Media discussion - 2025/26

madloaf said:
It's the BBC. It's a day ending in y and so there's another article fluffing united that nobody asked for.
www.bbc.co.uk

Why Manchester United have been better than their results

With just two Premier League wins since the start of April, it seems only a fool would say that Manchester United have been improving under Ruben Amorim…and yet that's exactly what the stats suggest.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
Click to expand...
This one made me spit my brew out this morning. Absolute fucking desperation.
 
Reply to my complaint to BBC about why rags get a dedicated senior reporter (Stone) but other clubs don’t.
It’s a laughable response & totally fabricated to make it seem the world want to read about that club to the exclusion of others. I give up. However, maybe they will give other clubs a dedicated reporter - not

Dear Audience Memberj

Thanks for contacting us about the BBC Sport website.

Simon's role is to report on Manchester United for BBC Sport. He is one of a group of senior journalists that cover specific Premier League clubs for us. And we're currently advertising more roles to further widen this pool. As you would expect, part of Simon's role is to cover key events involving Manchester United, and this is the same as our other writers following their assigned club at key times.

We can assure you, that we’re always mindful of the costs and finances behind putting together our output, while at the same time trying to provide the best possible service to our audiences.

Recently, with the season having almost drawn to a conclusion, one of the talking points in the world of football has been Manchester United's post-season tour to Asia, which stood out amongst the calendars of all other Premier League clubs. The tour had prompted much discussion and debate, with the team flying to Malaysia almost immediately after their final match of the season.

In this context, we felt it was newsworthy for our audience to feature an insight into the tour's progress. The tour wasn't without incident, and saw several widely talked about moments, including an open top bus tour before United's loss to ASEAN All Stars, where the team were booed off by a large proportion of a 70,000-plus crowd. Amad Diallo was pictured giving an obscene gesture to fans, there was speculation and tension around Alejandro Garnacho's future, and we were able to gain access to several press conferences and interviews.

With all of this in mind, we feel this brought value to audiences, but we recognise you may continue to disagree.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. We’ve discussed your concerns with the team at BBC Sport, which helps inform decisions about current and future content.

If you’d like to understand how your complaint is handled at the BBC, you might find it helpful to watch the short film on the BBC Complaints website about how the BBC responds to your feedback. It explains the BBC’s process for responding to complaints, what to do if you aren’t happy with your response and how we share the feedback we receive.

Wishing you all the best,  

BBC Complaints Team
 
CC1 said:
Reply to my complaint to BBC about why rags get a dedicated senior reporter (Stone) but other clubs don’t.
It’s a laughable response & totally fabricated to make it seem the world want to read about that club to the exclusion of others. I give up. However, maybe they will give other clubs a dedicated reporter - not

Dear Audience Memberj

Thanks for contacting us about the BBC Sport website.

Simon's role is to report on Manchester United for BBC Sport. He is one of a group of senior journalists that cover specific Premier League clubs for us. And we're currently advertising more roles to further widen this pool. As you would expect, part of Simon's role is to cover key events involving Manchester United, and this is the same as our other writers following their assigned club at key times.

We can assure you, that we’re always mindful of the costs and finances behind putting together our output, while at the same time trying to provide the best possible service to our audiences.

Recently, with the season having almost drawn to a conclusion, one of the talking points in the world of football has been Manchester United's post-season tour to Asia, which stood out amongst the calendars of all other Premier League clubs. The tour had prompted much discussion and debate, with the team flying to Malaysia almost immediately after their final match of the season.

In this context, we felt it was newsworthy for our audience to feature an insight into the tour's progress. The tour wasn't without incident, and saw several widely talked about moments, including an open top bus tour before United's loss to ASEAN All Stars, where the team were booed off by a large proportion of a 70,000-plus crowd. Amad Diallo was pictured giving an obscene gesture to fans, there was speculation and tension around Alejandro Garnacho's future, and we were able to gain access to several press conferences and interviews.

With all of this in mind, we feel this brought value to audiences, but we recognise you may continue to disagree.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. We’ve discussed your concerns with the team at BBC Sport, which helps inform decisions about current and future content.

If you’d like to understand how your complaint is handled at the BBC, you might find it helpful to watch the short film on the BBC Complaints website about how the BBC responds to your feedback. It explains the BBC’s process for responding to complaints, what to do if you aren’t happy with your response and how we share the feedback we receive.

Wishing you all the best,  

BBC Complaints Team
Click to expand...
Lovely they wished you all the best.
 
