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Turning? Are they now trying not to make money?

Are they fuck as like turning the amount of hacks on twitter telling everyone it won't be long now before Mata signs for them tells you this.

Got in from work tonight and my electric was off...been off all day apparently..so my milk was turning. Not the media. The smell is similar.

We have better written forum posts that that drivel, even if they were slapping around the rags.

Just a bandwagoner I guess but this from the Guardian (Daniel Taylor) would have been previously unthinkable in its positivity - probably hurt to write it but perhaps he recognises the wind of change,

"The football landscape in Manchester is changing. Just head through the eastern part of town, along Alan Turing Way, and a new stadium is starting to thrust skywards directly opposite Manchester City's ground, in the same way that Mini Estadi nestles beside the Camp Nou. The Etihad Campus, City's new training complex, will be operating within six months, with a 7,000-seat stadium as its focal point. The difference with Barcelona is the 80 acres of spare land that City have for development around it, now a frenzy of hard hats and scaffolding operating to the designs of Rafael Viñoly, the Uruguayan architect whose portfolio includes Jongno Tower in Seoul, Carrasco international airport in Montevideo and various additions to the skylines of New York, Tokyo and Los Angeles, among others.

For those of us who remember the old City, these are moments when it can feel like an entirely different club and it brings to mind a line in Pies and Prejudice, Stuart Maconie's book about his travels through the north. Manchester, he wrote, was still a "mucky kid at heart, but having been mithered by Mam and had their faces wiped with spittle on some civic hankie, they've scrubbed up dead smart." It encapsulates everything that has happened to City, on the journey from chip-fat to champagne.

Viñoly's latest project will feature a long sweeping footbridge, named the Commonwealth Way, to link the two grounds over a dual-carriageway. There will be 16 other pitches, accommodation for players, apartments for relatives, a medical centre, a boardroom, a media theatre and the kind of five-star luxury that it is fair to say was not always evident in the years the team trained on council pitches in Moss Side.

Then again, a lot has changed since the days Platt Lane doubled up as a meeting point for the local down-and-outs. Paul Lake tells the story in his autobiography about how a noisy troupe would congregate by the meshed perimeter fence to abuse the players on their laps of the pitch, including one guy whose party trick was to smile menacingly and rub his crotch up and down the netting.

"Wonder whether Bryan Robson has to cope with this at the Cliff?" was an often-heard lament among the players. Which feels like a piece of classic City, long before the days when they shelled out £639,000 a day on wages, ferried executives around in chauffeur-driven cars and once surprised Barcelona after a conference call from Abu Dhabi to Manchester was misunderstood, specifically the words "it's getting messy" and – true story – Garry Cook, bless him, put in a £30m bid for Lionel Messi.

"Typical City" – the phrase that they came to hate – tends to mean another five- or six-goal thrashing these days and the free-scoring exploits of Manuel Pellegrini's side tell only part of the story. City's Under-18s are unbeaten since 28 September and won 2-0 on Saturday against Manchester United. The Under-21s have not lost in three months. At senior level, City fans will have a better understanding now why the people of Málaga have named a street after Pellegrini and Roberto Mancini was let go.

At junior level, City's Under-13s and Under-14s are national champions. Nobody should get too far ahead of themselves but if Abu Dhabi's royal family continue to apply the same mix of hard ambition and incalculable wealth, it is not outlandish to wonder whether what we are seeing now is leading to a period of extended domination.

If it is a deception, apologies in advance for being reeled in. For now, though, it feels like common sense after City's anachronistic run of freewheeling wins. A 5-1 joyride at Tottenham, to go with a 6-0 against the same opposition in Manchester, the various ordeals for Arsenal (6-3), United (4-1), Norwich (7-0), West Ham (9-0 over two legs of the Capital One Cup semi-final), and not forgetting another eight occasions when City have scored at least four; these are results that belong to a black-and-white era.

Their latest financial results show that annual revenue, £87m only four years earlier, has risen to £271m, overtaking Chelsea and Arsenal and putting City sixth in the Deloitte money list. Yet there are other ways to calculate the club's growth. In the space of a year, City's ticket office have dealt with fans from 76 different countries. City's worldwide television audience is up by 133% since 2009 (in the UK it is by 103%) and 15.2m of the annual 33m visitors to their website are from abroad. No trophies are awarded for this sort of thing but it is still monumental progress that the club's YouTube channel attracted 60m hits over the year. Barcelona's, to put it into context, had 50.5m, Santos are next with 30.7m, then Real Madrid (24.5m) and Juventus (19.6m).


