14 Years Ago Today - The Most Important Game in Manchester City's History?

Today is the 14th anniversary of arguably the most important game in Manchester City's history - the 1999 Division 2 Play-off Final. Most clubs would claim their most important game was a title or cup winning game. But for Manchester City I'd argue this play-off final is the clubs most important game ever.

Why? Because without it there probably would be no Aguero scoring a last minute goal to win the Premier League. Instead Manchester City could well be still down there alongside Leeds United and Sheffield Wednesday - big clubs struggling to recover from disastrous relegation's. City may well still be at Maine Road as well. This game occurred before construction had started on the Etihad Stadium. Would a Manchester City in Division 2 have been able to afford the conversion costs for the stadium after the Commonwealth Games? And the new stadium was a key reason why Shiekh Mansour chose Manchester City when he decided to buy a football team.

For me it is one of the best memories I have as a City supporter. I was lucky enough to be there and, while I won't go into the drama on the pitch that day, two off the pitch events have remained with me to this day.

At the full time whistle I was a bit of an emotional wreck. The drama of the last few minutes had been a true emotional rollercoaster and I'd felt the effects. A city fan was walking up the steps while we waited for extra time and stopped when he saw me, just gave me a big hug and just said 'I know', before walking off. It summed up for me how we all felt.

The second event happened a couple of hours after the game. I was staying with a friend who lived in London and met him after the game in the centre of London. He'd been watching the game in a pub and was telling me about the atmosphere there when I suddenly realised that I had no idea how good the game had been. In hindsight this seems absurd but I'd been so caught up in the emotional rollercoaster that it hadn't sunk in yet. So I asked him, and he looked at me as if I was stupid before saying it was one of the best games he'd ever seen.

What if.... the Mancini news hadn't broken when it did?

FA Cup Final 2013

The night before the 2013 FA Cup Final, strong rumours started circulating that Mancini would be sacked. By the morning all major newspapers and many other news sources were reporting this. There had been rumours for months that this may happen but nothing this strong. The question that has bugged me since then is why did it happen at that moment? And what was the source for this?

What I write here should not take anything away from Wigan's achievement. They were the better side on the day and fully deserved to win the FA Cup. However, there will always remain a big what if question about the day for me. What would have happened had this news not broken when it did? It clearly had an impact, not least among the fans who spent a lot of time letting the club now exactly what they though of it. How much impact did it have on the team that day is unclear. But given how poorly they played and the seeming lack of work rate from many players it isn't hard to suspect it did play a part.

So where did the story come from? It could hardly have come at a worse time than the day of the FA Cup Final. So was it leaked by someone who wanted to prevent Mancini winning the cup, which would have made it more difficult for the club to sack him? I have no idea but it remains a troubling possibility.

As for subsequent events, I don't think it had any impact on the decision to sack Mancini. That decision looks to have been made some time ago. All it ended up doing was forcing Manchester City to bring that forward a few weeks. It's likely he would have been sacked after the club returned from the post-season tour of the USA. So in the long run the only impact other than on the FA Cup Final is likely to be minor.

New York City and Financial Fair Play

In a revealing interview with Ferran Soriano in the Telegraph about the investment in New York City and the future of Manchester City, he claimed that "this project [NY City] has nothing to do with FFP". That may be true, that the investment is not designed to help with Financial Fair Play (FFP), but it surely has FFP implications for Manchester City.

The first and most obvious implication is how would the initial investment in the new franchise be accounted for? And will this spending be counted when City are assessed for FFP? Initial reports suggest that the fee to buy the franchise is $100 million, and a stadium will be built at a cost of of $340 million. Combined with the inevitable start-up costs this means a total investment in the region of $500 million looks likely. While this will be shared with the partners in this, the New York Yankees, and there may be borrowing against the stadium to finance its construction, it is inevitable that this will mean Manchester City spending a considerable amount of money in the short term.

So from an FFP point of view this looks like it should make it harder for Manchester City to pass. Under Financial Fair Play, clubs losses are limited to €45 million in the initial monitoring period so additional investment such as this, which is unlikely to see any return for a few years, should make it harder to pass. But the regulations are not straightforward and contain rules allowing the exclusion of certain types of expenditure from the FFP calculations.

One of the exclusions covers investment in infrastructure. This is designed to allow investment in new stadiums, training facilities etc. At face value it looks like investment in a new football team and stadium could be discounted from FFP under this exclusion. However, I'm sure that when the regulations were written, the intention was to exclude investment in the teams own stadium and training facilities. Additionally the new team is outside of UEFA, who are behind the regulations. This means this may well fall into a grey area within the regulations. It's likely it will be excluded (as I'm sure City will have had lawyers and accountants checking this) but this isn't certain.

Once the initial investment has been accounted for, there is the ongoing implications due to the day-to-day operations of both clubs. Firstly any profits from the new team should be able to be counted as they are from a football related activity. Secondly there is a great deal of scope for mutually beneficial commercial cooperation between all three parties in this (Man City, NY City and NY Yankees). For example, I would not be surprised to see all three selling each others merchandise. These should all have a positive impact by providing additional revenue, assuming NY City are financially successful.

There is also much scope for cooperation in player transfers, loans etc. This is unlikely to be a blatant mis-use of the system. For example, we won't see NY City buying Cristiano Ronaldo for £100 million then selling him to Manchester City for £1. The MLS single entity structure, and the involvement of the Yankees, mean this will not be possible. While the majority of the benefits are outside the scope of this blog, there could be benefits financially from the cooperation, one example being Man City having somewhere to send players out on loan easily (thereby reducing the wage bill). But this impact will be small and I'm sure UEFA will check any transfer fee's between the two clubs for 'fair value'.

It's the role of the NY Yankees that makes me think this won't have a major impact on FFP. There will be a temptation for some to think Man City could play financial games, shifting revenue and costs between the two in a similar way to what we have seen from other companies. But this would mean the Yankees losing out which should mean it won't happen. So as long as the initial investment can be excluded from FFP, it looks like this deal will only have a small positive effect as it will help increase revenues from the commercial side of the football club.