Conn: Decision made in Abu Dhabi

David Conn, one of the most insightful reporters of the machinations within football clubs, has written today that the decision to sack Hughes came out of Abu Dhabi, rather than the Cook and Marwood double act:

From Abu Dhabi, Mansour and Khaldoon looked at their Premier League acquisition and considered that they had lavishly improved everything, the playing squad, training ground, stadium and all the supporting infrastructure – of which they believe Marwood's contribution to be a significant plus – but the one area which had stayed the same was Hughes and his coaching staff. They formed the view, which looks hasty to many in football but does not feel that way to them, that if they left Hughes in charge, the performances were not going to improve.

They will say, still, that they wanted Hughes and his team to succeed, and City sources argue that Marwood and Cook gave the manager full support until Mansour's confidence was finally lost.

Reports like this are difficult to evaluate. I suppose I would rather it was Sheikh Mansour who decided to sack Hughes. It's easier to live with being run by an impulsive billionaire owner than it is by his sneaky, whispering employees. A well run football club should be run by experts who work for the owners, I think, rather than the owners running it themselves. We just seem to have the wrong experts. Any chance we can buy David Gill off United?

How it happened, ii

More in today's papers about how we came to replace Mark Hughes with Roberto Mancini. And it looks even worse for Garry Cook, Brian Marwood and Khaldoon al-Mubarak than it did yesterday. Initially, we thought that even though Khaldoon reached out to Mancini after the 1-1 with Hull, that a firm decision was not reached until after the loss at White Hart Lane. We now learn from Ian Ladyman that the decision to sack Hughes was taken after Jimmy Bullard's equaliser:

Last night it emerged a verbal agreement on Mancini’s three-and-a-half-year contract was reached on December 2, as City beat Arsenal in the Carling Cup, but the board wanted to delay the appointment until after tough games against Chelsea, Bolton and Tottenham.

This is bad enough: keeping on a condemned man just to make the new guy's job easier. Worse still is the news that Garry Cook could not find it within himself to break the news to Mark Hughes:

Confronted by Hughes before the game, City’s executive chairman Garry Cook was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to give the man he appointed in the summer of 2008 any assurances about his future.

Some reports, unconfirmed yesterday, suggested that the conversation became heated. Who could blame Hughes if it did?

Cook, after all, was the man who sat in the Abu Dhabi sunshine just five weeks or so ago and mentioned Hughes in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.

Or as James Ducker reports the same conversation:

“Am I being sacked?” Hughes asked the sheepish-looking chief executive. Cook was non-committal. The man who had told anyone who cared to listen that Hughes was the best young manager around did not have the decency to tell him the truth. Hughes had to wait until after the game to be told to pack his bags during a ten-minute conversation with al-Mubarak, the man who had driven through Mancini’s appointment.

A member of Hughes' coaching staff told the Mail:

‘It was weird,’ said one of Hughes’s inner circle yesterday. ‘Nobody would meet our gaze before kick-off. Our wives were upstairs having their lunch and we were beginning to realise we were effectively out of work. But nobody would actually tell us.’

There's a lot more in the papers today and I will come back to it later in the day. But this all reflects very poorly on those running MCFC.

David Conn on Abu Dhabi motivations

We are very lucky this week to have The Guardian's David Conn doing a big three part series on the Abu Dhabi takeover at City. Conn is an excellent journalist who writes very well about the internal operation of football clubs; it is no surprise that he has turned his attention to City.

I appreciate that I'm a few days with this - the first part was in Friday's paper - but I'm going to tackle them in the order they appeared. The first article focussed on Abu Dhabi itself, with a fascinating Khaldoon al-Mubarak interview, and the motivations behind the takeover. The common perception is that it was launched as a means to enhance the reputation and prestige of Abu Dhabi. And the association between the club and the emirate in the minds of many westerners is something that the chairman acknowledges:

"There is an appreciation of the association the club have with Abu Dhabi that we hold very dearly," Khaldoon, with calm, steady conviction, explained. "There is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi, as Sheikh Mansour. These are loyalty, commitment, discipline, long-term thinking, respect, appreciation of history...

"We are acknowledging that how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are," Khaldoon said. "The UAE is different from other Arab countries. People think the Arab world is one, but it is not. This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about. That is something new, something we didn't really plan for."

The interview gets more interesting later on, as Khaldoon suggests that this prestige by association dynamic was not in fact the driving force behind the takeover:

The reasons, he explained, were twofold. Mansour believes City will be an investment, worth even more than he will have spent on it, if built into a top European club. But primarily, Khaldoon said: "Sheikh Mansour is a huge football fan. There is an enjoyment, a pleasure, which comes from owning it."

This idea that after an initial burst of investment a club can be made profitable is one that is shared by Roman Abramovich. Insofar as there are precedents for what Abu Dhabi has done to City, Abramovich's Chelsea is the best one, and their attempts to become self-financing have seen the club's trophy acquisition slow down relative to the Mourinho years of the mid-2000s. But Sheikh Mansour is insistent that City can, in time, stop sucking in his money:

"Sheikh Mansour is an astute businessman, who believes you can create a value from football that has not yet been accomplished," Khaldoon explained. "There is a pure, football, emotional side to it, and a big business side, too. I think what attracted Sheikh Mansour was the great football journey, but also there is a business sense, that we can create a franchise, a business, over years, which will create value and reap a long term return."

Well, we'll see. Football clubs have a habit of resembling financial black holes, particularly those which are built up on large cash acquisitions of players. Even United and Arsenal, who have successful youth development programmes and managers committed to them still need to spend big money on players to succeed. I'm sure Sheikh Mansour and Khladoon have done the sums and everything, but I'd be surprised if we're returning much of that investment to Abu Dhabi for some time.