Daniel Taylor...good article.

As someone who still remembers the dank, beery odour that used to drift across the stands at Maine Road, back in the days when the football could be supremely miserable and the idea of corporate hospitality was often an unplugged fridge stocked with cans of warm Strongbow, it was certainly a reminder of the changing times at Manchester City to discover the modern-day club now has an executive suite styled as a mini–Harvey Nichols department store.

It is, according to the blurb, the “ultimate match-day experience” where clients can browse designer handbags, shoes, jewellery and the kind of temptations you might not ordinarily expect while waiting for Eliaquim Mangala to trip up over his own legs. There is a cocktail bar, personal shopping assistants, a menu of different pampering treatments and a selection of perfumed ladies who can apply the latest shades of nail varnish, all within an 8ft by 11ft box. It is arranged by someone going by the title of Relationship Manager – and there might even be a game of football if everyone remembers to look outside the tinted windows.
The club has certainly changed immeasurably since my early days of covering it on a regular basis when the first welcome used to be the sandpaper rasp of Mike Corbett, a former bombardier and native of Glasgow, greeting visitors from a cabin decorated with posters of Ricky Hatton. These days, it is a small army of blazer-wearing officials with earpieces and walkie-talkies. Directors are ferried around in chauffeur-driven limousines, menus are put together by Michelin-starred chefs and, looking at some of the more unsuccessful signings, there is a level of expenditure that reminds me of an old line by a former Guardian colleague, David Hopps, in the years when Leeds United had ambitions to be part of the super-rich. “The Leeds programme has a team‑sheet so glossy that it is impossible to write on it,” Hopps wrote. “They should have given Peter Ridsdale chequebooks like that.”
The difference, of course, is that City are never going to run out of money, sitting on a 10th of the planet’s oil reserves and operating with the kind of long-term strategy that means nobody can suspect any longer the people bankrolling the club from Abu Dhabi are merely passing through. Pep Guardiola is on his way and the new manager has the restorative powers, the football intelligence and force of personality that make it easy to understand why so many people envisage a new period of domination in English football.
Yet Guardiola’s brief also entails winning the Champions League and that is not going to be straightforward when City’s chequebook has often been used so unproductively in the transfer market – combined with Manuel Pellegrini, like many of his players, being off form for the last 18 months – we are now in the almost implausible position where the manager in waiting is inheriting a team that might not qualify for next season’s competition.
Another Premier League manager – a man I would regard as one of the more astute members of the profession – confided over lunch recently that he thought City needed another eight or nine players if they were to become the team that Guardiola would want them to be. “Pep is not the problem,” was the gist of it. “He is too good not to make it work.” It was the next line that resonated. “There is a problem though,” he added, “and it’s the players.”
It has certainly been a strange season for City bearing in mind they have won the Capital One Cup, as well as reaching the Champions League quarter-finals for the first time, but still leave the distinct impression of having regressed in the last couple of years. As Roy Keane put it, that it is “cuckoo land” to believe the current team, lacking structure and plainly in decline, will be passing around the European Cup at San Siro on 28 May.
For that, a sizeable amount of the blame has to be directed towards Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, the two executives who have targeted the wrong players, overspent on others and generally had such an erratic record their own positions might have come under much scrutiny were it not for the professional background that made the Guardiola deal possible. Even then, there is a pile of evidence they have fallen short with their recruitment programme, however difficult it has been to negotiate Uefa’s financial fair-play stipulations, and unfortunately for Pellegrini the same applies to his own work and the fundamental reasons why he is being let go at the end of the season with a year to go on his contract.
The common misconception is that the deterioration coincides with Guardiola announcing he was moving to England and diminishing Pellegrini’s status in front of the players now they know he has, in effect, already been fired in advance. The bottom line, however, is that City have actually been floundering ever since they began the season with five wins on the bounce. Since then, they have taken a mere 36 points from the subsequent 24 games. There have been eight defeats, one in every three matches, and a league table covering that period (seven out of the eight months played this season) would leave them in ninth position, 19 points off the top – and behind, among others, Southampton and Stoke City.


Yes, we all know Manchester United have been wretched, lurching from one crisis to another and frequently leaving the sense that a bewildering manager and inadequate bunch of players do not fully understand what it means to wear the club’s colours. And yes, this has been the worst Chelsea team of the Roman Abramovich era, encompassing possibly the most chastening experience of José Mourinho’s professional life. Yet, going into this weekend, United had taken more points than City since 13 September and Chelsea had the same. Over the same timeframe, West Bromwich Albion would be two points behind the team put together on Abu Dhabi riches and so would Bournemouth.
This does not change the fact City’s supporters can be remarkably optimistic about the new era and the changing face of a club that began the 21st century with a 1-1 draw at Crewe Alexandra and a 5-2 home defeat to Leeds. Nonetheless, it does feel like another overhaul might be necessary bearing in mind the evidence that is stacking up against the current personnel.
If Guardiola studied City’s results against the top-half teams, he would discover they have won two out of 13 games this season. What does it say that only one other club – Aston Villa, this season’s Slapstick XI – have won fewer, or that City have gone 21 games without recording back-to-back victories and, again, that there is only Villa of all the top-division teams who have managed a longer stretch? Or, indeed, that the most expensively assembled squad in English football, featuring 11 players in the range of £22m to £55m, has managed only 13 goals from 14 away matches? The team has not recorded lower figures at the corresponding stages of any other season in the Sheikh Mansour era and only three clubs have scored fewer times. One is Tony Pulis’s West Brom. The other two are in the relegation places – Sunderland and Newcastle.
All this must be pretty startling for Guardiola and the mind goes back to an interview last summer with David James when the former City goalkeeper predicted his old club would not even finish in the top four. It seemed faintly preposterous at the time. Yet it turns out it is going to be a close-run thing and, for all Guardiola’s gifts, the new man could probably be forgiven for looking at the league table and wondering if it might need more work than he initially anticipated.

If I was Pep, I'd be asking for carte blanche to sideline players that don't want to leave and a transfer budget of up to £300M to buy the players I wanted. Otherwise it would be goodbye Vienna.

And those two clowns have wasted so much money on so much dross. We should be street ahead of everyone. We could have had Sanchez instead of him going to Arsenal for example.

Quite frankly, the squad has become a mess.

Agree Dawg.

I'm fucking livid that the best defence we can put out is MDM and Mango. What a fucking waste.