Man City Receive Two Year Champions League Ban

[Harry]

6 hours ago, Stan said:

I don't get where this sympathy lies or derivates though. They've broken the rules and been aptly punished. 

I think there's a collective desire to see them punished because of what they stand for. However to me they are a symptom. The cause is an established hierarchy of big clubs with entrenched wealth which makes it basically impossible for a smaller club to achieve success without external support.

[Azeem]

9 hours ago, Harry said:

I think there's a collective desire to see them punished because of what they stand for. However to me they are a symptom. The cause is an established hierarchy of big clubs with entrenched wealth which makes it basically impossible for a smaller club to achieve success without external support.

So basically your'e saying hate the sin not the sinner ?

[MUFC]

The blow can be softened if it gets reduced to a year and they win the CL this season.

[Honey Honey]

17 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

FFP seems to be pretty flawed in many ways (or is it actually a good policy that has been enforced incredibly badly?) and it's annoying when it affects your club but the idea behind it is vitally important in two ways.

1) It retains at least some competitive aspect in football. Rich clubs are still rich but it stops the richest people in the world using football clubs as toys to go head to head with each other. Even with FFP, money still dominates the game more than at any other time in football history but at least limiting the advantage of being rich to some extent means that you still have to have some basic competence on the footballing side. E.G. Man City and Man Utd could spend similar amounts of money on the sporting side of the club (players, coaches, manager, wages etc.) but the team that does the better spending, better coaching, better tactics still comes out on top. If Man City and PSG were allowed unchecked spending then make no mistake, they'd have just gone we don't care how much, we'll have Hazard, Van Dijk, Ronaldo, thank you very much and enjoy feeding off our scraps.

2) It protects clubs from themselves. FFP acts as a sort of red tape that prevents billionaire owners from coming in and signing loads of big names on long and expensive contracts, just in case they get bored after 12 months when they realise that it takes more than that to win the title and Champions League, fuck off with their bags of money and leave the club that they've treated as a toy with an untenable financial situation.

If that was point 2's purpose then it should have been done via a wage to stable income cap. But I think point 2 exists more to prevent excessive speculate to accumulate. Clubs that go into debt to try and further themselves. A perfectly normal part of business but in a completely abnormal business environment. 

Some FFP rules are rooted in the post 2010 economic crash culture of austerity and household budget thinking.

Others are about protecting the hegemony of Man Utd, Real Madrid and AC Milan.

[Happy Blue]

Man City will not be banned from the CL anytime soon if at all, it could drag on for years through the courts

Manchester City will take its fight with Uefa to state and international courts if its appeal to the Court for Arbitration of Sport in Lausanne fails. One of the leaked e-mails provided to the Uefa adjudication body said that rather than settle the club's 2014 financial fair play case, club chairman Khaldoon al Mubarak informed the then Uefa general secretary that he would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years.

[Honey Honey]

5 hours ago, Happy Blue said:

Man City will not be banned from the CL anytime soon if at all, it could drag on for years through the courts

Manchester City will take its fight with Uefa to state and international courts if its appeal to the Court for Arbitration of Sport in Lausanne fails. One of the leaked e-mails provided to the Uefa adjudication body said that rather than settle the club's 2014 financial fair play case, club chairman Khaldoon al Mubarak informed the then Uefa general secretary that he would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years.

I can see it now. Man City losing in state court after state court then 30 court cases later getting a favourable ruling in the UAE.

[DeadLinesman]

On 16/02/2020 at 08:20, Harvsky said:

Others are about protecting the hegemony of Man Utd, Real Madrid and AC Milan.

Not really working out for Man Utd or AC Milan right now 

[Inverted]

It seems to me that some people are reading City's tone and aggression about the ruling to be a sign of confidence that they have a strong case.

I think that's mistaken. They've not really offered a substantive argument at any stage - it's all been about UEFA bias, or the way the evidence was leaked. They've not actually challenged the substance of the finding at all. 

I think their belligerence is purely because they are aware that they possess resources which are enough to ruin the football world, and they would barely even have to exert themselves in the process. They don't care if they have a case or not - they've been inconvenienced, and worst of all, insulted, and they'll cause hell for it. These are men for whom, for once in their lives, things haven't turned out their way. These are aristocrats and billionaires, men from an intensely hierarchical and patriarchal society, who have been raised from birth without an awareness that there is even a possibility that they can be told "no". Their whole lives, there has never been a problem for which more money wasn't a solution - and FFP presents a unique and horrifying situation where, the more you spend, the worse the problem gets.

The very concept must be disgusting to them. 

If they can't get their way, then if they can at least torch the whole thing, they'll walk away satisfied. There's no real loss to them either way. The world of football is just a sideshow amusement compared to the pride of a sovereign state.