United fan like to taunt City with an adaptation of the old Inspiral Carpets song: "This is how it feels to be City/This is how it feels to be small/This is how it feels when your world means nothing at all." It no longer feels so cutting when pre-season fixtures in the United States are selling out within 20 minutes and analysis by the Mailman Group shows that City are suddenly more than twice as popular as any other European club on China's main two social media sites, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.

In other ways, City are still in a game of catch-up. At Old Trafford, there is a stadium tour every seven minutes and a plausible explanation why the television companies have selected every one of United's FA Cup ties for live coverage since late-January 2005. Repetitive? Yes. Unimaginative? Absolutely. But you can understand the logic when United pulled in higher viewing figures for their game against Crawley Town in 2011 than watched Arsenal play Barcelona three days earlier.

The modern-day City do not have the same kind of pull. Newspaper data also shows that they have plenty of ground to make up, comparing the number of website hits a City match would ordinarily attract compared to one featuring United, Liverpool or Arsenal. The drop to that next group down, comprising Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona, is considerable.

These are relatively small matters, however. The bottom line is that success on the pitch has to happen first and providing that it is sustained, the rest falls into place over time. Every league match at the Etihad is a sell-out these days and cup-tie attendances – so poor a few years ago the crowds used televised fixtures to chant their displeasure to the stay-aways – now average above 42,000, an increase of 7%. Plans have already been drawn up to increase the stadium's capacity from 48,000 to 60,000. It is ambitious but the work will not be undertaken unless extensive research confirms it will be worthwhile. For the current campaign, season tickets were sold out within 90 minutes.

A £1bn outlay from Sheikh Mansour will always polarise opinion and it is certainly an unorthodox place of sport when middle-ranking staff are asked to choose between a BMW or Range Rover for a company car (in a different time, it was something small and inexpensive with one strict condition: nothing red).

It is tempting as well to wonder how seriously Uefa have looked at the bloated sponsorship agreement with Etihad Airways, from the Abu Dhabi empire, that has helped City tick the financial fair play boxes. But it was always futile expecting a forensic investigation and before anyone complains too loudly it is also worth remembering the hypocrisies and self-serving interests of the clubs campaigning to Uefa for those regulations. They wanted a closed shop. What they got was a club living up to Lonely Planet's description of Manchester as having a "champagne-for-breakfast insouciance and almost giddy attitude."

That club, in fairness, have clearly had enough of being taken for a ride as potential sellers put on a premium for prospective signings, as Porto can now testify after bumping up the price for Fernando and Eliaquim Mangala. A few years ago, City would have signed the cheque. Nowadays, they bend to nobody. It is the big club's mentality and Manchester's changing skyline just adds to the sense of a club coming into their time. If they can hold off Chelsea, Arsenal and everyone else this season it is going to be difficult, in the extreme, to shift them from the top."

Comment: 12 months ago Roberto Mancini was fighting with Mario Balotelli - now the Premier League title is Manchester City's to lose

It was March last year when Joe Hart lamented the inability of Manchester City to make any inroads into the lead that Manchester United had established at the top of the Premier League as Sir Alex Ferguson closed in on his 13th and final title.

The phrase Hart picked, on England duty that day at St George's Park, to describe United was "a killing machine", articulating a remorseless, unyielding approach to regaining the title City had won the previous May. It summed up the feeling you suspected was prevalent at the club at the time: that there would be no stopping United whatever they tried.

Ten months on, Hart came down the tunnel at White Hart Lane on Wednesday, at the end of the victory that had taken City back to the top of the table, with the smile of a man who is not taking nights like these for granted. There is nothing prosaic about the way City are cutting through the opposition; nothing of the machine about the way they are setting themselves up to be one of the greatest sides of the Premier League era.

