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City Football Group (CFG) [Owner of Melbourne City]


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26 minutes ago, Forever City said:

What does the outcome of the hearing mean? Do we have to give up the name "Melbourne City FC" our can we still use it?

Apparently we have to have a temporary name until the matter is resolved.

They suggested; in the email that they've sent to club members; a few suggestions (take into account Melbourne Heart is still trademarked)

-Melbourne wombats

-Melbourne Monarchs

-Melbourne fighting irish (to pay heritage to melbournes irish heritage)

I don't mind monarchs, as our name temporarily

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3 hours ago, Forever City said:

What does the outcome of the hearing mean? Do we have to give up the name "Melbourne City FC" our can we still use it?

I'm no lawyer, but I think that if you read the case our club badge ("logo") has been accepted as a trade mark. IIRC, at that time it was deemed that both clubs could use the same name, or similar names, because the words were so general that no organization could claim them as unique. This case was about the phrase "Melbourne City Football Club" being registered as a trade mark in its own right.

The relevant extract from the article being:
"The Delegate found that the fact that the trade mark appeared in close conjunction to the logo diluted the effect of such use, meaning that the phrase MELBOURNE CITY FOOTBALL CLUB alone was not performing the function of distinguishing the goods on which it appeared from those of other traders."

TBH, like Phantom I'm astonished that this is still going on. I don't know who is being vindictive or bloody-minded, but I would have thought that the two clubs could have sat down and resolved this - and any other issues - a long time ago. 

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3 minutes ago, n i k o said:

CFG have made it a challenge to support this club. Gets tiresome having to defend fuck ups on a regular basis. We don't even have excuses to make like lack of access to fascilities, know how ect. 

Yes, they erred when they made changes before we had seen a couple of seasons of on-field success. It's been an uphill battle since then. The lack of real support for the club was palpable on Friday night.

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Australian football waits for results from Abu Dhabi meeting as city’s influence on local game grows

FOOTBALL
David Weiner
December 5, 2017 1:50pm
DAVID WEINER@davidweiner9
Source: FOX SPORTS



FIFA’S Member Associations committee meeting in Abu Dhabi will seal the next course of action for the future of Steven Lowy and his Football Federation Board in its stoush with its key stakeholders this week.

That’s a fitting venue, given the United Arab Emirates’ capital is proving such an influential force not just in the global football matrix, but right here, in Australia.

At the heart of Lowy’s press conference last week was a shot at the race for power and money in the Australian game, with the A-League clubs’ push for a greater slice of the pie. Greg Griffin, from Adelaide, is the public face of the clubs as the head of the Australian Professional Football Clubs Association, but moving heavily behind the scenes is Melbourne City vice-chairman Simon Pearce, a mover and shaker from the City Football Group.

He was a key protagonist as they purchased Melbourne Heart in 2014 in negotiations involving Frank Lowy, and remains on the board of Manchester City, the first big purchase of the Abu Dhabi Group for Development and Investment, which changed the face of football in 2008. He is also on the board of New York City FC.

City Group’s interest is not just pushing for more money for A-League clubs, but for them to be unleashed from the shackles of the FFA to then grow that pie and the size of the competition - as they have witnessed in the Premier League and Major League Soccer. In turn, the current governing body is at loggerheads thanks to the mistrust of what they think will be done if power is re-apportioned.


“It is not in the interest of the overall game, and Australia, that the A-League clubs have more influence over the board,” Lowy exclaimed.

Pearce is one who operates behind the scenes but his influence is key, and in a global context, extends to the very top in Abu Dhabi, where he became the Executive Director or Strategic Communications Affairs for the Executive Affairs Authority in 2005, a role in which he advised the senior leadership of the country, which then included its foray into football.

The game’s current state of uncertainty stems from the stalemate in negotiations between the roof body and the clubs, with the PFA and roof bodies of NSW and Victoria as well, although Victoria reportedly has concerns that the clubs are not showing any “willingness and commitment”, according to a report in Fairfax, to find a consensus.

The City Football Group’s arrival was hailed when they bought into Australian football, but now, they’re a key player in the current plight.


Indeed, while this causes a veritable pause in leadership off the field, there’s also a vacuum in leadership in the Socceroos top job.

In August, the City Football Group’s global commercial chief Tom Glick to the Australian Financial Review that the group is: “challenging and changing the world’s biggest sport. We have a group of clubs that give us the ability to deliver global reach with maximum flexibility and also drill down to be locally relevant. So we give brands the chance to be global and local and also identify with a group that is modernising and changing the sector we are in.”

One of those clubs is Yokohama F Marinos, the City Football Group’s J-League side, where Ange Postecoglou has been vigorously linked in the last week.


Those global tentacles provide CFG with extraordinary scouting resources and the ability to identify talent – Aaron Mooy is a classic case in point.

Postecoglou’s exploits, both across the road at Melbourne Victory, but then with the Socceroos, had him in the shop window, and it would be an intriguing irony if doors open in club-land, with a continental move, at a club whose owners are now flexing their clout here in our backyard.

Indeed, Australian football isn’t just waiting to learn of his replacement, but awaits developments from FIFA’s meeting in Abu Dhabi before knowing what comes next.

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Go to the profile of Nicholas McGeehan
Human rights researcher. Focus on Gulf, migrant workers' rights. Bit of football in there too.
Dec 18

The Men Behind Man City: a documentary not coming soon to a cinema near you

 
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Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, surveys his armed forces.

I have had an idea for the opening scene of Amazon Prime’s in-production fly-on-the-wall documentary about Manchester City’s 2017/2018 season. It begins with a sombre warning from a US TV news reporter from 2009: “A reminder that what you are about to see is extremely violent and disturbing.” Then an ominous pause followed by some menacing music as they introduce the grainy footage of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan using a cattle prod on a former business partner who is being held down by police officer somewhere in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. The menacing music gives way to the sound of Manchester City supporters hailing their owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan — Sheikh Issa’s brother — to the tune of kumbaya. “Sheikh Mansour m’lord, Sheikh Mansour,” roars the crowd as we see Issa beating the man with a board with a nail protruding from it, pouring salt into his wounds, electrocuting him, and setting him on fire. At this stage the producers must resist the urge to lighten the mood by showing some exquisite interplay between Kevin de Bruyne and David Silva. Instead the camera follows Sheikh Issa driving repeatedly over his victim in a Mercedes SUV, as City supporters continue to acclaim the royal family of Abu Dhabi, whose money has financed their rise to the top tier of European football.

The scene is now set for an incendiary analysis of modern football’s most sinister benefactors.

Now having hooked you into this yarn, I’m sorry to have to report that the producers and I have creative differences over this documentary. According to Manchester City’s website, “this ground-breaking, multi-episode series will follow the Club throughout the current campaign, offering fans an insight into the day-to-day workings of the club,” and there’s stuff about “taking fans into the inner sanctum of the Club’s world-leading training facilities,” as well as “interviews with the manager and access to executive meetings.” So, unfortunately there will be no Al Nahyan torture video intro and no subsequent examination of how unscrupulous actors feed off and manipulate supporters’ passionate love of their clubs. This will be a warm, fuzzy, we’re-just-a-bunch-of-dedicated-guys-pulling-together type of affair.

