They may as well do.
Whilst the aims of FFP were noble, if the biggest financial dopers in the history of sport have got away with their blatent cheating, what's the point?
They may as well do.
Whilst the aims of FFP were noble, if the biggest financial dopers in the history of sport have got away with their blatent cheating, what's the point?
Im no City lover but I always doubted the sincerity and motivation of FFP. Its timing seemed to coincide with England becoming the dominant league in Europe and just like Blatter and his cronies, the reputation of UEFA like FIFA now lies in the gutter and I like that. This country was shafted for years by their ilk and the last 5 years has been total payback.
Last edited by eddiewaringsflatcap; 13th July 2020 at 13:11.
I think the problem is that they had already planned on punishing City before the investigation was complete, whilst City could well have breached the rules the rules on sponsorship by companies owned by the clubs owners are at best unclear. I’m not a City fan, but are City, who have access to vast amounts of funding, less financially viable than Manchester United who are still laden with hundreds of millions of pounds of debt from their takeover 15 years ago?
For FFP to be viable loopholes need to be closed and grey areas need to be cleared up, otherwise they may as well get rid of it.
FFP is all about affordability, though. And, much as it pains me to say it, Man U have the biggest income of any club in the UK (because they're the biggest club). Their income allows them to spend the level of money that they do.
What Abu Dhabi were accused of (and the hacked documents looked like a smoking gun to everyone but CAS) was pretending bungs from the Abu Dhabi state (which can't be included as income for FFP reasons) was legitimate sponsorship income.
The problem is that up until being bought by a murderously tyrannical oil dictatorship for sportwashing purposes, Man City were a nothing club barely known outside of Manchestoh. As such, their income was a pittance in comparison to genuine big clubs like Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, who've built their status organically from the ground up by winning through the ages and attracting fans, media attention and global following as a result.
Man city have more local fans than utd or liverpool put together and since the premier league began, both utd and Liverpool have spent far more than city. Plus how the •••• can you call city a nothing club, you wouldnt have the bottle to walk round Manchester saying that, big mouth gob shite
More local fans than both clubs put together? Yeah, thats not likely, as for Liverpool and United spending more in the Premier League era than City, thats not the case, only Chelsea have spent more than City, according to https://www.transferleague.co.uk/hom...1992-to-date-2 and would be well above them if they hadnt spent time in Division 1 and 2.
Before the money was pumped in City last won the league in 1968 and last won a major trophy in 1976, and when in the Premier League spending most of the time in the bottom half of the table, without the money they would likely still be there, so could be seen as previously being a nothing club.
Methinks I touched a nerve...
Please provide a link to evidence to back up your 'more local fans than Man U or Liverpool put together' or we'll just consider it to be a fantastical claim based on sheer bollocks, because I can't see Citeh having a bigger local fan base than either. I've worked in Manchester for 19 years and met scores of football fans local to the area: Man U fans outnumber Citeh fans in those I've met by about 6:1.
The fact the Emptihad always has swathes of unoccupied seats hardly backs up your claim (although curiously the attendance figure is always inflated... more FFP chicanery?)
With regards to spending, if we go from when the tyrannical oil dictatorship bought you out in 2008, your net transfer spend has been £1.2bn. Man U's was second at £721m and Liverpool £328m (source: http://www.sportbible.com/football/n...90610.amp.html)
So that's more nonsense you've spouted.
Finally, do you agree that your angry insults and insinuations that Citeh fans would subject me to something unpleasant for merely saying that prior to hitting the oil dictator jackpot Citeh were a 'nothing club', show a serious inferiority complex amongst Citeh fans?
No they don't, don't be daft. There are more United fans in Manchester than City fans, it isn't even close. Yes, the percentage of City fans that come from Manchester is higher than the percentage of United fans that come from Manchester, but that doesn't mean United don't have more fans in the city. And I would strongly suggest that the percentage of football fans in Liverpool who follow Liverpool is also alot higher than the percentage of Mancs that follow City.
Twenty years ago you'd just been promoted from the third tier via the play-offs, and barring a decent spell for a decade between 1967 and 1976 when you won the league, the ECWC and a couple of League Cups you were basically an underachieving big city club until you came into money. Not a nothing club I agree, you were regularly in the European spots in the 60s and 70s, and were generally amongst the 5 or 6 best supported clubs in the land during those decades, but nothing to shout home about either.
Fans of genuinely big clubs expect to be at the top, and when they're not they make an issue out of it. It comes from history and expectation, and City never had any of that pre-2010. You'd never hear a Liverpool or United fan singing 'We're Not Really Here' when they were on the verge of winning something would you, because whilst the City fans were overwhelmed to find themselves in such a position that they used humour to explain it away, it still showed that there was never an expectation or even a hope that the club would organically get to the top beforehand. That's the difference.
