This is funny. "I'm not wrong, unless you just pointed out why I'm wrong, in which case I agree!".
City and Financial Doping | Charged by PL with numerous FFP breaches
- Thread starter VanGaalEra
- Start date
Armstrong doped at a time when all cyclists doped.
City doped at a time when everybody else was spending their earned money.
No, the reason City are 'in trouble' is because of the cheating. Armstrong and City both signed up to the terms of the league, and both violated those terms. That's all that matters.
You can argue til you're blue in the face about the merits of the laws in the country you live in - hell you can even lobby to get them changed - but if you break them while they're in force, you get punished.
Pep's obsession with perfection makes a big difference.
In the 100 pt season, they won the league with a bunch of games to spare and the next thing Pep did was show them the best ever points tallies in the PL and challenge them to go to the top. I'll always remember that moment from their Amazon documentary. The drive Pep has is something else.
On the other hand, in the season Liverpool won the league, they were on track for well over 100 points. But once they won the league, they relaxed (like we've done in the past ourselves tbf) and dropped quite a few silly points and it's not like they were focussing on CL or the FA cup or anything iirc.
You mean apart from artificially inflating their value with fake sponsors, illegally paying managers under the table, and refusing to comply with an ongoing investigation, they're exactly the same as every other club?
I'm impressed that it only took seventeen minutes for your point to be proven accurate.
I'm starting to think you're just trolling in this thread. It's been pointed out to you many times why this opinion is wrong, but you still keep spouting it.
I don’t think net spend is a perfect measure either, but it’s one factor. If you want to pick actual spend then It’d and City are both tied on exactly £1.79bn apparently; obviously there’s an assumption there that the figures are correct:
I guess the problem with ‘earning’ the right to massively outspend your rivals is that you are obviously going to think that that is fair, because it directly benefits your own team. And in addition to that it’s a perpetual advantage (like the one you are annoyed at city for having). The Prem could play for another 80 years or whatever, and no team would ever be able to match Utd’s spending power. Again, I’m sure you are aware of that, and I’m sure you want exactly that to keep happening. So I think this is less a moral argument by you, and more a case of wanting to be perpetually the most dominant team in the league, with every avenue for other teams to catch up shut down by legislation. Of course you are going to want that!
Amd the end result of all that cheating is that they STILL cannot spend as much money as Utd can. That’s the astronomic advantage that I think a lot of Utd fans are used to operating under.
Ha ha, yeah that’s right, I’m sure they were all at it. My point was more about some teams being allowed to follow a certain path and others not!
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
No worries, sorry you didn’t get it.
You are comparing a club that operates in a legal manner (United) with one that constantly breaks the rules (City). Then you equate them both with doping, something that’s illegal.
There’s no sense to be found in your words.
Except that much of what they are accused of is cooking the books to make it look like they're not spending as much, while in reality spending considerably more, but with much of that spend being 'off the books' with regards to wages, agents fees etc. This is on top of the fake sponsors and such.
Honestly, you just have to try and it’s actually not too tough to understand. I specifically contrasted the fact that under current rules one set of spending was allowable and the other wasn’t.
And that may be true- I’ve never seen any evidence for it other than on opposition fan sites, but I guess it’s not possible to disprove, is it?
Me too.
You are fighting a losing battle here though your analogies are bit off , but your larger point is true . The whole concept of FFP is bunkum should not have never been introduced if some individual or even the state wants to prop up the Clubs let them fecking do it without forcing them to jump through the hoops .
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Again, I was talking about your analogy.
The point here isn't whether the Premier League's implementation or FFP is just, moral, good for sport, bad for sport, biased against the colour blue or whatever. Manchester City FC signed up the rules of the competition, which included FFP. They have allegedly broken those rules.
That's it. That's the point. It's right there.
As it happens I think the whole concept of a sporting league where the top team can literally spend 10x the bottom team is a joke, and shouldn't be taken seriously. But that has literally nothing to do with the City case.
Sorry pal but ‘it’s been pointed out why you are wrong’ is a ridiculous argument. You don’t have a monopoly on the truth, and you do have a vested interest in one outcome over another. As I’ve said before, if the direct result of City and Chelsea being punished is that Utd are perpetually the richest club in the land then fairness doesn’t come into it, it’s just about domination.
I’m aware that most on here will view through red tinted specs, I’m not hugely expecting to change the board’s mind!