European football’s other emerging superpower is Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, but whereas that project is held up as a rather gauche attempt to buy instant success and divert attention from their appalling treatment of migrant workers as they prepare for the Qatar 2022 World Cup, Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City is increasingly held up as an example of How To Run A Modern Football Club. A long-read in the Financial Times on December 9, which referred to the Manchester City project and its global spin-off franchises in New York and Melbourne as the ‘Disneyification’ of football, is the latest example of a very well-sourced article reassuring us that the men behind Manchester City are focused on building a self-sustaining football empire. Well it was the latest example of such an article. Less than a week later, on December 15, The Guardian’s long-read was titled “Manchester City’s plans for global domination,” and once more the project was viewed in soft focus. David Conn and James Montague have chronicled football’s portfolio of Faustian pacts in impressive and entertaining detail and both have been rigorous in their scrutiny of Abu Dhabi’s actions and motives, but the sunny assessments of the Manchester City project far outnumber the critical ones.

In 2012, when Manchester City were just beginning to hit their stride in England, a senior investigative journalist at a large British broadcasting company told me that their colleagues in sport would be very displeased if negative news coverage of the Abu Dhabi government’s links to Manchester City led to them being denied access to the club and its players. Now that Manchester City look to be on the brink of an era of domination, at least in England, it’s perhaps time to take another look at who is really behind this project and why.

**********

The initial face of the Abu Dhabi takeover in September 2008 was that of Dr Sulaiman Al Fahim. “I find myself as chairman, as owner, even our official press release said I was the owner. It was nice, I like it. I like it when they put my picture in the news,” he told James Montague, a few weeks after the deal was struck. The men who were really behind the deal did not like seeing Al Fahim’s picture in the news and he was quietly moved aside. Manchester City is nominally owned by Sheikh Mansour Al Nahyan, who is so enthused by his investment of nearly £1 billion that he has attended one match in nine years. “Mansour did not like the fuss it caused”, was the rather implausible explanation that a City source recently proffered to Giles Tremlett to explain the Sheikh’s aversion to attending games. A simpler explanation might be that Sheikh Mansour has nothing to do with Manchester City and that it’s not his money that is responsible for its remarkable transformation.

Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest and most powerful of the seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The man who controls Abu Dhabi and dictates policy is Sheikh Mansour’s brother, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. And the men who run Manchester City are Mohamed bin Zayed’s key lieutenants, not Mansour’s. Chief among them is Khaldoon Al Mubarak, club chairman since 2008, and the Crown Prince’s right-hand man. Mubarak is also CEO of Mohamed bin Zayed’s mega-corporation Mubadala, which has assets of £50 billion, and invests vast sums of money around the world in sectors as diverse as real estate, pharmaceuticals, and aeronautics. Mohamed bin Zayed is also the driving force behind the UAE’s efforts to develop a domestic defence industry, which means he can now manufacture weapons and sell them to his own increasingly active army. All powerful and unencumbered by the need to justify his war-mongering in places like Yemen, which he has helped to destroy, Mohamed bin Zayed is fast becoming a one-man military-industrial complex.

Another key member of the team is the Australian Simon Pearce, also a Manchester City director, and Abu Dhabi’s head of strategic communications. Pearce made his name at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, whose work with clients such as Nicolai Ceaucescu, Blackwater and Union Carbide led to the famous quote “when evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed-dial.” Abu Dhabi made a direct hire and Pearce is charged with protecting and promoting Abu Dhabi’s reputation. In examining their motives for buying Manchester City it helps if you think of Abu Dhabi as a corporation as well as a city-state, and Pearce is as comfortable offering advice on business deals as he is advising on matters of domestic and foreign policy.

This isn’t speculation on my part, you can read some of his emails online at otaiba-inbox.com. The most interesting ones about football are the ones he sends to Yousef Al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States.

**********

“He’s slick, he’s savvy, and he throws one hell of a party” ran the byline of the Huffington post’s 2015 profile of Otaiba, or ‘Brotaiba’ as he was known in the corridors of the US State Department. Unfortunately for Otaiba, this savviness did not extend to using a properly encrypted email account, and the ambassador’s Hotmail account, otaiba7@hotmail.com (yes, seriously), was hacked and the emails dumped online. The Intercept have revealed the scandalous contents of Otaiba’s emails in numerous fascinating articles, but almost no attention has been paid to the emails pertaining to Abu Dhabi’s American soccer franchise, New York City FC. In an email sent on May 5, 2013, Simon Pearce briefs Otaiba, whom he calls “Chief”, on the public relations implications of concluding the franchise deal, which had recently come to light in the media.

“Now that the deal is in public play, delaying a decision further on the franchise and stadium creates additional risk to the project as well as to ownership group reputation,” writes Pearce. In a list of “downside considerations” Pearce states that “AD/UAE vulnerabilities” will be put in play and lists them as “gay, wealth, women, Israel.” Another downside he lists is the fact that “ownership group already defined by media, politicians, community as Abu Dhabi not CFG [City Football Group].”

Pearce describes the option of walking away from the deal as a “major setback for CFG business plans” and a “missed opportunity for big NY play.” Obviously, Pearce and co felt that the benefits of pursuing the deal outweighed the reputational risk, and two days later, on May 7, 2013, New York City Football Club was registered as a corporate entity in New York state, becoming the newest franchise in Major League Soccer.

 
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Screenshot of the email sent by Simon Pearce on May 5, 2017

When you look at how Abu Dhabi has been greeted in Manchester, it’s easy to see why they felt this was a risk worth taking.

Abu Dhabi made its ‘big play’ in Manchester in 2013 when it entered into a £1 billion property deal with Manchester City Council. A report which set out “the detailed commercial arrangements” for the joint venture was kept secret because it “involved consideration of exempt information relating to the financial or business affairs of particular persons.” The Guardian attempted to obtain the report through a freedom of information request, but the council denied the request, citing “the risk of prejudice to the commercial interests.” It’s not clear if they meant the commercial interests of the council or the commercial interests of Abu Dhabi, which in the case of this deal are managed by a company registered off-shore in the tax haven of Jersey.

Having been made aware of the council’s close business links to the Abu Dhabi government, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International wrote to the two most senior figures in the council, Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein, asking that they “take some simple and principled steps that would support victims of serious human rights violations and ensure Manchester’s commercial relationships with senior figures in the UAE government do not besmirch the city’s reputation.” The March 2016 letter made reference to the council’s celebration of the city’s radical past. (In 1862 Lancashire mill workers — at great personal cost — refused to touch any raw cotton picked by American slaves. Abraham Lincoln wrote to them, praising their heroism, which, he said “has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.” Mohamed bin Zayed would have had them maced and thrown them in jail. He’d have come up with something more devious for Emily Pankhurst, whose suffragette movement began at her Manchester home in Nelson Street.)

Leese responded, describing the Abu Dhabi government as “exemplary business partners” (which suggests he hasn’t seen the video of Sheikh Issa Al Nahyan using a cattle prod on his former business partner), and saying that the “alleged” abuses detailed in the letter were beyond the council’s sphere of influence. If that was debatable then, it’s laughably untrue now — last month Sir Howard Bernstein took up a job with the City Football Group.

