Best Article ever in Daily Mirror

[squirtyflower]

Good stuff indeed

Seems as though City have rounded up the Cavalry

 

[aguero93:20]

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Obviously the piece is to be welcomed, but whether this particular leopard can change it's spots remains to be seem.

I always had this one down as a broken digital 24 hr clock - never right, completely useless and totally uninformative.

 

[bluetoby]

If you think back over the years all most all football clubs announce grand plans with models and drawings of the most amazing schemes which never see the light of day. Now we did the same and some papers probably ignored the project because they have seen it all before on paper but now they cant ignore the bricks, mortar and concrete that now dominate part of east Manchester and are changing there opinions about MCFC now they know its not just talk it really exists.

 

[CityPar]

Good article IMO. Not sure whether the author has changed his tune permanently but at least there's no snide comments tucked in there. Seems genuine and definitely welcome as we don't seem to be getting any kudos these days either for our football or what we're doing in East Manchester.......

 

[MCFCTrick]

Fair play to Emily's lad for this one ...

 

[SmileySamir]

Credit at last! Bored of reading about Liverpool.

 

[The_Boxing_KangaBlue]

Will this point of view get any wider airtime though?

Will it fuck.

 

[Balti]

Fellow Citizens, I urge you to read this and admire the work - About time we had some supportive and positive press

HATS OFF TO OLIVER I SAY!!!!

Manchester City and their fans are entitled to feel aggrieved.

Tonight, the Blues can take a giant step closer to winning one of the most thrilling title races of recent years in English football.

If they thrash Aston Villa at the Etihad, City could become the only team to join the Chelsea of 2009-10 in scoring 100 goals in a Premier League season.

It would be more proof that they have played some ­wonderfully swashbuckling ­football on their way to the top.

And yet, City are the ­champions-elect we all forgot.

They are the side that got lost as we followed the compelling ­narrative of Liverpool’s underdog attempt to win their first title for 24 years.

City are the team with a boss who kept quiet while Jose ­Mourinho took all the attention with his talking and posturing.

City are the team who kept on amassing points while so many of us were captivated by the ­spectacle of the thousands lining Anfield Road before every home game, trying to will Liverpool to the title.

They are the club with the narrative of their own, the club that established itself ­incontrovertibly as the leading team in Manchester as United fell from grace.

And even now ­Liverpool and Chelsea have faded from the picture, still the ­headlines are not about City’s ­excellence.

Instead, it’s about the estimated £49million fine UEFA are set to attempt to impose on them for breaching Financial Fair Play ­regulations.

Something is wrong with FFP if it punishes a regime that is pouring millions into the ­regeneration of a deprived area of East Manchester.

Nobody is suggesting that Sheikh Mansour and his cohorts are driven by altruism but ­whatever their motives, it is hard not to admire much of what is happening at City.

Their youth set-up is so ­impressive, former United players are sending their kids to train there. They are pouring funds into a women’s team in the WSL, too. Their campus is a centre of ­excellence, a model of the way forward.

That is the problem with FFP - it enshrines the principle that might is right, big equals good. It seeks to perpetuate the hegemony of the clubs with the most supporters and the most revenue. There is no fantasy about it.

City’s story represents the dream of every downtrodden club, every poor relation - that one day it can be propelled to the top.

It has happened in front of us at Manchester City, and all UEFA want to do is punish them for it.

They distrust the rise of smaller clubs. It threatens their vested interests.

The irony is City stand on the brink of an achievement that deserves to be celebrated more than anything else they have done. They have gone head-to-head with a Liverpool side that appeared to have an unstoppable momentum and they seem to have outlasted them.

This is not the often-pragmatic side marshalled by Roberto Mancini. This is a team of ­wonderfully skilful players Manuel Pellegrini has moulded into a breathtaking attacking unit.

Some of their football towards the turn of the year was sublime.

They were at their unstoppable best when they could pair Sergio Aguero, whose season has been disrupted by injury, and Alvaro Negredo in attack.

In November and December, they stuck seven past Norwich, six past Tottenham, four past Fulham and six past Arsenal.

This is a team overflowing with flair, with the likes of David Silva, Samir Nasri, Jesus Navas.

This is a team that has the might and grace of Yaya Toure at its heart.

If City hold their nerve and win their second title in three years at the Etihad on Sunday, forget the petty objections of the joyless bureaucrats at UEFA.

Because it will be a triumph for a team that represents the best of football.

