You are comparing a club that operates in a legal manner (United) with one that constantly breaks the rules (City). Then you equate them both with doping, something that’s illegal.
There’s no sense to be found in your words.
City and Financial Doping | Charged by PL with numerous FFP breaches | Hearing begins 16th September 2024
- Thread starter VanGaalEra
- Start date
There’s no sense to be found in your words.
Except that much of what they are accused of is cooking the books to make it look like they're not spending as much, while in reality spending considerably more, but with much of that spend being 'off the books' with regards to wages, agents fees etc. This is on top of the fake sponsors and such.
Honestly, you just have to try and it’s actually not too tough to understand. I specifically contrasted the fact that under current rules one set of spending was allowable and the other wasn’t.
And that may be true- I’ve never seen any evidence for it other than on opposition fan sites, but I guess it’s not possible to disprove, is it?
Me too.
You are fighting a losing battle here though your analogies are bit off , but your larger point is true . The whole concept of FFP is bunkum should not have never been introduced if some individual or even the state wants to prop up the Clubs let them fecking do it without forcing them to jump through the hoops .
Last edited:
Again, I was talking about your analogy.
The point here isn't whether the Premier League's implementation or FFP is just, moral, good for sport, bad for sport, biased against the colour blue or whatever. Manchester City FC signed up the rules of the competition, which included FFP. They have allegedly broken those rules.
That's it. That's the point. It's right there.
As it happens I think the whole concept of a sporting league where the top team can literally spend 10x the bottom team is a joke, and shouldn't be taken seriously. But that has literally nothing to do with the City case.
Sorry pal but ‘it’s been pointed out why you are wrong’ is a ridiculous argument. You don’t have a monopoly on the truth, and you do have a vested interest in one outcome over another. As I’ve said before, if the direct result of City and Chelsea being punished is that Utd are perpetually the richest club in the land then fairness doesn’t come into it, it’s just about domination.
I’m aware that most on here will view through red tinted specs, I’m not hugely expecting to change the board’s mind!
Yep, quite obviously.
This is the issue that can't ever be solved in any sport unless it starts brand new with all teams together, and then as soon as some teams win things and others don't and the money starts getting split the same issue arises. I do think FFP by design helps this and shows a path to compete.
Look at United, the scale of the costs to modernise are staggering, versus clubs at the lower end of the table. If you are an owner coming in and want to invest, FFP allows you to pile unlimited money into training grounds, infra or youth development. So there's where you see your investment return - you can sell players, often pretty average players, for £30m plus these days and if you produce a top player it's not an exaggeration to be selling for £100m. Issue with City is they cheated, if they had not, they'd have won less but it's not like their academy isn't producing talent and I'd wager they'd still have won a fair amount but with a team playing guys like Palmer, Sancho, Lavia, Edozie, Bobb, Olise, Foden, Nmecha, Adarabioyo mixed in with big name signings. They would still very much be on the up and there would be nothing we could say against them apart from them being loaded.
Oh yeah just allow Nation states, Billionaires and unscrupulous businessmen to buy clubs, prop them up with money they could never generate on their own and then feck off when they get bored leaving the club in ruins. What could possibly go wrong?
The betting one is so funny. The LinkedIn profile with the default photo from google.
Indeed
Spending caps across the board, luxury tax, squad limits, placing funds unrelated to revenues in escrow, to protect the club from going under... Plenty of ways to make the sport better and tie success strictly to competence in youth development, coaching and shrewd transfer management. Imagine Brentford with a rich benefactor allowing it to challenge a United in the dark ages... There are a lot of clubs out there who could do way more if funded right, being blocked by old money.
But again, if you view football as this pristine virgin violated by Chelsea/City/PSG, then all of the above is nonsense and football is healed once City hypothetically get slammed back to League 2. And the rules are sacred.
Nah let's just allow the status quo go unchecked , and what exactly is the issue if somebody wants to burn their money on owning Football Club and making it successfull .
How many Clubs have been ruined when their Billionaire owners got bored can you give me some examples and didn't Clubs go bust before these pesky Billionaire owners came to town due to various reasons .
We can dress it up anyway we like it but most of the outrage stems from the fact that suddenly these no mark Clubs lacking in history as described regularly by big Clubs supporters became challenge and nuisance to their dominance . Why couldn't have they just stayed in their lane and known their place .