Pearce’s emails provide a fascinating insight into Abu Dhabi’s motivations for buying football clubs. There is certainly a public relations angle to these initiatives, but it’s a lot more subtle than mere reputation laundering, a criticism I have levelled in the past. Pearce doesn’t want the media and the general public to associate New York City FC with the Abu Dhabi government, but rather with the City Football Group, because the “vulnerabilities” of the Abu Dhabi government could jeopardize the business interests of Abu Dhabi Inc. By “vulnerabilities”, Pearce means government policies that jar with the progressive image City Football Group needs to project in order to prosper. In Pearce’s view the main issues are the UAE’s criminalization of homosexuality, its poor record on women’s rights, and its failure to recognize the state of Israel.

It’s highly doubtful that club ownership is primarily about generating income either, at least not directly. As stand-along businesses, the football clubs do not and will not generate the type of profits that interest these types of investors. Manchester City make much of the fact that the club has turned a net profit of £32.2 million in the last three years, but the net losses of the previous five seasons totaled £491.3 million — £121.3 million in 2009/10, £197.5 million in 2010/11, £97.9 million in 2011/12, £51.6 million in 2012/13, £23 million in 2013/14. When you throw in the cost of buying the club, estimated at £210 million, the losses from the 2008/2009 season, which the club do not appear to have published, and the £161 million net spend on players since it signed off its latest accounts, the net loss is probably close to £850 million. If the idea is to generate alternative revenue streams for the post-oil economy, they’re not doing a very good job of it.

What’s clear is that Manchester City FC and New York City FC enable Abu Dhabi to gain footholds in centres of power and influence, and provide a platform for the pursuit of further business opportunities which themselves consolidate and strengthen Abu Dhabi’s political influence. What’s not clear is whether that’s the primary purpose of their football interests, but Pearce’s emails point in that direction. Placing an abusive dictatorship under such bright spotlights is a high-risk strategy, as Pearce makes very clear, but he appears supremely confident of his ability to manage the reputational risks. He does this in three ways: firstly, by presenting the clubs’ owner as a wealthy benevolent businessman (Mansour), rather than an all-powerful statesman (MBZ); secondly by flooding the media with puff-pieces about how progressive the UAE is; and thirdly by attacking the credibility or the motives of groups and individuals who criticise the UAE’s abuses. Unfortunately, he’s very good at his job.

**********

Speaking about Manchester City on the excellent Second Captain’s podcast, Ken Early recently referred to Manchester City as a “host organism”. Early didn’t go so far as to compare Abu Dhabi’s rulers to a malicious virus, but when you look at how the men behind Manchester City exert their influence abroad, “host organism” is the perfect metaphor.

In 2012, Simon Pearce wrote briefing notes for Mohamed bin Zayed in which he urged David Cameron’s government to take steps to end what Pearce described as Islamist infiltration of BBC Arabic — Pearce advised MBZ that he should demand the prime minister’s “help … with the BBC in particular.” In return for silencing the British press and other favours, Pearce’s briefing notes indicate that Cameron was to be offered lucrative arms and oil deals for British business which would have generated billions of pounds for BAE Systems and allowed BP to bid to drill for oil and gas in the Gulf. Abu Dhabi also invests millions in Washington DC, much of it on the type of think-tanks that seem to think mostly about money. After successfully encouraging the neo-conservative analyst Michael Rubin to write an article questioning the credibility of Human Rights Watch research on torture in the UAE, Pearce could scarcely disguise his glee in the email he sent to Yousef Al-Otaiba. “Happy new year!!” it began. “The [Rubin] article demonstrates that we have now empowered the right to make legitimate demands of the left wing Human Rights lobby.” (In the interests of transparency, I should point out that I researched and wrote the Human Rights Watch press release on torture that Rubin criticised.) In France, the UAE was keen to empower the far-right, as documented by French journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, whose book “Nos Très Chers Émirs” contained the revelation, repeated elsewhere, that the UAE was at the ready to provide $2 million to Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign in France in 2015.

Things aren’t much better on the home front. MBZ has few qualms about keeping his own subjects in line the old-fashioned way, and his thuggish state security apparatus do that to devastating effect, roaming the streets in custom-made 4x4s with shackles built-in to the frame. Anyone who tweets out of turn is toast. One of the people languishing in Abu Dhabi’s jails is the award-winning human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. To describe Ahmed as a human rights activist seems rather reductive, he’s always been a lot more than that and his imprisonment — he tweeted criticism of the Abu Dhabi government and of the Sisi government in Egypt just before his arrest in March 2017 — weighs very heavily on everyone who ever had the pleasure of his company.

 
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Stencil of Ahmed Mansoor, courtesy of Manu Luksch.

As Sheikh Issa’s torture tape shows, the Al Nahyans charge sheet extends beyond human rights abuses to outright criminality. Sheikh Issa was never actually convicted of anything — a UAE court acquitted him of torture, concluding that he had been injected with drugs and was the victim of the most elaborate and stupid blackmail plot in history — but Al Nahyan family members who have been charged with committing serious crimes abroad haven’t been able to rely on a corrupt judiciary to get them off the hook. In July 2008, a few months before the Manchester City takeover, eight Al Nahyan princesses were arrested on trafficking charges in Brussels after their domestic servants escaped from the Hilton Hotel and found their way to the police. It took nine years for the case to reach trial, but in June 2017 the eight princesses were convicted in absentia on trafficking charges.

And then there’s Yemen. Abu Dhabi has played a key role in the wilful and needless destruction of one of the world’s poorest countries, and bears significant responsibility for the humanitarian disaster unfolding there. The Saudi-led coalition has bombed schools, hospitals, wedding and funerals, and more than 1000 of the 5000 civilians they have killed since March 2015 were children, according to the United Nations. In September 2015, by which time Amnesty International had already documented “a pattern of raids targeting heavily-populated sites, including a mosque, a school and a market,” Yousef Al-Otaiba sent an email in which he outlined a strategy to limit the political fall-out. “At least temporarily, urge caution when selecting military targets,” advised Otaiba, which suggests he was quite happy for indiscriminate targeting to resume once the political heat had died down. One of the people to whom he sent the email was Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak.

There’s more — there’s a lot more — but suffice it to say that while Abu Dhabi may not be the most abusive government in the world, they are easily the most abusive government running a football club. Qatar run them a close second of course, and there should be no PSG supporters taking the moral high ground. A quick glance at the bookies odds for this year’s Champions League reveals the extent to which top level European football is now dependent on funding from either Abu Dhabi or Qatar. Manchester City are currently the favourites followed by Paris Saint-Germain. Third favourites are Bayern Munich, whose shirts are now sponsored by Qatar, fourth favourites are Barcelona, who only recently ended a seven-year sponsorship deal with Qatar, and fifth favourites are Real Madrid, who have sold the naming rights to their new stadium to Abu Dhabi.

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi cut off diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed an economic blockade, accusing Qatar of aligning itself with Iran and supporting Islamic terrorist groups. However, while these accusations masked ulterior motives, the antipathy is very real and it would come as no great surprise if the Al Nahyans decided to rename Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium the “Qatar/ISIS Alliance Arena.” How this squabble will play out on the proxy battleground of the Champions League is anyone’s guess but don’t expect either Qatar or Abu Dhabi to put grievances aside out of any love of the game. They have no love of the game nor any interest in its well-being.

So tune into that Amazon Prime documentary if you must, but you’ll have to wait for mine to get the full story. Funding has proven a bit of an issue and it doesn’t have a title yet, but the first episode is going to be called “Sheikhs’ Lies and Videotape.”

