I suspect in the old days, we had a lot of players who were good at their clubs, understood what the manager wanted them to do and generally were good at it.
Then they came to City, a basketcase at the time. They'd play for different managers and most of them didn't know themselves what they wanted the players to do. Worse still, some managers would probably have come in and not rated them at all.
We were able to splash the cash at times in the 90s on players and I bet many players, and clubs, just couldn't turn our cash down. Imagine how someone like Holden felt going from a club like Oldham who had a style he knew inside out then coming to City where the style under Reid was alien to Oldham's. I can imagine many, many players came in only to be incredibly frustrated that they were made to look like turkeys. You can understand how some of these players left the club hating it. Jeez, I hated us at times! :)
Nowadays of course, it's a different club completely. If a player like Torres or Garcia want to leave, it's because he wants to go home and no one can blame him for that. It must be hard for a young lad in a different country afterall. Yaya was a strange one and I suspect it was his agent underneath it all wanting contract talks etc and Hart left because he couldn't play with his feet and Pep - correctly - identified that we wouldn't be able to play his style with him. I don't remember Hart badmouthing us though, he seems very pragmatic about it.
We've come a long way since the old days. If you want to remember what it was like, just have a look at United nowadays :)
