Yes, but how much do the respective squads cost? And how do the wage bills compare.

I'm not one for defending United but it's wrong to suggest that what City are doing isn't any different to what Man Utd have been doing over the years. United have earnt the right to spend big by long-term, sustained success both on and off the pitch. They've had to deal with the Glazers bleeding them dry and yet have still been winning trophies.

Manchester City, on the other hand, are buying players they have no right to be buying (Aguero) and paying them wages that no club in the world can compete with, because they are bankrolled by Oil money. They have won the football lottery and so therefore, in my opinion, this is a hollow victory.

They have bought the title in the most crass, distasteful way. Next time you top up your car you can take some credit for Man City's change in fortunes. ££££££££

That's the point I'm trying to make Dannyg. If memory serves, only the Spanish giants make more money than United do (maybe Bayern as well). They are a freaking cash cow. They have a £10m a year training shirt sponsorship with DHL. More than Arsenal gets for their main kit. They have the largest capacity ground in England, and consequently the largest gate receipts. They're sold out pretty much year after year. They are constantly in the latter stages of the champions league with 3 finals appearances in the last 5 yrs. They've also won too many titles to count.

All that equals money. City isn't even making half of what their neighbours do, yet outspend them, and everybody else. Can't compare the two. This title was bought.

I imagine what your suggesting would be against the rules and is blatant cheating. I hope you can come up with a better example Henri.How about it would be like you finding a way inside an elitist club that ensures everyone else is put on a lower rung for the members benefit?

How dare Man City not keep to their lowly station!

Nothing in the rules, yet though FP may change that, that an owner can't spend big for the club so they aren't cheating. Of course it becomes an issue of sustainability afterwards and the club has to rely on the owners so it is a big risk for the club. If a club can get a massively rich owner interested, good for them but they must be aware of the risks they take.

I don't think we as arsenal fans can complain in anyway about how city have spent there money considering we have cashed in to the tune of 60 million.

We have benefited from there take over more than any other club. Who would have paid the kind of money we got for players we wanted to move on in there last year of there deals. they have been a mini cash cow for arsenal over the last 2 years, and have kept us in the green.

I always take a very different view and imagine if Abramovich or the Dubai group were not around to invest in these clubs.

And it's a bloody horrible view from 2006 till now. Because with arsenals need to move stadium, there would have been nobody to challenge united for the title until we got are house in order.

If it was a choice of city or Chelsea buying the title or man utd winning it 6 years running i think most of us sane folk would choose the first option

How have they, especially City, earned it? They have been chosen as an object of investment by a rich owner, nothing more. I am not saying that their performance in recent years - in City's case: in this season - hasn't been impressive, but all this came on the back of heavy investment, it's not success that has been build on own merits.

In which way have we benefited from a rich owner when we qualified for the CL in the last 15 years?

That very much depends on the definition of benefited. Losing good players to an unfair rival is no benefit to me personally. Though I suppose the counter argument is that if we'd actually brought in comparable players...

You are taking my comparison far too literally.

What i was aiming at was the size of the unfair advantage and i stick by my example. ManC and Chelsea both have birth certificates they believe to be true which state they are U14 girls while in fact they are both 200 pound males on their prime. There are other girls in the boxing circles who have worked hard and trained to earn their place and then there are the two with their somewhat faulty birth certificates following the letter of the rules but maybe not that of fair competition.

I have no problem with ascension. I don't hope the small clubs forever to be held as small. But at the same time i do prefer the success coming from football reasons. Manchester City doesn't have a superior training regime, scouting network, tactics and while their manager is a good one he is not on level with the likes of Ferguson and Wenger. The only reason they are up there is because of ridiculous amounts of money and every achievement they have made since then are meaningless in my eyes.

And as for your worry that the "uefa exclusive membership" will create 4 elite clubs among whom nobody can break haven't you thought about the sugar daddy clubs in that equation? Despite being a member in your fiction club Chelsea can't break even. Not even close. Manchester City will follow suit as the increased revenue via the Champions League isn't even enough to cover their wages. So now 2 out of the 4 places are taken for good unless they cock-up in a major fashion like Chelsea did this season. What is even worse they can't even fail. After few more extra hundred million £ Chelsea will be golden again dropping most likely Tottenham out of the top four. Liverpool might do the same for us even though compared to the likes of Chelsea and ManC they are merely well off rather than outright rich.



I agree with you but i would drop the word investment. The word investment means putting your money into something you expect to give a healthy return where as the money poured in City is all well lost. I'd try words like charity or maybe a hobby?

Well I would more say their luck was getting an awesome stadium on the cheap. That helped them get new and ambitious owners who were not willing to just accept the status quo, accepting whatever meagre crumbs the likes of us handed to them from top of our mountain, but to try and make their club a world class one. Thhe got the right manager in, they paid big money to attract players, they got a brilliant squad togther and one that earnt their way to a title.



