Pep has so much to prove: Neil Humphreys
Man City's 'buy anyone' approach doesn't impress in current climate
One game, one defeat and Manchester City's bumbling billionaires are staggering towards a crisis.
Gary Neville has mournfully highlighted City's three consecutive defeats as if administering the last rites to a dying soldier.
Those losses, incidentally, were in the Champions League final, the Community Shield and the first game of the English Premier League season, where a City side missing John Stones, Kyle Walker, Kevin de Bruyne and Phil Foden toiled against Tottenham Hotspur.
Never let it be said that the hysterical EPL lacks perspective.
But there is definitely something in the air with regards to City's initial fumbling. A lack of sympathy, certainly, but that's to be expected. Since when did anyone care about the misfortune of rival clubs?
It's the lack of empathy that's interesting. No other club has been in City's current position before, owned and run by a petro-state with limitless funds and expected to win every available trophy to stave off anti-climax.
Pep Guardiola won the title by 12 points last season, but didn't take home the coveted Champions League, so he's obviously a failure.
Guardiola intends to buy the most accomplished striker in British football, so he's clearly the spoiled brat that gets every gift at Christmas.
In reality, the City manager is seeking to replace a club legend, Sergio Aguero, and hasn't bought a conventional centre-forward in more than four years. When it comes to strikers, he's hardly the Kardashians let loose with credit cards.
But the lack of empathy cannot be underestimated either. The traditional giants - Manchester United and Liverpool - are always loved and loathed in equal measure; that's all part of the partisan, prejudiced fun.
City, on the other hand, are judged differently.
If supporters didn't quite cross the Rubicon last season, the twin terrors of a pandemic's austerity measures and the European Super League cash-grab forced a tipping point.
WEALTHY WHINING
There's little patience for wealthy whining.
City may correctly point out, for instance, that the sale of several academy graduates raised almost £60 million (S$112.3m) so the club only needed to find another £40m to pay for Jack Grealish.
But City's stunning training ground and scouting infrastructure have ensured a growing monopoly on budding talent. They buy. They groom. They pick, in the case of Phil Foden. Or they sell, in the case of Jadon Sancho, and make money in a sell-on clause when he ends up at Manchester United.
Either way, no one's hearing any violins playing a sad song for Guardiola's current travails in the transfer market.
Harry Kane will arrive for £150m or he won't. But no other club in world football could feasibly spend a quarter of a billion pounds in a month (apart from the other petro state-owned club in Paris).
Covid-19 has accentuated the cracks of an untenable financial structure for almost everyone else, except Manchester City. So, yes, they are judged differently as a consequence.
While it's ludicrous to suggest Guardiola faces a crisis after winning three league titles in four seasons, it's still reasonable to ask why he lacks an attacking focal point or why Gabriel Jesus and Ferran Torres haven't quite worked out.
Just as it's equally daft to overanalyse an opening fixture that missed several key players, it's still fair to wonder why a bench that cost over £300m couldn't conjure a creative response against Tottenham.
Or why Spurs were able to brush past the 36-year-old Fernandinho or why Benjamin Mendy and Nathan Ake still look vulnerable in defence.
Too many pundits are already suggesting that City's campaign hinges on Kane's final decision, which is probably an oversimplification of their current squad depth. But the debate is not exactly a ringing endorsement either.
One signature shouldn't make or break a club of City's stature.
So Guardiola certainly has something to prove. At a time when there's not a great deal of tolerance for excessive displays of wealth, he knows he's got to deliver a return on that massive investment.
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