We are the 7th best club in the PL this year and probably won’t be playing CL football next year.
Agree that it’s probably a freak season but Mbappe was only coming if we won/challenge for the league and champions league.
The drop off in the last 12 months has undone all of the hard work that won’t before it in my opinion.
For me the 6 clubs have to be punished. You can only punish them by deducting points because that’s all that matters to these clubs. Just embaressed and angry we are part of the 6.
My logic is simple - it’s what I’d be calling for if we weren’t involved so it’s only right that the punishment be the same when we were involved
I don’t think it has undone all the hard work, I know “the sky is falling in” is a popular narrative but I take this season as it is.
City lost one of their CBS the season before and took a year of adjusting and would have fallen further off if we hadn’t won the title with 7 games to go.
I expected all things going well we would make top 4 and probably second.
Things haven’t, you’ve missed Hendo, VVD, Gomez and Alisson for large parts of the season, you’ve been playing two players who weren’t even in Klopp’s plans at centre back and had to play two midfielders for other parts of the season and then the team has just gone toothless upfront, that’s my major concern and where we need to improve.
However with all those players in the side I’d expect we’d be up there. The rest between games May help us and we don’t need to go hell for leather if we made one of the two other European competitions.
The 6th CL and the 19th title will never be taken from us, Klopp has also been very good at getting us top 4. I just can’t see how any manager could have coped with the injuries he has had.
Pep couldn’t cope with one defender missing.
In my view I’ve not heard any talk of Man Utd being punished for Sunday so if we go by that then bugger any further punishment.
Because the league didn’t go ahead none of the teams actually broke any rules. Its not against the rules to explore and get behind projects. It’s against the rules to take part in a competition that hasn’t been cleared by the league in advance. Not sure how a points deduction could ever be implemented. And yet again I struggle with the morale outrage. If UEFA had done it most of the people up in arms about it would be fine about it.
Their new system for awarding teams with enough coefficient points who don’t qualify through league placing has bypassed the ‘earn it’ and ‘sporting integrity’ speed hump and gone straight to begin…
The definition of “Earn It” is constantly changing. I had a Utd fan spitting feathers saying, completely unironically, that had they not earned qualification for the 99 tournament their eventual win wouldnt have meant anything. Ignoring the odd take that winning a premier competition is NOT earning it, they only qualified for that year’s tournament because of a then relatively recent change in the qualification rules.
But if UEFA do it apparently its fine. But if the exact same thing gets done by someone other than UEFA its diabolical and unforgivable and fans want their own teams docked points just for having the temerity to be involved.
Honestly, the ESL may have been the best thing for UEFA because some of the obnoxiousness of the new format has been completely swept under the carpet.
UEFA’s new system was introduced in part because they wanted to appease top clubs who were vying for such an arrangement although obviously it wasn’t enough to prevent the ESL.
That said, this new provision is a crock of shit as well. In fact their new “Swiss model” system needs to be scrapped. Fans should unite against it just as they did with the ESL. But seeing as that it is being introduced by UEFA and everyone has grown accustomed for the game to be fucked over by its own authorities, nothing will happen.
As fans we talk very little about football associations and the reform they need though I doubt many are of the opinion that UEFA, FA … don’t need reforming. Even so it’s another debate. (perhaps we could start a thread pooling our grudges and solutions?)
The issue is/was a small number of club owners deciding they know better and need greater control mainly for greed, the embarrassing thing was the owners of our club put us in it and apparently without consulting anyone who knows anything about football or the club!
The fact that the PL and the FA are considering introducing new rules to punish teams involved in something similar in the future is a fairly good indication that they cannot be punished under any current iteration of the rules.
I think the fact it never happened will probably mean we won’t see any punishments, I think the bullshit from City and Chelsea that they were just exploring it was an attempt,
As for the UEFA thing it’s slightly different from 12 clubs just doing it forever, some very shit clubs that wouldn’t get near the top of the co-efficient in the twelve
I don’t think that’s true, and I think the greed angle is a much too simplistic take on the situation.
There we 12 clubs and they all had different reasons to get involved.
I don’t think John Henry was balls deep in this because ‘greed’. I think for him it’s more about controlling costs and certainty over income.
That’s the big problem in England. Six clubs all carrying the kinds of wages bills and costs that need CL participation. Six rabid, hysterical fanbases demanding more money spent. Four places. From a financial planning point of view, it doesn’t make sense.
The unstated reality is that CL money has created a destabilizing effect in European football and any approach taken to distribute it creates a competitive imbalance on some level. The only way to avoid this is for 100% equal distribution among the whole of the confederation in a way that ignores participation and success.
