by Wes Mills
It's definitely been a busy couple months for Manchester City and their endless funds. Whether it was targeting more than 100 players, or buying huge names for large obscene sums of money. Now if football was played on paper, City would definitely challenge for the Champions League title.
However, we saw last Saturday vs. Tottenham that it takes a very long time for any team to gel together. I bring this subject up because it got me thinking... will they gel too slowly? I say this because we have seen teams start so slow to the point where they can't catch up (cite last year's Liverpool team as an example). Realistically, just getting into the Champions League is the goal for Tevez and co. To give you an idea how many players on Man City have spent 2 years or less in the Premier League here are the numbers: 10 of the 47 outfield players have spent less than 2 years in the Premiership with most more than half of those 10 being in their first year. Now we all know about the differences between the Premier League compared to the other top flight Euro leagues. Like the pace of the game, combined with the physicality which makes it very hard for new players to keep their stamina week to week as well as stay at 100%.
We saw last year how many times City had to deal with injuries and that was all because of the amount of new players who weren't used to the Premier League's pace. Now I expect the same thing to happen this year to the Citizens. So you're probably asking why is this Mancini's problem?
Well, as you know last year's manager of Man City at the time Mark Hughes was sacked due to the fact that Hughes wasn't winning as many games as Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak would've liked. And this was all due to the new players not getting used to the speed of Premier League as well the team not gelling like everyone had hoped. So Roberto Mancini could very well be in the same situation as Mark Hughes... sacked by Boxing Day.
So, if you ask me can money buy titles? I will tell you at the moment no. Due to many psychological reasons and many factors that a video game couldn't predict. However, this can all change.
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