City are like Newcastle, Tottenham, Everton and a few others. They are big clubs to an extent, play in big cities and therefore have decent sized fanbases. They also each have a period in history when they were really good, but those periods weren't very long and were all quite some time ago. City were the club that got the oil money and hit the big time, but had that money gone to any of the other 3 clubs mentioned they would be in City's place now and City would be 8th in the league and of no real consequence to anyone barring two derby games a season.
Just a quick note to say **** the EFL.
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Got a feeling that if Wigan have a good solicitor to fight this then they could create merry hell for the EFL, even a blind person can see how the EFL failed in the due diligence over the change of ownership. This is the sort of thing that could end up in the courts for years, should Wigan fight on if the appeal is unsuccessful.
I don't believe we will. It costs millions in the long run and we have no money to fight it. This appeal costs around 450000 with all costs going to the EFL whether we win or lose. It stinks to high heaven and we won't be the last club. Change is needed but while the Premier League gets richer and richer year after year the other 72(1) clubs are left to rot.
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He Pep, you chequebook-manager fraud, how times did Lyon score after your plastic club equalised?
Last edited by Webbo Again; 16th August 2020 at 13:23.
I think this is the kind of behaviour that makes our friends from Merseyside so dislikeable to everybody else. It's not good enough for them to just win themselves, they have to do it whilst going on the attack and insulting other clubs and their fans. It's in the DNA. It's the way they are. Childish! Angry! In your face! Abusive! No class!
However, on a more civilised note. ;-)
Pep's quality as a domestic manager isn't in doubt. He's perhaps the best there has ever been. Some of the football played over the last three years has been a joy to watch and there is no doubt they have been the most exciting, entertaining and magical team to watch in that period. Some of the systems that have been employed admittedly do take the best players to carry them out, but to teach a team to play out from the back like we do, well, no fraud can do that.
For those who claim it's all about the chequebook, then that doesn't bear out in the facts, either. United have spent as much as us in the last five or six years for very little success and much less quality football, but more pertinently, if it was simply about that, the Champions League would have been in the bag by now.
The reality is that he has an achilles heel, and a huge one. He's afraid of failure, and fear of failure makes it much more likely.
How can anybody explain the change in tactics, the defensive formations and the negativity designed to stop lesser teams such as Liverpool in 2018, Spurs in 2019 and Lyon in 2020? He seems to go all fuzzy round the edges and doubt everything he has ever achieved when in the later stages of Europe. Instead of trusting our players to go out there and do their stuff, he overthinks things and starts to get more concerned about negating the opposition. This came about because of the 3-1 defeat at Monaco in 2017, and whilst I could understand it at Anfield, to a certain extent, doing it at Spurs and especially on Saturday was just ludicrous, and it's made him look a tit. I reckon that if any one of 54,000 fans and a few empty seats had been allowed to pick their preferred team on Saturday, we'd have won.
As for the 'plastic club' jibes, well, as a season ticket holder for 41 years, one who watched us as continually the 4th best supported club in the country from the late 70s through to the dismal mid 1980s, and who, at that time were also one of the historically top 8 most successful clubs in the country, well, I think it takes a lack of understanding of football history to really believe that. It's always worth pointing out to those who talk about history but seem to know nothing about it, that the two biggest supported clubs in the inter-war era were Chelsea and Manchester City, those supposed plastic clubs with no history. You've got to laugh when the same people who used to talk about us as a "sleeping giant", now suggest we are "small", those that once praised us for 30,000 crowds in the Third Division now call the same people 'plastic' and those that constantly remind us of a few empty seats, follow it up by singing "where were you, when you were shit".
At the end of the day, though, I'd rather everyone hate us than be the lovable City that people liked because they rolled over and had their bellies tickled every week. It's all a sign of the times. I used to think Liverpool fans were great and i had no love of Everton. Now, Everton have become to many what City were in the 1990s, and Liverpool have been elevated up to the level of United as the team we'd like to beat for one reason and one reason only. The fans!
Last edited by DD; 18th August 2020 at 16:38.
THIS YEAR LENDING SUPPORT TO:- St. Helens RLFC, Manchester City, Celtic, Alemannia Aachen, Steps 1 to 6 Non-League Football
And all of the above happens while my team who finished 13 places beneath the bottom placed Premier League club in the League Hierarchy (prior to points deduction) are begging its fans for 500k just to survive past Monday. And we won't be the last.
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You can thank the big five in England and the G18 in Europe for the way the game has gone.
Back in 1992, things were honest and simple. Granted, United and Liverpool had more money than the rest and spent to excess at times, but generally the game was pretty even. Until those big five kicked up a stink in the 1980s, gate receipts were shared between the two clubs.
Until the big five threatened to spearhead a breakaway Super League with no promotion and relegation, TV money was split equally and all lower league clubs took a share. The compromise was a breakaway Premier League that took all of the money, but at least allowed promotion and relegation.
