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Sven Gone Eriksson

Dave Bowler

5/2/08

In England, there was an advert for a certain brand of tea that used to insist, “You only got an “ooh” with Typhoo!” So, what do you get with a Thaifool?
The sack apparently.

Such is the situation at Manchester City, making a late bid to wrest the coveted “most ludicrous club of the season” award from Newcastle United.

This is a team who are guaranteed to finish 9th at worst, perhaps even as high as 6th in the Premier League when the final whistle blows in a couple of weeks’ time, a position they would have sold several grandmothers for this time last year, or the year before, when they were on the fringes of the relegation scrap, kept afloat only by the incompetence of other clubs rather than any great quality of their own.

Coming from a position like that, transformation into a top six outfit takes time. Moving through the ranks and rising by at least five places in one season is no bad achievement. Let’s look at the teams above them shall we?

Of all those in the top eight, the only ones City could realistically argue they “should” be above would be Blackburn (level on points) and Portsmouth (two points behind). They have no cause to think they should be threatening the top five while they and Aston Villa (four points ahead) are very similar.

Eriksson is yet another victim of his own success, of the expectations he raised in the early part of the season when they were something of a surprise packet - there’s one every year. Sven’s signings were fresh, teams hadn’t yet worked out how to best combat the likes of Elano, Bianchi and Petrov, a competitive advantage which wears off over the course of the season. Second time around, City have been found out a little bit and are now in the next phase of development which is to develop other ways of playing for those days when the opposition is nullifying them.

Those who would prefer to keep on the right side of Mr Shinawatra - and given his allegedly dubious record back home in Thailand, if you want to keep your hands to yourself, that’s possibly a wise policy allegedly again - will point to the fact that Sven spent the thick end of £33million over the course of the current campaign and that 9th place is not the best return. But then all around them, teams are paying out extraordinary sums to achieve little more, little less. That is the going rate in the division and, from the starting place Eriksson had, only the greediest would quibble.

And that, of course, is the problem. Because you don’t have the kind of money that this new breed of footballing mogul has if greed is not a central part of your make up. You and I might say to ourselves, “If I just had a million, that would be it. I could retire, see everybody alright, and never worry again”. But these guys, if they’re a billion short of where they think they ought to be, they’ve got their accountants suspended from the ceiling attached to thumbscrews. But not necessarily by their thumbs. These are the Gordon Gekko brigade, though they might think Gekko was a bit soft. “Greed is good?” Not strong enough. “Greed is God”. And if that’s your philosophy, nothing other than coming first will do, whatever the realities.

You have to remember that the kind of people that are buying up our football clubs are the kind of people who are not used to hearing the word “no”. Not from anybody. These people hate losing, and they rarely do. But there can only be one Premiership winner, one FA Cup winner, one Champions League winner - and they might even come from a different country. Quite why these people want to take over sports teams where, by definition, you spend most of your time losing, is anybody’s guess.

Unless they’re not doing it for sporting motives. No, they can’t possibly be doing it for some kind of financial gain can they? Surely not.

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