Second article I have read from Freddie Pye on the BBC, where he claims to be the fans voice!

If he is the fans voice, we may as well, pack up now and follow the Kardashians.
 
Today, this column can exclusively reveal the outcome of the Premier League's 115 charges against Manchester City. The winner is ... nobody. Not Manchester City, not the Premier League, not the other 19 clubs, not the brand, not the fans, not even the broadcasters for all the dramatic tension this saga has created. Lawyers have been made even wealthier, reporters have been kept in headlines, although there remains personal scepticism about the public appetite for another internecine squabble around football's seemingly never-ending list of regulations. Yet does anyone get to have their arm raised in acknowledgment of a knockout after 12 rounds of attritional slugging? Almost certainly not. The Associated Party Transaction (APT) resolution tells us that.

At roughly 3pm on Monday it was announced that well, what was announced, actually? Nothing that could not have been resolved over a pot of coffee and some pastries locked in a legal office in London about two years ago. One imagines that's how Richard Scudamore, the predecessor to Richard Masters in the chief executive's chair, might have done it.

Legal bills were not a drain on the financial health of clubs when Scudamore was in charge. He was a facilitator of the Premier League's membership, a mediator, a negotiator, a smoother-over. At his leaving do at the German Gymnasium restaurant in London in 2018, a graph indicated the growth in broadcast revenues during his time. It looked like the north face of the Eiger. The owners and chairmen present kept gazing at it in awe.

Scudamore's style was to protect the product by sitting down and working problems through. The light-touch regulator that football has been promised? That was Scudamore in a nutshell. He only went for West Ham United over Carlos Tevez because they lied. Had the club been truthful about some of the clauses in his contract, Scudamore has always insisted that the league would have registered the player, even allowed him to play that weekend, and then sat down with West Ham's lawyers first thing on Monday morning to show them exactly how the contract would have to be structured and worded to stay legal.

This is not the style of the modern Premier League. Were the chairwoman, Alison Brittain, and Masters to depart now, the only graph resembling the Eiger would indicate what they had cost the clubs in legal fees about £50million in 2023-24, with significantly more likely to come. In City, in particular, it faces an opponent with the wherewithal and motivation to match its very expensive legal habit. This, ultimately, may have forced a much-needed compromise.

So why, when the verdict on the 115 charges drops, can there only be losers? Well, like the APT verdict, neither side can hope to emerge entirely unscathed. This isn't the Women's Rugby World Cup. Nobody gets to win 115-0. Whatever goes against City, however big, however small, there will be reputational harm. Any defeat on any accusation will always be used by their detractors to place an asterisk against their achievements.

Equally, if the Premier League goes down again, it is personally humiliating for the present administration. This is its case, its pursuit, its strategy. After the debacle defeat against Leicester City and the scandal of the legal fees against Nottingham Forest a case the Premier League actually won, with Forest admitting breaching PSR, yet it still ended up costing the league a fortune it needs to get this one over the line, and significantly.

Yet even if it does, say this was to be a Premier League slam dunk, what is proven?

That the league was illegitimate? That arguably the greatest club side many of us have seen was founded on deceit? When the time comes to negotiate the next TV deal, is that really such a triumph? Revenue is already dropping in real terms. The Premier League is having to offer more additional matches, greater access to maintain revenue streams. What will broadcasters pay if the past decade is then peppered with asterisks?

Talk to a lot of Premier League owners and they do not want past titles taken off City they know that's a terrible look. Serie A used to be Europe's strongest domestic league. It had already lost ground on the Premier League when the Calciopoli scandal led to Juventus being stripped of the 2004-05 title, which then went unawarded. The 2005-06 title was given to Inter Milan, who came second, trailing Juventus by 15 points. And it can be argued justice was done, but the fallout made the league less marketable and, in time, weaker. Italy had boasted five European champions in the 21 years before Calciopoli and has had two since. The last was Inter in 2010. There will be senior figures at elite Premier League clubs Tim Lewis at Arsenal springs to mind, as would Daniel Levy had Tottenham Hotspur's politics not defeated him first who will be furious at the Premier League reaching a settlement over APT. Yet this is what light-touch regulation looks like: compromise, understanding.

Again, there are no real winners because so much time and money has now been wasted on legal rulings that appear to have been ended by old-fashioned conciliation. City recognise the validity and enforceable nature of the Premier League's rules, the Premier League accepts that City's deals with Etihad and other Gulf partners are fair and reasonable in today's market, because some deals are bespoke.

