• Chief executive guaranteed Carling Cup victory over
United
• Abu Dhabi owners growing concerned about club's reputation
Garry Cook has twice had to apologise for remarks
he has made as Manchester City chief executive. Photograph: Alex
Livesey/Getty Images
Manchester
City's owners in Abu Dhabi are starting
to give serious consideration to the position of the chief
executive, Garry Cook, at the end of the season after becoming
increasingly perturbed about his leadership style and the frequency
with which he has attracted bad publicity.
Cook has developed a reputation as one of the game's more
derided figures after a series of personal embarrassments in which
his fondness for speaking his mind has come back to haunt him. The
latest came in the build-up to the second leg of the Carling Cup
semi-final against Manchester United when he was filmed telling
supporters in New York's Mad Hatter Saloon that City would get to
Wembley "not if, but when, we beat United again".
Cook also proclaimed that City were on course to supersede
United, Real Madrid and Barcelona as the "biggest and best club in
the world". He later claimed that he thought it was a closed event,
despite the presence of television cameras as he took the
microphone. Sir Alex Ferguson is understood to have cited Cook's
remarks to his players ahead of Wednesday's 3-1 win which took
United into the final with a 4-3 aggregate victory.
The sense at Old Trafford is that Cook committed one of the
oldest mistakes in the book and, after the match, the midfielder
Darren Fletcher pointedly referred to United "doing their talking
on the pitch". However, the concerns about Cook go back much
further and are more elaborate than just his habit of talking
himself into trouble. City have had a mixed record in the transfer
market, overpaying for several players and missing out on several
key targets, most notably the attempt to smash the world transfer
record by persuading Kaká to sign for the club from Milan for £91m
in January 2009. In one of Cook's more infamous outbursts, the
former Nike marketing executive accused Milan of "bottling it".
More recently, Cook came under scrutiny when City sacked their
manager, Mark Hughes, and it subsequently emerged that his
successor, Roberto Mancini, had been approached three weeks
earlier. Cook tried to pass off meeting the former Internazionale
coach as "general football talks" but the episode reflected badly
on the club when the Abu Dhabi United Group has been trying to
project an image of being different and more noble than other
football club owners. Cook later revealed that he had actually
started to identify possible replacements for Hughes as long ago as
last summer, despite having repeatedly insisted that the club would
be patient with their manager.
The sacking demonstrated the ruthlessness of the club's owner,
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the chairman, Khaldoon
al-Mubarak, during a period of significant change at every level of
the club. Cook was paid £1.5m last year and has admitted being
brought to tears during parts of a 20-month tenure in which, in
effect, he ousted Alistair Mackintosh from the job.
Cook was appointed by the previous owner, Thaksin Shinawatra,
the deposed prime minister of Thailand who had been charged with
corruption offences in his home country. In Cook's first major
interview, he defended Thaksin's reputation, saying: "Is he a nice
guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Has he got the
finances to run a club? Yes. Whether he's guilty of something over
there, I can't worry too much about. Morally, I feel comfortable
in this environment."
He subsequently admitted after Thaksin's conviction that he felt
"dreadful" about making those comments. "I have made some mistakes
in my life," Cook said, "but I deeply regretted my failure to do
proper research on Thaksin."
Garry Cook apologise for a humiliating blunder when he
mistakenly said the German striker had played for bitter rivals
Manchester United and inducting Uwe Rosler into United's Hall
of Fame instead of City's.
Uwe Rosler became a closet man United fan.
That particular episode was not under ADUG's watch, but Cook's
propensity for saying the wrong thing has started to jar with his
employers and also affect the way the supporters consider him. His
public gaffes include welcoming former striker Uwe Rösler to the
"Manchester United Hall of Fame" at a supporters' event, a mistake
that led to him being booed. Cook later wrote an apology for the
mistake.
Cook also vehemently denied reports that Robinho would leave the
club in January but was proved wrong yesterday.