Media Blogs

One Premier League football club has just posted profits of £48m, sits second in the table and is in the Champions League knock-out stages. Another has just posted record losses of £93m is in fourth place in the table and is not even in Europe.

If ever there was a case of statistics not telling the true story, surely this is it. Just take a glance on our United and City boards to see which set of fans are feeling good about things at present. In case you can’t be bothered to do that, it’s City.

And with good reason.

The 4-1 victory over Blackburn was the sort of effortless win we’ve come to expect of United over the years. There was about a five minute window just after Gamst Pedersen scored where there was a bit of old-school dithering, but other than that it was a fairly routine win.

Tevez is playing out of his boots and Micah Richards hasn’t shown that kind of form since he burst onto the scene as a teenager. I hesitate to describe Benjani’s presence and performance as any kind of re-birth though. Yes he got three assists, but two of them were courtesy of miscued shots.

City came in for a lot of criticism over the sacking of Mark Hughes and the hiring of Roberto Mancini, and it was a bit of a shambles. But one thing the club did right was to give their new man a rolling start.

Stoke (h), Wolves (a), Boro (a) and Blackburn (h) for your first four games. It’s buffet time Roberto – go on, help yourself.

Just quickly, it’s good to see new defenders breaking through at City, namely Congo-born Belgian Dedryck Boyata. Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder would have loved to pronounce that phrase.

Meanwhile, I don’t really know what to make of United at the moment. I watched them on Saturday and saw yet more evidence of a squad badly lacking in stardust. Joe Cole could be up for grabs in the summer, Franck Ribery seems to be agitating* for a move. United should be 100 per cent out for this type and calibre of player.

The money is all a bit of a riddle from my perspective. There are so many ways to spin it. I guess the only way to judge from a fans’ perspective is the playing staff. And United aren’t buying.