Nobody needs to torch the rulebook, City can stop feeling persecuted, return to the table, sign their deal with Etihad and the competition can move on. City, you will notice, acknowledge the APT rules as binding, but have stopped short of referring to them as legal. They reserve the right, as no doubt do the Premier League if a commercial agreement crosses their desks with a few noughts where they shouldn't be. And that's common sense. That's what should have happened in the first place, jaw-jaw always being preferred to war-war; and a damn sight cheaper too.

This is an entirely different case to the 115 charges, but the principle is not dissimilar. Costs on each side when the big one finally lands could be in the region of £100 million. Was that really necessary? Was alleged non co-operation around historic events really such an issue that it required its own lengthy charge sheet? Could it not all have been boiled down to transgressions alleged to have directly impacted the integrity of the league? Premier League clubs could end up paying more than £5 million each depending on the costs award. Would they have voted for that, or for the pursuit of Nottingham Forest, Leicester and Everton, had they known how expensive it would all be?

So can Manchester City now cash blank cheques on sponsorship? Of course not. Rules and parameters remain. City did not advocate for a league without rules. Equally, this idea that they, or Newcastle United, could buy every good player and dominate is flawed. But let's say they could. Let's say the new APT agreement gave them the clout to take Bukayo Saka out of Arsenal, retrieve Cole Palmer from Chelsea, prise Jude Bellingham from Real Madrid and put them together with Phil Foden. What would they have? They'd have the England forward line we know doesn't work because we've seen it and the impact on paper is ten times what happens on the field.

Hell, we don't even know if Liverpool will be able to blend Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Mohamed Salah and Florian Wirtz yet. We think it will work; it looks like it should work; but Wirtz hasn't started well and Salah is yet to hit last season's form, and the brightest spark is Ekitike, who may have to change position to accommodate Isak. And what if a regulatory compromise had given Newcastle the capacity to keep Isak from Liverpool? Would that have been such a bad thing; or would it have made for a better competition?

No doubt City's elite rivals who place the Premier League under such pressure to rein them in will not appreciate what they see as capitulation. It is not. It is common sense. The best deal is always the one in which both sides feel they have surrendered a little. That's not the same as losing. The problem with the 115 charges is we are already too far in. The damage is done, with no winners and not much hope of a draw. It's a match lasting two years and nobody gets a point.
 
Can you even begin to imagine how shit this must be
Wilson in particular is obsessed with the idea of Pep’s demise, he has been writing articles predicting it for the last three or four years, including early in the treble season. Think I’ll do a search and collate the highlights

IMG_4627.jpeg
 
Kinkybyname said:
Today, this column can exclusively reveal the outcome of the Premier League's 115 charges against Manchester City. The winner is ... nobody. Not Manchester City, not the Premier League, not the other 19 clubs, not the brand, not the fans, not even the broadcasters for all the dramatic tension this saga has created. Lawyers have been made even wealthier, reporters have been kept in headlines, although there remains personal scepticism about the public appetite for another internecine squabble around football's seemingly never-ending list of regulations. Yet does anyone get to have their arm raised in acknowledgment of a knockout after 12 rounds of attritional slugging? Almost certainly not. The Associated Party Transaction (APT) resolution tells us that.

At roughly 3pm on Monday it was announced that well, what was announced, actually? Nothing that could not have been resolved over a pot of coffee and some pastries locked in a legal office in London about two years ago. One imagines that's how Richard Scudamore, the predecessor to Richard Masters in the chief executive's chair, might have done it.

Legal bills were not a drain on the financial health of clubs when Scudamore was in charge. He was a facilitator of the Premier League's membership, a mediator, a negotiator, a smoother-over. At his leaving do at the German Gymnasium restaurant in London in 2018, a graph indicated the growth in broadcast revenues during his time. It looked like the north face of the Eiger. The owners and chairmen present kept gazing at it in awe.

Scudamore's style was to protect the product by sitting down and working problems through. The light-touch regulator that football has been promised? That was Scudamore in a nutshell. He only went for West Ham United over Carlos Tevez because they lied. Had the club been truthful about some of the clauses in his contract, Scudamore has always insisted that the league would have registered the player, even allowed him to play that weekend, and then sat down with West Ham's lawyers first thing on Monday morning to show them exactly how the contract would have to be structured and worded to stay legal.

