Makes sense, but you'd have thought he'd have let them know that in 2012. Maybe he was nervous about FFP which was kicking in around then? My gut feel is that Petrusha's point (which I didn't know) that Txkiki was shocked to hear he's gone to BAyern says that we expected him to succeed Mancini but couldn't give him any guarantees on a date. I also suspect that the club didn't expect more than a year or maybe two after 2012 from Mancini but Pep wanted to be back in the game and looked after himself. Fair enough.
This is a really interesting period in our post-takeover history. There was lots going on and I'm not sure that we'll ever know the truth behind it all.
I do think that, when they decided or when it became clear (depending on how events unfolded) that Pep wasn't coming in 2012, the focus was on being ready for him on 2013. That meant Mancini being kept on for a year, with his exit being prepared for during that period. IIRC, his contract was due to expire in 2013. But I suspect Roberto himself was doubtful about his long-term prospects under the new former Barca execs.
At any rate, Mancini was definitely looking for a way out that summer. He was reported to have held serious talks with Monaco, who'd just been taken over by a Russian oligarch called Rybolovlev. Mancini was supposedly Monaco's first choice as the new coach, but ended up signing a deal to catch the Russian national team. A Moscow sports paper published an image of the contract and they'd agreed to pay Roberto a stratospheric salary, which he obviously found impossible to say no to.
He had one problem - he'd agreed the deal with the chairman of the Russian Football Union, but it had to be ratified by the relevant committee, and they refused. Most people assumed, after Mancini didn't end up coaching Russia, that the picture of the contract must have been a fake, but it wasn't. Mancini had signed up for another job in the full expectation of leaving us to take that other job. The issue was that there was a political battle going on in the RFU, the other faction wanted Fabio Capello, and they won out.
Given that, by this time, Guardiola was in New York enjoying his sabbatical, we couldn't afford for Mancini to walk. It's one thing to say to a potential new boss, as we did with Pellegrini, that he's warming the manager's chair for Pep but he'll get three years. It's quite another to say that we expect (as City then did) your successor to be here in 12 months so you'll get one season.
We therefore agreed on a new contract for Mancini. We gave him a pay rise and five more years, but included a clause capping his compensation to two years' salary if he was fired. Both parties probably accepted that he wouldn't be here that long, so in effect he accepted three years' increased salary for probably working one year.
Of course, this became relevant later in the context of the Der Spiegel revelations. When Mancini was duly sacked in 2013, we had to find quite a large pay-off and looked to fund it by increasing some of the Abu Dhabi sponsorships that we were so reliant on back then. Those emails subsequently found their way to Der Spiegel, and we eventually found ourselves having to fight a two-year UEFA ban as a result.
I've rambled on long enough (not very busy at work this morning), but one other thing interests me. Mancini was very vocal about his unhappiness with the transfers in the summer of 2012, after we handed him Maicon, Nastasic, Javi Garcia and Scott Sinclair. The narrative on here was that Marwood betrayed him and so on, but I believe that this was a function of directives from Abu Dhabi aimed at keeping FFP losses within limits whereby we'd avoid sanction.
I wonder what the plan was for transfers had Pep rocked up at that point. Would we have somehow found more cash for him? Or did he think that he could reshape the side for his requirements - and it would have taken quite a bit of reconstruction for it to play successfully in his style - with money generated by outgoing transfers?