 
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Manchester City’s plan for global domination

Football has already been transformed by big money – but the businessmen behind Man City are trying to build a global corporation that will change the game for ever. By Giles Tremlett
 
 
 
 

Fri 15 Dec ‘17 17.00 AEDTLast modified on Mon 18 Dec ‘17 20.54 AEDT

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On 19 December 2009, Pep Guardiola stood and wept in the middle of Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi. The 38-year-old Barcelona manager clasped a hand across his face as his body gave way to huge, shoulder-heaving sobs. Zlatan Ibrahimović, the club’s towering Swedish striker, wrapped a tattooed arm around Guardiola’s neck and then gave him a vigorous push in order to jolt him out of it. But Guardiola could not stop. It was a strange place for the world’s most celebrated football coach to break down: Barcelona had just won a game that few people watched on television to secure one of football’s most obscure titles, the Fifa Club World Cup. But the victory secured an unbreakable record: Barcelona had won all six titles available to any club in a single year. That is why Pep was sobbing.

 

Back at home in Barcelona, it was a bittersweet moment for Ferran Soriano. A hairdresser’s son from the city’s working-class district of Poblenou, Soriano had become one of FC Barcelona’s top executives – and had helped build what could now claim to be the greatest football team the world had ever seen. “I was happy, but it was also painful not to be there when the team reached its pinnacle,” he told me. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Guardiola.

Soriano had overseen Barcelona’s finances for five years until 2008, and the club’s record owed much to the ideas he had developed after running a US-style political campaign to bring a group of swashbuckling, sharp-suited young men to power at elections for a new board of directors in 2003. He had even written a book, La Pelota no entra por azar (“The ball doesn’t go in by chance”), in which he argued that Barcelona’s success – and, by inference, that record – was the result of good, creative business management. Vicious political infighting had driven him to resign from the club the previous year. But even before that, he had seen one of his more ambitious ideas – to set up franchise clubs in other countries – thwarted at Barcelona. This was a step too far for a club owned by 143,000 voting fans, firmly rooted in their city and Catalonia.

 

But Soriano’s big idea has now been brought to life by two men who were watching very closely on the night Guardiola wept in Abu Dhabi: one is a member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the other is Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a youthful executive and adviser to the royal family. With their backing, Soriano is now upending football’s established order by building its first true multinational corporation – a Coca-Cola of soccer.

That corporation is City Football Group(CFG). It already owns, or co-owns, six clubs on four continents, and the contracts of 240 male professional players and two dozen women. Hundreds more carefully picked teenagers and younger children who aspire to greatness play in CFG’s lower teams. The longterm ambition is huge. The company will trawl the world for players – shaping and polishing them in state-of-the-art academies and training facilities across several continents, selling them on or sending the best to the clubs it will own (and improve) in a dozen or so countries. Supplied and shielded by the vessels around it, the flagship of this new football flotilla – Manchester City FC – will continue its already startling rise to become the world’s greatest club.

That is the Soriano idea – or at least, a simplified version of a complex plan. The corporation is only four years old, but it is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful forces in the world’s favourite sport – watched with awe, envy and fear by those who wonder if it could become football’s own Google or Facebook.


In a game where top players cost £200m, televised matches attract audiences of hundreds of millions and club owners are among the wealthiest potentates on the planet, no expense is spared in seeking any competitive edge. Once upon a time, money alone was enough to make the difference (if it was spent wisely), but that is no longer the case, in part because there is so much of it sloshing around the game.

When Manchester City won the Premier League in 2012, Sheikh Mansour was widely accused of “buying the title for £1bn” – the amount of money he had poured into City since purchasing the club four years earlier. It was City’s first league title in 44 years, and grown men cried when Sergio Agüero’s goalin the penultimate minute of the season’s final game secured the title. Mansour watched it on television: he had only ever been to one match at City’s Etihad stadium, and did not enjoy the fuss his visit caused. In the hours that followed, his phone hummed, filling up with 2,500 messages.

 

Man City CEO Ferran Soriano  Man City CEO Ferran Soriano. Photograph: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Getty Images

But this was also the end of an era. European football’s regulator, Uefa, had brought in new rules designed to stop clubs spending much more than they earned. Critics dismissed Mansour as a spoiled hobbyist, and even today some wonder to what extent his “private” ownership might become an instrument of Abu Dhabi’s soft power. But his few public statements made it clear that he had bought City – and ploughed money into it – as a genuine, long-term investment because “in cold business terms, Premiership football is one of the best entertainment products in the world”.

 

The ambition, then, was double – he intended to win at both football and business. But with the Uefa spending brake, that was about to become much tougher. He needed something new. Could City win without losing money?

In fact, when Soriano’s gang of smart young businessmen took over Barcelona in 2003, it was a loss-making club. As finance chief, Soriano helped deliver a spiralling “virtuous circle” of high investment, trophies and then even higher revenues. Forceful and analytical, he had built and sold a global consultancy business by the age of 33; at Barcelona, where he was nicknamed both “the Panzer” and “the Computer”, he made a strong-willed but sensible counterpoint to the club’s mercurial president, Joan Laporta. But Soriano also saw Barcelona as something far bigger than a city club, while realising that the global football business itself was poised to enter a new era. In 2006, at a talk Soriano delivered at Birkbeck College in London, he presented 28 slides that set out his early vision. Thanks to the phenomenal growth in their worldwide fan bases, he noted, big clubs were being transformed from promoters and organisers “of local events, like a circus” into “global entertainment companies like Walt Disney”. If big clubs seized the opportunity to “capture the growth and become global franchises”, they would soon stand apart from their rivals, creating a new, world-conquering elite.

“He thought, and thinks, in a different way to most other people in football,” says Simon Chadwick, now a professor at Salford University, who had invited Soriano to give the talk at Birkbeck. At the time, Soriano himself was disappointed to find English football so in thrall to a model in which managers such as Arsène Wenger and Alex Ferguson appeared to run their own clubs, while “the level of conceptualisation of the business model was zero”. Even the language was telling. “They called the coach ‘manager’, as if he managed everything,” Soriano recalled.

 

With his abrupt departure from Barcelona in 2008, Soriano’s dream of turning that club into a global franchise, with a first satellite team in the US, was definitively dashed. Instead, Soriano threw himself into running an airline, Spanair. But five years after his presentation in London, as Mansour sought a fresh competitive edge, both on and off the field, Soriano found himself, in October 2011, sitting down for a 7am meeting in a Mayfair hotel with the globetrotting New York lawyer Marty Edelman – who was tempting him back into football.

Edelman had been drafted on to City’s board by Mansour, working alongside his appointed chairman, the US-educated Khaldoon al-Mubarak, from the very beginning. Edelman, a real estate expert, was already a trusted adviser in Abu Dhabi, and the choice of an American was an early sign of the club’s new cosmopolitanism. Soriano initially brushed off City’s advances. He was used to associating Manchester with its glittering rival United, and he still distrusted what he called “the stereotype of the rich owner”. (In his book, he had even described City as a club that provoked “savage inflation” through “irrational investment”.) But the two sides were slowly discovering shared values. Chief among them was ambition – and with that came a willingness to challenge the status quo.