The 5-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur was, manager Manuel Pellegrini reluctantly agreed, "maybe" their best away performance of the season, as much for the manner of their attack as their defence. As a man who often responds to questions like he has recently awoken from a long sleep, it was notable that Pellegrini became animated in his opposition to any suggestion Danny Rose's red card had changed the course of the game.

Defeat for Spurs had been coming no matter what, Pellegrini said, and that theory was hard to argue with. City play their way, regardless of the opposition and 115 goals so far this season before the end of January is testament to the fact that it works.

Victory on Wednesday marked 20 games undefeated since they were beaten by Sunderland on 10 November. They have drawn just one league game in that period and this was the round of fixtures when Chelsea and Arsenal finally could not keep up with the pace. City's form has meant they have long been treated as title favourites, now they have the top spot to go with that status.

What a different beast to the team that were seven points behind United last year, a gap that would widen to 15 by the end of March. What a change of mood too when, for the first time since the transformation wrought on the club, a calm has descended on City. The Abu Dhabi revolution and the subsequent fast track to elite status was brutal at times, but it feels like an age has now passed since the last training ground bust-up.

The anniversary of Roberto Mancini's fight with Mario Balotelli passed earlier this month, a spectacular which belongs to a different age now, a time when City had a manager who believed in the principle of creative tension.

Finally they have someone in charge who realises that, with players this good, there should be no need to bother themselves with the kind of preoccupations that concern the mere mortals. Sergio Aguero and David Silva were playing on a different level to the rest on Wednesday and behind them was that familiar powerful team that were ruthless in exposing Spurs' mistakes.

Even with Aguero out, they will have Alvaro Negredo back against Chelsea on Monday when Jose Mourinho will doubtless try some kind of tactical ambush at the Etihad. Thus far he has tried to play with Pellegrini's mind without success. Asked about Mourinho's theory that City have to win the title, the Chilean stared into the mid-distance on Wednesday and replied: "I don't talk about things that Mourinho said."

Jesus Navas acknowledged after the win over Spurs that Mourinho's team face a particular kind of threat. "They work especially hard, all the players under Mourinho," he said. "He has a special, winning mentality so it is always difficult to face teams that Mourinho manages." But there is no quibbling with who the team of the moment are, and that is certainly not Chelsea.

The financial losses continue to stack up, as witnessed by the £51.6m in the most recent accounts, yet City do not feel like quite such a decadent project any longer, not now they have weeded the squad of its millionaire malcontents. They are a credible threat to Barcelona in the next round of the Champions League. If they overcome them, win the Capital One Cup final and eliminate Chelsea in the FA Cup then for the first time in memory, one could start talking about the Q-word.

It is a lot of ifs, and there is a good reason that no club has ever done the quadruple before. But these are the kind of terms by which City have aspired to be judged since Sheikh Mansour began the transformation in 2008. No team can ever plan to win four trophies in a season and, generally speaking, they never do. But it will require each of their respective cup opponents to have their performance of the season so far to beat City, a reality that shows how far they have come, in just 12 months.

SAM WALLACE The Independent Friday 31 January 2014

There's been some very good articles written of late and with everything going on, on the pitch and behind the scenes, it's hard for the media to keep up the silly pretense that they've tried to cultivate so far. It was always going to be about a matter of time and the more we show on the pitch, the more we win them over.

What also helps is drawing a team like Barca in the CL and the prestige it brings to our game. Previously, we may have got a bit of a gubbing in the build-up because nobody would've give us a chance however the difference now though is that that we go into this game playing like a team possessed and if we win should be followed with rapturous applause from all those who would have previously given us no accolade at all.

So, and I know none of us like the shit that is spouted in the media, whenever there is shit spouted about our club, remember this quote from one of the above articles:

In other ways, City are still in a game of catch-up. At Old Trafford, there is a stadium tour every seven minutes and a plausible explanation why the television companies have selected every one of United's FA Cup ties for live coverage since late-January 2005. Repetitive? Yes. Unimaginative? Absolutely. But you can understand the logic when United pulled in higher viewing figures for their game against Crawley Town in 2011 than watched Arsenal play Barcelona three days earlier.

The modern-day City do not have the same kind of pull. Newspaper data also shows that they have plenty of ground to make up, comparing the number of website hits a City match would ordinarily attract compared to one featuring United, Liverpool or Arsenal. The drop to that next group down, comprising Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona, is considerable.

