Was just about to post that.
He's not making any friends at City with those comments
He's not making any friends at City with those comments
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Hello mert. -
Quite a few gems from Sterling in the article above:
What a bitter, eye scratching scumbag. Most expensive team in sports history, assembed by cheating FFP over multiple years (best part of a decade), cooking the books, fraudulently paying 'themselves' for sponsorship. Neglects to mention how badly they failed in Europe (every single year) - knocked out by Spurs (after having intentionally injured Kane in the 1st leg). Constantly lying about their match day attendance so they can 'claim' more ticket revenue than reality. Playing crowd noises through their speaker systems because there real atmosphere is so ****. First team chanting about Sean Cox getting beaten into a coma and Mo Salah getting injured in the CL final. Giving extra 'payments' to offshore bank accounts to previous managers. Human rights abuses.Raheem Sterling says Man City not 'treated with same respect' as Liverpool
Former Liverpool player Raheem Sterling has questioned why no Manchester City players were awarded with the PFA Player of the Year
Raheem Sterling believes Manchester City are "not treated with the same respect" as Liverpool.
The winger joined the Reds from Queens Park Rangers' Academy as a 15-year-old in February 2010, but left many fans upset when he forced through a £44million move to the Etihad in 2015 after turning down what Brendan Rodgers had described as “an incredible deal” in terms of a new contract offer earlier in the year.
He has now spoken to Spanish media outlet AS about the fact no City players won the Ballon d'Or of PFA Player of the Year awards despite claiming every domestic title last term.
The 25-year-old said: "Especially in the last year where we have won the domestic quadruple including the league, to not have a player winning PFA Player of the Year kind of speaks for itself really.
"The award was given to a Liverpool player who had a fantastic season but I look at previous seasons as well when Yaya Touré scored 20 goals from midfield and he didn't win Player of the Year.
"Also, Sergio Agüero has been at the club for more than seven years and has scored unbelievable goals during this time, yet none of City’s players have won it.
"I think that certain players are not treated in the same way when they are from different football clubs across the country and across the world over the past few seasons. The first year we won the league, De Bruyne was unbelievable and they gave it to another player.
"Every year we win a major trophy and it's given to an opposition player. It's that sort of thing that doesn’t depend on us, but we keep going."
Sterling was pushed for his thoughts about this and declared that City weren't treated with the same respect as Liverpool.
"It’s something everyone can see," he added.
"It is impossible to win the league for four or five times and none of the players were Player of the Year.
"Every team which wins the league has a player who wins Player of the Year, for sure.
"So, this year Liverpool win the league and a Liverpool player will win the Player of the Year for sure.
"We win the league for five times and we were not treated with the same respect."
Want some respect then do the following:
- Stop cheating FFP, paying yourself for sponsorship, fiddeling accounts
- Try developing youth players through your system rather than spunking £50 million on a every position
- Try actually winning a Quarter Final in the champions league
- Try to win games without cheating by tactical fouling
- [Sterling specifically] stop scratching England team mates in the eye and stop diving all over the placeComment
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you love to see it
Trey Nyoni: countdown to stardom-2 years1year0.5 yearsComment
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**** me, and they call us 'victims' is there anyone they believe doesn't have it in for them?
Also isn't Player of the Year voted on by other players?Modifying post.Comment
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Sound's like Sterling is cracking up
OK so we have had PFA player of the year the last two seasons, the title could have gone to either us or Man City last year, and the award is made before the end of the season so the winners aren't necessarily known. VVD had a great season and deservedly won it, the year before Salah had a freakishly good season, so I think it's difficult to argue with either of those decisions.The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.Comment
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Apparently not photoshopped
[ame="https://twitter.com/the_paul_winn/status/1230826124780953600"]https://twitter.com/the_paul_winn/status/1230826124780953600[/ame]Comment
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I think we knew that he was like that already. It's good to know it's not personal
What's odd about this interview is that he makes it sound like the question was sprung on him yet conveniently for the photos there's a Madrid shirt. I wonder if, as City's most saleable asset, they're preparing to balance the books. Big rebuild needed there with Aguero and Silva aging, and Sane, Sterling, looking to be moved on. Pep's going to have to be creative for once in his career.Last edited by Norbs; 22-02-20, 11:09 AM.Comment
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How is this going down with City fans? There is usually uproar when players are posing with other teams shirts. It seems at best somewhat naive for him to agree to that picture, even if they are trying to say it is just about the upcoming CL tie.
As good a player as he is and for the positive things he has done in highlighting issues of racism, I am still glad that he doesn't play of us anymore, I just don't think he would suit the squad dynamic that works so well for us at the moment.Last edited by Exiled_red; 22-02-20, 12:03 PM.The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.Comment
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They probably think our sale to them was a ploy to later **** them up with a move to Real Madrid.Originally posted by Exiled_red View PostWas muß, das muß.Comment
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One of the finest articles I've read for some time:
RORY SMITH ON SOCCER
The Perils of Having Your Dreams Come True
Manchester City’s fans are the most vociferous defenders of their club’s reputation. But that does not mean they are not victims, too.
Manchester City fans have stood by their club. Because that’s what fans do.Credit...Lynne Cameron/EPA, via Shutterstock
[https://static01]
By Rory Smith
Feb. 21, 2020
Enjoying this newsletter every week? Forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory.
Manchester City’s fans do not see themselves as victims. They are — they feel — like the lucky ones, the lottery winners. More than that, in fact. Any fool can win the lottery. Manchester City earned it.
For years, their club traipsed in the wilderness, knowing nothing but disappointment and regret and misery, greeting it all with a wry smile. They endured the derision of their rivals and, in particular, the disdain of their neighbors, Manchester United. And then, with a bolt from a bright blue sky, it all changed.
Suddenly, Manchester City won titles. Suddenly, Manchester City was the best team in England. Suddenly, Manchester City had the best coach in the world. Suddenly, Manchester City broke records: 100 points in a season, an unprecedented domestic treble. It must have felt, on some level, like a karmic reward for all those years of pain.
The fans knew who to thank. A banner has hung from the top tier of the Etihad Stadium for some time now: a decade or so, maybe. It long predates the treble, the centurions, the arrival of Pep Guardiola. Memory is fickle, but it may even have been put in place before Queens Park Rangers and Sergio Agüero and the first title of the new era, back in 2012. It reads, in English and Arabic: “Manchester thanks you, Sheik Mansour.”
Manchester City’s fans do not act like victims, either. Or, rather, a portion of Manchester City’s fans do not. Writing about anything other than the wonderful style of Guardiola’s team, the sublime majesty of David Silva and the shimmering brilliance of Kevin de Bruyne, certainly, requires something of a thick skin.
Suggest that, perhaps, Abu Dhabi’s investment in Manchester City is not rooted exclusively in a love of the sport and happy, hazy, 1990s memories of Georgi Kinkladze, but in a desire to burnish the reputation of a Gulf state with a questionable human rights record, and a relatively small but highly concentrated burst of fury is guaranteed.
Over the last year or so, it has been the same whenever someone mentions the allegations that arose from the emails Football Leaks released: namely, that City not only breached UEFA’s financial regulations, but that the club also deliberately misled the investigators going over its accounts.
The bile comes, as sure as the sun: accusations that the news media is in league with a mysterious “cartel” of clubs, and also with UEFA, to bring down City. The rhetoric has only intensified in the last week, since UEFA threw City out of the Champions League for two years, not simply for breaking the rules of Financial Fair Play but also for misleading investigators.
The club, of course, vehemently asserts its innocence. It will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and perhaps beyond, with what it has called “irrefutable” proof it has done nothing wrong. Its fans believe it, unquestioningly. This is all, they say, a witch hunt.
They make that clear to journalists on social media — most often in the form of harmless abuse, though it is occasionally more troubling — and to UEFA, now seen as City’s persecutor, in real life.
City’s fans have long jeered the Champions League anthem because of the perceived vendetta against the club; during the team’s game against West Ham on Wednesday, some brandished signs declaring the organization a mafia. Further demonstrations are planned for the visit of Real Madrid in a few weeks’ time.
This is not how victims are supposed to behave, this defiance and rage, but that is precisely what City’s fans are in all of this.
Supporting a sports team is not — though it may seem like it, to nonbelievers — a straight consumer choice. It is, instead, part of our composite identity. Often, quite a large part. There are parallels, according to some studies, to how we regard our gender, our sexuality, our ethnicity. (Though it is not, we should at this point concede, quite as important.)
It may not be integral to who we are, but it is integral to how we see ourselves. A team’s success and failure is seen as “self-relevant,” as Daniel Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State University, put it.
Imagine, then, being told that the most glorious period of your team’s history — the thing you had dreamed about for so long — was not only in some way illegitimate, thanks to a transgression of a set of rules that you do not fully understand and that seem designed specifically to vanquish your ambitions, but that, as it happens, celebrating all those trophies is actually proof of your warped moral compass.
Fans will defend their club against almost anything; the problem is that that word — club — is a difficult, elusive thing to define. It is not, really, the owner: That is the business. It is not even the players and the coach: That is the team. The club is something else: a shared memory, a badge, a color, a spirit, passed down from parent to child.
Those meanings are often conflated and confused, and it leaves fans in the curious position of defending a tycoon or a company or, in this case, a state, because the maintenance of its reputation seems significant to the good name of a social institution. This is the price Manchester City’s fans have had to pay for their dreams to come true: to see their club transform from a sports team to some sort of pawn in a geopolitical power game. That is not, really, something they asked for.
If the psychological contortions of that are challenging, though, there is another aspect to the Manchester City story — one that has come into sharper relief this week — that reminds us that the club’s fans, the people for whom involvement with Manchester City is not emotionally optional, warrant a little understanding, at least.
Everything Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment vehicle that owns the club, has done since it bought City in 2008 suggests it is in it for the long haul. Its establishment of a network of clubs, at the instigation of its chief executive, Ferran Soriano, makes it clear this is not a short-term play.
Manchester City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, said accusations against the team were “simply not true.”Credit...Lynne Cameron/EPA, via Shutterstock
But throughout its battle with UEFA, City has given the impression that it would rather fundamentally alter the soccer landscape for good than submit to a set of rules that it does not like. That softened a little this week when Soriano appeared to offer UEFA an olive branch in an interview with the club’s in-house television station, but City remains determined to fight these charges to the end.
Continue reading the main story
But if its appeal to C.A.S. fails, and the Swiss Supreme Court, beyond that, rules against City, what happens then? Does it continue to fight, forcing fans to choose between their team and, to an extent, the structure of the sport itself?
Or does Abu Dhabi, convinced the scales are weighted against it, begin its slow withdrawal from soccer? Does it decide that there are better ways to improve its global standing, and sell off further slivers of the club to the Chinese government or to New York hedge funds?
This is the problem when clubs are not treated as community institutions but as trophy assets, to be bought and sold, available to those whose use for them is not entirely sporting, but financial or, in this case, political. The club as a whole — the part that the fans consider part of themselves — is entirely dependent on the whims of the club as a business.
That made Manchester City’s fans’ dreams come true, of course, and they will doubtless forever be grateful for that. But it also has the power to bring those dreams to an end whenever it wants, leaving the fans, once again, to adjust to a new reality, one that they did not ask for and do not necessarily understand.Oh I don't know.Comment
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All very well saying following a club is part of your identity but huge amounts of city fans were Chavs or Scummers until recently
3rd place. Worst champions ever.
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One other thing on the Sterling rant is that Man City's players have won other player of the year awards. Sterling himself won the football writers award last year, Kompany won Premier League player of the season when they won it in 2011-12.
He just mentions the PFA award, so presumably views this as more prestigeous than the others. The PFA award is voted for by fellow players around this time of year IIRC so whoever wins the league has nothing to do with it, as much of the time the title winner isn't obvious. When there are outstanding teams often they have a number of players that are all in contention, and the vote is split and someone else wins it - I think that this could happen to us this year. This to me seems the most rational explanation. The other options are that as Sterling suggests there is a conspiracy against City and everyone is out to get them, alternatively the PL community don't value City's achievements because they feel that they have been bought
The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.Comment
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Manchester City have hired the lawyer who helped block Brexit twice as the Premier League champions look to overturn their two-year ban from European football, according to The Mirror.
David Pannick QC is recognised as one of the UK's top lawyers and has been drafted in by City to lead their legal battle against UEFA following the decision earlier this month.
The 63-year-old represented Gina Miller on two occasions when she challenged Boris Johnson and former Prime Minister Theresa May on issues relating to Brexit.Comment
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