Mancini will pay price for boring a billionaire
The game we saw at Stamford Bridge yesterday suggests the fortunes being thrown at these clubs by their billionaire owners are subject to the law of diminishing returns.
At least the Chelsea billionaire got to celebrate a couple of goals with his friends in his private box. Wherever Sheikh Mansour was watching the match, it is to be hoped he was watching alone.
If City’s negativity was dull for neutrals, one wonders how it would have felt for the man who has spent £650m (€740m) to buy and build the team.
Roberto Mancini can claim to have made some progress with Manchester City in that they have got a bit further in the FA Cup and cut the number of goals they concede in the league to a fraction under one per game.
But since last season, City have added Edin Dzeko, James Milner, Mario Balotelli, Aleksandr Kolarov, Yaya Toure, David Silva and Jerome Boateng for combined fees approaching €180m.
The net result of that investment has been to leave them with the same number of points they had after 30 games last season. The only reason they are higher up the league is that everybody else has been worse.
Mancini is on course to hit the target of Champions League qualification, and will doubtless feel that under the terms laid out, he is entitled to keep his job.
There will be plenty of real football men who will agree that the City manager has welded together a mean defensive unit, with the tall defender Vincent Kompany and anchor midfielder Nigel de Jong particularly impressive. Football men know these things take time.
Is Sheikh Mansour a genuine football man? Or is he a billionaire hedonist who is used to getting whatever he wants, whenever he wants it?
Does he appreciate the way City squeezed the spaces between their lines, closing down Chelsea’s angles of attack, cutting off the service to Torres? Does he take satisfaction from the fact they so nearly fought their way to a grimly-earned point before Luiz popped up at the near post?
Or does he wish that the team he has spent so much money on would for once just attack and score goals and give him something to cheer about with his friends?
If Mansour is the former, the serious football man with a streak of hardbitten realism, the type of near-masochistic defensive purist who takes as much satisfaction from a superbly-disciplined 0-0 draw as from a chaotic 4-2 win, then he is the first such billionaire owner in the history of football.
The other billionaires he can be compared to — Abramovich at Chelsea, Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, Florentino Perez at Real Madrid, Massimo Moratti at Inter — are all adrenaline junkies who cannot tolerate coaches who bore them, even if the coaches are brilliant.
Abramovich sacked Jose Mourinho after five major trophies in three seasons because he got tired of the philosophy that put clean sheets first. Perez sacked Vicente del Bosque after two Champions Leagues in four seasons because he didn’t like the look of his face.
The lesson for a manager who is working for a billionaire is that the boss must at all costs be kept entertained. Oddly for a man who spent almost his entire career at big Italian clubs headed by a histrionic main man, Mancini does not seem to have grasped this.
At Stamford Bridge, City, the highest-paid squad in the league, sat back and showed little interest in attack or even in possession. So negative was their approach that when they succumbed to Luiz’s late sucker punch it was impossible to feel any sympathy for them.
That’s why Mancini needs to beat Manchester United in the Cup semi-final to give himself much chance of taking City into the Champions League next season.
Mancini did not personally speak to the press after the match, that honour was left to David Platt, whose most notable contribution was to remark that James Milner was “a universal player”. Well, that’s one way to describe him.
The winning manager, Carlo Ancelotti, was the one who had to face questions about his job.
The Chelsea chief executive Ron Gourlay told the BBC that the Italian had a contract till 2012, but that his performance would nevertheless be reviewed this summer. It seemed that most people in the press room were of the opinion that Ancelotti will not be in charge of Chelsea next season.
As questions about these comments devolved into a snippy exchange between Chelsea’s press officer and a journalist, Ancelotti did a good job of looking coolly unperturbed. He knows, as Gourlay said, “these things can be pretty fickle”.
At least Mancini does not have to suffer that kind of public indignity but it would be a surprise if City’s ownership was not considering his position. And if he does go, nobody will miss him.
The most expensive team in the league should not be playing underdog football.
