Very interesting read
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009 ... david-conn
How the takeover of Manchester City came just in time to rescue a club in disarray.
Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the chairman of Manchester City, flew in from Abu Dhabi for his first look at the club Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan had bought, on the weekend of the home match with Portsmouth, 21 September, 2008. Contemplating the view from the blue-cushioned seats in the directors box at the City of Manchester Stadium, Khaldoon might have been expected to be pretty content with what had been inherited: Mark Hughes' side helped themselves to a 6-0 feast and Jô, the Brazilian striker signed that summer from CSKA Moscow for £19m, even scored one of the goals.
Mansour had accompanied his takeover with an open letter to City fans, still the only public statement he has made about an acquisition which has since transformed the club and shaken the Premier League's established hierarchy.
In it Mansour introduced "my friend" Khaldoon, whose credentials were set out: chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company and chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority, which provides strategic advice to the Abu Dhabi government.
Mansour's letter promised to "build a team capable of sustaining a presence in the top four of the Premier League and winning European honours".
There were three votes of confidence in Hughes' ability to manage that transformation. The letter also pledged that fans would be listened to by the new owner — "we are very aware that without you there would not be a club to buy" – to honour the club's history, ensure the academy continued to develop even while star names were being signed, and to continue City's "contribution to the community".
These days Khaldoon, the executive chairman Garry Cook and all the senior people at City argue that for all the headline signings – Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Tevez, Gareth Barry, Joleon Lescott, Roque Santa Cruz and the other established players procured in an aggressive year of huge spending – they have striven to stay true to those promises.
Contrary to how he might have been expected to feel, watching a 6-0 victory at his first game, Khaldoon was seriously unimpressed by what he found at the club in the first instance, particularly the pitches and facilities at the Carrington training ground.
Hughes had joined in June 2008, after four high-achieving seasons at Blackburn Rovers. Kia Joorabchian, who first became known to English football as the representative of the unnamed investors who "owned" the economic rights of Tevez and Javier Mascherano, was playing a central role advising City, and he was instrumental in recruiting the manager.
The club were owned by Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed prime minister of Thailand who bought City for £21.5m in June 2007 from the previous shareholders, most substantially the founders of JD Sports, John Wardle and David Makin. Thaksin, who was removed from office in a military coup during 2006, had by then been charged with corruption offences in his home country and had US$2bn of his assets frozen — yet still City's directors approved the sale.
Hughes, in an interview with the Guardian, now admits he was aghast at the state City were in when he took over from Sven-Goran Eriksson in June 2008.
"I made the switch from Blackburn because I thought City was a club with potential, in a good financial position, and there would be money available," he reflected ruefully. "The reality wasn't exactly what was described and sold to me. In fairness we were able to go into the transfer market, but there seemed a focus that players had to be sold, and I realised that maybe the resources weren't in place that I thought."
The Carrington facilities were also not as he had expected, bearing no evidence of investment. "The training ground was not fit for purpose," Hughes recalled plainly. "I was quite shocked by how run down it was. Blackburn Rovers is a good club, well-run and organised, it has top-drawer facilities as a consequence of the money Jack Walker invested, and I made the assumption …" he paused. "That was my failing last year; I made too many assumptions. I assumed that people and facilities would be top quality and it was patently obvious they weren't."
Deals to sign players were already well-advanced when he arrived, including Jô. There was, Hughes said, "confusion and miscommunication" about players who might be sold, and he had to address the first-team squad to tell them he was in charge of football affairs, and not to listen to anything they were told by anyone else. "Whether they believed me or not at that stage is open to debate," he grimaced.
On late 2008 Thaksin and his wife, Potjaman, skipped bail in Thailand and became fugitives after Potjaman was convicted of tax evasion in Bangkok and sentenced to three years in prison.
Hughes, throughout it all, said he tried to stay in the football bubble, hoping that Thaksin's public problems would not affect the money available or work to be done. "Probably naively, I thought you could separate the two," he reflected, quietly, "but obviously you can't.
"If you are single-minded, you have to work purposefully, and if you get to a point where it is untenable and not manageable, then you make the decision to walk away. I never got to that point — but," he shrugged, "I was close."
Cook had joined from Nike – reccommended by Joorabchian; they knew each other because Nike used to have Corinthians' kit deal. Publicly Cook was seen as an apologist for Thaksin, after a disastrous interview he gave at the fag end of the regime, in which he delivered the lines which always haunt him.
"Is he [Thaksin] a nice guy?" Cook had asked rhetorically. "Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can't worry. My role is to run a football club."
Speaking before City's first home game this season, against Wolves, Cook addressed that character reference he gave for Thaksin, who was subsequently convicted of two corruption offences in absentia, and has allegations of serious human rights abuses long laid against him by Amnesty International.
"I feel dreadful about having said it," Cook said, making eye contact and looking genuinely, emotionally, contrite. "I have made some mistakes in my life, but I deeply regretted my failure to do proper research on Thaksin."
It all came out wrong, Cook winced. He had been trying to express the idea that he could not be deflected by Thaksin's political problems, which were outside his control. "The charges did not seem real," Cook said. "It felt like a political situation Thaksin had run away from. I did not want it to affect the day-to-day running of the football club but I was being enlightened on a daily basis."
In fact, Cook revealed, his own job had become a living nightmare as he too realised Thaksin's money was frozen but the people, and infrastructure, were not in place.
Cook felt that the job he had been brought to do, to lead a "renaissance" of City, was impossible, and that "the fabric of the football club had been taken away". He soon realised there was no money; City borrowed from Standard Bank against Premier League TV money not yet received, and bought players on deposit.
