HarrytheBlue
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This process may well deem FFP to be illegal - albeit by another court (not CAS).
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UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST
- Thread starter razman
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George Hannah
Well-Known Member
Your first sentence is completely wrong about AD and I didn't say exclusively -just read your own Wiki link, their London operation was downsized last year and its host moved to AD to head up CNN international which now provides increased content to the UK. Anway if you're not in the happy German world of Haribo (as per your location) just watch the Sky channel.Their Europe/Middle East/Africa service airs from London. A specific Middle East only service airs from Abu Dhabi.
Regional and online versions
There are six variants of CNN International:
As for your German comment, if this is meant to be a jibe it's gone way over my head. If your CNN reception airs exclusively from Abu Dhabi maybe you should get your TV or Sky box looked at.
- CNN International Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong SAR,
- CNN International Europe/Middle East/Africa, based in London, United Kingdom
- CNN International Latin America, based in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
- CNN International Middle East, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- CNN International North America, based in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
- CNN International South Asia, based in New Delhi, India
Last edited:
feedmpenzaandhewillscore
Well-Known Member
I have been seriously contemplating setting up my own City news platform in recent months, as a business separate from my other commitments.
I'm still unsure if I will be able to monetize it to the extent I need, as not to be so reliant on other areas of income.
I would appreciate any feedback from Blues.
I would read it, there are some very good people on here who contribute some very informed view points and in the wider world as well. You could expand it to football in general, a football website with no agenda pandering to rag click bait.
The hacienda must be built.
D
D
Deleted member 77198
Guest
Top post!Of course it has, but we can drag others down into the dirt with us.
For me, it's about time this club became one again, on and off the pitch.
Militant, mobilized and ready to lean in and push back.
We are Manchester fucking City - existing before Barca, United, Madrid.
Winning in Europe before Liverpool.
Winning makes you soft, you crave respectability and approval.
We don't need fucking approval, and the sooner Soriano realises this the better.
Our greatest asset will always be the people who bleed blue.
We need to stop fucking moaning. We know we are hated. Embrace it.
Too many have their entire lives dictated to by likes and comparisons.
Remember this. We are the richest club on the planet. The owner never went out and put Messi and Ronaldo in the same team, which he could have done ten times over.
We are Manchester fucking City. Our enemies should be very worried what comes next.
Let's have a bit of old-fashioned hostility in the air.
maurizio
Well-Known Member
We've been convicted since the leaks came out if not before judging by every post by a dipper or rag under any City related tweet or item of news. Makes no difference yesterday's verdict in reality apart from allowing the press to pile in as well. So we've nothing to lose in taking them all the way in the courts. And it's bringing our fans together in solidarity, let's hope it does the same to the players.We won’t end up getting banned and this will just make it all the sweeter when we keep on winning trophies.
The only damage is to our reputation mainly with fans of other clubs who detest us anyway. Neutrals wont giving a flying fuck - in the same way I couldn’t care less when PSG/Milan etc were going through this.
Pablo ZZZ Peroni
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- 19 May 2014
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- 2,488
I’m not actually bothered about being banned from the champions league. Most city fans couldn’t care less about it anyway.
it’s more the clear agenda UEFA have against us
MOST City fans don't care?
So it was a minority of fans then who generated the great atmosphere against Spurs, the crazed celebration of Sterling's "goal" at the end and who were totally crushed by the outcome?
I fucking cared and I don't think I'm in a minority.
kaz7
Well-Known Member
Click on his profile and onto posting and you'll find them all there,you can also click on follow him for future alerts @journoludThat’s a very good idea. I can see from other posts that @Prestwich_Blue has posted this morning but I haven’t got the will to go through hundreds of posts to read it/ them. No disrespect to anyone who has posted on here, all views are valid but I would like to see a distillation of the most informative
If the idea of an alternate to the CL is being poo-poo'd - how about a true international competition?
Following on from this idea, so it's not seen as a 'bridesmaid' competition we could also try to rope in the likes of Boca Juniors, River Plate, Corinthians, Independiente, Rangers and Celtic etc.
