From toilets with no doors and ‘the Temple of Doom’, City have made other top clubs fearful of an era of dominance at home and in Europe
It was the look on Mark Hughes’s face that lingered in the memory. His first press conference since that seminal day – 1 September 2008 – when Manchester City came under the ownership of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Hughes was behind his desk in the manager’s office, trying to make sense of it all, and occasionally looking up to the whiteboard where Robinho’s name had been added to his team for their weekend game. Robinho? No words were necessary.
Everything was very different at Manchester City back then. The greeting at the main entrance came in the Glaswegian accent of Jim Corbett, a former bombardier, in the hut he had decorated with posters of Ricky Hatton, rather than the welcome you can expect today from a small battalion of security guards, with their walkie-talkies, blazers and dangling earpieces.
Written by Daniel Taylor
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/aug/31/abu-dhabi-ownership-transformed-manchester-city-decade under the title “Ten years on: how Abu Dhabi ownership transformed Manchester City”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
