Man City - the new bitters?

[coachpotato]

6 hours ago, Rushies tash said:

 

Funny how Arsenal have suddenly become so interested. 4 or 5 years ago, nobody was arsed but us.

I think City have ramped it up though, I hope they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

[Scott_M]

In the summer, Guardiola out & Amorim in?

Hopefully Viana is as good a SD as he was a player. 

[elvis]

20 hours ago, coachpotato said:

I think City have ramped it up though, I hope they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

Taking on the premier league so openly , can only do themselves harm . 

Everything to lose and nothing to gain. 

[Vincent Vega]

A couple of interesting opinion pieces from Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian, and Sam Wallace in The Telegraph. 
 

Apocalypse now: City wrangle shows the wealthiest owners could kill football

Jonathan Wilson

 

Legal battle between Manchester City and the Premier League highlights the game’s existential crisis – is it too late to save it?

 

Don’t look up! As the families of Westeros squabble, the undead gather beyond the Wall. As senior monks jockey to be the new abbot, viking longboats mass on the horizon. As the left bicker interminably over infinitesimal doctrinal differences, right-leaning billionaire tech-bros fund the march of quasi-fascistic populism.

 

The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to Conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which makes it easy to dismiss the doom-mongers. When we’ve had so many warnings of the apocalypse, why should anybody listen now? But some day one of those prophets is going to be right. Nothing is eternal.

 

Football has never been so popular. Crowds in England are at the highest they have been for half a century and, if you include non-league football, probably ever. The global television audience is vast. It is an all-consuming universal. And yet that is its very problem; football is so magnetic that it has drawn the interest of too many who see it not as a sport, not as cultural expression, but as an entity from which they may profit.

 

Other sports, while never having quite football’s global appeal, have been unassailably popular in the past, only to decline: no one goes to the arena to watch gladiatorial combat any more, chariot-racing is defunct, cockfighting has had its day, even cricket – once England’s national sport – feels locked in a perpetual battle to survive, the rash of cash-boosting short-form tournaments reducing the schedule to unfathomable irrelevance. Football’s structure is different, but as new competitions are invented and existing ones expanded, its calendar does increasingly feel packed with content for content’s sake.

 

Football has proved extraordinarily resilient for 150 years but the existential threat is there. As fans and pundits and media have quarrelled over the past week about just who “won” the Premier League v Manchester City legal battle over associated party transactions (APT), taking up their pre-assigned positions behind the barricades, it’s all a bit Fuji and Kodak fighting a sales war 20 years ago: er, have you heard of digital?

 

The sport is now in the hands of states, oligarchs and private equity funds, none of whom, it’s fair to say, are likely to care much for the long-term good of the game. They are all rich enough to pursue hugely expensive litigation that could cripple football’s administrators, a point made explicitly in the email published by Der Spiegelpurportedly from City’s general counsel, Simon Cliff, that quoted the club’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, threatening “the destruction of [Uefa’s] rules and organisation” by suing them “for the next 10 years”.

 

For a long time it’s been problematic that those who govern the game also run and derive profit from competitions, creating a nexus of interrelated incentives that has led to clientelism – but this is worse. What future does any organisation have if a member has the power effectively to decide that it doesn’t have to obey regulations voted for by the others, the “tyranny of the majority”, to use another phrase used by City?

 

What the case seems to have established is that financial regulation is necessary to prevent successful clubs becoming a self-perpetuating elite, and that loans from shareholders to their clubs should incur interest at market rates so as not to count as a subsidy for the purposes of profita­bility and sustainability calculations. All of that seems entirely reasonable – and was already part of Uefa financial fair play regulations.

 

City, it could be argued, have done the game a favour by closing a loophole that ensures tighter financial controls. However, if that were their aim, it seems odd that they would describe the Premier League’s plan to update the regulations accordingly as “an unwise course”, which “would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs”.

 

The broader issue now is whether they have isolated a procedural flaw that could undermine the Premier League’s 130 charges against them (they, of course, deny them all). There are those, often cloaked in free-market dogma, who argue there should be no restrictions on what clubs can spend. But then the rich win, generate more revenue, buy the best players and win even more.

