Not really they have just been more pragmatic this season.
We aren't making a 10 points gap with them. The league is over.
Another boring one horse race
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We aren't making a 10 points gap with them. The league is over.
Liverpool and City will split the titles between them for the foreseeable future Man City had a down year last year, Liverpool are having one this year - they'll be back up there next season.
You think they'd have been poorer in the English league without CL games in midweek?
Did people say this after we’d won 3 in a row in 2001? Or when we won the league by 18 points in 2000? Or after we did 3 in a row again in 2009?
Yeah they’ve got money, but football is cyclical. We need to raise our game and sort our own problems out before moaning about them spending.
Yeah they’ve got money, but football is cyclical. We need to raise our game and sort our own problems out before moaning about them spending.
But they still only have a couple of standout players who just drives the whole thing along imo. You cant rest them and expect Dias and Stones to score every game or have that header always flick wide.
Theyll slow down soon enough, its just will anybody be close enough to put pressure on them. The Arsenal game looked like they didnt want to get forward and were happy with 1-0 but what if they just didnt have the legs?
Say the miracle happens and we win our next 2, go to Etihad and nick it. Its down to 7 and theyre 1 game away from dropping points and making a title race out of it.
Its not probable but it is possible. They arent 20 points clear here
I think it's over.
So hard to take that our scumbag yankee leechy owners don't give a crap whilst City spend their way out of trouble whilst we are forced to take a measured careful approach in this financial situation
I love your optimism. But what I see every week is other teams slowing down too, and not having 350m of players rested. Wolves will play tonight and midweek without much change and the change they do make will be a real drop in quality. At this stage of the season, city will brush them aside
We needed the gap less than 10 points before the game at City in my opinion
City are among the top spenders every season, and over time that adds up. Some clubs might do more in individual seasons but City are consistently up there. So for example if Chelsea spends 200 million in one season and nothing for 3 seasons before while City spend around 100 million every season, City have spent double that of Chelsea in that time.
Secondly what you are not considering is that other clubs have to spend money on facilities and academy from their own earned money. While Abu Dhabi gives that money directly to City as that doesn't count towards FFP. Abu Dhabi have spent billions on City academy and facilities, you can see how much of a financial difference that alone causes.
The most annoying thing is I don't even think Pep has many extraordinary players at his disposal (apart from de Bruyne and Fernandinho).
Pep made this team work. Such a shame, I wanted him badly at United.
3 wins in 4 seasons plus cups trophies. He really made this league his bitch.
Pep made this team work. Such a shame, I wanted him badly at United.
3 wins in 4 seasons plus cups trophies. He really made this league his bitch.
That’s not the point. A punishment would at least have given the oil clubs second thoughts on the way they were doing business. Instead the CAS decision completely blew that up. The only way European football could have any semblance of what it once was is a salary cap system.
The team is not that great. Just have depth and the best coach. Enough for them to stroll to the title.
At the moment we’ve got an inferior squad and manager. We need to fix both.
Salary cap would just make it worse. The owners from the middle east would just fill the players back pockets from overseas channels to get around it - like they most likely are already to get around FFP.
I don't think we have inferior squad. Not by much. Pep is the difference.
Why no CL success?
I’m not sure much would have changed had we spent more, especially since Ole hit the reset button.
3 signings a summer, but the right sort of signing is a far more healthy approach to building a squad in my view, and we’re reaping the rewards now. If we’d spent 400m on 6 players the summer he turned up, we could have had another Lampard situation.
His players aren't all world class, like most seem to think. He has that quality in strategic places, but as you said he has a work ethic that they all subscribe to. You don't get any of his team strolling round the park or not making the necessary runs all over the pitch.
It’s a cup, anything can happen. The league is the true metric, surely.
Sorry couldn’t disagree more. Liverpool have had their fluke seasons and that’s that for a while I imagine. Lucky decisions, wins by small margins. Yes they were very good, but I’d still argue City played the better football last season. Liverpool were just more consistent and more fortunate.
