#38 What is a football group?
Soccer 101
TSS
4.9 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Soccer 101, Joe Lowery answers the question, what is a football group? Hint, there’s a lot of money involved.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to Soccer 101. |
| 0:14.0 | My name is Joe Lowry, and on this episode we're talking all about football groups, |
| 0:18.9 | or soccer groups, whatever you want to call them based on your |
| 0:21.5 | current location, is just fine with me. What is a football group? Well, to best answer that question, |
| 0:28.0 | we need to go back to Manchester, England, circa 2008. Before the turn of the decade from the |
| 0:33.5 | 2000s, Manchester City wasn't a particularly successful club. |
| 0:39.2 | They'd fallen out of the Premier League as recently as 2001, after an 18th place finish, |
| 0:44.5 | sent them down to the English Championship. |
| 0:47.1 | Although they'd returned to the Premier League soon after, they then established themselves |
| 0:51.3 | not as the perennial title contender they are today, |
| 0:56.9 | but as a decidedly poor First Division team. |
| 1:03.5 | They finished 9th one season, then in 16th, then 8th, then 15th, then 14th. |
| 1:08.4 | The results were poor, and so was then club owner Toxin Shinawant. |
| 1:11.8 | Well, as a billionaire and the former prime minister of Thailand, |
| 1:17.6 | Shinnawant probably wasn't entirely strapped for cash, but in 2008, he did have assets worth about 800 million pounds frozen because of corruption charges that he was facing in Thailand. |
| 1:23.5 | So, in 2008, Manchester City was in a bit of a pickle. The on-field stuff was bad. The off-field |
| 1:30.3 | stuff was bad. How on earth was the club going to get back on track? Well, what's a way to fix |
| 1:36.6 | almost any problem inside or outside of soccer? Get someone to throw money at it, which is exactly |
| 1:43.0 | what happened in Manchester. |
| 1:45.1 | In the summer of 2008, the Abu Dhabi United Group formed and bought Manchester City. |
| 1:50.8 | What on earth is the Abu Dhabi United Group? |
| 1:53.5 | Well, I'm glad you asked. |
... |
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