Thaksin originally didn't want to listen to a takeover approach on behalf of Mansour. At the outset, he wanted someone to invest in the club for a minority stake, and there was no interest from Abu Dhabi in that arrangement.
It was only when Thaksin started to acknowledge that the British government might revoke his visa that things changed, at which point events started to move at a serious pace. The prior dissonance between Thaksin's objectives and the Sheikh's had given the likes of Everton and Newcastle a head start in terms of having the opportunity to convince Mansour that they were the right vehicle for his ambitions. Indeed, we were actually quite lucky that neither took that chance before we seriously entered the picture.
I also don't want to praise Thaksin unduly, because he's a problematic individual in any event and, further, we could easily have been headed for disaster in the form of administration and relegation had he not got lucky with selling the club the club to Mansour in the summer of 2008. However, an unimpeachable source told me at the time that two things had happened as a result of the Thai's takeover the previous year without either of which (but especially the first one) Mansour might well never have alighted on us as his preferred purchase option.
1. The Thaksin takeover unified what had previously been an extremely fragmented shareholder base, making an acquisition of control over the club a much lengthier and more complex process than if it had been wholly owned by a single shareholder. Mansour had no appetite for anything resembling the former and was widely reported at the time to have declined to pursue an interest in Arsenal for precisely that reason. At City, Thaksin had already undertaken the task of unifying all of the shares within the holding of a sole owner.
2. During Thaksin's year in control, he'd prioritised improving the club's international profile and, after a year with him and Sven as owner and manager respectively, we were much bigger news globally than we had been a year previously under Wardle, Mackintosh and Pearce. Obviously we were nowhere near the likes of Liverpool and United in terms of reach but we'd arguably stolen a march at this point on Everton and Newcastle, our rivals for the Sheikh's attentions.
It was widely claimed at the time that Garry Cook had delivered a presentation about City's potential that convinced the Abu Dhabi stakeholders of our being the right option for them. Importantly, in doing so, Cook was able to point to ongoing progress that evidenced the viability of the propositions he was evincing.
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