Robinho may have been a gift horse for Mark Hughes, but after 18 months it is evident that other expensive signings have not worked out

An open and entertaining game was the last thing anyone wanted to see. There was speculation over whether Mark Hughes would even attend, and when he did emerge from the tunnel he was greeted by a banner draped across the opposite stand bearing the slogan: Manchester thanks you, Sheikh Mansour. Well, it is Christmas.

If festive jollity has been in short supply in the Hughes household this week, it was completely absent from the dugout. It was apparently irrelevant to Hughes’s future at the club whether or not Manchester City won this match, which seems unjust but actually makes a sort of sense. Even the manager would have to admit that City cannot have made startling progress if they have arrived at a position where a home game against Sunderland is a must-win match.

Hughes always said City would be a long-term project, repeatedly stressing it would take several transfer windows to make all the adjustments necessary, though he must have known all along that the club’s Abu Dhabi owners would want a quicker return on their considerable investment than another mid-table finish or, even worse, qualification for the dreaded Europa League.

It now seems clear that Champions League qualification was the goal all along, otherwise City would not be unhappy with a situation where winning their match in hand would take them back to the fringe of the top four. The only explanation for the events of the last few days is that the club’s hierarchy no longer have any confidence that any particular match can be won. With just one win in 10 matches before this fixture, Hughes can offer little in his defence. Indeed, his defence offered little in his defence, and that was part of the problem, but Hughes must find it embarrassing that even Birmingham City have won more games without anything like the same amount of money to spend.

City began like a train, as if setting out to make a plea on behalf of their manager, before familiar defensive failings saw them stuck in the Eastlands equivalent of the Channel Tunnel. In nonchalantly breezing to a two-goal lead then just as casually surrendering it, City underlined that nothing has really changed. Even Hughes cannot argue with that, and from the look on his face it appears he knows it.

Hughes has his sympathisers, of course, and those who see the glass as half full rather than half empty argue that patience is a virtue in team-building, and it is a sad indictment of modern football mores that a manager can be sacked before Christmas after losing only two games. That may be so, but the mega-money game cuts both ways. No one was complaining about the Abu Dhabi group being in a hurry when they completed their takeover at the end of the summer of 2008 and threw in the £32.5m Robinho as a goodwill gesture.

Hughes had only been at the club a matter of weeks then, and already must have had the feeling the ground was shifting beneath his feet. The talented Brazilian is not everyone’s idea of a team player and was far from the normal Hughes template for signings, established when money was tight at Blackburn. Even when he made the short journey to Eastlands to take up work under Thaksin Shinawatra, Hughes was still talking about looking for value in signings, and being interested mostly in players who he could improve and therefore make more valuable. If Robinho was a marquee signing to announce the club’s unlimited ambition, he has since behaved like one. Right up to his petulant disappearance against Spurs he has caused Hughes problems in one way or another, and was only selected for the bench here.

Even when he plays, Robinho has only occasionally looked as impressive as his price tag, though it is hardly Hughes’s fault if he none too secretly hankers for a move back to Spain or needs a manager with a more stellar CV fully to motivate him. Robinho may have been more of a gift horse the manager could not refuse than a real Hughes signing, yet after 18 months at the club it is evident that some of the other expensive players Hughes has brought in have not worked out as well as anticipated. Broadly speaking, the manager has done better with the sort of player he might have signed for Blackburn had he had a bigger budget. Shay Given and Craig Bellamy (a player he did sign for Blackburn) have been the success stories of the season so far, with pinching Gareth Barry from under Liverpool’s nose one of the manager’s best bits of business.

Less successful have been the statement signings, where Hughes has appeared to spend big just because he could. Chasing John Terry seemed a daft idea at the time and was ultimately shown to be so, though even dafter was the idea that Joleon Lescott would do instead. The former Everton defender is simply not a £22m player, as any Goodison regular could have told Hughes, and the City manager moved out a far more reliable and capable organiser of a defence in Richard Dunne, who has been outstanding all season for Aston Villa.

Similarly, for all the manufactured furore of his image on a poster, City have been seeing all season why Manchester United were only using Carlos Tevez as an impact substitute by the end of his spell at Old Trafford. Tevez might conceivably have been worth the £25m his owners were asking for him – it was his pass that sliced Sunderland apart as early as the fourth minute here – though if City really did pay more than double that amount because of his unusual ownership, they paid well over the odds. Roque Santa Cruz proved once again is still a fine player who will score goals when asked, but he was far better value as a Blackburn gamble than a £16m understudy. Wayne Bridge, currently injured, has never looked as secure at City as he did at Chelsea, and his left-sided partnership with the unavailable Lescott does not look likely to last.

Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Touré ought to have been decent captures, as you would expect of established Premier League performers sold at top price, though it is possible Arsenal saw the best of both of them. Touré is currently going backwards faster than Liverpool in the title betting. The centre-half was badly at fault on both occasions when Sunderland made light work of overhauling an almost instant two-goal deficit, as comedy defending came back to haunt Hughes just as he must have been feeling fairly chuffed. The manager’s expression as Jordan Henderson slammed an equaliser past Given after City had defended a corner with comprehensive ineptitude was a mask of pain. Angry, hurt and upset all at the same time, as anyone has a right to be after replacing his in the belief he was bringing in quality.

That is the area that does not appear to have worked, and although City are all about new money and new aspirations, it will simply be a variation on an old story should Hughes become the latest manager to be sacked on the eve of a transfer window because his employers have lost confidence in his shopping ability. It also goes to show that managing a big budget is not necessarily any easier than getting by on a small one.

Mark HughesManchester CityPremier LeagueSunderlandPaul Wilsonguardian.co.uk