Liverpool don’t have the depth to come back again to compete properly with City. They’re way off. They’ve had their moment and it’s gone for many years to come.They’ll still be top four for most seasons for some time though (not this season).
Perhaps I’m just deluded
.But no way are Liverpool splitting the titles and winning them for the “foreseeable”.
There's no doubt Pep is a genius no matter how bitter we are about his spending or team he's managing. He has adapted this season and started to play more pragmatic football to deal with the season circumstances and it paid off. Even at this stage he's still evolving as a manager. There's really no manager who is as good as him in the world at the moment imo.
Ederson, Dias, Cancelo, Gundogan and Foden have all been world-class this season.
Then add in the usual suspects like Aguero, Sterling, Fernandinho and De Bruyne to a team that already has Laporte, Rodri, Mahrez, Bernardo, Jesus etc. as squad players.
It’s an extraordinary squad.
A vacuous club funded entirely by oil money but objectively an extraordinary squad.
Yes but those violations would at least be easy to spot and therefore easier to punish.
Still, the CAS decision and the UEFA verdict only refer to European games, you'd think that if 'English football' was being "killed off"' as you claim, the PL and FA would have measure to punish City if they violates their guidelines. But quite apparently, as opposed to UEFA, they don't find anything wrong with what City are doing.
In that vein, I find it a bit hypocritical to moan about CAS when the Premier League title race is concerned.
City quite easily have one of the best squads in Europe, and a far better squad than anyone else in this league.
5 seasons and potentially not a sniff
Hopefully salary taxes and squad limits can put an end to any one side dominating football for extended periods of time unless it is based on organic work from the academy or good transfers in
It's the bloody disgusting fact Ole got NOTHING he needed last summer which means that the CB & RW we desperately crave went back another year and now the exact same thing is happening with a DM & ST too
They just spent their money much better than us in recent years. We can't complain about how much they spend when we pay some of the highest fees around.
If our recruiters and negotiators were up to par we'd spent more effectively and we'd have a squad a lot closer to theirs in quality.
If our recruiters and negotiators were up to par we'd spent more effectively and we'd have a squad a lot closer to theirs in quality.
Competitive cup competition I suppose is harder to guarantee dominance in the way a 38 game season allows. But you're also speaking too soon. They will win it, it's a near certainty, which is a shame to say about what is supposedly the biggest competition
They aren't easy to spot now? Do you believe Man City genuinely have the 3rd/4th highest wage bill in the league?
It's not even close in my opinion.
I just don’t want the premier league to turn into the shithouse boring league that the bundesliga has become.
If god help us Chelsea do go in for Haaland and Sancho he won't get what he wants again. If you keep getting players from the next choice down or even lower, then we will just fall further behind.That way of doing business will cost the club in the end and unfortunately it will be Ole who is the biggest victim.
You can argue their manager is a sporting freak. His win percentage in over a decade of football is over 70% if not close. That's ridiculous at the highest level.
I don't think they will be as dominant under another manager.
Which is an ironic comment seeing that many attribute what you call Bundesliga's 'shithouse boringness' to the exclusion of sugar daddy money.
Or we didn't just give into the whims/impulses of whichever manager we have at the club. Long term we've done far less harm to ourselves in windows, where we've 'not backed managers' as apposed to just giving them what they want.
16/17, 17/18 and 19/20 are some of the most self damaging transfer windows we've had at the club.
Yeah I was a little disappointed last summer as well to be fair. I felt we should have signed a right winger for sure. We should have got Sancho but with the price Dortmund wanted in a pandemic, I get it. I didn’t like it, but I understand why we didn’t pull the trigger there. It looks to be the correct move as well, I can see us landing him this summer for about 40m less than they were after.
Centre half was an issue but I feel like Ole knows too much upheaval is bad news, and wanted to address certain areas first. What would have been nice though was to walk away from the Sancho deal in July, and go after a CB instead, rather than call Dortmund’s bluff right up until deadline day. But this comes down to poor organisation rather than stingy owners imo. We never spend the Glazer’s money anyway - we spend our own money.
I would rather he went abroad because couldn't stand seeing him in a City or Chelsea shirt next season