Etihad Campus, Stadium Development and Collar Site
- Thread starter GeekinGav
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el blue
Well-Known Member
Well that Central Retail Park site on Grt Ancoats st has been rumoured for a supermarket tender for ages. If Asda were offered the lease there you would have to suspect they'd see it as a superior site?
Centurions
Well-Known Member
Mean a long while since I've been around there but surely that's no better than where they are now? Farther East up Ashton New Road seems a much better catchment area for them although I have no idea of available plots.el blue said:
ColinLee said:
There are quite a number of publicly owned plots around East Manchester but many of them are too small for anything like a supermarket.
I would have thought the Holt Town plans could be tweaked to include a supermarket as there isnt one in there iirc.
Also that little industrial estate adjacent to the Merc' garage (the Merc garage is apparently owned by MCFC and part of the clubs developments) could be snapped up and would kill two birds with one stone?
Gordyola
Well-Known Member
ColinLee said:
Theres a thread about this on Skyscraper City forum http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1604025
kramer said:
That site on the Ancoats Retail Park is nowhere near big enough.
It would have to be similar or bigger than the current Asda site.
I'm sure our guests from Barcelona will be given a tour of the new training academy tomorrow.
Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when Sheikh Mansour(?), khaldoon Al Mubarak, Ferran Soriano meet Josep Maria Bartomeu and..... <a class="postlink" href="http://www.fcbarcelona.com/club/history/presidents" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.fcbarcelona.com/club/history/presidents</a>
This belongs in here.
Had to wipe a tear from my eye as I was reading it.
Had to wipe a tear from my eye as I was reading it.
Manchester City dream of a future as the 'new Barcelona’
The Premier League great pretenders aim to match the world’s best clubs. Telegraph Sport finds out exactly how the master plan is coming on
Manchester City the new Barcelona? Not exactly, but they are aiming big
Sky-blue thinking: City want Manuel Pellegrini to spearhead their push to be the dominant force in Europe Photo: ACTION IMAGES
By Oliver Brown
9:39PM GMT 17 Feb 2014
From a viewing platform above the Etihad Campus, a £200 million monument to the cultivation of football as the finest craft, the astonishing extent of Manchester City’s ambition unfurls. Across a swathe of brownfield wilderness once home to the Clayton Aniline dyemakers, whose effluvia had turned the ground a toxic shade of purple, 80 acres of the lushest greensward – the giant carpet for a veritable production line of sky-blue starlets – are reaching the final stage of fruition.
If the Premier League’s great pretenders do truly aspire to a mantle as the ‘new Barcelona’ then this sprawling talent foundry, lit by pale winter sunshine on the eve of City’s defining confrontation with the Catalans, is the most dazzling manifestation of that dream.
Privately, City executives reject the label of ‘Barcelona-fication’. They do not perceive their ‘campus’, their pride and joy linked directly to the Etihad Stadium through a bridge across Alan Turing Way, as a direct emulation of Barça’s La Masia school or the gilded compound at Sant Joan Despí that has superseded it. Instead, the club have drawn inspiration from an eclectic set of 30 templates, encompassing the Los Angeles Lakers, the Australian Institute of Sport, the New York Giants, Nike’s laboratories in Oregon and – almost out of a sense of duty – Barcelona.
Brian Marwood, the leading architect of City’s academy structure, talks effusively of replicating the “DNA and philosophy” of the Blaugrana, as if imitation could indeed be the sincerest form of flattery. And yet the notion of copycat tactics is over-simplistic. The Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan-sanctioned vision, of juxtaposing first XI and youth team within a huge catch-all complex embedded in a once benighted corner of east Manchester, was in place long before the Barça brains trust of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain even arrived here.
From the initial takeover in 2008, it became clear that the powerbrokers in Abu Dhabi were intent on forging a system far removed from Thaksin Shinawatra’s Eastlands regime. An emirate that has imported its own versions of the Guggenheim and the Louvre to a ‘cultural district’ on Saadiyat Island resolved at the outset to apply the same high production values to a football club.
There is a story at City of how, when former chief executive Garry Cook reported for his first day at the office, he asked where the human resources department was, only to be told: “We don’t have one.” Such duties rested, the incredulous Cook was informed, in the hands of “Pam from accounts”.
That chaos has given way, in just five years, to the slickest streamlining. Even the arrangement of Khaldoon Al-Mubarak’s ‘chairman’s lounge’, an über-deluxe set of suites inside the Colin Bell Stand, is meticulously configured by Natasha Mullany, City’s ‘head of protocol’.