Always preferred as it seems a lot do also the lure of the prem and the domestic cups, looking forward to Wembley again in a couple of weeks but this idea now seems to be a little more appealing depending on how the Premier league view our situation, never been a fan of uefa and hope we some how bury them in court would take some bollox for clubs to break away
Top post!
Love it
Seige mentality
Fuck um
portisheadblue
Well-Known Member
Here’s the latest from The Athletic under the name of Oliver Kay.
At launch they promised to be “different” so I took an annual subscription and after one week cancelled it because in the main it’s the same old shit
And here’s another helping ....
———————————————————
The official line is that Manchester City are “disappointed but not surprised”. It is one that reinforces that idea of a stitch-up, a “prejudicial process” at the hands of a kangaroo court, because City still insist that the evidence in their favour is “irrefutable”.
It would be nice for City to share that evidence one day because for now the case against them looks damning. It is why, nearly six years after negotiating and accepting a £49 million fine (two-thirds of which suspended and later refunded) for alleged breaches of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, we were informed on Friday night that they faced another £25 million fine and, more dramatically, a two-year ban from the Champions League and Europa League.
Of course, City will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) but, for all the bullishness among the club’s hierarchy, UEFA’s announcement last night was an almighty blow to the Premier League champions’ ambitions and indeed to their reputation. Anything less than an overwhelming victory on appeal — a full acquittal, with all sanctions quashed — would be insufficient for a club that has consistently and vehemently protested its innocence.
City stand accused not only of exceeding the maximum losses allowed under UEFA’s FFP regulations but of trying to beat the system by “overstating” sponsorship revenue and, according to UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber, failing to co-operate in the investigation of their case.
The case against City was blown open again in November 2018 when the German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed what it called the Football Leaks files, based on e-mails accessed by an individual since identified as Rui Pinto, a Portuguese national who has been charged with 147 criminal offences including computer hacking, all of which he denies.
City have consistently called those leaks an “organised and clear” attempt to damage the club’s reputation, referring to “out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen from City Football Group and Manchester City personnel and associated people”. The Football Leaks process seemed indiscriminate, though; whether it was shedding light on the finer points of transfer deals and players’ contracts, illegal third-party agreements or secret talks about the possible creation of a breakaway league by leading European clubs. An early mission statement said simply: “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough’.”
City would have us believe that their ownership by Sheikh Mansour is an antidote to such rottenness — a pure personal investment by an individual who loves his adopted club and city so much that he paid it a visit in August 2010 — rather than, say, yet another prime example of “sportswashing”, a phenomenon whereby regimes use association with sport in order to launder their image. Put simply, City are to Abu Dhabi what Paris Saint-Germain are to Qatar: a vehicle that has opened up more and more investment opportunities for regimes seeking to diversify their economy, improve their image and expand their global influence. Football clubs, like financial institutions and famous buildings, always seem to be available to the highest bidder.
Petrodollar states are allowed to bankroll football clubs as long as they stay within the rules. And here we come to the subject that attracts furious indignation from some of City’s supporters. For decades, clubs were allowed to spend as much money as they liked. It was not until 2008, the same year their club was bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, that UEFA decided it was time to regulate spending.
In fact — and this is where City do have a legitimate grievance — FFP was not originally meant to be about controlling expenditure. When the former UEFA president Michel Platini first outlined his determination to clamp down on financial excesses within European football, his target was debt. On the eve of the 2008 Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea, Platini complained that this “unsustainable level of debt (…) is distorting the level playing field in Europe”.
David Taylor, then UEFA’s general secretary, cited “a problem with clubs that secure debt (…) in order to compete at a higher level than their resources would allow”. That was not true of Manchester United, whose debt remains a burden to the club, entirely for the benefit of the Glazer family, but it was certainly true of Chelsea, beneficiaries of a £578 million interest-free loan from Roman Abramovich (which he later wrote off).
