Guardian writers' predictions: 4th Odds to win league: 10-1
Perhaps the best way to encapsulate what has happened at Manchester City this summer is to remind ourselves that this time 10 years ago their supporters were still rejoicing the Paul Dickov goal that had grabbed the club by its shirt collar and saved them from the ignominy of another season among the hoi polloi of the old third division. Those days can feel like a trick of the imagination when the modern-day City are happy to spend £100m-plus in a single summer, but their fans will not need reminding of what it was like back in the days when their club reeked of poverty and bad organisation.
Joe Royle, the manager back then, tells one story of discovering there was no hot water in the dressing-room showers and bringing it up with the maintenance guy only to be told it had been like that for years. Niall Quinn, the former player, remembers signing from Arsenal and discovering City "hated spending money", so much so they were reluctant even to give him any boots. "At Arsenal, if there was a hole in your sock you weren't allowed to wear it. At training, no Arsenal player could go out wearing a sock with a hole in it. Socks with holes were not the Arsenal way. No sir! But the Manchester City I joined was a hole-in-the-sock sort of club."
August was once a time when City's supporters would get together, bristle with indignity, and complain bitterly about how much money the dreaded enemy, Manchester United, were spending. Now the talk is of who is coming next, of whether the club can break into the Champions League and, after that, how long it will be before they can win it. OK, that might still be some way in the future, and nobody should really expect them to be too close to United this season. But, at the current rate of growth, it is tempting to wonder whether Sir Alex Ferguson is being totally genuine when he says he could not care less about a club that, funnily enough, he does not seem to be able to stop talking about.
Ferguson used to speak of City in the kind of slightly patronising way someone might refer to a little cousin. He would call the City of Manchester stadium the "Temple of Doom" and if a City-supporting journalist turned up at his press conference he would teasingly offer them painkillers or a dark room to have some time alone.
Now, whether Ferguson likes it or not, we are back to the days when there are two clubs in Manchester who count. Money talks and, for City, it has said goodbye to the days when they were made to feel like second-class citizens. Anyone who wants to argue the point need only look at who Barcelona asked to be the opposition for the Joan Gamper Trophy on Wednesday week, their annual gala match in honour of the club's former chairman and founding player. A small thing, maybe, but it is another indication of how City are now being seen by Europe's top clubs. As is the fact that Ferguson has begun to talk about United's neighbours with the kind of spite that he used to reserve for Arsène Wenger and, more recently, Rafael BenÃtez.
Not that Ferguson is alone, of course. Hughes and his colleagues have become wearily accustomed to the frequency with which the club, together with Real Madrid, have been accused of "destroying football". Football's fear and loathing would like us to believe they have "no class", that they are the kind of lottery winner who would be chewing gum as they swigged from a beaker of warm champagne. Even one of their own, Colin Shindler, the author of Manchester United Ruined My Life, got in on the act recently, complaining that the club he loved had lost its soul. "This Abu Dhabi lot have got money, but that's all they've got. They've taken my love who Shinawatra turned into a whore, cloaked her in the finest of silk dresses and doused her in the most seductive of Arabian fragrances. I don't recognise her any longer. She might look beautiful but she's rotten at the core."
And then there are the myths. A columnist in the Daily Telegraph last week sniped that City would play Blackburn Rovers next weekend with a goalkeeper and 10 strikers. For the record, City have assembled five centre-forwards – Roque Santa Cruz, Craig Bellamy, Carlos Tevez, Emmanuel Adebayor and Benjani Mwaruwari. Of those, Benjani is up for sale and Hughes has already said Bellamy and Santa Cruz cannot be expected to play three times a week given their injury history.
Hughes has spent £94m so far on Santa Cruz (£17m), Tevez (£25m), Adebayor (£25m), Gareth Barry (£12m) and Kolo Touré (£15m) and a few of those players do look overpriced but at the same time the manager is entitled to reflect on "an exceptional summer" and the five major signings all should play an important role. Adebayor and Touré, for example, both have plenty to prove after disappointing seasons for Arsenal. Touré, like Barry, is a candidate to take over from Richard Dunne as captain if, as expected, the next buy is a replacement for the four-times player of the year. As for Tevez, it might be true that Ferguson made him United's fourth-choice striker last season but, even so, it has been amazing how so many Old Trafford matchgoers appear to have forgotten about the "sign him up" campaign and now convinced themselves he had the worst first touch they have ever seen.
Ah, the critics say, but what about the ghastly Garry Cook and all that Americanised claptrap he came out with after moving to the club from his marketing position at Nike headquarters in Portland, Oregon? Except if Cook's record at City were applied to perhaps any other business you would acknowledge his achievements. His jargon will always jar with some people and, by his own admission, he said far too much early on, in particular that critique of the former owner Thaksin Shinawatra – "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things" – when the former prime minister of Thailand was on Human Rights Watch's Most Wanted list.
