Falastur

As mentioned before, while I'd love to see it happen, the sheer amount of money that top teams receive from invites to play friendlies mean that Manchester City simply can't afford to take part in one.

Most accounts seem to regard this as a mixture of supporting Girona to allow them to stay up in La Liga (bear in mind that Guardiola may be a Barca legend but he is still ultimately a Catalan and Girona is now Catalonia's #3 team) and providing a stable place for Manchester City's youngsters to go out on loan and play against teams that, regrettably, Melbourne City don't play against. I'm not sure to what extent this is actually going to affect Melbourne City.

Yep. Another article here, for those who haven't seen it already: https://www.foxsports.com.au/football/melbourne-city-sign-esports-fifa-gamer-marcus-gomes-days-before-millions-watch-him-at-fifa-interactive-world-cup/news-story/f7c4e0f5344e012168c53ffc968a5f81

I just watch it and hear "OH IT'S ENGELAAR"

Got to be the Engelaar half-way line goal for me. Was one of the first Heart games I ever remember seeing, and it definitely stuck in the memory.

Would be interesting to see if it did happen. CFG usually prefers their marquee names to be less egocentric that Zlatan, but no-one can deny that he certainly adds star value to a side.

Pair of scissors and a bit of thread and you've got yourself two fine half-and-half scarves right there. Fun for all the family.

Haha. I get what you're saying but the work of the assistant manager is frequently completely different to the actual manager themselves. A lot of assistants will have only peripheral involvement in tactics, for example, which is the most important part of being a successful manager.

I like that he's being kept in the club family and I hope he becomes a successful manager etc, but I tend to be sceptical of appointing ex-players to senior positions unless they've proven themselves. I was on record in other places as being against the appointment of Patrick Vieira to NYCFC and while I'm happy to have been proven wrong on that account it hasn't convinced me any more of the wisdom of the principle as a whole. By all means I hope that Paddy can manage the first team one day, but only if he's earned it by genuine success at lower levels first.

I agree with you in principle, but in practice - at least for Manchester City - they can't afford to do anything less than accept the highest-paying friendly invitations that they receive. Top PL clubs can be offered several million to make a single appearance in pre-season. Play four or five friendlies at that rate and that's a whole new player you can afford. That's why I suspect CFG friendlies will be few and far between.

I'm probably behind the times, but I thought that the A-League suspended all talk of adding teams a few weeks after suggesting they were looking for bids?

That really is a miserable shirt - it looks like it's made of the same heavier materials you saw in use 5-10 years ago. That said, I agree that it's a lot of trouble to have gone to for a fake. Anyway, where's the A-League badge?

He didn't even watch training most of the time. He just did office work and then got his assistants to update him on how coaching went at the end of the day.

Yeah, Orlando are doing surprisingly well this year. However, their previous season under Kreis was every bit the disappointment that Kreis' time at NYCFC was, so it remains to be seen whether it's a flash in the pan or the start of something new.

Pretty much. When Khaldoon and Garry Cook sacked Mark Hughes back in 2009, they were ruthlessly savaged by the British media for being everything wrong with football - heck, a full year on, when Hughes's new Fulham team played Manchester City, leading sports journalists declared live on TV that it would be a "victory for football" if Fulham were to win the game, for no reason other than because they thought they club needed to be taught a lesson about how unfair it was to sack him after a mere 18 months. The fact that they had retained a managerwho they hadn't even appointed in the first place (he was hired just weeks before the takeover) for so long was entirely irrelevant. This is also before the Barcelona guys joined CFG, and everyone knows that Barcelona like to base the way they work on natural succession rather than frequent change and so on. Ever since then, it's seemed fairly strongly to me that they have a real aversion to not giving managers long enough to prove themselves. The only really like to step in when they think that things just aren't working. Firing Jason Kreis in New York after only one season is pretty much the only time that they have leapt to action since then, and I can only presume that that is because they were just getting the vibe that he simply was not working in terms of what they wanted from a manager. Others here have observed multiple times that in spite of JVS' serial failures, he was slowly achieving what could be deemed his minimum required standards every year. It was always my gut instinct that they were keeping him on 'til the end of his contract simply because they felt that a sacking would go against their word from the start of each season that he would continue if he met X, Y and/or Z conditions. People will say that them bringing in a new manager now means that the clock is reset and we're now going to be stuck with a new guy who could serially fail until the end of his contract. The corollary to hiring a brand new manager, of course, is that he will have targets set at exactly where they think Melbourne City should now be at, and not based on a function of growth since the manager's previous season. Anyway, as Malloy says, whether you think this is a positive or negative, that's the indication I get of how CFG operates.

