ThunderPower_14

I don't see this being an issue, given the broadcasting partners will want to maintain what i'm sure is a very lucrative relationship with the Premier League. There's also no way they can just demand a refund for the entire season when they've made billions in advertising off of what has already been broadcast.

I think the unprecedented nature of this pandemic means you can make it up as you go along a bit. Clearly the PL don't have a set in stone codified plan for an abandoned season or it would already be reported. Given that, let's try to minimise unfairness as best we can. At this stage, if the season is cancelled entirely and stricken from the records, Liverpool and their idiot supporters are unbelievably, crushingly hard done by. Bookies haven't even been taking bets on them to win the title for weeks. Relegation is still very much a 6-way dogfight. It's sport. We need to be sporting about it.

Agree with this in general, except I think Liverpool will be awarded the title regardless. Liverpool fans will burn the league down at this stage given their lead, and nobody else will really complain vigorously if they're named as champions. Only Man City can catch them, and I feel like even Man City would do the sporting thing and concede it if asked. The PR move with the least risk is to award Liverpool the title. It's an unprecedented situation so the PL can basically make it up as they go, and they'll be aiming to keep it as fair and reasonable as possible to avoid a massive controversy.

The 1939-40 season was abandoned after 3 games. If we were 3 games into this season a total abandonment would be an obvious choice, fair to everyone, and no club is meaningfully more disadvantaged than any other. It's not nearly as fair when one club has a 25 point gap on top with 9 games to play, mere days away from the title being mathematically confirmed. Imagine if that were us. It's manifestly unfair to Liverpool, way over and above how unfair it is to anyone else in the league and completely not in the spirit of organised sport. It's the league administration equivalent of one of those goals chalked off by VAR because a player who didn't touch the ball had a fraction of a centimetre of a heel offside in the build up play.

That's just one set of terms the season could be cancelled on though. The season did happen. Players scored and assisted goals. Teams won, drew and lost. These things don't just get wiped from the record books. It'll be recorded as a pandemic affected season, not a season that didn't happen at all. They could theoretically decide to freeze the league where it is and rank the clubs from 1-20 on points accrued per game, and then relegate us. I think we'd sue, but they could try that on. They could do any number of things. I don't think they'll void the entire season, I think they'll likely cancel the rest of the fixtures and then made decisions about things like the Champion, European places and relegation (or no relegation) the fairest way they possibly can to avoid angst.

In most seasons i'd agree, but they're 25 points ahead and their nearest rival (the only club who can mathematically catch them) has 30 points to play for. I hate Liverpool as much as anyone but the greatest injustice that could come out of this is that a club in such a dominant position has a rightful title taken away. It'd be awful for the sport. As soon as the rest of the season is officially cancelled (and it will be), Man City should come out and congratulate Liverpool on their title. It's the fair and sporting thing to do. "Voiding" the season is the wrong way of putting it. Are we pretending the games never happened? So games, goals, assists, milestones all stricken from the record? Ridiculous. It's unfair to relegate clubs in the thick of a relegation battle with 10 games left, but the idea that Liverpool shouldn't be given a trophy even if they'd had the league mathematically sewn up? Irrational and silly. They'll already miss out on being able to lift the trophy in front of their fans, but they're the rightful champions and if the rest of the season is cancelled they should be given the title. It'd be totally different if they were 5 points up, but they're 25 points up.

While I think that Liverpool's title is a little tainted, it's only in the sense that they won't get to lift the cup in front of a packed stadium full of their idiot fans. 25 point lead with 9 games to go. Only City can catch them, and the fair and sporting thing to do would be for City to concede if asked.

I don't think you can relegate anyone and I think it's manifestly unfair to stop 2 teams with commanding leads over 3rd place from coming up. I'd award Liverpool the league, they absolutely deserve it. I'd then bring Leeds and WBA up and play a 22 team season, relegating 4 teams the following year and promoting 1 automatically and 1 through the playoffs. It's a bit unlucky for the sides in and around the playoff positions this year but I don't see how you can relegate a team with 10 games left unplayed.

Football boots with the weird built-in sock.

It'd be nice if we could start scrapping like a team in a relegation battle shortly. It just feels like we're in cruise control. Bruise free, strolling around football. It was the same last time we went down, but that was after years of our culture being eroded. We're absolutely capable of staying up but we need something significant to change.

There needs to be a widening of the interpretation of what a clearcut scoring chance is to include wide open counter attacks, even if it's still in the counter-attacking team's half. Any cynical challenge in that situation should be a red, but again, it's absolutely the kind of thing that will be called far leniently for the likes of Man City and Liverpool.

