UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST

[TheThirdDeano]

It’s 6:30pm for us aussies (on Monday)

In a way that's a good thing for us, I'll be knee deep in work until then anyway so it's something to take my mind of it!

 

[alexmcity]

The crucial thing now is how likely it is that the club bosses have been informed about the decision. For, if they know, the outcome must be positive.

 

[Bill the Blue]

You're obviously old school. Now you would have to mention the obvious editing clues in 'Fight Club' and 'Seven' how obvious it has all been. I wonder if we could get Del La Soul to re-record '3 is the Magic Number' and get City walking out to it next season, doing high fives, with 'The Fifth Element' playing on the screens.

Oi, less of the old if you don't mind, ive still got all my hair and teeth..! Ha!!


Anyway, I'm that confident on the outcome, I've had a fiver on us..!

 

[Shads]

This is my problem, there maybe nothing to leak by UEFA and City. This is a CAS process, not UEFA. UEFA and City can't leak anything if they don't know. On the other hand Pep seems confident. I go with Pep knows but I am not sure of that.

The underlying aspect is confidence in our case. I was never convinced by the UEFA emails in of themselves. They raise questions but I don't think they are conclusive. City should be able to furnish contracts, evidence of payments and the missing emails, witnesses etc to make a convincing case. We may not have wished to do so at UEFA because of the leaks and lack of confidentiality. They were in most fans eyes, extremely biased against us.

It’s part of the process Marvin. The CAS rules themselves state that the parties find out first. That is common procedure for Arbitration’s worldwide. Finding out at 9am on Monday is not the “before” that they are talking about either. It will have been either Wednesday or Thursday ie 24-48 hours prior to the original date of Friday.
From experience the results are normally emailed to the Lawyers first who then inform the parties. I do Not know if CAS publishes decisions simultaneously but I doubt it. I suspect It may be nearer 10am when the City and Uefa statements are released that we actually know. Sorry to put a dampener on all you 9.30am alarm setters.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

That stuff from 'Phil in Gibraltar' is almost certainly bullshit but it's very convincing bullshit.

We're pretty sure that despite Tony Evans' nonsense, UEFA's case rested almost exclusively on the hacked emails. They may have relied on some of the stuff that PWC went through in 2014 (hence Evans' reference to evidence we had provided to them) as well but the emails were key.

We've always said as well that the emails were taken out of context. One or two looked very incriminating on the surface but we never saw the full chain. So there was an email that talked about ADUG being part of the money chain but we never saw any response to that, which could have said "None of this money is coming through ADUG" or "Yes but the ADUG contribution will be funded wholly from the Executive Council or the Crown Prince Court". We know that at least for the early part of the Etihad sponsorship, it was certainly funded by the Executive Council so that's entirely possible. UEFA may not like that but basically it's none of their business and there's nothing they can do.

So I could well imagine a scenario at CAS where UEFA claim that the Etihad ownership was disguised owner investment, on the basis of the emails. CAS then ask our legal team about that and we produce solid evidence of transactions from the Crown Prince Court or Executive Council regarding the Etihad Sponsorship that completely exonerate ADUG/Sheikh Mansour. So CAS turn to UEFA's legal team and ask them to comment and they say "But we've these hacked emails...".

It's an arbitration hearing, not a trial, so maybe even UEFA's legal team had to eventually accept, in front of the panel, that there was no disguised owner investment. Whether that's how it works I don't know but it's possible that we came out of that hearing 99% certain we'd won.

 

[Nicholas van Whatsisface]

I don’t understand why City would agree to move the judgement to the Monday, seemingly at UEFA’s request if we didn’t already know the outcome.

Why would we go out of our way to help an organisation that it trying to screw us, and delay finding out the result for a longer period of time, when we don’t have to?

If there was the possibility of the ban being upheld, surely we’d want bad news breaking on a Friday rather than a Monday. Especially in the week of the semi-final.

We aren’t at war with UEFA itself, but a faction within it driven by self-interest and determined to try and remove us as a competitor off the pitch, because they can’t manage it on the pitch.

Khladoon and Soriano have been explicit about this, and if we prevail tomorrow (which is still a very large ‘if’ for me), City will be looking to develop a strong relationship with a UEFA represented by sympathetic parties rather than direct enemies.

