou were falling season on season
In Soriano's own words, the club opted for revolution rather than evolution, "The idea was to invest in the team....immediately to regain prestige and media attention that would generate revenue to invest again in the team. But, if we opted for prudence - delaying sporting investments until the club was economically sound - we would be running the risk of wasting precious time in respect of our rivals, who were growing at a dizzying pace. We would not have been able to compete for the best players, nor would we have had the capacity to pay our top players' salaries, which we would have had no choice but to transfer, as had happened three years before with Luis Figo." This is indeed
part of city's strategy, and at Barca it worked like a charm. Revenue rose rapidly, but as Soriano says, "this growthwas not the result of an extraordinary or unexpected source of revenue,
but had been achieved by growth in all the traditional sources of income in a proportional manner.
The point I'm making is that Soriano faced just the problems at Barca in 2003 as City have faced. His solution was the same heavy investment strategy as City, but without the same scale of corporate-global dimension. This may be because the "team" (off the field) broke up in 2009... Second point is that FFP would have stopped Barca doing this, with the consequences Soriano outlines... Third point, Platini cannot point to one case where a team has achieved anything like that by abiding by FFPR - it is simply a way of keeping clubs out of the CL. M> Dupont may find barca useful in court. Has he got Ferran's number?
