Campaign against Man City is not a ‘moral’ one; rival fans just want them to fail
Do those wanting Man City punished actually care if they are guilty? Plus, both sides of the Everton debate as the FFP topic dominates.
Send your views on this subject and any other – maybe England? – to theeditor@football365.com
Mailbox correction on City financial charges #37461296:
Another day, another correction.
Man City DID fail to cooperate with the UEFA enquiry and were fined for it, that is absolutely true. The context though that everybody conveniently ignores, is that City were perfectly cooperating with the CFCB investigation right up until that body leaked sensitive business information of Man City’s to the press, and then they stopped because UEFA couldn’t be trusted not to leak files to their mates that were supposed to be confidential (and indeed were of great interest to rival clubs chasing sponsorships).
This was even commented upon by CAS so feel free to use this point next time you’re all pretending that you read the judgement.
In regard to the PL case, City deny the failure to cooperate charge and it’s fair to say that according to the journalists covering them, they were pretty shocked this came up. They even commented on this in their initial statement.
It’s funny how Mailboxers rant on and on about how corrupt UEFA, the Big Four, the ECA, the PL and the rest are but when it comes to Man City apparently they’re all paragons of virtue and it’s not a stitch-up despite the 115 charges being conveniently released the day before the Independent Football Regulator vote, despite the fact that the press release was so rushed that they had to go back and edit it because they quoted the wrong regulations (which for a legal statement tells you a lot), despite the fact that UEFA attempted to break its own rules to charge City and were caught by CAS, despite the fact that City only failed FFP the first time around because UEFA DID change their rules 2 years into a 3 year Monitoring Period to disallow some exemptions, despite the fact that of the 5 actual allegations by the PL 2 of them are instantly dismissable and the other 3 have already being investigated and cleared by numerous courts.
People coping on the Etisalat deal don’t understand firstly how small that deal is and secondly how it will be clear like everything else was.
Do you know why City have 115 charges against them? Because they’re fishing. The PL spent 6 years investigating City’s accounts (with cooperation of City by the way) and came up with a bunch of easily dismissable stuff (“paying people off the books”, etc), a bunch of stuff other people have already investigated and which they have no new evidence of (sponsorship deals) and a vague charge which doesn’t really mean anything concrete and is subjectively judged (failing to cooperate).
If the PL ACTUALLY believed that they had the evidence to go against City then they’d have a small and watertight case, instead they’ve gone as wide as possible.
There were 28,000 documents submitted in the Everton case as evidence relating to a single charge. How many do you believe the PL will get for 115 charges? How much manpower do you think it would take to go through and cross reference it all?
This is all irrelevant any way to be honest, because not a single one of you actually cares about this case in the terms of its legal merits.
You’ve already judged City guilty so if YET AGAIN there are no financial irregularities found then it doesn’t matter to you because despite having no legal, accounting, marketing or football business experience then you all know better than every court in the land.
Stop pretending you’re on some moral crusade for truth and start acknowledging that you just want City to fail for other reasons and you’re hoping through ignorance that the financial irregularities that still remain completely unproven is the thing that will topple them because your clubs have no ability to compete on the pitch due to terrible mismanagement. Oh and the guys who were “there’s no smoke without fire”/”just because its not proven doesn’t mean its not true” the other day, please please please disqualify yourself from jury service because you’re a danger to society.
I’m sure this will result in some face saving deal for the PL who will hand down some massive and hilarious sentence docking 5 billion points
and stripping every title ever won ever which they know will be completely unenforceable and will be overturned about sixteen seconds into the appeals process. But they get their big PR win for a few months, City get dragged through the press as per usual and the fact that it all gets dismissed on appeal won’t matter a jot to people because everybody wins in that scenario apart from those of us who would prefer Governing bodies not to purposely attempt to stitch up people because they happen to be taking revenue away from clubs they’d prefer it to go to.
And no, you still don’t understand how the time barring thing worked.
Paul, Manchester
Man City are just the modern version
Lee made a comment about Liverpool spending within their means, maybe now and that is the issue with FFP it doesn’t go far enough back for when both Liverpool and Manchester united had unlimited footballing funds (for the day), to build what they are.
As for City the idea of them getting punished seems unlikely. The PL needs the current biggest club for the rating. Man City has the most views internationally for all the subscription sites, so the PL will just hurt themselves.
And like Barcelona a few years ago La Liga did nothing out of fear of them leaving, if city get punished and join La Liga (most likely league) the PL bosses just punish themselves and we know by now the people in charge care less about the fans than even the clubs do.
Will Reily
Why can’t we punish Man City retroactively?
As a Liverpool fan, I should be laughing at Everton’s punishment this week, but somehow I’m not.
It was fascinating to read the email from Holster about the way these rules have been imposed on lower-league teams, genuinely eye-opening, I had no idea that was going on. My thought is that two wrongs don’t make a right and this still seems wrong. Not least because the fine has been imposed mid-season, when it could have been held over for the start of next season, giving Everton time to appeal.
