Pigeonho said:
The perfect fumble said:
When you're a business as large as Utd, or a financial gamble as gargantuan as the one Sheikh Mansour has made at City, everything is corporate. You can look at every club in the Premier League and pretty much gauge what they do using standard business models, of the type you would use to analyse businesses of similar size in any industry, and you'd get pretty close to the mark.
That's one of the reasons American owners can't understand relegation, why would anyone relegate a profit making club simply because it's results are poor?
Of course personalities and history and all the other sporting paraphernalia have to be factored in, but the bottom line, when journalists file in to Old Trafford many of them come to worship at one of the most powerful corporate entities in world football, not to analyse and certainly not to criticise.
Based on what they see happening at City then, and with that very possible outcome that Moyes might drag United down the table, would it not make sense for those journo's to file into City in the same way you think they file into OT?
We've not yet reached the "king is dead, long live the king" moment, when the balance of power is seen to shift, the smart reporters will see it coming, but it's like an ocean liner, the turn will be slow, but it will happen, and to stretch the maritime analogy further, they'll be a number of hacks still playing "Glory, Glory Man Utd" on the good ship Scum as they disappear below the waves, or so I would like to think, but in reality, unlike the Titanic, Utd are probably unsinkable.
Utd have reached a stage of development where a Stoke like mid table irrelevance is unlikely, the club retained enormous following even in the barren 70's and 80's, she is likely to remain a football presence of considerable power for the foreseeable future, but her days of pre-eminence are over, and the smart money knows it.
Liverpool is a good example, analysed as a business it's "product" is not as good as it once was, but customer loyalty to a great degree has still been retained, however if the product continues to disappoint then customer enthusiasm will dim, potential customers will go elsewhere, and those retained will be older and less affluent. So they'll be re-launches and changes of management, culls and gimmicks, false dawns and PR fluff all intended to slow the inevitable decline, but decline she will because the fundamentals at Liverpool are flawed.
The fundamentals at Utd are not flawed but the cooler heads at the swamp, staring across Manchester at the Etihad, see a competitor who seems to be doing all the right things, they'll be more worried about us then we are of them.