This is not the style of the modern Premier League. Were the chairwoman, Alison Brittain, and Masters to depart now, the only graph resembling the Eiger would indicate what they had cost the clubs in legal fees about £50million in 2023-24, with significantly more likely to come. In City, in particular, it faces an opponent with the wherewithal and motivation to match its very expensive legal habit. This, ultimately, may have forced a much-needed compromise.

So why, when the verdict on the 115 charges drops, can there only be losers? Well, like the APT verdict, neither side can hope to emerge entirely unscathed. This isn't the Women's Rugby World Cup. Nobody gets to win 115-0. Whatever goes against City, however big, however small, there will be reputational harm. Any defeat on any accusation will always be used by their detractors to place an asterisk against their achievements.

Equally, if the Premier League goes down again, it is personally humiliating for the present administration. This is its case, its pursuit, its strategy. After the debacle defeat against Leicester City and the scandal of the legal fees against Nottingham Forest a case the Premier League actually won, with Forest admitting breaching PSR, yet it still ended up costing the league a fortune it needs to get this one over the line, and significantly.

Yet even if it does, say this was to be a Premier League slam dunk, what is proven?

That the league was illegitimate? That arguably the greatest club side many of us have seen was founded on deceit? When the time comes to negotiate the next TV deal, is that really such a triumph? Revenue is already dropping in real terms. The Premier League is having to offer more additional matches, greater access to maintain revenue streams. What will broadcasters pay if the past decade is then peppered with asterisks?

Talk to a lot of Premier League owners and they do not want past titles taken off City they know that's a terrible look. Serie A used to be Europe's strongest domestic league. It had already lost ground on the Premier League when the Calciopoli scandal led to Juventus being stripped of the 2004-05 title, which then went unawarded. The 2005-06 title was given to Inter Milan, who came second, trailing Juventus by 15 points. And it can be argued justice was done, but the fallout made the league less marketable and, in time, weaker. Italy had boasted five European champions in the 21 years before Calciopoli and has had two since. The last was Inter in 2010. There will be senior figures at elite Premier League clubs Tim Lewis at Arsenal springs to mind, as would Daniel Levy had Tottenham Hotspur's politics not defeated him first who will be furious at the Premier League reaching a settlement over APT. Yet this is what light-touch regulation looks like: compromise, understanding.

Again, there are no real winners because so much time and money has now been wasted on legal rulings that appear to have been ended by old-fashioned conciliation. City recognise the validity and enforceable nature of the Premier League's rules, the Premier League accepts that City's deals with Etihad and other Gulf partners are fair and reasonable in today's market, because some deals are bespoke.

Nobody needs to torch the rulebook, City can stop feeling persecuted, return to the table, sign their deal with Etihad and the competition can move on. City, you will notice, acknowledge the APT rules as binding, but have stopped short of referring to them as legal. They reserve the right, as no doubt do the Premier League if a commercial agreement crosses their desks with a few noughts where they shouldn't be. And that's common sense. That's what should have happened in the first place, jaw-jaw always being preferred to war-war; and a damn sight cheaper too.

This is an entirely different case to the 115 charges, but the principle is not dissimilar. Costs on each side when the big one finally lands could be in the region of £100 million. Was that really necessary? Was alleged non co-operation around historic events really such an issue that it required its own lengthy charge sheet? Could it not all have been boiled down to transgressions alleged to have directly impacted the integrity of the league? Premier League clubs could end up paying more than £5 million each depending on the costs award. Would they have voted for that, or for the pursuit of Nottingham Forest, Leicester and Everton, had they known how expensive it would all be?

So can Manchester City now cash blank cheques on sponsorship? Of course not. Rules and parameters remain. City did not advocate for a league without rules. Equally, this idea that they, or Newcastle United, could buy every good player and dominate is flawed. But let's say they could. Let's say the new APT agreement gave them the clout to take Bukayo Saka out of Arsenal, retrieve Cole Palmer from Chelsea, prise Jude Bellingham from Real Madrid and put them together with Phil Foden. What would they have? They'd have the England forward line we know doesn't work because we've seen it and the impact on paper is ten times what happens on the field.

Hell, we don't even know if Liverpool will be able to blend Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Mohamed Salah and Florian Wirtz yet. We think it will work; it looks like it should work; but Wirtz hasn't started well and Salah is yet to hit last season's form, and the brightest spark is Ekitike, who may have to change position to accommodate Isak. And what if a regulatory compromise had given Newcastle the capacity to keep Isak from Liverpool? Would that have been such a bad thing; or would it have made for a better competition?