At the same time, UEFA formed the 'Champions League', replacing the honest European Cup with a formula that guaranteed the bigger clubs entry every year, which in turn guaranteed them the money to ensure qualification the next year, by way of negotiating mega-bucks deals for group stages that few people had or have any interest in at all.
They created a never-ending spiral of money spending, but at the same time created a huge gulf in wealth between them and the rest that could now only be bridged by owner investment. The numbers were now so large and the disparity in wealth so huge that footballing dreams for most fans had been shattered. There was no way back, and that's how the G18 always wanted it, because their ultimate aim was to create a gap so large that they could eventually justify breaking away and forming their own European Super League.
Unfortunately, for them, mega-owners saw this as a chance to invest, but rather than invest in the established elite, they took over outsiders such as Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris St Germain. The plot was then hatched by UEFA to stop this unwanted intrusion on to their patch and FFPR rules were brought in place. Chelsea and especially City (given how far they were behind) then had no choice but to spend huge amounts in an initial period to make sure they crossed the drawbridge before it was pulled up. This they managed to do. much to the chagrin of the self appointed elite.
Unfortunately for lower clubs, it's all cast them further adrift. Even more unfortunately, owners aren't allowed vested interest in more than one club here, so the lower clubs in trouble because they owe the equivalent of a day's worth of Alexis Sanchez's wages cannot be helped out.
Of course, Wigan have been part of the Premier League party and their new owners haven't been anything like as rich or as intelligent as ours. They have mismanaged the club and the situation isn't something that even I could pin on the G18 or Webbo on City. I accept Covid and all the money issues that come with it, but everyone else managed to avoid the same pit fall. I'd be all for a central pot that big clubs could put into struggling clubs, but that then creates a major issue in that some of the lower clubs will harbour no ambitions of playing it by the book, knowing that any difficulties they get in would be resolved by the central pot helping them out.
The game now isn't what it was. The Champions League and Premier League have destroyed the game in so many ways, but made it better for those whose teams made the cut and especially for those who watch the games on their televisions. Maybe, in that sense, the Super Leagues with no promotion and relegation would have been better, because those fans of lower league and non-league clubs could turn their TVs off and simply watch the more honest game of football at the lower levels. Their ambitions of joining the elite may have been stripped, but without huge foreign investment, they have been anyway.
I'm at a point now where I see two different sports. The one that Manchester City play in will never leave me, because they are a club that I have supported and loved through all its various ills over the last 41 years. I've never deserted them, but even before 2011 I had some great memories. It's been a true rollercoaster of emotion, and I doubt many have had that true range of emotions I have had watching my team over the years when watching theirs. It's been a dream ride, punctuated by more than the odd nightmare.
However, I'm also as partial to watching non-league games, going to different grounds, getting wet, mingling with proper football fans, eating a pie, sampling a dodgy pint and risking a smack in the face from the ball when perusing the programme. But let's not pretend they are the same game now. They are not. The continents started to move in different directions back in 1992 and the telephone cable that connected them has long since snapped.
Last edited by DD; 28th August 2020 at 13:59.
THIS YEAR LENDING SUPPORT TO:- St. Helens RLFC, Manchester City, Celtic, Alemannia Aachen, Steps 1 to 6 Non-League Football
Great to see a thread about the football again.
You have quite the talent for rewriting history and putting a particular slant on events and motives.
During the 90's, globalisation in general and of football in particular, along with growing economic power within certain countries that had strong football following, saw international demand for TV rights soar for the big [Western] leagues. It was the big, glamour clubs these people wanted to see - and pay money to watch on telly. At home, Sky threw money at the game to get TV rights to live matches. Again, although to a lesser extent, it was fans of the bigger clubs predominantly tipping-up the money to Sky. That in itself enriched not just the big clubs, but all teams who got into the Premier League. When the leagues below this sought to negotiate their own TV deal, they could only secure a fraction of the money, and even then the TV company (OnDigital) lost money (albeit they had piracy issues), thus proving that few people wanted to watch lower-leagues.
The biggest clubs were the milch cow for all of football.
In other countries, Spain especially, TV money has always been shared unequally. As a lefty, I really don't agree with this and am glad that PL money is allocated more equally. But when you look at the breakdown of incomes of the biggest British clubs without a sugardaddy, you see that the differential is made by global appeal and the commercial opportunities that that provides, not heavily-biased allocation of TV revenues.
I do get your point about FFP and the effect of protecting this status quo, although other clubs in each of Spain, Germany & France who are not part of the established 'elite' have become bigger/wealthier organically, rather than as the plaything of a crooked billionaire or sportwashing vehicle of a tyrannical dictatorship. There is certainly a moral argument that clubs like Abu Dhabi, Qatar Saint Germain and Chelski are 'cheating' by using financial doping to skip the long process of building a fanbase sufficient to improve your revenue and commercial attraction enough to enable you invest in good players and a manager to pull it all together.
