Futiboli....

CHELSEA VS MAN CITY PREVIEW

They were two upper-mid-table clubs based in the middle of large cities. Supporters flock to their 40,000-50,000-seater stadium every home game. Each fan remembers, or knows of, one club’s 3 FA Cups and the other’s 4. Each fan hopes their team can re-produce the glory days of by-gone decades. However, two halves, one angry team talk, and some defensive slip-ups later the fans leave downcast again. That elusive place in Europe is slipping away and they can’t control it. However, like all stories, this one has a happy ending. You see, people abroad have decided buying a football club would be a fun thing to do. These people also have , rather conveniently, many billions of pounds. And so deals are struck, and the clubs pass from their British owners to foreign hands, one directly and the other passes hands a few times before finding its ultimate owner.

Ok, by now you will have guessed that I am talking about two clubs the world of football holds close to their hearts, Chelsea and Manchester City. These two clubs are the clubs that have “bought their way into football”, to quote my Liverpool supporting friends.
Once bought both owners followed the same path, one huge shopping spree. Hundreds of millions have been spent. Roman Abramovich, according to CNN, is said to have spent £240 a minute on Chelsea. To put that into perspective, that’s about 100 Big Macs every minute. Sheikh Mansour too has splashed the cash on high profile signings, and I am sure Mancini will be given a huge budget to get through this summer.
Then the teams became serious fixtures on the minds of the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Chelsea
finalised the “Big Four”, who dominated the top four positions of the Premiership for the latter half of the decade. No other clubs were given a look-in. Man. City, as soon as they were bought, were rumored to be able to upset this imbalance that had formed at the top of British football.

However, despite a dismal season for Liverpool, Man. City don’t hold that Champions League place. One might say this was their first season of showing they could hold off bigger clubs, but the start of the season simply didn’t justify the huge spending Man City had made in the summer transfer window. Of course, Hughes was then replaced by Mancini. Yet it was too late, and Man City had already had too much damage done to themselves.
Considering that two years after being bought Chelsea had already won a Premier League title one might therefore claim that Chelsea’s riches have been managed more wisely. Especially when one considers that when the size of relative wealth of their owner’s is compared: Abromavich’s £8 billion seems rather measly compared the Abu Dhabi United Group (Sheikh Mansour and his investment group). However, hopefully after more investment Man City will convert their billions of pounds into competitive, beautiful, football.

The two clubs are the bain of any other supporter, as they, or so say the supporters, are defiling the very values of the game that is football. Perhaps this was most poignantly shown in Jose Mourinho’s tactics he employed with Chelsea, where a string of emotionless boring wins lead Chelsea to two league titles in a row. However, now it seem that Chelsea are showing they can turn on the style and play beautiful football whilst winning as shown by their 103 goals from this Premier League Season. This it could be said provides a valuable defense for the millions spent, as they contributed to providing us with some amazing matches and good football.

And so the story continues, with Chelsea still chasing their Champions League dreams and Man City hoping that next season they can make an assault on that fourth place position…