Nothing ever lasts forever

Wednesday was probably not a normal day in Manchester, but it was a normal day in Jakarta. 

I was sat in a heaving traffic jam, going nowhere as usual, when a motorcycle crawled past on my left with what looked like half a family on board. Scrunched in between his father and older brother there was a boy, wearing a Manchester United shirt with the name “Chicarito” on the back. I wondered if the boy knew about the day’s tumultuous events at his adopted club. Did he know that the most successful British manager had announced his retirement? Did he even know who Alex Ferguson was at all?

The key reason why a team from Newton Heath, Manchester has been able to connect with a boy in a city on the other side of the world lies in one man – Alex Ferguson. United were successful before Ferguson, but the projection of their success across the globe, which coincided perfectly with Sky TV and the popularity of the Premier League, has known no bounds under Ferguson.

Constant success is what fans in other countries covet and that’s why so many have nailed their colours to United’s mast. Whichever way you look at it, the root driver behind that success has been Ferguson. 

Without him, there would have been no such consistency at the club. That’s not to say United would not have won things, but they probably would not have enjoyed success to the extent they have. Without Ferguson, probably no penchant for staging comeback after comeback. Without Ferguson, probably no surpassing of Liverpool as the team to have won the most English league titles. Without Ferguson, probably no 1999 treble, which I think did so much to endear United to potential fans across the world.

In the Matt Busby era United won a few league titles, a couple of FA Cups and a European Cup. But Ferguson has long surpassed that and has taken the club from a very good level to a great level.

All of this has happened to the dismay of United’s rivals, especially Liverpool and, of course, Manchester City.

Perhaps City fans have had it the worst. As City plummeted down the leagues of England, Ferguson’s United kept on winning the top honours. Then, when City finally did win something  - albeit the Division 3 playoff final against Gillingham, United went and won the Champions League against Bayern Munich, as if to remind City fans that really, they’d won nothing at all.

Some might question why I have devoted a post to Ferguson on this blog, but in truth, as a City fan, you cannot ignore Ferguson. He has been a pillar of our discontent for many a year, a figure that we have all railed against at some point or another, a force from within Old Trafford that many of us have defined ourselves against. The archenemy, disliked even more than the players who pulled on red shirts. The Red Devil himself.

City fans have lived in Ferguson’s shadow for so long that they even concocted a song for him to cheer themselves up in the darker moments. I can hear it now, echoing off the walls of the pubs around the Etihad Stadium, amid the laughter on the dark afternoons when all other hope seemed lost:

“We’re having a party when Fergie dies, we’re having a party when Fergie dies, jelly and ice cream when Fergie dies, jelly and ice cream when Fergie dies, karaoke when Fergie dies, karaoke when Fergie dies,” and so on.

Some might call that a very dark kind of humour, but the song also reveals a grudging respect – the acknowledgement that City fans would only ever win when Ferguson was no longer at the helm of Old Trafford.

This is only partly true of course, given that last year City won the Premier League crown for the first time, and the way it was won, snatched from under the nose of Ferguson, could not have been sweeter. Of course, the Scot has had the last laugh, opting to leave just after he has delivered another title, but at least City did put a dent in his silverware collection with last year’s title, and at least City fans tasted victory at the direct expense of Ferguson before he went quietly into the night. 

Credit where credit is due, the Scot has seen off challenges from Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and now City for the league, but now more challenges are emerging. Grasping victory today is so much harder then doing it five, 10 years ago. A decade ago no-one could have foreseen City becoming the force they have. Having already tasted the Premier League title, with formidable resources, City are now regrouping. Then you have the Blues of London – add Mourinho to the mix and Chelsea will also be resurgent. Everywhere you look, on every front, challenges, and all the while a man at the centre of it all, the determination still burning in his eyes but also the realisation that there is only so many challenges one can meet. 

A Liverpudlian band once sang “Nothing ever lasts forever”. Perhaps those words have been at the front of Ferguson’s mind for a while. The timing of his departure will have mattered much to him. Better to go now, still at the top, than to become mired in the next phase of English football where re-establishing dominance could be harder than ever.

It is not only the ability to win consistently that separates the good from the great, but the ability to recognise the right time to leave. Pep Guardiola did it at Barcelona – arguably with less fronts to fight on and with better players. Now Ferguson has done it at United.

And so the old enemy has gone. But will City fans, in a strange kind of way, harken back to the days when they had a clear target to rail at? Maybe, but I sense most would prefer to face a United team without Ferguson, rather than one with him at the helm. Most would rather forget this era. Most will miss ol’ Baconface like a hole in the head.

