Manchester City admit lining up potential managers last summer

Posted Wednesday, December 23, 2009 by theguardian.com

Manchester City admit lining up potential managers last summer
Manchester City's chief executive, Garry Cook, defended the club's contingency planning, including a decision to sound out replacements for Mark Hughes last summer. PA

Manchester City's increasingly beleaguered chief executive, Garry Cook, has risked further damaging the club's credibility by admitting he started sounding out possible replacements for Mark Hughes as long ago as last summer.

The process to investigate the availability of Roberto Mancini as well as Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho and Guus Hiddink began not in the last few weeks, but at the same time as Hughes was being trusted to embark on an unprecedented £125m recruitment programme with what seemed to be the full backing of the club's owners in Abu Dhabi.

Cook, it emerges, was looking at "contingencies" even at a point when the billionaires bankrolling the club were frequently making public statements about Hughes being part of their long-term vision.

"Before the season started we went about our business plan for the year meticulously. We did our scenario planning, mapping out the season, the results we were seeking, and in those plans we looked at the options open to us if we were in a position when we needed to look for a new manager before Christmas," Cook revealed.

"Even at that point we looked at the managers who could be available in a World Cup year, and those who might definitely be available. We had no intention of replacing Mark Hughes, but surely as a business we are entitled to examine all the options?"

He remains unrepentant in the face of allegations that the club tried to orchestrate a cover-up after Hughes was sacked on Saturday to disguise the fact that City had been speaking to Mancini behind the manager's back since early December.

Cook has been heavily criticised for trying to pass off Mancini's appointment with the club's owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, in London on 2 December with the remarkable claim that it was simply a meeting to discuss general football issues.

Craig Bellamy, one of the players closest to Hughes, was so upset he threatened to leave until being pacified at his first meeting with Mancini yesterday and has decided not to submit a transfer request. Cook, however, reiterated that he stood by that point and did not regret the chain of events leading to Hughes's dismissal, adding: "The key message is that we do not have to apologise for our actions; we have nothing to apologise for."

The operation to replace Hughes undoubtedly included a substantial amount of secrecy and subterfuge, but Cook attempted to justify this by pointing out that Sven–Goran Eriksson had suffered similar treatment when Thaksin Shinawatra owned the club.

"I seem to recall Sven was still our manager but he knew he was being replaced before the last game of the season. Weren't they identical circumstances to the way we went about executing our decision to appoint a new manager?"

City have been taken aback by the scale of the criticism they have received and, in particular, the accusation against Cook that he was economical with the truth at Mancini's introductory press conference on Monday, when he stated that the Italian had been offered the job last Thursday but omitted to mention talks had begun at roughly the same time that Hughes was leading the team past Arsenal into the Carling Cup semi-finals three weeks ago.

"The misinterpretation is that we said the decision to sack Mark Hughes was taken after the Spurs game [on 16 December]. Roberto said he had a meeting [a fortnight earlier] in London, but that was a general discussion," Cook said. "Roberto has been caught up in a language issue; in truth, he has been shafted. We are livid that the media has taken a little information and misinterpreted it and that Roberto has been caught up in the crossfire."

Hughes has employed a barrister, Paul Gilroy QC, to help him reach a compensation package and Cook described it as a "touch circumspect [sic] of Mark to leave us saying he was on target for sixth place and 70 points". The chief executive declared that "no club since 1995 had finished below fourth place with 70 points". While that is true, he need look back only to the Premier League table at the end of last season to realise that 70 points would have meant a fifth-placed finish, with Arsenal in fourth on 72.