But perhaps it is time to recognise some of his other work and the way piece by piece, as his staff will attest, he has brought a new era of professionalism to the club. In total, more than £20m has been spent on the club's infrastructure. A new £4m office block has just opened to bring the staff from beneath the stadium into daylight. Drive into Carrington now and a once-drab training ground has transformed into a tree-lined state-of-the-art facility. Touré was so impressed he asked to have a solo training session at 9pm on the night he arrived to sign his contract.
Some will never be convinced, of course. But this is what happens when people come into new money and are not afraid to show it off. There will always be someone else who wants to scrape a key down the side of the shiny new 4 by 4.
Ferguson could barely contain his anger when he discovered that City had put up a "Welcome to Manchester" billboard at one end of Deansgate, in the city centre, to celebrate Tevez's switch from United to City. Nobody can escape the fact it was a deliberate pot-shot at United but, then again, Ferguson's response succeeded only in opening himself to a charge of hypocrisy. Hughes, in contrast, handled the matter with great skill, casually pointing out that there is a banner permanently in place at Old Trafford that mocks City's lack of silverware. "33 Years" started off as "26 Years" when it was put in place in 2002 and has interchangeable numbers so it can be altered before every season.
Hughes might also have pointed out that Ferguson should have chosen his words more carefully before branding them a "small club with a small mentality". After all, did he not accuse BenÃtez of showing "contempt" and "arrogance" towards the end of last season for talking in similar terms about Everton. Double-standards? Never.
The truth is that Sheikh Mansour and the rest of the Abu Dhabi United Group have been impeccable owners so far, demonstrating patience, thought and intelligence – and not just saying they had belief in Hughes but actually meaning it.
Shindler might think the soul of the club has been lost. Others would argue that the fans' engagement with the club is as strong as it has been for many years. Last season, when City reached the Uefa Cup quarter-finals, the club let everyone in for a fiver. Last week, there were 10,000 people at the stadium for an open training session. The fans are not an afterthought at City, like they are at some clubs (and once were under a previous regime). Early in his time in Manchester, Cook watched one supporter trudging away from the ground, soaked to the skin, after queueing for a ticket. There is now a new ticket office, complete with a roof.
"There is so much more to the soul of Manchester City than the money men," Jack Pitt-Brooke wrote on his City website, The Lonesome Death of Roy Carroll, in response to Shindler's comments. "If anything, they are merely the foundations, or the enablers, to allow the soul-carrying aspects of the club to exist. The Player of the Season last year was, for the first time in ages, someone City had raised and nurtured in our own academy. We have just given a five-year deal to a local lad we've raised ourselves, and who has it within him to be a great captain of the club. Then there's Micah Richards and Michael Johnson who, with a bit of focus, can still grow into City regulars. And the football itself is about to be better than anything I have seen in my lifetime."
Perhaps the best way to encapsulate what has happened at Manchester City this summer is to remind ourselves that this time 10 years ago their supporters were still rejoicing the Paul Dickov goal that had grabbed the club by its shirt collar and saved them from the ignominy of another season among the hoi polloi of the old third division. Those days can feel like a trick of the imagination when the modern-day City are happy to spend £100m-plus in a single summer, but their fans will not need reminding of what it was like back in the days when their club reeked of poverty and bad organisation.
Joe Royle, the manager back then, tells one story of discovering there was no hot water in the dressing-room showers and bringing it up with the maintenance guy only to be told it had been like that for years. Niall Quinn, the former player, remembers signing from Arsenal and discovering City "hated spending money", so much so they were reluctant even to give him any boots. "At Arsenal, if there was a hole in your sock you weren't allowed to wear it. At training, no Arsenal player could go out wearing a sock with a hole in it. Socks with holes were not the Arsenal way. No sir! But the Manchester City I joined was a hole-in-the-sock sort of club."
August was once a time when City's supporters would get together, bristle with indignity, and complain bitterly about how much money the dreaded enemy, Manchester United, were spending. Now the talk is of who is coming next, of whether the club can break into the Champions League and, after that, how long it will be before they can win it. OK, that might still be some way in the future, and nobody should really expect them to be too close to United this season. But, at the current rate of growth, it is tempting to wonder whether Sir Alex Ferguson is being totally genuine when he says he could not care less about a club that, funnily enough, he does not seem to be able to stop talking about.
Ferguson used to speak of City in the kind of slightly patronising way someone might refer to a little cousin. He would call the City of Manchester stadium the "Temple of Doom" and if a City-supporting journalist turned up at his press conference he would teasingly offer them painkillers or a dark room to have some time alone.
Now, whether Ferguson likes it or not, we are back to the days when there are two clubs in Manchester who count. Money talks and, for City, it has said goodbye to the days when they were made to feel like second-class citizens. Anyone who wants to argue the point need only look at who Barcelona asked to be the opposition for the Joan Gamper Trophy on Wednesday week, their annual gala match in honour of the club's former chairman and founding player. A small thing, maybe, but it is another indication of how City are now being seen by Europe's top clubs. As is the fact that Ferguson has begun to talk about United's neighbours with the kind of spite that he used to reserve for Arsène Wenger and, more recently, Rafael BenÃtez.