It seems the reason behind this is that teams should be punished in the season in which the offence occurred. This makes sense, but it also makes Man City’s lack of cooperation even more galling. They don’t have to be found innocent, just drag the process out long enough and they can continue to pile up trophies. There is an answer to that, retroactive punishment. Let’s see Everton’s honesty as a gain rather than as a worse punishment, and let’s see how City’s attitude changes when they face all their gains being wiped out.
For example, Man City’s offences apparently stretch back ten years, here’s the title winners for the those ten years (working backwards):
Man City
Man City
Man City
Liverpool
Man City
Man City
Chelsea
Leicester
Chelsea
Man City
Retroactively fine them 3 points per season, the list becomes:
Man City
Liverpool
Man City
Liverpool
Liverpool
Man City
Chelsea
Leicester
Chelsea
Liverpool
With a minor points fine, six titles becomes three. Make it the full 10 points and they lose another title which would go to Arsenal. And more, in two of those years City beat United and Arsenal to Champions’ League places by only goal difference in one case and only three points in the another. The chance to play in those tournaments can never be repeated, but the monetary gain City made could be taken from them and paid as compensation to the other clubs.
Suddenly, City’s intransigence doesn’t look so smart and maybe they’d start seeing the value of cooperation and it would vindicate Everton’s honest approach and encourage more honesty from clubs in the future.
The counter argument to this will be that as a Liverpool fan I’m biased because we stand to gain the most from this approach, but if we stand to gain the most from the correction, it’s because we lost the most from the offence.
Barry, LFC, Chippenham
Premier League are acting like cowards
I wanted to express my views on the FFP saga and the seemingly cowardly way the Premier League have dealt with it all. If Everton are guilty of breaching the rules, all well and good. To deduct them ten points in the mid-season, seems ludicrous. I think it would have been better to apply the deduction for next season, suspended if they get relegated to the Championship. Doing it now only causes Everton to cry foul, should they go down this season.
It is also poor form that the PL has not moved the case against Man City along. They may have the best manager, the wealth and the profile to be considered the primary product of the PL but they have a duty to be seen to be governing the sport fairly. This is clearly not the case.
One hundred and fifteen charges are a serious indictment and to not give this the attention that it requires seems cowardly or worse incompetent. Chelsea have also had suspicions raised by the press investigation into their finances. The Man City saga needs to be dealt with swiftly. If their administration cannot or will not put a defence together, that is their problem.
The longer the delay, the more the integrity of the sport will come into question. We have the best league in the world, so let us act like it.
Sterling Burke
Everton retorts
Mike, WHU has just shown once again that narrative truly can be misleading when you can’t think for yourself. Everton have one of the lowest net spends going. We’ve barely spent any money on players for a number of seasons.
We’re being hammered for trying to improve our Profit and Sustainability by building a new stadium- proving once again that FFP is a ring fence for the chosen few.
Some irony a West Fan piping up when they’ve been gifted a free stadium. If they were still at Upton Park it’s a fair shout that they’d be plying their trade in the Championship now.
All fans outside the ESL breakaway mob should be concerned that just 19.5m overspend resulted in a 10 point deduction. I can pretty much guarantee they’ll be coming after a few others soon enough.
Roll on Sunday when we show the Premier League exactly what we think of their corruption.
Ian, UTFT
…I rarely write back in to rebut anything in response to my letters but I couldn’t ignore this one.
Mike from WHU says it has to do with expenditures on players. Mike’s missed this one. While he’s correct that we’ve absolutely spunked a bucket load of money on players with nothing to show for it (well over 500M in the last six or seven years,) that isn’t the crux of the issue here. The issue is how we’re dealing with accounting in regards to the stadium and COVID. Accounting mate.
Not “spending too much on players.” Big big difference. And that’s exactly what our conversations with the league have been about for the last two years when this was brought to their attention. Did we try to hide it? Nope. Did we try to stall this with high powered lawyers? Nope. We probably made it too easy for the league to “fast track” the punishment.
You also won’t find ONE Evertonian who says we didn’t deserve some sort of penalty, regardless of whether or not our issues were intentional or not (they weren’t.) What EVERY Evertonian is saying is that the punishment surely doesn’t fit the crime. And it’s not just Evertonians saying this. I can promise you I’ve watched pundits from just about every channel your country has on offer and most if not all of them have said they don’t get the harshness of it.
I’ve head the word “excessive” used more times this past week than in the past five years. Evertonians are rightly angry with our current owner (an accountant…you couldn’t make it up !!) and our former chairman for getting us into this mess to begin with.
Go into administration? That’s a nine point deduction. Accounting differences between what we felt was right (according to accounting principles) and what the league felt was right? That’s ten points right there.
