Chelsea

[Demitri_C]

[Delphinho123]

I wonder if any of their players would be of interest to us… 

[sne]

7 minutes ago, Delphinho123 said:

I wonder if any of their players would be of interest to us… 

Shame Kante is too short 

[Zatman]

11 minutes ago, Delphinho123 said:

I wonder if any of their players would be of interest to us… 

Well they arent allowed sell players, even if they can we could probably only attract the duds like Barkley, Loftus Cheek or Hudson Odoi

They are the European champions they will have bigger suitors

[StewieGriffin]

UEFA will be getting involved once Chelsea get past Lille - no way they'll be happy with a Quarter Final tie at Stamford Bridge with no fans

[Robbie09]

Just watched TT’s interview on the news and his suggestion they replace the sponsors logo with a message of support for Ukraine.

What a top bloke, far too good for that club. 

[maqroll]

1 hour ago, Zatman said:

Well they arent allowed sell players, even if they can we could probably only attract the duds like Barkley, Loftus Cheek or Hudson Odoi

They are the European champions they will have bigger suitors

We could do a loan deal for Mount and Kante

[Zatman]

Just now, maqroll said:

We could do a loan deal for Mount and Kante

Well that would also not be legal

[maqroll]

34 minutes ago, Robbie09 said:

Just watched TT’s interview on the news and his suggestion they replace the sponsors logo with a message of support for Ukraine.

What a top bloke, far too good for that club. 

Tuchel is growing on me. Didn't have too much time for him until this season. He's shown some depth of character in a few instances. 

[maqroll]

Just now, Zatman said:

Well that would also not be legal

If no money is exchanged why not?

[Jareth]

Funny how the Germans are so good at times like this. Debt bloody paid. 

[Zatman]

1 minute ago, maqroll said:

If no money is exchanged why not?

You have to pay for loan fees as well. We paid 8million for Barkley

Plus you cant loan more than one player from the same team

[TheAuthority]

9 minutes ago, Zatman said:

You have to pay for loan fees as well. We paid 8million for Barkley

Plus you cant loan more than one player from the same team

What if it's Januzaj?

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

I don't understand not selling tickets and merchandise, as long as the money stays with Chelsea and Abramovich can't enjoy those proceeds.  That's all legitimate business that all Premier League clubs are involved in.

Presumably the point is that the authorities do not believe that you can prevent money that goes to Chelsea from being money that goes to Abramovic, if he decides that he wants it to be so.

[theboyangel]

34 minutes ago, TheAuthority said:

What if it's Januzaj?

That’s classed as a cheeky loan, the same as Isco

[HanoiVillan]

Further to the discussion on this thread last night, Barney Ronay making obvious but very important points:

Shouldn’t someone in football also care about the war in Yemen just a little?

'The internet always knows what you want. This week a particular video clip has been popping up in those wormholes filled with adverts at the side of my screen, pressing its nose up against the glass for hours on end like an unhappy cat mewling at the window.

Alan Shearer slams Roman Abramovich over Ukraine statement. There it is again. And here is the text of Alan’s actual slamming: “There’s still no condemnation from Roman or the club about what’s happening in Ukraine.” It is a robust and sincere statement, deserving of serious treatment. So let’s break this down.

Alan Shearer has clearly looked at the facts. And he has decided that the invasion of a neighbouring state, the bombing of civilians, the use of advanced weaponry: all of this is unacceptable.

By extension, for an English football club to be owned by someone complicit in such crimes, well that is unacceptable too. This is non-negotiable. As Alan Shearer rightly states, we cannot have our football clubs tarnished, sullied, or linked with regimes that may be guilty of such crimes.

At which point three possibilities present themselves. Alan Shearer has never heard of the war in Yemen. Alan Shearer is unaware of who Mohammed bin Salman is, or what he does as his main day job. Or third, Alan Shearer is wiling to overlook both of these things because he really likes and cares about Newcastle United.

And sadly at this point the world does start to intrude. It isn’t hard to make the connection here. Newcastle United are owned by a fund that is governed by a state. And that state is also, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, involved in the bloodstained invasion of a neighbouring state.