But chief executive Soriano, the urbane 46-year-old whom City waited a whole year to prise from Barcelona, is eager not to project any impression of boardroom remoteness. It was he who decided that on match-days, the top table of executives should dine not separately, but alongside all fellow staff and guests. On the night of City’s scheduled home match against Sunderland, the atmosphere in the lounge is a vibrant one, if slightly subdued by the game’s abandonment 30 minutes earlier due to tempestuous weather.
Signs of the club’s increased global reach are everywhere: Jason Kreis, head coach of New York City FC, the club’s US franchise, is in town, while staff talk of having to conduct evening teleconferences in four time zones – from the East Coast to Australia, where City have just acquired A-league side Melbourne Heart, and from Manchester to the Abu Dhabi mother-ship.
On high table itself, the chatter is largely in Catalan. Soriano is accompanied by Jorge Chumillas, the kindly chief financial officer with whom he used to work at now-defunct airline Spanair, and during dessert Begiristain comes over to scrutinise Arsenal’s performance against Manchester United on the plasma screen. Their interest in the Arsenal threat to City’s league position is acute and yet it is the prospect of Tuesday night’s Champions League collision with Barcelona, and of reunions with several former compadres in the Nou Camp hierarchy, which looms largest.
For this Barcelona confrontation has the feel of a signal moment in the fulfilment of City’s ambitions. Soriano, in his 2012 book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance, identified the 10 global leaders in club football as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Milan, Inter and Bayern Munich. “Others, like Manchester City,” he noted, “are trying to be in that group.”
The time of noble endeavour has since passed. The manner of City’s maiden qualification for the Champions League knockout phase, beating the all-conquering Bayern away, confirms that they belong in this rarefied realm. The next two matches will illustrate how far advanced they are to realising their hope, and in some places the fear, that they can burgeon into the dominant force in Europe.
In Manuel Pellegrini, City have the man they want to sustain that quest.
Any assumptions that the scrupulously low-key Chilean is a stop-gap figure, an interim appointment until Jose Mourinho next becomes available, are misplaced. In the eyes of Soriano and Begiristain, the 60-year-old Pellegrini provides the perfect antidote to the madness of life under Roberto Mancini, satisfying every criteria they seek in a manager: measured, cerebral, wedded to the pursuit of play of great artistic merit, and sufficiently pliant to tolerate the input of a director of football.
Ultimately, it was not Mancini’s failure last season to retain the league title for City that triggered his sacking, but the chaotic culture he engendered. There was the fight with Mario Balotelli, the public traducing of Carlos Tévez, the attempt to import doctors from Lombardy not registered to practise in the UK, and even a mortifying moment where he lambasted communications chief Vicky Kloss to reporters as she stood next to him.
City’s rationalisation for removing Mancini – that they desired a more “holistic” environment – invited mocking suggestions that they should bring in the Dalai Lama and hold training talks in air thick with scented candles. While the word might be alienatingly corporate, the ideal is one in which the club are passionately invested. On the wall of the staff refectory there is a montage of photographs, featuring everybody from Soriano to the night porter, under the banner “One team”.
Soriano has absorbed enough lessons throughout his extraordinarily varied career, which has comprised banking, venture capitalism and the thwarted efforts to establish Catalonia’s own airline with Spanair, to appreciate that no company benefits from being too rigidly stratified.
Those who have served at City through fair weather and foul, from a third division defeat to York to tonight’s engagement against the most feted club team on earth, attest that the working ambience is the best they have known it. Having witnessed the machinations of Shinawatra, the alleged human-rights abuser who would lavish absurd salaries on such useless players as Felipe Caicedo and Nery Castillo, City’s longer-serving, battle-hardened employees recognise a charlatan when they see one. And the Abu Dhabi owners appear very far from that category. Granted, there were mis-steps, not least in their choice of Sulaiman Al-Fahim – a ‘Dubai Del Boy’ noted mainly for his fondness of Lamborghinis – but their enticement of a coveted leader like Soriano reflects a readiness to enlist the best possible candidate for each role.
Soriano serves as a corrective to City’s earlier extravagances – the desperate bid by Cook to secure Kaká for £100 million at Milan Malpensa Airport, or the 2008 deadline-day signing of Robinho for £35 million – which all supported a theory they were nothing more than vulgar arrivistes, propped up by petrodollars. Under his guidance, the club’s expansionist impulses are more carefully controlled. The purchase of NYC FC, for example, is an opportunity one that Soriano claims “many others were looking at”.
