gmckennasell said:
it looks like we have just got our noses in the uefa trough , just in time , FFP will hurt for a year or two , but the fact is , we dont have to pay stupid wages and transfer fees anymore , players come to us to win trophies , and play in the chumps league every season. We can now pay decent hungry players 80k to 100k basic a week , and give them incentives to win games/cups/leagues , uefa must be seriously pissed we have gate crashed their party.
I disagree with your last bit, mate.
I believe UEFA has slowly come to accept our place at the top table of European football. The global focus on our games with Barcelona will have significantly crystallised this in their minds imo. They will perhaps appreciate, although never publicly acknowledge, investment of the scope and scale of ADUG at City could very well be a positive force for wider European football.
Platini and UEFA's remit was to keep the G14 from breaking away and FFP's evolution from being about debt to profitability was a clear manifestation of this. Unlike others I've never felt that FFP was about stopping us in our tracks
per se , but rather to protect the status quo by restricting practices which threatened their hegemony. FFP has now, for better or worse, achieved that aim, albeit with the exception of City, with PSG arguably previously being part of that elite. I believe that is palatable to most of the cartel and I strongly suspect sentiment among most
ancien regime clubs, at least beyond these shores, is ambivalent to our arrival, and quite possibly even benign now the drawbridge has come up. Those aren't sentiments that are shared among our peers in the English game, however, who I'm sure would all wish we'd just disappear.
We shouldn't look upon the G-14 as some sort of homogenous group of identikit clubs. Like any other alliance, built around mutual self-interest, there will be petty rivalries and back-stabbing between the parties. There are many within that grouping who will have realised which way the wind is blowing and come to accept our place among them. People can always come to accept change once they realise there is nothing they can do to resist it.
Hopefully our power base will strengthen at the expense of the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool within European football in the years ahead. It would be a fitting denouement to the project that those who most sneeringly looked down their noses at us and most vociferously resisted our right to exist at the top of the game were the ones left outside once our influence and vision rendered City to be a truly irresistible as a political force within global football, which will surely come to pass, sooner or later.