By the time FFP was introduced three years later, though, United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and the rest of the establishment clubs, several of them heavily indebted, had used their influence to persuade UEFA to change focus. It was not, in the end, a clampdown on debt; there was nothing to prevent leveraged buy-outs like the Glazers’ — instead, it was all about sustainability. The financial stability it has brought to European football, relatively speaking, is to be welcomed, but it has also served to reinforce the hierarchies that have built up over the course of the Champions League era.
City, PSG and others are entitled to complain that it left them with precious little time to move towards sustainability between the new regulations and the sanctions starting to bite. City are certainly entitled to argue that their case seems to have been handled less sympathetically than that involving PSG, whose president Nasser al-Khelafi sits on UEFA’s executive committee and has a prominent role at beIN Media Group, which is one of UEFA’s major broadcast partners. City’s own attempts to gain influence in UEFA’s corridors of power have so far been rebuffed.
What City are not entitled to do, though, having signed up to the regulations that allow them a licence to compete in the Champions League, is to try to ride roughshod over the regulations and then expect to avoid punishment.
There is a passage in Der Spiegel’s Football Leaks coverage — the contents of which has never been disputed by City, even if they continue to complain about the context in which things have been presented — that appeared to sum it all up.
The allegation goes that when compiling City’s accounts for 2012-13, the club’s chief financial officer Jorge Chumillas wrote an internal e-mail stating that, due to the cost of sacking Roberto Mancini, “we will have a shortfall of £9.9 million in order to comply with UEFA FFP this season”. Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, is alleged to have replied that this problem could be overcome if City could be paid the contractually stated bonus from their sponsors for winning the FA Cup.
There was just one problem with this. City had lost the FA Cup final to Wigan Athletic.
According to Der Spiegel, a compromise was reached whereby various sponsors — the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, the Abu Dhabi-based fund Aabar Investments and the Abu Dhabi department for culture and tourism — would have their payments adjusted so that the shortfall was covered. When Chumillas asked whether they would be allowed to change the date of sponsorship payments, Simon Pearce, a board member of City Football Group and a special adviser to the club’s chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, is alleged to have replied, “Of course. We can do what we want.”
That line appears to sum up the City hierarchy’s approach to the whole FFP question. It has not exactly served them well to this point. There is much to be admired about the work City have done over the past decade — their investment in infrastructure and in high-calibre people at all levels of the club, the development of a strategy and a philosophy summed up by the excellence of Pep Guardiola and his squad over the past two seasons, their commitment to community projects in Manchester — but the hierarchy’s belligerent approach to the FFP challenge smacks of extreme arrogance. What is more, it threatens to undermine so much of that good work, particularly if a Champions League ban causes Guardiola and his players to question their futures at the club.
In fact, it is worth recalling what Guardiola said last March after UEFA reopened their investigation in light of Der Spiegel’s allegations. Of the City hierarchy, he said, “I work with them and have known them for a long time. I trust them a lot. After that we’ll see.” Of the prospect of UEFA’s investigation he said, “If (the outcome) is not good, then ok, we will accept it. If everything is right, then it will finish and we will move forward.”
Football was never meant to come down to accountancy, hacked e-mails and legal representation behind closed doors in Switzerland. Then again it was never intended to come down to a battle between petrodollar states, Russian oligarchs and American real estate investors.
In Platini’s eyes, FFP was going to be all about reducing those influences, bringing the game down to a pure level. It has done nothing of the sort — if anything, European football has become even less of a level playing field than it was before — but the rules are the rules and if you sign up to play in the competition, you have to go along with them. If City have treated those rules and the entire process with total contempt, then they deserve to be punished accordingly.
(Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
At launch they promised to be “different” so I took an annual subscription and after one week cancelled it because in the main it’s the same old shit
And here’s another helping ....
———————————————————
The official line is that Manchester City are “disappointed but not surprised”. It is one that reinforces that idea of a stitch-up, a “prejudicial process” at the hands of a kangaroo court, because City still insist that the evidence in their favour is “irrefutable”.
