Sheikh Mansour

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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Nigels Tackle » Mon Apr 16, 2018 3:15 pm

Sideshow Bob wrote:wonder if he still complains about that money we wasted on bony. wife is prob sick of hearing it.


which one?
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby CuteMancs » Mon Apr 16, 2018 3:16 pm

PeterParker wrote:Have to wonder, why us?

Why did he choose us?


The story I heard was that they were looking at four clubs, City, Everton, Newcastle and Arsenal. The criteria, apart from actual cost of the club was existing fan base, stadium and business strategy. We just ticked all the boxes.

Not sure where I heard this, but I think it was a 93.20 podcast. I am old and senile now, and much beer has flowed under the bridge, so I could be wrong
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Sideshow Bob » Mon Apr 16, 2018 4:17 pm

Nigels Tackle wrote:
Sideshow Bob wrote:wonder if he still complains about that money we wasted on bony. wife is prob sick of hearing it.


which one?


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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Wonderwall » Mon Apr 16, 2018 5:34 pm

CuteMancs wrote:
PeterParker wrote:Have to wonder, why us?

Why did he choose us?


The story I heard was that they were looking at four clubs, City, Everton, Newcastle and Arsenal. The criteria, apart from actual cost of the club was existing fan base, stadium and business strategy. We just ticked all the boxes.

Not sure where I heard this, but I think it was a 93.20 podcast. I am old and senile now, and much beer has flowed under the bridge, so I could be wrong


It was Gary Cook who sold them the dream after Thaksin made the introductions.
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby edge275 » Mon Apr 16, 2018 5:34 pm

CuteMancs wrote:
PeterParker wrote:Have to wonder, why us?

Why did he choose us?


The story I heard was that they were looking at four clubs, City, Everton, Newcastle and Arsenal. The criteria, apart from actual cost of the club was existing fan base, stadium and business strategy. We just ticked all the boxes.

Not sure where I heard this, but I think it was a 93.20 podcast. I am old and senile now, and much beer has flowed under the bridge, so I could be wrong


This might be somewhat unpopular, but Garry Cook gave them a presentation, and he unashamedly told them that since both Manchester City and Manchester United have 'Manchester' in their name, they can piggy bank off how well known the name 'Manchester' is from the rags' success when it comes to branding and trying to market the club worldwide. The Sheikh understood the logic of that, and was totally on board with it.
"Like all bullies, they've just found out that there is a much bigger guy in town, someone who is richer and more powerful than their worst nightmare. And this smiling Arabic assassin is intent on stealing all the treasures they've nicked off everyone else, and pulverising them into commercial and footballing oblivion as he does so."
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby carolina-blue » Mon Apr 16, 2018 5:37 pm

edge275 wrote:
CuteMancs wrote:
PeterParker wrote:Have to wonder, why us?

Why did he choose us?


The story I heard was that they were looking at four clubs, City, Everton, Newcastle and Arsenal. The criteria, apart from actual cost of the club was existing fan base, stadium and business strategy. We just ticked all the boxes.

Not sure where I heard this, but I think it was a 93.20 podcast. I am old and senile now, and much beer has flowed under the bridge, so I could be wrong


This might be somewhat unpopular, but Garry Cook gave them a presentation, and he unashamedly told them that since both Manchester City and Manchester United have 'Manchester' in their name, they can piggy bank off how well known the name 'Manchester' is from the rags' success when it comes to branding and trying to market the club worldwide. The Sheikh understood the logic of that, and was totally on board with it.


I liked Gary Cooke met him in Atlanta few years back really nice guy
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby edge275 » Mon Apr 16, 2018 5:41 pm

carolina-blue wrote:
edge275 wrote:
CuteMancs wrote:
PeterParker wrote:Have to wonder, why us?

Why did he choose us?


The story I heard was that they were looking at four clubs, City, Everton, Newcastle and Arsenal. The criteria, apart from actual cost of the club was existing fan base, stadium and business strategy. We just ticked all the boxes.

Not sure where I heard this, but I think it was a 93.20 podcast. I am old and senile now, and much beer has flowed under the bridge, so I could be wrong


This might be somewhat unpopular, but Garry Cook gave them a presentation, and he unashamedly told them that since both Manchester City and Manchester United have 'Manchester' in their name, they can piggy bank off how well known the name 'Manchester' is from the rags' success when it comes to branding and trying to market the club worldwide. The Sheikh understood the logic of that, and was totally on board with it.


I liked Gary Cooke met him in Atlanta few years back really nice guy


Pasted a bit from an article about him with some quotes:

-------------------------------------

And no doubt, he will cast his mind back to May 2008, when he took up Thaksin Shinawatra’s offer to quit his role in charge of Brand Jordan at Nike to become City’s chief executive.

It didn't take him long to discover that the former prime minister of Thailand was too beleaguered by accusations of human rights abuses and fraud in his homeland to be concerned by the state of his Premier League investment.

