City and Financial Doping | Charged by PL with numerous FFP breaches | Hearing begins 16th September 2024

I wonder how many cease and desist letters they've sent out.
All of them probably.

That's why I don't think they will every be punished. They have so much money that they can lawyer up from here till the end of times and bury any process in legal purgatory.
 
It’s wild that they are sending out cease and desist letters to YouTubers. No wonder the media don’t talk about it.
 
It’s wild that they are sending out cease and desist letters to YouTubers. No wonder the media don’t talk about it.
I find it weird that more fans outside of United and Liverpool don't really care in my experience which is crazy. Surely every fan should be angry about this and want to see proper action but instead for years it's just been a bit of banter. There just doesn't seem to be the appetite for calling it out among football fans as a whole.
 


So they signed a player, that player went on loan to Girona and next season he's going to City having not played a game for the struggling team he signed for and all 3 teams are owned by the same owners.

Unfortunately by the time the rule makers have caught up to the whole multi-club ownership thing and have imposed laws that regulate it, City would have already benefitted enough from it.

Won't be publicised or talked about so much, but multi ownership is inherently terrible for the game. I find it insane it's allowed.
 
Apparently goldbridge is going to read it out on his that's football channel either today or tomorrow
 
C&D letter to YouTube fan channels, a new low and additional charge in my eyes for each letter sent. So far we know of two, 117 charges FC is the name, cheating is the game
 
This is what’s known as strong-arming. Strong-arming by a state interfering in football.

Pure gangsterism.
 
I find it weird that more fans outside of United and Liverpool don't really care in my experience which is crazy. Surely every fan should be angry about this and want to see proper action but instead for years it's just been a bit of banter. There just doesn't seem to be the appetite for calling it out among football fans as a whole.

Most football fans can barely see beyond the end of their beak.
They'll only start to care when it directly affects their club. No-one cared when it was just United affected.

Pretty dim from half of the league really, as City are the only team who've been in the champions league every single season since they first got in.
That's quite a statement in itself.
 
Or maybe City is working through a separate entity to make legal threats and playing semantics here? Who knows? All rumors.

It's pretty funny that anyone would read that and go, oh it must be made up then.
Rather than the much more obvious that it's come from intermediaries working for the club!
 
Every time I see this thread bumped I expect to see a full exoneration and formal apology from the PL.
 
I find it weird that more fans outside of United and Liverpool don't really care in my experience which is crazy. Surely every fan should be angry about this and want to see proper action but instead for years it's just been a bit of banter. There just doesn't seem to be the appetite for calling it out among football fans as a whole.

It's very obvious why, because to the vast majority of the football pyramid it doesn't matter

Maybe when you start to get 95 point second place finishes like Arsenal then you start to sympathize with Liverpool. If you've hated United you probably don't care as much. Apart from those 3 groups (and maybe Tottenham), why would Villa or West Ham or most other fans (who don't treat PL rules as the 10 commandments) give a feck?
 
I find it weird that more fans outside of United and Liverpool don't really care in my experience which is crazy.
I was talking about this with a group the other day (very few of whom support Utd). It's not that they "don't care", quite the opposite, but none of them think anything will happen and the result is they completely ignore City's "achievements". There's as much interest in City winning the league, CL etc. as there is in who wins the Mexican third division (south) league. It's like Putin winning the Russian presidential election... of course he did!

They were much more concerned that (in their eyes) the current FFP/PSR rules effectively lock in the "big 6" as it prevents an ambitious owner from (eg) doing an Abramovich and buying their way up the league.
 
I was talking about this with a group the other day (very few of whom support Utd). It's not that they "don't care", quite the opposite, but none of them think anything will happen and the result is they completely ignore City's "achievements". There's as much interest in City winning the league, CL etc. as there is in who wins the Mexican third division (south) league. It's like Putin winning the Russian presidential election... of course he did!

They were much more concerned that (in their eyes) the current FFP/PSR rules effectively lock in the "big 6" as it prevents an ambitious owner from (eg) doing an Abramovich and buying their way up the league.

I subscribe to the NYTimes, and Rory Smith is a great football writer on there who has a newsletter. One of them was about City's dominance, and the nonchalance in England around their dominance, and he made a parallel with Bayern Munich's recent dominance of the Bundesliga (with earned money of course):

This sentiment was captured perfectly by Dario Minden, a spokesman for Unsere Kurve, a sort of umbrella group for Germany’s organized fans, as he tried to explain why — in a way — it was almost better for Bayern Munich to win the Bundesliga, rather than anyone else.

