I have to say that of all this week’s Champions League encounters, none will come as close to holding my attention as much as this Tuesday’s encounter between Real Madrid and Manchester City.
The game is being played between two clubs that are approaching this season’s competition with a paradox in common. They share the strutting arrogance of ruthless trophy hunters whose model of big spending on star signings , while winning championships, has nevertheless fallen short of the globe-trotting success story their fans were promised. Rather than unassailable, the true fortunes of both clubs remain somewhat unpredictable at present. Reputations are at stake, not least that of their highly paid managers and one or two of their highly paid players.
Philosophically these are clubs that now prioritise the individual over the team, the ‘star’ foreign signing over youth development, who look for a quick return for every buck invested, and who are quite prepared to dispose of out of form players -and managers if necessary- like rusty widgets who have lost their place on the production line.
To be fair, Real Madrid’s president Florentino Perez and the club’s voting members who have been complicit in his project have been at it rather longer than Man City under Sheikh bin Zayed al Nahyan Mansour-more than ten years in fact have passed since the Spanish club got going with the likes of Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Figo, Zidane, and Beckham, ousting Vicente Del Bosque as too old fashioned and surplus to requirements, and ending up with Mourinho who earns an estimated euros 14.8m in a country that struggles to pay its own public employees.
According to a recent survey published in the Daily Telegraph, in the first three years under Mansour, Man City spent £266 million cash on players after sales. Over the same period the cumulative outlay on wages was £390 million, meaning City were spending on salaries alone more than their income, of £365.3 million, although the club would point to the £61.6 million they spent on the regeneration of area of Manchester.
Real Madrid have spent a great deal more in Euros since Florentino Perez’s galactico project was first conceived .Madrid have splurged further millions in recent years on the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, and Benzema although they waited until the very end of the last transfer window to pay a knock-down price for Modric.
Tuesday’s game has been typecast by some commentators as a clash between an aristocratic (Real Madrid) and a nouveau riche (Manchester City) of the game. The comparison leaves unanswered why Man City has appointed Ferran Soriano a former member of the FC Barcelona management board as its CEO.
Soriano’s book ‘Goal’(subtitled the ‘Ball doesn’t go in by chance’) published in English last year nonetheless provides some insight into the man’s thinking. Appointed vice-president and general manager of FC Barcelona in 2003, Soriano writes of what he describes as the remarkable turn-around of the club which hadn’t won a trophy in four seasons and then went on to win La Liga three years running and the Champions League twice in three years.
So what is Soriano’s recipe for success? This how my former FT colleague Roger Blitz incisively summarized the ambition and limitations of the Soriano project when he reviewed ‘Goal’ for the newspaper last December. “Far from retrenching to look after the concerns of the local, Catalan market, Barcelona – under the presidency of Joan Laporta – sought to become one of football’s biggest international brands.
You also carry out some basic housekeeping – in this case, discovering how many of the club’s registered members were still living (all but 9,000, it turned out) and answering phone calls. You increase ticket prices by up to 40 per cent, beef up the marketing operation – by copying Manchester United’s strategy – and tidy the place up a bit.
Next, you set about getting players to win matches. This is the hard part. No one familiar with European football will find much out of the ordinary in Soriano’s chapters on “the winning team” and “leadership”. The right head coach is critical, as is recognizing when to ship out ageing and uninterested superstars.”
Soriano’s book by contrast glosses over that aspect of FC Barcelona most of its own fans and other fans most admire-the importance attached to La Masia, its youth academy which has developed the club’s style and ethos with the likes of Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta.
The book also pays little attention to the fact that the club left behind by his boss after Soriano had quit, was not exactly a bed of roses in financial terms. When Sandro Rosell succeed Joan Laporta as Barca President, revised accounts approved by the club’s general assembly, which represents the interests of 175,000 fee-paying members who own the club, showed that instead of making the Euros 11m profit that Laporta had claimed in his last season at the helm, the club had in fact lost Euros 79m- allegations strongly denied by Laporta and now the subject of ongoing court proceedings.
Soriano’s book also ducks the issue of the imbalance in wealth across La Liga clubs, caused in large part by Barcelona and Real Madrid grabbing the bulk of television rights revenues, transforming the two clubs into a virtual unassailable duopoly.
It will be interesting to see how Soriano deals not just with the more equitable TV rights distribution of the Premier League but also with the British media which has a tradition and quality of investigative journalism which its Spanish counterpart lacks.
