The weird defense of Manchester City
The weird defense of Manchester City
Because the project is based on making the UAE look good, people are twisting themselves in knots avoiding the obvious.
Jurgen Klopp ruffled some feathers in Manchester with his comments in the press conference before the match.
"Nobody can compete with City”
Below is my transcription of his comments and I have included the video of him (it starts at roughly 5:01).
"Nobody can compete with City on that. You have the best team in the world and you put in the best striker on the market. No matter what it costs, you just do it. I know City will not like it, nobody will like it, you've asked the question but you know the answer. What does Liverpool do? We cannot act like them. It is not possible… There are three clubs in world football who can do what they want financially. It's legal and everything, fine, but they can do what they want… You compete with them, it is not a problem at all for me, it's like it is. It’s not possible to deal with that and there is no ceiling for this club, there is no ceiling for Newcastle. Congratulations. Some other clubs have ceilings.”
This has caused a stir in Manchester with briefings being made in the press but no official statements. It has also caused opinion writers to try and distract from the pretty obvious fact that while there are other rich teams in football and it has long been deeply unfair due to this, the clubs with state-backed financing do have different goals and different constraints on their spending.
I will use this column from Simon Bajkowskiwho is the Chief Manchester City writer for the Manchester Evening News.
First, Klopp could have said nothing at all. Managers generally know when what they say will generate headlines, and choose when to feed the media cycle and when not to.
Yeah, he could have but this is a bit “we don’t like what you said and we wish you hadn’t said it” type. I am fairly certain Klopp wasn’t bummed to be asked this because it seemed like something he really wanted to get out.
He could have pointed to the £64m signing of Darwin Nunez (rising to £85m with achievable add-ons) and the £400,000-a-week agreed to make Mo Salah the best-paid player in Liverpool's history.
Again, he could have said something like this. I don’t think his point is that Liverpool are NOT trying to compete because they are but this does ignore that what Liverpool can do is different than what Manchester City can do.
He could have questioned why his owners had not spent even more to strengthen the team and the squad, given that - as this excellent article goes into detail on - some would argue Fenway Sports Group appear to have paid more attention to maximising their profits than giving the club more spending power.
What I think this highlights is the difference between the types of ownership. FSG are an ownership group with a lot of resources but they are in this to get a return on their investment. City Football group by contrast do not seem to worry about profit maximization that at all, their goal is to win the biggest trophies, which in return will make City’s ownership and the UAE look good. To a certain extent this column is a perfect example of this working exactly as planned.
Instead, the German coach played into the tedious and factually incorrect narrative that City have spent years fighting, that somehow they have stacked the game in their favour.
This feels like a pretty big claim. I don’t think what Klopp said is really in much dispute, Manchester City have the ability to spend money that other clubs really don’t feel like it is possible to keep up with.
This data is a bit old but really illustrates the massive injection of money into Manchester City over the last 10 years. That seems consistent with the argument that most teams cannot do this, so in a sense it does feel like things are stacked in Manchester City’s favor.
The comments were demonstrably untrue on almost every level. City can point to three independent judges at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and confirm that the Blues have not done what they want financially but have in fact played by the same rules as anyone else.
A couple of things here, I don’t believe that is what CAS found, my understanding is that the majority of issues were overturned because of time constraints for when the breaches were found. The ruling that they broke the FFP rules was partially upheld. One of the big things that came out of that was just how much Manchester City stonewalled and delayed having to discourse things to UEFA.
A bumper summer of sales for City has sent their net spend soaring, making their figures healthier than Liverpool over the past five years - their net spend over the last five years is £130m compared to £181.3m for Liverpool - despite spending over £250m more in the market. When you factor in that they received £145m for Philippe Coutinho, a grand total of £217.3m received in transfer fees over a five-year period suggests that Liverpool are not as good a selling club as their reputation would have you believe.
This feels like some selective end-point type stuff to make Manchester City look good. If we instead look at the bigger picture since the take over things look like this:
Only Manchester United have been in the same ballpark for net spending with Chelsea also being somewhat close on overall spending but still about 10% lower overall.