There's more than one Blue Moon

Around 8,000 miles to the east of Manchester, a Blue Moon is also now rising over Indonesia, and at the center of that rise is group of young, City-supporting Indonesians who have established a network of branches across the country. They are Indonesia's very own Citizens.

In the West, little is known about Indonesia, the fourth most populated country in the world. Home to 240 million people, it contains the world’s largest Muslim population, spread across roughly 17,000 islands and speaking 300 different languages.

Much like City, Indonesia is a story waiting to be told. With a massive consumer base, Indonesia – like City - has for years been a sleeping giant. That potential is now being realised, with Indonesia already the largest economy in Southeast Asia. After navigating a stormy transition to democracy at the turn of the 21^st century, the country is resurgent, just as City have risen from the depths to the summit of English football.

But it is Indonesia’s thirst for football that's of interest here. Many Indonesians don't support their local teams because of the quality of local football (there's not much to shout about) but perhaps more so because of the grim future prospects of the game here. It  suffers from corruption and chronic infighting. There's been two top tier leagues for the last few years because clubs can't agree on the terms of a single league. Money - and who gets what piece of which pie - has a big role to play, but on the pitch, the national team has suffered, with many players being banned from the national team as they are deemed to be playing in the wrong domestic league. It's chaotic, a situation that would cause serious social unrest if it ever happened in England.

Indonesia's thirst for the beautiful game is largely directed at England, and Indonesians look upon English teams and English fans with envy. When compared to their own national game, for Indonesians, the Premier League is a brilliant spectacle. The quality of football on show is there for everyone to see, but when that is combined with the blistering pace and the noise of the crowd transmitted into cafes across the country, the attraction proves irresistable, a lure that becomes even more potent when they find themselves part of something, wearing the shirt of their adopted team, chanting their heads off with friends in a cafe - the closest you can get to actually standing (or sitting) in the stands at the game itself.

For the more business minded, Indonesia is also a market waiting to be seized. Predictably, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal have already established fan bases here. United even have a glitzy Red Café in Jakarta.

But City’s grassroots presence is growing, and if the club hasn't already, it would do well to take note. Through their new website at indonesiacitizens.org (which is still going through some technical teething problems!) the network of Indonesian supporter branches across the country are linking up, pooling their support, and getting organized. The group has 31,000 followers on Twitter (@INA_Citizens) - a mere drop in a population of 240 million - but its a start.

And what the branches may lack in numbers, they more than make up for in their desire to support City. On match days, they turn up at the venue in full gear (I even saw a City shirt from the dark days of Ged Brannan and Jamie Pollock), they know 90 percent of the City songs, and when the singing does finally grind to a halt during half time and after the game, the Oasis tunes (Wonderwall, Roll with it, et al) are blasted out, followed by quiz questions, live bands and the ritual group photos. 

Some might call them glory hunters, but they will say they are adopted Mancunians, in love with their adopted club just as much as the next fan. 

What is certain is that they are evidence of City's progress over the last five years. Success in the modern game is not the same as success in the 1960/70s. Today, success comes with a price: Manchester no longer has the monopoly on where else the Blue Moon chooses to rise.

A season lost in the mind?

One prominent theory as to why the Blues haven’t been firing on all cylinders this season seems to centre on us not sufficiently strengthening the squad.

There’s probably an element of truth in this, but I think the overarching reason why City haven’t got out of third gear this season is that we’ve not been up for it mentally.

We’ve not been ready for the mental task of retaining the league title. Some say the first league title is always the hardest, because you are going into the unknown and trying to do something you’ve not done before, but for City this season, there’s been no question that retention has been the harder task.

A look at our neighbours and the outstanding difference this season appears to be Robin van Persie. Of course that’s true – the lad has gone and bagged 19 goals in league, so that can’t hurt anyone’s title ambitions. But it is only part of the picture. The bigger part of that picture is about performances, or lack there of, from our existing squad. 

We started the season with four top rate strikers, probably the best in the league, but none of them – save perhaps flashes form Sergio Aguero – have really been at the top of their game. Four strikers of the quality we had represented incredible depth. If an inform Aguero, Carlos Tevez, Edin Dzeko and Mario Balotelli had not put us on top of the league at this point in the season, we certainly would not be 12 points behind the leaders.

