Are Manchester City’s fans troubled by their club’s transfer window endeavours?
I thought that the whole point of choosing to follow City instead of United was that you didn’t want to follow a team mired in debt with a bench full of blatantly there-for-the-wages foreign players. I thought that the point of being a Blue was that – rightly or wrongly - you could regard any success that came your way as earned instead of bought.
I know that it’s early days, and that nobody knows how this new approach to achieving Premiership success is going to work out. I know that it may even work yet. Goodness knows that nobody else has taken a team as lacking in inertia as Man City and thrown this much money at it this quickly before. That said, there are a few things that we do know for sure.
For example, we know for sure that by the time Christmas rolls around Manchester City will be hundreds of millions further in debt than they are today - and that they will not be sitting at the top of the League. We also know that buying every wet-permed toothy superstar in Europe does not guarantee top four status, let alone the League title. Failure to achieve at least the former will surely see Mark Hughes shown the door and the same revolving door policy that has taken hold at Stamford Bridge begin at The City Of Manchester Stadium.
Speaking of Russia’s Western-most suburb, does anybody think that Chelsea are really that much better off for the hundreds of millions that they now owe to Roman Abramovich? With the benefit of hindsight they would have done just as well if they had just hired Mourinho and bought one or two of the over-priced players that they eventually shelled out for.
For all the money spent, it was pre-Abramovich stalwarts like Frank Lampard, John Terry and Joe Cole that seemed most responsible for the success attributed to The Special One.
In these cash-starved times, it turns my stomach to see oil-rich gazillionaires waddle around sporting newly-acquired Premiership football teams in much the same way as Paris Hilton sashays around an international airport showing off the latest fashionably microscopic pooch.
If the current global recession has anything to teach Premiership boards of directors, it is that borrowing money to buy the things that one wants but cannot afford without considering the consequences only leads in one direction.
And that direction is not up to the top of the table.
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