 

That’s why, until 1983, home teams in the English league paid the away team a levy and why a maximum wage was implemented in 1901. The maximum wage soon proved exploitative but the significant point was the rationale behind it: there has to be regulation to prevent the richest clubs developing what would in effect become monopoly positions – a principle that would be accepted by all but the most libertarian free-marketeers.

 

No one ever seems to consider how the game should look. In an ideal world, how many points would the average Premier League champions get? What is a club? What happens when the investment funds of authoritarian states with command economies start dabbling in a free market?

 

The issues are complex, global and would require an enormous, perhaps impossible, amount of consultation and collaboration to resolve – but these are questions that are not even asked. Everyone is wrapped up in their own self-interest, driven by their own greed. And that brings danger. Already at certain clubs there is a clear preference for high-spending occasional fans over regulars.

 

Tournaments are bloating. The Champions League is a footstep from being a Super League. There is more and more content and less and less of it means anything. Financial bullies, celebrated by fans and partisan cheerleaders, seek the right to bully financially. Football is being dragged away from the communities that fostered it.

 

What if the global appetite dwindles? What if this new audience moves on, to MMA or esports, or something else? If English football has ostracised its base, it might find there isn’t much left, and the self-absorbed mega-rich aren’t going to hang around to bail out the decades-old institutions they own; the medium-to-long term isn’t in their thinking. What if an infinitely rich owner bankrupts the Premier League?

 

How might football end? Through the greed and monstrous self-interest of those who never really cared for that game, and the complacency of those who allowed it to happen. Winter may already be here.
 

 

Manchester City’s tactics in Premier League battle are clear: Sue until they win

Club took it upon themselves to challenge APT rules and failed, but expect more legal challenges until, presumably, they get their way

Sam Wallace13 October 2024 8:00am BST

 

The tribunal hearing between Manchester City and the Premier League in June came down principally to one disputed commercial deal: the club’s new 2023 agreement with Etihad Airways, the Abu Dhabi carrier that has its name on City’s shirt and stadium.

 

It was a single deal, unusually large in scope of the rights that it encompassed according to the independent valuers Nielsen, used by the Premier League’s regulatory team to assess the fair market value of such an agreement. 

 

Indeed, the rights package City proposed to sell to Etihad was “as large as the rights that some clubs would grant across all of their sponsorship agreements with multiple counterparties”.

 

It was agreed in the early part of last year between City, owned by an Abu Dhabi royal, and Etihad’s parent company, the Abu Dhabi state, and thus subject to the Premier League’s associated-party transaction [APT] rules. Over 30 pages of the arbitration tribunal judgment, published this week, the three panellists decide that the Premier League was not unreasonable to judge the Etihad deal above fair market value. City’s challenge had failed.

 

What the Etihad deal was worth to City, how long it was to run, and how it compared to all other commercial income, was sadly lost to the redactions. But given that it was the sale of the prime real estate of the club’s commercial landscape, and the focus of its extensive legal challenge, one might assume it was also the most lucrative in the portfolio.

 

City do not like the APT rules which underscore the financial controls – profit and sustainability rules [PSR] that themselves underpin the Premier League’s competition. So the club took it upon themselves to challenge APT rules over the course of the tribunal, and failed. It scored some wins, as City lawyers saw it, in pulling shareholder loans into the APT rules and a couple of procedural hits.

 

City will challenge anything they do not like

 

The Premier League agreed that those amendments would have to be made. Since Monday, clubs have submitted details on shareholder loans to the Premier League and there is a preliminary meeting on Thursday. City itself contacted the 19 other clubs and told them, via its general counsel Simon Cliff, that the Premier League’s analysis was wrong. That APT rules were now void and that there should be no rush to change them.

 

It would likely benefit City for there to be a notion that there are no APT rules and thus no effective PSR. 

 

But if 14 clubs vote for the amendments in the weeks to come the APT rules will be updated anyway.

 

Do City have another six allies? Only time will tell, but implicit in the letter sent to clubs was that their legal war will go on and on and on. 

