sport news IAN LADYMAN: How Newcastle United have learnt lessons from Manchester City's ... trends now
Back in 2008 when Manchester City had just become the richest football club in the world, their owners in Abu Dhabi found themselves on the front and back of a tabloid newspaper on the same day.
‘On the front page they were being laughed at for some banking issue and on the back page they were being laughed at for claiming they were going to buy every famous footballer on the planet,’ reveals a source heavily involved at the time.
‘They had only owned the club for a matter of days and it had to stop. They were in danger of becoming a laughing stock’.
Close to that situation 15 years ago was a financial broker called Amanda Staveley, who had successfully facilitated the sale of a busted, ailing City to Sheik Mansour of Abu Dhabi. Staveley remained close to City through that spectacular transition and, in her current position as director of Newcastle United, has not forgotten the lessons learned.
‘She knows how all that was perceived back then,’ another source told Mail Sport this week. ‘It certainly wasn’t going to happen at Newcastle.’
Back in 2008 when Man City became the richest club in football, their owners were scrutinised
Newcastle United's owners have learnt lessons from their Premier League rivals
The Toon play City at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday evening in a huge clash
Staveley and Newcastle are at City’s Etihad Stadium for a fixture likely to become central to the shape of the Premier League in years to come.
Newcastle are already a Champions League club less than two years after being bought by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. City are Treble winners.
Newcastle’s ascent has been rapid and has come on the back of a net outlay of £325m over four transfer windows. It’s significant but doesn’t quite match the helter skelter nature of City’s early dealings and pronouncements.
On the day their takeover was completed in 2008, every journalist in Manchester scrambled for the phone number of Mansour’s first spokesman Sulaiman Al Fahim, a mouthpiece from Dubai happy to tell the world that City were about to steal Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United while also bidding for Fernando Torres, Cesc Fabregas, Thierry Henry, David Villa and Didier Drogba.
‘Ronaldo has said he wants to play for the biggest club in the world, so we will see if he is serious,’ said Al Fahim.
Fahim was quickly jettisoned. He went on to own Portsmouth for six weeks in 2009 before, a decade later, being sentenced to five years in jail for stealing £5m from his wife to fund the purchase.
City, though, did stick to that caricature of wild and unstructured spending, if only for a while.
On the day of the takeover they broke the British transfer record to buy Robinho from Real Madrid for £32.5m while also trying to hijack United’s purchase of Dimitar Berbatov from Spurs.
In the period between July 2008 — two months before the takeover — and August 25 2009, City
