I think City fans genuinely believe they have that level of commercial activity yet cannot sell out a FA Cup semi final ticket allocation in a treble winning season. Jokers.
City and Financial Doping | Charged by PL with numerous FFP breaches | Hearing begins 16th September 2024
- Thread starter VanGaalEra
- Start date
so none of you have ever gone 34mph in a 30mph zone? that’s basically all city have done and you want to throw the book at us. hippocrits.
Making up fake sponsors to cook the books is fraud.
How do you explain how City have got the biggest revenue in football?
"I'm not saying that money hasn't helped"
This kind of blind loyalty is a big part of why I never want United to be state owned.
This kind of blind loyalty is a big part of why I never want United to be state owned.
well structured sponsorship deals that paid out early on the premise that city won the treble at a later date. think of it like pay day loans.
feck me
I wish someone would approach me with an offer - "We'll pay you to join online websites to promote City." First post in the 115 FC thread, go figure.
Exactly, none of us are innocent. We've all gone into a zoo and poured laxatives into the feeding troughs. Hipposhits.
rimaldo doesn't support City, by the way. rimaldo doesn't even support his seventeen children.
I know, I think their understanding of the reality is a bit skewed to be honest.
The equivalent of pay day loans is possibly the stupidest explanation I've heard so far!
I expect all of this will be swept under the rug and result in nothing more than the legal equivalent of a speeding ticket for the sheiks. The barn door may be closed behind City, making a de facto twofer. A win-win for City and their deluded fans.
I disagree. The case is brought by the PL and decided by a PL appointed committee. Bringing the charges was greater reputational risk to the PL than ignoring them. I don't see this getting swept away quietly as I think the PL could have done that already if that was their intention. I would expect expulsion, if not permanently then very lengthy.
You are set for huge disappointment.
The money will talk in the end and it will be the end of football because it’ll either be outlawed moving forward and city will never be caught or everyone will just use city as a blueprint
I don't see it. The PL have openly accused City of money laundering, fraud, corruption and financial doping. I don't see this going back to some settlement favourable to City.
I love that your "Supports: man city" tag gives you even more ammunition to wind people up who don't know who you are.
You're in for a shock then. The fact is this goes to state-level and in the interest of good relations with the UAE this government (which is bought and paid for as they've proven over years) will interfere. The punishment will not harm them in the long term. Maybe in the short term is the best we'll get.
You may be right, but how can the rest of us not have our suspicions that nothing more than a slap of the wrist is the worst City will suffer?
What we should see as punishment — since a cash fine even in the hundreds of millions is completely pointless — is City’s PL trophies rescinded, but on a scale of 1-10 the likelihood of that happening is much closer to 0 than to 1.
Exactly this. People always say it’s a great business model but it’s awful - pure impatience and greed stopping them simply building a legitimate football setup.
The way this works though is sadly too well known and obvious. The gov will pressure the PL to hand out a half hearted punishment and the usual media outlets will not shut up about how harsh the punishment is and how now City will have paid their dues etc. And yet within a couple of seasons max City will be back where they are and laughing all the way to the bank for decades to come.
And that’s fair enough but I think the PL will see it as a way of lining their own pockets and they’ll take the hit on the chin.
I will caveat this with them smashing city hard if they consult with the other 20 PL clubs about the result first though
Ok. Lets assume thats all thats happened. So City should get the £100 fine and 3 points right? You agree? So £100 x 115 is an £11,500 fine. And 3 points x 115 is 345 points. It only takes 12 points to be banned. The minimum ban for getting 12 points is 6 months. So, using your own analogy, City should be banned from football for at least 4 and a half years.
And you know whats funny? They wont even see this level of punishment.
So why have @rimaldo changed teams?
I love that your "Supports: man city" tag gives you even more ammunition to wind people up who don't know who you are.
light fraud at best. the kind that if we were talking about a tory mp, they’d be getting a peerage.
kids need to see a meerkat explode in to a cloud of brown mist to understand the cruelty of nature.
firstly, how dare you. secondly, i’ve been supporting them royal blues since the days of shaun goatee, geordie kinkylady, nicholas bambi and stevens island. not to mention knowing about our rich history of legends like michael summerball and denise laws.
i was one of the first city fans to wear my wife’s dressing down and a tea towel on my head when we were taken over by the middle east. i’ve even tried to get jobs at every single one of our sponsors, even though i can never find anything about any of them online. that hasn’t stopped me rehearsing how i think interviews may go in my head (i get the job.)
This is the stuff in the thread that is bordering on conspiracy theory levels.
Let's assume (long assumption*, but play on) that the PL have City dead to rights. Caught red handed. There's rock solid proof that City are guilty of the allegations.
You think that due to state relations between the UK and the UAE, the charges will get swept away, despite the desires of most clubs in the PL? There would be a mass revolt at all levels of the game. The UK government aren't that stupid, they'll placate the UAE in other ways, but City gets what is coming to them.
*The other conspiracy theory in this thread is that the PL has rock solid proof of impropriety that UEFA and CAS missed but that remains to be seen. I could be wrong, but given City's defiance and recent court successes, the conclusion of this will be a fine and some docked points, but not annihilation. Not because City paid people off, but because the PL couldn't prove the charges to a sufficient level, yet there's enough that City aren't totally pure, and it'll be in the interest of both parties to settle.