 

Every time City run up against something they do not like, they will challenge it, and that challenge will be long and expensive. That was certainly the way that Cliff’s letter was interpreted when he counselled against a “knee-jerk reaction” in updating the APT rules.

“Such an unwise course,” he wrote, “would be likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs.”

 

This is where the Premier League is now. In City, a club that wishes for its fellow 19 shareholders to do as it does and disregard the advice of the Premier League of which they all have a stake, its legal regulatory team and its board. The league for now must assume that every time it seeks to sanction City, or refuse to assign fair market value to its commercial deals, it can expect a legal challenge.

 

This was a sporting competition with its own rules to which the Premier League’s owners, its 20 shareholders, adhered. But not anymore. It is a remarkable situation that the most successful single-nation football competition on the planet finds itself. It makes you wonder too of life inside City’s hierarchy in Manchester. What kind of pressure are the club’s execs under to produce a result?

 

Every so often, the tribunal report gives some startling insight into the nature of the legal battle. As the Etihad fair market value dispute developed, City’s lawyers received new valuations of the deal to support their cause, submitted by a third party sometime between Dec 18 last year and Feb 27. They handed them to the Premier League on Mar 23.

 

The valuations were “unexpected and substantial”, the tribunal reported and caused “considerable difficulty” for the already stretched Premier League regulatory team. In analysing them the league had to make a further 96 requests for clarification. It asked for two extensions to the deadline for the board to make its judgment. City opposed both requests.

 

Club’s legal team is undeterred

 

The tribunal found that communications were often sent “very late at night”. City responded in April to a deadline extension request of the Premier League at 11.15pm The league’s non-exec director Mai Fyfield, a key figure in its decision-making, and a “candid and engaged” witness according to the tribunal, found herself up until 4am reading documents.

 

At one point she was asked to discuss the so-called terms of a deal with a non-associated party that City’s lawyers submitted in support of the valuation of the Etihad deal. She declared that the terms submitted did not constitute a completed deal at all. “In the contract those things are 40 pages,” Fyfield told the tribunal. 

 

“Here [the deal being used as a comparable] … it’s a page. There’s clearly some detail to be worked through.” She said the evidence from City was not a negotiated final deal. It was more what the putative partner might pay “to get in the room”. The tribunal saw no error in her verdict.

 

At times, this case felt like it was being fought on sheer scale by City, with whatever was to hand, and done so in the wee small hours of the undergraduate essay crisis. 

 

Their big challenge, that the Premier League board had been “unreasonable” – the legal threshold – in finding the Etihad deal was not at fair market value, failed on all but a procedural point.

 

Yet City’s legal team is undeterred. It wishes for the Premier League not to amend the rules upon which it scored its victories because to do that would be to heal those minor wounds. One might have thought that was the point of a dispute. To reach agreement, adapt accordingly and move on. But City just threaten more of the same. More legal challenge, until, presumably, they get their way.

[Tj hooker]

These cunts are nothing more than a bully with money who won't ever be happy until they are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want .

The only thing you can do with these fuckers is to never give in to them because if they win then the game in this country will be finished and they won't care one jot .

Bastards the lot of them .

[Section_31]

Keep saying it but the other clubs should break away and start a new league without them and their henchmen.

[Bobby Hundreds]

As said a million times a lot by me, if they win their case or come out of it happy it's fans who should show justice. Don't fucking turn up to their games let the tv companies have to show every fucking time they play home or away there's nobody there and why there's nobody there. Sportwash that. Boycot the cunts.

[redinblack]

5 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

As said a million times a lot by me, if they win their case or come out of it happy it's fans who should show justice. Don't fucking turn up to their games let the tv companies have to show every fucking time they play home or away there's nobody there and why there's nobody there. Sportwash that. Boycot the cunts.

I agree with this I think it's the only thing that will do anything. The league will come to an "accommodation" with City which allows both sides to claim victory. Empty seats and fans refusing to accommodate in any way shape or form fixtures with City.....well.....they couldn't sue all of them could they? And they would be shown up for the trash they are. It's a great dream but probably not happening.

[an tha]

9 hours ago, Vincent Vega said:

A couple of interesting opinion pieces from Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian, and Sam Wallace in The Telegraph. 
 

