From Garry Cook to Pep Guardiola: Manchester City have come a long way

Posted Thursday, February 04, 2016 by theguardian.com

City are no longer the noisy neighbours after snaring the most coveted coach in the game, Pep Guardiola. Their actions have spoken loudest of all

Almost exactly seven years ago, post-takeover Manchester City were portrayed as a club who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. They had reached peak Garry.

During a slapstick 24 hours, their much-derided chief executive, Garry Cook, returned home from Italy emptyhanded having had a £108m bid for Kaká turned down, accusing Milan of “bottling it” for good measure.

On landing in Manchester, he was told that the misfiring striker Robinho, signed for a then British record £32.5m as a statement of intent, had quit their training camp to attend to family issues in Brazil.

Seven years later and no one is laughing. City have just snared the most sought after coach in world football as part of a well-thought-out strategy that first involved bringing the executives that formed such a close working relationship with him at Barcelona. No longer noisy neighbours, their actions have spoken loudest of all.

Four months before Cook’s slapstick sojourn in Milan, Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group had ushered in a new era for English football by ending the chaotic, controversial reign of Thaksin Shinawatra in a deal worth around £200m.

In the time since, hundreds of millions of pounds more have flowed from Abu Dhabi to east Manchester. On the pitch, progress has been sudden and dramatic in relation to City’s history but, at least if the Champions League is also taken into account, perhaps merely above par rather than spectacular.

It is off the pitch that the divergent paths taken by City and their rivals are fascinating.

While Roman Abramovich burned through a succession of managers, ending up back where he started with José Mourinho in a failed attempt to rekindle his first love and United have failed the post-Ferguson exam question, City’s succession planning looks remarkably well engineered in comparison.

It did not always feel that way at the time, not least in the slightly shabby way that the departures were handled, but in hindsight the progression from Mark Hughes to Roberto Mancini to Manuel Pellegrini to Guardiola looks as seamless as an upwardly mobile car fanatic trading in every couple of years for a new model.

It was telling that City’s statement confirming the much trailed arrival of Guardiola contained a reference to negotiations having started in 2012. Since then, the ongoing regeneration of the area around the Etihad in east Manchester has won the club’s owners brownie points from local politicians.

An academy has been built from the ground up that has so comprehensively outmanoeuvred its rivals that it has sparked jealousy and anger in the red half of Manchester, once so pre-eminent in youth development.

Uefa’s financial fair play restrictions have been seen off, with revenue growth (partly fuelled by the new TV deal) and the relaxation of the rules enough to ensure comfort on that score.

And a network of overseas clubs that once looked like a curate’s egg is starting to coalesce into shape with the highly rated Patrick Vieira bound for New York and Chinese investment making the idea of a global network of City branded clubs make more sense.

If there is still a nagging unease about the extent to which an arm of a Gulf state (now backed by a Chinese investment fund) has bought into one of the biggest names in English football for its own ends, the club’s owners are doing all they can to blunt it by doing the right things on the ground. It is not a factor that is likely to trouble Guardiola, with his long-time links to Qatar, for long.

And City fans would be right to point out that similar queasiness could also be derived from a Russian oligarch who made his money in questionable circumstances or American buyers pulling off a leveraged buyout that has seen hundreds of millions flow out of the club.

Manchester United retain the edge in commercial terms, having minted a global sponsorship model under the stewardship of Ed Woodward that traded heavily on their romantic history but in doing so became the envy of every other club in world football.

But City are closing fast, with the recently published Deloitte Money League confirming they remain second only to United in the English game in terms of revenues.

The respected financial blogger Swiss Ramble has pointed out that those once contentious sweetheart deals with Etihad are now arguably undervalued. Guardiola’s very presence will bring a certain air of luxury and class to City’s operations, adding a sheen that will play well with global sponsors.

If Real Madrid and Barcelona have stolen a march on Premier League clubs in some parts of the world – visit the world’s busiest airport hub in Dubai and count the number of families clad in Messi or Ronaldo shirts for proof – then City are thinking imaginatively about how to make inroads.

Of course, their rivals are all thinking about how they too can best take advantage of the continued growth of the Premier League in exploding new markets from the US to China and India. But if the first phase of the Premier League’s overseas expansion was characterised by a “me too” dash for commercial deals, what is fascinating is the extent to which the biggest clubs are now set on markedly different paths.

Their scattered overseas owners might have had different reasons for buying into the Premier League growth story, and be motivated to a greater or lesser extent by prestige or profit, but there are now clear differences in strategy.

In capturing a young sought-after manager from overseas, Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are perhaps closest in profile to City – but the move for the German was an opportunistic rather than strategic one.

Meanwhile, the distribution model that keeps the Premier League competitive and the big bucks flowing in has also increased the jeopardy factor. As Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United have found in different ways, it doesn’t take much to send a season out of kilter in a ferociously competitive league.

Pitching themselves somewhere between Abramovich’s belief that he can perpetually rip things up and start again while continuing to win things (which appears to have cost him Guardiola) and the safety-first approach of Ivan Gazidis and Arséne Wenger to making no sudden movements at Arsenal (likewise), City have secured their new quarry.

In doing so they have created the conditions in which they have the chance to create a dynasty on and off the pitch, potentially leapfrogging the local rivals who have long cast a shadow in the process. The question is: having invested so much forethought in luring their man to the Etihad, can they and Guardiola now take it?