Rival Major League Soccer clubs have expressed at whether the New York fan base can support a second franchise, next to the existing Red Bulls in New Jersey, but City are pressing ahead in their annexation of the US market with a rare fervour. Already the partner club have a substantial Manhattan office close to Grand Central Station and are understood to be targeting a stadium site in the Bronx, harnessing the passion of local Hispanic constituencies, in time for their first match next April.
Claudio Reyna, the ex-City midfielder who combines popularity at the club with a respected record as US Soccer’s technical director, is installed as the perfect salesman as NYC FC’s director of football. The addition of Melbourne Heart to their global empire represents a further significant step, raising a possibility that future academy products could move between continents, spending their entire careers playing for teams under the club’s care.
But it is the central citadel of the Etihad Campus that constitutes City’s most emphatic statement of intent. Spanning 15 full-size pitches, on-site accommodation for 32 first-team members and a 7,000-capacity stadium for youth-team games, it affirms a commitment – bred by Barcelona, who fielded eight homegrown players in the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley – to form a self-perpetuating centre of excellence.
To think, this is a tract of land once earmarked for the country’s first ‘super-casino’. Here in the districts of Beswick and Harpurhey, among the poorest communities in the country and which until recently did not even have their own sixth-form college, the gambling plan was not exactly a masterstroke of sensitivity. One City source goes further, asking: “Honestly, can you think of an idea more reprehensible?”
The alternative, we are soon to discover, is a gleaming bastion of one club’s determination to elicit both respect and disquiet from their rivals as they ascend to European football’s grandest stage. The new Barcelona? Not exactly, but Manchester City are an institution who could soon be very much more than the sum of their exorbitant parts.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/10644870/Manchester-City-dream-of-a-future-as-the-new-Barcelona.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... elona.html</a>
mike channon´s windmill
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Sat here with a fookin big grin on my face reading that and thinking about tomorrow and my trip up to the "Ciudad Condal" on the 12th March
A
A
Anonymous
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Goosebumps!
This and only this
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jrb said:This belongs in here.
Had to wipe a tear from my eye as I was reading it.
Manchester City dream of a future as the 'new Barcelona’
The Premier League great pretenders aim to match the world’s best clubs. Telegraph Sport finds out exactly how the master plan is coming on
Manchester City the new Barcelona? Not exactly, but they are aiming big
Sky-blue thinking: City want Manuel Pellegrini to spearhead their push to be the dominant force in Europe Photo: ACTION IMAGES
By Oliver Brown
9:39PM GMT 17 Feb 2014
From a viewing platform above the Etihad Campus, a £200 million monument to the cultivation of football as the finest craft, the astonishing extent of Manchester City’s ambition unfurls. Across a swathe of brownfield wilderness once home to the Clayton Aniline dyemakers, whose effluvia had turned the ground a toxic shade of purple, 80 acres of the lushest greensward – the giant carpet for a veritable production line of sky-blue starlets – are reaching the final stage of fruition.
If the Premier League’s great pretenders do truly aspire to a mantle as the ‘new Barcelona’ then this sprawling talent foundry, lit by pale winter sunshine on the eve of City’s defining confrontation with the Catalans, is the most dazzling manifestation of that dream.
Privately, City executives reject the label of ‘Barcelona-fication’. They do not perceive their ‘campus’, their pride and joy linked directly to the Etihad Stadium through a bridge across Alan Turing Way, as a direct emulation of Barça’s La Masia school or the gilded compound at Sant Joan Despí that has superseded it. Instead, the club have drawn inspiration from an eclectic set of 30 templates, encompassing the Los Angeles Lakers, the Australian Institute of Sport, the New York Giants, Nike’s laboratories in Oregon and – almost out of a sense of duty – Barcelona.
Brian Marwood, the leading architect of City’s academy structure, talks effusively of replicating the “DNA and philosophy” of the Blaugrana, as if imitation could indeed be the sincerest form of flattery. And yet the notion of copycat tactics is over-simplistic. The Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan-sanctioned vision, of juxtaposing first XI and youth team within a huge catch-all complex embedded in a once benighted corner of east Manchester, was in place long before the Barça brains trust of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain even arrived here.
From the initial takeover in 2008, it became clear that the powerbrokers in Abu Dhabi were intent on forging a system far removed from Thaksin Shinawatra’s Eastlands regime. An emirate that has imported its own versions of the Guggenheim and the Louvre to a ‘cultural district’ on Saadiyat Island resolved at the outset to apply the same high production values to a football club.
There is a story at City of how, when former chief executive Garry Cook reported for his first day at the office, he asked where the human resources department was, only to be told: “We don’t have one.” Such duties rested, the incredulous Cook was informed, in the hands of “Pam from accounts”.