Actually the outrage for me stems from City literally cheating. Not just cheating, actually, but agreeing to the rules like every other club and then cheating.
And if you really need to have it explained why FFP was brought in then I suggest you look at how many clubs have gone into administration in the last 30 years, or how before FFP was introduced over half of the pro European teams were reporting financial losses.
I think the point is rather clear. The way Armstrong cheated and the way City have cheated are fundamentally different. Lets make the comparison more direct. Currently, there are no spending rules in pro cycling, you can spend whatever the sponsors give you. The big spenders are teams like Ineos, Team Visma and UAE. On the bottom of the list you find teams like EF Education, Cofidis, Arkea-Samsic. The difference from top to bottom is pretty big, we're probably talking about 4-5x the spending power. Generally, the success of the team is very correlated with spending, because you can afford the best riders (and equipment and such, of course, but the riders is the most important part).
Imagine that the UCI for some reason said that from this season, you're only ever allowed to spend up to your current budget. So, no matter how much money Cofidis could get their hands on, they wouldn't be able to spend as much as the top teams. They decide to cheat, and find a way to spend as much as Visma does. In so doing, they perform better than Visma.
They have broken the rules, because they spent more than they were allowed to, so they have cheated. As athletes, they competed on equal grounds. As teams, they had potential access to the same level of athletes, because they spent similar amounts of money.
This is, to me, fundamentally different than doping.
I mean, there were no rules in place for Chelsea's arrival on the scene and everyone loved them then. No reference made to the money they injected, since it was not against the rules.
Right, so back to reality
It seems like everyone misunderstood my Lance Armstrong point.
Ignore semantics for a moment. Cheating in any form, once there's enough public perception surrounding it, is difficult to shake off once you've gained that reputation. City could be found not guilty tomorrow (like in an alternate reality where Lance was cleared) but supporters from other clubs won't forget.
For some reason the City - sorry, IPSWICH supporting Nic decided to talk about how City are just doing what United have done for years. With the exception that United don't seem to have openly cheated the system.
The poster has been looking for bites for a long time.
I'll be honest, I missed how the whole Armstrong thing started.
It was certainly a wild ride, that's for sure!
Well except of course that City, whilst pretenting to spend similar on transfers to United have also done massive stadium, training and infrastructure upgrades. They’ve built an academy no none state owned club could ever dream of and thrown an incredible sum of money at it to turn it into a conveyor belt of players to sell for net spend.
United, in an attempt to even stay within light years of this nonsense, can’t even upgrade their training ground jacuzzi, let alone improve their stadium or the area around it, can’t fire a manager until he misses CL, dish out contracts to none deserving players to protect their value on the asset sheet, and their academy is at a fecking training ground they used in the 80’s
In attempting to keep up with the state’s spending, we now loan Weghorts, Amrabats & Reguillons.
Here’s City just doing what United do….
That's not a great argument.
The FFP stuff came in because clubs were spending beyond their means, going into administration etc, not to keep the likes of City in their lane. That's a story put about by City who are steamrolling the division and going for a second treble, while being lauded for it with a lot of the football media pretending they aren't totally corrupt, yet claim there's a conspiracy against them. It's absolute lunacy.
The danger of a sugar daddy owner is that they could get bored, overstretch themselves financially or get caught up in a geo-political situation. If the club is being kept in a false position due to money being pumped in then it could all fall apart fairly quickly once the owner walks away. I also included unscrupulous business men in that sentence btw. The point is that clubs need to be self-sustainable and run in a responsible manner. I don't know how you can suggest otherwise.
Also as the pigeon says City are cheating and blatantly lying about it. If City didn't cheat there wouldn't be much of a problem. Even now people are claiming they're self-sufficient and don't need to cheat 'anymore' because they have some real sponsorship deals but they're still being propped up by the likes of Etihad etc.
This is also absolute bollocks by the way, you already know that United very rarely outspend their rivals prior to Roman arriving, as you’ve seen the youtube video and been told literally hundreds of times.
We have spent like mad since City especially though in order to try and keep up, and at the cost of everything else with our infrastructure, whilst Spurs, Arsenal have new stadiums and training grounds, Liverpool have a new stand etc.
Despite this spending, all those teams have been gaining on United in the Deloitte table since SAF’s retirement and our inevitable downturn. Both Liverpool AND Spurs are now within touching distance, without state help.
