The Day We Caught The Train: Part 2

A Billion In The Bank

Manchester City was the richest club in the world, whatever that meant. Rumours continued to swirl in the Manchester breeze. The club was in for all sorts of players. Dimitar Berbatov and of course Robinho.  And according to reports, most of the forward players in Europe’s major leagues. The links with Ronaldo were met with less enthusiasm. “Buy him and have him selling programmes,” suggested one online poster.

And it seemed the man to lead us into the light was a man named Sulaiman al-Fahim.  Fahim, one of the more “colourful” characters in Abu Dhabi, ran Hydra Properties and presented an Apprentice-style reality TV show called Hydra Executives, leading him to be dubbed by some people as Abu Dhabi’s Donald Trump. It is uncertain whether this was intended as a compliment.

It was reported that Al Fahim believed City needed to sign 18 players in total to eventually win the Premiership title and Champions League. He had outlined a team of players he wanted to bring to City, including Lionel Messi, Sergio Ramos, Javier Mascherano, Philip Lahm, Cesc Fabregas, Fernando Torres, Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Cristiano Ronaldo and David Villa.

You might as well aim for the stars.

“Our goal is very simple,” he said. “We want to make Manchester City the biggest club in the Premier League, and to begin with, to finish in the top four this season.”

City would finish 10^th, 22 points behind  4^thplaced Arsenal.

Windows 2008

Time was of the essence. With the transfer window about to slam shut, as transfer windows are wont to do, there was little opportunity it seemed to make a statement. But perhaps there were other issues besides projecting to the footballing world.

The following paragraph from The Club is fascinating, but perhaps is to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Mansour gave the purchase the green light. This would not be an acquisition by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund — this came out of Mansour’s pocket. There was one highly unusual condition attached to the sale, however: Manchester City needed to sign a superstar player immediately or Abu Dhabi would consider backing out. It didn’t matter who the superstar was. He just had to be big enough to match Abu Dhabi’s ambition. And they needed to get him right now. The transfer window was closing in 24 hours.

Garry Cook has since reiterated the facts that without a big purchase the owners might have pulled out. It seems rather unlikely, Cook over-emphasising the importance of what he did that day perhaps. What’s more, the contradictions in ownership claims that have dogged the club ever since 2008 are perfectly illustrated in that single paragraph. This was a personal investment, yet the book’s authors claim a big purchase was necessary to project to the world the ambition of Abu Dhabi. So which was it?

“This is all the Abu Dhabi royal family,” explained Anil Bhoyrul at the time, the former Mirror journalist who broke the story for his Dubai-based magazine Arabian Business. “This [ADUG] is essentially an investment vehicle set up for Man City and funded by sheikhs in the royal family. It’s not exactly clear which sheikhs it is yet but this is the Abu Dhabi royal family.” Bhoyrul had previously been investigated over the so-called ‘City Slickers’ share tipping scandal along with the paper’s then editor, Piers Morgan.

What was made clear on the forums of those “in the know” in the weeks that due diligence was carried out, was that Shinawatra may well have played a dangerous game in the period leading up to September 1^st. The club had flirted with administration many a time in the preceding years, and it seemed that it had done so once more. Shinawatra’s funds were frozen back in Thailand and the club was not in a good place financially. Without his funds at hand, the spending spree of the previous summer required a loan to make the second instalment of payments. Without a takeover, that loan would have had serious repercussions for the club by 2009. One thread on the Bluemoon forum in August 2008 was titled simply, “Administration within a fortnight”.  It seemed another owner had gambled with the future of City. What’s more, ADUG seemed to be the only interested buyer, and Shinawatra was driving a hard bargain. But thankfully not too hard, as it turned out.

A deal was agreed, in principle.

And whilst Thaksin may have had no other interested parties (a point he may contest, with Staveley commenting at the time of many interested parties from the Gulf region), Sheikh Mansour and ADUG certainly had cast their eyes elsewhere when contemplating investing in the Premier League. According to a BBC article at the time, City was the eventual choice because Arsenal’s major shareholders had collectively agreed not to sell to anybody in the near future, Newcastle were quoted at £400m and Liverpool were deemed poor value because of the need for a new stadium.

Thus, Garry Cook and Thaksin’s right-hand man Pairoj Piempongsant, would find themselves sat in an office in Old Park Lane desperate to spend as much money as humanly possible as the transfer deadline approached. All the targets were attackers, as they were sexier than a good, solid centre-half. Cook and Pairoj spent all morning on the phone to agents and executives while the office in Manchester faxed off a string of offers across the continent. Reports that City accidentally bid for Lionel Messi though were laughable, the rumour being that the spoken word “messy” was misinterpreted. Meanwhile. Alex Ferguson kidnapped Dimitar Berbatov, and he was soon picked out at Old Trafford by a Sky Sports News camera.

We’ve got Robinho

And then, just past midnight, the news filtered through on the BBC transfer deadline day feed.

0005: TRANSFER CONFIRMED AND MY GOD IT’S A CRACKER

Robinho, the 24-year-old Brazilian, has left Real Madrid and signed for Manchester City. That is officially the biggest deadline day deal in history. Probably.

The longest, most intriguing day in City’s history had its denouement.  Sheikh Mansour/ADUG/Abu Dhabi/ the UAE state had its trophy. Robinho, a player Chelsea had been negotiating to sign for weeks, was a Manchester City player, costing a cool £32.5m. He thought he had signed for Chelsea, mocked rival fans. He had wanted to, but Real Madrid’s president was loath to deal with a club that had already printed Robinho shirts, and who would not go above a fee of £29m. The Brazilian maestro had never been to Manchester, and this was equally true as the news of his signing spread. Much of City’s business is done in London not Manchester, so it was there Robinho landed before signing on the dotted line late in the day, just half an hour from the midnight deadline.

Everything had changed. Everything would change. Not just for City, but in English football.

Curtis S recalls the day:

After landing back in Manchester, I wondered whether we’d managed to sign any last minute freebies before the window closed. Obviously this was in a time where smartphones and social media weren’t as apparent, so I had to rely on the taxi driver to give me news. He informed me that we’d been taken over by “Abbi Dabbi” in his words and that we’d signed Robinho.  I first thought this is a United fan, looking to wind up a City fan on his return to dreary Manchester. When he insisted it was true I then thought, Christ – this jet lag is making me delusional.

It wasn’t until I turned my phone on and checked my messages from my red mates that I realised the cabbie was telling the truth. I had received things along the lines of “you’ll always be in our shadow” and “you’ll never win anything”. As soon as I got back home, I abandoned my cases in the garden such was my panic to get to the TV and get Sky Sports News on.

And that was the experience for many of us. Glued to Sky Sports News in the days when it was still the place to go for breaking news. By 2008 Twitter was a thing, but I was not aware of it. We sat late into the night, glued to our television screens, waiting for the next breaking story, the next big player to be linked, the next story that would be hard to comprehend, to accompany all the other incomprehensible stories and rumours that day. September 1^st, 2008. Many an hour spent flitting between the TV and the message boards.

We woke up the next day rubbing our eyes and wondering what was real and what we had dreamt. The only regret was that this takeover had not completed just a couple of weeks earlier. What a fun 14 days would have lay ahead if it had. On the other hand, the deadline was only on September 1^stbecause August 31^stwas a Sunday that year, so the extra day was welcome.

Instead, Nigel De Jong, Craig Bellamy Shay Given and Wayne Bridge would arrive during the January 2009 transfer window, Kaka would thankfully bottle doing the same, and the next summer Carlos Tevez was welcomed to Manchester.