That chaos has given way, in just five years, to the slickest streamlining. Even the arrangement of Khaldoon Al-Mubarak’s ‘chairman’s lounge’, an über-deluxe set of suites inside the Colin Bell Stand, is meticulously configured by Natasha Mullany, City’s ‘head of protocol’.
But chief executive Soriano, the urbane 46-year-old whom City waited a whole year to prise from Barcelona, is eager not to project any impression of boardroom remoteness. It was he who decided that on match-days, the top table of executives should dine not separately, but alongside all fellow staff and guests. On the night of City’s scheduled home match against Sunderland, the atmosphere in the lounge is a vibrant one, if slightly subdued by the game’s abandonment 30 minutes earlier due to tempestuous weather.
Signs of the club’s increased global reach are everywhere: Jason Kreis, head coach of New York City FC, the club’s US franchise, is in town, while staff talk of having to conduct evening teleconferences in four time zones – from the East Coast to Australia, where City have just acquired A-league side Melbourne Heart, and from Manchester to the Abu Dhabi mother-ship.
On high table itself, the chatter is largely in Catalan. Soriano is accompanied by Jorge Chumillas, the kindly chief financial officer with whom he used to work at now-defunct airline Spanair, and during dessert Begiristain comes over to scrutinise Arsenal’s performance against Manchester United on the plasma screen. Their interest in the Arsenal threat to City’s league position is acute and yet it is the prospect of Tuesday night’s Champions League collision with Barcelona, and of reunions with several former compadres in the Nou Camp hierarchy, which looms largest.
For this Barcelona confrontation has the feel of a signal moment in the fulfilment of City’s ambitions. Soriano, in his 2012 book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance, identified the 10 global leaders in club football as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Milan, Inter and Bayern Munich. “Others, like Manchester City,” he noted, “are trying to be in that group.”
The time of noble endeavour has since passed. The manner of City’s maiden qualification for the Champions League knockout phase, beating the all-conquering Bayern away, confirms that they belong in this rarefied realm. The next two matches will illustrate how far advanced they are to realising their hope, and in some places the fear, that they can burgeon into the dominant force in Europe.
In Manuel Pellegrini, City have the man they want to sustain that quest.
Any assumptions that the scrupulously low-key Chilean is a stop-gap figure, an interim appointment until Jose Mourinho next becomes available, are misplaced. In the eyes of Soriano and Begiristain, the 60-year-old Pellegrini provides the perfect antidote to the madness of life under Roberto Mancini, satisfying every criteria they seek in a manager: measured, cerebral, wedded to the pursuit of play of great artistic merit, and sufficiently pliant to tolerate the input of a director of football.
Ultimately, it was not Mancini’s failure last season to retain the league title for City that triggered his sacking, but the chaotic culture he engendered. There was the fight with Mario Balotelli, the public traducing of Carlos Tévez, the attempt to import doctors from Lombardy not registered to practise in the UK, and even a mortifying moment where he lambasted communications chief Vicky Kloss to reporters as she stood next to him.
City’s rationalisation for removing Mancini – that they desired a more “holistic” environment – invited mocking suggestions that they should bring in the Dalai Lama and hold training talks in air thick with scented candles. While the word might be alienatingly corporate, the ideal is one in which the club are passionately invested. On the wall of the staff refectory there is a montage of photographs, featuring everybody from Soriano to the night porter, under the banner “One team”.
Soriano has absorbed enough lessons throughout his extraordinarily varied career, which has comprised banking, venture capitalism and the thwarted efforts to establish Catalonia’s own airline with Spanair, to appreciate that no company benefits from being too rigidly stratified.
Those who have served at City through fair weather and foul, from a third division defeat to York to tonight’s engagement against the most feted club team on earth, attest that the working ambience is the best they have known it. Having witnessed the machinations of Shinawatra, the alleged human-rights abuser who would lavish absurd salaries on such useless players as Felipe Caicedo and Nery Castillo, City’s longer-serving, battle-hardened employees recognise a charlatan when they see one. And the Abu Dhabi owners appear very far from that category. Granted, there were mis-steps, not least in their choice of Sulaiman Al-Fahim – a ‘Dubai Del Boy’ noted mainly for his fondness of Lamborghinis – but their enticement of a coveted leader like Soriano reflects a readiness to enlist the best possible candidate for each role.