I’ve said it before, the argument is fecking ridiculous, United, like Spurs and Liverpool are a football club, and their fortunes will often be shaped by periods of good and bad, this league has never been like Germany or Spain and we were always going to let the likes of Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal in post Fergie.
Take City away and a more successful Liverpool would have already surpassed us.
City’s fortune is shaped by nothing, they have a bottomless pit even if they are shite for 10 years, 20 years etc. We have a league in which football clubs must make good football decisions in order to be able to be able to pretend they can compete with an oil state football project.
City quite simply can outspend the most profitable club in the league, all whilst spending off the books. Without FFP, they’d obviously be even fecking worse. Messi would certainly have ended up there.
City can spend 10 fold of United, all whilst building new stands, infrastructure, and whilst having a wage bill the size of the rest of the league combined (a la PsG).
The only thing even making City pretend to follow the rules and rein it in is FFP.
Last edited:
Are people just missing the most simple fact here: that the merits of FFP don't matter? Go to the FFP thread.
This is the 'City signed up to rules then broke them, then hid the evidence, then refused to cooperate with investigations, and now are lobbying the government by promising to buy weapons of war if they'll just leave them alone' thread.
This is the 'City signed up to rules then broke them, then hid the evidence, then refused to cooperate with investigations, and now are lobbying the government by promising to buy weapons of war if they'll just leave them alone' thread.
Pidgey in before me.
Excellent point, and it begs the question why so many who claim to have the sport's best interests in mind (when speaking about City) ignore this massive flaw in the rules (the answer is obvious; they didn't care until their clubs were disadvantaged). In a world without rule-breaking, you've basically entrenched a hierarchy of clubs, capped by their revenues. Because you can't build a stadium overnight or organically sell noodles to billions in Asia; and you being competent on and off the pitch won't move the needle against big sides with entrenched financial advantages.
Which is why it's either you're upset that stupid rules were broken, or non-plussed at stupid rules being broken, and there's not much ground for compromise there.
So it's about helping all of the disadvantaged clubs have a chance? And City are somehow the saviours for breaking the "entrenched" clubs?
Before City started paying Mancini under the table they hadn't finished in the top 4 since 1978. Then they suddenly went from mid table to being in the Champions League spots from 2010/2011 onwards, again after they started paying at least one person at the club under the table thanks to a new ownership that are currently under investigation.
So how does City cheating when other clubs are following the rules benefit all of the other teams that have missed out on Champions League football?
The rules being stupid or not is not exactly the point. The point is that one team have breached the rules everyone else was following, and some folk are desperate for them not to be punished in the same way other clubs would have been were they doing the same thing.
Sorry but that’s just rubbish. You’ve just glossed over Utd spending £1.8 billion on the basis of ‘trying to keep up’. And spurs are not within touching distance. You bring in about £4 million a WEEK more than them.
Just out of interest, what on earth happened to the money if you haven’t out spent your rivals pre-Abramovic? You were well known for bringing in tons more than anyone else. If you haven’t spent it, where is it? Can’t blame the Glazers as we are talking pre 2004.
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pag.../articles/deloitte-football-money-league.html
Spurs are incredibly just €120m behind the biggest club in the country, despite no state ownership. It's almost like they are single handedly proving you wrong, but then you see Liverpool just €63m behind and you realise it aint single handedly, there is two of them, with Arsenal also back in resurgence.
We were a plc then mate. But aside from that, we like everyone else made improvements to facilities etc, similar to Spurs now in an attempt to grow organically like any football business can and should. And typically when we did, even more clubs wage and transfer spending started to look similar. These infrastructure years are something that's always existed and given opportunities to other sides, like when Arsenal had to serious ease off the spending for some years when they moved the stadium. Unfortunately the big greedy Abu Dhabi football project took that space though.
And don't say "if you haven't" as you know fecking full well we didn't... we were always 2nd behind Liverpool or 3rd behind Liverpool and Blackburn until the treble in 99, and after that massive success we had earned the luxury of 3 "extravagant" spending season at the top. Around 2003 we then did a part stadium rebuild in the quads, Roman came to Chelsea, City came, and our spending turned solely to players and wages, the infrastructure was forced to go to shit if we wanted to spend like them.