By being in the right place at the right time then accepting uefa as our sugar daddy, ensuring the league became unequal in our and Man U's favor?



I know but it is fun

I would more go that we and Man U are U14 girls who were at the top of our game when luck came our way. The rule makers of the 14 wrestlers major competition became a clique. They gave our two girls lots of money, the best training, prestige, inbuilding nearly every single advantage in our favor.

Chelsea and Man City are two girls who were not at that level due to whatever reason but same age group. One of them indeed was about to be without a family (Chelsea going bankrupt), the other benefited from the council's generosity (Man City.) The two got adopted by rich parents who wanted the best for their children, or whatever motives, so they paid the money to get the best coaches, training and so on. They had to pay over the odds to do it becuase they were up against the clique. It was the only way for the girls to break into the clique and the blame should not go to the parents for darking to spend to break the unfair system but the authorities for putting the clique there in the first place.



I would say Maninci is better then Wenger is now but he is whiny. In fairness, Man City got some great players fairly cheaply, turned Lescott into a top cb and they turned around one or two players Wenger couldn't get the best out of.

Great, you want small clubs to rise. Just you don't want the likes of Wigan to have Whealen buy their way to the top flight. Which is fine but how can they rise so high? Spurs and Newcastle do well... well that is nice of them now excuse me as the CL clubs pillage their best players. Spurs and Newcastle should be looking for this season to be a springboard to better things yet the inequality is so inbuilt that both sides expect to be pillaged by CL clubs. You want sugar daddies gone, fine, but how will you make the system fairer?



The Exclusive membership has already happened, been going on for years. However I have thought about the issue of sugar-daddies. Both owners will eventually want the clubs not to be a drain, though to achieve this may take longer then Roman's patience, so will instead transfer to uefa sugar-daddy and enjoy the same benefits as us. However Uefa is trying to stop rich men buying way to success so some effort is being made to deal with the problem. Nothing is being done about the Mathews effect.

If FP works, Chelsea and Man City may both be in real trouble due to no CL football. However that still won't fix the problem that us, Man U and one or two others will be sitting at the top of the league till one of us does a Hicks+Gillet/Freddy Shepperd, patronizing other clubs who dare to dream by ensuring the ladder has been pulled up behind us.

But, Magic Hat. You're still only looking at this from one perspective. Fine, Chelsea and Man City couldn't have broken into the elite without RIDICULOUS investment. I mean, really. The amount of money pumped into both of them is just shy of 2 BILLION pounds in the space of about 8 years. that is absolutely mind boggling. We're not talking about throwing in a 50 mil here or there. We're talking about splashing 200m in one year, when you only made 5m profit. Come on, I cannot see how you can figure that to be "alright".

I'm not even worried about what it has done to our hopes of winning the title. I think we've done enough to scupper our chances, without having to consider the influence they've had. Your posts paint the picture of someone who wants some semblance of parity, as if you're rooting for the "little guy". Your talk about pulling up ladders becomes weaker when we consider how their ridiculous spending have affected the likes of Bolton (loved how Coyle had them playing, but they're relegated), Everton, Villa, etc.? All that's happened is that now these clubs will simply have to hope to get a rich owner as well. A big part of that has been the transfer market clusterfuck that they've caused. It's meant that average players around the league now cost in excess of 10m. Moreover, the wages afforded even further creates a divide. £221,000 a week for Yaya Toure sounds normal? How about Wayne Bridge collecting his £90,000 a week, all the while not even making the reserves? EDIT - Forgot to mention Adebayor and his +/-£180,000, whose salary they are most certainly paying a large portion of, even while on loan to our direct competition, Tottenham.

Again, it's amazing that we can cope. We still perform respectfully year in, year out. I do want Wenger gone, but he and the men behind the scenes at Arsenal deserve a good bit of credit. If anything, we should be praising what Newcastle have achieved. But, that might be short-lived, because I see reports that Demba Ba might want to go to Chelsea. He'll definitely make a shit-ton of money there and as a bonus, might get to go on one of them parades in an open-top bus and what not.

The money in the league has risen dramatically (even forgetting about UEFA money), with the TV deals that they've signed. From this all the clubs benefit. The net effect gets lessened due to inflation. This inflation has been from external forces (billionaire blank-check owners), and it's made the increase in revenues moot. Even Wayne Rooney was holding his club to ransom to get more money. I remember Frank Lampard and John Terry bitching a fit when Shevchenko was getting £150,000 and they wanted parity. All it has done is further widened the divide you say you want to see removed.

