Manchester City's Life-President Bernard Halford explained his hopes for a season of hope to Empower-Sport's Satish Sekar earlier this season. Mark Hughes had found work with Fulham and immediately piled the pressure onto his successor Roberto Mancini. They had spent big in short time, but success was not guaranteed.

"We treat every game with wanting to win and we treat all our opponents with respect," Halford said. "We're developing a squad which hopefully can challenge on all four fronts that we're looking for. The manager's got a good squad where he can rotate players and we just want to do well in all competitions and we want to win something for those wonderful fans of ours."

It was a strange season in the Premier League, but Manchester City never really threatened to win the league – qualification for the Champion's League was their aim. Hughes said that Champion's League football had to be achieved with such a squad. It was left late, but that mission has been achieved. The club focuses on football ambitions as it must and has big ambitions.

"First of all, as a club, we want to become global, which we're working towards," said Halford. "We've got a wonderful marketing team that are working on that at the present time, but I mean our aims as a club in the football are to do well on all fronts and to do well in Europe and then take it on from there."