Man City - the new bitters?

[Bobby Hundreds]

Doesn't matter what punishment is given out now, every one clearly sees them for what they are. 

[Bobby Hundreds]

Actually it does matter because if they are allowed to do this shit with no consequences then the whole sport it fucked.

[Trumo]

1 hour ago, A Red said:

I did like the idea on bluemoon of "aggressive yodelling"

 

Promising to deliver dogshit through your letterbox but failing to turn up?

[coachpotato]

That’s the point though, not everyone does.

Danny Murphy was asked about it on MOTD the other night and he said they were unlucky to get the ban.

There’s loads who don’t see them as cheats, but just a poor club that is trying its best to break into the elite and who are being barred by the likes of us, United, Bayern etc.

It’s scary.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

7 hours ago, Aventus said:

Should buy them a few more flat screens, then they can each have a go at drawing something and putting it on a slide show so they all get a turn. 

Fuck me, that's bad!

[Davelfc]

Next will be displays fitted to the seats to emulate people. 

[cloggypop]

Holocrowds

[Bobby Hundreds]

Hollow trophies

[coachpotato]

15 minutes ago, Philtrum said:

Next will be displays fitted to the seats to emulate people. 

I’d trademark that if I were you!

[Horus]

Give it a week before the plan on blue moon is to knock door and run at the UEFA HQ. 

[Aventus]

[A Red]

24 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Actually it does matter because if they are allowed to do this shit with no consequences then the whole sport it fucked.

I think you were right first time around. Everyone does now see them for what they are.....cheats. They are going to struggle even more than they do already to increase their fan base, not just this country but more importantly to the owners, worldwide. Every sponsership deal, transfer purchase and set of accounts will be scutinised making it more difficult to be underhand. 

 

Even if they get away with this their reputation is fucked and the only way of improving it is to be 100% transparent and that means proving to spend within their means. If they have to do that its back to being a yo yo club

 

[Vincent Vega]

I thought the actual point of the Abu Dhabi City takeover was as a PR exercise to show them (Abu Dhabi) in a good and positive light, win friends and admiration. I'm not sure that's going well to be honest, in fact I'd say it's a bit of a shitshow.

[Mudface]

11 minutes ago, Vincent Vega said:

I thought the actual point of the Abu Dhabi City takeover was as a PR exercise to show them (Abu Dhabi) in a good and positive light, win friends and admiration. I'm not sure that's going well to be honest, in fact I'd say it's a bit of a shitshow.

I read something to the effect that if you asked the average football fan in 2008 their impression of Abu Dhabi, then you'd probably just get a shrug and a blank stare. Ask now, and Yemen, slaves, dictatorship, corruption and wide scale cheating and belligerence would likely be the predominant answers. Not exactly what they wanted...

[VERBAL DIARRHEA]

City fear a Sheikh down.

[Butch]

12 hours ago, Jennings said:

bewildered

Joined:

30 Jul 2017

Messages:

263

We should all take white handerchief's and wave them duriung the "anthem", impossible to stop them being taken into the ground, no 'regulations' being broken

 

 

 

[dockers_strike]

2 hours ago, Mudface said:

I read something to the effect that if you asked the average football fan in 2008 their impression of Abu Dhabi, then you'd probably just get a shrug and a blank stare. Ask now, and Yemen, slaves, dictatorship, corruption and wide scale cheating and belligerence would likely be the predominant answers. Not exactly what they wanted...

Yeah but you cannot repeat much of that in any media comments section else you get accused of racism.

[Horus]

17 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

Yeah but you cannot repeat much of that in any media comments section else you get accused of racism.

That's just the kind of thing a racist would say...

[Numero Veinticinco]

3 hours ago, Butch said:

 

Business idea. Buy white hankies and sell them outside the ground at a mark up. 
 

A double pack should be enough 

[Le Duan]

11 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/17/manchester-city-backers-are-not-the-sort-to-take-punishment-lying-down?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

Manchester City backers are not the sort to take punishment lying down

 

There is resentment among City fans about their treatment and word is that Abu Dhabi will be fighting back against Uefa

 

 

In 2011 Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the emir of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, received a letter. It came from a group of Emirati intellectuals inspired by the recent wave of pro-democracy protests sweeping through the Middle East and north Africa, and requested a range of modest reforms, including an extension of the voting franchise which at the time encompassed just 2% of the country’s population.

 

No marching on the streets. No popular unrest. Certainly no disorder of any kind. Just a letter. Nonetheless, with a regime petrified to the point of paranoia by the spectre of political Islamism, the reprisals would be swift and merciless.

 

Within weeks the arrests had begun, rounding up most of the 160 letter’s signatories, who were designated as “terrorists” plotting to overthrow the regime. Citizenships were revoked. Hefty prison sentences were dished out. In 2014, Abu Dhabi enacted Terrorism Law No 7, reclassifying peaceful opposition as a terrorist act punishable by death, and criminalising a whole range of hazily-defined acts, from “antagonising the state” or “stirring panic among a group of people” to “carrying explosive crackers for a terrorist purpose”.

 

Now: does this strike you as a group of people that is going to be intimidated by the fine print of Article 56, section (a) of the 2018 edition of Uefa’s Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations?

 

Does a regime serially defying a United Nations arms embargo in Libya – according to the UN’s own reports – strike you as the sort that places a high premium on bureaucratic process? Does the family that bought itself the world’s largest super-yacht – a $600m behemoth two-thirds the size of the Titanic and reportedly equipped with its own missile defence system – strike you as the sort to take a swingeing punishment with humility and good grace?

 

These are just some of the ways of understanding Manchester City’s current dispute with Uefa, one that for all its clear footballing repercussions carries far more sinister overtones. Trawl the City messageboards in the wake of Uefa’s decision to ban the club from the Champions League for two seasons, and it won’t take you long to stumble across the rhetoric of scorched earth: of traitors and revolutionaries, violence and purgation, shady cartels and subhuman scum.

