Ok everyone. I’ve found what Pep means when he described $hitty as legends:
From The Guardian: What seemed [most striking about hacked emails published by Der Spiegel in November 2018] was the contempt with which various City executives spoke of Uefa: the joking comment allegedly made by City’s lawyer, Simon Cliff, when a member of Uefa’s investigatory chamber died, “one down, six to go”, and the claim the club chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, had told the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, that City would rather “sue for the next 10 years” than pay another fine. City have neither denied the veracity of the emails nor apologised for them, preferring to point out they were illegally obtained.
This was from Jonathan Wilson when $hitty were handed a two-year ban - which of course got overturned a few months later.
Anyone subscribe to independent.ie? I read the headline and the caption next to the photo, but the article is behind paywall.
Caption to the photo is
‘A classless club run by classless people’: Txiki Begiristain, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Ferran Soriano and Pep Guardiola, manager of Manchester City, celebrate with the Premier League trophy.
Every Man Cheaty PL title record must be followed by a proper asterisk as @NZred has said.
“PL Champions 2021-22 * after violating multiple FFP rules over the past 7 years.”
In the meantime, someone please forward this to Mr. Guardiola. We are in your head Pep, and you’ll one day wake up to Chelsea-like bad news…Your club’s dirty tricks will come to an end.
Enjoy the program this coming weekend!
Said this a couple of times, Liverpool make narratives, they buy them. Their little comeback is being pushed but no one really cares. If they had lost it in the last minutes then yes it would have been a narrative.
Football crowds are nothing if not a hived mind collection of automatons who do the thing they saw on the telly. It sounds stupid, but they did it because the other lot did it.
I was actually really angry with our coverage of it that was bending over themselves to not say anything about it being out of order.
I think this is the sad thing. Them inexplicably getting themselves into a situation like that, being kept out by a reserve keeper (the keeper didnt really have to be outstanding, but that would have been the narrative) and then pulling it back all in the space of about 5 minutes is remarkable. It SHOULD matter. But it really doesnt. When you’ve stacked the deck so far in your favour then these things don’t matter.
10 mins into their pitch invasion, after experiencing something that SHOULD have been their Istanbul, they were singing the Gerrard song. Do they have a song about any single one of their players (I bet they have one already for Haaland).
It’s up to the authorities to check them. Der Spiegel are onto them, the British press have generally been fawning lapdogs. The relevant football authorities, with the CAS, have so far not managed to do anything to rein them in.
I half wonder if it is going to require government agency. Abu Dhabi appear to have bought and paid for enough influence in the corridors of power in the game, that even if someone wants to take them on, they know it is probably a forlorn hope that they would win, given the chairman’s comments about spending millions on the best lawyers in order to prevail in any legal action.
HMRC would not be dissuaded by that, but are the ‘crimes’ enough to warrant decisive government action? Im not talking about some sort of slap on the wrist.
There’s a natural tendency we have as human beings to want justice. We all know that what they are doing is wrong, but sadly I’m not seeing them getting their comeuppance any time soon.
what an end of season brawl.