There is the view that things always need to be freshened up a little for the new season, just to keep the established pros on their guard. The argument goes that - yes - we have freshened up the squad, but not with the right level of quality, so the strongest starting eleven is pretty much the same as it was last season. Teams have become accustomed to the way we play and have adjusted accordingly. New blood of the quality to improve the squad would have given the opposition something different to think about, etc. 

But can we really make a proper judgement on the quality of our new signings? It is Javi Garcia’s first season in the Premier League and no doubt he has struggled, but there is no way he should be discarded as an inferior signing just yet. We miss Nigel de Jong’s qualities, but I was always under the impression that Garcia was brought in because he could offer us more than de Jong – a combative midfield presence allied with a bit of deep midfield creative play – and a threat from set pieces. Garcia needs another season at least until he can be judged.

As for the others, Maicon, Scott Sinclair and Jack Rodwell have hardly played due to injury or – especially in Sinclair’s case – not being selected. Between them they have something like eight Premier League starts. It’s hardly fair to brand them lower grade replacements either.

And then of course we come to Matija Nastasic, who has been anything but a disappointment. We await his development with great interest.

The fact is, all the way through the squad, there's players who haven't been performing. Joe Hart hasn’t, Samir Nasri hasn’t, Yaya Toure hasn’t. By his own dazzling heights, neither has the magnificent David Silva, but this I think is more due to the fact that the onus is always on the magician to pick the lock when the going gets tough because no one else is stepping up to the plate. When we look back at the campaign, it will be the draws that we will curse: Southampton, QPR, West Ham, Arsenal; not to mention the defeat against Sunderland. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more down the line this season.

With the league now 95 percent lost, perhaps we could freshen up our squad - late in games - with some our youth players (if indeed that have been registered) to get Premier League experience. Although the striker has just come back from injury, John Guidetti is the obvious choice. Its not as if the 20-year-old is wet behind the ears, having bagged 20 goals in 23 appearances for Feyenoord last season. Who knows what would have happened this season if he’d stayed free of injury? The other two players are Denis Suarez and Marco Lopes, the latter of which has already featured in the FA Cup against Watford, scoring a goal. Introducing youth needs to be measured of course – if we cant have first then it must be second. A loss to Chelsea this weekend doesn’t really bear thinking about.

However, the focus on our youth needs to intensify. Since the likes of Micah Richards and Stephen Ireland, it feels like we’ve been waiting years for someone to come through the academy. The academy has of course produced some good players – solid Premier League players I would say – but by and large there has been nothing on the scale of what West Ham and Manchester United have produced in recent years. Any hopes surrounding the return the greatest product of our academy – Michael Johnson – have now been snuffed out for good. 

Nobody knows what the future holds in terms of Financial “Fair” Play, but we do know that the Premier League is moving toward it in some fashion through restricting losses. That of course is the other dimension to our “second rate” signings this summer. If we’d have broke the bank on signing another raft of top rate talent, how much deeper would we have mired ourselves in the UEFA regulations that are on their way?

Sooner or later, FFP is going to bite, so our player development is the key to our future success. The sooner we start giving more youngsters opportunities in the first team, the better.

Dark Blue

It started in defeat, it ended in defeat, and there was nothing to shout about in between. That’s the short, gloomy story of City’s 2012-13 Champions League campaign.

It’s difficult to draw any positives, other than the fact that the squad has gained more of the much-vaunted “European experience” that some quarters say is so essential in these kinds of situations.

Last year, one result ended up killing us – it was the 1-1 draw at home to Napoli. If we have won that, we’d have been into the knockout stages at the first time of asking. This year, three draws at home effectively gave us no chance, but by the time we came to the last of those home fixtures – against Real Madrid – the momentum was already lost.

And it had all started so well.

Travelling to Madrid for our very first match of Group D was no easy task, but by the 86th minute we were 2-1 up and heading for a historic victory. Five minutes later it had all gone wrong, a trademark Cristiano Ronaldo strike putting us to the sword, and we went home empty handed.  Looking back, that result was our Napoli result this time around, and we never recovered.

We could have put things back on track two weeks later, at home to Borussia Dortmund, but we came away with a point.  Then came the hammer blow. With the next two games coming first away and then home against Ajax, I think a lot of fans expected us to get things back on track with six points. Instead – once again - we only managed one, and things came apart.

But it’s one thing looking at the results and another to look at the performances – this is the real concern. Things were always going to be tough against Real, but we capitulated in the Bernabeu. We were played off the park at the Etihad against Dortmund. We lost a winning position away at Ajax, and then had to come from 2-0 down at home against the Dutch team to salvage a point. You can’t be going 2-0 down at home against the weakest team of the group and expect much in return.