Even then, it was an off-and-on affair. Meetings followed in Paris and Abu Dhabi, before, in April 2012, Soriano was sneaked through Manchester airport (where the club says it “can get people in without anyone knowing they have arrived”) and taken to a room at the Lowry Hotel booked in someone else’s name. A former rugby second-row forward, Soriano is, at 6ft 3in, difficult to hide. By now it was a mutual seduction, with City wanting to persuade him that, with Mansour’s long-term commitment, the club could be as great as Barcelona. Soriano, in turn, pitched a mould-breaking plan that required deep pockets, imagination and a steady nerve. Both sides agreed that City should aspire to being the world’s top club – a position long held by either Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester United. “And I mean number one – not number two or three,” Soriano told me.


The idea of becoming the world’s biggest club was not just vanity or business machismo. Soriano had spotted long before that a tiny group of elite clubs would capture the new global market, but he also wanted to build something “far bigger”. Football clubs, he pointed out, were massive brands but absurdly small businesses: a team with a global following of 500 million fans might have an income of only €500m. “That’s one euro per fan,” he says, “which is utterly ridiculous.” In business terms, this was “a combination of a lot of love and, literally, no love” – because fans in, say, Indonesia spent nothing on their club. “So what can we do? The answer was pretty simple, maybe too simple, but very bold. You have to be global but local. You have to go to Indonesia and open a shop.” He outlined his idea for a corporation that would have both a global brand – in Manchester City – and lots of local brands, developing talent through a network of clubs that would also provide a pipeline of players for City. He knew this might sound far-fetched. “If I had pitched this idea to Real Madrid, the answer would be ‘you’re crazy’ – and that is actually what had happened in Barcelona,” he told me.

 

But City was already going through a revolution, and was ready for more. For Edelman, the plan put flesh on the skeleton built with Mansour’s millions. “Any great idea needs to have a host, right? And we were a great host,” Edelman told me at his Park Avenue offices. “You couldn’t take Ferran’s idea and just put it on a blank sheet.” Soriano’s idea (which he now terms his “artistic challenge”) was a way of taking Mansour’s original vision – summed up in his early pledge to build “a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars” – and putting it “on steroids”, in Edelman’s words.

Soriano started work as CEO of Manchester City on Saturday 1 September 2012. Two days later, he arrived in New York to create a new football club. This meant paying $100m (£74m) for a spot in Major League Soccer (MLS), the professional league for the US and Canada, and building a team from nothing. Seeking a local partner, Edelman eventually took Soriano to see Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, the owners of the New York Yankees. The brothers had inherited their baseball team, but Hank is a soccer fan who played at college and coached his local high-school team. It was one of the quickest deals Edelman had ever seen struck, taking “about 15 seconds” to agree it. “It just worked,” he told me. The Yankees took 20% of the new team and offered their stadium as a temporary home. (It still is, though it takes 72 hours to transform it from a baseball field into a soccer pitch.) The team, baptised New York City Football Club, began playing in 2015. Forbes now values it at $275m (£205m). To fans it is “NYCFC”, or simply “New York City” – a marketer’s dream. “Our brand is perfect, because it is ‘City’ and we know we can add that word to any city,” observed Soriano, who began his working life marketing detergents.

When I first visited the Etihad campus in March, the wall behind the reception desk bore the shields of City, NYCFC and two other clubs: Melbourne City, and Yokohama F Marinos, a Japanese club in which CFG owns a minority stake. Melbourne Heart, as the Australian club was originally known, had only been founded in 2009. It won its first major trophy last season, just two years after City bought it and changed its name, and changed its colours to sky blue. “It’s like being a start-up tech firm, and Apple buying you,” Scott Munn, the club’s founding CEO, told me. East Manchester, in this analogy, will become the Silicon Valley of soccer. A modest cluster of other football businesses is even forming in the area – making the Californian analogy even more apt.

 

By the time I returned two months later, City had bought yet another club, this time in Uruguay – Atlético Torque, a second-division side that was founded in 2007 and became professional only in 2012. At the company’s annual staff meeting in May, a representative from the new outpost began his presentation with a map of South America and a large arrow pointing to Uruguay. “Nobody knows what is Torque. Nobody knows where is Torque,” he admitted, only half-jokingly. (It is in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo.) “In this room we have as many people as go to a Torque match.” The ambition, however, was for the club to rise to the first division, finish in the top four and qualify for continent-wide competitions – and this in a country that produces world-class players such as Barcelona’s Luis Suárez or Paris Saint-Germain’s Edinson Cavani. Rather more mysteriously, the club also aimed to “sign and register players from all across South America”. The latter was the result of a cold statistical analysis, which had revealed that Uruguay was the biggest per-capita exporter of professional footballers – an astounding £25m-a-year business. And this was despite the fact that many small clubs often sold talented players cheaply when they were still teenagers. “It’s astonishing,” Soriano said. “We are big, and will hold on to them longer” – making them even more valuable.

The next time I saw Soriano – at his holiday apartment in the small Catalan beach resort of Tamariu – it was July, and he had closed yet another deal just a day earlier. For €3.5m (£3.1m), City had purchased 44% of Girona, a club in Spain’s top division. This was a far bigger fish. As he sat on a balcony overlooking the bay in shorts and a T-shirt – pulling data on fan numbers and television rights out of a battered laptop – Soriano looked happy (and not just because, in Tamariu, he can make work calls from his balcony and then pop down to join his two “Mancunian” infant daughters on the beach).

“When we agreed the price last year, it was in the second division. Now it’s in the first,” he said. On 29 October this year, with help from players loaned by Manchester City, the newly promoted team convincingly beat Real Madrid in their first meeting. The injection of CFG cash and know-how at Torque has had an even more dramatic effect. Last month it finished top of Uruguay’s second division, meaning it has already been promoted – just six months after it was bought.


Soriano is convinced that football will eventually become the biggest sport in almost every country in the world, “including the United States and India,” he says. So how far will CFG go? “We’re open. In Africa we have a relationship with an academy in Ghana. And we’ve been looking at opportunities in South Africa,” he said. CFG already has a close relationship with Atlético Venezuela in Caracas; Soriano also mentioned Malaysia and Vietnam. The limit, he suggested, was two or three clubs per continent. But the next major purchase may well be in China, where the group is “actively looking” to buy a club.

 

In October 2015, China’s football-loving president, Xi Jinping, visited City’s Etihad stadium; two months later, Chinese investors bought 13% of CFG for $400m (£265m), valuing the whole at $3bn. This was probably well over 30% more than Mansour had pumped into it (no exact figures are available). Soriano has been watching the dramatic, chaotic evolution of Chinese soccer – a pet project for Xi – ever since he arrived in Manchester. At first, Soriano was put off by rumours of chaos and corruption, and then by a price bubble. “The market is now more rational and the league is more structured,” he says.

Xi wants China to create 50,000 special “soccer schools” within 10 years – partly to get deskbound schoolchildren fit – and to make ready 140,000 pitches. Soriano sees an opportunity to teach millions of children soccer, which “might be bigger than the business of Manchester City”. It is a reminder that CFG – which recently put $16m into a joint venture to own and operate five-a-side urban pitches in the US – is interested in the entire sector, not just clubs.

