The problem is that where the money comes from is not the only problem, it's how money in general is the biggest factor in the game.
Champions league Semi Finals 2020-21 - April 27-28 and May 4-5
- Thread starter roonster09
- Start date
It’s going to be city isn’t it? Still only their first and It won’t be easy getting number two.
It's a global entertainment business, money was always going to become a bigger factor as more and more eyes were on it. Plus it kind of just the way of the world now. It's wealth obsessed.
I don’t really care what biased opposition fans say to be honest. People don’t like Utd because we were successful despite the fact we did it the right way through respectable values. It was never really about the money, that just came from our success. I don’t disagree in rival investment, but when clearly corrupt money elevates teams above decades worth of sporting merit that’s a real problem. Teams have shown over the years you don’t need that stupid amount of money to compete. The likes of Arsenal, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leicester etc have all done well without the need for state funding. In now way have the made the game better for anyone expect a small pool of club fans.
No, but I don't agree that just because we got our money through normal business means it's ok, and a good thing for football.
If City dont win this year they never will, rather City then Chelsea, I have no love for RM but hope they win it, cant be doing with the smug City fans.What a shit CL season where Chelsea seem like the best alternative
But it's not happening. It's City's year.
Dont give a toss about the money.
I bet city fans say the same about us.
Funny how things turn around when you're not the main ones benefitting from the big spending.
Yes but this has been in a lot of people's eyes as the main problem. City, Chelsea, and PSG are just the natural progression of it.
Eh? So you’d rather the owners keep it? I don’t think we have really outspent similar clubs across Europe with similar stature to us historically (at least not by a lot).
Sir Alex spent under £547 million on 99 players and he went on to win these major trophies : 13X Premier League Titles.. 5X FA Cups.. 4X League Cups.. 2X Champions Leagues, 1X European Cup Winners' Cup... plus these non-major trophies : 1X Intercontinental Cup.. 1X Club World Cup.. 1X UEFA Super Cup.. 10X Charity Shields/Community Shields.. 
I don't really care what they do with the money.
The similar stature part isn't really important. Stature shouldn't mean you have such a massive advantage over smaller teams. Money either rules football or it doesn't.
How does that compare to the other teams at the time?Sir Alex spent under £547 million on 99 players and he went on to win these major trophies : 13X Premier League Titles.. 5X FA Cups.. 4X League Cups.. 2X Champions Leagues, 1X European Cup Winners' Cup... plus these non-major trophies : 1X Intercontinental Cup.. 1X Club World Cup.. 1X UEFA Super Cup.. 10X Charity Shields/Community Shields..
In my memory (and obviously that could be wrong) it was always Utd who could consistently outspend their rivals. I’m talking over, say, a 5 year period. I know that Newcastle and Blackburn had short spells where they may have outspent you but I’m fairly sure if you looked at your spending on transfers & wages between say 1993 and 2003 you’d be comfortably ahead of everyone else. What’s difficult is is actually proving whether I’m right or wrong, does anyone have any details of those wage bills and transfer spends in the first decade of the Premiership?
Thanks for cheering me up!Sir Alex spent under £547 million on 99 players and he went on to win these major trophies : 13X Premier League Titles.. 5X FA Cups.. 4X League Cups.. 2X Champions Leagues, 1X European Cup Winners' Cup... plus these non-major trophies : 1X Intercontinental Cup.. 1X Club World Cup.. 1X UEFA Super Cup.. 10X Charity Shields/Community Shields..
You clearly can’t see a difference in legitimate money and corruption fuelled cash. Unfortunately most other fans will agree with you purely due to how much they hate Utd and like to see anyone else on top.
That is true, however their team is not build on star players (aka PSG). They have an expensive squad but hardly world class level. Team that beat PSG - Ederson, Mahrez, Walker, Zinchenko, Dias, Silva, Foden - hardly players that everybody in the market wanted. de Bruyne and Gundogan are their only world class players, with Sterling dropping form and Aguero injured. Surely some credit has to go to Pep for that, especially for making them so good defensively.
Their journey to the top has been fueled by oil money, nobody denies it. To be honest I'd be angry like some people on here if we were spending like last years under Fergie ("no value in the market"), but since we've been amongst top spenders recently, I don't see this as an excuse.
You got it. We were the best supported team in the land even through the Dippers years of dominance, go figure.
And Ferdinand, adjusted for inflation, would cost over £150m now, one of the most expensive transfers of all-time.
There is a difference, I said there was.
The problem is you have your head in the sand about the problems with the huge amounts of money in football we have benefitted from.
This corrupted money in football is just a natural progression of the way which money has dominated football, which we have benefitted from.
If Real get to the final, I don't see them losing.
Ruben Dias ?
he could be our new Cantona'...fantastic player who wears his heart on his sleeve
PSG are finished, I can see a clear out of their top players & Manager
We were never the biggest spenders in the league. In the early years Villa, Blackburn, Leeds and Liverpool all spent more than us. Even City a good few years before they went down. Then Newcastle and Arsenal before Chelsea and then City took over.
