Manchester City* - 130 charges (and counting...)

How many fucking ts can a word use?

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The report says that the football league are still investigating them but can’t disclose what… you never know.

As if any accountant, forensically trained or not, wouldn’t notice that in the payroll records :roll_eyes:

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IMO it wont be FIFA, UEFA or the FA that bring Man City down,

it’ll be HMRC,

just like they brought Glasgow Rangers down

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I think that was the insinuation, the reason why the domestic investigation was considered by many insiders as more a liability because, if the Der Spiegel reports were true, it would have required fabrication of tax records to pass the EPL’s rules.

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This isn’t news though or at least shouldn’t be to anyone here. I’ve mentioned the PL investigation several times.

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Those cunts will skate it again , while crying ‘fake news!’. Seriously , how does it take three years (and counting) to investigate something like this ?

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Ye but it’s great that it’s being kept in the public domain.

We need news outlets to keep this story alive

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It’s never really the UK outlets doing the spadework though, tellingly. The German media are always at the vanguard and you can only assume that they are correct in thinking that their German readership care more about the cheating going on in football even when it’s not their league.

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City have been doing all they can to disrupt and obstruct it.

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City have made numerous attempts to claim that any publication of details of the ongoing investigation prior to a final determination prejudices them and demonstrates that the process is compromised. They did it with UEFA too.

How much of what has just been published is new though? From what I can tell most, if not all, was already part of the UEFA enquiry.

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As @anon59854308 pointed out earlier, all these stories will amount to nothing until HMRC decide to take action.

Or MI5/6

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Can’t see that happening with Saudi Arabia buying all our guns.

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and selling the oil/gas :man_shrugging:

The HMRC thing might be an astute observation.

So far what Man City have demonstrated is they are rich, and will throw their money and weight around to achieve their aims, even if they cheat. And what the governing bodies in the game have demonstrated is that they cannot hold them to account and enforce their rules. They allowed them to time bar it all, and then we all collectively vomited as the CAS panel was infiltrated with a Man City placement.

All this is to say that the game doesn’t look capable of policing this sort of thing.

It will need government. And HMRC might well be the way it happens. Still, with regard to government and its ability to step in when something is egregiously wrong, consider Abramovich. He was at Chelsea for 20 years and everyone knew the score. It was only after Russia invaded Ukraine that they acted. And even then, Abramovich had already decided to sell as he had other fish to fry for his Master Putin.

The UK government essentially took action after the fact, once the course and outcome was already set. Which is to say, with regard to waiting for them to hold Man City to account, I hope they do, but I’m not holding my breath.

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I think this is more an issue of Der Spiegel’s strengths than the British media’s failures. I could be wrong, but as someone who doesnt read the paper all I know of them is a reputation for really great investigative journalism. The extent the british press can do these stories is to buy Sam a pint of wine and get him to brag about unethical things that arent technically illegal and report it as a scoop. Der Spiegel seems to have a history of Woodwood and Bernstein type investigations.

I think where the British press fail is in not reporting on city in the context of the CAS finding…a club who bought their way tot he top via cheating and are only allowed not get away with it on a technicality, by a ruling considered way out of bounds by most experts.

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Doesn’t the Guardian regularly do good investigations of that nature too? It’s about the only interesting strength of theirs, apart from their entertaining football minute-by-minute features…

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Yes, they’re part of the same investigative group of journalists as der spiegel.

Really good investigative work, if you exclude Cadwalladr.

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Worth pointing out that HMRC also have an open investigation into City that’s related to the FFP issues. You see, City would have had to declare their accounts accurate which they cannot have done truthfully if they aligned with what they presented to UEFA (which they would have to have been).

There are people at City who must be concerned about jail time right now. If that happens it’s inconceivable that the PL could downplay that.

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Here’s hoping!

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