Yep, quite obviously.
This is the issue that can't ever be solved in any sport unless it starts brand new with all teams together, and then as soon as some teams win things and others don't and the money starts getting split the same issue arises. I do think FFP by design helps this and shows a path to compete.
Look at United, the scale of the costs to modernise are staggering, versus clubs at the lower end of the table. If you are an owner coming in and want to invest, FFP allows you to pile unlimited money into training grounds, infra or youth development. So there's where you see your investment return - you can sell players, often pretty average players, for £30m plus these days and if you produce a top player it's not an exaggeration to be selling for £100m. Issue with City is they cheated, if they had not, they'd have won less but it's not like their academy isn't producing talent and I'd wager they'd still have won a fair amount but with a team playing guys like Palmer, Sancho, Lavia, Edozie, Bobb, Olise, Foden, Nmecha, Adarabioyo mixed in with big name signings. They would still very much be on the up and there would be nothing we could say against them apart from them being loaded.
Oh yeah just allow Nation states, Billionaires and unscrupulous businessmen to buy clubs, prop them up with money they could never generate on their own and then feck off when they get bored leaving the club in ruins. What could possibly go wrong?
The betting one is so funny. The LinkedIn profile with the default photo from google.
Indeed
Spending caps across the board, luxury tax, squad limits, placing funds unrelated to revenues in escrow, to protect the club from going under... Plenty of ways to make the sport better and tie success strictly to competence in youth development, coaching and shrewd transfer management. Imagine Brentford with a rich benefactor allowing it to challenge a United in the dark ages... There are a lot of clubs out there who could do way more if funded right, being blocked by old money.
But again, if you view football as this pristine virgin violated by Chelsea/City/PSG, then all of the above is nonsense and football is healed once City hypothetically get slammed back to League 2. And the rules are sacred.
Nah let's just allow the status quo go unchecked , and what exactly is the issue if somebody wants to burn their money on owning Football Club and making it successfull .
How many Clubs have been ruined when their Billionaire owners got bored can you give me some examples and didn't Clubs go bust before these pesky Billionaire owners came to town due to various reasons .
We can dress it up anyway we like it but most of the outrage stems from the fact that suddenly these no mark Clubs lacking in history as described regularly by big Clubs supporters became challenge and nuisance to their dominance . Why couldn't have they just stayed in their lane and known their place .
Actually the outrage for me stems from City literally cheating. Not just cheating, actually, but agreeing to the rules like every other club and then cheating.
And if you really need to have it explained why FFP was brought in then I suggest you look at how many clubs have gone into administration in the last 30 years, or how before FFP was introduced over half of the pro European teams were reporting financial losses.
I think the point is rather clear. The way Armstrong cheated and the way City have cheated are fundamentally different. Lets make the comparison more direct. Currently, there are no spending rules in pro cycling, you can spend whatever the sponsors give you. The big spenders are teams like Ineos, Team Visma and UAE. On the bottom of the list you find teams like EF Education, Cofidis, Arkea-Samsic. The difference from top to bottom is pretty big, we're probably talking about 4-5x the spending power. Generally, the success of the team is very correlated with spending, because you can afford the best riders (and equipment and such, of course, but the riders is the most important part).
Imagine that the UCI for some reason said that from this season, you're only ever allowed to spend up to your current budget. So, no matter how much money Cofidis could get their hands on, they wouldn't be able to spend as much as the top teams. They decide to cheat, and find a way to spend as much as Visma does. In so doing, they perform better than Visma.
They have broken the rules, because they spent more than they were allowed to, so they have cheated. As athletes, they competed on equal grounds. As teams, they had potential access to the same level of athletes, because they spent similar amounts of money.
This is, to me, fundamentally different than doping.
I mean, there were no rules in place for Chelsea's arrival on the scene and everyone loved them then. No reference made to the money they injected, since it was not against the rules.
Right, so back to reality
It seems like everyone misunderstood my Lance Armstrong point.
Ignore semantics for a moment. Cheating in any form, once there's enough public perception surrounding it, is difficult to shake off once you've gained that reputation. City could be found not guilty tomorrow (like in an alternate reality where Lance was cleared) but supporters from other clubs won't forget.
For some reason the City - sorry, IPSWICH supporting Nic decided to talk about how City are just doing what United have done for years. With the exception that United don't seem to have openly cheated the system.