Interesting the bit at the end:

Lyon women beat Manchester City women 3-1 (Champions League). Torque drew 0-0 with Miramar Misiones. Melbourne City's NPL team are in fact the only CFG club to have come out of any fixture ahead this weekend.

They're a CFG sponsor after teaming up with Manchester City in 2015. Also this (which I'm decidedly not a fan of): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-17/manchester-city-signs-premier-league-s-first-sleeve-sponsor

I think it's quite possible (though not certain). However, I will say that I suspect that they would have to register the name change before a season, so likely the earliest that they would change their name is by the end of 2017.

I think he must be doing both jobs at the same time, because the Manhattan Kickers article was written in September 2016, three months after the Olyroos appointment?

Zero chance that CFG hire someone that they already fired for being so argumentative that barely a single person from the board to the admin staff could stand him by the end. I love Mancini for what he accomplished in Manchester, but I have to be completely honest: talk of him being sacked for failing to win the league again and for losing the FA Cup in 2013 are off the mark. He was fired because he ended up with barely any friends left at the club because of his abrasive manner with those he interacted. On a completely different note, and I know that this hasn't really been raised in some time but I just wanted to get it out there: I've finally worked out where Gombau went when he went to NYC. I know a lot of people seem to have (or, did have) this theory that he was working for NYCFC and thus being kept in tactical reserve until, like King Arthur or a well-timed Dominos Pizza, he is needed most by his people. He's actually working to spearhead David Villa's own "DV7" academy, which is a CFG-like-but-not-CFG-like group of academies which aren't owned but all co-operate to share a DV-based style of football which is their signature. Gombau specifically has been designing what this style of football should look like: http://www.manhattankickersfc.com/pages/DV7 Of course, Villa is himself a NYCFC player, so there's still very much a link, but he's conclusively not on CFG's payroll and my gut feeling is that the fact that he's not working directly for CFG suggests that he's very much independent from them and would not necessarily feel compelled to move if they asked him.

I would've thought that too, although the evidence is (that is, the press release even refers to it) that long before CFG closed the deal with them they'd already stumped up the cash for Torque's own version of CFA, plus apparently they are paying to have a stadium in Minas (note: not the city Torque are from) done up, which makes it sound like at the very least they want to be seen to be investing properly on giving the club resources. I suspect that any players they do pass through Torque they will want to play there for at least a season each in order to avoid any suggestions of literally just being a slant on third-party ownership.

I don't see it either. He may be a well-known name in the A-League but he's still nowhere near the national team so I can't see him being a huge draw for fans as a big-name signing, and that's if they make it back to the Primera Division, as suggesting he would sign for Torque right now is like suggesting that Mile Jedinak might be tempted to return home by the prospect of playing in the NPL. That would be the only reason I can see CFG might see an interest in it, because their record so far suggests that they aren't buying multiple clubs in order to play annual games of musical chairs with their players, especially with moving players to less prestigious leagues.

Sorry I didn't respond to this before. I wrote a whole long response on my phone before I headed to work, and then as I switched to another tab to copy a link, it reloaded the page and I lost everything I'd written. Just got back in front of my PC now, so I'm taking this opportunity to catch up. Basically, my point was: fair play. Good research, and I wasn't aware of most of that. I will accept that that is fairly direct and I couldn't hold it against anyone to be upset at CFG on the basis of that. I will say that all of those points seem to relate to the very early period of CFG's involvement, though, so my only response can be that everything since then is fan-sustained hype, but I can't deny that they definitely did contribute to their own expectations after all if that was said.

On the plus side, now we get to use this when things go wrong during the games: