The Game's Gone

[maqroll]

2 hours ago, NurembergVillan said:

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/26/gareth-bale-set-to-join-china-jiangsu-suning-on-1m-a-week-contract-real-madrid-football?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter&__twitter_impression=true

Imagine how cool his story could have been had he taken a pay cut to return to England. Now he'll kick a ball around in some polluted Chinese megalopolis and no one will care. $ad!

[mikeyp102]

49 minutes ago, The_Rev said:

He's on about £650k a week at Madrid anyway, isn't he? He's probably banked well over £100m just since he left Spurs. Will a year in China really make any difference to his lifestyle in retirement? We are now reaching the the point where it's probably just whether his great grandchildren drive Aston Martins or BMWs, right? 

I can’t see anyone in a decent league even paying a quarter of what he’d earn out there. He’s in a weird position that despite his talent no one can afford him. If I was in his shoes I’d absolutely take China for 1 yr, then come back on lower money 

[TheAuthority]

It's an interesting one. Supposedly he doesn't really integrate well because he's a quiet lad and really enjoys going back and playing with Wales. 

He likes being home - so I'm very surprised he would go to China - that's a lot further away than Madrid. Maybe @mikeyp102 is correct - no-one can really afford him, so go for a year, earn a stupid amount (Madrid also get a reasonable fee I imagine to save face) and then back to the UK a year later.

[Zatman]

Interesting discussion on ESPN the other day that Bale has lost his pace and he wouldn't be as effective in the European leagues

[Chindie]

I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Bale retired a little earlier than many players would. His game is centred on his pace and fitness coupled to great skill. His time at Real has been marred with dozens of niggly injuries, if his body is starting to feel the strain then if he can't (or doesn't want to) change who he plays he might be forced to retire. In that case, going to China to pump his bank account even more is an even greater no brainer.

I also get the impression that he isn't someone whose life is football, so that might also weigh in on the decision.

It's certainly shitty that a quality player is chasing a huge payday that ultimately isn't going to change his life, given his earnings already, but that's the way things are. There's not many people that will turn down more for less, unless more comes with a lot of baggage. And he may not have much choice given its obvious Real want rid but his status and wage isn't viable outside of a few hyper rich European teams, who probably don't want him. So big money Chinese working holiday it is.

[bannedfromHandV]

6 hours ago, Zatman said:

Interesting discussion on ESPN the other day that Bale has lost his pace and he wouldn't be as effective in the European leagues

He’s definitely lost pace which is a bit surprising as he should be in his prime now, I think he’s just lost desire to be honest, going to China will not reinvigorate that. Just hope he doesn’t listen to his agent as I’m sure he’ll be waxing lyrical about the virtues of going there.

[villa4europe]

Go to China and get a £400k pay rise or move to the PL and face a £400k pay cut

Or don't play football at madrid

No one else would come near his ludicrous Madrid wages, again it's the Madrid move that is stupid and leaves him nowhere else to go but China 

[Zatman]

In a rare positive for this thread, La Liga are no longer allowing Friday and Monday matches as fans dont want them

Edited July 27, 2019 by Zatman

[HanoiVillan]

6 hours ago, Zatman said:

In a rare positive for this thread, La Liga are no longer allowing Friday and Monday matches as fans dont want them

Let's hope the PL follows. 

Spoiler

 

[The_Rev]

Bale to China is off now according to the BBC. 

[Xela]

Real seem to be in a (relative) mess. 

Bale will outlast Zidane there at this rate.

[Genie]

3 hours ago, Xela said:

Real seem to be in a (relative) mess. 

Bale will outlast Zidane there at this rate.

It looks like Zidane has tried to do a bit of a SAF and bomb off a very high profile player to make the other sit up and take notice. Seems to have backfired spectacularly.

Not sure ZZ will be in charge on October.

 

[Chindie]

Interesting read on Citeh, and how basically being a state owned club might change the way they act when backed into a corner...

Quote

...

We are now more than ten years into Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City project, and at the most interesting juncture.

On the field they are the emerging superpower of European football, but this domination has only sharpened the focus on what goes on off the pitch, and in that regard City are now fighting a war on two fronts. The UEFA investigation will once more pit them against a governing body that has the power to ban them from elite competition and with whom they already have a very difficult relationship. The other battle is with an increasingly skeptical and critical media.

If we want to understand how Manchester City is likely to respond to these new challenges, it’s important to focus again on who is running the club, rather than what is driving their interest. There are still pockets of flat-earthers out there who believe that Manchester City has nothing to do with the Abu Dhabi government, ignoring the fact that the club is nominally owned by the UAE’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sheikh Mansour Al-Nahyan, that club chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak is consiglieri to Mansour’s all-powerful brother, the charismatic and ruthless Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, and that club director Simon Pearce is also the Abu Dhabi government’s long-standing communications director and propagandist in chief. The men who run Manchester City are the same men who run Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates more broadly, and states, unlike many football club owners, usually behave predictably.

So we can expect Manchester City to flex its muscles in much the same way that Abu Dhabi exerts its influence both domestically and internationally; through fantastic wealth, aggressive diplomacy, intimidation, and propaganda — all of it backed up with a capacity for extreme force. In fact, as we’ll see, it looks like they might already have begun.

The UAE’s central role in the disastrous war in Yemen is rightly held up as the most obvious example of its aggression and brutality, but there is another conflict that tells us much about its strategies and tactics. UEFA investigators examining City’s conduct over Financial Fair Play could learn a lot from looking at the UAE’s role in Libya’s bloody civil war.

Financial Fair Play and Anti-Tank Missiles

In November 2018 Der Spiegel-led revelations, based on a trove of emails obtained and released by Football Leaks, provided evidence that Manchester City had funnelled millions of pounds into the club by stealth, in violation of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. The allegations center around the events of 2014 when City were obviously engorged on petrodollars — the footballing equivalent of a chocolate-smeared Augustus Gloop protesting his innocence to Willy Wonka — but somehow got away with a 20 million Euro fine from UEFA. Der Spiegel lifted the lid on how City cooked the books, including the revelations that they had disguised the source of sponsorship money, set up shell companies and paid manager Roberto Mancini an additional £1.75 million off the books annually — his declared salary was a measly £1.45 million — via the Al Jazira Club in Abu Dhabi. (It was this third-party payment that led Rob Harris to ask Guardiola if his payment arrangements included the same additional benefits) “We are breaching anyway,” wrote City’s Chief Financial Officer in 2011 with City having lost several hundred million pounds and unable to adhere to FPP rules. “We are just relying on mitigating factors to get us through.” In 2012, City’s CFO asked Simon Pearce if it was ok to change the date of payments from sponsors on its books, Pearce replied “Of course, we can do what we want.” Der Spiegel also detailed how City worked behind the scenes to avoid any meaningful sanction. According to an email written by City’s lawyer, “Khaldoon said he would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them [UEFA] for the next 10 years” and raised the spectre of “the destruction of their rules and organization.”

What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with Libya? Well, Libya has been in the grip of a civil war since the toppling of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi in 2011, and it has become the focal point of yet another proxy battle between the UAE, which supports authoritarian anti-democratic strongmen, and Qatar, which supports political Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been a bloody and ruinous conflict. In 2014, warring factions “indiscriminately shelled civilian areas” in Libyan cities, according to Human Rights Watch, and “seized people, and looted, burned, and otherwise destroyed civilian property in attacks that in some cases amounted to war crimes”, leading the United Nations to pass Security Council Resolution 2174, which required that a UN committee approve the transfer of arms to Libya. But as the New York Times revealed (in a story based on yet more leaked emails), the UAE decided to simply ignore the resolution and ferried arms to their preferred strongman, former army General Khalifa Hifter. “The fact of the matter is that the U.A.E. violated the U.N. Security Council Resolution on Libya and continues to do so,” said Ahmed al-Qasimi, a senior Emirati diplomat, in an email he wrote on August 4, 2015 to the UAE’s ambassador to the United Nations. Or, to put it another way, they were going to breach anyway. And they had reason to feel confident that they’d get away with it, not least because at the same time as they were running guns into the country, they were in secret negotiations with the man charged with mediating peace in Libya, UN special representative Bernardino Leon. Leon now earns £35,000-a-month as the Director General of the Abu Dhabi based Emirates Diplomatic Academy. When the news of the Abu Dhabi government’s rule breaking and corruption of officials broke, the man called in to deal with the negative publicity was, of course, Manchester City director Simon Pearce.

An opportunity presents itself to publish — in ten to fourteen days — a full report on the accusation and the leaked emails for both the UN and Leon,” wrote Pearce on November 13, 2015, the day after the New York Times reported the leak.

In Pearce’s email to senior Ministers in the UAE government — he signs off with a solitary and telling ‘S’ — we see again how Abu Dhabi relies on attack as the best form of defence. Pearce claims that he will provide proof that the Muslim Brotherhood (code for Qatar) hacked the emails that revealed the UAE’s skullduggery. Pearce doesn’t suggest they make any effort to dispute the allegations, instead they should focus on attacking the motives of the messenger. In that regard there is a remarkable similarity with Manchester City’s response to the Football Leaks revelations on City’s financial fair play chicanery: “the attempt to damage the Club’s reputation is organized and clear.” The similarity no doubt reflects the fact that Pearce was in charge of both strategies.