And here we are now, because of the last 15 or so years, it looks likely we'll need to find 3 billion we don't have to get our stadium up to top club standards, and a tonne more on the training facilities and the academy. Most estimates find we're likely looking at a 4bn bill if we wanna equal other top clubs like Madrid or Barca.
"just like City".
And I'll ask you again, we know 100% that City have been trying to cheat FFP. So let's imagine it doesn't exist, how do you think City's spending looks then? FFP is the only reason City even keep up the charade of playing the game on a same level as others in the league, without it they'd have been like PSG, massively outspending absolutely everybody (which they likely do already with that Mancini wage system).
Spurs spending since the Prem started is 3,7bn and they have a brand new stadium and training ground.
Arsenal spending since the Prem started is 5bn and they also have a brand new stadium and training ground.
United's spending since the Prem started is 6.7bn and now have a desperate need for a new stadium and training ground to keep up with the rest.
Now reimagine our spending without City (and maybe Chelsea) had we not felt the need to keep up and instead built a new stadium and training ground after 2010. That plus SAF retiring is how football opens up opportunities.
Last edited:
After scouring the internet for an journo daring to write a story against them, there was a nice one from Daniel Story in the i, "City's dominance is a disaster for the Premier league". "as City edge towards an historic achievment, that loses all meaning", "the Prem league is losing all trust", "is becoming a league of asterisks", etc.
No idea if this lot hold much weight, but it's just nice to see a few people willing to talk about it, as listening to the mainstream media you wouldn't even know this was happening.
No idea if this lot hold much weight, but it's just nice to see a few people willing to talk about it, as listening to the mainstream media you wouldn't even know this was happening.
I'll be surprised if you get a response from Nicola, who seems to be very selective with what they want to discuss.
@NicolaSacco I'm guessing you still haven't seen any evidence of City's wrongdoing?
I haven't called them saviors. And I've said that if they've been stupid enough to leave enough evidence of their dirt such that the PL finds them guilty, they should be slammed down the pyramid.
I don't care about City as much as making football more fair and equal. In my ideal scenario money as a factor toward success is much less important. Otherwise, whatever happens... Meh
So they should be punished for not being clever enough about their cheating as opposed to their cheating? Makes sense.
Shame, was about to show him that pre City the league's highest paid player looked like this:
92-93: John Barnes
93-94: John Barnes
94-95: Eric Cantona
95-96: Bergkamp
96-97: Ravanelli
97-98: Shearer
98-99: Shearer
99-00: Keane
00-01: Keane
01-02: Keane
02-03: Keane
03-04: Crespo
04-05: Lampard
05-06: Gerrard
06-07: Shevvy
07-08: Terry
Then came City, and unsurprisingly we started by shitting our pants Rooney was going to them by offering him an absolutely insane contract to prevent that happening, and we haven't looked back since, with Sanchez, De Gea and Ronaldo all having seasons with ridiculous money. Both Sanchez and Ronaldo both offered it to prevent them going Citeh.
Nicola has this daft idea in him that because we were so successful in the 90's and started to then spend our ridiculously well earned money in the 00's that we somehow had/have the same advantage the Abu Dhabi project has. Ignoring that it was Fergie's genius that got us there, not outspending everyone with massive financial power, and in fact, the old dominant side (Liverpool) outspent us all through the 90's trying to regain their spot.
I'm also convinced that post Fergie, we get overtaken again by Liverpool and with Spurs actually winning a title or two them getting even closer. The Abu Dhabi football project has stopped that power battle post Fergie, it's instead replaced it with a much more dominant club that can outspend everyone 10 fold if they feel it necessary. They'll never have to reel it in for a few years a la Arsenal if they wanna build a new stadium, or likely how United will once their project starts, in fact, they won't even notice the 3bn has gone from "some account".
Last edited:
I mean, if they can't be found guilty of the important Rules, why should they be punished?
The convenience with which this post was ducked at the time said a lot. Apart from filling their coffers from time to time, City cheating themselves to the top of football has been of enormous detriment to a number of clubs, not just the old order.
Using the league cup as evidence of anything is silly. It was won by lesser clubs because bigger clubs led by Fergie's United didn't give a feck about it; if they did, they could have dominated it as well. Now they do.
Have they been of detriment to Arsenal and Liverpool? Yeah. Tottenham? To a lesser extent, yes. The others? They were fecked anyways.