And, even with all of that, what I find incredibly unbelievable is that City could have walked away completely empty-handed this season, if not for some good fortune mixed in with determination. Three minutes' injury time and the title would be back in Old Trafford, and we'd all be commenting on how much money was wasted. As it was, they did win it, and somehow it's all good?

That's true LG but the club had a choice of were these players would end up playing. They were all going to be moved on regardless.

In each case, we could have sold any of adebayor, nasri, toure, to somebody else. I'm sure there were other offers on the table but the club wanted to take the highly inflated fee's over market value.



But there has been a return on investment. They won the fa cup and have pushed on to win the league this season. If there investment was too make city the best team (on the field) in england then surely it's been a 100% success.

Jack Walker who "invested/lost" millions to see Blackburn win a title never made a "healthy return " other than being a life long fan and seeing he's team become champions of england which too him was priceless.

You could say that the glazer family have made an investment in manchester united because there aim is to make a return from the club not invest.

There are better things they could do with the money personally but it is the owners money. If they want a highly successful football club and are willing to pay to break the clique then establish their club, that is up to them. Now if uefa wishes to stop that, or the likes of Wigan and Bolton at a lower level, I'm happy as long as they truly even things up. Stop it so the likes of Real Madrid don't get so much government help with their debts at one extreme but mostlyL stop the entire system becoming a closed club for certain teams like us.



Well so far, the only way to get into it has been lots of money yourself or great timing becuase a CL club has imploded spectacularly.

We stop Man City type owners. Fine. Then the likes of Everton, Bolton, Villa would still be outside looking in while a select group of 4 remained wealthy and safe from the dirty little Everton's while we swan about alongside the likes of Real Madrid. Uefa ensuring nobody can come in and challenge our place at the top of the table unless we did something silly.

Banishing rich owners won't suddenly open up the league to the likes of Villa or Everton. Rich owners are the only way teams can aim for the top now and it was the only way before the likes of Mr Roman came along. If we truly want to see an even league then uefa has to also stop the system that ensures we have several inbuilt advantages on anybody other-side the top four.

Or you referring to the heavy debts the likes of Bolton, Villa and Everton carry?



It isn't amazing that we can cope. We get an inbuilt advantage on the likes of Spurs, Newcastle and Villa. We got the prestige, the facilities, the money that comes from uefa's exclusive club.

Yep, Ba, Tiote and others or Spurs Modric and Bale may be taken by the elite, protected by uefa, clubs. It saddens me as I said earlier.



I agree the wages are shocking.

To me, it is still better in that when it offers a club the chance of breaking into the clique then ensuring that nobody can break it. Currently all people seem to want to do is stop the rich owners but not address the other problems in a bid to equalize the league. If we are not going to follow FP with wider reforms then it is pointless and will only Now ideally, we can address both issues with wide reforms. Something like FP but combining that with ways to ensure the CL does not end up destroying the competitiveness of the leagues by ensuring perpetual domination of a select few clubs.

However if we just stop rich owners, wages will come down I imagine. Since the elite four will never be challenged and smaller clubs couldn't splurge on wages, the elite clubs won't have to pay as much anymore.



I wouldn't have been making those comments but I agree, the football world can be remarkably fickle.

Even they way you describe City's way to the top, the performance on the pitch comes into the equation pretty late, doesn't it? They started from scratch instead of building on previous success and just bought a good manager and a good squad, which enabled them to win the league. That's not earned success, that's bought success, and it's bought with money that has not been generated by the club itself. We are up there because we earned it on the pitch, and then came the UEFA money and the prestige to establish ourselves up there (or thereabouts, these days). Our and City's success stories have different starting points - one is in the pockets of a rich investor, one is on the pitch.

Which brings me to the next point:


The reason why the UEFA is not a sugar daddy is that their criterion for the distribution of money is footballing success. If we finished midtable this season, the UEFA money would have been gone, from one season to the other. Another club would have benefited and would have gotten the chance to establish themselves up there. The exclusive UEFA club you are talking about is still based on footballing success. In contrast to UEFA, real sugar daddies splash their money to generate success, not as a reward for it. It's anybody's guess why some clubs are chosen as an object of investment and others are not as "lucky", what we do know is that the decision is not necessarily based on how good a club is at football - quite the contrary in some cases, the owners seem to tend to invest more if their playthings aren't successful on the pitch.


The league won't be equalised, it's based on inequality, on some clubs being better at playing football than others, and being rewarded for this. Therefore it doesn't make sense to me to say "I want small clubs to rise" - I want clubs that are good at football to rise. And City's reason for rising was not being good at football.

Originally, the mechanism of distribution in football is meritocratic, that is based on merit: Being good at football means you merit to be at the top, being at the top generates more prestige, pulling power, money and a bigger fanbase than being bottom. Being at the top for a long time generates even more prestige, pulling power, money and an even bigger fanbase.

