PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

Prestwich_Blue said:
The accelerated investment is all public knowledge - Khaldoon openly said it - so Harris claiming it as a secret he'd been told as part of some inner-circle is complete nonsense.
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Even I knew and remembered that, which makes Harris’s comments even more odd to me.

I’m trying to be polite as he’s clearly not in a good place.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
I know from my club contacts that the media strategy was to court certain journalists who the club thought were 'opinion formers'. Serious journalists who could write using a more sophisticated medium than a crayon. So probably people like (I'm guessing) Martin Samuel, Henry Winter, Martyn Ziegler, David Conn, Rory Smith, etc. I do know Nick Harris was one of that group. I talked to him and passed on stuff I knew, which the club seemingly had no issue with (I'd have certainly known if they had).

They shared information with them, the intention being that we'd get a more sympathetic and objective hearing in the media, rather than the shite spouted by the red-tops, which we knew we couldn't influence. But even that group of journalists are driven by clicks, and objective articles about City don't generate clicks. Oli Kay, who was at The Times, told me that so I've had it first hand.

But it's no secret that we accelerated investment in the squad before the FFP door was slammed shut in our face. Then, in 2012/13, facing FFP failure, we did as much as we could to bring forward income. We sold the image rights to Fordham, we called off sponsorship revenue early. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what we did by the way. If Etihad contracted to paying £600m over 10 years, we may have drawn down £300m in the first 3 years, say. That's not uncommon either. I seem to recall united front-loading either their Team Viewer or kit deal, so they got a big payment up-front. Nothing wrong with that. The accelerated investment is all public knowledge - Khaldoon openly said it - so Harris claiming it as a secret he'd been told as part of some inner-circle is complete nonsense.

At some point though, Harris's attitude changed dramatically. I know his wife had a brain tumour (and she died sadly about a year ago), they had two young girls and his mental heath suffered quite badly. That's a terrible thing to happen in anyone's book. But even knowing all this, the club were very puzzled about his 180 degree turn. His hatred of us is seemingly pathological.

Delaney was the same to a large degree. Up to us winning the league at Brighton in 2019 he was OK. By the time we'd beaten Watford at Wembley, just one week later, he'd turned.
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I think the very first sentence shows the flaw in modern journalism, journalists, talking heads, pundits have begun to think their opinion matters and in reality it just doesnt, their job and their only job should be to impart information in an honest fashion and let the people who receive that information form their own opinion on it.

The reality is that these people for the most part are no better educated on the matters that they are reporting on than you and i, take the reporting on the '115 charges' although even that is wrong, it is a load of opinion pieces who dont even understand that not only have we not been charged but if we had been charged they dont understand what it is we were charged with and yet they feel qualified to give their opinion with regards to it on a national platform, the arrogance is unbelievable, pb and stefan obviously know from where they speak and have an informed viewpoint on it and thus their reporting is invaluable, people like holt, delaney, kay, law etc wouldnt know fca laws any better than they know commercial property laws yet instead of just imparting information in an unbiased fashion like actual reporters they are no better than nutters like goldbridge ranting on the internet for clicks and should be treated as such, it is a rule of life that you should never try and be educated by someone who knows less than you, it is a golden rule of life that you should never try and be educated by a blithering halfwit whos only qualification is being able to rant nonsensically and tell other idiots what they need to hear to justify their sad little lives.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
That's pretty well on the right lines. I'm not even sure whether it was a case of passing or failing FFP though. Simply putting forward incorrect accounts would be a breach of the rules. Even if those accounts were "correct" (in the PL's eyes) we still could have passed the PSR/FFP rules yet still face charges.

The thing that struck me yesterday was that possibly the PL have done their 'version' of what our accounts should have been, knocking off what they see as 'fake' sponsorships and adding image rights payments back, and in that scenario we would have failed PSR and FFP. It's pretty desperate stuff if so.
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Yes, that's what I was getting at.

The alleged breaches include failing FFP in 2015/6 - 2017/8, I think. Iirc, the club was hovering around break-even in the years to 2018, so the only thing significant enough to take the result to a loss over the 105 million limit would be the alleged "topping up" of the Etihad sponsorship, I think.

If they are pinning their most serious allegations on that, then I suppose they don't have a chance, surely?
 
Blue_Lightsaber said:
Think its time City took this clown to court and forced a court decision of cease and desist upon him:

View attachment 104324
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Possibly the saddest thing about Harris is that he's got 145K followers, there must be a fair percentage of those who know he has mental issues and yet they carry on feeding his delusions with likes and comments. Presumably, in real life they'd wouldn't do that?
 
argyle said:
This is hysterical nonsense.

City can't stop media outlets writing stuff about us that we don't like. Only if they cross into slander or libel which is very rare and even then City would just have a correction or article taken down.

Various journalists have said that behind the scenes, City are very active at correcting articles or things said.

If you don't like what's written or said, stop reading it and listening to it. Some seem to go out of their way to find stuff so they can get angry.

