And you my friend are talking bollocks.I have supported this club for 47 years and i was there in the old second[in effect the third] division standing getting piss wet through,watching us get tonked by some mediocre side, in some shitehole of a ground and getting the piss taken out of us by the local inbreds.
Those days are thankfully gone and like it or lump it we ARE the richest club in the world and some of us want to see us competing worldwide at the very top and winning a shed load of trophies before we shed off this mortal coil.We will NEVER be rags in Blue due to that misery and grounding we all endured and in spite of the laughs along the way it was on the whole fucking misery! Now you and some others might still want to stand there in sack cloth and ashes saying,''At least we are not rags,we have the right attitude!'' but some of us want some joy and sunshine in our lives,we have on the whole fucking earned it with big shiny bells on! If spending a lot of money to watch the top players in sky blue and wanting to see us win trophies makes us rags then i have news for you....we already are,or you have fallen asleep and missed the last seven years!
Th trouble is we can't spend whatever we want or we face sanctions that restrict our spending in the future and reduce our squad numbers for the CL. So regardless of how much you want City to pay up and get on with things, that's not how we can operate. Have you seen just how many clubs have been taken over in recent times. Not many have managed to keep on competing at the top level. Most have spent a lot of money which has left them in a bad position. PSG are still up there but the French league isn't as competitive and therefore they should always be winning it with their resources.
Chelsea have a very rich owner who has decided to limit spending to what the club generates. As rich as our owners are they're not investing in the club just because us City fans have had to put up with a lot of shite over the years. There are many more football clubs out there who have been through what we have, and most have not subsequently had any success. Many haven't had success at all.
We can't keep paying limitless amounts of money if we want a squad full of committed players. You end up with petty arguments between playing staff querying why others earn more than they do. You end up with a refusal to perform at their best ability because they don't feel they're being paid enough. We could then sell those players but we'd be losing all that investment.
Ferran rightly decided it was time to offload high earners and negotiate deals based on performance related bonuses. Giving the players an incentive to play well is common sense.
Txiki will have been working on our deals since Christmas time. He's worked hard enough to make us the no.1 club for De Bruyne to move to despite competition from other top sides who would probably pay him higher wages. We won't walk away just because De Bruyne doesn't hand in a transfer request but even when you're talking about millions of pounds, negotiating one million less is still worthwhile.
With Sterling we bid £25m despite knowing it would take £50m to get him. We ended up paying £44m and will pay up to £49m if he reaches his potential. For all the time it took, that's good business and if De Bruyne is valued at £Xm by Wolfsburg and we manage to do something similar we'll be very happy with that. It's more complex because he isn't demanding to move, but it will still happen.
This summer we lost two homegrown players who played a big part in our squad last season. We've replaced them with two England Internationals, one who has a decade left at the top level at least, and another who is very experienced but only 25. We paid a combined £52m for them (ignoring add-ons). In today's market that's good business when Luke Shaw, Andy Carroll and many other English players have commanded circa £30m despite a lack of consistency.
As for the query from another poster on why bother with De Bruyne when he won't ever be as good as Hazard... there's no saying he won't be and there's a clear need for further creativity and younger players in our squad. He ticks the boxes there. Silva won't be around forever and De Bruyne is capable of replacing the creativity we lose with Silva out of the side. Sterling is the one likely to provide for us the attributes Hazard does for Chelsea.
