Manchester City

[dom9]

I sort of get that. We had a similar blind spot over Suarez, and your natural reaction is to defend your club when it’s under attack. And then I see that Heysel and Hillsborough were trending nationwide on twitter earlier because of those bitter *******s trying to deflect, and I hope they end up relegated the cunts.

The Suarez analogy is 100% correct.

Everyone closed ranks and whatever the rights and wrongs of that case were, LFC and its fans felt they were victims of a flawed process.

It's easy to forget that.

I totally understand how the City people are feeling hard done by. Does that make them right? If course not.

But like Suarez, their owners have massively ****ed up and overstepped the line.

It's the fans left having to pick up the pieces and so they warp reality to try and find any semblance of justification.

Why? Fan = Fanatic

And in the age of social media, the bubble they find themselves in just perpetuates and amplifies the feeling.

We were wrong about Suarez (and many won't accept that) and City fans are wrong about FFP if they're complaining against it.

[Buzzo]

This is a good article which picks apart most of what City fans hope is going on and has gone on.

They are bang to rights.

Manchester City show disrespect to Uefa with misinformation and sweeping claims

City are angry and indignant but their attack on governing body has parallels with the toxic Brexit campaign

David Conn Sat 15 Feb 2020 16.52 GMT

Manchester City’s hierarchy surpassed themselves with the aggression and ferocity of their response to the Valentine’s Day blow from Uefa, the two-year ban from the Champions League and €30m fine for deceit in their financial submissions. City have been hostile and adversarial in their public statements, and conduct of their case, throughout the investigation by European football’s governing body that followed the leaks of the club’s emails published by Der Spiegel in November 2018.

This time City went further and made it personal, reacting to the very serious finding that they did mislead Uefa by overstating their sponsorship revenue, principally from the Abu Dhabi state airline Etihad, between 2012 and 2016. The statement City unleashed immediately included the same notes of a tune the club has been playing for a year now, but with added volume. The Uefa club financial control body (CFCB), two semi-independent panels of distinguished lawyers, politicians and professors which oversees financial fair play compliance, had run a “flawed”, “consistently leaked” and “prejudicial” process, which was totally biased.

The statement singled out “the Uefa Chief Investigator”, the former Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme, alleging that by a comment he made in December 2018, he “publicly previewed the outcome and sanction he intended to be delivered, before any investigation had even begun”. The club claimed Leterme oversaw a biased process with “little doubt in the result that he would deliver” and that “this is a case initiated by Uefa, prosecuted by Uefa and judged by Uefa”.

City are angry and indignant, of course, particularly as the emails that have damned them were exposed by Der Spiegel’s source, Rui Pinto, who is now on remand in his native Portugal accused of 147 criminal offences including computer hacking, which he denies. But this attack looks intemperate in two principal ways: in the specifics of the allegation that Uefa’s scrutineers acted improperly, and more broadly, in the magnitude of disrespect for European football’s governing body.

Financial fair play is depicted as a wicked European plot by elite clubs to pull up the drawbridge. The contradictions in this argument are rarely acknowledged
To take the second first, perhaps somebody who loves City might have tried to reason with the club’s hierarchy that now is not a great time in Britain to be whipping up their supporters, and anybody else prepared to listen, to believe the worst of a European institution. The perception they are generating of Uefa, the sporting bureaucracy which has organised Europe’s elite football competitions since 1955, and introduced FFP in 2011 to encourage financial sustainability, has parallels with the toxic Brexit campaign. Actual facts struggle for proper recognition, while misinformation and sweeping allegations are easier to digest.

Financial fair play, the injunction to spend within revenues which has transformed European football from basket-case losses for many clubs to general financial health, is depicted as a wicked European plot by elite clubs to pull up the drawbridge.

The contradictions in this argument are rarely acknowledged: it was no kind of fair competition anyway pre-2011 that the only clubs able to compete with the elite had to be funded by a Gulf state interest or an oligarch. Fairer “competitive balance” is a different issue from FFP; from the beginning of professional football, it has been achieved only with an equitable sharing of the game’s money, not by a flawed dream to find a rich owner.

That battle should be fought with the elite clubs – including City, who now Sheikh Mansour has funded them into the grounds of the gilded castle, were among the most aggressive in the “big six” to demand a greater slice of the Premier League’s international TV rights.

Then there are the specific allegations, that this European body is flawed, its processes and officials improper and prejudiced, for reasons unexplained. On the specific allegation against Leterme, City’s hierarchy understand – clearly – that in framing the statement they were alleging bias, prejudice and impropriety by every member of the CFCB’s two “chambers,” who looked at City’s “irrefutable evidence” and found themselves unconvinced.

