A very small part of me can sort of understand how Everton and Spurs fans can be feeling aggrieved that we have new found wealth and look to be making a push to become a top team, club and dynasty in the Premier League and beyond. That's because they have been trying to break into that position themselves and halt the cartel. But even they have had [approximately] 125 year histories to become the best clubs, if they haven't done it in that time then they shouldn't be blaming City and our owner for stopping them in the last 3 seasons. 99.9% of the time when you aren't as good as you want to be it is your own fault, nobody elses!
But what I'll never, ever, understand is how fans of the cartel clubs can be all of a sudden moaning about us. Their number one stance is to mock City's history but as we've all discussed to death (and deep down everyone knows it) City have had a great and rich history, as eventful, as much of a roller coaster, as exciting as any club anyone could care to mention. Okay so we've not won as many trophies as the cartel clubs, but they had to build from somewhere, there was once a time when they were shit, had shit crowds, had hardly won a thing yet they built in some way to become what they became at their peaks. But in what ways did they build? Well:
[Arsenal] Finished fifth in the second division in the 1920's. Yet all of a sudden it was in the news that they were being promoted. "How?" you say?! Well they bought/bribed/corruptly retarded a place in the first division (this is literally the equivalent of Millwall paying the Premier League millions to let them enter the Prem after finishing nowhere near the top of the Championship at the expense of a fourth team to get relegated - who in the Arsenal question back then were Spurs who weren't originally relegated but were dumped by the FA for Arse to be promoted!). Then poaching the top team of the times top man and top players (from Huddersfield), buying other top players from around the league because they were richer than everyone else and then taking over as the country's most successful team in the following years and never being relegated ever from this point on.
[Liverpool] Openly criticised neighbours Everton for having an owner who pumped money into the club, even coining them "The Mersey Millions" with their Littlewoods and Moores money (Mancunians by the way!). Then having the very same people put money into their club, buying all sorts of players left-right-and-centre (even mentioned in Shankley's book that was banned from Anfield - yes their beloved Shankley, banned!! - after he said they had an unprecidented amount of money for the time and went around spending it!) St John, Keegan, Dalgleish, Hansen, Barnes, Collymore, and dozens and dozens of others along the way, did not grow up in Bootle, they were all bought for a lot of money. They then went on to dominate the following decades.
[United] Well they were a fucking joke of a club and were getting crowds of just hundreds of people at Bank Street. Then out of nowhere, as they were about to fold, they got a mega-rich owner, bought a shit load of players, built a new stadium and went on to win trophies.
Merely a few decades later they were a joke of a club, again. They were pulling in average season crowds of just 11000 (many individual attendances of just 4000) at Old Trafford, they won fuck all for 37 years, they couldn't even afford their own kits (borrowed City's old kits / Rags!). Then, again, out of nowhere they managed to get another mega rich owner who bought loads of players and pumped a load of money in to develop a youth system for them to go on and win trophies again.
Decades later they went over a quarter of a century without winning the league title, while their owner (who tried to kill millions of school kids and then committed suicide when he was rumbled for it, maybe a slight exaggeration but you get me drift!) with himself and then his son, pumped a never-been-seen-before amount of money into a football club for player, after player for transfer records (by the time the Premiership, as it was then, was formed the United squad was the most expensive ever assembled in football history!). They went on to dominate the following decades.
Yes, this is the cartel. They'd have you believe, especially their fans, that they are squeeky clean clubs who built from solid foundations and have had teams exclusively of lads who grew up in the shadows of their stadia and only spent what they've won. But the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
Now, City have come along (and Chelsea before us) and wanted to break up the cartel. Okay we had our most baron decades in our history recently (but never had crowds as low as United ever had when they were shit! Far from it in fact!). Yes we were fortunate enough to get a new stadium from the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games, and, yes we were extremely fortunate enough to be taken over by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan who has and will continue to invest a lot of money into the football club to continue to win trophies. But at the same time revolutionising the way football clubs can earn their own money; creating jobs(!); re-developing a whole section of a city; introducing mass sporting and commercial venues that will be there for not only the local community but for worldwide visitors; changing the lives of young people/sportspeople all around the country with what we will see developed around East Manchester in the upcoming decades. As well as making football more exciting as someone different can break the cartel up who tried to monopolise football for themselves and not let any other clubs have a share of the success and wealth. City are doing nothing different to what anyone else has done before us in football terms (well apart from being less corrupt than Arsenal, less hypocritical than Liverpool and less genocidal than Louis Edwards!), and in other terms the Sheikh is doing more for the city of Manchetser than any if the other cartel club's owners ever did for their respective cities. What did Henry Norris and William Hall ever do for the local community and wider London area whilst associated with Arsenal? What did Littlewoods and the Moores family ever do for the local communities and Liverpool as a city? What did John Henry Davies, James W Gibson or Louis Edwards ever do for the city of Manchester? What did any of these people do apart from pump money into their football clubs to make them successful? ... answer: FUCK ALL!
City may very well have bought a lot of players in for a lot of money, and we'll continue to do so, but we still field more of our own Academy players than Everton and Spurs do, and more than the mere two United had in their squad in the first season of the Premiership (Beardsmore and Giggs). And we'll continue to do the same in the upcoming years. How is that a bad thing?
Whatever anyone says, City are here to stay! We've seen it all before with your clubs and in other sports with the likes of Wigan RLFC, Manly-Warringah in the NRL and other NRL teams, NFL teams, NBA teams, Premiership rugby union teams... teams with money have sustained periods of success and then other clubs get rich and have their own time in the sunshine. It also happens in business, in fact, in all walks of life.
Good luck to Chelsea, to Paris Saint-Germain, to Wolfsburg, to Roma and to Malaga. Who the fuck wants to see the same fucking clubs keeping all the big money for themselves and buying all the best players from the smaller clubs to keep them in their place below the likes of United, Liverpool, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Lyon, Marseille, Bayern Munchen, Ajax, Milan, Internazionale, Juventus... bore off the lot of you! Come on Espanyol, Sevilla, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Napoli, Sunderland, Den Haag; get yourselves some investment, stop the way football has been run in the last 40 years where the top clubs keep it all for themselves, let's see some fresh faces and colours around Europe!
-- Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:24 pm --
stonerblue said:
BimboBob said:
Can i just ask one question...
Is Old Trafford in Salford or Trafford?
I've often wondered about this meself.
If only we could have a thread on the subject that would give a definitive answer. Geogaphy has never been my strong point.
Old Trafford the place is part of the town of Stretford in Trafford. Old Trafford the football stadium isn't actually in Old Trafford the place, it's more part of Stretford or more probably would be classed as Trafford Park in Trafford. But that has never really mattered to me. Trafford, Manchester, Salford meh... we're all part of the same connurbation and we're all the same people.
