City compared to the rags are like chalk & cheese in the transfer markets these days
Could you imagine the shit we would get if we had spent like they have for the last 8/9 years with absolute nothing to show for it!
I would say it’s as good an example as there is of the skewed way they are dealt with by most of the media. It’s difficult to imagine a worse return on investment than united have secured in the last decade. Genuinely reckon a random supporter picked from the terraces would have likely enjoyed more success.
They have overpaid for players whose careers have immediately gone into decline, never to recover. They have had a number of conspicuous and spectacular failures in the transfer market which have quickly descended into loan deals containing eye watering losses. They have wasted hundreds of millions of pounds. No club in world football has invested such large sums so poorly, or anything remotely close. They deserve nothing but ridicule for their incompetence, especially coming as it does, wrapped in hubris.
And yet the underlying narrative is about our spending, which by any possible metric has been significantly, overwhelmingly even, better deployed than theirs. Surely the cost of their bench invites more comments than ours given the pitiful decision making and reckless profligacy that it represents. Surely that is more newsworthy. More noteworthy.
It’s often used as a stick to beat us with that if we make a mistake in the transfer market, we can just go out and buy a replacement, despite the number of unequivocal big money failures at City being vanishingly small (Mendy, Bony spring to mind) and yet the club that routinely does it, and spends overall around the same as us, is hardly ever mentioned in those terms.
It’s an incredible track record of failure that is all too rarely reported as such, and certainly not with the force and frequency it deserves. It’s actually remarkable just how systemically bad the club’s recruitment has been, as well as being…err…clear and obvious, and a widespread failure to report it honestly in those terms can only be rooted in a conscious decision not to, which betrays an embarrassing absence of professional self-respect on the part of our sporting media in this country.