Straight from the horses mouth, it's all about the pull and the media will always be biased in favour of the majority; they buy the stories and the advertisers pay for circulation. Luckily, the tides are a'turning and the good ship City is coming about.

It's only a matter of time.

There is a concerted effort this weekend by certain parts of the media and the football establishment to unsettle the club. I doubt this will ever change. I puts a little perspective on why the Govan Piss-can behaved towards them in the way that he did. That's not our modus operandi so we're stuck with it, I reckon.

mcfc1632 wrote:Just a bandwagoner I guess but this from the Guardian (Daniel Taylor) would have been previously unthinkable in its positivity - probably hurt to write it but perhaps he recognises the wind of change,

To be fair to Daniel Taylor (long suffering Forest fan) he normally writes a fairly balanced article and is one of the few journalists I enjoy reading - he doesn't blow smoke up our arses so don't expect everything to be as a positive & why should it. The calmness that MP has brought to proceedings I think has helped our relationship with the press and I much prefer our football doing the talking than our manager - let Jose rant to anyone who will listen, it sounds like a child who just can't get his way

That Mario/Mancini fight incident is and interesting one.When it happened I was surrounded by paps taking routine pictures and hoping for something special and we could not believe what unfolded in front of us.

It was a game of maybe 9 or 10 aside and AJ got a ball on the left side and went passed Mario.Mario was being a little lazy and just flicked out at AJ to trip him up.A petulant foul and nothing more but Mancini flew over to Mario in a rage giving him an unreal verbal bollocking. Mario virtually didn't react and maybe (it was a distance away) just smiled and my guess is that reaction really wound Mancini up.

Mancini then basically lost it ,grabbing and pushing Mario to the amazement of watching players.I will always remember Rekik watching on open mouthed.Pictures inevitably got the the papers in quick time but as I remember it the "blame" seemed to be more pointed at Mario than Mancini.There were supposedly eye witness reports on what happened which suggested a violent challenge by Mario.As I understand it the eyewitness was the photographer who took the pictures.He told me how amazed he was that despite what he had seen and reported it was Mario that got the blame and not Mancini.Surely not the first occasion that he had become aware that the press don't worry about the truth when they can pursue their own agenda.

Some good articles posted in a good thread.

I've a few rag acquaintances and they are split roughly in the cannot/ will not believe it's happening and they will still be champions; the yes we aren't doing so well this season but we've got better history and next season will be better (Liverpool used to try this one out for ages as i point out), and the realistic you are the better side and we have lost the plot brigade, which to be fair is growing apace as the viewpoint.

The one thing they really really don't see is the planning and building that is going on behind the current league leading free scoring squad in the shape of the succession plan and the infrastructure behind it. Their class of 92 (21 years ago now, no 22!) happened before many rages were even born. Since then who? Januwotsit, Wellcrap, errrrr. Some are daft enough to think Rooney is an academy player. They just dont get it.

The one who did said to me "it's like being the rebel army in Star Wars watching the Death Star being built. What you have already is awesome, whats to come is unthinkable". I offered him a drink to cheer him up - but he had to catch his train back to London, naturally.

No they aren't. Some predictable shit before our big game Monday night in the Sunday People this morning ......... Proper bollox !

Doesn't look like it looking at todays papers. The rags(the champions) lose their 8th game in the league. Yet it's shite like paying bob 10m. Our rivals trying to stitch us up. Long way to go before they turn.

glossopblue wrote:Doesn't look like it looking at todays papers. The rags(the champions) lose their 8th game in the league. Yet it's shite like paying bob 10m. Our rivals trying to stitch us up. Long way to go before they turn.

Absolutely this ! A whole load of shite stirred up and thrown our way the last few days before our biggest game of the season .

City64 wrote:

glossopblue wrote:Doesn't look like it looking at todays papers. The rags(the champions) lose their 8th game in the league. Yet it's shite like paying bob 10m. Our rivals trying to stitch us up. Long way to go before they turn.

Absolutely this ! A whole load of shite stirred up and thrown our way the last few days before our biggest game of the season .

I thought Barcelona was on the eighteenth?

