Yep. Don't agree with this CFG multi-club ownership thing at all. If we want to start our own teams like New York City for instance, that has its problems but is mostly fine. But moving in and buying up clubs with long histories feels wrong to me. And for every success story like Girona there's a story like Troyes AC, where they've been relegated twice in two seasons and you've got fans ironically singing "Merci City!" as they go down. The pros don't outweigh the cons imo.
It's a legitimate way to spread some of our overheads and is proving a good way to develop players, if not for our direct benefit then for profit in our P&L. It's not going away.
Girona had never been in the top flight before our involvement so we are not adversely affecting their fans who have just witnessed a title challenge for the first time.
I think everyone acknowledges mistakes were made for Troyes, but I'm pretty confident they will be able to make an immediate return to the second tier next season (which is roughly their natural level), and could easily kick on from there.
In my opinion though, the journalists that have covered Troyes have treated Gironas achievements as an outlier and Troyes as the embodiment of our multi club ownership. For me, it's the other way round - Troyes is the outlier.
Palermo are probably the European club with the richest history (outside of City) in the group, but were in Serie C when we got involved. They're currently competing in the Play Offs to go up to Serie A.
Lommel are also in the play offs to get up to the top tier of Belgian football.
New York, Melbourne, Mumbai, Yokohama have all had success. Yokohama are due to play the 2nd leg of the Asian Champions League Final this weekend.
I wouldn't want City to be used as a means for another club to have success, but I don't think our success needs to come at the detriment of the other clubs. It should be a mutually beneficial arrangement.
With that being said, I don't like what has happened in China, as even though we've taken a third tier team to the top flight, we relocated it just to make more money.
