CAS judgement: UEFA ban overturned, City exonerated (report out p603)

[PannickAtTheDisco]

Henry turned when the Der Spiegel “leaks” were published. Maybe he felt let down after giving City support. Maybe we can get the relationship back on a better funding with Henry (over time) now they CAS found in our favour.

Hardly, he's on the Dipper erm...list.

 

[BluessinceHydeRoad]

We've gone through a period where a dearly-loved and long-standing football club has, through Arab capital, overthrown and toppled footballing tradition and the supporters of Manchester City have been exposed to vitriolic reaction for a decade. It's completely understandable and very human.

We have grown weary of this battle but I for one feel blessed that I supported this club before this period and lived through this footballing revolution.

I dearly hope that World War one is now over, and that we can leave the trenches behind. There should now follow a period of hope and recovery but the enemy has not been truly vanquished. It has been defeated on the battle-field but it will grow again, and when the time is right it will gather its forces and attack again, and the football world will again be plunged into war. As our friends from the Villa would say: Be Prepared!

Although this conflict maybe over, I don't think I will ever forgive or accept the journalists who turned their sustained fire on our club, and at times on our supporters. Journalism is a noble profession. We are all people who want to understand and interpret the world and share that view with other people hence the growth of social media but the current industry was almost entirely subsumed by loyalty to the old guard of football, and lacked any moral independence and fortitude. Bigotry has blinded them of an ability to look at facts and interpret them. They were tested by events, and they failed. History will judge them very badly indeed. Will there be a reckoning? That is perhaps for us to decide.

Do not buy or contribute to the commercial media. That is the over-riding lesson of this conflict. They failed football fans. All football fans not just City fans.

Nice one, Marvin. What we're getting now from the media (there are, of course, a few honourable exceptions) is a monotonous trotting out of a well worn stab-in-the-back "theory" - the media got it right, but UEFA fouled up in front of an unfit-for-purpose CAS.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

He was done as far as a lot of blues were concerned when he went sucking up to the WhatsApp group

Very well said. No way back after that. An unbelievable lack of awareness.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Hmmm, Henry Winter's turn to the dark side is more complicated, I think. He's very well thought of and is in his prime earnings-wise. I see no obvious reason why he would take the unthinking, populist route unless there are incentives to do so.

Winter is conspicuously from old money so much less likely to need to prostitute himself to pay his mortgage, or even have a mortgage at all.

 

[Stoned Rose]

Even more utter wankstains

@gordondaviesmoustache likes this post.

 

[OB1]

Well, it's been brewing ever since I observed the nauseating, hysterical, hyperbolic glee with which the football press responded to the original Der Spiegel stories based on the Football Leaks materials. I've been waiting ever since to have my say once the matter was properly disposed of, a moment that arrived with this week's publication of the full CAS report.

It probably also doesn't help that I'm currently in a Russian hospital undergoing treatment for Covid and associated pneumonia. I can't say I felt in much of a mood to soft-soap my views, to be honest. (I'm doing fine and am much improved compared with my rather pitiful state earlier in the week, thanks.)

Shit, sorry to hear you have got the dreaded C-19. Good that you are doing OK. Wish you a speedy recovery.

 

[cookster]

It's a shit article. It's a collage of other people's articles, primarily Conn's as he's the only on who mentioned the 2-1 verdict and highlight the fact that City "chose" the chair of the panel. Sam Lee has been fucking clueless on this from day 1, relying on Matt Slater for anything that required some knowledge and insight.

Not sure if sarcastic @projectriver

 

[SilverFox2]

Frankly, proper journalism in football is dead. Petrusha nails it: the days of proper investigative journalism within football are over.

What was Der Spiegel’s “scoop”? It wasn’t exactly Watergate style detective work. A hacker who had first tried to blackmail City sold the stolen emails to Der Spiegel, who paid for them because they were handed them on a plate.

Because that’s what “journalism” in football at least at PL/CL lever has become. Stories are handed to football writers by “sources” who all have their own agendas. Agents, clubs, UEFA officials etc. Who use the media as pawns to further their own interests. And because these days what pays is what clicks, journalism has basically turned into PR for the G14 clubs.

There used to be some notable exceptions. Henry Winter was once a writer worth reading. Those days are gone. Martin Samuel, much though I respect him, I don’t think does much serious actual journalism these days. Mostly he seems to me to offering his opinion on the issues of the day. Which is well worth reading, don’t get me wrong, but I think his days of chasing the story down are over, and in fairness he’s earned it.