 

Chinese president Xi Jinping, Man City striker Sergio Aguero and then prime minister David Cameron at MCFC’s Etihad stadium in Manchester in 2015.  Chinese president Xi Jinping, Man City striker Sergio Aguero and then prime minister David Cameron at MCFC’s Etihad stadium in Manchester in 2015. Photograph: Sergio Aguero/AP

CFG is not the only owner of multiple clubs – and some other teams are experimenting with modest forms of integration – but the others are largely just investment portfolios. CFG is the only owner that has consciously established a single corporate culture around the world, which in some cases extends to wearing the same sky-blue shirts. Fernando Pons, a sports business partner at Deloitte in Spain, sees this as a prime example of what consultants have dubbed “glocalisation” – a concept that implies taking a global product, but adapting to local markets. “A Girona or New York City fan will almost certainly also become a City fan,” he said. It also means that the advertising for Nissan, SAP and Wix that is seen at the Etihad stadium in Manchester will be replicated in Melbourne or New York – and that players from the US or Australia will be able to travel off-season to the world’s most advanced training centre, built on 34 hectares of land beside the Etihad and equipped with sophisticated extras such as hyperbaric and hypoxic chambers that can simulate high altitude or boost blood oxygen levels.

 

What seems to excite Soriano most, however, is the vast pool of players and the range of clubs they can play in. CFG almost certainly already owns the contracts of more professional soccer players than anyone else in the world, and that number is only set to go higher. So while “entertainment” and running clubs is the group’s first business, he explained, “business number two is player development”. The inspiration is Barcelona’s famous and much-copied Masia youth academy, which, for about €2m each, produced legendary players such as Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta, Xavi, Carles Puyol and Guardiola. At today’s prices, the same group would cost closer to €1bn. “We are globalising the Barça model,” Soriano said.

The logic behind this was made even more clear – in the same week we met in July – by the widespread amazement over the £198m fee that the Qatari owners of Paris Saint-Germain had agreed to pay Barcelona for the Brazilian star Neymar. Transfer records are smashed almost yearly, and Soriano now sees this inflation as an inevitable part of the game, now driven not by wealthy owners but demanding fans.

“Why is that? It’s very simple: the industry is growing,” he explained. “Ultimately, it goes back to the clients – these are the fans, who want to watch good football and are ready to pay. So clubs have more money to spend, but the number of highly skilled or top players generated each year does not change.”

 

“This is a typical ‘make-or-buy’ challenge. You can’t buy in the market, so you have to make,” Soriano said. “This means spending a lot of money – on academies, coaches, but also in transfers for young players. It’s like venture capital in that if you invest 10 million each in 10 players, you just need one to get to the top who is going to be worth 100 million.”

For Manchester City, the expanding web of CFG clubs solves a particularly English problem, which occurs when promising footballers hit 17 or 18. Soriano calls this “the development gap”, and it may explain why England’s national team performs so badly. “If the player is top quality, he needs to play competitive football to develop. It’s not only for the technical aspect of the game, but also for the pressure. The under-21 or under-19 competitions in England don’t provide this, because games aren’t in front of a lot of fans and there isn’t enough competitive tension,” he said. If Spain and Germany are much better at developing players, he says, it is because clubs such as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich all have reserve teams that play in their countries’ second or third division against other professional clubs – not in a separate league, as English youth teams do. “If you manage a boy who has talent and is promising, who is 18 or 19, you can have him training with the first team, but playing in the second, where games are difficult, competitive and you play before crowds of 30,000.”

 

Manchester City players in training session at the City Football Academy in Manchester.  MCFC players in training at the City Football Academy in Manchester. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty

Because Premier League clubs are not allowed to field second teams, the primary way to develop promising young players who are not quite ready is to loan them to another club, usually in a lower division; Manchester City, for example, currently has around 20 players out on loan. But once a player is loaned out, the parent club loses control over their development – as Chelsea can testify, having bought up so many young players that more than 30 are on loan at 24 different clubs. At worst, this leads to the warehousing of players and the ruining of promising careers. CFG’s integrated web of clubs, all (in theory) playing the same style of football, is meant to solve that. “In this system we control exactly what they do. The coaching is exactly the same. The playing style is exactly the same,” Soriano said.

 

If this vision works out, successful players will progress from, say, Torque to New York, and then to Girona, and then – eventually – to Manchester City. CFG will not “own” them, since they will belong to the individual clubs, who must compete against outside bidders and pay transfer fees where appropriate. But CFG clubs will have insider information on the players, who can, in turn, be confident of fitting in with the style at all the other CFG clubs – while transfer income will end up back in a single corporate pot. In May, club officials gave me the example of the Australian midfielder Aaron Mooy, who joined Melbourne City in 2014 and was the team’s player of the year in his first two seasons. CFG decided Mooy was good enough to play in England, and Melbourne sold him to Manchester City for £425,000 in June 2016. But Mooy did not play for the club – he was immediately loaned to Huddersfield Town, who were then a second-division team. After helping them win promotion to the Premier League, Mooy was then sold to Huddersfield – for £10m. The deal shows how CFG can leverage its insider knowledge of players to simply trade them, even if they never actually play in Manchester. The profit from this one transaction, incidentally, was some 40% more than it cost to buy the entire Melbourne club.


Hiring Pep Guardiola was always part of Soriano’s big plan – though enticing him to Manchester required time and patience. One of Soriano’s first City hires was Barcelona’s former director of football, the man responsible for buying new players and helping to choose coaches, Txiki Begiristain. “Immediately we went to talk to Pep, because Pep was the best coach in the world,” Soriano told me. Guardiola had just left Barcelona and was determined to enjoy a sabbatical year in New York. “So we said: ‘OK, come next year’,” Soriano recalled. “And [the next year] he said: ‘I’m sorry, I want to go to Bayern Munich’. So we said: ‘OK, come in three years.’ And he came.” This kind of patience is only available when your owner has no need to cash in and, in a fast-moving sport where fans demand instant results, knows how to play a waiting game.

Guardiola’s prime task is to meet Soriano’s definition of a “number one” club by winning at least one title per season. “That doesn’t mean you win every year, but that in five seasons you win five trophies. It means getting to April with possibilities of winning the Premier League and playing in the semi-finals of the Champions League,” he explained. City have only managed the latter once – in 2015/16, the season before Guardiola arrived – but the target implies winning the Champions League every four years.

 

Sheikh Mansour (front right) with chairman of Manchester City FC Khaldoon al-Mubarak (front left) and Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola (front centre) at a training camp in Abu Dhabi, 2017.  Sheikh Mansour (front right) with chairman of Manchester City FC Khaldoon al-Mubarak (front left) and Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola (front centre) at a training camp in Abu Dhabi, 2017. Photograph: Victoria Haydn/Manchester City FC via Getty Images

But an implicit part of Guardiola’s job, away from the merry-go-round of matches and press conferences, is to help engineer something that may ultimately prove more valuable – a recognisable and entertaining playing style across all of CFG’s teams and players. Again, the model comes from Barcelona, where players moved seamlessly from junior teams to the Camp Nou because all had learned the same Cruyff-style soccer. In the CFG model, clubs and academies in a dozen countries should be doing the same – creating a frictionless supply line of players who automatically know how to play Pep-style and can slip in and out of the group’s teams. Soriano says that will allow “a more seamless movement of players”, with the best ending up at City.

