Manchester City gets a lot of hate. Much of it is a little silly, and comes across as envy disguised as principle. This is a shame, because there are many things about the club that legitimately deserve scorn; it's just that the good reasons to hate Man City are often too subtle or convoluted to galvanize attention. One such example of the club's true shittiness came on Thursday, when it officially announced Brazilian winger Sávio as its latest signing.
At first blush, there isn't anything about City's decision to sign Sávio that would seem objectionable. The 20-year-old had his breakout season last year for the remarkable Girona team that took La Liga by storm, mounting a credible title challenge for much of the season before eventually settling for a still stunning and wholly deserved third-place finish, which granted the small Catalan club a spot in the upcoming Champions League. To the extent that a team as choral as Girona had one, Sávio was its star. The team's venomous attack was built mainly around finding ways to isolate Sávio high and wide out on the left wing, where the take-on specialist would routinely destroy any poor defender tasked with keeping him in check. His dribbling has always been his most immediately impressive trait, but his explosion last year came from what he was able to do after he'd already ran past a defender or two—namely, his ability to setup teammates with his passing and to score himself. The nine goals and 10 assists he put up in league play are what really turned him from a dribbler with promise into a true force of nature.
If there are two traits manager Pep Guardiola loves in a player, they are dribbling and versatility. Sávio is a serrated knife with the ball at his feet, and he's equally comfortable and effective playing on either wing. (In fact, part of what's so impressive about his performances last season is that he primarily did it playing on the left, when he's more naturally a right-sided player.) Quietly, Man City really missed Riyad Mahrez's presence—his speed and dribbling and effectiveness in the penalty box—after his unexpected exit to Saudi Arabia last summer. At the very least Sávio looks like a strong replacement for Mahrez's role as a reliable rotation winger, and because he's still so young, there's no reason why he can't develop into something even more in the coming years. Especially for the price—something in the £30 million region—the Sávio signing looks like another typically smart piece of business for one of the best-run clubs in the world.
It's only when you start looking beneath the surface of this deal that you start to notice the rotten smell. For one: Where is that £30 million going? Well, not to Girona. Technically Sávio was on loan at Girona last year. His parent club was Troyes, which competes in France's second division. Sávio had signed with Troyes ahead of the 2022-23 season, joining from Brazil's Atlético Mineiro for about €6 million. That money made him the club's record transfer fee, and ostensibly the face of the team as it sought to establish itself in Ligue 1 after getting promoted to the top division the season prior. So, how did Sávio do for Troyes? Well, he didn't play a single minute for the club—not because he wasn't good enough, but because he was really only ever a Troyes player in name, since, in a sense, even back then he already belonged to Manchester City.
There's an important commonality between Man City, Girona, and Troyes: they are all owned by the same company. They are but three of the 10 clubs owned and operated by City Football Group, a holding company based out of Britain which, once you flip over all the shells, you'll find is really just another tentacle of the Abu Dhabi royal family's soft power regime. The multi-club ownership model has been around for a while but has really taken off over the past few years. As in so many other facets of the game, Man City has quickly emerged as the most ruthlessly efficient mover in this sector.
No matter what the owners involved may try to say about their intentions, the idea of the multi-club ownership model is to create a big, hierarchical chain of clubs through which to move players, coaches, and money to strengthen the capacities of each individual team and, ultimately, to benefit the focal club(s) at the top. Especially in a time of (on paper) more stringent domestic and continental financial regulations, it makes a lot of sense for big clubs to be able to test out prospects, buy or sell players, and move around assets in a way that doesn't necessarily involve the top dog's books. Instead of taking a risk on a high-potential but still raw player yourself, why not send that kid to a lower level team and see how it goes there first? Instead of doing that by loaning said youngster to a separate club that will do whatever it wishes, why not loan or even transfer him to one of the clubs within your network, where you as the owner can oversee and influence every last detail of how that move goes? Instead of just eating the salary of an underperforming player no one else wants a part of, why not take that albatross off your big club's neck and place it on one of your smaller ones, to offer the big club more financial breathing room? The potential benefits for the team at the top of a multi-club pyramid are legion—and so are the risks to the smaller clubs, who can easily find themselves turned into glorified academies or dumping grounds for the clubs that "really matter."
The case at hand is a good example of all this. It's almost certain that from the moment Sávio signed with Troyes in 2022, City Football Group had already considered him an asset belonging to Manchester City. A promising Brazilian teen going to a newly promoted Ligue 1 outfit doesn't make much sense outside of the Man City angle, especially not when he was immediately sent to the Netherlands to play for PSV after "joining" Troyes. But what does make sense is City Football Group seeing Sávio's potential when he was in Brazil, bringing him into their web of influence via Troyes, inserting him into their greater club chain to assess his development, and, should he eventually become as good as it appeared he might, then bringing him to the Premier League on the cheap.