Biden is moderate and therefore "electable", but he's clearly losing his marbles and has a long, storied history of stuff that Trump will be able to attack him on. Sanders has been a progressive champion for his entire career. I also don't agree that you don't elect Sanders because it's too hard to get his ideas through the house and the senate. You don't start a negotiation by finding the middle ground, you find the middle ground at the end. The Democrats tried their moderate against Trump in Hillary, who had more baggage but was also a lot more popular than Biden. Time to try something different.

I quite like the current lion, but the badge overall stinks of design by commitee, which it was, if I recall correctly. Didn't Lerner get everyone to vote on what they wanted to be in the badge, or something like that?

Orton RKO'd Beth Pheonix. Overturning the man-on-women violence ban for shock value tells me they're worried about AEW.

I think they'll score a couple early and take the game away from us, which is probably the merciful thing to do. I still have flashbacks of standing in a pub full of absolute word removed Arsenal supporters for our last crack at it, who were actively rubbing it in to the small band of Villa supporters who'd turned up. It was soul destroying and i'll have a chip on my shoulder about Arsenal fans for life over that. City fans are nowhere near that bad, but I don't think i'll go out for this one.

How we can be fighting a relegation battle and still put up a first half performance like that is mind boggling. I've been a big supporter of Smith, but that's just inexcusable again. Hopeless.

We're 1 f***en point above the relegation zone late in the season and we f***en don't show up for the first 10 minutes. Diabolical.

Then they have to comply with a modified FFP, I guess. It wouldn't necessarily need to be an entire years, because a club will continue to receive revenue from operating despite an owner disappearing, but there'd need to be a formula. I'm certainly not suggesting we throw out any sort of protections to stop dangerous owners bankrupting clubs, I just don't like the current system which protects exactly nobody and doesn't allow clubs to spend money they can very easily afford to spend. We're a perfect example. We were almost insolvent under Xia to the point where the club's entire existence was under threat, and that was despite apparently complying with FFP. Now we're at risk of getting relegated because our spending is limited, which could cost us hundreds of millions of pounds if we go down and can't get back up. How is that protecting us?

I'd even go as far as requiring owners to set up a trust account with a certain percentage of wage and transfer fees owing over the next 12 months, so that if the owner disappears and stops investing, the club can still get through to the next summer transfer window without being unable to pay players and staff. There has to be some way of investing your own money in a business you own though. It's ludicrious that we can have the 3rd richest owners in the Premier League and be at risk of being relegated because we weren't allowed to spend. If we get relegated, it will cost us tens of millions of pounds, doing far more damage to our finances than any sort of spending would do. It's a broken system.

Their stance on the matter suggests they've been arguing against FFP for a number of years. UEFA being legislator, investigator, judge jury and executioner on this has been unfair and it'll be interesting to see how the CAS see it. I personally think it's manifestly unfair to have a competition with such a great correlation between spending and success, and then artificially stopping clubs spending when those clubs can easily afford to do so. If it were really protecting clubs from themselves that'd be one thing, but it's not, and it's not designed to. Look at Bury.

Nobody likes the rules though. They're objectively bad rules that need to be changed for the good of football. Someone is bound to challenge them and win eventually. Remember, if we fall foul of FFP we'll have fans of other teams gleefully wishing us to be relegated and calling us cheats because we tried to overhaul our squad so we could stay up. Better that a club with Man City's financial backing goes after the system first.

I think there was plenty to like about today against quality opposition, but we defend like it's a meaningless dead rubber and not a key game in a relegation battle. That will catch up with us if we don't sort it out.

What was the alternative to "signing up", just curiously? Not playing in Europe? Not playing in the Premier League? Is that really a reasonable thing for them to be expected to forego? The laws are unjust. They "signed up" because their was no reasonable alternative but to do so.

They lied and creatively accounted to get around an unjust set of rules that shouldn't exist in the form that they do. A set of rules specifically designed to stop a club like Man City being successful at the expense of the long term established European giants. They cheated the system, but it's the system in this case which is dirty, not the club trying to navigate around it. IMO.

I am content with the Premier League TV money being a thing as long as it's still negotiated as a league and distributed fairly. I'd prefer an equal distribution to all 20 clubs, but I can handle a finishing position based distribution provided we don't enter a situation like in other European leagues where individual clubs negotiate their own TV rights. As soon as the bigger clubs try to take more than their share, they can sod off to their European Superleague.