Now if you're one of the crowd who thinks their success isn't legitimate because "small club, not enough fans, more revenue than Real Madrid hahaha, "sportswashing"" then none of this matters. No result of this process will legitimize their accomplishments for a group of football supporters.
For extra WUMmery I would assume.
shortcut to winning stuff whilst being state owned. seemed more foolproof than waiting for united to bollocks it up under qatar. now it looks like jazzy has lost out to jimmy, so i’m considering my options again.
You can track City's gradual ascent in the Deloitte Football Money League here. The reflex answer would be steep COVID setbacks for La Liga and the Spanish giants combined sustained dominance in what has become the most commercially successful league in the world and improved performances in Europe, garnering further commercial interest. Of course, if the provenance of the whole enterprise is suspect, none of what happens after the fact matters as far as present-day legitimacy is concerned, but that is another can of worms. In practice, though, what tends to happen is that such questions of legitimacy fall by the wayside in the wash of history in favor of brute force of results and trophies. As they say, behind every great fortune there is a crime, and humanity has made easy practice of legitimizing or ignoring such things. This is why a conviction or some sort of formal sanction would be important for the historical record; otherwise any sort of financial chicanery or malfeasance will be soon forgotten as the brand grows and generations turn over (no pun intended). For context, pre-takeover City were consistently charting in the low teens on the Deloitte Football Money League, roughly around where West Ham or Everton are charting these days.
Some other bits that I find more interesting than City's financial engineering:
- When they first started reporting the Top 30 clubs after the 2008-2009 season EPL teams represented 10 of the Top 30 places. After the latest iteration, EPL clubs represent 16 of the Top 30 places, so a net gain of 6 club positions in under 15 years.
- In the earliest iteration, after the 1996-1997 season, Flamengo charted in at number 11, never to chart again.
- In the past decade, top charting revenue has gone from €512.6 million (Real Madrid) to €731 million (Manchester City)
- The peak revenue year, which still has not been topped, was 2018-2019 pre-covid, with Barcelona (€840.8 million) and Real Madrid (€757.3 million) charting first and second, respectively.
Well, yes, City's ascent has been anything but organic (organic ascents today are impossible, but ignore that for a second).
What I find fascinating about these discussions is that there are people who find it implausible that a team that has won a majority of top level English trophies in the past decade, have competed at the highest level of the CL (winning it last season), and regularly play in what is considered the most followed league in the world, rank near or at the top of revenue earnings, because they aren't a big club, or they don't have enough fans, or they didn't win trophies in the 80s/90s. Even more so fascinating is the idea that Deloitte would somehow be fooled into thinking City earn way more than they do.
For extra WUMmery I would assume.
Too obvious?
As I've said before, the City fans I know personally fall into the following categories:
1) Anti-Abu Dhabi, have distanced themselves from the current incarnation of the club (yes, they do exist).
2) Acknowledge they've cheated (inflated sponsorship contracts, shady "bonus" salaries, pretty much all of it), but don't care because football was corrupt as feck well before the "oil money", so what's the difference.
3) Partly acknowledge the cheating, but focus on the fact that the "pyramid" was unfair to begin with, meaning that City's only realistic chance of glory was to be bought by cheating gazillionaires.
4) Hate United, don't care about anything else. Owned by Hitler? Fine, as long as it means we don't have to suffer United winning anything.
I personally don't know a single City fan who actually claims their rise to power has been 100% legitimate (not with a straight face, some in category 4 may claim that when angry or drunk, but generally not).
But. The City fans I know are from Manchester or thereabouts. They actually attend games (when they're arsed), and many of them did so well before Abu Dhabi.
Purely online fans are a different kettle, I would imagine. And - sadly - City are getting more and more of those. In spite of the decidedly non-glamourous nature of the club and its rise to power, it obviously matters that they win things.
It's not that Deloitte or anyone has been fooled into thinking City earn way more than they do. It's been widely reported that City have used fake crypto currency type sponsors to inflate their commercial revenue. The reason they have had to inflate it so much is to offset years of massive spending.
Is that what people believe? Or is it to do with fake sponsorships that have inflated City's revenues which are then reflected in their Deloitte standings? I thought most of this was fairly straightforward, and remarkably uninteresting if anything. City have been cheating for years. What is interesting (at least to me) is whether or not they face any consequence for said cheating.
Let’s start a thread that gives a league table week by week without City. Let’s assume they are facing a 140 point deduction or whatever relegates them three divisions. Then you have to make all their games null and void. Complicated job, but I bet Giflord could do it
Nah not obvious enough really. Needs some more pep love.
It is just as ironic as the saudis sitting on the human rights commission.
I vehemently agree crypto money is funny money, but they're not the only clubs who've been caught up being sponsored by crypto companies. I don't think they have any issues funding their spending today through legitimate means. The artificial injections happened a decade ago, and that's why they are in this position today. My understanding is that that is the focus of the PL probe. And that was probably time barred in the UEFA probe, but isn't here.