That would explain why Troyes never got a single minute of production from its record signing, why CFG decided to send Sávio to Girona in his second year after Troyes got relegated, and why Girona, instead of moving heaven and earth to sign its standout player on a permanent deal using its new Champions League riches, sat by while Man City scooped him up for a relative pittance. And it potentially goes even further. It's perfectly possible that Sávio hits the ground running in the Prem and proves to be the exact Mahrez replacement the Citizens sorely need. However, there's also a good chance Sávio doesn't wind up performing in Manchester this year (while the Brazilian is very good, it's not clear if he's up to the level of Man City), and finds himself on the transfer list come next summer. Should that be the case, City would stand to gain a very tasty return on investment; even off of a down season, Sávio's youth and his electric campaign with Girona would surely command the kind of €50-plus million transfer fee that would today seem to be closer to his real market value.
The proposition is a win-win for Man City. Meanwhile, both Girona and Troyes suffer. Troyes is the biggest loser. The French club's entire tenure as a Man City subsidiary, which begain in 2020, has been a disaster. Though City Football Group did help get Troyes promoted in 2022, since then CFG has put aside any pretense that this proud club is, in their hands, anything other than a feeder club. CFG is responsible for all three of Troyes's most expensive signings ever—along with Sávio, there's Brazilian midfielder Metinho and Swedish winger Amar Fatah—and not one of them has made a single appearance for the Troyes first team.
Fans have complained that the club's transfer policy has been based solely on signing and developing young players (for whose benefit?), many of whom have proven ill-equipped for the relegation battles Troyes has found itself in. The club has fired popular, experienced managers while hiring and giving a baffling long rope to Australian manager Patrick Kisnorbo, a company man who'd previously worked for CFG's Aussie club Melbourne City before being handed the reigns for a club in a country he had no experience with in a language he did not speak. WIth Kisnorbo in charge, Troyes was relegated back to Ligue 2 after that blip of a season in Ligue 1, and would've been relegated to Division 3 this past season if not for another club going bankrupt and automatically taking one of the relegation spots.
Any hopes for a brighter future for Troyes brought about by CFG's deep pockets have been dashed. Troyes has now essentially been hijacked by the owners, who don't see it as its own institution with its own history and fans and intrinsic value, but instead as a farm to exploit in case some of what grows there can be shipped off to the club the owners really care about.
Girona's situation is, happily, nowhere near as bleak. Though its roster is stuffed with players with former ties to CFG clubs, it just so happened to hit upon a concoction that has worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Having a top-tier La Liga outfit in the fold would seem to offer some major potential benefits for Man City, as a place to send talents who are too good for CFG's Troyes-level clubs but maybe need more polishing before they're ready for Man City, and as place to send castaways. For that reason, you don't see CFG trying to gut Girona the way it has Troyes any time soon.
Any upcoming transfers between City and Girona will need to be indirect, of course. UEFA already has a rule that prevents clubs with the same owner from competing against each other in the same competition in an attempt to head off one of the more obvious dangers of the multi-club ownership model. However, UEFA has been quite flexible in applying the rule over the years as these kinds of situations become increasingly common. UEFA has already signed off on allowing Man City and Girona to compete in the upcoming Champions League, but before it did so it required the clubs to implement firmer boundaries between the two at the decision-making level. Part of the agreement was that City and Girona cannot transfer players between one another for the next three transfer windows.
This new ruling posed no risk to the Sávio signing, since the former Girona player was on Troyes's books, not Girona's, before going to City. Girona now will have to look elsewhere to find a new attacking centerpiece, and also won't have the large transfer windfall to invest, since it didn't make any money off of the Sávio deal. Still, Girona looks like an excellent team, and its truly miraculous season, and the celebratory Champions League campaign it will soon enjoy, shouldn't be seen as tainted by the City Football Group's stink. What's more, so long as Girona stays good, it will probably insulate itself from the sad, subservient fate of Troyes.
But how long will that last? How long will Girona still be first and foremost Girona, and not Man City's glorified reserve team? Recent transfer rumors may offer a hint. Reports said that Girona had been pushing hard this summer to bring in Luciano Rodríguez, a 21-year-old Uruguayan forward who currently plays for Liverpool Montevideo (no association with the Premier League's Liverpool), to help replace Sávio's lost production. That deal seems to have fallen through. Instead, Rodríguez looks headed for Brazilian club Bahia. Why would a player on the verge of signing for a European Champions League team instead go to one struggling to stay up in Brazil's Série A? Well, Bahia is also owned by the City Football Group. So don't rule out Rodríguez finding his way to Girona this season, nor his eventually moving up even higher in the very near future. As always, it's nearly impossible to keep Manchester City away from what it wants.