More than protecting the positions of big clubs, though, FFP was designed to stop clubs spending money they hadn't got and ultimately getting into financial difficulty. It's easy to say that bankrolled sugardaddy clubs don't face that issue, but what would happen to Chelsea if, say the Russian crook p*ssed off Putin and fell victim to a poisoning? (albeit Chelsea's success has brought them a global following to go with their 'fashion accessory of the C-listers' fandom and therefore high revenues) What if the Abu Dhabi dictatorship fell to an Arab Spring 2? Or the region descended into a hot war as the geopolitical and oil ambitions of the Saudi/UAE/Kuwait bloc and the Iran-allied states spilled over? That big wage bill would still need to be serviced - not to mention making up the shortfall from the lost wages that are currently paid offshore direct by Abu Dhabi.
But regardless, your club - like PSG - is still owned by a murderous dictatorship for whom equal rights and civil liberties are an alien concept and who have 'appropriated' the income of the country's natural resources to enrich themselves beyond imagination whilst using modern slavery for both building projects and servile jobs. Perhaps by following an established big club it gives me the luxury of being picky, but I really wouldn't want my club owned by such a regime, and I'd campaign against it if the possibility ever arose. And if we ever were bought by such a set of scumbags who just threw money at mercenary players to buy us silverware, I certainly wouldn't feel anything like the same jubilation as I've done when Liverpool have won trophies. Yet we have you and thousands of others who are, in their own way, doing a PR role for the human rights-abusing, equal rights-denying, murderous, terrorism-funding, modern slavery-using dictatorship. Well done you.
You say this, but you also do the same. I have a razor-sharp memory for football in the 1980s and I remember exactly what happened. There has been nothing ‘re-written’. As a “lefty”, you should have been appalled by the way the big five tried to screw the rest. Your ‘morally superior’ club was a leading part of that motion.
Come on. You are an intelligent bloke. You don’t really believe this for a minute, do you? Why would UEFA care if individual clubs got themselves into difficulty. It was ALL about protecting the elite. You know it. I know it. Platini knows it. Everybody knows it.
Of course other clubs have got wealthier. With the vast amount of money circulating in the game, how could that not be the case? TV money alone allows each to grow ‘organically’. Even we would have done. The point is that the gulf between the established elite and the rest has become an unbridgeable gap and that is largely due to FFPR. The only way to cross that bridge now is by financial investment and masses of it.
As for growing the global fanbase, well the only way you can do this is by being successful. That’s the modern world. So, it is actually physically impossible to organically grow enough under the set of circumstances we now live with. That wasn’t the case in the past.
You may think that all the money is invested by ADUG but that is far from the case. Deloitte can tell you that. If you don’t believe that we are largely self-financing now, that is your choice. Outside of UAE companies alone we have massive deals with Puma and the Chinese now own a large share of the club too. The City Football Group pulls in all sorts of sponsorship deals across the globe and our football academy alone is averaging a £100 million profit a year over the last three.
As previously stated, you ‘lefties’ always told us to butt out of Middle-East affairs before. If you criticised their way of life, you were racist. None of our business. You can’t judge their standards by ours etc. Now it suits your agenda though, you’re all offended by it.
Of course, if we do want to go down the path of blaming Shiekh Mansour, Khaldoon Al Mubarak and any connected with the club for the human right issues in UAE, then it might be prudent to research their local laws and customs, how they came about, why they remain and why those individuals cannot be held responsible. The reality is that they do not have the power to change systems. They may or may not agree with things, that I cannot say, but it might be useful to see if you can find Colin Savage’s piece on this. It was an article in a written publication, but when I have time, I might be able to find it and copy some of it here. Needless to say, it takes years to put motions through legal processes and many of the old guard are so set in their ways that they would never pass them.
“Mercenary players”? A quote that was thrown about ten years ago and was proved not to be the case. Our current top player is nowhere near one of the best paid in the world, nor have any of them been. Kaka would have been a mercenary but didn’t come. Nobody has ever fitted into that category since Robinho.
I felt more jubilation than you can imagine. I have been present at every single one of City's trophy wins in the modern era. Unless you’ve actually been present at your team’s trophy wins, you cannot possibly comprehend what that jubilation feels like, especially after years of not winning anything.
In the meantime, thank you for carrying on your obsession with Manchester City. It’s great. :-)
THIS YEAR LENDING SUPPORT TO:- St. Helens RLFC, Manchester City, Celtic, Alemannia Aachen, Steps 1 to 6 Non-League Football
The majority of Saints and City fans have seen Saints at Main Road (remember that) more times than city. In the 80s and 90s Town had more fans in St Helens than city.