Soriano serves as a corrective to City’s earlier extravagances – the desperate bid by Cook to secure Kaká for £100 million at Milan Malpensa Airport, or the 2008 deadline-day signing of Robinho for £35 million – which all supported a theory they were nothing more than vulgar arrivistes, propped up by petrodollars. Under his guidance, the club’s expansionist impulses are more carefully controlled. The purchase of NYC FC, for example, is an opportunity one that Soriano claims “many others were looking at”.
Rival Major League Soccer clubs have expressed at whether the New York fan base can support a second franchise, next to the existing Red Bulls in New Jersey, but City are pressing ahead in their annexation of the US market with a rare fervour. Already the partner club have a substantial Manhattan office close to Grand Central Station and are understood to be targeting a stadium site in the Bronx, harnessing the passion of local Hispanic constituencies, in time for their first match next April.
Claudio Reyna, the ex-City midfielder who combines popularity at the club with a respected record as US Soccer’s technical director, is installed as the perfect salesman as NYC FC’s director of football. The addition of Melbourne Heart to their global empire represents a further significant step, raising a possibility that future academy products could move between continents, spending their entire careers playing for teams under the club’s care.
But it is the central citadel of the Etihad Campus that constitutes City’s most emphatic statement of intent. Spanning 15 full-size pitches, on-site accommodation for 32 first-team members and a 7,000-capacity stadium for youth-team games, it affirms a commitment – bred by Barcelona, who fielded eight homegrown players in the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley – to form a self-perpetuating centre of excellence.
To think, this is a tract of land once earmarked for the country’s first ‘super-casino’. Here in the districts of Beswick and Harpurhey, among the poorest communities in the country and which until recently did not even have their own sixth-form college, the gambling plan was not exactly a masterstroke of sensitivity. One City source goes further, asking: “Honestly, can you think of an idea more reprehensible?”
The alternative, we are soon to discover, is a gleaming bastion of one club’s determination to elicit both respect and disquiet from their rivals as they ascend to European football’s grandest stage. The new Barcelona? Not exactly, but Manchester City are an institution who could soon be very much more than the sum of their exorbitant parts.
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/10644870/Manchester-City-dream-of-a-future-as-the-new-Barcelona.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... elona.html</a>
What a good read that is! Thanks for posting that jrb.
bernabias home shirt
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- 14,916
What a great read that was,you just can't believe how far we have come.
Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, but it kind of fits in with the previous article and thread:
http://www.theguardian.com/football...chester-city-embraced-the-barcelona-blueprint
How Manchester City embraced the Barcelona blueprint
Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano arrived at the Etihad with a philosophy born at the Camp Nou for sustainable brilliance
There is a glint in Joan Laporta's eye as he recalls the conversation he had with Pep Guardiola in the spring of 2008. The decision had already been made that Franck Rijkaard would not continue beyond the end of the season and Barcelona's then president called in the B-team coach to tell him that the board thought that he, a 38-year-old with no first-team experience, was the ideal man to take over. "And do you know what he said to me?" Laporta grins. "He said: 'You haven't got the balls'."
As it turned out, he did have the balls. But the decision wasn't just about courage, it was also rooted in conviction and calculation. Laporta considered Johan Cruyff but had been persuaded otherwise and a thorough search began. The sporting director had played with Guardiola in Cruyff's "Dream Team", closely monitored Barcelona B and came increasingly to see Guardiola as the best candidate. Not just for who he was but also for what he represented: former ballboy and captain, defender of a particular style and promoter of youth. "We chose a philosophy," Laporta is fond of saying.
Manchester City did too. Barça's sporting director was of course Txiki Begiristain, now at the Etihad, and Laporta's vice-president in charge of economic affairs was Ferran Soriano, now City's chief executive officer. The first call came in December 2011. Soriano met Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan and Khaldoon al-Mubarak in Abu Dhabi but with his company, Spanair, in a process of liquidation, he declined. When he eventually agreed in summer 2012, one of his first calls was to Begiristain. Now comes a blast from the recent past. "I'd have preferred a different opponent," Begiristain said after the Champions League draw, "but I'm happy to see old friends again."
The assumption that City simply copied Barcelona's model, air-lifting it in, is facile and flawed. So is the theory that signing Soriano and Begiristain was merely a prelude to signing Guardiola, although no doubt they would have liked to. Much of what City are building pre-dated their arrival but the official line sounds very like Barcelona when it talks of a "common football philosophy that links the youngest academy boy to the most senior first-team player," that includes the heart of the gigantic Etihad Campus development, the City Football Academy.