"Thaksin's money was locked away. Every bit of revenue was being accelerated and the players were being mortgaged. We got into a position where we couldn't pay the players – and John Wardle [the former chairman who had sold his shares and left the board] was asked to lend the club £2m. I was working stupid hours to make sure I was not missing anything; I was living in this paranoia."
Cook had been tempted away after 13 years at Nike's headquarters in Portland, Oregon, working his way through sales, and international business development, to latterly become president of the Jordan brand. He had been earning handsomely, and he came to believe he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
"My wife had packed up everything in our house in the States, the furniture was in transit, and I sat in my hotel room in Cheshire crying down the phone. I felt I had unravelled everything, undone all my hard work, because I had been seduced into this role. I realised I had taken my family into the lion's den."
Vincent Kompany, the then 22-year-old Belgian centre-half, arrived from Hamburg for £6m to further his ambitions, and, sitting recently in the revamped Carrington, surrounded by the new stellar signings, he recalled the turmoil he found at City. "At the time I signed I was supposed to meet the owner, but then I was told he had to cancel it to go into hiding somewhere. It was a bit of a funny situation."
Stephen Ireland, now 23 and who had come over from Cork to join the academy at the age of 14 – after being invited for trials at every Premier League club – said he felt immediately comfortable at City, a "family club", but the period under Eriksson's management had been too lax, and became bizarre when the club's owner turned fugitive.
"When Thaksin took over everybody thought it was going to be massive, and it wasn't," Ireland remembered. "There was no stability, people weren't sure what was round the corner. It was mad, that somebody like that, who was on the run and had been convicted of corruption, could own our football club, for our careers to be in his hands. Everybody was wondering what's next. Thankfully we got a new owner."
Hughes was playing in the City academy's golf day at the Marriott hotel in Worsley, Salford's leafy suburb, when he began to receive phone calls telling him that Sulaiman al-Fahim had announced an Abu Dhabi takeover of the club. Sky News arrived to trail Hughes round the course and by the end of the day City had signed Robinho, a move the manager approved. He recalled al-Fahim bragging about City signing galácticos, fuelling the richest-club-in-the-world label.
"I knew from the beginning we could not rise to that expectation," the manager said. "We didn't have the right players, we didn't have the right quality. It took a while, but the new owners recognised that talking like that was not the way they like to do business. They wanted to make an impact, and did so by signing Robinho, but the statements after that did not reflect Abu Dhabi in a good light and that is when Khaldoon was asked to come in and take over."
Khaldoon first met Hughes when he flew in to Manchester and they went for a meal at an Italian restaurant, Stocks. Both quiet, intense and driven characters, they were mutually impressed. Hughes then took his new chairman on the grand tour around decrepit Carrington.
"I must say I was extremely surprised," Khaldoon recalled. "I took a tour with Mark and I couldn't believe what I saw. It was not the minimum level of infrastructure required for a top-tier club.
"When I returned I immediately went to Sheikh Mansour, showed him pictures of the facility and he was very straight to say, 'this is unacceptable'. There were some quick fixes, quick wins, we could do at City, like fixing the gym, the medical facility – we had to do it quickly, because it was simply unacceptable."
Changing the squad and the culture which, Hughes believed, was too slack, would take longer, but the Abu Dhabi owners pulled in contractors they knew and the gym and treatment rooms were overhauled in four weeks.
Where before there were a handful of stationary bikes, a couple of treadmills, no dedicated weights room and desultory gloom, now there are 20 bikes, all the weights and the multi-gym Hughes' staff wanted for training and rehab, a six-bed medical centre, refurbished hydrotherapy plunge baths, a new kit room, and motivational messages slapped optimistically on the walls. One is Muhammad Ali's famous quote: "The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights."
Khaldoon was also taken aback by the holes he found in the organisation. A businessman schooled in corporate systems, chief executive of an Abu Dhabi fund with more than $10bn of government assets under investment, he found City had no personnel department, no finance director.
"I found it shocking," he reflected. "In the famous Premier League, to run without basic functions like these. I'll be frank, I expected it to be more structured. One of the big surprises was how amateurish it was."
After Mansour's takeover there was relentless speculation that he would sack Hughes and replace him with a marquee name like Jose Mourinho, the assumption being that Mansour's votes of confidence would prove as worthless as they notoriously have been from homegrown chairmen.
It was widely thought that Cook would go too, but in fact Mansour and Khaldoon quickly decided that Cook, like Hughes, was one of the biggest assets they had inherited.
Both men flew to Abu Dhabi to meet Mansour in the early weeks after the takeover. They spoke in the grounds of the sheikh's palace. Hughes remembered they talked for an hour, about Hughes' approach as a modern manager, which includes dedicated sports science and performance-analysis departments, his desire to build a no-excuses culture around the players, the positions where the squad needed strengthening.
"We left," recalled the manager, "and within an hour of driving back to the hotel, Khaldoon had a phone call from Sheikh Mansour saying we have to put something out on the [news] wires, that I had a complete mandate to carry on. That was a huge boost."
Khaldoon denies they ever considered sacking Hughes, whom he believes will become "a great manager", or that any ultimatums were given, despite grim patches of form in the months before the January transfer window. They also retained Cook, whom they believe has the ambition, and ability, to reconstruct City's operation into one befitting a truly top club.
"No question, Garry knows, and will say he didn't start on the right foot," Khaldoon smiled. "People make mistakes. But I could feel there was more good than mistakes. People say we took a gamble and a bet — not really. It only took a couple of meetings for me to see what Garry was about and what he could do for this club."
The chairman of Manchester City then turned again to the way in which the club links with the far greater responsibility he shoulders, for the strategic direction of Abu Dhabi, and the image, and the values the emirate seeks to embody.
"We believe in loyalty," he said. "We don't leave our men behind, we stick with them. We went through difficult times last season, but we all faced it together. And now, I hope, we are looking at a brighter future."
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