It was the look on Mark Hughes’s face that lingered in the memory. His first press conference since that seminal day – 1 September 2008 – when Manchester City came under the ownership of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Hughes was behind his desk in the manager’s office, trying to make sense of it all, and occasionally looking up to the whiteboard where Robinho’s name had been added to his team for their weekend game. Robinho? No words were necessary.
Everything was very different at Manchester City back then. The greeting at the main entrance came in the Glaswegian accent of Jim Corbett, a former bombardier, in the hut he had decorated with posters of Ricky Hatton, rather than the welcome you can expect today from a small battalion of security guards, with their walkie-talkies, blazers and dangling earpieces.
City did not even include a trophy cabinet when they moved into the Commonwealth Games stadium in 2003. All their collectables, including a porcelain cow, were stored in a dimly lit room and nobody should be surprised that when Vincent Kompany arrived with the most fortuitous timing, 10 days before the takeover, he can remember the dressing-room toilet did not even have a door. The groundsman, Lee Jackson, will tell you City were so skint he did not have enough white paint to do the lines on the pitch.
And, despite everything, there was something rather endearing about City in the years before the money, when it was Manchester’s other club. “Manchester City has long been perceived as a ‘friendly’ club,” Mark Hodkinson writes in the book, Blue Moon, that offers the most insightful account, going back to the late 1990s. “In stereotypical terms, United is your out-of-town hypermarket, faceless, homogenised and shamelessly avaricious, while City is your friendly corner shop, all ‘how are you?’ and ‘nice-to-see-you’ love.”
But City were also a club that dipped in and out of crisis, with a finely tuned reputation for magnificent failure, usually in comical circumstances. Their final game of the 2007-08 season was a nine-goal thriller at Middlesbrough. The problem was Middlesbrough scored eight. The wind howled, the curtains trembled. Kompany can also recall wondering why there was no coffee machine at the training ground. “We can do you a cup of tea,” he was told. But coffee? No, pal, not at this club.
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City were football’s Slapstick XI and the idea they were about to become the richest club on the planet felt rather perplexing for those of us who had covered their bleakest times and remembered Sir Alex Ferguson listing United’s rivals, in order, as Liverpool, Arsenal and Leeds. City tended not to get a mention unless Paul Hince, the chief sports writer and long-suffering Blue, was there from the Manchester Evening News and Ferguson wanted the latest from “the Temple of Doom”.
Yet here we are, 10 years to the day, and maybe it is easier to understand now what Hughes meant about City wanting to be “bigger than the Big Four” (albeit with him not lasting too long under the new regime). Maybe Pelé was being a touch harsh when he said Robinho “needs serious counselling” for choosing City. Perhaps we journalists should not have sniggered when Garry Cook, City’s accident-prone chairman in those days of change, told us they would, in time, be the top team in Manchester. Cook came out with that line when the Premier League and Champions League trophies were United’s possessions, with Cristiano Ronaldo about to win his first Ballon d’Or and an advert for MUTV showing a skip outside Old Trafford, filled with empty cans of silver polish. It turns out Cook knew more than us, after all.
Bernard Halford, the club’s life president, was there on the night everything changed, as the man who signed off the Robinho deal. “The papers went through at 10 minutes to midnight and there were fans outside, driving around the stadium, beeping their horns,” he recalls. “For City to spend £32m on a player was unheard of. A year before that, we’d have expected the entire team to cost £32m.”
Halford’s association with City goes back to 1972 when he was appointed as the club secretary. He has worked with 22 managers (excluding caretakers), the last being Manuel Pellegrini, been through five relegations, five promotions and, pre-2008, toasted one solitary trophy. He is 77 now and better qualified than anyone to talk about the transformation of Manchester’s football landscape.
“The biggest thing that tells you what we’ve become is when you’re in your car. I used to drive from Royton, where I lived, to Maine Road and I’d count how many shirts or scarves I’d see. Kids on zebra crossings, walking to school, that sort of thing. Red or blue? United or City? They outnumbered us, considerably. Not now, though. Now it can be 10-0, or even more.”
