City is owned by the City Football Group, a holding company which owns almost a dozen clubs throughout the world, including the NYC FC team in the MLS. They use the same branding, for instance the NYC FC team has similar jersey colors and designs as Man City. It's deliberate and unless the club they acquire already has a well-established brand with kits which have a lot of history, they change it to the Man City themes.
But the strategy behind collecting clubs goes well beyond uniforms and visual branding.
They actually park some prospects, like a 17 year old Brazilian forward on NYC FC who may some day be good enough to be transferred to the flagship club of CFG.
Rather than loan prospects to other clubs, they park them in other clubs owned by CFG, so that they play under the same system as City and go through the same development process, same analytics, etc.
In fact, when some of these clubs, such as a Belgian club in the lower divisions, are making big transfer decisions, they actually consult by teleconference with some personnel people at MC.
These other CFG clubs have bigger budgets than other clubs in their leagues, just like MC. There haven't been any stars developed through this system yet. For one thing, MC just buys the best players, not rely so heavily on internal development, at least since the Emirati have owned them.
But other owners are starting to use similar strategies:
The success of CFG's corporate model has been noticed by other investors who have been building stables of clubs, such as Miami-based 777 Partners, which has added Genoa, Vasco da Gama, Standard Liege and Red Star to its portfolio in the past year alone. The United World group, run by Saudi Arabia's Prince Abdullah, is built around Sheffield United. David Blitzer, Real Salt Lake principal owner, has holdings in England, Germany and Spain. Red Bull has six clubs from Austria to Ghana. None of those has the same degree of integration as CFG or a similar corporate structure, but the building blocks are there.
Inevitably, there will be others. For the same $3 billion that Boehly and his partners recently paid for Chelsea, an entity could buy an MLS club and add teams in every country where CFG now operates and beyond. The ownership stakes in Palermo, Lommel, Troyes and Montevideo were acquired for a total of less than $50 million. Boehly himself seems interested in adding several smaller clubs to create a similar stable.
Read in ESPN: https://apple.news/AJRSfFKPnTnCnsAz07KhiYA
There may come a time when these conglomerates have teams in the same competition. For instance, if their other clubs do well enough in the top divisions of these other countries, they may be UCL opponents, in which case UEFA would force them to have one of the clubs withdraw.