You can try to change the meritocratic mechanism of distribution by equalising it: money, prestige and so on will not be distributed based on merits, but independent from that on equal terms. Putting a cap on prestige and pulling power is difficult, but you can do so with sponsorship deals, with the money club's can earn in the CL, with stadium sizes and with TV rights. It would be a league with a socialist touch, so to say, and it would be more equal. But besides being pretty dull, it would also be less fair, because you are not really rewarded for being good at the thing all this is about. Is this roughly going in the direction you are thinking of?

All this talk of meritocracies and socialism drove home something particularly ironic to me. The United States (who only really became what they are today due to Europeans wanting to leave the aristocracies behind, where you are either noble or not, and create a society where people get rewarded based on what they can do) has professional sports that are the complete opposite of these values. One could say there's a massive socialist underpinning to their three major sports (and no, I do NOT count Nascar!). The losers get the pick of the litter of all the young players entering the league the following year. The playing field is relatively level with upper limits on how much spending can be done on players. You simply can't hoard all the stars, while still paying them the huge salaries they command. There has to be balance.

Meanwhile, in Europe, where there is more than a heavy dose of socialism in place, the leagues are the opposite. There's no charity. Don't perform, and you get booted. Just ask poor Bolton. I prefer the meritocracy, myself. I truly think the only way you can create anything coming close to a level playing field, and remove some of the unfair advantages some clubs have, is to restrict what can be paid in terms of salaries. Contrary to what some may think, the salary caps doesn't prevent you from giving players a mammoth contract, but just like when playing FIFA (on manager mode) or FM, you have to balance what you spend on one or two star players, with what you'll have left to spend on the rest.

The inequality is in one club being able to have 90k-a-week players sitting around not playing football. If they HAD to balance the books, they'd get rid of him sharpish. That's someone some other club may have the opportunity to utilize, and benefit from (Wayne Bridge's usefulness notwitstanding). This is the part that creates inequalities, not the UEFA money. It's why there can be "galacticos" in Spain.

Going back to a much earlier discussion on this topic, I truly think there should be a UEFA superleague. Just lump the top sides in Europe into a competition that would mimic an NBA or NFL. Just have them play each other every week and divide up that money between themselves. Just leave the "normal" everyman football clubs to compete at a more realistic level. It is still good fun to watch two teams who are fairly evenly matched (if even of lesser quality) to go toe-to-toe. One could argue it has more entertainment, than Wolves coming to the Emirates and parking the bus, because they figure they cannot win anyway.

It's probably the best way forward. As it is now, these top sides are, in many ways, bigger than their respective FAs. They have a lot of power and they will always choose to keep in place any system that continues to give them an advantage.

Salary cap systems do tend to achieve parity (or at least close to it) in the North American professional leagues. They do not, however, make everybody happy. Certainly if you want all (or almost all) teams to have a chance to win in any given year then a salary cap system is the way to go. It means no team can build a team of top players because they will not be able to afford the salary demands of so many stars under the cap and the penalties for exceeding the cap are high. The NFL and NHL are the best examples of this parity. Inequality still reigns in MLB because their system is a bit different. That seems to be the case in the NBA too. As I said though, players don't like it because it limits their earning power. Fans of teams with less limit on available spending hate it because their clubs have the wherewithal to spend but are prevented from doing it. Owners are divided depending on whether they can or can not spend. All these things give rise to the frequent work stoppages and collective bargaining disputes. So it's not perfect.

I can't see UEFA (or FIFA) implementing something like this. Not in the near future. But it's something that might alleviate some of MH's concerns more than FFP will.

That's because neither MLB nor the NBA have a true salary cap. MLB operates under a luxury tax system where teams who's wage bills are above a certain point pay a "tax" that is distributed to the other teams. Teams like the NY Yankees simply view that tax as a cost of doing business, much like Manchester City would do.

The NBA, on the other hand, operates under a "soft cap." Basically, there is a salary cap, but there are a whole host of exceptions to which it doesn't apply. For example, if you are resigning an existing player on your team to a new contract, only a portion of the salary applies towards the cap. It is insanely confusing.

Unfortunately, I am not sure a hard salary cap, such as that used by the NFL and NHL, could be implemented in football.

The first problem is that it would have to be implemented by FIFA or UEFA, or you end up with each league having different caps that would cause players to flee to the league with the highest cap.

The second problem is that I am not sure European labor policy/law would allow it. In the USA, salary caps are imposed in the Collective Bargaining Agreements between the players union and the leagues. But it doesn't appear that there is any such CBAs in the European Leagues and I don't think the EU courts (from what minute amount of European labor law I understand) would allow such a rule to be imposed unilaterally.

However, I do believe that salary caps are the best solution for the "Sugar Daddy Problem."