‘‘The league here is well organised and the restrictions that it has (salary cap, rules on squad sizes and number of foreign players) are positive,’’Soriano says. Melbourne Heart players acknowledge the fans after the team defeated the Newcastle Jets at AAMI Park last weekend. Credit:Getty Images ‘‘There are other leagues where this does not exist, and there is corruption. We are early in the history of the league, and maybe we can help develop it. We have experience in the Premier League, but Txiki Begiristain (City’s director of football) and I have been with Barcelona as well. We never considered Western Sydney. ‘‘When you look at the number of people in the city who like football, play football, the number of people living here there’s enough to fill this stadium every week.’’ The deal which sees Heart sold for a figure of around $11.5 million to the City led consortium also includes the ownership group of the Melbourne Storm as minority shareholders with a 20 per cent stake. Bart Campbell, chairman of the holding company Heart Consortium Group and chairman of NRL club Melbourne Storm NRL, said “partnering with City to co-invest in Melbourne Heart will further strengthen the sporting landscape in one of the world’s greatest cities and bring a range of new capabilities to AAMI Park.

‘‘It is our shared ambition to replicate the model that City created with the New York Yankees around New York City FC and for both organisations to benefit as a result,” Campbell says. City’s move on struggling Heart has already set the social media agenda buzzing, chiefly with questions about name and colour changes for the club. Soriano and his colleagues smiled but were non committal when the question was put to them as to whether Heart would abandon its red and white stripes in favour of City’s Sky Blue, and whether it might change its name to Melbourne City FC, sharing initials with their parent company’s MCFC acronym. ‘‘This is day one for us. We want to take our time and listen. I think everything is open,’’ says the chief executive, who was formerly the vice chairman at Barcelona earlier in his career.

For Heart the sky is now the limit. Soriano spoke of the chance of sporting synergies not just with City in Manchester, but with its affiliate in the US, New York FC, for which they have just bought a license as part of the next MLS expansion. ‘‘We have experience in football performance, medicine, sports science, and of course tactics and technical development,’’ he says. ‘‘We also know about player recruitment and have large scouting networks all over the world to look for players for the Melbourne team as well as the others. ‘‘We want all our teams to take benefit from our global organisation.’’

Heart fans shouldn’t however, hold their breath waiting for the likes of Yaya Toure or Sergio Aguerro to be making guest appearances down by the Yarra. "We won’t be sending Manchester City players because they are City players. We will be sending the best players this team needs,’’ Soriano says. That could mean players from the MLS franchise, although Marwood, who has been one of City’s football development staff during the Sky Blues rise, did not rule out the chances of some of City’s younger and fringe players being sent over to Australia for loan deals to boost Heart’s playing stocks. ‘‘Why not ?’’ the former Sheffield Wednesday and Arsenal winger says. ‘‘It’s a league that’s competitive and we send out young players on loan all the time. What an experience it would be to send them out here to play.’’

Another major benefit for Heart is that the City investment will allow the peripatetic club to develop a training base and headquarters which it can truly call its own. Heart’s progress has in part been stymied by the lack of certainty surrounding its training set up. This season it has trained at a number of venues before settling on Epping for the remainder of the campaign. The City officials said they will build and establish a youth development structure and training set up based on the template of the impressive facility they are building in Manchester, although of course much smaller. Loading ‘‘Our aim is to have a very good training facility. We want all our teams to play with the same principals so we want to get them to train the same way in the same high quality training environments,’’ said Soriano.

Begiristain pointed out that youth development will be a major plank of Heart’s program given that there are so many restrictions on the number of foreign players that can be signed by A-League clubs.