This may prove more challenging than it sounds. On a warm August afternoon this year, as smoke rose from dozens of tailgate barbecues in gravel-covered parking lots, I joined fans wearing the sky-blue colour of NYCFC as they trooped into the New York Red Bulls stadium in Harrison, New Jersey. David Villa – the 35-year-old former Barcelona player – led them to a 1-1 draw in what has already become New York’s “classic” football derby. But this was relatively scrappy football – the kind played in the second or third divisions of England or Spain.

A few days earlier, I had watched coach Patrick Vieira – who moved here from managing City’s “elite development” under-23 team – train his squad on a pitch in leafy Westchester County, north of New York City. When I asked Vieira, a former Arsenal captain who finished his playing career in Manchester, if his team – whose salaries, under MLS rules, are capped well below Premier League level – always played “City football”, he admitted that it did not. “You can’t play the same football in New York as in Manchester, because of the players,” he said. “What we have in common is a philosophy to play what we call ‘beautiful football’ – the offensive game, to try to have possession, create chances, score goals and play attractive football. The level will be different, but the philosophy tries to be the same.”


As CFG grows and its impact is felt around the world, its rivals are beginning to fear its size, and hover, hawk-like, over its accounts. Javier Tebas, the outspoken lawyer who presides over Spain’s La Liga, clipped CFG’s wings when it appeared on his territory this summer, accusing Girona of misrepresenting the details of five players loaned by City. The club was forced to increase the accounting value of those players – a measure that, given Spain’s budget cap system, left Girona with 4% less money to spend on players’ wages. “We had to correct certain market values … so that loaning of players did not represent unfair competition,” explained Tebas. Girona are still trying to get that decision overturned.

At the Soccerex football business conference in September, Tebas took aim at Manchester again, accusing City of circumventing the rules by taking hidden state aid in the form of sponsorship contracts with public companies from Abu Dhabi. (He had similar complaints about Paris Saint-Germain’s Qatari owners, who he claimed were “pissing in the swimming pool” of European football.) In Tebas’s view, what is provoking inflation in transfer fees and player wages is not fan demand, but Gulf cash and so-called “state clubs” – including “Manchester City and its oil”. City not only denied this, but threatened to sue him – and Uefa has ignored Tebas’s demands that it investigate the club’s finances. But the vocal hostility from the head of a league dominated by Real Madrid and Barcelona is a sign that the latter two – whose not-for-profit, member-controlled structure prevents them taking the CFG route to global expansion – are starting to feel threatened.

 

Man City star Kevin De Bruyne (centre) during their recent victory over Swansea City.  Man City star Kevin De Bruyne (centre) during their recent victory over Swansea City. Photograph: Thomas/JMP/REX/Shutterstock

But Tebas’s suggestion that CFG uses its muscle to push the regulatory boundaries is not without merit. In 2014, Uefa punished City with a €20m fine for breaking the financial fair play rules in previous seasons. The Australian league, meanwhile, introduced new rules last year after CFG circumvented the league’s ban on transfer fees between clubs with a ruse that one critic dubbed “farcical”. Manchester City bought a local player called Anthony Cáceres – “outbidding” Australian clubs by paying a transfer fee – before loaning him straight to Melbourne. The league responded by banning the practice for the first year after signing.

The same ownership whose deep pockets have enabled these global ambitions may also be a source of further difficulties – in part because the desire to protect Abu Dhabi’s image looms large at CFG. This has become more challenging as the emirate’s ambitious mega-projects, such as the collection of museums on Saadiyat Island, attract the attention of human rights organisations, who accuse the UAE of violating the rights of migrant construction workers. When emails from the Emirati embassy in Washington were leaked earlier this year, among them was a memo revealing that CFG’s directors had fretted about a proposal to build an NYCFC stadium on parkland in Queens – where there was already public opposition to such a project – out of fear that stadium critics would attack Abu Dhabi’s involvement, targeting its attitude to “gay [rights], women, wealth, Israel”. The project was abandoned, and NYCFC still does not have its own stadium.


There is a central paradox to the economics of football. While the global business has long expanded at annual rates of 10% or more, few clubs have ever made much profit, let alone paid owners an annual dividend. Even the mighty Premier League clubs have, jointly, posted pre-tax losses in three of the last five seasons. And yet the price of clubs keeps rising. Mansour, for example, was estimated to have paid around twice as much for City as the previous owner, the exiled former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, had done just 15 months earlier.

Soriano says that sports franchises are exposed, week-in, week-out, to such relentless competition that they are driven to constantly reinvest profits – meaning that owners only really make money by selling. Others see football clubs as a “rarity” for ultra-rich collectors – with billionaires queueing to join the small, exclusive club of those who own famous clubs. These are also incredibly resilient assets: Manchester City, founded by vicar’s daughter Anna Connell to keep working men off booze and brawling in 1880, is one of many now in their second century. “How many companies that were on the New York stock exchange in 1917 still exist?” Soriano asks.

Manchester City: a tale of love and money

 
 
Read more

Ultimately, value comes from combining talent and emotion – meaning players and the fans who adore them. This is the “love” Soriano talks about, which CFG must turn into money if it is to become the successful multinational corporation that the owners want. If Guardiola ever sobs for City – something only likely if he wins another Champions League trophy, which Soriano hopes will happen this season – then fans of one of England’s most historic football clubs will happily give themselves up to adoration. Many more might follow them.

But CFG’s multinational corporate model somehow obliges us to take a more hard-nosed view of how much this “love” is really worth. Will CFG ever match a Coca-Cola, Disney or Google for size or value? Manchester City will have to win many more games, and many titles, before that happens – by which time, if the model works, other football multinationals might have appeared, all of them transforming love into money at a global scale. In the hard world of business, of course, there is only one way we will ever find out the “true” monetary value of CFG’s global juggernaut, on the day Mansour, or someone else, sells the company, and the market renders its own judgment – and puts a price on all that love.

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15 hours ago, malloy said:

Can someone who has read them post a TL:DR.

The 1st article references western perceived controversies with the United Arab Emirates (owner of CFG) and how CFG run their dealings to avoid shining the spotlight on their true ownership, in order to minimise negative press about the UAE, whilst using the positives that come from owing a globally recognised successful football business to enhance the reputation of the UAE.

 

The 2nd article is a critique on CFG’s business model, including discussion on how it responded to FIFA’s financial fair play rules, and how it differs from the other big world clubs. There is dialogue on the merits of the way CFG is strategically purchasing it’s clubs to create a global business identity  and the benefits of doing this, as well as references to the possible aims (politically) of the UAE in funding such an enterprise. 

It concludes that although CFG’s business model may ultimately be very successful in a footballing sense, time will tell if other clubs will copy this model, and that clubs created under this model may be harder for fans to follow or invest in emotionally, because of the way they exist. For example, you may love drinking Coca Cola, or using Google, but you don’t really care for the businesses themselves.

Edited by Torn Asunder
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If they made the clubs look and operate more independently id be a lot more at ease, but how it has been makes me un easy. Although with the whole red on the kit issue, I wouldnt be surprised if this was all to do with nike being dickheads which is entirely possible. 

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2 hours ago, Dylan said:

If they made the clubs look and operate more independently id be a lot more at ease, but how it has been makes me un easy. Although with the whole red on the kit issue, I wouldnt be surprised if this was all to do with nike being dickheads which is entirely possible. 

