Please explain how it is not sustainable? I'd have thought a club that earns hundreds of millions every year and backed by a man with an estimated wealth of around £20bn would be able to sustain spending £200m or so every summer. It seems to have worked without any problems so far. And please explain your view without recourse to the rather silly hypothetical question of 'what if he just decides to leave tomorrow?'.
Yes - well. This is the crux of it, if you’re regarding FFP as some sort of general “fair play” instrument. Which it isn't, as far as I'm concerned, not if "fair" means "leveling the playing field" or something approaching that.
Nevertheless, in terms of how people (fans) perceive things, if it is considered more “fair” to be richer than your rivals because you have used your fanbase and your success on the pitch to get ahead, City comes out worse looking than United. You can’t deny that, presumably.
However, it seems arbitrary enough as a criterion from a certain angle. If it weren’t for Sky, United wouldn’t have taken the strides we took, regardless of our expansion of Old Trafford. It was the TV thing that got the ball rolling for real, and that wasn’t United’s idea. We capitalized on it, being shrewd, but it wasn’t our brain child.
Still, the difference between United and City is pretty obvious: When Fergie took over, United were an under-performing giant. We had the highest attendance in England in spite of being behind Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal (even Leeds, Forest, Villa, not to mention Derby, arguably also Tottenham) in terms of major trophies in the era after the Busby years. We were a “brand” just waiting to be exploited. City were, let’s be honest, nothing: A mediocre English big club (yes, that’s a category - you had history but were nothing special, below the likes of Newcastle and Sunderland, for instance, in terms of historical significance) whose only claim to fame in recent years was being United’s local rivals.
So, was our success in the Fergie era more “deserved” than yours in the oil era? Meaningless term, obviously. Neither club “deserved” anything from a moral standpoint. But there is - again - an obvious difference: We capitalized on general trends because we were already a giant. You didn’t capitalize on anything - you were simply acquired by a filthy rich party. The only tangible upside you had going for you, compared to other historically significant English football clubs (again, City are among them, I don’t deny that) was the location: You were the rivals of the biggest team in the land, thus making you ideal “noisy neighbours”. Overtaking United, in Manchester, was a goal worth pursuing - much more so than investing in the same, or a similar, manner in some other club on that level.
CAVEAT: The above is, of course, assuming Mansour realized he purchased “City” and not “Manchester” (as United is known as throughout most of the world).
Where did he mention UEFA? He was talking about opposition fans and people in the media.
