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Man City to sue PL

FrenchDarrenBent said:
This will all end with City being stripped of their last 4 championships.
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I’d celebrate long and hard if that happened. But don’t give the titles to the runner ups…. Leave them forever with a * as a lasting reminder of City’s despicable cheating and ownership.
 
sd_1992 said:
Every club that has won the league in the last 20 years other than leiscester have bought the league.

Seems like it is only a problem when city do it. And they aren’t even the biggest spenders.
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Unless you count the off the book payments
 
the golden visionary said:
What's your band called? Are you based in merseybeat territory?

Love a bit of dogma.
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From '69 to '87 the bands I was in were Liverpool based.

Moved to Norwich on promotion in 1987, so the bands I was in after that were based there. Here's a track from the CD I mentioned. The first 20 seconds are a bit of studio trickery.


Mods: Apologies for going off-topic - just answering a question...
 

ForeverBlue92 said:
Good for them.

Hopefully they win and it allows clubs owners to sponsor themselves with inflated figures.

Might finally result in the cartel having to change FFP to a system not based on revenue which only benefits the status quo.
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Instead, if City win, it will be based on who is run by an unregulatable nation state. In other words, it's City v Newcastle for the title forever.
 
carolinablue232 said:
I guess when you’re not used to rules, anything would seem discriminatory…Or they just know they’re about to have the book thrown at them and they’re doing this as a preemptive defense mechanism.
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Oh, they're used to rules. Their rules.
 

I mean just the thought of a league allowing clubs to essentially fake sponsorship deals in order to invest unlimited money is insanity.

If City win this it guarantees them success for decades to come. Our new stadium will count for nothing and any faint hope of a decent new owner arriving and increasing our chances of success is finished.

City and Newcastle will have unlimited money to dominate the league and cups every season, and Europe doesn't matter for us anyway as we're nowhere near and even if we snook in in the future you'd have to come across one of them anyway, so European success is also off the cards.

Liverpool would end up state owned in a matter of seasons, and that's the top three spots and domestic cups locked out forever.

It'll make it very easy to walk away from Everton and football once and for all.

The one positive is that the Premier League's rules can be changed by 14 teams voting in favour of a proposal - and there are definitely more than 14 extremely anti-City clubs in the league right now.
 
Football has always allowed unlimited spending, it's only changed very recently. I don't agree with faking sponsorship deals but I don't see why clubs can't spend whatever they like on players if they can afford it.
 
Hypocritical Man City’s only goal was sportswashing but league let them in
Panicking powerbrokers now realise the scale of their error – unless these cuckoo owners are expelled from the nest, English football’s whole ecosystem faces collapse

Matthew Syed
Wednesday June 05 2024, 8.00pm, The Times

Did they suppose the document would never leak? Did they not count on the brilliant investigative reporters at Times Sport, the best in the business? Did they hope that their perversion of the words of John Stuart Mill, in his wonderful tome On Liberty, would never see the light of day? Or do they no longer care about how they look, knowing that a proportion of Manchester City fans will take to social media to defend the indefensible, turning tribal allegiance into an advanced form of cognitive dissonance?

“The tyranny of the majority” is the breathtaking claim of City. They argue that their freedom to make money has been limited by the Premier League’s rules on sponsorship deals, which forbid related companies (such as Etihad Airways sponsoring a team backed by Abu Dhabi) from offering cash above the commercial rate determined by an independent assessor. They say they are being persecuted, held back by a cartel of legacy clubs that want to monopolise success at their expense.

I am guessing that all fans will see through this comedy gold. City have won the past four Premier League titles and more than 57 per cent of the available domestic trophies over the past seven years. According to my former colleague Tony Evans, this makes them the most dominant side in top-flight history: more dominant than Liverpool in the Seventies and Eighties (41 per cent), more dominant than Manchester United in the Nineties (33 per cent).

Indeed, they are almost as dominant as the emirate of Abu Dhabi, which understands the concept of tyranny quite well having engaged in human rights abuses of a kind that led Amnesty International to question its treatment of immigrant workers and to condemn the arbitrary detention of 26 prisoners of conscience.

But dominance is, as Einstein might have said, a relative term. City want more money than they have at present, more dominance than they enjoy now, more freedom to spend on players (their bench is worth more than the first teams of most of their rivals) so that they can win, what, 40 league titles in a row? That would indeed turn the Premier League from what many regard as a fairly enjoyable competition into a tyranny of the minority.

And this is why the story revealed by my colleague Matt Lawton will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of all but the most biased of observers. The motive of City’s owners is not principally about football, the Premier League or, indeed, Manchester. As many warned from the outset, this was always a scheme of sportswashing, a strategy of furthering the interests of a microstate in the Middle East. It is in effect leveraging the soft power of football, its cultural cachet, to launder its reputation. This is why it is furious about quaint rules on spending limits thwarting the kind of power that, back home, is untrammelled.

And let us be clear about what all this means. An emirate, whose government is autocratic and therefore not subject to the full rule of law, is paying for a squad of eye-wateringly expensive lawyers to pursue a case in British courts that directly violates British interests. For whatever one thinks about what the Premier League has become, there is no doubt that its success has benefited the UK, not just in terms of the estimated contribution to the economy of ÂŁ8billion in 2021-22, but also through a tax contribution of ÂŁ4.2billion and thousands of jobs.

Yet what would happen if the spending taps were allowed to be turned full tilt by removing restraints related to “associated partners”? That’s right: what remains of competitive balance would be destroyed, decimating the league’s prestige and appeal.

Remember a few years ago when leaked emails showed that Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the City chairman, “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years”. Isn’t it funny that such people love the rule of law abroad — seeing it as a vehicle for outspending counterparties on expensive litigation — almost as much as they fear it at home? It’s as though City have ditched any pretence to care about anything except the geopolitical interests of their owners. What’s certain is that the Premier League can no longer cope with multiple City lawsuits and has had to hire outside help. In this case, as in so many others, the rule of law is morphing into something quite different: the rule of lawyers.

In some ways you almost feel like saying to football’s now panicking powerbrokers: it serves you right. These people welcomed Roman Abramovich, then stood wide-eyed while state actors entered the game too. They surely cannot be too surprised that the logical endpoint for this greed and connivance is that the blue-ribband event of English football is now fighting for its survival. When you sup with Mephistopheles, you can’t complain when the old fella returns to claim his side of the bargain.

But the dominant sense today is the shameless hypocrisy of the owners of City. They said that they were investing in City because they cared about regenerating the area. They now say that unless they get their own way, they are likely to stop community funding. They said that the commercial deals were within the rules; they now say that the rules are illegal. They said that competitive balance was important for English football; they now want to destroy it. They said they were happy with the democratic ethos of Premier League decision-making; now they hilariously say it’s oppressive.

I suspect at least some City fans are uncomfortable with this brazenness and may even be belatedly reassessing the true motives of the club’s owners. What’s now clear is that cuckoos have been let into the Premier League nest. Unless they are properly confronted or ejected, they could now threaten the whole ecosystem of English football.
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Ultimately Man City are the monster the PL created
 

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