Arsène Wenger says Manchester City are not in touch with the world, that we're destroying football and the global economy by creating inflationary pressures in deflationary times, that we lack values and have no sense of reality. How dare he?
Very easily, in fact. And any true Manchester City fan, however hungry for success, would agree with the Arsenal manager.
For years I despised Chelsea for bringing the crass loadsamoney culture to football. Now City, my life-long club, are making Chelsea look positively Shylockian. City have been a comedy club for years, but people used to laugh with us rather than at us. Not now. A billion quid a week for Kaka and it looks as if he might be coming. And he calls himself a Christian. Jesus.
Ah, but these are exciting times at City, enjoy, friends tell me, roll with it, as those Oasis boys would say. Pardon me? Being knocked out of the League Cup by Brighton, hammered in the FA Cup by Nottingham Forest and perilously close to the drop zone is exciting?
No, exciting times were doing the double over Manchester United last year, and challenging for a top-four slot for half the season with a hybrid team of homegrown kids and foreign imports. But let's not be rose-tinted. By then the rot had set in. We'd already allowed ourselves to be sold to anybody who dangled a big enough cheque, no matter his human-rights record, no matter he was facing fraud charges, and no matter that it was inevitable his assets would be frozen.
So to yesterday, and our Abu Dhabi saviours who announced they were going to sign up a 20-strong squad of £30m plus players as if that were a guarantee of success, and that they were going to break all records in terms of transfer fees and wages, as if that in itself was a measure of success.
I still can't believe Kaka will sign. I don't want to believe that one of the world's leading footballers would stoop so low as to join us. But say he does, and just say we go on to buy up the entire Brazil squad for a few trillion quid, and they did gel, and we did win the league with the most expensive team ever assembled, would it really feel like a triumph? I hope not.
