Prestwich_Blue said:
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 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.
Some great posts in this thread. I haven't quoted them in full because I hate it when people do that, but I've kept some just so that people can see the discussion I'm responding to.
If we look back 50 years in City's history, the club was dying on its feet. We were set to finish in what was then our lowest league position of the century. We drew gates below 10,000 for certain league games. Gary James has even revealed that City board members approached United with a view to a ground share, to lead to a merger, because Manchester couldn't support two major clubs. Yet three short years later, we were claiming the title with a side playing great football in front of crowds that had swelled by 250%.
The catalyst had been to appoint a brilliant new managerial pair who inspired many of the locally born, home-produced players (the likes of Doyle, Oakes, Pardoe and Young) to achieve heights many thought beyond them. We supplemented these players with buys, sometimes for fees that represented pretty hefty outlays by the standards of the time, but this was achieved with self-generated funds. Mercer and Allison doubled home gates in their first season. A cup run that saw us play five games in rounds 5 and 6 before an aggregate of 250,000 fans produced the cash to spend a club record fee on Colin Bell, who remains one of the greatest to wear the shirt.
Between the title win in 1968 and the early 1980s, we were regarded as a really top club. We contended for trophies, and played in Europe, this - along with the Junior Blues initiative - allowing us to grow our support base to the extent that we were third between United and Liverpool in the attendance tables. We also spent the cash on ground improvements which, when completed, saw Maine Road regularly chosen ahead of Old Trafford for major club fixtures that had to be played at neutral venues (between 1973 and 1984, we hosted five such games in which United didn't feature, while they had three). While we spent big on occasions, we didn't use external funding to do so, and we continued to bring through kids who turned into good First Division players of the time and often into internationals: Corrigan, Booth, Donachie, Barnes, Owen, Power and so on.
This was the City I encountered when my old man first took me to Maine Road in 1975, and, to use a modern expression, it was very much a club that "did things the right way". And if you were to ask me whether I'd prefer to cement and maintain the status of a really big club using the methods I've outlined above, then of course I would. Unfortunately, it's not a choice any club now has if it wishes to challenge for the domestic title or the CL (and why should that privilege be reserved for a small cartel?). Complaining at us for not following the seventies model is as futile as moaning that most of the old-style corner shops have disappeared, or that people can no longer leave their doors unlocked when they go to bed. It harks back to a world that no longer exists.
In any case, the "right way" is what we were pretty much trying to follow up to 2007, when we were living within our means and focusing on our Academy. We nearly won a UEFA Cup spot one year, but might have gone one better eventually. And if the likes of Birmingham and Swansea could win a League Cup in recent years, maybe one year we could have enjoyed similar fortune to end the long trophy doubt. Maybe with a better manager than Stuart Pearce, we could even have done what Everton did one year, and made the CL preliminary stage before getting knocked out. But in essence we'd have been a perpetual also-ran looking from the outside as an oligopoly dominated the top end of the game, having constructed for itself such an inbuilt financial supremacy that no one else could crash through the glass ceiling without the kind vast financial investment FFP now renders impossible.
I'm pleased that ADUG came along and delighted that we were the club they chose. However, had they picked someone else such as Everton or Newcastle, I'd have been happy to see that club shake up the football world. We had the choice of knowing our place and accepting it or having a shot at challenging an elite that, as PB described above, has systematically over previous decades removed as many regulatory elements as it could that had the effect of levelling the playing field to give others a chance of success. Actually, I'm quite proud that we ended up being the ones to challenge this.
Back when I first started watching football, it was seen as one of English football's greatest strengths that clubs could emerge from the doldrums and, thanks to an inspired managerial appointment or a good crop of kids coming through or both, and challenge for the game's major prizes. Leeds, Liverpool, City, Derby and Forest all won or nearly won the title in the sixties and seventies within a fairly short period after they were struggling in the second tier. Villa won the League and then the European Cup a decade after they were grubbing round in the third tier. The fact that these possibilities no longer exist in the modern game seems to me a great shame, and I'm regularly surprised by fans and pundits seeming to embrace the new order with enthusiasm.