Not that Ferguson is alone, of course. Hughes and his colleagues have become wearily accustomed to the frequency with which the club, together with Real Madrid, have been accused of "destroying football". Football's fear and loathing would like us to believe they have "no class", that they are the kind of lottery winner who would be chewing gum as they swigged from a beaker of warm champagne. Even one of their own, Colin Shindler, the author of Manchester United Ruined My Life, got in on the act recently, complaining that the club he loved had lost its soul. "This Abu Dhabi lot have got money, but that's all they've got. They've taken my love who Shinawatra turned into a whore, cloaked her in the finest of silk dresses and doused her in the most seductive of Arabian fragrances. I don't recognise her any longer. She might look beautiful but she's rotten at the core."
And then there are the myths. A columnist in the Daily Telegraph last week sniped that City would play Blackburn Rovers next weekend with a goalkeeper and 10 strikers. For the record, City have assembled five centre-forwards – Roque Santa Cruz, Craig Bellamy, Carlos Tevez, Emmanuel Adebayor and Benjani Mwaruwari. Of those, Benjani is up for sale and Hughes has already said Bellamy and Santa Cruz cannot be expected to play three times a week given their injury history.
Hughes has spent £94m so far on Santa Cruz (£17m), Tevez (£25m), Adebayor (£25m), Gareth Barry (£12m) and Kolo Touré (£15m) and a few of those players do look overpriced but at the same time the manager is entitled to reflect on "an exceptional summer" and the five major signings all should play an important role. Adebayor and Touré, for example, both have plenty to prove after disappointing seasons for Arsenal. Touré, like Barry, is a candidate to take over from Richard Dunne as captain if, as expected, the next buy is a replacement for the four-times player of the year. As for Tevez, it might be true that Ferguson made him United's fourth-choice striker last season but, even so, it has been amazing how so many Old Trafford matchgoers appear to have forgotten about the "sign him up" campaign and now convinced themselves he had the worst first touch they have ever seen.
Ah, the critics say, but what about the ghastly Garry Cook and all that Americanised claptrap he came out with after moving to the club from his marketing position at Nike headquarters in Portland, Oregon? Except if Cook's record at City were applied to perhaps any other business you would acknowledge his achievements. His jargon will always jar with some people and, by his own admission, he said far too much early on, in particular that critique of the former owner Thaksin Shinawatra – "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things" – when the former prime minister of Thailand was on Human Rights Watch's Most Wanted list.
But perhaps it is time to recognise some of his other work and the way piece by piece, as his staff will attest, he has brought a new era of professionalism to the club. In total, more than £20m has been spent on the club's infrastructure. A new £4m office block has just opened to bring the staff from beneath the stadium into daylight. Drive into Carrington now and a once-drab training ground has transformed into a tree-lined state-of-the-art facility. Touré was so impressed he asked to have a solo training session at 9pm on the night he arrived to sign his contract.
Some will never be convinced, of course. But this is what happens when people come into new money and are not afraid to show it off. There will always be someone else who wants to scrape a key down the side of the shiny new 4 by 4.
Ferguson could barely contain his anger when he discovered that City had put up a "Welcome to Manchester" billboard at one end of Deansgate, in the city centre, to celebrate Tevez's switch from United to City. Nobody can escape the fact it was a deliberate pot-shot at United but, then again, Ferguson's response succeeded only in opening himself to a charge of hypocrisy. Hughes, in contrast, handled the matter with great skill, casually pointing out that there is a banner permanently in place at Old Trafford that mocks City's lack of silverware. "33 Years" started off as "26 Years" when it was put in place in 2002 and has interchangeable numbers so it can be altered before every season.
Hughes might also have pointed out that Ferguson should have chosen his words more carefully before branding them a "small club with a small mentality". After all, did he not accuse BenÃtez of showing "contempt" and "arrogance" towards the end of last season for talking in similar terms about Everton. Double-standards? Never.
The truth is that Sheikh Mansour and the rest of the Abu Dhabi United Group have been impeccable owners so far, demonstrating patience, thought and intelligence – and not just saying they had belief in Hughes but actually meaning it.
Shindler might think the soul of the club has been lost. Others would argue that the fans' engagement with the club is as strong as it has been for many years. Last season, when City reached the Uefa Cup quarter-finals, the club let everyone in for a fiver. Last week, there were 10,000 people at the stadium for an open training session. The fans are not an afterthought at City, like they are at some clubs (and once were under a previous regime). Early in his time in Manchester, Cook watched one supporter trudging away from the ground, soaked to the skin, after queueing for a ticket. There is now a new ticket office, complete with a roof.
"There is so much more to the soul of Manchester City than the money men," Jack Pitt-Brooke wrote on his City website, The Lonesome Death of Roy Carroll, in response to Shindler's comments. "If anything, they are merely the foundations, or the enablers, to allow the soul-carrying aspects of the club to exist. The Player of the Season last year was, for the first time in ages, someone City had raised and nurtured in our own academy. We have just given a five-year deal to a local lad we've raised ourselves, and who has it within him to be a great captain of the club. Then there's Micah Richards and Michael Johnson who, with a bit of focus, can still grow into City regulars. And the football itself is about to be better than anything I have seen in my lifetime."