So who is it out there who might answer your question? Why was this disastrous prosecution launched, and how could UEFA possibly have concluded City had acted dishonestly on such flimsy evidence?

The answer, sadly, to the question “when will this get investigated” is “it won’t.” Not because the story isn’t worth researching and writing, but because journalism at this level doesn’t work like that any more.

Is this a sign of the times Chris, by that I mean has clickbait overtaken journalism?
The digital world means the traditional newspaper needed to change for financial reasons so editors insist journos follow their researched customer base and literally pander to their often extreme views.
Views of news prevails which allows say a cartel or say a Government (eg Russia or Qatar or g##) to buy into a financial need in return for job security and skewed publicity.

Propaganda is now sold by a financially desperate media who simply want clicks and have descended to having all their media pages advert features along with those tagged as such.

 

[Ardwick Green Blue]

So we're all agreed that Sam Lee is a fucking useless cnut, then?

Ignore my ridiculous comment that his article was a bit interesting :)

 

[OB1]

I haven't been able to post my views since publication of the report. I'll also face difficulties in posting for some time to come (this is a one-off contribution and I won't be able to respond to replies to it).

But the conclusion to that article, especially the closing paragraphs, is the ultimate takeaway from CAS. This is all the more valuable as it comes from a legal professional who's (presumably) neutral in terms of fan allegiance.

I also note that CAS has been called not fit for purpose by some of our detractors in recent days. Not so. What's shown itself up as most unfit for purpose in this saga is the British football media.

City were charged with inflating revenue under sponsorship contracts whose fair value wasn't contested by UEFA, under which the relevant services had been provided, and which were underwritten by organs of the Abu Dhabi Emirati government.

All of this was in the public domain. And it showed, as many of us on here repeated ad nauseam, that MCFC would highly likely prevail before CAS unless UEFA possessed evidence hitherto unknown to us. Of course, they ultimately didn't.

Yet the British football media unanimously gloried in the prospect of our demise from the publication of Der Spiegel's revelations onwards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall one media outlet (and I mean literally not a single fucking one) ever at any stage suggesting that City may prevail.

It was all in the emails, they gloated. Well, chaps, take a look at what the CAS says about that. Should hardly have required the Brain of fucking Britain to work it out, should it.

Now, your level of performance has been truly execrable on an objective level from any body of professionals with pretensions to even bare adequacy as a group. One issue is that we find football writers trying to grapple with complex issues of finance and law when they're, perfectly understandably, lamentably ill-equipped to do so - even those who claim expertise in the relevant areas. But there's a deluge of cases where the ineptitude is bound in with bad faith: they're also desperate for us to fail.

Well, it isn't failure, is it? Quite the contrary. On the main point, the one that matters, the one on which UEFA's AC tried to hang an extended ban, it was rather emphatic: as has been said elsewhere, count the usage of terms such as 'no evidence' in the report. Anyway, try to convert the result into football terms and you're probably looking at something like 4-0.

By all means indulge your incompetence and bias by trawling through the rest of the report, the flim-flam, for out-of-context phrases you can use to discredit City for the delectation of your clickbait sheep. Go big on the barely relevant obstruction point if you want to. We're happy to have obstructed an investigation mired in illegally obtained materials, prejudicial conduct, and vicious and self-interested third-party lobbying, all egged on by vacuous press cheerleading.

The thing is, you've shown us what you are now, haven't you? We knew all along, of course, but you used to try and gaslight us. You reported on us fairly and we were too thin-skinned to see it, you used to say. That won't wash any longer, will it? Act as PR shills for our enemies in the way you seem to want to. Fine. Don't expect a reaction from us other than utterly fucking despising you for it, though.

A final mention for David Conn, the self-appointed conscience of football. I long regarded his professional success as an example of Emperor's new clothes syndrome as others queued up to praise him extravagantly. I did, however, respect him for what seemed to be an ethical approach and genuine integrity.

What a sad state of affairs, then, to see his tendentious output over the last few months. It truly rivals the worst imaginable from any bigoted, comically biased, bottom-feeding hack scum that's out there. Still, chin up, David. You can always trot off back to FC United and help your mate Walsh be the exemplar of soul in modern football. Oh.

OK, maybe The Guardian will let you write a bit for the front end of the paper. Oh, no, another no-go. You did those stories on Orgreave a while back and they were fucking dreadful so you were sent back to the toy section. Looks as though you've found your level, then, doesn't it. As have City, however much you and your journo mates wish it were otherwise.

I stood up and applauded this.

Brilliant. Needs framing: one of the best posts this forum has seen.

Get well soon.