The Super League | FA + PL: New Charter & Fines | UEFA: Settlement

[Alan Harper's Tash]

I. Have. Finally. Caught. Up. On. This. Thread.

Time for bed.

 

[Grealish’s Shinpads]

It was a massive fuck-up from any club who signed up to this insanity and no amount of sugar-coating or mental gymnastic will make up for it, BUT I personally won't hold a grudge and hope you'll get your first CL this year. See ya around...

Hope you’ll get your first FA Cup this year!

 

[Ted_Bovis]

The people’s front of Real and the Real People’s front rumoured to want in too

Splitters!

 

[TFC]

I. Have. Finally. Caught. Up. On. This. Thread.

Time for bed.

Now it's slowed down, I'm going to have to find something else to do. I might talk to the woman and little people I see in the house from time to time.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Now it's slowed down, I'm going to have to find something else to do. I might talk to the woman and little people I see in the house from time to time.

Reminds me of the first lockdown gag.

Football’s been suspended. Don’t know what to do.

Found a woman sitting next to me. She seems nice. She says she’s my wife.

 

[Tricky_Trev]

Reminds me of the first lockdown gag.

Football’s been suspended. Don’t know what to do.

Found a woman sitting next to me. She seems nice. She says she’s my wife.

That’s so weird, I have one next to me that said she used to be my wife.

 

[1.618034]

Sorry, daily mail, and I can't stand their shite, and I utterly refuse to accept their adverts.

Fair enough.

It's the DM so I don't care...

Enjoy!


From Day One, the very point of Abu Dhabi buying Manchester City was reputation and image. Winning friends and influencing people.

It was all about the Gulf state revealing qualities of sophistication and imagination - differentiating itself from Qatar, brash Dubai, or anywhere you cared to mention on earth.

This brand image would be there in perpetuity, good for the time when the oilfields were drained dry. In other words, it was never about the money.


And that is why City’s decision to join the desultory, avaricious band of money-grabbers plotting their Super League breakaway was so baffling to behold in the first place.

You could see this coming from a John W Henry, who has viewed his investments as commodities all his life. Or a Stan Kroenke, a ruthless entrepreneur who took over his local NFL team and promptly shipped them off to Los Angeles. Or a Joel Glazer, who evidently has little more to do with his time than leach off other people’s sports clubs.

But not Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan - an individual who has ploughed £1.3bn in City and is still investing.

Granted, the man in question has scarcely been seen in Manchester. He turned up for a home game against Portsmouth in the Mark Hughes era and has not been tempted back.

But the people he has installed in the significant positions have more than done the job for him. They’ve built the best training base, hired the best manager, established the best digital media operation and the best player acquisition model. They’ve provided vital economic redemption for Manchester’s struggling east end and even built a college there.

Yet then the Abu Dhabis found themselves among football’s pariahs – despised by the supporters who have cherished all that they have brought and destined to be remembered as one of the Gang of Six who stole English football from the people.

There really always was a suspicion that they were less convinced by the whole sorry show than the thrusting, conniving owners of Manchester United and Liverpool. It seemed significant that confirmation of their own involvement came after the others, on Sunday.

It will be entirely legitimate for City now to say, through Sheikh Mansour, that they were bounced into appending their name to the European Super League project on Sunday by a desperate band of hustlers, determined to make their land grab before UEFA laid out their own Champions League expansion plans the following day.

City can say this boldly, too, because those clubs have done them no favours. They were all co-signatories of a joint letter opposing City’s request to suspend their own Champions League ban which was later overturned. The rest of the band of six were taking the moral high ground, back then.

Withdrawing allows City to retain that position that they have been proud to hold this past decade – a club outside football’s restrictive, self-serving Establishment cabal. A cabal which, City have argued relentlessly in that time, deliberately constructed the UEFA Financial Fair Play system to keep out enterprising, imaginative newcomers like them.

It also means City moving on from the controversy surrounding their handling of those UEFA rules. UEFA found that they had breached FFP and imposed the ban. The Court for Arbitration in Sport was by no means flattering when rescinding it.

And somewhere along the road, the joyful City we knew became shrill and angry – justifiably, they would say – and at war with those governing a sport in which they have shone a light in so many ways.

Pep Guardiola certainly has no wish to follow the money and consign to history all that this proud, passionate football club – founded 140 years ago by a vicar’s daughter for the working classes of an east Manchester crippled by unemployment – has come to represent.

‘It's not sport when there is no relation between effort and success,’ he said on Tuesday. ‘It's not sport. It's not sport if it doesn't matter if you lose. I want the best competition as possible. It's not fair if teams fight at the top and cannot qualify.'

The players feel the same. And the way City’s staff curated his quotes seemed significant, too. They were the lead item on the club website for the rest of Tuesday. City tweeted them beneath the words: ‘The boss speaks out.’

As Guardiola has led, so his club have followed. Now watch the whole wretched edifice come crashing down.

And Manchester City will genuinely be able to say that they were the ones who helped save English football.

 

[1.618034]

There’s only 4 teams left

Bury FC?

 

[moggymoz]

no chance they would have left like you say, i bet when city withdrew and it hit the news they were all linked up on the phone planning the next move

marco​

I just want to say, you were spot on today, reading your posts throughout the day made me confident that we were gonna fuck this thing off... Cheers.

 

[Cobwebcat]

Bury FC?

5 teams