Apocalypse now: City wrangle shows the wealthiest owners could kill football

Jonathan Wilson

 

Legal battle between Manchester City and the Premier League highlights the game’s existential crisis – is it too late to save it?

 

Don’t look up! As the families of Westeros squabble, the undead gather beyond the Wall. As senior monks jockey to be the new abbot, viking longboats mass on the horizon. As the left bicker interminably over infinitesimal doctrinal differences, right-leaning billionaire tech-bros fund the march of quasi-fascistic populism.

 

The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to Conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which makes it easy to dismiss the doom-mongers. When we’ve had so many warnings of the apocalypse, why should anybody listen now? But some day one of those prophets is going to be right. Nothing is eternal.

 

Football has never been so popular. Crowds in England are at the highest they have been for half a century and, if you include non-league football, probably ever. The global television audience is vast. It is an all-consuming universal. And yet that is its very problem; football is so magnetic that it has drawn the interest of too many who see it not as a sport, not as cultural expression, but as an entity from which they may profit.

 

Other sports, while never having quite football’s global appeal, have been unassailably popular in the past, only to decline: no one goes to the arena to watch gladiatorial combat any more, chariot-racing is defunct, cockfighting has had its day, even cricket – once England’s national sport – feels locked in a perpetual battle to survive, the rash of cash-boosting short-form tournaments reducing the schedule to unfathomable irrelevance. Football’s structure is different, but as new competitions are invented and existing ones expanded, its calendar does increasingly feel packed with content for content’s sake.

 

Football has proved extraordinarily resilient for 150 years but the existential threat is there. As fans and pundits and media have quarrelled over the past week about just who “won” the Premier League v Manchester City legal battle over associated party transactions (APT), taking up their pre-assigned positions behind the barricades, it’s all a bit Fuji and Kodak fighting a sales war 20 years ago: er, have you heard of digital?

 

The sport is now in the hands of states, oligarchs and private equity funds, none of whom, it’s fair to say, are likely to care much for the long-term good of the game. They are all rich enough to pursue hugely expensive litigation that could cripple football’s administrators, a point made explicitly in the email published by Der Spiegelpurportedly from City’s general counsel, Simon Cliff, that quoted the club’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, threatening “the destruction of [Uefa’s] rules and organisation” by suing them “for the next 10 years”.

 

For a long time it’s been problematic that those who govern the game also run and derive profit from competitions, creating a nexus of interrelated incentives that has led to clientelism – but this is worse. What future does any organisation have if a member has the power effectively to decide that it doesn’t have to obey regulations voted for by the others, the “tyranny of the majority”, to use another phrase used by City?

 

What the case seems to have established is that financial regulation is necessary to prevent successful clubs becoming a self-perpetuating elite, and that loans from shareholders to their clubs should incur interest at market rates so as not to count as a subsidy for the purposes of profita­bility and sustainability calculations. All of that seems entirely reasonable – and was already part of Uefa financial fair play regulations.

 

City, it could be argued, have done the game a favour by closing a loophole that ensures tighter financial controls. However, if that were their aim, it seems odd that they would describe the Premier League’s plan to update the regulations accordingly as “an unwise course”, which “would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs”.

 

The broader issue now is whether they have isolated a procedural flaw that could undermine the Premier League’s 130 charges against them (they, of course, deny them all). There are those, often cloaked in free-market dogma, who argue there should be no restrictions on what clubs can spend. But then the rich win, generate more revenue, buy the best players and win even more.

 

That’s why, until 1983, home teams in the English league paid the away team a levy and why a maximum wage was implemented in 1901. The maximum wage soon proved exploitative but the significant point was the rationale behind it: there has to be regulation to prevent the richest clubs developing what would in effect become monopoly positions – a principle that would be accepted by all but the most libertarian free-marketeers.

 

No one ever seems to consider how the game should look. In an ideal world, how many points would the average Premier League champions get? What is a club? What happens when the investment funds of authoritarian states with command economies start dabbling in a free market?