Not everything has run as intended since Sheikh Mansour added the club to his portfolio. Cook’s 83-page blueprint pledged to turn them into “the Virgin of Asia and the world” with their own line of energy drinks, City-branded Mini Coopers, scooters, telephone cards, designer clothing stores and a chain of City Eating fast-food restaurants.
Those plans never took off and – no apologies for repeating this story – Cook’s greatest moment came early on, discussing transfer targets with the new owners on a crackling telephone line from Abu Dhabi to Manchester. A comment about “it’s getting messy” was misheard and Cook immediately fired off a £30m bid to Barcelona. Apparently, he heard the instruction, amid all the excitement, as “let’s get Messi”.
Likewise, perhaps you remember Sulaiman al-Fahim, Abu Dhabi’s equivalent of the old Harry Enfield Loadsamoney character, who fronted up the takeover and talked about making a £135m bid for Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as going for just about every other superstar footballer who might be available. Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry and Fernando Torres were all namechecked. “Ronaldo has said he wants to play for the biggest club in the world, so we will see if he is serious,” Fahim said.
To give them their due, Abu Dhabi quickly realised it needed a different approach. Fahim was sidelined and, PR-wise, City have got more right than wrong on the upward trajectory, featuring three Premier League titles, one FA Cup, three League Cups, 11 trips to Wembley, Sergio Agüero in the 94th minute, David Silva, Yaya Touré, Kevin De Bruyne, the 6-1 at Old Trafford, Carlos Tevez and Welcome to Manchester, Pep Guardiola and the Centurions, Mario Balotelli and Why Always Me?
As anniversaries go, not everyone will wish to celebrate. Critics will question whether the mind-boggling amounts of money have been good for the sport as a whole. Abu Dhabi’s human rights record will conjure up headlines of a different kind and, as long as that remains the case, there will be misgivings about the people at the top of the empire.
At City, though, the most prominent banner inside the stadium is to thank Sheikh Mansour and, though Robinho stayed only 15 months, it was the Brazilian’s signing that made the rest of the football take notice. City gazumped Chelsea in the process, making it the first time Roman Abramovich had ever been outmuscled in the transfer market. There was also a late attempt – unsuccessful – to hijack Dimitar Berbatov’s move from Tottenham Hotspur to Manchester United.
“I remember it [the takeover] being announced on television with all the transfer deadline news and, the next thing, we’ve signed Robinho,” Kompany says. “As soon as he’s there, you’re looking at him and thinking: ‘OK, he’s extra-terrestrial.’ He would make us look silly doing keepie-ups with rolled-up socks. We were like: ‘OK, when can we head it?’ But then you start measuring yourself up against one of the best players in the world and you think: ‘You know what, I can do it.’ It was important to have a player like this within our team and it raised the profile of the club.”
And, yes, Kompany can also report that it is possible now to get his brew of choice. “It was like one of those television makeover shows where they are building stuff and then there’s the big reveal. We went away for the international break and they changed everything at the training ground. I don’t know how they did it so fast. Next thing you know, we had this massive coffee machine come in from Nespresso. I think it was used so much it needed to go in for maintenance after two weeks. I said: ‘I told you coffee would work here.’”
Those pitches are leased now to Bury of League Two. In the old days, City trained at Platt Lane, in the heart of Moss Side, where the local drunks would gather by the fence to shout abuse as the players jogged by. Now, there is a village-sized training ground opposite the Etihad Stadium and, as Halford says, it is a “buzzing area” full of new opportunities.
“It’s beyond a football supporter’s dream, Alice in Wonderland stuff, and it’s not just the football team, it’s everything the sheikh has created for the city of Manchester,” Halford adds. “We’re top of everything – community schemes, job creation in what was a deprived area, our training ground, our academy. It’s not just a snowflake on the river, it’s long term.”
And the next 10 years? That perhaps is the era that should frighten City’s rivals the most. “You can only see more pots on the shelf and, before long, the Champions League,” Halford says. “That would be the ultimate dream. And when we’ve won it, we’d say: ‘We want to win it again next year? Can we do it again? And again?’ We want to be up there with the great Real Madrid and Barcelona sides.”