Quite a nice article by Martin Samuel.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... AMUEL.html

Here's the article:

f you can’t beat them, sue them. That is the latest plan. Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea may use UEFA small print to derail Manchester City, if they fail to do it on the pitch.

Were City to fail UEFA’s financial fair play regulations, there is room to plea bargain, to promise to make good, to affect change by a certain time, and remain in the Champions League.

Yet if that happened, there is also a 10-day period in which other clubs can challenge the decision.
The suggestion is now that the English clubs would gang up on City and try to force UEFA to reconsider. Manchester United would be part of this too, no doubt, if they were in any position to contemplate Champions League football next season.

So let’s start with what is not Manchester City’s fault. It is not Manchester City’s fault that Arsenal, with immense financial resources, chose to recruit one player in the transfer window: Kim Kallstrom, a 31-year-old loan deal from Spartak Moscow, who turned up seriously injured. It is not Manchester City’s fault that Chelsea had to sell last year’s player of the season, Juan Mata, to Manchester United for £37million.

It is not Manchester City’s fault that Liverpool have failed to win the title in the modern era, despite spending significant money on players ranging from Phil Babb to Stan Collymore, Emile Heskey, Djibril Cisse, Fernando Torres, Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll — all of whom have been club-record signings since the formation of the Premier League, and about two of whom have lived up to expectations.

Finally, it is not Manchester City’s fault that, due to the arbitrary and misapplied nature of UEFA’s financial regulations, an expansion project that would have proceeded steadily had to be hiked up to ramming speed to get inside the fortress before the established elite raised the drawbridge.

In every other aspect, City are attempting to build from the roots up: academies, facilities, local regeneration. They are giving more back to the area of east Manchester than they have ever taken out.

The reason hundreds of millions had to be spent on players, however, was that Michel Platini came up with a plan for greater financial responsibility and then executed it so poorly that any team beyond the upper echelon was likely to remain so for ever.

City had to smash their way in or risk exclusion. This was Platini’s doing, not City’s choice; just as it is to please UEFA that balance sheets now have to be so expertly constructed.

Football club accountants must be more creative than coaches these days. The current complaints centre around vague calculations in Manchester City’s latest figures — image and intellectual property rights have been sold to an unnamed party for close to £50m, allowing the club to cut its losses by almost half - but they are unlikely to be any more brilliantly conceived than Chelsea’s profit of £1.4m to June 2012, with Roman Abramovich also converting £166.6m in loans to equity.

If it wasn’t so unjust it would almost be comic that Chelsea are among the most vocal objectors to City’s business strategy. Financial fair play was introduced as a way of stopping Abramovich, and other new money investors, buying up the prizes.

Having hijacked the idea and manoeuvred Platini into turning it into an elite-club protection scheme, to hear his minions pontificate on FFP compliance is a bit like watching the Corleone family trying to go legit, but without the inevitable bloodbath.

Last week, without naming names of course, because everyone knew whom he was talking about anyway, Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho spoke of investigating the clubs who are complying with FFP in what he termed a ‘dodgy’ way. ‘If I was a journalist interested in football, it would be something interesting to do,’ he said.

So let’s get interesting.

In the eight seasons prior to that profit in 2012, Chelsea lost £630m. In 2009, Abramovich wrote off £710m in loans he had given the club since 2003 (this does not include the £166.6m figure converted to equity last year). Since 2012, Chelsea have lost another £49.4m, compared to Manchester City’s £51m. Maybe they sold the good accountant to Manchester United, too.

And do you know what? It shouldn’t matter. As long as a very wealthy man is giving his money to a football club — and not placing it in jeopardy, or holding it to ransom with loans — what is the problem?

This is money from outside football coming into football. It creates competition and trickle-down benefits and, as no investor wants to be putting in forever, in time they all try to run the business for a profit anyway.

It wasn’t fair when UEFA were moaning about Abramovich either. Indeed, the only reason Chelsea’s losses are of interest now is their hypocrisy in attacking City for doing exactly what Abramovich did, except with the good fortune of not having UEFA on his back at the time.

Abramovich threw money at Chelsea because he wanted to — City bought players because they had to. There’s the difference.

Now, remind us all again, Jose, what’s dodgy?

Martin Samuel. BANG ON!!!

Top piece of sensible as it is writing