Rob O'Connor delves into Man City's Champions League ban and ponders whether it could actually be a good wake-up call for modern football ownership.
When the tears from Manchester City’s Champions League ban have dried, and when those who’ve benefited from the mischievous account-keeping have taken a close-up look at how the other half live, there might be room enough to reflect on how we ended up here.
Something like this has been coming ever since Roman Abramovich spent the first rubles that started Chelsea’s revolution in 2003. There has always been something clearly askew with a system that lets a benefactor walk his chosen club around the outside of the premise that success in sport is to be earned, intrinsic in which is the sub-premise that financial power is a run-off of success on the pitch. So clearly in fact, that people got bored of pointing it out really rather quickly.
Instead, a subversion of that basic premise took over, a revisionist rearrangement of the past to justify the mess in the present. Isn’t this just how success works in business? Money is put in to a project from outside so that its owners can seek out and remunerate the best talent, grow the company and place themselves at the forefront of specialist development in their field. The more we thought it through, the more it seemed to make sense.
It’s how industry changes and grows; there has to be money in the pot in order to challenge the form, rather than focusing solely on the pallid day-to-day of getting by. Teams at the bottom end of the league do what they do – long balls, looking for re-starts, disrupting the play – because that’s how to survive against better-resourced sides. Manchester City, Chelsea and Paris Saint Germain approach the technicalities of their work entirely differently, because they are free to invest in a wider diversity of talent and skills.
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