It would be nice for City to share that evidence one day because for now the case against them looks damning. It is why, nearly six years after negotiating and accepting a £49 million fine (two-thirds of which suspended and later refunded) for alleged breaches of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, we were informed on Friday night that they faced another £25 million fine and, more dramatically, a two-year ban from the Champions League and Europa League.
Of course, City will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) but, for all the bullishness among the club’s hierarchy, UEFA’s announcement last night was an almighty blow to the Premier League champions’ ambitions and indeed to their reputation. Anything less than an overwhelming victory on appeal — a full acquittal, with all sanctions quashed — would be insufficient for a club that has consistently and vehemently protested its innocence.
City stand accused not only of exceeding the maximum losses allowed under UEFA’s FFP regulations but of trying to beat the system by “overstating” sponsorship revenue and, according to UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber, failing to co-operate in the investigation of their case.
The case against City was blown open again in November 2018 when the German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed what it called the Football Leaks files, based on e-mails accessed by an individual since identified as Rui Pinto, a Portuguese national who has been charged with 147 criminal offences including computer hacking, all of which he denies.
City have consistently called those leaks an “organised and clear” attempt to damage the club’s reputation, referring to “out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen from City Football Group and Manchester City personnel and associated people”. The Football Leaks process seemed indiscriminate, though; whether it was shedding light on the finer points of transfer deals and players’ contracts, illegal third-party agreements or secret talks about the possible creation of a breakaway league by leading European clubs. An early mission statement said simply: “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough’.”
City would have us believe that their ownership by Sheikh Mansour is an antidote to such rottenness — a pure personal investment by an individual who loves his adopted club and city so much that he paid it a visit in August 2010 — rather than, say, yet another prime example of “sportswashing”, a phenomenon whereby regimes use association with sport in order to launder their image. Put simply, City are to Abu Dhabi what Paris Saint-Germain are to Qatar: a vehicle that has opened up more and more investment opportunities for regimes seeking to diversify their economy, improve their image and expand their global influence. Football clubs, like financial institutions and famous buildings, always seem to be available to the highest bidder.
Petrodollar states are allowed to bankroll football clubs as long as they stay within the rules. And here we come to the subject that attracts furious indignation from some of City’s supporters. For decades, clubs were allowed to spend as much money as they liked. It was not until 2008, the same year their club was bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, that UEFA decided it was time to regulate spending.
In fact — and this is where City do have a legitimate grievance — FFP was not originally meant to be about controlling expenditure. When the former UEFA president Michel Platini first outlined his determination to clamp down on financial excesses within European football, his target was debt. On the eve of the 2008 Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea, Platini complained that this “unsustainable level of debt (…) is distorting the level playing field in Europe”.
David Taylor, then UEFA’s general secretary, cited “a problem with clubs that secure debt (…) in order to compete at a higher level than their resources would allow”. That was not true of Manchester United, whose debt remains a burden to the club, entirely for the benefit of the Glazer family, but it was certainly true of Chelsea, beneficiaries of a £578 million interest-free loan from Roman Abramovich (which he later wrote off).
By the time FFP was introduced three years later, though, United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and the rest of the establishment clubs, several of them heavily indebted, had used their influence to persuade UEFA to change focus. It was not, in the end, a clampdown on debt; there was nothing to prevent leveraged buy-outs like the Glazers’ — instead, it was all about sustainability. The financial stability it has brought to European football, relatively speaking, is to be welcomed, but it has also served to reinforce the hierarchies that have built up over the course of the Champions League era.
City, PSG and others are entitled to complain that it left them with precious little time to move towards sustainability between the new regulations and the sanctions starting to bite. City are certainly entitled to argue that their case seems to have been handled less sympathetically than that involving PSG, whose president Nasser al-Khelafi sits on UEFA’s executive committee and has a prominent role at beIN Media Group, which is one of UEFA’s major broadcast partners. City’s own attempts to gain influence in UEFA’s corridors of power have so far been rebuffed.
What City are not entitled to do, though, having signed up to the regulations that allow them a licence to compete in the Champions League, is to try to ride roughshod over the regulations and then expect to avoid punishment.