Yet Sheikh Mansour did see in Barcelona's model something that dovetailed with his vision and goes beyond the football: from international expansion to the opening of new markets, from youth development to revenue creation there are parallels. It may be over-simplistic, but here there's a temptation to say that City, like Barcelona, want to be likeable; to avoid being seen just as arrivistes.
There is also a need to make their economic position sustainable: financial fair play demands it. "Sustainability has always been central to Sheikh Mansour's investment in City," the statement ran when they unveiled academy plans. "The long-term future is dependent on the ability to recruit and develop young players." When Sorriano was at Barcelona he calculated that every home-grown player who reached the first team had cost the club ¤2m. "Good business," as he put it.
When Laporta's board won the elections in 2003 Barcelona had gone four years without winning a trophy, the debt stood at ¤186m and salaries accounted for 88% of their income. Soriano was obsessed with bringing that figure down to 50%, a mantra he repeats in Manchester. Barcelona's income was only the 10th biggest globally and, according to Soriano, they risked becoming a "medium" club. Soriano later wrote how every club, every business, needs a "Visionary"; a "Doctor No", who imposed realism; and a "Back", someone who carries the team in practical terms, a doer. That message, too, is familiar to staff at City.
Outgoings would be cut but more importantly Barcelona had to increase income. Soriano talked often of kick-starting a "virtuous circle", for which risks had to be taken. Another, related word used often was "mediático": Barcelona needed players who generated media and marketing interest, particularly internationally. Only 23% of their average TV audience was national and, Soriano noted, supporters could be captured through allegiance to key players. Laporta had campaigned on a deal with Manchester United to sign David Beckham.
Ironically City's CEO admitted that the model Barcelona followed was United's. "I saw David Gill once and confessed that we'd taken inspiration from his marketing and commercial strategy to make Barcelona recover. I said thank you to him," Soriano wrote in 2009. "And 'inspire' is a euphemism: what we did really was directly copy everything United did well."
Beckham did not arrive, Ronaldinho did. As it turned out, it would have been impossible to sign a more likeable player. He was a good one too. The Brazilian was Fifa world player two years in a row. "He changed our history," Xavi Hernández said. "He was more a boardroom signing than ours," Begiristain admitted.
Barcelona also sought to repackage and express the notion of "Més que un club" (more than a club) for an international audience. It was rarely defined with precision. Rather, it was projected in as something broad, a little nebulous, as something "good", a reflection of the club's "values". The sponsorship of Unicef was the result, explicitly designed to give an idealistic look to the club's identity. A commitment to a "spectacular" style contributed too. But, Soriano admitted, "A good footballing product is a team that wins." He even had a formula for it: (CxE)T. Commitment multiplied by balance to the power of talent. Soriano wanted players hungry for success, who'd not yet won much.
He insisted, too, on the style. Barcelona drew up a nine-point checklist of the attributes managers needed, with each point fleshed out. It began with "respect for the sporting model" and included references to the style of play, the idiosyncrasies and "values" of the club and the importance of youth development. For Begiristain, "talent" or technical ability had to predominate. "Good play starts from the back," he explained. "At least one of the centre-backs has to be able to play, for example."
When Rijkaard was struggling in the first season, Sandro Rosell, then one of the vice-presidents, agitated to sack the Dutchman and sign Luiz Felipe Scolari, rejecting the style that now seems so entrenched. As Soriano told Graham Hunter for his exceptional book Barça: "[Rosell and his group's] idea was that this kind of football, the Barça style, was outdated. We lost [to Chelsea] and they said: 'You see? We should hire a Scolari-type manager and bigger, stronger players.' The magic we achieved was to say: 'No, that's not who we are. We play spectacular football and will not deviate.'"
Rijkaard continued and won two league titles and the European Cup. By 2008 Soriano and fellow directors thought the hunger had gone and the search for a new manager began. Begiristain had focused on Guardiola but was initially reluctant to say so, staying open-minded. There was a process to undergo, one that took him to Lisbon to meet José Mourinho, guided by that same nine-point checklist.
The meeting was three hours long, with Mourinho offering a detailed analysis of how to remedy the team's ills and insisting he would play a Barça style. Begiristain was impressed but harboured doubts, not least that the Portuguese would start fires, inside the club and out. That footballing "identity", the concept, weighed heavily too.
It looks obvious now; it was risky then. Mourinho was the safe bet. Laporta and his board had the balls. Here again are the parallels. Sacking Roberto Mancini was not popular, just as turning down Mourinho was not. But Begiristain had played under Cruyff and still adopts an almost reverential tone when he talks of the Dutchman as a "fearless" manager whose response to problems was "always to be more attacking". Guardiola, a Cruyffist, lacked experience but fitted the idea.