My sense is our accommodation of UEFA’s wishes on Friday was all about our future relationship with them - rather than our past.

 

[NeilYoungIsBack]

Apologies if this has been said, but Pep did say on MotD that today's result guarantees CL football next season. A slip of the tongue maybe, but he's usually pretty careful about what he says

I noticed that the guy who does the commentary on the City+ site (Alistair Mann?) said the same thing early in yesterday's game - he said win against Brighton "guarantees CL football next season".

When Sterling scored City's 5th he made the same point but expressed it differently - he said City will play CL football next season.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Medical stuff?

Forgot about that. We discovered Bad Cat AIDS on here of course.

 

[Bill]

The irony. The Rags who’ve bullied English football and used their financial dominance to buy success for the last 70 odd years. Ffs.

one with a brain on the caf

Even as a Manchester United fan, the moral aspect of this case and Financial Fair Play trumps all else, that being that the advent of Financial Fair Play in the first place is a complete abhorrence.

It's the footballing equivalent of an upcoming legal battle between a rich man and a poor man. The rich man can afford one of the top lawyers in the land, whilst the poor man can only have a fair chance of competing with the rich man in the upcoming legal battle if he secures outside financial investment to hire a lawyer of equal standing to the rich man's. The rich man however, given his significant influence with the lawmakers of the land, colludes with them to create a new rule that prohibits the poor man from using his outside financial investment towards his lawyer's fees. The rich man can then trounce the poor man on a legal battlefield totally tilted against the poor man from the start.

Owners should be allowed to invest in the playing staff of their football clubs. One can talk about an annual transfer net spend limit of maybe around £80m for ALL CLUBS in order to stop the market becoming unsustainably inflated through state-level investment, but the current FFP mantra of "big clubs can spend lots, small clubs can stay in their box" is bull.

and one so desperate it's funny as fuck.
enjoy .


While this is a well thought out argument, I don’t think the solution is as simple as you say. FFP should be more nuanced, but something like it needs to stay to protect clubs from the very owners that are being defended here.

What would happen to City if their owners dropped them tomorrow? Let’s be honest, they have players and staff on very expensive contracts and, allegedly, receiving extra wages under the table.

Do we really think these magical sponsors are going to stay for a few years while they sell off players on impossible contracts? Or are they going to stay and pay well over the odds for inflated sponsorships at a club that doesn’t even fill their own ground on match day, nevermind have a truly global presence?

They are not, and it could destroy the club in very quick fashion.

If City and PSG want to spend the GDP of a small country on players, then they should have challenged FFP as it is written in courts of law and used that investment to get lawyers on the case and reap the rewards from their blossoming academies in the meantime. As well as buying players with genuine revenue. (Which Premier League clubs have a lot of)

Man City didn’t do that, they agreed to the laws, broke them, then tried to cheat to cover it up. The other teams in the competitions that agreed to the same terms were all playing by the rules and lost out on revenue and European competitions because one team decided they were above it.

FFP should absolutely be adapted, and Man City should be allowed to invest and grow within more nuanced parameters. They should be allowed to invest in players and staff from private funds that are considered as such, but they haven’t done that. They overspent widely, were deceitful about where the money was coming from and they continue to pay transfers and inflated salaries that contravene the rules of the competitions they play in.

By all means, let’s challenge FFP and help teams to use private investment to their advantage. Lets not reward cheating and deceitful practices as a means of moving forward.

 

[Blue Theatre]

FWIW.... I've just had a look at the NY Times and they have nothing on the decision at all. As they are one of our arch enemies in the media on the side of US owned PL clubs they'd be cock a hoop if they knew we had lost and would definitely publish this before the announcement.

I'd love this to be true, but if any media organisation knew the result, and felt they could legally publish it, surely they would ?

It would still be an enormous scoop and bring hundreds of thousands of people to their website ... even if it wasn't the result their owners wanted ?

Also, the leak would embarrass City a little, and take the wind out of City's sails for our own press release on Monday. The journalists could also get their own perspective in first, before City.

So a more likely conclusion to draw from the media silence is that no one knows ?