As it’s
cover would suggest, David Conn’s new book Richer
than God: Manchester City, modern football and growing up is primarily a
tale about Manchester City. It is both the story of
the club’s shambolic fall from grace and then astonishing rise back to the top
of the English game, backed by the millions of a sheikh from Abu Dhabi.
Taken in
its entirety though, the book is about much more than City. It’s about the rise
of the obscenities of modern football, or more specifically the Premier League,
flush with its mega millions with players on hundreds of thousands of pounds a
week, while the grass roots of the game silently rots away. For Conn, the rise
of “the money game” as he describes it has destroyed the very soul of the game
itself, along with his love City, the team he supported so fervently well into
his twenties, which now due to its untold wealth is perhaps the clearest
example of all that is wrong with the modern game.
Richer than God is a must read for City fans wanting to enrich
their understanding of just how close the club has come to financial ruin over
the past few decades. The rot started in the 1970s, when chairman Peter Swales
– installed in 1973 and charged with the task of carrying on the club’s glory
era of the late 1960s. City had the opportunity to dominate the era, but
instead Swales appointed the wrong managers and oversaw a mass exodus of talent
from the club, wasting a fortune on lower grade replacements. Conn describes it
as a “great purge” and points to how traumatic it was for City fans. “Even now,
writing this, I still can’t believe what happened,” he says. The desolation
leaps off the page.
That
experience alone must have been bad, but the years that followed, decades even,
which saw relegations that eventually culminated in the club languishing in
England’s third tier, were even worse. As Conn writes, this was the era when
former City manager Joe Royle coined the phrase “Cityitis” – which tries to
explain how good players seemed prone to messing things up whenever they put on
a Blue shirt.
But as
Conn expertly perceives, “Cityitis” is as equally uncomfortable for fans. “There
is something more profound in [Cityitis],” writes Conn. “[It is] the nestling
of misfortune deep in the bosom of triumph.”
Conn’s
insight into the current regime running the club, headed by Sheikh Mansour, a
member of the ruling family of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, is unparalleled.
After all
the heartache and despair, City are now the richest club in the world and are
the number one team in England, having won the English league last season
backed by the Sheikh’s millions.
For Conn the
new City, which as one would expect being owned by a Sheikh, is a slick,
professional business operation geared toward achieving results of the highest
order, is out of character with the club’s traditional personality of enduring
“whatever life bloody threw at you”. He has a point, but to me how City became
the richest club in the world is just another example of the club’s erratic,
bi-polar history since the early 1970s. With City you have to expect the
unexpected. Sometimes it’s been good, most times it’s been bad.
Conn’s
access to Mansour’s people is unmatched. There’s analysis of where the club’s
chairman, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, fits into the Abu Dhabu government. Being
chairman of City is just one of Khaldoon’s many high profile, strategic roles.
According
to Conn, Mansour’s people have always been at pains to say that buying City was
Mansour’s private investment – the deal had nothing to do with the Abu Dhabi
state, of which Mansour is a minister for presidential affairs.
But I’m
not certain how the political and the private can be separated in a situation
such as this. It’s well known that Abu Dhabi is looking for ways to diversify its
economy once the oil runs out. It’s looking for ways to tell the world about
itself and Manchester City represents one way of doing that.
City will
potentially serve a dual function for Mansour. As a businessman, the club
stands to make him a lot of money if he gets the management of it right. As a high-ranking
politician in the Abu Dhabi emirate, the club also acts as a projection of the
emirate’s image overseas, boiled down to the bare bones, a softer element of
its foreign policy.
The history
of Mansour’s country, the reason for him getting involved in the club and the
state that he found the club in, are all documented by Conn in detail here – once
again essential reading for those wantingan insight into the mindset of the club’s current
owners, about which not a great deal is known.
Any fan of
the modern game should also cast an eye over these pages.
Conn
speaks from the heart about the way football used to be and the way it now. This
change is told through Conn’s own life trajectory, with City the vehicle
through which he spins the yarn.
A City fan
from the age of six, supporting the team from the mid-1970s onwards with
unbridled devotion, Conn’s career turned toward investigative journalism. As
millions of pounds flowed into the game in the early 1990s, Conn began to look into
the financial side of football and came to realize his beloved club – just like
many others – has become a business, owned by people who were at base only
concerned about making large amounts of money out of the loyalties of the fans.