Xavi is among many players who see similarities between Pellegrini and Guardiola. "We're asking the new manager to build a squad and also a football concept and a way of working that will last 10 years," Soriano said when City turned to Pellegrini. "This was a long-term decision taken with a lot of careful analysis. I was worried about the image we were giving the world."
"One of the reasons I came here was Txiki," Pellegrini said. "I chose City because I was convinced they knew my footballing model. Managers have to deliver the spectacle fans want, especially at clubs that invest a lot of money signing the world's best players. I'm not an iluso [a naive dreamer]: if someone says you're going to win 1-0 playing badly, fine. But I believe you get better results playing well. It's not about mortgaging your results for a sterile beauty."
And that's the crux. Soriano admitted that he wanted five titles in five years. As for Begiristain, not long before joining City he said: "Barcelona are attractive because of their style but without the titles that would mean nothing."
http://www.theguardian.com/football...chester-city-embraced-the-barcelona-blueprint
blueparrot
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somapop said:Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, but it kind of fits in with the previous article and thread:
How Manchester City embraced the Barcelona blueprint
Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano arrived at the Etihad with a philosophy born at the Camp Nou for sustainable brilliance
There is a glint in Joan Laporta's eye as he recalls the conversation he had with Pep Guardiola in the spring of 2008. The decision had already been made that Franck Rijkaard would not continue beyond the end of the season and Barcelona's then president called in the B-team coach to tell him that the board thought that he, a 38-year-old with no first-team experience, was the ideal man to take over. "And do you know what he said to me?" Laporta grins. "He said: 'You haven't got the balls'."
As it turned out, he did have the balls. But the decision wasn't just about courage, it was also rooted in conviction and calculation. Laporta considered Johan Cruyff but had been persuaded otherwise and a thorough search began. The sporting director had played with Guardiola in Cruyff's "Dream Team", closely monitored Barcelona B and came increasingly to see Guardiola as the best candidate. Not just for who he was but also for what he represented: former ballboy and captain, defender of a particular style and promoter of youth. "We chose a philosophy," Laporta is fond of saying.
Manchester City did too. Barça's sporting director was of course Txiki Begiristain, now at the Etihad, and Laporta's vice-president in charge of economic affairs was Ferran Soriano, now City's chief executive officer. The first call came in December 2011. Soriano met Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan and Khaldoon al-Mubarak in Abu Dhabi but with his company, Spanair, in a process of liquidation, he declined. When he eventually agreed in summer 2012, one of his first calls was to Begiristain. Now comes a blast from the recent past. "I'd have preferred a different opponent," Begiristain said after the Champions League draw, "but I'm happy to see old friends again."
The assumption that City simply copied Barcelona's model, air-lifting it in, is facile and flawed. So is the theory that signing Soriano and Begiristain was merely a prelude to signing Guardiola, although no doubt they would have liked to. Much of what City are building pre-dated their arrival but the official line sounds very like Barcelona when it talks of a "common football philosophy that links the youngest academy boy to the most senior first-team player," that includes the heart of the gigantic Etihad Campus development, the City Football Academy.
Yet Sheikh Mansour did see in Barcelona's model something that dovetailed with his vision and goes beyond the football: from international expansion to the opening of new markets, from youth development to revenue creation there are parallels. It may be over-simplistic, but here there's a temptation to say that City, like Barcelona, want to be likeable; to avoid being seen just as arrivistes.
There is also a need to make their economic position sustainable: financial fair play demands it. "Sustainability has always been central to Sheikh Mansour's investment in City," the statement ran when they unveiled academy plans. "The long-term future is dependent on the ability to recruit and develop young players." When Sorriano was at Barcelona he calculated that every home-grown player who reached the first team had cost the club ¤2m. "Good business," as he put it.
When Laporta's board won the elections in 2003 Barcelona had gone four years without winning a trophy, the debt stood at ¤186m and salaries accounted for 88% of their income. Soriano was obsessed with bringing that figure down to 50%, a mantra he repeats in Manchester. Barcelona's income was only the 10th biggest globally and, according to Soriano, they risked becoming a "medium" club. Soriano later wrote how every club, every business, needs a "Visionary"; a "Doctor No", who imposed realism; and a "Back", someone who carries the team in practical terms, a doer. That message, too, is familiar to staff at City.
