How the City Football Group is heading towards Global Football Dominance?
From Melbourne City FC to New York City FC, City Football Group is slowly expanding their footballing presence but for what?
City Football group or CFG have been slowly changing football ownership since their foundation. Khaldoon Al Mubarak in his statement said “We have an ambition as a football group to have an organization that is global and that will have multiple clubs as part of it.”
Currently, CFG has 10 member clubs spanning from the Americas to Asia with Man City being the flagship club of the group. The group is not solely owned by Abu Dhabi United Group. Silver Lake and China Media Capital also have a stake in the group.
Ferran Soriano whilst at FC Barcelona envisioned having a franchise of the Catalan club and he pushed for it in the MLS but things did not turn out to be as he expected eventually he exited the club. A few years later he joined mega-rich Manchester City and revived his vision of a global football entity and CFG was born in the year 2013.
Almost every top football club on the planet has a scouting network spread all across the globe, it is impossible to operate throughout the world and have all the needed information about local players. On the other hand, CFG shares information throughout the group of clubs and makes player movement easy between the sister clubs.
Red Bull Football is another global football group working on similar lines and has had great success wherever they have operated till now. In 2018, RB Leipzig and RB Salzburg both qualified for the Champions League that season, UEFA rules do not allow multiple clubs from the same owner in any UEFA competition but they granted them to face each other. UEFA let them change the way they want clubs to operate.
This extended network of sister football clubs also provides these clubs with a unique proposition of scouting and using players to improve the overall standard of these respective teams. As the flagship franchise of City Group, Manchester City has been beneficiary of this model more often than not. An academy, boasting of tremendous footballing talents around the world is an example of such a network. These academy graduates represent the City Group clubs across the world. Many of the emerging talents from the Man City academy, try their Mattle in Spanish side Girona. Douglas Luiz, Aleix Garcia, Pablo Maffeo all benefited from the exposure to top-flight football and all of them were sold for a substantial fee.
Any player signed by other City franchises, if promising, is transferred to Manchester City to grow and fulfil his potential, one of the examples of the above scenario would be Aaron Mooy. Even though he couldn't break into the City side, the club still profited from his move by selling him to Huddersfield for 10 million pounds. A more high-profile transfer raised many eyebrows when Frank Lampard joined New York City FC and then took a loan transfer to Manchester City. A Chelsea legend playing against them for a rival, not an everyday story in the game of football. The further insult came when he was the one scoring against his old side.
Closing thoughts?
City Football Group is on a mission to change how football clubs should run, they are backed by a powerful country altogether. It could mean footprints in more countries and becoming as powerful as a governing body altogether.
For instance, a player being signed by Girona could easily play for Man City without even paying a dime. Is it good for the football business? It is going well for the group and the expansion plan is always on so let us see how well they change football ownership dynamics.