aguero93:20 said:
Chippy_boy said:
Yes, I agree. The £100m Kaka bid was another catalyst imho. It was too big, too audacious for us at our stage of our development. Now perhaps as double league champions with an established squad and CL progress. But back then it was like a red rag to a bull. Platini mentioned it repeatedly as being totally wrong and although that was hypocritical given the similar sized deals that are done by other clubs, in a way I can see his point.
For all they knew at the time, we were going to just blow the whole of the establishment out of the water with a £1bn superteam that would render all competition null and void for the foreseeable. The fact that we were on a track to produce a solid, self-sustaining business, investing in the community etc perhaps sounded like hollow promises.
Perhaps we could have handled it better in hindsight, with a more softly softly approach. Dunno.
I think you're all attaching too much importance to a couple of events early on in the take-over, if they wanted a reason to come after us it's that we're going to permanently take one of Arsenal/Chelsea/Liverpool/Scum's place in the Champions League, even though we'll match any of them for global viewing figures soon enough. In fact, I reckon plan B could well be a 5th champions league spot for the Spanish and English Leagues and maybe 4th spot back in Italy (also makes the Bundesliga's 4th spot safe so it'll keep them happy too)
People's perception of us had to start somewhere, and who amongst us wasn't shocked when it was suddenly announced that we'd been taken over again and we were now the richest club in sporting history. Add to that 24 hours after the takeover, we blew Chelsea out of the water with a £31m winning bid for Robinho, I think that alone shocked the shit out of the football world let alone what was to come.
I recall at the time similar sized clubs complaining that we were cherry picking their best players wnd they were forced to sell because their players wanted the riches on offer. Yes the club's all took the kings shilling and paid the price later, but what could they do? Lescott, Barry, Milner all made it clear they wanted to leave their respective clubs, so all that was left to do was for their club's to price the player's out of the market, so what did we do? We paid what was required so we got the players we needed and that process has created the Man City we see today.
We had to do what we did, but its understandable that it led to a lot of jealousy from other club owners and fans. Some of our fans didn't do us any favours either, as I recall having to tell more than one or two of my Blue supporting mates to treat out lottery win with dignity. I explained to one, how would you feel if your next door neighbour won the lottery and started calling you a skint tramp and started wages wads of cash under nose. Wouldn't you want to see him waste all his dough and fall flat on his face?
All in all, we quickly learned how to show humility, but alas even this was too late for most. Even though we've gone a long way to repair that early image, in some quarters their memories of us from those brief moments and I'll feeling it brought toward us run long and deep and we shouldn't underestimate this as the effects are being felt right now through FFP
