Listen we've known each other a while and I respect the head on your shoulders. But I'm left today watching your reaction video and reading your posts and the overwhelming thought is "what did you THINK would happen?".
The European Super League was always going to come up, it's too profitable an idea for it to not keep coming around.
Did you think these investors at City from the other side of the planet who were happy to post the biggest financial losses in the history of the sport were going to purposely hurt their growth by dying on a moral hill of competitiveness? These people who purposely distorted "competition" by their huge investments? There's just not a reality where I could have seen that happening in 2011 let alone 2021.
We've spoken for years about City's desire to be one of the big boys in European football. We've all known that that is what we wanted. That's what we've gotten now. We're locked in for a quarter of a century as one of the giants of the game.
City were never the "cartel busting" force that some on here presented them as. City were out to make money for City and grow the club to be the biggest in the world. That was always their goal from the day the takeover happened. Shit, they literally told us that in the Shiekh's first statement if I remember correctly.
Buried in this thread I've argued that competition doesn't exist in the European football and hasn't done for the last 30 years. But I'm consistently surprised that people who support a club who know better than anyone else that you NEED a billionaire investor just to compete can really talk like there's real competition already and this is a death knell for it. Competition died a decade before City were taken over. City's actions over the past 12 years prove that competition is dead because look at what we had to do in order to compete.
And watching Sky Sports come out against this as a money grab is almost making me vomit. Remember free to air top division football? Sky Sports invented much of the economics of football that led to the death of competition. Now that digital distribution is going to be the major player rather than satellite, and they are not positioned like Amazon are to deliver that content digitally, they've suddenly found some morals about the whole affair.
It never ceases to amaze me how corporations suddenly find morals when it is in their financial advantage to do so.