 

[ChicagoBlue]

The Telegraph article is, IMHO, even better!

When Abu Dhabi’s rulers first decided to build a bonfire of hundreds of millions of pounds at Manchester City they would have laughed at the idea that blowing money was a crime punishable by Uefa sanctions. Imagine that: a sport where they throw a £50 million penalty at you for excessive generosity.

Strictly, Financial Fair Play (FFP) is an anti-subsidy initiative by a game that prostrates itself to foreign billionaires and then ticks them off for investing too much. It defiles the World Cup by awarding it to Qatar, then disapproves of Qatari spending at Paris St-Germain.

It says little about rampant ticket price inflation, the huge sums extracted by agents or grotesque individual player salaries. Whichever way you turn it, Uefa’s clumsy lunge at “fairness” has ended up being about two gulf states who jumped into football as an act of future-proofing because their oil was running out.

No torch is being held here for sovereign wealth. But the distortion of the London house market by foreign speculators, for example, is a far more serious issue than City paying Sergio Agüero’s wages via a so-called sweetheart deal with Etihad Airways.

Uefa-ologists might have spotted that president Michel Platini enjoys a cosy relationship with Qatar, who chose Paris as their investment outlet, and that it might have been somewhat awkward for Europe’s governing body to punish PSG without also directing their disapproval at City.

The clubs hit hardest by these arbitrary actions are those who had to spend heavily to raise underperforming clubs into the elite. City and PSG both fit this profile.

It was no surprise, then, to find Roman Abramovich broadly supportive of the FFP principle. Chelsea’s owner had already torched the kind of cash City and PSG have burned in the last three years. By endorsing the move to have such extravagance cast as a crime, Abramovich was simply blocking the way to new tycoons and therefore protecting his competitive advantage.

From Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi’s viewpoint, a £50 million fine doubtless leaves a kind of moral stain. It implies financial doping, or even cheating, with its suggestion that the £35 million-a-year Etihad deal was really a polite way to cook the books.

As with PSG and the Qatari tourist board (£167 million), Uefa clearly believe that the deal was inflated to allow one part of an oil-rich state to subsidise another. And they might be right.

Yet the people who struck those deals are unlikely to appreciate being singled out in an industry that is synonymous with creative accounting. If in doubt, consider the mess Barcelona got themselves into over Neymar.

Nobody wants an unregulated free for all, or illegality, or the crushing of the poor by the rich. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

So far all that expenditure has bought them one Premier League title and not much headway in Europe. There is no wholesale buying of trophies because the Premier League is too competitive to allow it. This season City have had to fight Liverpool and Chelsea for the championship. The seductive allure of FFP is that helps the poorer against the richer. All it might do in this case is to make Abu Dhabi resent being stigmatised and cause them to question Uefa’s motives. You can see the speech bubble now: “They take our money and then fine us for giving it to them?”

A much greater problem, certainly in England, is clubs being ram-raided by speculators who seek to suck money out, not put it in. Portsmouth and Birmingham City are just two examples of clubs that have been treated like lumps of meat on an “investment” menu.

Many of us would like to see regulation attack that issue before the Uefa bureaucracy drives through arbitrary penalties against a club (City) who are putting money in, rather than taking it out, however vulgar it might sometimes seem.

Where is the £50 million fine for the Glazers for servicing their debts from Manchester United’s revenues? On this evidence, FFP is mere grandstanding.

Hit all the high points I have been discussing here, especially the morality issue that will not go down well in Abu Dhabi. No-one likes being called a cheat, or manipulator, least of all someone like Sheikh Mansour, who has shunned the limelight and simply got on with the business of creating a dynasty out of a toxic, chemical-laden landfill in a East Manchester while also helping fill the coffers of the Manchester City Council in larger fees for THEIR stadium that HE is vastly improving to bring in more revenue FOR THEM!

If this is "ruining football" in the upside down, black is white, world of Michel Platini, then I do believe a court is going to have to PROVE IT to a Sheikh Mansour. Of course, Twatini's wet dream would be for the Johnny Come Lately's (like City & PSG) to simply go away, sell out, and not come back. Clearly, he has not been paying attention! Maybe, someone needs to "phone a friend" at FIFA and recoup some of the millions spent greasing the wheels for the Qatar World Cup!!

P.S. The Keegan article in the MUEN is actually pretty good, too!

 

[cityboy5]

Does anyone know if he supports Manchester City ?