The 2018 comment by Leterme that City have escalated into proof of institutional bias was brief and quite noncommittal, given to a magazine, Sport and Strategy, in Belgium, where he was prime minister from 2009-11. “If it is true what has been written, there might be a serious problem,” he said to questions about the Der Spiegel coverage. “This can lead to the heaviest punishment: exclusion from the Uefa competitions. If the information is correct, this possibly goes against truthful reporting.”

So there were two ifs, one might and a possibly in his brief reply, which was little more than a general note that if City had lied in their financial reporting of the sponsorships, that is serious and can lead to the most severe punishment. That applies to any person or organisation in any sport: deceit, or lying, is a breach of trust, so worse than any failure to abide by technical rules.

It was abundantly clear from Leterme’s remark that it all remained to be investigated. Yet City, having welcomed the investigation when it was announced in March, are now telling their supporters that now their “irrefutable evidence” was not deemed convincing, it shows the process was biased due to a brief comment made by Leterme four months earlier.

A genuine look at Uefa’s FFP system has to acknowledge it is quite sophisticated for a sporting body. The rules themselves were developed with Deloitte and other legal and accounting experts. Serious efforts were made to clear them in principle and avoid an anti-competition challenge from the European commission, which succeeded largely because the prime purpose, to encourage financial sustainability, is recognised to be valid.

The two-stage chambers manned by semi-independent appointees is designed to avoid as far as possible an organisation being the prosecutor, judge and jury that City claim to be the case. The adjudicatory chamber, which heard the charges when they were made by Leterme’s investigatory chamber, is chaired by José Narciso da Cunha Rodrigues, a former general prosecutor in Portugal. After hearings last month, he reached the finding that City were guilty, as did the chamber’s other members: Christiaan Timmermans, a Dutch law professor; Louis Peila, a very experienced Swiss judge; Adam Giersz, a former Polish sports minister; and the English barrister Charles Flint QC. He is president of the UK’s National Anti-Doping Panel and trusted enough in Abu Dhabi’s neighbouring emirate of Dubai to be a director of its financial services authority.

So City’s reaction to the considered conclusion of these distinguished European professionals was to allege that all were biased, and reached a prejudged conclusion signalled by Leterme.

[ChesterDave]

I sort of get that. We had a similar blind spot over Suarez, and your natural reaction is to defend your club when it’s under attack. And then I see that Heysel and Hillsborough were trending nationwide on twitter earlier because of those bitter *******s trying to deflect, and I hope they end up relegated the cunts.

There have been a lot of Heysel related comments. Horrible *******s probably convinced themselves they care about the dead rather than just wanting to use it to bash Liverpool.

[Buzzo]

The Suarez analogy is 100% correct.

Everyone closed ranks and whatever the rights and wrongs of that case were, LFC and its fans felt they were victims of a flawed process.

It's easy to forget that.

I totally understand how the City people are feeling hard done by. Does that make them right? If course not.

But like Suarez, their owners have massively ****ed up and overstepped the line.

It's the fans left having to pick up the pieces and so they warp reality to try and find any semblance of justification.

Why? Fan = Fanatic

And in the age of social media, the bubble they find themselves in just perpetuates and amplifies the feeling.

We were wrong about Suarez (and many won't accept that) and City fans are wrong about FFP if they're complaining against it.

Thats a good post.

And I agree, the City board of sold their fanbase down the river. Now, I've only ever heard from their lunatic fringe, but they must have good fans, honest fans, so what has happened is a lot to come to terms with. I recall even trying to tell my mum who had heard about the Suarez incident that the terminology he was using and a different meaning ini Uruguay... But what was I really defending? Nobody should want to be part of the lunatic fringe to lead the argument.

Its the same with Pep and the City players, to their mind they were doing nothing wrong (exactly the same has literally just happened in Rugby). But the advantages they had in terms of squad depth which will be so decisive over a domestic campaign ultimately gave them strength in depth far beyond what was reasonable.

[baitman]

We supported suarez against evra and quite rightly, but bitey suarez was indefensible, and no one did defend those actions.

[rodo]

Stu Brennan has been awfully quiet on the subject

[Red_Polo]

Stu Brennan has been awfully quiet on the subject

What since this utter ****e?

[ame]https://twitter.com/StuBrennanMEN/status/1227886629664129024[/ame]

What a ****ing delusional whopper, even City fans in response calling him out left, right and centre

[SB]

Haha I reckon uefa made their decision a few days ago and said they’d wait til today to announce it, to give us all a nice start to the weekend [emoji119][emoji119]

Can’t wait for peps next press conference [emoji23][emoji23][emoji897]

So considerate of them hey

https://tenor.com/view/good-morning-...ma-gif-3464492

[SB]

Does seem a bit like banning me from competing in Miss World.