Unless there are major changes to FFP, City and PSG will be the last to sneak in before the door shut, while the likes of Everton and Villa will probably never win the domestic title again. Moreover, I don't think that City get the credit we deserve for what we've achieved over the last two or three years with the spectre of FFP looming over us.
Only at the end of the 2010/11 season did City reach the position Chelsea were in when Abramovich took over, which was having a team that could legitimately aspire to win domestic Cups and to qualify for the Champions League. And the 2011/12 financial year, which started on 1 June 2011, was the start also of the first FFP monitoring period. This means we've had to be pretty careful in terms of what we spent, which meant, as others have pointed out, that we've missed out on a number of world class talents that have come to the PL. In the circumstances, I view the two league titles in three years as a fine haul, and I don't think we're given enough credit for it.
If we win nothing this season, it may be slightly disappointing, but the bigger picture is that we've taken the FFP 'pinch'. As long as we finish in the top three to guarantee participation in next season's CL and the increased financial rewards that will bring, then I think we can look back and reflect with satisfaction even if we win nothing else. In my opinion, it would be pretty creditable to get to the point where we're free of FFP sanctions with two titles, two domestic cups and two qualifications from the CL group phase under our belt.
Meanwhile, we're now set fair to prosper, having pulled ahead of Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool in terms of revenues. Not everyone may like the way we've done that. Matt Scott's rather laboured 'Alice in Wonderland' extended metaphor is nothing but an innuendo that we're resorting to chicanery to get our way, for instance. (As an aside, doesn't Scott have a dreadful prose style when his stuff isn't tarted up by national newspaper subs?). However, as others have said, we were put in a position where we had to innovate, and we have. We now definitely need to rejuvenate the squad over the next couple of years, but the financial position should enable us to do that.
All told, with the Campus and our financial results, I think the football world is waking up to the fact that we really are a long-term project, though there's a lot more to come. However, we're still widely regarded as being an interloper not deserving of rubbing shoulders in the company of football's aristocracy. In other words, people see us as "having arrived but not belonging", as I put it in another long post some time ago.
This can really grate, but I see no alternative to giving it time. If, by 2020, we've won a couple more domestic titles, cracked the CL, are playing before 62K every week in an imposing stadium and development of the Collar Site is continuing apace, I suspect that we'll see a lot less of that type of commentary. This is all realistic considering the recent financial results and there's so much more to come on the financial side; we really have barely started.
I'm not trying to score points over Chelsea and good luck to them in terms of having transformed their club, but they do provide an instructive example of perceptions changing over time. After all, when Matthew Harding first invested in them 20 years ago, they had four major trophies in their history (and many wouldn't count the League Cup I've allowed them, given that there was no Wembley final or place in Europe and not all top division teams entered). Their average gates over the previous two decades had dipped below 20,000 on nine occasions. No one mentions these things now, though I do recall fans of some rival teams denigrating them as a 'plastic club' in the early Abramovich years.
In any case, I have to say that I enjoy the discomfort of some of our detractors. We've gone from, at the outset of the ADUG era, holier-than-thou admonitions that we'd never be capable of buying success to sourly grudging snipes, often from the very same people, that with the money we've spent, we should be doing better. Long may that continue.
The one thing I really hope for from City as the stadium expands, we see a concerted effort to offer a decent proportion of cheap ticket prices. I have no problem with us trying to "monetise" those supporters who are able and willing to tip up plenty of cash, and I'm proud of the community ethos that shines through in our new developments. However, I hope we stay mindful of the need to engage the traditional support base, which by and large is hardly affluent, in tough economic times. This is my single gripe with the club at the moment.
That aside, ADUG have delivered everything we could have expected and more since the takeover, and in general we have nothing to reproach ourselves for in terms of the way our success has been achieved. Moreover, now we're free of FFP, I think the next four or five years are set to be even more exciting than the last. So though we get plenty of brickbats, I'd brush them off if I were you. As they say, the winners get to write history and we're going to be the winners.