No doubt City's elite rivals who place the Premier League under such pressure to rein them in will not appreciate what they see as capitulation. It is not. It is common sense. The best deal is always the one in which both sides feel they have surrendered a little. That's not the same as losing. The problem with the 115 charges is we are already too far in. The damage is done, with no winners and not much hope of a draw. It's a match lasting two years and nobody gets a point.
Click to expand...
As ever, a lone voice of reason among a Confederacy of Dunces
 
Marvin. said:
In theory you would expect a correlation between popularity of a football club, and media coverage but this doesn't seem to work in the case of Man Utd. I have observed that support for Man Utd has significantly declined over the last decade and yet media coverage of Man Utd seems to have increased.

I asked Google Gemini to graph football shirts sold by Premier League club, and here it is. Sadly it doesn't provide the source for this data.

View attachment 169065

I would judge this to be a good metric for the level of support of Premier League clubs. The only outliers for me are Chelsea and Arsenal. I see far more Arsenal shirts than I do Chelsea.

When I watched Man Utd's tour games in the US, many of them were poorly attended. If I walk around Manchester, it's very obvious that support for Man Utd has fallen significantly yet it seems that commercial media organisations are covering Man Utd more than ever before. In my opinion, the reason for this is that if Man Utd support has declined, hate for Man Utd has been maintained. All the best supported clubs in England hate United. Even fans of locally supported clubs like Leeds or Newcastle hate Utd. As far as commercial media organisations are concerned, all they want are downloads and comments. They monitor the metrics very closely.

I know I read articles about Man Utd because I don't like them and when I look at the comments to Man Utd articles on the BBC, it is full of comments written by Man Utd haters.

If it bothers you that the BBC Football is covered with Man Utd articles, try not to read the articles and do not comment. Reads and comments are what drives these articles.
Click to expand...
Interesting that, and like you I think it rings true.
I think the explanation is simply demographics too. They haven’t been successful in recent years but it’s the legacy/hangover from when they were. Plenty of journalists (or people in positions of responsibility/recruitment in bbc football or other organisations) in say, their 40s or older, will be prime age for being fans from their “glory years”.
 
Kinkybyname said:
Today, this column can exclusively reveal the outcome of the Premier League's 115 charges against Manchester City. The winner is ... nobody. Not Manchester City, not the Premier League, not the other 19 clubs, not the brand, not the fans, not even the broadcasters for all the dramatic tension this saga has created. Lawyers have been made even wealthier, reporters have been kept in headlines, although there remains personal scepticism about the public appetite for another internecine squabble around football's seemingly never-ending list of regulations. Yet does anyone get to have their arm raised in acknowledgment of a knockout after 12 rounds of attritional slugging? Almost certainly not. The Associated Party Transaction (APT) resolution tells us that.

At roughly 3pm on Monday it was announced that well, what was announced, actually? Nothing that could not have been resolved over a pot of coffee and some pastries locked in a legal office in London about two years ago. One imagines that's how Richard Scudamore, the predecessor to Richard Masters in the chief executive's chair, might have done it.

Legal bills were not a drain on the financial health of clubs when Scudamore was in charge. He was a facilitator of the Premier League's membership, a mediator, a negotiator, a smoother-over. At his leaving do at the German Gymnasium restaurant in London in 2018, a graph indicated the growth in broadcast revenues during his time. It looked like the north face of the Eiger. The owners and chairmen present kept gazing at it in awe.

Scudamore's style was to protect the product by sitting down and working problems through. The light-touch regulator that football has been promised? That was Scudamore in a nutshell. He only went for West Ham United over Carlos Tevez because they lied. Had the club been truthful about some of the clauses in his contract, Scudamore has always insisted that the league would have registered the player, even allowed him to play that weekend, and then sat down with West Ham's lawyers first thing on Monday morning to show them exactly how the contract would have to be structured and worded to stay legal.

This is not the style of the modern Premier League. Were the chairwoman, Alison Brittain, and Masters to depart now, the only graph resembling the Eiger would indicate what they had cost the clubs in legal fees about £50million in 2023-24, with significantly more likely to come. In City, in particular, it faces an opponent with the wherewithal and motivation to match its very expensive legal habit. This, ultimately, may have forced a much-needed compromise.

