Garry Cook's Manchester City future in doubt after failed boast
• Chief executive guaranteed Carling Cup victory over United
• Abu Dhabi owners growing concerned about club's reputation
* Daniel Taylor
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 January 2010 00.10 GMT
Garry Cook has twice had to apologise for remarks he has made as Manchester City chief executive.
Manchester City's owners in Abu Dhabi are starting to give serious consideration to the position of the chief executive, Garry Cook, at the end of the season after becoming increasingly perturbed about his leadership style and the frequency with which he has attracted bad publicity.
Cook has developed a reputation as one of the game's more derided figures after a series of personal embarrassments in which his fondness for speaking his mind has come back to haunt him. The latest came in the build-up to the second leg of the Carling Cup semi-final against Manchester United when he was filmed telling supporters in New York's Mad Hatter Saloon that City would get to Wembley "not if, but when, we beat United again".
Cook also proclaimed that City were on course to supersede United, Real Madrid and Barcelona as the "biggest and best club in the world". He later claimed that he thought it was a closed event, despite the presence of television cameras as he took the microphone. Sir Alex Ferguson is understood to have cited Cook's remarks to his players ahead of Wednesday's 3-1 win which took United into the final with a 4-3 aggregate victory.
The sense at Old Trafford is that Cook committed one of the oldest mistakes in the book and, after the match, the midfielder Darren Fletcher pointedly referred to United "doing their talking on the pitch". However, the concerns about Cook go back much further and are more elaborate than just his habit of talking himself into trouble. City have had a mixed record in the transfer market, overpaying for several players and missing out on several key targets, most notably the attempt to smash the world transfer record by persuading Kaká to sign for the club from Milan for £91m in January 2009. In one of Cook's more infamous outbursts, the former Nike marketing executive accused Milan of "bottling it".
More recently, Cook came under scrutiny when City sacked their manager, Mark Hughes, and it subsequently emerged that his successor, Roberto Mancini, had been approached three weeks earlier. Cook tried to pass off meeting the former Internazionale coach as "general football talks" but the episode reflected badly on the club when the Abu Dhabi United Group has been trying to project an image of being different and more noble than other football club owners. Cook later revealed that he had actually started to identify possible replacements for Hughes as long ago as last summer, despite having repeatedly insisted that the club would be patient with their manager.
The sacking demonstrated the ruthlessness of the club's owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, during a period of significant change at every level of the club. Cook was paid £1.5m last year and has admitted being brought to tears during parts of a 20-month tenure in which, in effect, he ousted Alistair Mackintosh from the job.
Cook was appointed by the previous owner, Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed prime minister of Thailand who had been charged with corruption offences in his home country. In Cook's first major interview, he defended Thaksin's reputation, saying: "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Has he got the finances to run a club? Yes. Whether he's guilty of something over there, I can't worry too much about. Morally, I feel comfortable in this environment."
He subsequently admitted after Thaksin's conviction that he felt "dreadful" about making those comments. "I have made some mistakes in my life," Cook said, "but I deeply regretted my failure to do proper research on Thaksin."
That particular episode was not under ADUG's watch, but Cook's propensity for saying the wrong thing has started to jar with his employers and also affect the way the supporters consider him. His public gaffes include welcoming former striker Uwe Rösler to the "Manchester United Hall of Fame" at a supporters' event, a mistake that led to him being booed. Cook later wrote an apology for the mistake.
Cook also vehemently denied reports that Robinho would leave the club in January but was proved wrong yesterday.
