More emerging this morning as to how the downfall of Hughes was planned, and executed, and one
which left Hughes a lame duck manager:
It emerged a verbal agreement on Mancini's three-and-a-half-year contract was reached
on December 2, as City beat Arsenal in the Carling Cup, but the board wanted to delay the
appointment until after tough games against Chelsea, Bolton and Tottenham.
A nice look at the situation from David Conn today, in which, contrary to some opinion, the
decision to sack Hughes was very much made by the owners of the club, and not Garry Cook and/or
Brian Marwood:
The view began to harden that something did have to change. Hughes had the same first-team
coaching staff, including his former Welsh playing colleagues Mark Bowen, Eddie Niedzwiecki and
Glyn Hodges, who have worked alongside him since he started out in management with his national
team 10 years ago.
It's fitting in a way that this should be one of the last headlines of 2009: Real Madrid deny
rumours of €1bn offer from Manchester City owner. If the Noughts was the decade of
wildly-inflated transfer fee, the teens will be the decade of the conglomerate owners.
There has been quite a lot of talk since 2008 about how football would eventually succumb to the
economic crisis, with once-mighty European clubs swimming in debt, forced to make yearly interest
payments equivalent to once-in-a-life-time transfer deals.
