He’s not any PM though. Lots of evidence of his close ties with them as Mayor. If he’d stopped when he said he can’t intervene, that would have been what any PM does. But he went on to intervene/influence with his words
I think this is naïve but hope you’re right
Well said Linda.
I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed with Jurgen. Those cheating cunts cost him so much, his defining work if you like. I feel he has the right to be much more vocal in condemning them. I also thought he might have said more about the refereeing of our games once he left but never mind, I think a lot of that will come out in the wash.
I think JK is the ultimate sportsman. All that matters is what happens on the pitch, and it has to be done fairly. A lot of the fans are the same to be fair, many wouldn’t take part in the demo’s against Hicks and Gillett or the ticket price rises. Only interested in what happens in the 90 minutes.
I know one thing though, if the boot was on the other foot those bastards would be shouting it from the rooftops and the fucking bald hypocrite would be centre-stage.
Granted, but I think any Prime Minister would be under immense pressure on the matter. This isn’t Burnham weighing in on a football issue. It stopped being a football issue when The Premier League allowed a nation state to buy a football club.
The Premier League are now in the position where they have to consider their product. If there is any sense that City have escaped with no or a minor punishment that will destroy any credibility the league has and cost billions in revenue in the long term.
They could not have been any strong in how the scale of the cheating was described.
I’m not exaggerating, but I really think this could unravel the whole show.
This is essential reading to understand how tangled a web there is
An important unstated element of Chakraborthy’s piece though is the funding void the UAE stepped into. This was peak austerity with local government funding being really difficult to fund.
Yeah exactly, this is where I’m at. I don’t see how there can be any satisfactory resolution given the scale of the fraud and the geopolitical dimension.
Maybe the whole PL house needs burnt down and from the rubble they can built something more authentic for the fans. Now that is naive!
How about a “Football League” with divisions based on sporting achievement, where clubs both big and small get a share of the revenue.
Radical … but it might just work !
Thinging about this the last couple of days, The Premier League is 35 odd years old. The current Man City owners have been at the club for 18 years, 10 of which they have been found guilty of cheating in such a scale that no sport has ever seen ever before - that is just under 30% of the leagues erxistence is now brought into question as to the genuine nature of if the competition has been legitimate.
There is still another 8 years that has not yet been investigated, but does anyone honestly believe that after 10 years of cheating, they would suddenly stop? Which then means 18 of the 35 years of the Premier League are potentially questionable, that is half of the leagues history!
So if half of the leaguesd history is questionable, can the Premier League itself actually survive?
Should we maybe start asking the question about burning both City and the league to the ground and start all over again?
The PL needs to take stock of where it it and what has led to that. There’s 17 years where city have either cheated or continued to succeed as a result of that cheating. Yes it’s 50% of the PLs lifespan but even during that cheating there have been fantastic results from other clubs, seasons where cheating didn’t win, seasons where some clubs have achieved more than expected and then cemented themselves as legitimate PL teams.
Stamp out cheating/corruption etc and the PL can be seen as the best and most competitive in the world, if they don’t take this opportunity to do that then this could end up being the point when the whole thing should be dismantled.
When Kenyon first got to Chelsea he made a big deal of his objective being to use the money Roman was pumping into Chelsea to establish them as a legitimate powerful business that can self sustain the same level of economic dominance that the then present Roman fueled version had. It’s that sort of “acceleration” framing everyone keeps using. If that was what City were doing then yes you can imagine they would throttle this back over time as the multi time prem winning side would have built up the legitimacy to economically compete with only what it legitimate brings in.
Does anyone see any evidence of that in these docs? If anything the scale of it increased over time. Factor in their position appears to be that they did nothing wrong then why would anyone believe they suddenly stopped in 2018?
Every bit of Pep’s legacy there is just as tainted by this as Mancini’s and Pellegrini’s
John Henry starting to sweat that all of a sudden we owe our sides 10s of millions in additional bonus payments
From what I remember in some of the seasons we paid out the win bonuses even when we didnt win anyway didn’t we - or was that just as runner up in the CL?
No need to sweat as city will be paying it
Show me Stevie dancing half-drunk with Klopp on an open-top bus parade with three PL trophies by their side and I’m chipping in to pay the lads their bonuses!
Sums it up very succinctly. Well done. Please note, Mr Burnham.
If anything , it makes me respect Jurgen more.
City stole that moment from him. Having it been given retrospectively does jackshit.
Henry would just ass another 200m to the eventual asking rate in the City lawsuit
I do think Chelsea should be coerced to vote for expulsion of City. The reality is that there’s a huge element of Saudi investment in clearlake capital.
The geopolitical equation between UAE and Saudi isn’t the best right now. So rub it in , divide and conquer.
We can then look at the Saudi clubs later.
Except set the historical record straight. Let’s not underestimate the importance of that.