By Laurie Fitzgerald
On Friday, Manchester City announced their financial figures for the 2010-11 season – and it did not make for good reading.
The world’s wealthiest football club confirmed they had made a staggering loss of £194.9 million, which is the biggest deficit suffered during a 12-month period in the history of English football.
It follows a year of another massive spending spree by the Eastlands club, with the likes of David Silva, Yaya Toure and Mario Balotelli assembled amongst many big names in what is now a star-studded squad.
On the pitch the investment is paying off. City are top of the table after an excellent start to their Premier League campaign, and are competing in their first season in the Champions League.
But off the pitch it’s astonishing that a business carries on as normal in this current economy when it makes such a significant loss in such a short space of time.
Of course there will be those that point out the loss has come from an unlimited pot of gold belonging to owner Sheikh Mansour, whose billions have completely changed the landscape at the Etihad stadium.
City fans will also state that after years of ups and downs, including a drop into the third tier of English football, the club are due such an upturn in fortunes.
All are valid points, and there’s no doubt that a large amount of money and spending is needed to achieve what is constituted as success in modern-day football.
However, if City continue their imperious march to the Premier League title come May then it will be on the back of obscene spending that simply doesn’t give anybody else a chance.
FIFA are introducing the financial fair play rules over the next couple of years, but by then City will have made efforts to straighten the books, safe in the knowledge they have a squad that can compete on all fronts and dominate domestically.
Other sides won’t be able make up the ground because of these new rules, meaning that the gulf will be there for the foreseeable future.
This may paint a bleak and predominantly negative view of the subject, and when all is said and done if your club has the money to spend then you want to see the owners do exactly that.
But if City do go and dominate over several years, it will be on the back of financial figures that no other club would even be able to survive from let alone benefit – and that is something that won’t sit comfortably with many football fans.
So what do you think? Are you ok with the fact that Manchester City have got into this position on the back of such a financial loss? Leave a comment and let us know your views.
A poignant question. Football is not a realistic business anyway but City’s operations are like a joke. However any restrictions would be catastrophic for all the biggest clubs in the world, so it’s really difficult to know where to go with this one.