Nearly missed that one

[Irishnev]

The animosity goes back further than you perhaps would imagine. The distrust, the cold-shouldering, the politics. Officials from Manchester City can still remember the first time they qualified for Europe in the Abu Dhabi era and how, when they turned up in Monaco for the draw, they were left with the clear impression that the elite European clubs saw them through hard, suspicious eyes.

A small thing, perhaps, but it might offer some context as to why City have always suspected they were not welcome at the top table. One executive who was present told me a while back about the incredible awkwardness of realising they were being blanked. It became a running joke behind the scenes about how many times they would be accused of “ruining football” and how often Bayern Munich, in particular, felt it was their right to comment about the way City went about their business.

The fans in Manchester latched on to it, too, positioning a banner — “Ruining Football Since 2008” — inside the stadium, early in the 2010-11 season, as a middle finger to the club’s critics.

It was on the same side of the ground where there is a permanent tribute to Sheikh Mansour, the club’s owner, and faced directly towards the stand where UEFA’s dignitaries would be seated. Then City had their first Europa League tie, against the Romanian side Timisoara, and a decision was taken, high in the club, that the banner should probably come down. Even at that stage, City felt they had an issue with European football’s establishment.

The background feels relevant now City have been left with the considerable stigma of being banished from the Champions League for the next two seasons, tarnished as cheats and held up as guilty, in the eyes of UEFA, of a multi-million-pound deception to evade the governing body’s financial fair play (FFP) regulations.

It is a stain on the club that is not going to be easy to wash out. It will always be in the history books, an ugly red cross vandalising the club’s Abu Dhabi years, and their only possible mitigation is that FFP appears to have been devised specifically with the intention of pulling down the shutters on the nouveau riche. There are plenty of us with misgivings about the regulations and, beneath everything, perhaps City make some relevant points about a system that has been driven by some of their direct opponents.

The bottom line, however, is that City need to look harder at themselves if they have deliberately cooked the figures, as alleged, to try to deceive UEFA. The upshot is threatening to have repercussions that go way beyond the club’s exclusion next season, and the one after that, from Europe’s premier competition.

The obvious threat involves the stark possibility that some of their category-A players will wish to leave. Not a mass exodus, perhaps, when City still hold many attractions. But there are players in Pep Guardiola’s squad who are entitled to want a crack at the European Cup and do not wish to have their invitation withheld through no fault of their own. And who can blame them? Of course, those players are going to be wondering whether they want to hang around. Of course, they will be giving serious consideration to moving on.

Every player at City will have ambitions, dreams, targets. It is part of being an elite footballer and those free midweek nights are sure going to feel blank, demoralising in the extreme, when the Champions League anthem is playing elsewhere.

There is a difference, of course, between a footballer who is considering moving on and one who actually has the gumption to go through with it. Let’s also keep in mind that City still have an awful lot in their favour and any club with their wealth will always be in a position of strength. Heck, they might even knock Real Madrid out of the next round and win the damn thing this year. Which would be a considerably better form of protest than booing the Champions League anthem.

All the same, it is easy to understand why City’s supporters must be finding this all very unsettling when it is also threatening to affect their transfer plans for what was supposed to be an extensive summer of recruitment.

Those fans are a stoic bunch, on the whole, particularly the ones who might appreciate the fact that UEFA’s announcement came on the anniversary of the team losing 1-0 to Bury during the season, 1997-98, that ended with the team dropping into the old Second Division (now League One). As crises go, City have endured far worse. At least Guardiola does not have a drinks coaster shaped like a panic button, unlike Joe Royle, the manager who coined the phrase “Cityitis”.

These, however, are emotional times for the modern-day City and, as well as the near-unremitting speculation about Guardiola’s future, it has to be unnerving for the supporters when they are already having to contemplate the fact David Silva is now in his last three months with the club. Silva has worn City’s colours with such distinction one suggestion is that a statue of him, Vincent Kompany and Sergio Aguero should go up on the approach to the stadium.

Now, though, how many of Silva’s team-mates might be wondering, however strong their attachment to City, if there might be better adventures to be had elsewhere?

As difficult as this might be for City’s supporters to contemplate, what does Aguero make of it now he has reached the stage of his career when, even for the greatest players, insecurity can appear on the horizon?

Aguero has achieved many great things in his career but he is yet to experience the sweet-scented night of a Champions League final. He will be 34 when City’s ban expires and, to put it bluntly, time is not on his side. If he doesn’t feel that silver between his fingers this year, can he be blamed for wondering whether it might be time to reassess his options? And could City really take umbrage when this is a mess of their own making?

Aguero is the club’s record scorer, a four-time Premier League winner and a genuine history-maker if you understand why there are so many people in Manchester with “93:20” inked into different parts of their bodies. He has given the club such prodigious service over the past nine seasons he could probably be forgiven for thinking he deserves better. He certainly doesn’t deserve to miss out. None of the players do.