The poster has been looking for bites for a long time.
I'll be honest, I missed how the whole Armstrong thing started.
It was certainly a wild ride, that's for sure!
Well except of course that City, whilst pretenting to spend similar on transfers to United have also done massive stadium, training and infrastructure upgrades. They’ve built an academy no none state owned club could ever dream of and thrown an incredible sum of money at it to turn it into a conveyor belt of players to sell for net spend.
United, in an attempt to even stay within light years of this nonsense, can’t even upgrade their training ground jacuzzi, let alone improve their stadium or the area around it, can’t fire a manager until he misses CL, dish out contracts to none deserving players to protect their value on the asset sheet, and their academy is at a fecking training ground they used in the 80’s
In attempting to keep up with the state’s spending, we now loan Weghorts, Amrabats & Reguillons.
Here’s City just doing what United do….
That's not a great argument.
The FFP stuff came in because clubs were spending beyond their means, going into administration etc, not to keep the likes of City in their lane. That's a story put about by City who are steamrolling the division and going for a second treble, while being lauded for it with a lot of the football media pretending they aren't totally corrupt, yet claim there's a conspiracy against them. It's absolute lunacy.
The danger of a sugar daddy owner is that they could get bored, overstretch themselves financially or get caught up in a geo-political situation. If the club is being kept in a false position due to money being pumped in then it could all fall apart fairly quickly once the owner walks away. I also included unscrupulous business men in that sentence btw. The point is that clubs need to be self-sustainable and run in a responsible manner. I don't know how you can suggest otherwise.
Also as the pigeon says City are cheating and blatantly lying about it. If City didn't cheat there wouldn't be much of a problem. Even now people are claiming they're self-sufficient and don't need to cheat 'anymore' because they have some real sponsorship deals but they're still being propped up by the likes of Etihad etc.
This is also absolute bollocks by the way, you already know that United very rarely outspend their rivals prior to Roman arriving, as you’ve seen the youtube video and been told literally hundreds of times.
We have spent like mad since City especially though in order to try and keep up, and at the cost of everything else with our infrastructure, whilst Spurs, Arsenal have new stadiums and training grounds, Liverpool have a new stand etc.
Despite this spending, all those teams have been gaining on United in the Deloitte table since SAF’s retirement and our inevitable downturn. Both Liverpool AND Spurs are now within touching distance, without state help.
I’ve said it before, the argument is fecking ridiculous, United, like Spurs and Liverpool are a football club, and their fortunes will often be shaped by periods of good and bad, this league has never been like Germany or Spain and we were always going to let the likes of Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal in post Fergie.
Take City away and a more successful Liverpool would have already surpassed us.
City’s fortune is shaped by nothing, they have a bottomless pit even if they are shite for 10 years, 20 years etc. We have a league in which football clubs must make good football decisions in order to be able to be able to pretend they can compete with an oil state football project.
City quite simply can outspend the most profitable club in the league, all whilst spending off the books. Without FFP, they’d obviously be even fecking worse. Messi would certainly have ended up there.
City can spend 10 fold of United, all whilst building new stands, infrastructure, and whilst having a wage bill the size of the rest of the league combined (a la PsG).
The only thing even making City pretend to follow the rules and rein it in is FFP.
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Are people just missing the most simple fact here: that the merits of FFP don't matter? Go to the FFP thread.
This is the 'City signed up to rules then broke them, then hid the evidence, then refused to cooperate with investigations, and now are lobbying the government by promising to buy weapons of war if they'll just leave them alone' thread.
This is the 'City signed up to rules then broke them, then hid the evidence, then refused to cooperate with investigations, and now are lobbying the government by promising to buy weapons of war if they'll just leave them alone' thread.
Pidgey in before me.
Excellent point, and it begs the question why so many who claim to have the sport's best interests in mind (when speaking about City) ignore this massive flaw in the rules (the answer is obvious; they didn't care until their clubs were disadvantaged). In a world without rule-breaking, you've basically entrenched a hierarchy of clubs, capped by their revenues. Because you can't build a stadium overnight or organically sell noodles to billions in Asia; and you being competent on and off the pitch won't move the needle against big sides with entrenched financial advantages.
Which is why it's either you're upset that stupid rules were broken, or non-plussed at stupid rules being broken, and there's not much ground for compromise there.