CFG - South America Expansion

LionNYC

LionNYC

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"If the reports are correct, CFG will add their first franchise in South America in the coming weeks. Second division Uruguayan Club Atlético Torque is rumored to be the takeover target. According to Uruguayan news outlet Ovacion, Torque have been working with City Football Group for some time."

Club Athletico Torque Ciudad? Torque Ciudad Club de Futbol?

All that's left is Africa...and Antarctica...and Mars!

https://twitter.com/x/status/844916494647640064
 
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LionNYC said:
"If the reports are correct, CFG will add their first franchise in South America in the coming weeks. Second division Uruguayan Club Atlético Torque is rumored to be the takeover target. According to Uruguayan news outlet Ovacion, Torque have been working with City Football Group for some time."

Club Athletico Torque Ciudad? Torque Ciudad Club de Futbol?

All that's left is Africa...and Antarctica...and Mars!

https://twitter.com/x/status/844916494647640064
Click to expand...

Honestly, this might be our best sister club yet (for us). Kind of wish they were going with an Argentinian team though.

The Japanese, Australian, and United States teams don't exactly sit in the biggest talent pools and are long term projects. A South American club and West African club with academies could be exporters of talent for the rest of the group. They should develop enough players for their own teams, and the better ones could go to richer leagues for higher salaries (i.e. NYCFC) while the world-class players could work their way to MCFC.
 
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LionNYC said:
"If the reports are correct, CFG will add their first franchise in South America in the coming weeks. Second division Uruguayan Club Atlético Torque is rumored to be the takeover target. According to Uruguayan news outlet Ovacion, Torque have been working with City Football Group for some time."

Club Athletico Torque Ciudad? Torque Ciudad Club de Futbol?

All that's left is Africa...and Antarctica...and Mars!

https://twitter.com/x/status/844916494647640064
Click to expand...
The rumors now are that they'll be in Minas (right outside of Montevideo) so probably Minas City, or Minas Ciudad.
 
LionNYC said:
"If the reports are correct, CFG will add their first franchise in South America in the coming weeks. Second division Uruguayan Club Atlético Torque is rumored to be the takeover target. According to Uruguayan news outlet Ovacion, Torque have been working with City Football Group for some time."

Club Athletico Torque Ciudad? Torque Ciudad Club de Futbol?

All that's left is Africa...and Antarctica...and Mars!

https://twitter.com/x/status/844916494647640064
Click to expand...
Road trip!
 
sbrylski said:
Honestly, this might be our best sister club yet (for us). Kind of wish they were going with an Argentinian team though.

The Japanese, Australian, and United States teams don't exactly sit in the biggest talent pools and are long term projects. A South American club and West African club with academies could be exporters of talent for the rest of the group. They should develop enough players for their own teams, and the better ones could go to richer leagues for higher salaries (i.e. NYCFC) while the world-class players could work their way to MCFC.
Click to expand...
Considering the league turmoil down there, CFG could probably buy the entire Argentinian 1st division for the price they paid for NYCFC.
 
LionNYC said:
So Club Atletico Torque is moving to Minas? New stadium?
Click to expand...
They play in Minas, it would be a new stadium they'd want to build. Here's where they play now
Estadio-Municipal-Juan-Antonio-Lavalleja.jpg
 
NYCFCfan said:
They play in Minas, it would be a new stadium they'd want to build. Here's where they play now
Estadio-Municipal-Juan-Antonio-Lavalleja.jpg
Click to expand...

Lord help us if they get a stadium before we do.

Edit: joe beat me to the punchline.
 
LionNYC said:
South American land? South American government? Are you kidding. They could have a stadium done before our season ends.
Click to expand...

Especially when you consider the owner of CFG is the most trusted advisor of a petro kingdom. He could be videotaped giving a breficase of money to the Uruguayan president and nothing would touch him. In South America that can get a lot of stuff done.
 
LionNYC said:
So Club Atletico Torque is moving to Minas? New stadium?
Click to expand...

This is one of the things which doesn't sit right with me about this. I've never been a fan of moving existing teams to new locations, even if they are small sides who probably only get crowds in the low single-figure-thousands at tops. The team currently plays in Montevideo and Minas is 60 miles away, which I know NYCFCFan describes as "just outside of Montevideo" but is far further than any of their existing fans are going to be willing to travel to watch them play. I guess the reason they want to move there is because Minas don't have a professional team at the moment, but it still just feels dodgy.

When I first heard the reports that CFG were going to treat any S. American team the suggestion was that they were going to treat the team which they bought into as an existing brand which they didn't want to tinker with too much - no "City" name or changing their colours, kind of like Yokohama only different (in that CFG don't actually run Yokohama, it's still Nissan's baby; they just support it) but it seems that they've decided to take the opposite approach and aim for a club so small that doing this kind of thing won't hurt them too much with any backlash as the club's existing fans are too few to cause trouble. For this reason, I can very much see a "City" name being adopted. They already have the colours, to be fair.

Also, the report I've seen suggests that CFG are pretty much already building them training facilities and upgrading a stadium for them, so I guess they want as much as possible to be already arranged before they complete the purchase. They're going to have to hurry up if they want it to be done before Torque's new season starts, though, as their first game of the 2017 season is next Friday.
 
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mgarbowski said:
Why the hell would they move from Montevideo to a city with a population of under 40k?
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Presumably because they want to avoid competing in a saturated market where they will already start at a significant disadvantage. The exact same reason MK Dons moved to Milton Keynes away from London back a decade ago. You have to remember that Uruguay is basically a city with a hinterland. One third of the population lives in the city, and a vastly higher proportion of institutions are there. There are 16 teams in the Uruguayan Primera Division and another 15 in the Segunda. Of those 31, 22 play in Montevideo. That's 22 professional teams competing for a share of the 1.3m population of the city, and this is in a country where, as in much of the world, it's considered a mortal sin to change your team allegiances, so just how many fans can they believe they can create there? Far better to move to a city with no local teams, where the locals may not consider themselves real fans of any other team since their options are all so far away, and so will be far more willing to attend the games of a new team in town.

I still object to the move in principle, but I see the business sense.

That said, at the end of the day I highly doubt this move has the primary goal of creating new CFG fans. Rather their aims will just to be to run a stable team (hence the move to avoid the competition for support), hopefully make them successful for the money and publicity, and use them as a convenient way of navigating the minefield of South American business deals in order to acquire players who can move on to other continents.
 
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Falastur said:
That said, at the end of the day I highly doubt this move has the primary goal of creating new CFG fans. Rather their aims will just to be to run a stable team (hence the move to avoid the competition for support), hopefully make them successful for the money and publicity, and use them as a convenient way of navigating the minefield of South American business deals in order to acquire players who can move on to other continents.
Click to expand...

100%. There are no major tv deals, ticket revenues, and jersey sales to be made in South America. It's all about the legalese of FIFA.
 
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Falastur said:
That said, at the end of the day I highly doubt this move has the primary goal of creating new CFG fans. Rather their aims will just to be to run a stable team (hence the move to avoid the competition for support), hopefully make them successful for the money and publicity, and use them as a convenient way of navigating the minefield of South American business deals in order to acquire players who can move on to other continents.
Click to expand...

Agree with you and LionNYC LionNYC. I'm sure they'll heavily invest in an academy down there too.
 
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