Considering the amount that Thaksin’s invested in the club, City probably don’t have much choice in the matter but they’ll probably conclude it’s for the best. Thaksin has developed an unfortunate habit of popping up in Asia and briefing on his transfer targets with rather more candour than City would like.

Try this one for size, delivered at a conference in Hong Kong a few weeks ago and popped up on the Reuter news wire a few hours later: “Dietmar Hamann is getting old.” Ouch! It’s no exaggeration to say that City were aghast, Hamann having delivered so much steel this season that the club’s other ‘ol Blue Eyes – Sven - wants to offer him a new one-year contract. Then there was the suggestion, in the same briefing to journalists, that the Brazilian striker Adriano might be on the way from AC Milan in a deal which, logic suggested, might mean the end of the road for the Italian striker Rolando Bianchi.

All this has left Sven to draw on his vast wealth of diplomatic skills to smooth things out with the players concerned. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that Saturday’s programme notes, in which Eriksson raved about the benefits of Hamann’s 'experience' on young players, was an attempt to put things straight about him and he talked up Bianchi at some length too.

Sources at City think that the Asian media’s penchant for press conferences explain why their owner is so talkative. But life may be a bit less bumpy for Sven after Thailand’s elections on 23 December in which Thaksin’s proxy party – ‘People Power’ - is making a bid for victory which, it is widely assumed, would enable him to return from exile. In the election build-up, the big football pronouncements get Thaksin TV air space and do the party’s efforts no harm.

But buried in the Hong Kong interview was Thaksin’s disclosure that he’s finding running a football club very expensive and might need to find other ways of financing it. Life’s seemed a lot simpler under foreign ownership at City than at Old Trafford to date but expect 2008 to be a challenging year for the City PR team.