Summer spending spree won’t be repeated – Hughes

Mark Hughes has stated that the incredible turnover of players in the last two transfer windows isn’t going to be repeated in the future.

These are fascinating statements that appear to confirm how Sheikh Mansour has invested heavily in the short team, with a view to having City compete for the Champions League positions.

Mark Hughes:

“In the future we won’t be going into the market to this extent again. We have gone very quickly into the market and brought in big numbers of players.

“Usually in football this doesn’t happen over short periods. We are obviously investing heavily in our academy and in our scouting.

“In future we will be looking to acquire players we feel will add value to the club and become great players at Manchester City, rather than going out to the market and at times paying a premium because we need the players now.

“We will be in the market if top players become available, but it won’t be at the level we have seen in the last two windows.

“I set out what I felt the club needed in terms of players.

“It was basically a process that should have been done over a three- to five-year period but we made the decision that we would try to make it happen in two windows, and to see how far we could get with it.

“For us to bring in the amount of players we have brought in, and the amount who have gone out, means we have changed personnel at an unprecedented level. Twenty-six players have been sold, released or sent out on loan and that is a huge turnover.

“The challenge we have is that we have a lot of new faces, but those new faces are of the type of character that we think will help in that gelling process.”

Will rival clubs, the media, Michel Platini and Uefa now relax and recognize that we’re not the death of football? Will they recognize that we’re only making an initial investment in the same way Blackburn did when Jack Walker took over, or Chelsea did when Roman Abramovich took over?

It would be nice to think so, but in the short term I doubt it.

In a relatively quiet transfer window elsewhere for the Premier League, we have generated reams of good copy for the press. Columnists will still need to fill their columns and with our higher profile, editors know that ‘outrage’ stories on our new money will continue to prove popular with readers.

Platini and Uefa have their own agenda to push in trying to curb the success of a Premier League that shows up the flaws in the Uefa competitions. Talking up the threat of our spending also helps Platini push the idea of a wage cap. Details of how a wage cap would work are conspicuously harder to find than proclamations on our ‘immoral’ spending.

However it would be interesting to see if the comments by Hughes prove to be true. Whilst I’m sure we won’t see the volume of transfers in future windows, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a smaller number of bigger signings.

If City were to gain a Champions League place then the ‘galactico’ players who have previously said no to our advances, may become more amenable to joining us. To challenge for the Champions League these top class players may even be a necessity, and I get the impression that Sheikh Mansour doesn’t intend to settle for being an also-ran.

Whatever happens, this has been an amazing transfer window, and it will be fascinating to watch how the team comes together.