I think there have been 4 seasons since the PL began where we had the biggest transfer window, but at no point in the last 30 years have we been the biggest overall spenders in the league.
Don't let a few big signings fool you. What Chelsea and then City have done has eclipsed anything we ever spent. That's before you take into account how the funds we used were raised.
The big boys competition. Fair play to City playing some lovely stuff. This is what Pep and City have been building up to the last few years.. all the hard work.
So it took 1 Billion and I don't know how many years for Pep to get City to a CL final!
Best you go and research that yourself..
Is he? Was he world class when they got him? Genuine question. I thought there was a discussion that we went for Lindelof instead of him for whatever reason.
I think the answer is that it's a very large amount.
That’s not it at all, it’s not about preventing competition, it’s the opposite. If that were true then why did United fans campaign (and win) against the BSkyB takeover in 1997?
The problem is, nobody likes “Man Yoo” because we were successful for so long. I get it. It must have been incredibly tiresome to watch and hear about constantly. Especially because winners are usually, by definition, bad losers.
However, don’t let that blind you to what we (the Utd fans) are saying. We campaigned against the BSkyB takeover because it was bad for football. We campaigned against the Glazer takeover (and continue to do so) for broadly the same reason, although admittedly now unlike with the BSkyB takeover these owners hurt us rather than help us.
Problem 1 - When oil barons buy up football clubs and pump them full of dirty money it turns fans off football. As another poster said, this is only the start. “City” will continue to spend and build relentlessly and we could see a situation where they win two or more trophies every year. The issue is, apart from 40,000 “City” fans, nobody is interested. People respond with apathy. We are already bored. There’s no sporting merit. It’s not just “City” to be fair, who really wants to see three of the final four CL spots taken up by PSG, Chelsea and City? For the neutral (and for the good of the game) far better it was Barcelona/Real, Manchester Utd/Liverpool, AC Milan/Juventus, Bayern/Dortmund...real football teams, who have grown organically, with global fanbases
Problem 2 - You allude to this at the end of your post. The ESL is a direct response to the rudderless FFP rules failing to curtail the oil clubs. Yes, the likes of Utd, Liverpool and Real wanted to boost their revenues but the other key driver was to introduce much stricter FFP rules as a condition for playing in the ESL. This is why City, Chelsea and PSG were all so torn. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Join and have their spending heavily curtailed and struggle in an “elite” league. Don’t join and see their revenues fall dramatically behind. This hasn’t been focused on much at all by the press but is a key part of the problem. It the FAs/UEFA can’t or won’t do something about these clubs, the “establishment” will be forced to take matters into their own hands. Again, this would be a disaster for the game as a whole.
I'd say he is right now but not when they got him.
£30 Million in 2002 would be worth approximately just over £50 Million..
https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/2002?amount=30000000
Exactly. I don't know what is the general football world opinion now about City individuals, but I'm pretty sure most of them were not considered world class when City bought them. De Bruyne and Gundogan are the exceptions, as I mentioned before. Fairly modest for CL finalists, Premier League winners and League Cup champions.
So in other words preserve the status quo and don't dare challenge them, or for want of a better phrase something similar to the ESL proposals.
Also funny you mention Bayern, pre 1960 they had a mere two major honours (for perspective that is half as many as WHU currently while we had more in the decade pre Roman alone), so did they make a deadline that others missed? Why was it all right to challenge the status quo in 1960 but not the 00s?
Clearly from your timeline graph it is.
The last 10 years of his career we were the 2nd highest spenders behind Chelsea obviously.
doubt you went for Lindelof instead of Dias, not sure Dias had made his debut for Benfica when you signed Lindelof.
Dias wasn't classed as WC when he signed for City, in some area's he was marked and another expensive flop in the making.
The last 10 years spending really kicked in, but really dropped at the end with the new owners cutting back.
Before that though spending was really low. Money just became more and more important.
Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Although I don’t fully agree it’s a logical and well thought out answer, and I’d be lying if I said I knew much about the Sky takeover, or about the financial constraints of the new ESL, about which I’d heard nothing, which certainly supports your point.
It’s at best very convenient though, that a central consequence of getting rid of the factors in football that fans on here claim to have a purely ethical problem with, would be that Man Utd would return to being by some distance the richest club in the league. Which would likely mean getting the best players, winning the biggest trophies. You must agree that in the back of every Utd fans mind they know that that would be the likely outcome.
I’m sure I could google it but what exactly was the problem with the Sky takeover, and was it fan power that stopped it happening?
Not sure what you mean by last 10 years. The 01 year period from 92-2002/03 was broken into 2 5 year periods.
There was also a thread on transfer spend instead of just net spend. That also showed how we weren't the biggest spenders.
F365 gave year wise breakdown too.