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Opinion

Manchester City disrespect Newcastle United and rest of English football

7 years ago
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I often lie awake at night worrying about the injustices served on clubs such as Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United and Manchester City.

How everybody else who hasn’t ended up at the top table of English football isn’t doing enough to help these clubs get ever richer and more powerful.

Pep Guardiola is one of many high profile managers to arrive in the Premier League from abroad, who get a real wake up call that they won’t find it quite as easy as their past jobs.

The Man City boss had only managed previously at Bayern Munich and Barcelona, countries where most seasons it is a one horse and two horse race respectively.

Over halfway through the season, Guardiola finds himself and his team 10 points off the top and not even in a Champions League spot.

When looking for reasons that may have contributed to his struggles, Pep Guardiola has come up with the problem that his young stars are handicapped by the fact that currently they can’t play in a Manchester City B team in the Championship.

He says that it should be like Spain where La Liga clubs have B teams that play in the lower leagues and this helps to bridge the quality/competition gap for young players from ‘big’ clubs, preparing them better for eventual first team football.

If ever there was a wrong way of looking at something, this must be it.

English football has the strongest league set-up in the World by some distance, 92 clubs over four divisions, and even the fifth tier is now largely comprised of full-time teams.

Allowing Premier League clubs to field B teams simply devalues and disrespects every single other club, including those other Premier League clubs who wouldn’t go down that route.

The current set-up is already far too weighted in favour of the richer clubs, with in particular the ridiculous loan system that allows clubs like Chelsea to have an astonishing 38 players out on loan at the moment, with the vast majority destined never to play for them – Christian Atsu one of the many.

The disastrous checkatrade trophy this season is surely the only further proof you need that fans of other clubs are not interested in watching B teams from Manchester City or indeed any other club.

There are a lot of things that need fixing in English football but this is not one of them, plus just how naff would it be if you had a scenario of B teams from the Manchester clubs (or whoever) finishing in the top two places in the Championship but not allowed to go up?

Pep Guardiola claims that his idea is ‘The future of English football’….well the way he is going and judged on the way Man City have acted in the past with failing managers, he won’t be around much longer to view any future of English football at first hand.

Pep Guardiola:

“I think the reserve league for the young players is not good enough.

“They compete in these second teams but it is not a good league, the consistency is not physically strong. In Spain, the second teams in Barcelona and Madrid play in front of 40,000-45,000 people in Barcelona/Madrid.

“Here, they play with no spectators. It’s not strong enough and that’s why it’s so difficult for the English players sometimes at big clubs like City.

“I think it’s a real problem for English football.

“So why can we not create Manchester City or Manchester United second team and not play in the Championship against Newcastle?

“They’d play for the second team of United, City, Tottenham and they compete with Newcastle playing in front of huge (numbers of) fans. That is the future of English football.”

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