 

The issues are complex, global and would require an enormous, perhaps impossible, amount of consultation and collaboration to resolve – but these are questions that are not even asked. Everyone is wrapped up in their own self-interest, driven by their own greed. And that brings danger. Already at certain clubs there is a clear preference for high-spending occasional fans over regulars.

 

Tournaments are bloating. The Champions League is a footstep from being a Super League. There is more and more content and less and less of it means anything. Financial bullies, celebrated by fans and partisan cheerleaders, seek the right to bully financially. Football is being dragged away from the communities that fostered it.

 

What if the global appetite dwindles? What if this new audience moves on, to MMA or esports, or something else? If English football has ostracised its base, it might find there isn’t much left, and the self-absorbed mega-rich aren’t going to hang around to bail out the decades-old institutions they own; the medium-to-long term isn’t in their thinking. What if an infinitely rich owner bankrupts the Premier League?

 

How might football end? Through the greed and monstrous self-interest of those who never really cared for that game, and the complacency of those who allowed it to happen. Winter may already be here.
 

 

Manchester City’s tactics in Premier League battle are clear: Sue until they win

Club took it upon themselves to challenge APT rules and failed, but expect more legal challenges until, presumably, they get their way

Sam Wallace13 October 2024 8:00am BST

 

The tribunal hearing between Manchester City and the Premier League in June came down principally to one disputed commercial deal: the club’s new 2023 agreement with Etihad Airways, the Abu Dhabi carrier that has its name on City’s shirt and stadium.

 

It was a single deal, unusually large in scope of the rights that it encompassed according to the independent valuers Nielsen, used by the Premier League’s regulatory team to assess the fair market value of such an agreement. 

 

Indeed, the rights package City proposed to sell to Etihad was “as large as the rights that some clubs would grant across all of their sponsorship agreements with multiple counterparties”.

 

It was agreed in the early part of last year between City, owned by an Abu Dhabi royal, and Etihad’s parent company, the Abu Dhabi state, and thus subject to the Premier League’s associated-party transaction [APT] rules. Over 30 pages of the arbitration tribunal judgment, published this week, the three panellists decide that the Premier League was not unreasonable to judge the Etihad deal above fair market value. City’s challenge had failed.

 

What the Etihad deal was worth to City, how long it was to run, and how it compared to all other commercial income, was sadly lost to the redactions. But given that it was the sale of the prime real estate of the club’s commercial landscape, and the focus of its extensive legal challenge, one might assume it was also the most lucrative in the portfolio.

 

City do not like the APT rules which underscore the financial controls – profit and sustainability rules [PSR] that themselves underpin the Premier League’s competition. So the club took it upon themselves to challenge APT rules over the course of the tribunal, and failed. It scored some wins, as City lawyers saw it, in pulling shareholder loans into the APT rules and a couple of procedural hits.

 

City will challenge anything they do not like

 

The Premier League agreed that those amendments would have to be made. Since Monday, clubs have submitted details on shareholder loans to the Premier League and there is a preliminary meeting on Thursday. City itself contacted the 19 other clubs and told them, via its general counsel Simon Cliff, that the Premier League’s analysis was wrong. That APT rules were now void and that there should be no rush to change them.

 

It would likely benefit City for there to be a notion that there are no APT rules and thus no effective PSR. 

 

But if 14 clubs vote for the amendments in the weeks to come the APT rules will be updated anyway.

 

Do City have another six allies? Only time will tell, but implicit in the letter sent to clubs was that their legal war will go on and on and on. 

 

Every time City run up against something they do not like, they will challenge it, and that challenge will be long and expensive. That was certainly the way that Cliff’s letter was interpreted when he counselled against a “knee-jerk reaction” in updating the APT rules.

“Such an unwise course,” he wrote, “would be likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs.”

 

This is where the Premier League is now. In City, a club that wishes for its fellow 19 shareholders to do as it does and disregard the advice of the Premier League of which they all have a stake, its legal regulatory team and its board. The league for now must assume that every time it seeks to sanction City, or refuse to assign fair market value to its commercial deals, it can expect a legal challenge.