Bayern also has a colossal financial edge, of course. It, too, seems to German fans to be a different animal compared with everyone else. “If Bayern wins it,” Minden, an Eintracht Frankfurt fan, said, “it is almost like nobody does.” The success of a direct rival, of a comparable peer, can sting, but there is no point in wondering why the lottery winner has a nicer house than you do.

I'd wager that people and neutral fans "cared more about City" when they looked human, when they needed a last gasp winner to win the league against THE team at the time, United, or when they won again under Pellegrini against Chelsea. Regardless of how they got their wealth, things started to get boring when they got really, really good, and eliminated the sense of jeopardy in their short term and long term.

Regarding the bolded in your post, hehe.
 
It's very obvious why, because to the vast majority of the football pyramid it doesn't matter

Maybe when you start to get 95 point second place finishes like Arsenal then you start to sympathize with Liverpool. If you've hated United you probably don't care as much. Apart from those 3 groups (and maybe Tottenham), why would Villa or West Ham or most other fans (who don't treat PL rules as the 10 commandments) give a feck?
I think what you're saying is true but here is the thing that i think Premier League fans at least should be aware of: If City had been punished years ago with a massive points deduction or even expulsion from the league, your club would move up the table by one in any of those previous seasons. Now one place doesn't sound much if you're a midtable side like Fulham this season for example, but to relegation-threatened teams or European chasing teams that's a huge amount of revenue and prestige that you might miss out because the league has no urgency/ethics in punishing a team that have flagrantly cheated for years on end and have not on one single occasion fallen out of the top 4 since they first 'achieved' that. It's a bit weird to me that other fans don't have more of a discussion about it.

To use some examples, you have Leicester City (who admittedly have had some dodgy financial issues themselves btw) narrowly miss out on top 4 by the tightest of margins in two seasons and you have Spurs who probably will end up in 5th place but would be a champions league team if City had had their points deduction this season. City and their ridiculous financial doping have effectively 'locked in' one of those champions league/European places at the expense of the other 19 other teams in the league. To me that surely should be something to be angry about?
 
Their hearing date has to be in the summer, probably only a couple of months to see how this is all resolved now...
 
The FA should issue immediately issue and apology to City for its arrogance in even hinting, let alone formally investigating, that City senior management have done anything that would be considered less than fully above board.
 
So what did the letter actually demand he stop doing?

I think he was making some sort of link between 115 charges being brought on City and them potentially not doing things entirely legally.

A bit of a stretch if you ask me.
 
I think what you're saying is true but here is the thing that i think Premier League fans at least should be aware of: If City had been punished years ago with a massive points deduction or even expulsion from the league, your club would move up the table by one in any of those previous seasons. Now one place doesn't sound much if you're a midtable side like Fulham this season for example, but to relegation-threatened teams or European chasing teams that's a huge amount of revenue and prestige that you might miss out because the league has no urgency/ethics in punishing a team that have flagrantly cheated for years on end and have not on one single occasion fallen out of the top 4 since they first 'achieved' that. It's a bit weird to me that other fans don't have more of a discussion about it.

To use some examples, you have Leicester City (who admittedly have had some dodgy financial issues themselves btw) narrowly miss out on top 4 by the tightest of margins in two seasons and you have Spurs who probably will end up in 5th place but would be a champions league team if City had had their points deduction this season. City and their ridiculous financial doping have effectively 'locked in' one of those champions league/European places at the expense of the other 19 other teams in the league. To me that surely should be something to be angry about?

You're not wrong, if you snipe City then everyone moves one space up. The issue is that the benefits of that one bump up are marginal to all but maybe 3 teams (the one who now wins the PL, the one who now gets into the CL, and the one who avoids relegation). Let's throw in 1-2 additional teams who are now genuine title challengers. For the others there's little benefit, and little to hate City for.
 
I think he was making some sort of link between 115 charges being brought on City and them potentially not doing things entirely legally.

A bit of a stretch if you ask me.

Cheers, fair enough.
 
Their hearing date has to be in the summer, probably only a couple of months to see how this is all resolved now...

It's a massive failure of all stakeholders in English football that it won't be resolved this season and points deduction applied this season
 
If they break on rules this last year, this year or going forward theyll be immediately punished for that, right?

that's the thing, the 115 charges only take us as far as 2018 or so I think, can't remember the exact date.

There is a still another close to a decade of them doing god knows what after all this.