As a result, Conn’s footballing
innocence is lost to the point where he no longer feels comfortable being a
part of a club he has supported since he was a boy.
The
English Football Association (FA), the creators of today’s worldwide game, are
put to the sword by Conn for gradually allowing the game’s commercialization to
spiral out of control.
As Conn
explains, in the beginning the FA were against clubs paying players and also
against clubs becoming money making machines for those that owned them. Later
on, the FA also prioritized financial equality through clubs sharing the
proceeds of attendance at games, which, Conn says, made the game more
competitive on the pitch, with smaller teams having a better chance of winning
things.
In the face
of pressure from the big clubs, Conn charts the slow, spineless retreat of the
FA on each of these principles, which ultimately culminated in the big clubs
threatening to breakaway from the football league if they were not granted a
greater share of a lucrative SKY TV deal that ushered in the Premier League era
in the early 1990s. Conn tells of how the FA acquiesced in the deal, thinking
it could continue to control the game – a “fateful” decision that was the
precursor to fans being screwed by higher ticket prices and many younger fans
being priced out of attending, which in turn led to the decline in stadium
atmospheres – especially given the onset of all seater stadiums.
For the
clubs, “the Premier League is about making as much money as possible without
having to share it,” according to Conn.
The
calamity of City is reintroduced into the story here, when Conn analyses a
takeover of the club headed by former City playing legend Francis Lee, and is
rocked back by its details.
Far from
really caring about the progress of the club, Conn potrays Lee as someone who
was in it to make a fortune for himself, with plans to build a new stand with
restaurants serving top class food charged at top class prices.
Conn comes
to the realization that what he thought of as his club was in fact now a
business, subjected to a “corporate tangle between businessmen looking to make
money for themselves out of owning the shares.”
All this
of course was just the start of football’s uber-commercialization. People talk
about City ruining football with their untold wealth, but the City that many
feel repulsed by today – owned by a Sheikh who has pumped millions in to win
the league – is only the end, most extreme point of this process.
Businessman
and tax exile Jack Walker invested tens of millions of pounds in Blackburn
Rovers to fund their Premier League title in the mid 1990s. Russian oligarch
Roman Abramovich did the same at the turn of this century, but only to a bigger
extent. Manchester United are not viewed in the same light because they have
been at the top of so long (no foreign owner put them there). In reality
though, United are no different. They complain about today’s ridiculous
transfer market prices, but only after they spent somewhere in the region of
19m on Ruud Van Nistelrooy, 28m on Juan Veron, 27m on Rio Ferdinand, 27m on
Wayne Rooney, 18m on Michael Carrick, 30m on Dimitar Berbatov, 19m on David de
Gea and 17m on Ashley Young. United have spent big to retain their power at the
top of the English game. Other clubs have spent big to get there.
Conn
contrasts the obscene nature of the modern game with its antithesis – supporter
owned football clubs. He visits FC United of Manchester, a club set up by
Manchester United fans who did not want to line the pockets of their club’s new
owner, American Malcolm Glazer, who has since loaded United with around 500m
pounds worth of debt. Attending FC United, listening to their chants of
resistance about destroying Glazer and SKY tv, Conn says is a “cleansing of the
palate”. If there is another way to a more equal game, then this must be it.
The most
compelling part of this book is Conn’s damaged relationship with City and
modern football. His realization of the truth – that football clubs had become
money making machines – and his revulsion at that truth, seemed to me at first
to be a little naïve. But then I grew up in the era of Premier League. To me,
clubs have always been businesses. Fans aren’t stupid. Many know they are being
ripped off but they go along with it all, wanting to see their team win
trophies. For most, it is a trade off. But Conn is a purist. His evangelism for
a more equal game transcends colours of any team and is refreshing.
He seems
resigned to never reconciling himself to the club and game that he loved,
instead destined to roam the fields of objectivity, without a footballing home.
Even as he charts City’s journey to the title last season in the book’s final
chapter, Conn is still left questioning it all, and the message that City’s
title win gives to impressionable young fans watching the game: “Reach for the
stars, work hard, keep going until the very end and get a Sheikh to put in £1bn.”
In the
end, it is hard to disagree with it all, wherever your loyalties lie.
