Dribble said:
Noithing drives innovation like adversity. Both posts brilliantly sum up what City were forced to do as a reaction to the G14's attempt to stop a new player entering their cosy, closed-shop football domain.
Would we have been as innovative as we have had the world of European football remained the same? It was always stated that our initial heavy investment would be eventually replaced by a sustainable financial model, but I believe this process was accelerated and massively ramped up because of the probable consequences FFP.
So what have we done? It was made very clear we weren't welcome in the existing elite football world, so we've created our own world in which we are kings which runs parallel to the hackneyed world populated by the current European elite. None of them weren't arsed about us in the slightest as FFP had bitten, we were fined a world record £49m and were not allowed to spend over a sanctioned amount which saw the likes of Fabregas, Sanchez, Costa and Di Maria pass us by as we stood by seemingly nuetered by UEFA. Job done!
But less than 6 months later we post massively improved financial results which shocked the football world and now the smell of coffee is beginning to wake the G14 up to the fact that we are indeed just at the start of our journey. We've started the first phase of the preparatory work by creating our own world in which to operate, marketed this to sports fans and business commerce on a global scale never before seen thus giving an alternative to the stale tried and tested predictable football world of old which draws City and Bayern in the same CL group 3 years out of 4.
City are now a bigger monster at this stage of our development than we would have been if the G14 hadn't concocted FFP to try and kill us at birth. We are a monster of their creation and I don't believe it will be too long before the G14 begins to break apart as one by one they jump their sinking old world sailing vessel and try to board our new world carbon fibre power boat.
By all accounts Real are the first to realise this and the rest are sure to follow.
Have to add my congratulations on that post as well.
It's laughable to see the idiots over on RAWK bleating about doing things the "organic" and traditional way, with the success coming first, before the money. But that was in the 1970's when there was little or no money, above what teams earned at the turnstiles (and whatever a sugar saddy like David Moores gave them). In those days teams like Villa, Ipswich, Forest and us could win things and a managerial genius like Shankly, Paisley or Clough could be the major difference between being successful and being average.
That model first changed when a handful of powerful, well-supported clubs felt it wasn't fair that they should share gate receipts with their visiting opponents and threatened a breakaway if their demands weren't met. The outcome of that was that four of those five clubs won the title year after year and only once in the last 35 seasons has it been won by a team outside that cartel (Leeds) or the 'benefactor' clubs (us, Chelsea & Blackburn). That's no coincidence. They did that via skewed distribution of the single source of finance.
Then TV came along and the PL was formed. Fortunately the prize money was relatively evenly distributed but the bigger teams could still afford to pay higher fees and bigger wages, as gate receipts were still a significant revenue stream. But there was a huge disparity between the PL and the rest of the league and so owners did whatever they could to bridge that gap. People like Dave Whelan funded their clubs to make the leap and other owners were prepared to take unsustainable risks with their clubs' finances.
Did the Liverpools of this world say "Hang on, it's not fair that we've got loads of money and they haven't?" Did they fuck. They set out to grab even more, by expanding the lucrative CL from being a true competition for champions to one where you could qualify with a distant fourth-place finish. And for a short while, apart from an odd hiccup once in a while, they ruled the domestic and European football world. And the financial disparity grew even greater. But did those clubs then say "This isn't right. Any team used to be able to challenge for the title and now they can't. We'd better make it more of a level playing field by distributing our CL revenue among the other 16 clubs." No they didn't. They and their fans gloried in their status and their perceived entitlement to success.
Matthew Harding had already taken Chelsea up the league but Abramovich showed he was prepared to spend whatever it took to get to the top and stay there. It also gave him some political insurance against the capricious politician/mafioso to whom he owed allegiance and his fortune. Clubs were also taken over by money launderers and others interested in self-promotion. Football clubs had become bigger than just football. But did those guardians of the moral and ethics of the game say "Hang on. We need to take a step back and ensure that the character of the game and the clubs doesn't get damaged?" For the third time, the answer was no and they actively sought out and encouraged ever richer men to come into the game, no matter how morally dubious they were.
And now you needed three income streams to maintain success - tickets, TV and commercial - and the brighter clubs latched onto that third stream and sweated it. They recognised that football was a powerful brand that could be used by others to market their products or services. And a canny & ambitious Sheikh in Abu Dhabi realised that he could use it to market his state, gain global recognition for it and his major corporations. And the model of football ownership had changed again but seismically this time.
And all of a sudden, those "big" clubs that did everything to polarise the game, encourage increased revenues, maintain their own status, lock out pretenders looking to grab it and jealously guard their revenue streams, decide it's not fair. Well ain't that a woman.