There was a lot of debate surrounding the final game against Dortmund. Some fans wanted us to go for the win, snatch third spot in Group D and then qualify for the Europa League. Others wanted us to lose, finish bottom of the group and thus not qualify for a competition they saw as second grade, a distraction to our league and FA cup push.

Of course, the latter got their wish, and along with it came the record of being the lowest-ever Champions League group points total returned by an English club. That’s not a record I’m proud of.

A run to the latter stages of the Europa League would have also increased our UEFA coefficient, which in the long term will spare us the fortune of being lumped with a group as hard as the ones we’ve had to endure. Now we won’t have the chance to do that, and will instead likely have to face Group of Death part three next year.

We have of course also been unlucky with the draw in both years. I’m not an expert on UEFA coefficients, but this year, the likes of Malaga ranking (66th) and Montpellier’s (97th) are well below City’s (19th), and yet because of the luck of the draw, they got distinctly easier groups that City did. Drawing Dortmund in Pot 4 was the killer.  We could have had Cluj, instead we got the German champions. The margin of error in the Champions League is slim at best, but for us – this year - it was minute.

But we can whine on about draws all we want. For the money that has been lavished on this squad, for the facilities they have, for the player care department that pampers to their every need, there is no excuse – this Champions League has gone badly wrong for us.

Given our recent history, some will say we should be grateful to be in the Champions League at all. But that's a loser's view. We weren't there to make up the numbers.

One thing’s for sure – this early exit won’t have been in the 10-year plan of Mansour and Khaldoon. They invest in progress, not regression. And so for this club not to be involved in European football is surely unacceptable for the men from Abu Dhabi, the men who usually win, whatever they turn their hand to.

So now all eyes turn to the men in Manchester, who are tasked with winning. Inevitably, questions will be asked of them and of their leader, Roberto Mancini. The Champions League monkey on his back just got a whole lot bigger. Remaining in the Europa would have lessened the media/fan focus that is now going be brought with full force on City’s every move on the domestic front.

Silverware is managerial oxygen at the Etihad these days, and Mancini’s options are getting blocked off. He needs to keep winning – its as simple as that.

I’ve written before about Mancini’s days of judgment nearing. Those first set of judgments – a top four finish, winning a cup, and then winning the league – he passed with flying colours. But football waits for no man and now further judgments are on their way.

The team is at a defining point of their season. They’ve come nowhere near reaching the heights of last year and at times have looked a bit labored and out of ideas when the magic of David Silva is not around.

The wreckage of the Champions League lies around them, but somehow, the English Champions must put that ordeal behind them, find strength in adversity, and steal themselves for the task that now lies ahead.

Just look down the road – isn’t that what champions do?

If D is for Death, then C is for Capitulation

We all thought last year’s Champions League group stage was hard, but unfortunately for City, this year it is looking like a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The Blues' schooling in the highest class of club football goes on, and Real Madrid certainly dealt out a few lessons in their 3-2 victory at the Bernabeu on Tuesday night.

As we felt very painfully last year, the Champions League will always be a competition of fine margins, and so it proved again on Tuesday night.

After having been dominated in the first half (Madrid’s possession stats were something like 70 percent) City grew into the game and eventually went ahead with Edin Dzeko’s well-taken strike.

Then came the defining passage of play. Yaya Toure, our biggest threat going forward, went on another of those surging runs through the middle and found himself in on Iker Casillas, only to drive his shot into the side netting. Madrid went up the other end and Brazilian left back/left winger Marcelo scored, and City’s defensive dam had broken. It might’ve been a different game if we’d have gone 2-0 up. Instead it was 1-1.

But at 1-1 we still didn’t give up and when Alexander Kolarov’s freekick flew into the Real net on 85 minutes, you felt we were on the verge of something historic.

That only served to spur Real on, Karim Benzema leveling having been given the time to turn in the penalty area, and then in the final minute Cristiano Ronaldo of all people thumping a shot from the edge of the area past Joe Hart to secure the win and confirm our late, late capitulation. Ronaldo had been largely restricted to long range shots all night, but this final one turned out to be effective.

Hart should have done better with the shot. I don’t know whether his vision was blocked – and of course we should acknowledge the quality of the shot itself – but you felt the England number one should have least got his hand to it. That said, Hart was the main reason why we were still in the game when the first half came to a close, producing a string of fine saves.