On Friday, just after the announcement from UEFA, City got in touch with all the relevant agents to ask them to stay calm and make sure the players did not say anything on social media. The players were then invited to a meeting at the club today. The club’s message was that they had always suspected there was a ban coming their way and that they were going to give UEFA a heck of a fight, starting with an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. All of which ties in with their public insistence that the evidence in their favour is “irrefutable” and they have suffered a huge injustice.

We will see. The agents are there to look after their players but, let’s be realistic, they can also earn millions in commission by arranging transfers. Raheem Sterling was already being linked with a move to Real Madrid before learning he will have to sit out the Champions League for two years. That speculation will undoubtedly now accelerate. There will also be scrutiny on Kevin De Bruyne at a time in his professional life when he is playing at the point of maximum expression. The Champions League would be weaker without his brilliance.

Nobody can be sure, yet, how this is all going to play out. All that can really be said for certain is that the best players, as a rule, want to play in the best competition. And that, for City, has to be a significant worry when there are people who know Bernardo Silva, for instance, and think it inconceivable that he will accept being out of the Champions League in the two years preceding the defining World Cup of his career.

“Expect players to be brutal, ruthless and act in their own interests,” one agent says. “Even the ones you think are nice.”

Leroy Sane, who was left out of Germany’s last World Cup squad, might also be thinking the same. Indeed, the events of the past few days could conceivably have made up his mind that it is time to leave Manchester.

Sane had been swaying in that direction anyway and, as if this whole process has not been galling enough for City, it is Bayern who are hoping to tempt him back to Bundesliga. The irony is not lost on City, who consulted lawyers last season when the then president, Uli Hoeness, was quoted saying that Sheikh Mansour paid for signings by ramping up the price of oil. City let it be known, via unnamed sources, it was the remark of a “smug, arrogant egotist”, which is probably an accurate gauge of relations between the two clubs.

As for Guardiola, imagine the pressure he will be under to regain the Premier League title from Liverpool if he keeps to his word and sticks around for another season. Guardiola was being deliberately contrary earlier this week when he floated the idea he could be sacked if his team lost to Madrid. He won’t be fired and nobody surely ever thought he would be. It would, however, confirm his reign in Manchester will not feature the trophy he craves the most and that will weigh on him heavily when, ultimately, this was why Abu Dhabi was so intent on bringing him to the club.

Eleven years since their takeover, City have managed only one Champions League semi-final so far and that was under Manuel Pellegrini. Guardiola, who is never good at hiding his feelings, can hardly feel enthused about the possibility of his time in Manchester ending this way — controversially, with a sizeable cloud hanging over the club and more debate, perhaps unfairly, about whether he has come up short. He has, in effect, only this season to shape that debate more to his liking.

At the very least, the ban leaves City with all sorts of financial complications bearing in mind the pay structure that the chief executive, Ferran Soriano, introduced after arriving at the club from Barcelona. City, like most clubs, operate a performance-related scheme that means players can earn significant bonuses, often in excess of £1 million, just for qualifying for the Champions League. Their pay automatically goes up for being involved in the competition and there are considerable bonuses dependent on how far the team goes.

The players, in other words, could now find themselves losing out on huge sums of money through no fault of their own. Guardiola, too, if he and his staff have the same arrangement in their contracts, which is highly likely. Behind the scenes, there is an expectation that Soriano and the director of football, Txiki Begiristain, will make sure the club cover everybody rather than risk the upset it might cause. But it is unconfirmed so far and the players are waiting to find out.

Add to that the amount of money the players could lose through personal endorsements and it is no wonder they and their agents might feel aggrieved. Adidas, for example, have a two-tier system that has City in the top range, with the likes of Spurs and Atletico Madrid a rung below, but that could conceivably change.

City, to go back to the earlier point, have been through worse and — with a nod to the football historian Gary James for this little fact — they have also faced heavier punishments for previous misdemeanours. In 1906, the club were caught making improper payments and 17 players were banned from playing for them ever again. The directors were ordered to resign and the chairman and secretary were barred from football sine die.

The secret, perhaps, is to avoid getting yourselves into trouble in the first place.

[fidget]

We supported suarez against evra and quite rightly, but bitey suarez was indefensible, and no one did defend those actions.

[ChesterDave]

You can estimate the age of the author of that piece Nev shares by referencing the old second divisions as league 1. The old second division is the championship!

[Hollowman]

Not back then. The Championship wasn't named that until the rebranding in 2004. When City went down, the Second Division was the third tier, below the Premier League and the First Division.

[dizzycat]

Does seem a bit like banning me from competing in Miss World.

[Mark79]

Who's that article by?

Guessing it's from the Athletic.