Part 5: Premier League Transfers
Manchester City: Manchester City were one of the few teams in the Premier League that showed signs of hope and promise. They were a team that looked like they were going to be breaking into the big time soon.
However all of this changed when the Abu Dhabi United Group decided to take over the club in August 2008. The club saw an inflow of money that it had never witnessed in its history. This was soon followed by the team investing in numerous players.
Whoever the managers felt were appropriate to play in the squad, were brought in with money not being a problem. It didn’t matter to the club if the players that were brought in were wasted. Such was the case when Robinho was brought in from Real Madrid but never really made an impact on the Premier league and was hence used as an attraction tool by the club.
The team recently instated Roberto Mancini to help steer the team to victory and the Italian manager decided that he needed to re haul the team once again, if the team had any hopes of performing better than they did last term. City almost made it into the Champions League but a last day defeat to Tottenham saw the London based team take the final Champions League spot.
The players that Mancini brought in are: Yaya Toure, James Milner, Mario Ballotelli, David Silva, Jerome Boateng, Aleksandr Kolorov, Alex Henshall and Albert Rusnak.
The players that were allowed to leave the team were: avier Garrido, Valeri Bojinov, Robert Mak, Stephen Ireland, Paul Marshall, Filip Mentel, Andrew Mitchell, Karl Moore, Martin Petrov, Jack Redshaw, Tobias Johansen, Silvinho, Benjani Mwaruwari, Craig Bellamy (L), Nedum Onuoha (L), Vladimir Weiss (L), Ryan McGivern (L), Gunnar Nielsen (L), David Ball (L), Keiran Tripper (L), Andrew Tutte (L), Adam Clayton (L)
It is clearly visible that the manager allowed more players to leave the team as compared to the players he brought in. This was because of the fact that he felt all those players were surplus to his needs. Even though some of the players being dropped included the likes of Petrov and Ireland.
However the manager justified his decisions by saying that he wanted the players to get more field time and felt that if they stayed they would get no game time and it would affect the players international careers.
On the other hand Mancini has justified his spending by saying that instead of just splashing money around he has carefully spent money on bringing the very best players in their respective positions to the club. He also went on to say that, if a team hasn’t won anything for a while it is about time that they start spending money, because if they don’t then there is no chance of them winning any trophies.
Manchester City have already managed to beat the likes of Liverpool with a more than convincing score line, which leads everyone to believe that Mancini might actually know what he’s doing.
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