Manchester City chairman Thaksin Shinawatra insists he still has a "good friendship" with former manager Sven Goran Eriksson.

He told the Daily Mail: "I want you to know that Sven is a good man. I brought him to the club and supported him with investment (more than £50m spent last season) and we still have a good friendship.

"But I want this club to advance faster, much faster. Sven is a good football general, but we need more. We must play with more consistency, much more urgency. In the second half of the season, the slide was too bad, too much. We lost 8-1 at Middlesbrough! The shame of that."

Thaksin added: "The team stopped playing! They stopped working! I could not take this. I understand you cannot win every game. A football is round; it does not bounce along a straight line. I can accept the unpredictable, but not such a fall. We had to make a change.

"Mark Hughes is an excellent appointment. The players need to be motivated, instead of playing like people who are not being paid any money!"