“It took me about 10 days to inform Shinawatra that he had no option but to find a buyer for the club,” Cook revealed. “If he hadn’t taken my advice, then the consequences for City would have been absolutely disastrous.

“I have to be honest here, we were in an extremely bad and precarious place. We were standing on the edge of the precipice.

“The model being used wasn’t sustainable. For example, we were leveraging money against future ­television revenues to put deposits down for new players.

“That, in itself, is a dangerous ­position to be in. But it was just the tip of the iceberg.

“It got to the point where John Wardle, the former City chairman who had sold the club to Shinawatra, was lending us money to pay the wages.

“John was an integral part of keeping City afloat. But, even with his generosity, City were, quite literally, just moments away from it all going horribly wrong.

“Thankfully, I was able to sell Sheikh Mansour – or at least the people who work for him – the dream I had for the club when I decided to leave Nike.

“It was a perfect storm. City couldn’t have been in a worse situation and Abu Dhabi was looking to invest in a Premier League football club as a vehicle to promote the nation."

More than £1billion has since been spent transforming a club that had become synonymous with glorious failure. But Cook soon found out that throwing money at problems that had dogged City for decades wasn't the only solution.

He also had to win the hearts of minds of those people who already had a huge emotional stake in the club.

“I still have the Power Point presentation that I made to executives of the Abu Dhabi United Group,” Cook added.

“There were three other clubs who Abu Dhabi were looking at, but we ticked all the boxes: We could deliver the name Manchester - and I admit that I unashamedly used the global recognition of our rivals Manchester United to push our cause; we could deliver the name City - something that could become a powerful brand - and we could also deliver a fantastic stadium surrounded by 200 acres of land that was ripe for development.

-------------------------------------

Cook Link
"Like all bullies, they've just found out that there is a much bigger guy in town, someone who is richer and more powerful than their worst nightmare. And this smiling Arabic assassin is intent on stealing all the treasures they've nicked off everyone else, and pulverising them into commercial and footballing oblivion as he does so."
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby aristation » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:09 pm

Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough
It may be my last year as a season ticket holder as it just doesn't seem the same with so few English and local players (but I said that last year)
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Nigels Tackle » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:14 pm

aristation wrote:Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough


the best run football clubs have owners you rarely hear from...
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Dameerto » Tue Apr 17, 2018 9:00 am

Nigels Tackle wrote:
aristation wrote:Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough


the best run football clubs have owners you rarely hear from...

True that. I get the impression he likes being in the background.
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Mase » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:30 am

Dameerto wrote:
Nigels Tackle wrote:
aristation wrote:Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough


the best run football clubs have owners you rarely hear from...

True that. I get the impression he likes being in the background.


Would love for him to come over for the trophy presentation though.
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Bournemouthcityfan » Tue Apr 17, 2018 5:43 pm

Your excellency I have supported this club since 1963 but what you have done for me is miraculous. You have a superb chairman very smart himself and he has very smart staff and they all have done a superb job.
My eternal thanks to you for making my dreams true.
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby zuricity » Tue Apr 17, 2018 5:51 pm

Bournemouthcityfan wrote:Your excellency I have supported this club since 1963 but what you have done for me is miraculous. You have a superb chairman very smart himself and he has very smart staff and they all have done a superb job.
My eternal thanks to you for making my dreams true.


Yer soft bugger !
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby zuricity » Tue Apr 17, 2018 5:52 pm

Mase wrote:
Dameerto wrote:
Nigels Tackle wrote:
aristation wrote:Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough


the best run football clubs have owners you rarely hear from...

True that. I get the impression he likes being in the background.


Would love for him to come over for the trophy presentation though.


So you can dick him for selling the love of your life ?
:roll:
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Mase » Tue Apr 17, 2018 6:22 pm

zuricity wrote:
Mase wrote:
Dameerto wrote:
Nigels Tackle wrote:
aristation wrote:Remember this thread on Sunday and the Huddersfield game we do not show our respect and sing his nameoften enough


the best run football clubs have owners you rarely hear from...

True that. I get the impression he likes being in the background.


Would love for him to come over for the trophy presentation though.


So you can dick him for selling the love of your life ?
:roll:


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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Saul Goodman » Thu Aug 30, 2018 10:41 pm

10 years to the day since the Sheikh bought Manchester City
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby PrezIke » Thu Aug 30, 2018 11:14 pm

Saul Goodman wrote:10 years to the day since the Sheikh bought Manchester City


Some good that's done.

We could have had the Glazers or Kronke.
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby aaron bond » Sat Sep 01, 2018 2:35 am

Good article in the Guaridian:

Ten years on: how Abu Dhabi ownership transformed Manchester City

From toilets with no doors and ‘the Temple of Doom’, City have made other top clubs fearful of an era of dominance at home and in Europe

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.

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.”
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Dunnylad » Sat Sep 01, 2018 7:33 am

There’s an excellent one in the Telegraph also - the story about Barry is a new one on me

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/20 ... -football/
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Re: Sheikh Mansour

Postby Scatman » Sat Sep 01, 2018 7:53 am

Several in the Mail
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