The damage is done with who? rags and liverpool fans? Fans of other teams don't like us anyway, they didn't before the charges and they won't long after.

Blues need to grow a set.
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The line you say is target reporting for other fans and damaging our reputation worldwide,
it's simple, if you can not stop Manchester City from winning then mud the water to make out it's only because they are cheating,

We are 100% talking about United and Liverpool for sure, They promote their glory and hate anybody wanting some of the pie, So they put something out to mud the water of somebody else's success because it hurts their reputation and stops people from becoming our new fans,
 
ancoats said:
The line you say is target reporting for other fans and damaging our reputation worldwide,
it's simple, if you can not stop Manchester City from winning then mud the water to make out it's only because they are cheating,

We are 100% talking about United and Liverpool for sure, They promote their glory and hate anybody wanting some of the pie, So they put something out to mud the water of somebody else's success because it hurts their reputation and stops people from becoming our new fans,
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and as i have said repeatedly, the world does not care what is in the daily mail, mirror or sun, their readership on the grand scale is very tiny. It is mainly bitter rags and dippers who read this as it feeds into their viewpoint and helps soothe the bitter pill that they just aint that good any more, but the reality is it will not affect the younger generation as that is not how they consume their news, not in this country and certainly not in other countries.

Put it this way the advert of haaland promoting beats headphones with lebron will have billions of views more than any myopic pathetic article that holt puts in the daily mail. The viewership of us winning the treble will ahve gained hundreds of thousands more fans than any sad rant in the guardian will have lost us. The world is a different place now and the print media and the red tops just havent caught up.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
I know from my club contacts that the media strategy was to court certain journalists who the club thought were 'opinion formers'. Serious journalists who could write using a more sophisticated medium than a crayon. So probably people like (I'm guessing) Martin Samuel, Henry Winter, Martyn Ziegler, David Conn, Rory Smith, etc. I do know Nick Harris was one of that group. I talked to him and passed on stuff I knew, which the club seemingly had no issue with (I'd have certainly known if they had).

They shared information with them, the intention being that we'd get a more sympathetic and objective hearing in the media, rather than the shite spouted by the red-tops, which we knew we couldn't influence. But even that group of journalists are driven by clicks, and objective articles about City don't generate clicks. Oli Kay, who was at The Times, told me that so I've had it first hand.

But it's no secret that we accelerated investment in the squad before the FFP door was slammed shut in our face. Then, in 2012/13, facing FFP failure, we did as much as we could to bring forward income. We sold the image rights to Fordham, we called off sponsorship revenue early. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what we did by the way. If Etihad contracted to paying £600m over 10 years, we may have drawn down £300m in the first 3 years, say. That's not uncommon either. I seem to recall united front-loading either their Team Viewer or kit deal, so they got a big payment up-front. Nothing wrong with that. The accelerated investment is all public knowledge - Khaldoon openly said it - so Harris claiming it as a secret he'd been told as part of some inner-circle is complete nonsense.

At some point though, Harris's attitude changed dramatically. I know his wife had a brain tumour (and she died sadly about a year ago), they had two young girls and his mental heath suffered quite badly. That's a terrible thing to happen in anyone's book. But even knowing all this, the club were very puzzled about his 180 degree turn. His hatred of us is seemingly pathological.

Delaney was the same to a large degree. Up to us winning the league at Brighton in 2019 he was OK. By the time we'd beaten Watford at Wembley, just one week later, he'd turned.
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He seems to be blurring the lines between saying it’s public knowledge that we have accelerated spending and perhaps even income and it being public knowledge from inside sources that we are cooking the books which is fraud so he is fairly openly accusing us of a crime which is apparently common knowledge despite no police or HMRC etc investigation and no referral to them from any of the people that have evidence be it the prem Nick himself or any other source or journalist it’s a mad claim
 
mancboy said:
and as i have said repeatedly, the world does not care what is in the daily mail, mirror or sun, their readership on the grand scale is very tiny. It is mainly bitter rags and dippers who read this as it feeds into their viewpoint and helps soothe the bitter pill that they just aint that good any more, but the reality is it will not affect the younger generation as that is not how they consume their news, not in this country and certainly not in other countries.

Put it this way the advert of haaland promoting beats headphones with lebron will have billions of views more than any myopic pathetic article that holt puts in the daily mail. The viewership of us winning the treble will ahve gained hundreds of thousands more fans than any sad rant in the guardian will have lost us. The world is a different place now and the print media and the red tops just havent caught up.
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Holt is considered to be a leading football journalist (I know the bar is set very low) and he's no better than a large number of posters on here for instance.

I remember a piece he wrote when he was at the Mirror that didn't age particularly well. It was a compare and contrast between Sheikh Mansour and Randy Lerner when he was Villa owner. Needless to say everything Lerner did was amazing (organic growth blah blah) whereas our owner was a know-nothing who could only throw huge sums of money at it. His immortal last line was 'Every club should have a Randy Lerner' :)
 
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