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Roberto Mancini's brand of football was simply not good enough for City, and showed no signs of improving.
Speaking in depth about the Italian's sacking for the first time, Blues chief executive Ferran Soriano, who played an influential role in Mancini's sacking, also tackled the issue of Mancini’s relationships with his players and staff.
Carefully avoiding naming the incoming Manuel Pellegrini, Soriano also predicted that the new manager would give City a more attractive, winning style of football, help to develop a stronger youth policy, and soothe the tensions in and around the team.
Looking back at a tumultuous 10 days which saw City lose the FA Cup final, sack the manager and fly to New York to announce the set-up of a new American team, Soriano said the decision to give Mancini the boot had been a tough one – but that the Wembley defeat to Wigan had no bearing.
“It’s always hard,” said the former Barcelona bigwig. “Nobody wants to change a manager but we all want to play good football and we all want to win. I think for the new owners of City to have had only two managers in five years is very good. It shows the willingness to have a very stable managerial team.
“Roberto Mancini did very good for the club. He changed it from a club that was not winning to a winning club and that is very hard. That is all good and we are thankful.
“We are now looking for several things. We are looking to play good football and to win – and I said that in the right order. If you play good football, you will win.
“We believe we have a fantastic squad. It would be very hard for us to change the players for any others in the UK and that includes the champions of the league.
“What we also want is a football concept so that the basic way we play is shared by the whole organisation – from young teams all the way to the first team and all the way to New York.
“We are asking the new manager to have close collaboration with the youth football and to work together to achieve this. Teams that have won consistently in the past have a core of players that are home-grown.”
City’s original statement on the sacking of Mancini spoke of results not being as good as had been hoped this season, domestically and in Europe, and of the need for a “holistic” approach – developing a football creed which suffuses the entire club.
But for the first time, Soriano tackled the issue of Mancini’s relationships with his players and staff.
The Italian’s tendency to publicly criticise his players, and accusations that he was aloof and arrogant around the training ground, did cause concerns for senior management.
“We want a manager who knows about football, but we want somebody who knows about man-management. This is something we are convinced about – myself, the board, the owner – that it is impossible for us to win, win the Champions League in the end, if we don’t have a group that behaves like a family,” said Soriano.
“Like a family where there are no such criticisms as we have discussed, where everybody respects everybody, and to do this you need to be senior, need to have experience of managing groups.
“Our group is difficult, only in the sense that it is diverse in terms of nationalities and languages and so on.
“But they are also very mature people. I can see that for myself because I have seen them, I have seen the players behave and how they behaved when the manager went.
“If they work with a senior manager, they can do great things. What Roberto Mancini did for this football club is fantastic and you cannot have the inspiration of finding the perfect person.
“I think Mancini is a champion – he is a winner. To change the mentality of the club and create this winning attitude from him was great.
“Other areas were different and more challenging but to the new manager we are asking this – we know we have very good players, very mature players so if they are in an environment where there are fewer tensions they will be able to deliver more on the pitch.”
Mancini also clashed with former football administrator Brian Marwood, publicly accusing him of failing to land City’s transfer targets last summer, leading to the late signing of a glut of players, most of whom have failed to make a real impact.
Soriano said that criticism was misguided: “It is unfair to criticise anybody for what happened last summer.
“Last summer there were some players who were signed in the last weeks. They were all players the manager asked for and maybe there will be other players the manager also asked for that were not signed. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not only the desire of the manager, it’s the market, the competition, the prices. And, by the way, regardless of all of this, the squad we have is a fantastic squad – not only in England, in Europe, so nobody should complain about the players we have.”
But the Catalan stressed that tensions in the dressing room and with other staff, while a cause for concern, were not a major factor in the decision to sack Mancini.
“I think it has been a bit exaggerated,” he said. “I have seen dressing rooms with tensions before. Those tensions come from the competition and the fact all the men in that dressing room want to win all the time – they want to play all the time and that is impossible.
“So we are not too worried about this and it’s not the reason why we decided to change the manager.
“Having said that, with the new manager we are asking him that the dressing room has as much harmony as possible, knowing that total harmony is impossible.”
Soriano also said that while Mancini got the team playing good football, and did pay attention to the youth policy, he did not do enough of those things.
“We can’t complain too loudly about being second in the league and runners up in the FA Cup,” he said. “I think we were doing some of these things but we want more. We want more of playing better and we want more of developing a football concept shared across the teams.
“We are changing because we want to improve, even though what we had was very good. We believe that the new manager we choose will do those things and that’s why we are changing.
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