If they follow what they have done with Heart/City, then other clubs they have purchased (Girona, Torque) should in due course be required to play in City Blue, and to be rebadged as "something City." If not, the question is why have they been so insistent with our club?

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On 21/12/2017 at 1:27 AM, jw1739 said:

If they follow what they have done with Heart/City, then other clubs they have purchased (Girona, Torque) should in due course be required to play in City Blue, and to be rebadged as "something City." If not, the question is why have they been so insistent with our club?

Honestly, the answer to that is "because Melbourne Heart/City taught CFG that rebranding a club in sky blue and calling it 'City' is not an automatic trigger to providing an influx of fans, which somewhere in their inflated ideas of self-worth they thought it would. The thing is, while I don't think they will try many more ideas to harmonise this club with the one in Manchester, and they won't try such ideas in many other places now, they still can't step back from what they've done here and, say, make the red and white stripes the home kit again because to do so would be to not just admit that they had got it wrong but to very visibly advertise it to the world. In fairness, it's not just aloof, PR-shy companies like CFG who will refuse to do something like that - pretty much any company would do the same unless the response from the customers (or fans, in sporting terms) made such a massive uproar as to make sticking with the current line untenable.

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Had enough of this shit club.

1 sub in the whole match

Not playing Marcin

Not playing McCormack as proper striker and playing him as False 9 which isnt working.

Bouzanis is a dickhead

Kamau slips all the time

Mauk, Kamau and Fitzgerald cant counter attack

Brattan as attacking mid even though he should be center or defense mid

What r u doing Wazza and CFG

Play our youth from now on

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I'm not trying to drag back up the Red and White vs City Blue but we were told we were changing so that we could have more synergy and cross promotion with Man City and NYCFC etc etc.

Two-thirds of the way through us completing the switch to City Blue, has there been anything that could be seen as cross promotion or synergy etc?

 

 

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42 minutes ago, Deeming said:

I'm not trying to drag back up the Red and White vs City Blue but we were told we were changing so that we could have more synergy and cross promotion with Man City and NYCFC etc etc.

Two-thirds of the way through us completing the switch to City Blue, has there been anything that could be seen as cross promotion or synergy etc?

@Deeming Hmm. I can think of competitions where the prize has been a visit to Manchester to watch a City match. I think some of the sponsorships (e.g. Nissan) might be common across the group? CFG appear to be involved in the scouting of our visa players.

The sorts of things I'd hoped for included interchange of players (interchange of male players scuppered by the "Lampard Rule", but we've probably benefited from CFG in recruitment of our women's team) intra-CFG matches (the only one I recall took place on the Gold Coast!) and so on.

There's probably more cross-promotion and synergy behind the scenes that we don't know about, but as members/fans/supporters of Melbourne City I'd say we've got very little out of it so far.

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8 minutes ago, jw1739 said:

@Deeming Hmm. I can think of competitions where the prize has been a visit to Manchester to watch a City match. I think some of the sponsorships (e.g. Nissan) might be common across the group? CFG appear to be involved in the scouting of our visa players.

The sorts of things I'd hoped for included interchange of players (interchange of male players scuppered by the "Lampard Rule", but we've probably benefited from CFG in recruitment of our women's team) intra-CFG matches (the only one I recall took place on the Gold Coast!) and so on.

There's probably more cross-promotion and synergy behind the scenes that we don't know about, but as members/fans/supporters of Melbourne City I'd say we've got very little out of it so far.

From memory there was a bit of stuff early doors (City promos on big screen etc) and some fans cut up rough that they were promoting Manchester at Melb games. Pretty sure the club decided to stop that cross promo stuff on a weekl;y basis after that becaus ethe same thing happend with NYCFC.

Anyway i couldnt care less about cross promotion. Focus on Melb, fuck the rest.

Edited by bt50
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1 hour ago, jw1739 said:

@Deeming Hmm. I can think of competitions where the prize has been a visit to Manchester to watch a City match. I think some of the sponsorships (e.g. Nissan) might be common across the group? CFG appear to be involved in the scouting of our visa players.

The sorts of things I'd hoped for included interchange of players (interchange of male players scuppered by the "Lampard Rule", but we've probably benefited from CFG in recruitment of our women's team) intra-CFG matches (the only one I recall took place on the Gold Coast!) and so on.

There's probably more cross-promotion and synergy behind the scenes that we don't know about, but as members/fans/supporters of Melbourne City I'd say we've got very little out of it so far.

All true, but none of that was contingent on the change to light blue. Exactly what has that done for the supporters or for the local franchise?

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It depends a little how you define “cross-promotion” or “synergy”. Nonetheless, a few other connections I can recall between the clubs are: 

- Melb City men’s team training in Manchester and England

- Melb City women’s team training in The UAE

- JVS going to Manchester/England pre-season

- Some Melb City men’s team players going to Manchester at the end of the EPL season, and seeing Man City get silverware 

- I remember a tribute video made in Manchester, with a few Man City players and/or staff, being played at AAMI Park (but I can’t remember the details, who or why)

- A few players like Caceres and Brattan technically joining Man City or CFG, before joining Melbourne City

- Mooy joining Man City or CFG

- A few Man City Youth Team players joining Melbourne City for pre-season

- Daniel Arzani training or trialling with Man City/CFG in Manchester, before joining Melbourne City

 

From my point of view, CFG is weary about potential negatives from cross-promotion/synergy/connections between the CFG clubs. That’s probably one reason why some of these stories/issues get limited or poor promotion. I don’t think CFG or Melb City has promoted the story of Arzani going to Manchester at all (we only know about it from Arzani’s social media and 1 or 2 articles). 

However, clearly one of the potential positives of Melb City of being owned by CFG is Melb City having more resources (or more access to resources). Melb City using the CFG scouting network is one of the most obvious examples, of a connection with seemingly lots of upside and effectively no negatives (another clear positive example, I believe, is that all of Melb City’s games get the latest video analysis done in Manchester, and then the analysis is sent back here to the Melb City coaching staff’s benefit). So, it could be said that Melb City having limited use of CFG resources-because CFG is weary of negatives, like negative media (David Villa anyone?)-creates its own wasteful negative, that Melb City is apart of the biggest and richest football group in the world, but only uses these benefits and connections in a pretty limited way.

 

It’s probably a rather difficult balancing act, having Melb City benefit from the CFG group while not appearing to be a derivative or feeder club. But year after year Melb City is building more experience with this situation, and this is a central and ongoing fact with Melb City that needs to be gotten right, for Melb City to get some real success. So I’d like to see some more useful connections between the club. And for these connections to be told in a compelling and useful story by the club (if CFG and Melb City don’t explain and tell the story of the connections between our clubs, the newspapers will, and that would be to Melb City’s [and CFG’s] detriment). Two places I’d suggest they start is with New York City and Melbourne City, because as far as I’m aware there have been no connections between our clubs, and given our more comparable levels I see no reason at all why that’s the case (connections between Melb City and NYCFC could surely provide some benefits to both clubs). And another point is Daniel Arzani: the club could surely tell a story about him going to Manchester, being Wowed by Man City and CFG, and realising with CFG and Melbourne City that’s how he could achieve his football dream. Anyway, there’s no shortage of time or opportunities. CFG and the clubs just need to make some smart moves, and I believe we’ll see big benefits.

Edited by Murfy1
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