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Manchester City are no strangers to using their wide City Football Group (CFG) links to sign promising young talents from around the world.
CFG is the parent company that owns City, and fully owns or has an interest in another eleven clubs in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia, all of which sit in their multi-club system.
Pep Guardiola’s side sit, of course, at the top of this food chain and have used the system to strong effect in the past.
Manchester City eye up City Football Group signing from Brazil
Savinho is the latest example of this structure in action for the Sky Blues in recent years, the Brazilian brought to Europe by CFG club Troyes, loaned to stable-mate Girona, and then eventually signed by City.
Multi-club systems are not without controversy though, not only for their impact on the smaller sides in the group – notably Strasbourg in Chelsea’s set up recently – but also because it allows often Premier League sides to invest by proxy without deals hitting their balance sheet until they’re confident of the player’s first-team impact.
Those criticisms have not stopped City’s interest in Bahia youth product Ruan Pablo, according to a report from Globo.
Bahia, CFG’s outpost in Brazil, see Pablo as one of their brightest youth products, and have moved to keep him at the club by extending his current terms to 2030.
With that new deal comes a fresh release clause, set for international clubs at €200m.
That should protect the youngster from being poached, unless CFG want to move the young winger to another one of their clubs, at which point Bahia would be powerless to resist, and unlikely to bank anything like €200m.
And such a move cannot be ruled out, as the Brazilian outlet says Pablo is being “closely monitored” by City.
In FourFourTwo’s opinion, this is the downside to multi-club systems for those sides that are other than the primary member.
Bahia have found and trained a player they clearly believe to be one of the next stars, but the more success he achieves with the club, the more likely they are to lose him.
It reduces a club like Bahia to little more than a feeder club, who are likely to only ever see middling talents progress from the academy, with the cream of the crop reserved for England.
Pablo is valued at €5m, according to Transfermarkt.
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