Financial Fair Play prevented Manchester City achieving the supremacy they wanted in European football just like the UN Arms Embargo prevented the UAE gaining supremacy in Libya. In both cases, Qatar was their key adversary in a proxy war. In both cases leaked emails, for which the UAE holds Qatar responsible, revealed the UAE’s complete disregard for the rules, and the fact that they paid people involved vast sums of money to corrupt the system. And what is more, they continue to do so. In June 2019, the New York Times revealed that a cache of powerful US-produced anti-tank missiles had been discovered in the arsenal of General Khalifa Hifter, the UAE’s man in Libya. The marking on the missiles’ shipping containers revealed they were sold to the UAE in 2008. They can do what they want, remember.

So we have a fairly good idea of how City will respond to UEFA. As they did in Libya, Abu Dhabi will stick to their guns. But what of the PR battle with the skeptical press pack? Here it’s useful to look back at how and why City’s slick PR machine has begun to malfunction and more specifically how their supporters have responded to the criticism that has been levelled at their owners.

The problems really began after a 3–0 Carabao Cup final victory over Arsenal in February 2018, when Guardiola used the platform of a post-match press conference to express his solidarity with leaders of the Catalan independence movement. Several of these men had been jailed a few months previously on charges of sedition, rebellion and misappropriation of funds in the aftermath of the Catalan government declaring independence from Spain. After dealing with the usual round of questions about the game itself, Guardiola took the opportunity to call for the release of the imprisoned men. He spoke articulately about the importance of democracy, and the right of people to express their opinion, and railed at the injustice of pre-trial detention. However, Guardiola’s meticulous attention to what happens on the pitch seems to stand in marked contrast to a rather fuzzy grasp of issues off it, and he had apparently failed to note the tension between his comments on Catalonia and the gushing praise for City’s nominal owner, Sheikh Mansour Al Nahyan, that had prefaced them. Mansour is the deputy Prime Minister of a government that doesn’t think twice about disappearing and torturing anyone who expresses either a favourable view of democracy or an unfavourable view of his family’s rule.

When Rob Harris asked Pep how he reconciled his stance on Catalonia with his praise for Mansour, his principles collapsed like the Arsenal defence. “Every country decides the way they want to live for themselves,” said Guardiola. According to Guardiola’s theory of democratic exceptionalism — which in fairness he seemed to make up on the hoof — democracy and free speech is cool for Catalans, but not for the citizens of the government that pays his wages. It was this incident that gave skeptical journalists the hook they needed to ask more probing questions about Abu Dhabi’s stewardship of City, and it came not from searing investigative journalism — City had, with a few notable exceptions been given a free ride by the British press since their takeover of the club in 2008 — but from the blundering hypocrisy of their own manager. Nine months later, in November 2018, this started to become a serious problem.

At the same time as Der Spiegel published a series of splashes that detailed City’s creative accounting, Abu Dhabi’s propensity for arresting and abusing British tourists and businessmen finally made the front pages of the UK press. The abuse of British nationals in the UAE is not rare. (According to a freedom of information request, forty three British nationals complained of torture or ill-treatment in UAE custody between 2010 and 2015, the UAE authorities are still refusing to provide vital evidence to UK coroners in the inquest into the 2011 death in a UAE jail cell of Lee Bradley Brown, and British tourist Ali Issa Ahmad recently made further allegations about serious abuse in UAE detention after he was allegedly beaten up for wearing a Qatar shirt in Abu Dhabi in February 2019.) But what set this new case apart was that it involved a PhD student, Matthew Hedges, and the accusation was that he had been spying for M16. Hedges had been held at an undisclosed location without access to lawyers or British consular officials and subjected to what western torturers might refer to as enhanced interrogation techniques. The club was quickly enmired in the media coverage of the case and the criticism didn’t just come from earnest columnists in the broadsheets. “I suggest every ⁦@ManCity⁩ fan who cares about justice for a British citizen demands their club’s owner does so, or boycotts games until he does,” thundered Piers Morgan.