There is a passage in Der Spiegel’s Football Leaks coverage — the contents of which has never been disputed by City, even if they continue to complain about the context in which things have been presented — that appeared to sum it all up.
The allegation goes that when compiling City’s accounts for 2012-13, the club’s chief financial officer Jorge Chumillas wrote an internal e-mail stating that, due to the cost of sacking Roberto Mancini, “we will have a shortfall of £9.9 million in order to comply with UEFA FFP this season”. Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, is alleged to have replied that this problem could be overcome if City could be paid the contractually stated bonus from their sponsors for winning the FA Cup.
There was just one problem with this. City had lost the FA Cup final to Wigan Athletic.
According to Der Spiegel, a compromise was reached whereby various sponsors — the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, the Abu Dhabi-based fund Aabar Investments and the Abu Dhabi department for culture and tourism — would have their payments adjusted so that the shortfall was covered. When Chumillas asked whether they would be allowed to change the date of sponsorship payments, Simon Pearce, a board member of City Football Group and a special adviser to the club’s chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, is alleged to have replied, “Of course. We can do what we want.”
That line appears to sum up the City hierarchy’s approach to the whole FFP question. It has not exactly served them well to this point. There is much to be admired about the work City have done over the past decade — their investment in infrastructure and in high-calibre people at all levels of the club, the development of a strategy and a philosophy summed up by the excellence of Pep Guardiola and his squad over the past two seasons, their commitment to community projects in Manchester — but the hierarchy’s belligerent approach to the FFP challenge smacks of extreme arrogance. What is more, it threatens to undermine so much of that good work, particularly if a Champions League ban causes Guardiola and his players to question their futures at the club.
In fact, it is worth recalling what Guardiola said last March after UEFA reopened their investigation in light of Der Spiegel’s allegations. Of the City hierarchy, he said, “I work with them and have known them for a long time. I trust them a lot. After that we’ll see.” Of the prospect of UEFA’s investigation he said, “If (the outcome) is not good, then ok, we will accept it. If everything is right, then it will finish and we will move forward.”
Football was never meant to come down to accountancy, hacked e-mails and legal representation behind closed doors in Switzerland. Then again it was never intended to come down to a battle between petrodollar states, Russian oligarchs and American real estate investors.
In Platini’s eyes, FFP was going to be all about reducing those influences, bringing the game down to a pure level. It has done nothing of the sort — if anything, European football has become even less of a level playing field than it was before — but the rules are the rules and if you sign up to play in the competition, you have to go along with them. If City have treated those rules and the entire process with total contempt, then they deserve to be punished accordingly.
(Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
I’ve suspected for a while that the “leaks” benefited UEFA more than anyone. Yesterday confirmed it.
UEFA have one objective - to navigate a way through this while keeping as many parties happy as possible.
They have satisfied the cartel by damaging our reputation with this sanction but the leaks mean it will be overturned by CAS. It will be seen as UEFA doing all they can but City “getting off on a technicality”. We’d still be guilty in the eyes of the football world but receive no punishment. That suits UEFA perfectly.
I have little doubt this ban will be thrown out - the only question I have is whether city will play along with the charade and accept the reputational damage if no ban is enforced. Or will City get the ban overturned and go after blood? My suspicion is we will play along - our lawyers won’t act on emotion like us fans, which is almost always a good thing.
UEFA have one objective - to navigate a way through this while keeping as many parties happy as possible.
They have satisfied the cartel by damaging our reputation with this sanction but the leaks mean it will be overturned by CAS. It will be seen as UEFA doing all they can but City “getting off on a technicality”. We’d still be guilty in the eyes of the football world but receive no punishment. That suits UEFA perfectly.
I have little doubt this ban will be thrown out - the only question I have is whether city will play along with the charade and accept the reputational damage if no ban is enforced. Or will City get the ban overturned and go after blood? My suspicion is we will play along - our lawyers won’t act on emotion like us fans, which is almost always a good thing.
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