Hughes' modest wish list at odds with City's grand ambition
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Your support makes all the difference.The billionaire who was Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan's personal representative in the purchase of Manchester City has admitted there is a difference in opinion on how to develop the club between his own ideas of signing box office names and Mark Hughes' plans to build through more modest acquisitions.
Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim, the businessman and property mogul who secured the £200m deal in August, reeled off names in the days afterwards of those players – from Cristiano Ronaldo to Fernando Torres – whom he wanted to see in the club's colours. The Arabs' immediate, audacious £32m purchase of Robinho suggested his vision was the way ahead and there was no doubt that the Brazilian's arrival brought the global attention which Abu Dhabi was looking for in buying a Premier League club.
But Hughes, with names like Chelsea's Wayne Bridge, Portsmouth's Lassana Diarra and Blackburn's Roque Santa Cruz on his list, has displayed a more measured philosophy and though the City manager said of Dr Al-Fahim's ambitions a few weeks back that "the people who made those statements have obviously moved aside now", it remains to be seen whether the entrepreneur, highly acclaimed by the British financiers who brokered the take-over, will have his say if City continue to founder.
"My vision is rather different [to Hughes']," Dr Al-Fahim said yesterday. "I put my vision forward but it is the role of the manager and the chairman to take it forward. I was only asked to close the deal. Only if I was approached by His Highness [Sheikh Mansour] would I have the chance to put ideas across."
Dr Al-Fahim did not shed any light on suggestions in Abu Dhabi that he has produced a list of four of five big names for whom City might bid and he said that Sheikh Mansour was not currently seeking further involvement from him. But the so-called Donald Trump of Abu Dhabi – so named because, like Trump, he hosts his own reality show – is bound to have his ideas on how to develop City.
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