 

This was a sporting competition with its own rules to which the Premier League’s owners, its 20 shareholders, adhered. But not anymore. It is a remarkable situation that the most successful single-nation football competition on the planet finds itself. It makes you wonder too of life inside City’s hierarchy in Manchester. What kind of pressure are the club’s execs under to produce a result?

 

Every so often, the tribunal report gives some startling insight into the nature of the legal battle. As the Etihad fair market value dispute developed, City’s lawyers received new valuations of the deal to support their cause, submitted by a third party sometime between Dec 18 last year and Feb 27. They handed them to the Premier League on Mar 23.

 

The valuations were “unexpected and substantial”, the tribunal reported and caused “considerable difficulty” for the already stretched Premier League regulatory team. In analysing them the league had to make a further 96 requests for clarification. It asked for two extensions to the deadline for the board to make its judgment. City opposed both requests.

 

Club’s legal team is undeterred

 

The tribunal found that communications were often sent “very late at night”. City responded in April to a deadline extension request of the Premier League at 11.15pm The league’s non-exec director Mai Fyfield, a key figure in its decision-making, and a “candid and engaged” witness according to the tribunal, found herself up until 4am reading documents.

 

At one point she was asked to discuss the so-called terms of a deal with a non-associated party that City’s lawyers submitted in support of the valuation of the Etihad deal. She declared that the terms submitted did not constitute a completed deal at all. “In the contract those things are 40 pages,” Fyfield told the tribunal. 

 

“Here [the deal being used as a comparable] … it’s a page. There’s clearly some detail to be worked through.” She said the evidence from City was not a negotiated final deal. It was more what the putative partner might pay “to get in the room”. The tribunal saw no error in her verdict.

 

At times, this case felt like it was being fought on sheer scale by City, with whatever was to hand, and done so in the wee small hours of the undergraduate essay crisis. 

 

Their big challenge, that the Premier League board had been “unreasonable” – the legal threshold – in finding the Etihad deal was not at fair market value, failed on all but a procedural point.

 

Yet City’s legal team is undeterred. It wishes for the Premier League not to amend the rules upon which it scored its victories because to do that would be to heal those minor wounds. One might have thought that was the point of a dispute. To reach agreement, adapt accordingly and move on. But City just threaten more of the same. More legal challenge, until, presumably, they get their way.

Said it many times and i doubt i am only one - their owners believe they can just use their money to get the result they want and any challenge is just there to be overpowered and run over with their money.

 

They won't accept any other outcome than their will being bent to.

[col06]

7 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Keep saying it but the other clubs should break away and start a new league without them and their henchmen.

And make sure states can never ever own clubs again should never of been allowed in the first place what did they think would happen the idiots

[Wezza]

And scrap the multi club bollocks as well 

[Barnesey]

I wonder how their huge legal costs will affect PSR?

[Pete]

29 minutes ago, Barnesey said:

I wonder how their huge legal costs will affect PSR?

Fakeus Companyus will announce a sponsorship of them for the same amount as their legal costs. 

[Barrington Womble]

11 hours ago, an tha said:

Said it many times and i doubt i am only one - their owners believe they can just use their money to get the result they want and any challenge is just there to be overpowered and run over with their money.

 

They won't accept any other outcome than their will being bent to.

 

I agree with this and it is the challenge the other PL clubs should be looking at. I have repeatedly said the solution is don't fight them and walk away. They challenged 30 different aspects to APT rules, because they wanted to win just one. It's a very simple equation. Each club by PL rules needs to act in the "utmost good faith". Legally this is pretty hard to enforce in law. But it is not morally. So the other sides should use this as the key of proof there's no win in legal challenges with them. It leaves 2 choices, just let them have what they want. Or walk away. 

[No2]

Some very interesting things coming out of Benjamin Mendys employment tribunal.

 

Benjamin Mendy's £500,000 per month wage was withheld by #ManCity after he was charged in 2021, an employment tribunal has been told. His contract also showed he would receive £900K for appearing in 60% of matches, a £1M bonus if @ManCity qualified for the #UCL, and an annual £1.2M payment to his image rights company.

 

So his wages are £6m a year plus £1.2m for image rights, £7.2m guaranteed. Another £1m for qualifying for the CL, another guarantee.