 

This is the language of existential threat, the register of total warfare, and it is fed by the incendiary invective coming out of the club. One little snippet to emerge is the fact City’s appeals to the court of arbitration for sport have been dubbed “Cas One” and “Cas Two”, as if they were military campaigns, rather than ringbinders being delivered to a courtroom by clerks in TM Lewin suits. Witness, too, the assertion of the club’s lawyer Simon Cliff in the Der Spiegel leaks of 2018 that “Uefa doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression”, that a lawsuit against their auditor could “destroy the entire organisation within weeks”. City talk about their footballing enemies the way Abu Dhabi talks about its real ones.

 

This, perhaps, was the most persuasive argument against allowing cherished footballing institutions to fall under the control of entire states. It wasn’t the lack of transparency or the potential for financial distortion, grave as those are. But in hindsight it was perhaps inevitable over time clubs would come to resemble state actors in their own right, that sporting problems would impel geopolitical solutions, that the cut and thrust of footballing sabre-rattling would increasingly take on the character of the real thing.

 

There has always been a slight misconception about the concept popularly known as “sportswashing”, the attempt by autocratic regimes to embed their soft power through sport. It is never purely a PR exercise: there are PR firms for that, and they tend not to go to the trouble of spending £1.5bn on footballers or rebuilding large parts of east Manchester.
 

Rather, it helps to think of the sportswash as some vast, pointless infrastructure project: a man-made glacier, a giant bridge to nowhere, a Nando’s visible from space. The objective is to create something so iridescently perfect that it generates its own innate shock and awe, a timeless monument to beauty, wealth and the power to do whatever the hell you want.

 

And so there is a rich double irony at work here. Firstly, for all the eye-watering sums lavished on the brilliant Guardiola sides, it is instead the years of faltering ascent, the 2012-16 era, for which City are being punished: not the years of £50m full-backs, but your Mangalas and Rodwells and Wilfried Bonys. Secondly, that one of the world’s most meticulously-crafted sporting projects could be undone by simple naivety: an apparent belief the rule of law could be subverted by force of will alone, a failure to build any sort of political or diplomatic contingency against it. While the Qataris at Paris Saint-Germain made it a priority to infiltrate the corridors of power, City find themselves adrift: friendless and alone, with only their money and their hubris to protect them.
 

It may yet be enough. The word is City are stockpiling a cache of inflammatory evidence against other clubs, in anticipation of an epic fight. Perhaps, armed with a battery of lawyers and accountants, they will get their ban overturned. Perhaps, as some of the more bellicose voices insist, they will even destroy the apparatus of football as we know it, which definitely feels like a proportionate response to not being allowed to sign Stevan Jovetic. Either way, you sense for City the ends will always justify the means. After all football, like geopolitics, is very much a results business.

Spot on. Perhaps UEFA and The Premier League should up the ante as well and expel them from both competitions indefinitely?

[Le Duan]

4 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

Hollow trophies

That’s good - can I shake your hand again?

[Butch]

Those cheating cunts denied us number 19 last season. 

[Moo]

What the pundits and writers who object to FFP,  on the principle that owners should be able to invest what they want and buy a place at the top table, fail to grasp is how that approach has the potential to finish football as a competitive sport.  Their views are very short sighted. 

So you give Man City (and Everton using Carragher's example) carte blanche to spend what they want rather than earn success so they become the dominant force, what then?  How does everyone else compete? And how do you keep people interested?  Man City and it's (a)pathetic support have already shown that success is not as much fun when it's bought.  No, FFP may not be perfect but something needs to be in place to protect football in the long term and, fundamentally, protect it as a sport. 

[dockers_strike]

1 hour ago, Moo said:

What the pundits and writers who object to FFP,  on the principle that owners should be able to invest what they want and buy a place at the top table, fail to grasp is how that approach has the potential to finish football as a competitive sport.  Their views are very short sighted. 

So you give Man City (and Everton using Carragher's example) carte blanche to spend what they want rather than earn success so they become the dominant force, what then?  How does everyone else compete? And how do you keep people interested?  Man City and it's (a)pathetic support have already shown that success is not as much fun when it's bought.  No, FFP may not be perfect but something needs to be in place to protect football in the long term and, fundamentally, protect it as a sport. 

 

This is it exactly. People like samuel and the city fans who back this 'as much as the owner wants' to pump into a club do not seem to realise they will be shrinking this competitive cartel in the medium to longer term not growing it.

 

Once you have an owner throwing as much money as they want into a club, yes, they'll make a city or a PSG successful. So the question has to be asked why is there only one club like city in England and one like PSG in France? And the answer is, rich people dont like pissing money up the wall for ever and a day.

 

Ambramovic did it for his 'day' then events took a turn and he wound in his neck. Why? Because even he knew he couldnt compete with the wealth of an oil nation. Similarly, why hasnt another oil nation or rich oligarch bought a French club to challenge PSG? Again, the answer is unless you have a bottomless money pit, why bother when the Qatari backed club can just outspend you?

 

 

[Scooby Dudek]

The point the pundits/ex players etc are missing is if they agree with FFP or not it is completely irrelevant. They are rules now and City and everyone else signed up to them. 

Argue and push/bribe to get the rules changed but you have to abide by the rules as they stand. 

 

Lots don't like VAR (and I know tainted title etc) but people are pushing to get parts of VAR changed, like the off side but everyone is following them now, because that is what they signed up to.

 

The fact that City tried to hide the fact they were bypassing FFP is the issue, I believe, UEFA have with them. Again this makes liking or not liking FFP irrelevant.