Don’t disagree with the sentiment of the big boys not getting all their cake, but to pretend that City are not cooking the books is pure naïveté.
Certainly Fifa think so.
I read an interesting stat somewhere about how you can correlate success with spending. I can't remember the exact metric but it was kind of about how each point gained cost a certain amount of money.
It was put together with a massive dataset over decades and decades and using loads of different leagues.
Essentially it suggested that there's one of two situations:
A) Guardiola is about 10 times more effective than anyone else who's managed a football club ever because their spend to success metric was way, way out of line with the curve.
B) City are very adept at masking spending and actually have spent a lot more than it appears in the surface.
If it's B) it's no surprise really as clubs have always done this (i.e. to get round max wage back in the day), but as you said above, City are doing it on an industrial level.
I do agree with Materates that there's a lot of envy towards City from clubs who assumed they'd sewn up the right to be the 'big boys' forever but the problem is that we're approaching the scale of money and investment with City and Newcastle that no one in the world will be capable of challenging and when we reach that end game, I'm not sure what happens. We've always had the assumption that sooner or later someone will both outspend and outcoach the dominant force but when the dominant force is the world's richest states, then we end up having to wait for global geopolitics to shift in order for the Premier League to reshape and I'm not sure I'm especially into that.
City are both very good and very rich. They're an excellent football side and absolutely ruthless behind the scenes.
To be honest, I wish the lot of them (all the global capital clubs) would fuck off to a world league and get up to their shenanigans there as I find it boring as fuck and arguing about the relative morality of an American investment group Vs an oil state is like choosing between a glass of piss and a glass of flat lemonade someone has tipped an ashtray in and left for a week.
