ManCity owner plans to buy Russian football club. Pros and cons of acquiring FC Ufa
City Football Group (CFG), led by Mansour ibn Zayd Al Nahyan, intends to acquire a Russian club. Football experts and sports media speculated on the prospects of the RPL and FNL teams to be under the wing of a member of the ruling royal family of the Abu Dhabi emirate. The Ufa football club is named among the applicants.
Mansour has already heard about the Bashkir club. It was FC Ufa that made one of the most high-profile transfers, having sent Alexander Zinchenko to Manchester City (one of the clubs of CFG holding). After that, FC Ufa and the club of the English Premier League signed a multi-year cooperation agreement. Due to it, the general director of the Ufa club Shamil Gazizov took an internship at ManCity. Obviously, Mansour Ibn Zayd Al Nahyan will take into account all these events when buying, prostoprosport.ru reports.
However, according to experts, there is a significant con in the Ufa purchase - the lack of a modern stadium. Although the Bashkir team renovated the Neftyanik stadium several years ago, the arena is considered quite modest by current standards. The Arab sheikh is used to his teams playing in beautiful and top-end stadiums, and here, it would be necessary to invest in reconstruction or in the construction of a sports facility from scratch. Experts are sure that Mansour will never be able to earn back the tidy sum of investments.
Today, the City Football Group Arab holding includes Manchester City (England) and Lommela (Belgium), Mumbai City (India), New York City (USA), Melbourne City (Australia), Yokohama Marinos (Japan), Sichuan Junyu (China), Girona (Spain) and Atletico Torque (Uruguay).