As The Athletic marketed itself as a kind of superior online publication, I found Sam's handling, as its MCFC correspondent, of the whole UEFA ban and CAS case deeply disappointing. I can understand that he doesn't understand the financial and legal issues involved as he's a sports journalist and there's no shame in that. However, while no one else in the media (at least that I saw) ever sought to address the case from a City perspective, Sam never did, either, and in his position he was the one person who IMO should have.
At a minimum, the following are questions he should have been asking and should have written pieces seeking to address:
1. If everyone else is so sure that City are guilty, why has City's public line always been so implacably sanguine in terms of the club prevailing before a neutral body? If you remember Soriano's conversation with Chris Bailey on the club's official website, he went way beyond the generalised positive noises that parties to litigation often come out with regarding their cases - he was utterly unequivocal. That would be completely senseless if he simply had a no-hope case, so what reasons might he have to think he could win?
2. If the allegations against City were true, the necessary corollary would be that various officers and employees within the club would have committed fraudulent conduct conforming to the definition of various serious criminal offences for which the penalty can be several years of imprisonment. Is it really likely that people such as Khaldoon and Soriano would have taken that kind of risk?
And he never addressed those in print. It seems most likely to me that it didn't even occur to him to ask them. Well, if you're writing for an outlet that asks me to pay money I work hard to earn so that I can read your stuff, then I'm afraid it's not fucking good enough.
As I said earlier, I do get that he isn't an expert in finance or law, so he'll look for help in forming any analysis he chooses to print. No problem there. But I'm sure I'm not the only person who remembers him trumpeting one day on Twitter how he had a WhatsApp chat lined up with Delaney and other likeminded journalists to learn about the topic. That he did this but didn't reach out to someone like Stefan shows that his judgement here is absolutely fucking wretched.
In terms of his output more generally, he does produce some decent stuff, especially on tactics. (I'm now in my third year of subscribing to The Athletic, and they've retained me because I arrived on a promotional offer and when I twice unsubscribed, they offered me another year for buttons. It just about remains worth it, but largely because I consume almost entirely content that isn't about the big Premier League clubs.)
However, it irks me that, where other major clubs have more than one correspondent, Sam is all there is for City fans. He does actually generate some worthwhile stuff, but there's always a detachment in it. I don't want embarrassing propagandist bullshit along the lines of James Pearce writing about the cult, but I sometimes want to read articles from someone who I really feel gets the club and its fans. Sam totally doesn't, IMO, and that's a big disappointment for me in terms of The Athletic's coverage of our club.
Just seen this. For me, the thing about allegations of 'whataboutery' is that they're a go-to resource for obnoxious hypocrites, who sling them around when seeking to shut down the exposure of their venal double standards.