So Mike, no, we’re aren’t looking for sympathy from other supporters of other clubs. We got none after the infamous FA diving panel (which of all people, you should have been sympathetic as the only other player punished besides our Niasse was your Lanzini), we’ve got none after how much we’ve been jobbed by VAR over the last two years, and we’ll get none here. Don’t want your sympathy. But I do expect you to understand the differences here between “blowing too much money on players” and the issues we’ve brought up in terms of accounting. I know you don’t want to hear it but it’s the truth of the matter.
Today it’s Everton.
Tomorrow it’s _______________ ???
Hope it’s not your club.
TX Bill (You know what’s going to happen, we’ll appeal, they’ll deny it, and they’ll tack on another 2 points. Why, because Everton.) EFC
No sympathy for Everton
The defence of Everton by Everton management, the Mayor, supporters, pundits and commentators alike is eye-rollingly laughable. The club’s own statement is grounds for future comedy skits alone.
Think of the fans: As if they are kids they needed protecting or something. It may be fair, to a small extent, that they mismanaged the club in an attempt to ‘appease’ the fans desire for better. But let’s face it, Everton fans must be used to not winning much. Their only real claim to fame recently has been length of time in the top division and have only clung on to that by the skin of their teeth.
It’s too late – the transgression occurred in prior years – and if deductions should take place should have been then: Following on from the first point, they would definitely have been relegated in that case. I am sure the relegated clubs have thoughts on that. Think of their fans!
We’re not as big a club as, say, City or Chelsea, and they haven’t been done: True they haven’t been done yet. But that doesn’t negate your own ‘crime’. But it’s hilarious that after always hearing about Everton fans deserve more because they are a big club (see point about how long in top division) to now use not being a top club as an excuse for a smaller penalty.
It’s beyond all precedents – we’re being made a scapegoat: Well, in many other leagues teams have been relegated or fined far more. Granted it is a little hazy what the points system is based on exactly but it’s not beyond precedent. We can only lick our lips over what perennial cheaters like City snd Chelsea will hopefully get.
But it was Covid: This one really cracks me up, like no one else suffered through Covid. Besides, the PL gave everyone Sone dispensation for Covid by measuring over 4 years instead of the usual 3.
But it was the Russia/Ukraine war: How could we have known that using dodgy people to loan us money and invest in the club could have future consequences. Don’t think we need to dwell on this one.
The new stadium naming rights fell through (as a consequence of the previous excuse): Most same people would say that trying to include any funds from naming a stadium that isn’t yet built and was never going to be built during that time frame should have been considered to offset other funds spent anyway.
Ultimately Everton flew too close to the sun trying to compete for – reads notes: a consistent 8th place finish – as part of the grand plan. They have been woefully mismanaged for so long and had been warned on numerous times which blows away their excuse that they should be penalized less for cooperating. Continuing to bend the rules while being warned not to, is about as opposite to ‘cooperating’ one can get. Especially when their consultant accountants stated their job was to fund ways to ‘workaround’ the rules – even when being investigated.
It’s hard to feel sorry when clubs who try to gain advantages in whatever way other than running the club well.
Can’t wait for the clubs relegated over the last few years to start suing Everton.
But it has been comedy gold, so hoping this one runs for a while.
Paul McDevitt
Bring on the Euros
And so draws to a close the greatest Scoland qualification performance of my lifetime. We faded slightly at the end, but only after qualification was secured. 5 wins from the first 5 games was just phenomenal and the wins against Spain and Norway will live long in the memory.
I got into football just before Euro 96, so with that and the World Cup 98 it felt like major tournaments were just something that Scotland took part in. Little did I know I’d have 23 years to wait until we played at Euro 2020(21). Even then though, that didn’t quite feel ‘proper’. Maybe it was the way we qualified through the backdoor, the covid impact or the way the tournament was organised. We played 3 games, 2 of them at Hampden park and the other was at Wembley. This feels more real, with the prospect of tens of thousands of Scots following the team round Germany.
It also feels like a genuine chance to do something special. I’m not talking about winning it, but just getting out of the group. We hold the record for most Euros appearances without getting past the group stage. We hold the record for most World Cup appearances without getting past the group stage. It’s genuinely laughable that Scotland, with the players they had in the past, have never played a knockout match, but there we are. This team is not a patch on the players of the past, but it’s the best we’ve had for a long, long time and with the right draw, we might just do it.
If there are any concerns, the defence upon which our qualification was secured has looked flaky of late. One goal conceded in the 5 games of the campaign has turned into 14 goals conceded in our last 5 games. Albeit, those games did include England, Spain and France and only one of them was a match where anything was at stake. We’ve also had a raft of injuries and are not blessed with the deepest squad. Hopefully by the time the Euros come round, everyone is fit and ready to go.
Looking forward to December 2nd and seeing if the draw gods are kind to us and give us the chance to make some history.
Mike, LFC, London