Since the Manchester City owners now made the official bid for the takeover of Bahia, there’s huge expectation in Brazil about this operation.
Even though the purchase is still to be approved by the board and fans, there’s big confidence that it will happen, with the club set to have much bigger aspirations now.
To talk about the takeover, UOL journalist Rodrigo Mattos now features a very long interview with Bahia president Guilherme Bellintani. The conversation was about all aspects of the operation, with some of them having to do with the direct relationship the Brazilian club will have with Manchester City.
One of them was about them becoming the ‘pole of attraction’ for South American players to move between clubs from the City Group, which naturally represents a great opportunity for Manchester City.
“It is possible, but not necessarily. These are complementary operations,” Guilherme Bellintani told UOL.
“They can buy and take straight to New York City. It’s possible that they sign a more experienced player from Goiás, for example, 24 years old, a not so young player, for New York City. Or it’s possible that they sign a 19-year-old, who passes through Bahia and then goes to Girona, or do the opposite. It is the platform’s characteristics.
“The concept is global, the decisions are global. The club is not a bubble. In Manchester, they arranged a heads’ meeting, entered the room and told me how the clubs are doing, bosses from all sectors. I had conversations with all sectors. The group’s general strategy was outlined in these meetings. I learned more about football in one year than four years as president of Bahia. Again, we signed an available coach and he was a winner. They want a coach who knows how to coach the team with certain characteristics. May he have the potential to be a winner. Using an expression from Ferran in the Bahia council, a team was in the bottom of the championship and they didn’t fire the coach because they saw that the team was going to give results. And there were times when the team was on the top and he was sacked.”
Bellintani was also asked about Bahia playing in the same ways as Manchester City, as that was said to be a request from the City Group.
“This will necessarily happen, City’s standard of play. They built a system, we’re going to have to play like Manchester City play. Of course we have limitations, there are not the same players. They (City) do not adapt to the club, the club adapts to them. Therefore, it will be inconceivable not to have a goalkeeper who knows how to play with his feet or a defender who is only physically imposed. It’s inconceivable to hire a coach just because he won last year. We need to have a coach within certain game criteria.”
Asked if Bahia’s agreement is different from other sides from the City Group, who are only used as satellite clubs for Manchester City, Bellintani believes that it will be different, with them working to be protagonists in Brazil.
“There is no contractual commitment that Bahia will be the winner at the top of Brazilian football. What do I mean by a winner? We’re not going to win the Brazilian league every year, or have full dominance of Brazilian football. That’s not the project. The project is to have a national dimension. It means being on a recurring basis in Libertadores, after a few years of project, on a recurring basis on the continent.
“There is no project to be the greatest. Even for these results that we project, it takes at least ten years, to be very competitive nationally. Whether this competitiveness will win the title, we don’t know. Budget and investment is what we see. It doesn’t put us between the first and the fourth. It puts us between the fifth, eighth or tenth. What can change is to add the know-how. Platform’s money and expertise. This can cause the money to ‘go up’ by competence.”