We had by this point become accustomed to Manchester City fans arguing the toss — some more intelligently than others — over FFP, so it wasn’t a surprise to see them railing at Der Spiegel, but the response of some City fans to the Matt Hedges case broke new ground, as notedby Guardian journalist Barney Ronay . “It’s actually happening! Not a parody. Man City fans on Twitter are backing Abu Dhabi’s legal processes and suggesting, well, not everyone gets locked up you know… humans are doomed.” It would be wrong to say that City fans came out en masse in defence of Abu Dhabi’s abuse of a UK citizen but many did, and a majority of online City seemed to be furious at the notion that they might finally express some concerns about the behaviour of the people running their club. “So bizarre, it’s worth reiterating,” wrote Jonathan Wilson, reflecting on the incident months later. “A proportion of supporters of a football club in the north-west of England decided to back the flawed legal apparatus of an oppressive regime 4,500 miles away against a British man who, whether he had been spying or not, had been treated appallingly for six months. This is sportswashing in action: the Abu Dhabi state had funded the Pep Guardiola revolution and so had to be supported in all matters, including possible human rights abuses.”

...

Meanwhile, over on social media, something genuinely disturbing was happening. A few months previously, an anonymous account bearing the avatar of City striker Sergio Aguero logged in to Twitter for the first time. Initially it lay largely dormant, but its activity picked up at the same time as Man City’s PR offensive and at the time of writing it has gathered 7,500 followers, many of whom hail the man behind the account, known as Rabin, as the second coming: a speaker of truths who exposed the hypocrisy of the anti-City press pack and led the fightback against those who sought to tarnish the club’s reputation.

“I may be wrong but the media treatment of club & fans crossed a line, went into a land where you could accuse City’s boardroom of being filled with blood, or turn in a formulaic article about Sportswashing both with no evidence” mused Rabin in a notable thread posted on June 5. “A reporter could get up and ask a question to the manager at the moment of epic achievement if he has taken money on the side, with zero evidence and the rest of the media praising him for it. He could start a taunting the club and the manager for a lack of response on his Twitter feed,” he went on in reference to Rob Harris. “A few more times and that questions would have gone from a veiled allegation to a fact. With push back from the fans the taunting has stopped.” The thread bumbled on, accusing Tariq Panja of the New York Times of “playing fast and easy with facts” and of misrepresenting official responses given to him by the Manchester City’s communications team. It closes with some humble pie, “I’m just adding my voice to push back in the little way I can” and a call to arms “I’m addressing the elephant in the room. I hope others do too.” The syntax is odd — Rabin is clearly not from anywhere near Manchester — but the message is clear: we, the fans, can fight back and silence the journalists attacking our club.

And it is Rabin who has led the charge, churning out lengthy conspiratorial threads that are devoid of substance, but which provide succour and reassurance to people who desperately want to believe that criticism of City’s owners is rooted in prejudice, not reason. Almost without fail, those most susceptible to Rabin’s portentous reasoning have avatars and Twitter handles that are indicative of what Martha Newson might call a rather porous boundary between their personal self and their social identity as a Manchester City supporters, and these people can then be corralled into attacking and smearing journalists. When you strip most of the lines of attacks on journalists down, most of it comes back to them…..eh…being journalists. For example, Rob Harris only asked Guardiola awkward questions because he has appeared on Al Jazeera (it’s owned by Qatar ergo Harris is a Qatar-funded anti-City stooge). Barney Ronay wrote a book about the Russia 2018 World Cup and not a book about human rights abuses in Chechnya, so he’s obviously a hypocrite. Miguel Delaney, who has come in for the most severe abuse, is a hypocrite simply because he writes for The Independent, and its owner sold a 30% stake in his holding company to a group with links to the highly abusive Saudi Arabian stateand licensed use of the Independent brand to the same group. The list of people who have had some sort of Rabin treatment is of course much longer and includes Nick Harris, Ewan Mackenna, James Montague, Duncan Castles, and John Nicholson, all of whom have asked awkward questions about the Manchester City project. In amongst the orchestrated attacks on journalists there are some more interesting threads, like the thread on serious allegations of professional misconduct levelled at UEFA’s chief investigator Yves Le Terme, which, as ever, ends with Rabin tagging a series of influential online accounts.

So who is Rabin? Well, this is something he — or she — does not like to discuss. His identity can never be revealed, for reasons that he has never made clear. In June, as questions about his identity and motivations began to raise suspicions, an incident that nearly resulted in his unveiling led to his brief departure from Twitter amidst a blaze of videod accusations and counter-accusations that I would discourage anyone from watching in full.

The internet is a strange place and it’s possible that Rabin is just a highly fused City fan with a talent for misdirection and a lot of time on his hands, but his is not the only suspicious anonymous account churning out lines of attack, and there is a far more plausible explanation for his activities. It’s one that makes little sense if you think of Manchester City as a traditional football club, but it makes perfect sense if you think of Manchester City as a propaganda tool for the Abu Dhabi government.

...