Over the last five years, Manchester City has spent 2.5 billion on wages plus fees, Liverpool have spent a lot too but they have only spent 2.06 billion on wages plus fees. That is a difference of nearly 100 million a season.
An average wage bill over the last five years for which there are figures (going up to the 2020/21 season) in which Liverpool's total is 92 per cent of City's further demolishes the idea that Liverpool cannot compete
Does it? It seems like that is still a pretty big gap. That is something where we are talking about 1-2 additional high level players that they are able to pay compared to Liverpool. Over the course of a 38 match season the additional depth can be a huge benefit.
as does the fact that transfer fees paid for Manu Akanji, Julian Alvarez and Sergio Gomez come to less than half of what Liverpool expect to pay for Nunez alone.
This is not apples to apples. These three players are not starters, Liverpool bought Fábio Carvalho and Calvin Ramsay for less than Manuel Akanji. The more apt comparison with Erling Haaland where his transfer fee was lower but he is on HUGE wages so the total cost dwarfs that of Nunez. This is just some disingenuous slight of hand.
If the Merseyside club seriously cannot go for the best players in the market, it must be a different Liverpool that are set to contend for Jude Bellingham in the summer.
This is such a strawman. Klopp did not claim that Liverpool cannot compete for the best players, but rather that they have limits to their spending. If Liverpool were to sign a player like Bellingham, that would probably represent a good chunk of their player budget, for a team like Manchester City or Newcastle they can choose to just make their player budget bigger if they want to.
The irony of glass ceilings was lost on Klopp too when he (erroneously) bemoaned that three clubs have them: Liverpool were, of course, the leading British club aiming to set up a European Super League that would have made an unsmashable glass ceiling for all but a few elite sides before fan backlash forced the collapse of the idea. Maybe some glass ceilings are better than others.
The funny thing about this is that Klopp was one of the people that publicly spoke out against it making this a very weird attempt to tar him with something he was against. Klopp isn’t Liverpool even if it feels that way at times.
I am a bit of a Super League defender, partly because it would put some constraints to level the playing field. The way it was set up was very poor but the inequality between the top and bottoms teams is a concern, as is that the differences between leagues is continuing to grow. The worst thing for me is that games become a foregone conclusion because of the differences between teams ability to recruit players.
The Liverpool manager made all of the Sunday back pages about how it was impossible to compete with City, rather than putting the focus on how the man who just three months ago had said he had the best left-back and right back in the world, four of the best centre-backs in the world and one of the best goalkeepers in the world was going into this fixture 13 points adrift.
This was true when he said it. The biggest difference is that Manchester City have the budget to attempt to be deeper at all of those positions while they too have basically some of the best players in all eleven spots on the field.
For City bosses, Klopp used the same tactics as La Liga supremo Javier Tebas in attacking them on their most sensitive issue by unfairly suggesting that they were operating on a different financial level to everyone else - even if their owners are significantly richer, the difference in terms of money actually spent is far closer.
It is sort of close but still a big gap even over the cherry-picked years. In the wider view the gap only grows and there is nothing to suggest that the spending power they showed in the past is not still there should they stumble at any point. their owners are significantly richer, and that gives them a much larger margin of error for if things go wrong.
If it can feel like it is impossible to compete with City, that is more down to do with their sustained high performance in a number of areas in recent years where individuals who are some of the best in the world in their job have excelled.
Again, because they have more money than almost every team in the world to be able to attract those people to the team. That is the point.
There are many in the game who will have agreed with Klopp or will not understand the depth of City frustration… City will not hesitate to fire back in future if there is any more from Klopp about the spending of the two clubs.
I think sorry tough shit if people seeing through sportswashing attempts frustrates you. I think they should own up that they spend a lot of money to build the best team in the world, they have spent a ton to get to this point and yes maintaining it doesn’t take the same levels of investment but should things go wrong, they still have that to fall back on. This type of argument trying to divert attention doesn’t feel tied to reality at all but you can’t really buy into being the “Evil Empire” type team conquering all before them when your goal is trying to have a good PR spin for a country.