So why, when the verdict on the 115 charges drops, can there only be losers? Well, like the APT verdict, neither side can hope to emerge entirely unscathed. This isn't the Women's Rugby World Cup. Nobody gets to win 115-0. Whatever goes against City, however big, however small, there will be reputational harm. Any defeat on any accusation will always be used by their detractors to place an asterisk against their achievements.

Equally, if the Premier League goes down again, it is personally humiliating for the present administration. This is its case, its pursuit, its strategy. After the debacle defeat against Leicester City and the scandal of the legal fees against Nottingham Forest a case the Premier League actually won, with Forest admitting breaching PSR, yet it still ended up costing the league a fortune it needs to get this one over the line, and significantly.

Yet even if it does, say this was to be a Premier League slam dunk, what is proven?

That the league was illegitimate? That arguably the greatest club side many of us have seen was founded on deceit? When the time comes to negotiate the next TV deal, is that really such a triumph? Revenue is already dropping in real terms. The Premier League is having to offer more additional matches, greater access to maintain revenue streams. What will broadcasters pay if the past decade is then peppered with asterisks?

Talk to a lot of Premier League owners and they do not want past titles taken off City they know that's a terrible look. Serie A used to be Europe's strongest domestic league. It had already lost ground on the Premier League when the Calciopoli scandal led to Juventus being stripped of the 2004-05 title, which then went unawarded. The 2005-06 title was given to Inter Milan, who came second, trailing Juventus by 15 points. And it can be argued justice was done, but the fallout made the league less marketable and, in time, weaker. Italy had boasted five European champions in the 21 years before Calciopoli and has had two since. The last was Inter in 2010. There will be senior figures at elite Premier League clubs Tim Lewis at Arsenal springs to mind, as would Daniel Levy had Tottenham Hotspur's politics not defeated him first who will be furious at the Premier League reaching a settlement over APT. Yet this is what light-touch regulation looks like: compromise, understanding.

Again, there are no real winners because so much time and money has now been wasted on legal rulings that appear to have been ended by old-fashioned conciliation. City recognise the validity and enforceable nature of the Premier League's rules, the Premier League accepts that City's deals with Etihad and other Gulf partners are fair and reasonable in today's market, because some deals are bespoke.

Nobody needs to torch the rulebook, City can stop feeling persecuted, return to the table, sign their deal with Etihad and the competition can move on. City, you will notice, acknowledge the APT rules as binding, but have stopped short of referring to them as legal. They reserve the right, as no doubt do the Premier League if a commercial agreement crosses their desks with a few noughts where they shouldn't be. And that's common sense. That's what should have happened in the first place, jaw-jaw always being preferred to war-war; and a damn sight cheaper too.

This is an entirely different case to the 115 charges, but the principle is not dissimilar. Costs on each side when the big one finally lands could be in the region of £100 million. Was that really necessary? Was alleged non co-operation around historic events really such an issue that it required its own lengthy charge sheet? Could it not all have been boiled down to transgressions alleged to have directly impacted the integrity of the league? Premier League clubs could end up paying more than £5 million each depending on the costs award. Would they have voted for that, or for the pursuit of Nottingham Forest, Leicester and Everton, had they known how expensive it would all be?

So can Manchester City now cash blank cheques on sponsorship? Of course not. Rules and parameters remain. City did not advocate for a league without rules. Equally, this idea that they, or Newcastle United, could buy every good player and dominate is flawed. But let's say they could. Let's say the new APT agreement gave them the clout to take Bukayo Saka out of Arsenal, retrieve Cole Palmer from Chelsea, prise Jude Bellingham from Real Madrid and put them together with Phil Foden. What would they have? They'd have the England forward line we know doesn't work because we've seen it and the impact on paper is ten times what happens on the field.

Hell, we don't even know if Liverpool will be able to blend Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Mohamed Salah and Florian Wirtz yet. We think it will work; it looks like it should work; but Wirtz hasn't started well and Salah is yet to hit last season's form, and the brightest spark is Ekitike, who may have to change position to accommodate Isak. And what if a regulatory compromise had given Newcastle the capacity to keep Isak from Liverpool? Would that have been such a bad thing; or would it have made for a better competition?

No doubt City's elite rivals who place the Premier League under such pressure to rein them in will not appreciate what they see as capitulation. It is not. It is common sense. The best deal is always the one in which both sides feel they have surrendered a little. That's not the same as losing. The problem with the 115 charges is we are already too far in. The damage is done, with no winners and not much hope of a draw. It's a match lasting two years and nobody gets a point.
Click to expand...
Excellent read.
 
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