Gulf bot armies is one thing, but would Abu Dhabi go so far as to use online propaganda as a means of systematically attacking UK journalists who have criticised Manchester City? Well, the simple answer to that is, yes, they almost certainly would. The UAE has a long record of smearing its critics, as documented in a 2018 report by the UK-based organisation Spinwatch which details the UAE’s well-funded attempts to “undermine, vilify and smear groups and individuals that pose a perceived ideological and political threat to that country.” Not surprisingly, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak and Simon Pearce get honourable mentions in the report. That doesn’t mean that this online activity is part of an Abu Dhabi dirty tricks campaign, of course, but it certainly fits their modus operandi. Marc Owen Jones is better qualified than anyone to assess the possibility that Rabin is an online shill for hire. “His speech seems very on message and almost scripted, and his attempts to appear genuine somewhat hackneyed,” says Jones. “His [Rabin’s] anonymity does not make any sense and is suspicious… and the rhetorical devices he uses and the logical fallacies he deploys are the staple of PR companies” Jones points out that online shills and fake grassroots campaigns — a practice known as astroturfing — are now part of the packages offered by western PR companies, and refers to the February 2019 revelations that Tory strategist Lynton Crosby had offered to run just such a campaign as part of a £5.5 million package designed to strip Qatar of the 2022 World Cup. And, of course, the government that has been most keen on stripping Qatar of the World Cup is the same government that runs Manchester City.

All of which is to say that if Rabin is not part of an online propaganda campaign paid for by Abu Dhabi, then he should send Simon Pearce his CV and an invoice. If he is, then people — including policymakers and those in charge of football governance — need to pay attention.

Elite european football is now drenched in petrodollars, and English football is in danger of following suit. The proposed Qatari investment in Leeds United would almost certainly make them a powerful force as would any serious Gulf investment in Newcastle United — whether that be from figures in the UAE or Saudi Arabia — and the apocalypse scenario is the long-mooted sale of Manchester United to the Saudi royal family. The Gulf’s despots have a talent for bringing dystopia to life and it is entirely possible that the English Premiership will become the next proxy battleground for their feuds. If it does, we can expect them to bring their bot armies with them, and we can look forward to the unedifying spectacle of legions of highly fused fans defending their respective owners’ depravities. Welcome to Trollerball.

 

Trollerball

This is all grimy and horrible.

[Rob182]

Reading that makes me so glad that our owners are (on the face of it) genuine, wealthy businessmen with no connections to corrupt government agencies. The worst thing I've read about Sawiris is to do with a failure to pay a multi-billion pound tax bill in 2014.

[HanoiVillan]

12 hours ago, Rob182 said:

The worst thing I've read about Sawiris is to do with a failure to pay a multi-billion pound tax bill in 2014.

To be fair, that's also very much Not Good. 

[big mean bunny]

That's an interesting and terrifying read. I understand the natural reaction to be defensive and guarded about your clubs owners, sometimes I get like that with the Wolves owners, even though I am wary of being too positive about them it rankles me when fans of other clubs try to use it to target you. Particularly when it's Liverpool fans for example as if being owned by a US sports conglomerate, who have a lot of people who massively profited from the banking collapses involved with them, is somehow more noble than being owned by a company with ties to the Chinese state and government.

I wish football was more fan owned but we have truly crapped the bed on that. 

 

[sne]

Contractual obligations and all that.

Juve fined £650k for not playing CR9 in a friendly in South Korea, they claim he had an injury.

Question is how much are these teams paid to begin with for these exhibition games?

Quote

Italian football champions Juventus breached an agreement when they benched superstar Cristiano Ronaldo in an exhibition match against South Korean league All-Stars, a local organizer of the match claimed Saturday.

Some 63,000 fans at Seoul World Cup Stadium went home disappointed Friday night, as Ronaldo did not play in a 3-3 draw between Juventus and K League All-Stars.
"After finding out that Ronaldo's name was not on the second half squad list, we requested Juventus to play Ronaldo as written in the contract," the agency said. "The club told us that both the manager and the player know about the clause, but Ronaldo can't play because of his physical condition. Juventus didn't respond to our calls later."

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190728000119

[Zatman]

Juventus should tell them to go **** themselves, players get injured

[HanoiVillan]

8 minutes ago, Zatman said:

Juventus should tell them to go **** themselves, players get injured

Well then they shouldn't have signed such a dumb contract then, should they. 

[villa4europe]

10 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Well then they shouldn't have signed such a dumb contract then, should they. 

was going to say the same thing!

the "games gone" element for me is that juve agreed to a game where contractually Ronaldo had to play at least 45 minutes and the organisers of the game sold tickets based on the same