Outgoings would be cut but more importantly Barcelona had to increase income. Soriano talked often of kick-starting a "virtuous circle", for which risks had to be taken. Another, related word used often was "mediático": Barcelona needed players who generated media and marketing interest, particularly internationally. Only 23% of their average TV audience was national and, Soriano noted, supporters could be captured through allegiance to key players. Laporta had campaigned on a deal with Manchester United to sign David Beckham.
Ironically City's CEO admitted that the model Barcelona followed was United's. "I saw David Gill once and confessed that we'd taken inspiration from his marketing and commercial strategy to make Barcelona recover. I said thank you to him," Soriano wrote in 2009. "And 'inspire' is a euphemism: what we did really was directly copy everything United did well."
Beckham did not arrive, Ronaldinho did. As it turned out, it would have been impossible to sign a more likeable player. He was a good one too. The Brazilian was Fifa world player two years in a row. "He changed our history," Xavi Hernández said. "He was more a boardroom signing than ours," Begiristain admitted.
Barcelona also sought to repackage and express the notion of "Més que un club" (more than a club) for an international audience. It was rarely defined with precision. Rather, it was projected in as something broad, a little nebulous, as something "good", a reflection of the club's "values". The sponsorship of Unicef was the result, explicitly designed to give an idealistic look to the club's identity. A commitment to a "spectacular" style contributed too. But, Soriano admitted, "A good footballing product is a team that wins." He even had a formula for it: (CxE)T. Commitment multiplied by balance to the power of talent. Soriano wanted players hungry for success, who'd not yet won much.
He insisted, too, on the style. Barcelona drew up a nine-point checklist of the attributes managers needed, with each point fleshed out. It began with "respect for the sporting model" and included references to the style of play, the idiosyncrasies and "values" of the club and the importance of youth development. For Begiristain, "talent" or technical ability had to predominate. "Good play starts from the back," he explained. "At least one of the centre-backs has to be able to play, for example."
When Rijkaard was struggling in the first season, Sandro Rosell, then one of the vice-presidents, agitated to sack the Dutchman and sign Luiz Felipe Scolari, rejecting the style that now seems so entrenched. As Soriano told Graham Hunter for his exceptional book Barça: "[Rosell and his group's] idea was that this kind of football, the Barça style, was outdated. We lost [to Chelsea] and they said: 'You see? We should hire a Scolari-type manager and bigger, stronger players.' The magic we achieved was to say: 'No, that's not who we are. We play spectacular football and will not deviate.'"
Rijkaard continued and won two league titles and the European Cup. By 2008 Soriano and fellow directors thought the hunger had gone and the search for a new manager began. Begiristain had focused on Guardiola but was initially reluctant to say so, staying open-minded. There was a process to undergo, one that took him to Lisbon to meet José Mourinho, guided by that same nine-point checklist.
The meeting was three hours long, with Mourinho offering a detailed analysis of how to remedy the team's ills and insisting he would play a Barça style. Begiristain was impressed but harboured doubts, not least that the Portuguese would start fires, inside the club and out. That footballing "identity", the concept, weighed heavily too.
It looks obvious now; it was risky then. Mourinho was the safe bet. Laporta and his board had the balls. Here again are the parallels. Sacking Roberto Mancini was not popular, just as turning down Mourinho was not. But Begiristain had played under Cruyff and still adopts an almost reverential tone when he talks of the Dutchman as a "fearless" manager whose response to problems was "always to be more attacking". Guardiola, a Cruyffist, lacked experience but fitted the idea.
Xavi is among many players who see similarities between Pellegrini and Guardiola. "We're asking the new manager to build a squad and also a football concept and a way of working that will last 10 years," Soriano said when City turned to Pellegrini. "This was a long-term decision taken with a lot of careful analysis. I was worried about the image we were giving the world."
"One of the reasons I came here was Txiki," Pellegrini said. "I chose City because I was convinced they knew my footballing model. Managers have to deliver the spectacle fans want, especially at clubs that invest a lot of money signing the world's best players. I'm not an iluso [a naive dreamer]: if someone says you're going to win 1-0 playing badly, fine. But I believe you get better results playing well. It's not about mortgaging your results for a sterile beauty."
And that's the crux. Soriano admitted that he wanted five titles in five years. As for Begiristain, not long before joining City he said: "Barcelona are attractive because of their style but without the titles that would mean nothing."
http://www.theguardian.com/football...chester-city-embraced-the-barcelona-blueprint
These kind of articles seem to be appearing all over the media this week. It's as though the the outside world have just realised the things we've been saying in here for the last few years.. Seems like they needed to see the physical evidence before they could understand what was happening.
dirtydenzel
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Anyone got a clue what that Champions lounge, marquee thing was last night ?
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