 

This is a left back we're talking about here making £9m per year, thats twice was Robbo was earning at the time. Even with all his success,  he's still earning less than that cunt was making.  Makes you wonder what's Haaland and De Brunye are making?

[Barrington Womble]

7 hours ago, No2 said:

Some very interesting things coming out of Benjamin Mendys employment tribunal.

 

Benjamin Mendy's £500,000 per month wage was withheld by #ManCity after he was charged in 2021, an employment tribunal has been told. His contract also showed he would receive £900K for appearing in 60% of matches, a £1M bonus if @ManCity qualified for the #UCL, and an annual £1.2M payment to his image rights company.

 

So his wages are £6m a year plus £1.2m for image rights, £7.2m guaranteed. Another £1m for qualifying for the CL, another guarantee.

 

This is a left back we're talking about here making £9m per year, thats twice was Robbo was earning at the time. Even with all his success,  he's still earning less than that cunt was making.  Makes you wonder what's Haaland and De Brunye are making?

I thought the mail or someone like that found out haaland was on £875k. 

[No2]

29 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

I thought the mail or someone like that found out haaland was on £875k. 

That's the thing, all the websites that report club wages have City paying around £3.6m per week. They have us and Arsenal either side of the £3m mark.

 

City's number would be 18 players on 200k. Then we see they have a left back on £190k from a contract signed 7 years ago. City have 18 what I'd call senior players, so the likes of Rico Lewis, Oscar Bobb, reserve keepers etc not included in that, either are the management team. The real wage figure has to be at least twice that, cheating cunts.

[Barrington Womble]

1 hour ago, No2 said:

That's the thing, all the websites that report club wages have City paying around £3.6m per week. They have us and Arsenal either side of the £3m mark.

 

City's number would be 18 players on 200k. Then we see they have a left back on £190k from a contract signed 7 years ago. City have 18 what I'd call senior players, so the likes of Rico Lewis, Oscar Bobb, reserve keepers etc not included in that, either are the management team. The real wage figure has to be at least twice that, cheating cunts.

 

there's probably all kinds they do in the group though. i think in the last accounts, the group lost about the turnover of all the clubs who aren't man city or something stupid (I can't remember the details now). so these young players they get, stick elsewhere in the group and all the cost is in the agent, the group picks up the agent fees - and then the player turns up at city. the whole thing with these charges now is all the stuff they did off the books. it's beyond a bit of cheating, it is fraud. 

[Mathewbet1]

Pep will do one soon , like rats on a sinking ship.

[coachpotato]

There’ll probably be stuff happening away from the public gaze that might see some of the protagonists taking decisions before the outcome becomes public.

If there’s the slightest chance City are going to get caned, the likes of Guardiola will be off elsewhere, no doubt shaking his head and muttering he knew fuck all, before the shit hits the fan, so you could be right Mathewbet1. 

 

[cloggypop]

Txiki Begiristain is already off

[Lee909]

Saw a thing earlier today showing what a cunt Guardiola is and how he fucked over Bayern. He supposedly agreed a deal with City behind their back and when Bayern spoke to him about a new deal and that they had a deal agreed for de Bruyne he told them de Bruyne isnt in his plans for what he wants to do with Bayern. Bayern pulled out the deal,Guardiola walked and had told City to sign de Bruyne before he joined a year later

[elvis]

2 hours ago, Mathewbet1 said:

Pep will do one soon , like rats on a sinking ship.

Said this I while back , I'm surprised he didn't fuck off before the court case I guess his ego won't let it be .

[elvis]

2 hours ago, coachpotato said:

There’ll probably be stuff happening away from the public gaze that might see some of the protagonists taking decisions before the outcome becomes public.

If there’s the slightest chance City are going to get caned, the likes of Guardiola will be off elsewhere, no doubt shaking his head and muttering he knew fuck all, before the shit hits the fan, so you could be right Mathewbet1. 

 

Since city's latest outbursts and shenanigans/shithousery , I can seen the premier league twisting the knife like fuck if they're found guilty.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to antagonise them even further is beyond me.

[Scott_M]

Cheats never prosper, part 2…