Defensively too, we were not quite at the races, just as I don’t think we have been this season.

You can criticize Mancini for his selection, but you can also compliment him for his decisions. 

Maicon and Matija Nastasic starting for the first time, Garcia in his second game, and Barry in his first game back after injury – were all risks, not in terms of quality, but in terms of consistency and understanding. Then again, football is a game of risks. Perhaps Lescott would have been a better choice – if nothing else than for the partnership he has with Kompany. Maybe he was injured.

But then, look at Mancini’s substitution of Silva for Dzeko – it gave us a cutting edge and put us in the lead almost immediately, and was an inspired substitution. We all would have been lauding Mancini for that if we had won.

The plus side of selecting Maicon and Nastasic is that they are being blooded with the rest of the team. The young Serb looks a good deal. I couldn’t have imagined Stefan Savic playing in this game, but this lad handled it.

We all knew it was never going to be easy against the Spanish champions, but that said, on another night we could have received a hammering. The most worrying thing for me was the first half performance – we could not get the ball off Real.

Barcelona tend to do that against Real when the two giants meet, so just imagine how City would have coped against Barca?

It just shows the gulf that exists between winning the Premier League and then taking on Europe’s cream of the crop, and it shows how far we still have to go to becoming Europe’s best, which is where we want to be.

I still feel that we should be winning a few more Premier League’s before the Champions League becomes a realistic target. Yes, we have a squad with European experience, but they have not played much together, let alone won together, Europe’s top competition.

The next game against Borussia Dortmund now becomes a must win. The importance of winning at home cannot be overstated. Last year, it was the home draw with Napoli at the beginning of the competition that kicked us out in the end. We should have won that game and we have to make sure that does not now happen again.

Lost soul

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. 

The first defence

It’s that time again - the start of the season - but this time with a twist that many City fans have yet to experience – the first defence of the Premier League title.

The high-octane effects of last season took their time wear off, but victory is always insatiable, a thirst quenched only by the taste of further victories. Sergio Aguero’s goal against QPR will never be forgotten, but now it is history and the club must focus all its will on repeating the feat – albeit more surefootedly – this time around.

This season that has to be the priority. The question is can they do it?

It’s been a good pre-season as far as pre-seasons go, winning the majority of matches, although nowadays one senses these things are more about opening the club up to new markets than anything else. The plus points are that we don’t have too many injuries, and we’ve also had the opportunity to blood more youngsters.

Today of course we also won the FA Community Shield, the trophy that eluded us last year when we shot ourselves in the foot against United, surrendering a two goal lead in a game we should have easily won.

Even if it means little, it’s a nice start to our season as champions.

However, the transfer market – or rather City’s inability to move decisively within it – has to a large extent overshadowed these positives. The frustration of this situation was most clearly evident in Mancini’s press conference prior to today’s match, with the City manager simply referring the vast majority of transfer questions to City’s head of football administration Brian Marwood – the man responsible for acquiring new players.

City of course are also hamstrung by the new financial fair play (FFP) rules, and their need to cut the wage bill or, at least, keep it on an even keel. The two most notable culprits - Emmanuel Adebayor and Roque Santa Cruz – have not yet been moved on, meaning that we can hardly add to a frontline that boasts four top class strikers.

There’s also a sense of club that will no longer be held to ransom. We were surely there in the market for the likes of Thiago Silva and Robin van Persie, but the hierarchy are now much less willing to pay over the odds for this kind of talent, and are much more keen to drive a harder bargain. The Daniel Agger transfer story smacks of this. We all know the spending of recent years just isn’t sustainable and, if continued, would see us kicked out of Europe because of FFP. At any rate, the true holy grail is bringing through our own talent.

Chelsea and United have both strengthened, and of course we should be looking to – no team can ever stand still. We certainly need new faces for the Champions League if nothing else. But if the squad remains unchanged until January it shouldn’t be a cue for all hell to break loose.

We’ve now got something at City that we haven’t had for decades: consistency. There will always be power battles within the club – managers will always want new players and administrators will want to do it in a way that is right for the club. One thing that gets lost in all this is that we’ve a strong, balanced squad, with good depth and exceptional talent. The spine of team is now established: Hart, Kompany, Yaya, and any one from our four top strikers.

The other big plus is that we’ve some exciting new talent on the fringes. Anyone watching the pre-season friendlies will have seen the likes of Karim Rekik, Abdul Razak and Dennis Suarez. Hopefully we’ll see a bit more of them soon.