For the last seven years Saudi Arabia has been waging a war that has led to the deaths of an estimated quarter of a million people, not to mention famine, chaos and societal collapse. The organisation Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the role of Mohammed bin Salman – who, to be clear, manages the fund that runs Newcastle United - for alleged war crimes.

And yet instead of calling out, say, Amanda Staveley for failing to condemn these issues Alan Shearer believes instead that the takeover of Newcastle by the Saudi fund is “a special day” filled not with pain, guilt and chicanery, but with hope.

[...]

That state of cognitive dissonance is just too weird to gloss over. Shall we set it out here, just to be clear? Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the British government because he is “associated with a person who is or has been involved in destabilising Ukraine and undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”

What happens if we take these words and transpose them? Because Newcastle’s ownership is not just “associated with” or distantly tied to the destabilising, undermining and Biblical-scale destruction of it own neighbour Yemen. It is openly and personally engaged in it.

This not a link that needs to be proven or teased out. It is literally the same person overseeing both the football fund and the fighter jets. And given it is now OK, and indeed de rigueur to suggest Chelsea’s trophies are stained by the blood of the citizens of Kyiv and Mariupol, it has been an odd thing to scan the sports websites and slip between these two extremes.

Over here we have the guilt and the shame of Chelsea. And then just below the news from Newcastle about what an excellent job Eddie Howe is doing (which he really is) and what a smart, entirely commendable bit of spending that £80m winter window investment is turning out to be.

This is not whataboutery. It is literally the same thing. Football owner + bloody war = undesirable. This is genuine equivalence. An estimated 10,000 children have been killed or maimed in Yemen. Shouldn’t someone in football also care about it just a little? Alan?'

more at link: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/mar/11/shouldnt-someone-in-football-also-care-about-the-war-in-yemen-just-a-little

[WallisFrizz]

Now reporting that takeover can go ahead. So what happens to the £1.5 billion debt to Abramovich. If he writes it off so that takeover can go ahead where does that leave them with  FFP? 
 

Its all v confusing but if they sort the takeover, I can see them carrying on as normal after that. 

[Panto_Villan]

@HanoiVillanso my knowledge of the Yemen conflict is a little sketchy, but isn’t that article misrepresenting things?

From what I understand: Yemen was previously governed by an Arab-friendly government. Then there was a Houthi uprising (backed by Iran) that tried to overthrow the government. The government doesn’t want to be overthrown and the UAE and Saudis don’t want an Iranian proxy in charge in Yemen, so they intervene. There’s a long civil war and lots of people die.

Is that correct? If so, then I can’t help feel NATO would do exactly the same thing in the same position and we’d consider it totally justified.

Consider if there had been no invasion in Ukraine, and instead the eastern separatists made a push on Kyiv backed by undercover Russian special forces. In that situation I wouldn’t be surprised if NATO would provide the Ukrainians direct assistance in the form of special forces and air strikes, rather than meekly allow Putin to install a puppet regime. If the conflict then gets bogged down and lots of civilians die, does that make NATO barbarous monsters?

I don’t think the formula is as simple as “bloody war = bad”. WW2 was an incredibly bloody war but most consider it justified on the part of the Allied forces at least.

A large scale war of conquest is very different from supporting a proxy in a civil war, no? That’s why Russia wasn’t sanctioned too badly after 2014, even though they literally grabbed a load of territory from a neighbour and murdered everyone on board a civilian airliner in the process.

[sne]

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, Panto_Villan said:

@HanoiVillanso my knowledge of the Yemen conflict is a little sketchy, but isn’t that article misrepresenting things?

From what I understand: Yemen was previously governed by an Arab-friendly government. Then there was a Houthi uprising (backed by Iran) that tried to overthrow the government. The government doesn’t want to be overthrown and the UAE and Saudis don’t want an Iranian proxy in charge in Yemen, so they intervene. There’s a long civil war and lots of people die.

Is that correct?

It's an over-simplification. There is an internationally-recognised government, but whether it actually has support and legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population is up for debate, and it has been tenuous since 2011. The claim that the Houthi movement is a 'proxy' for Iran seems to be correct in terms of Iran supplying the movement with food, weapons etc, but is misleading in that it seems to ignore that the Houthi movement was born out of local politics and frustrations, and is not just some irregular Iranian military units.

1 hour ago, Panto_Villan said:

Consider if there had been no invasion in Ukraine, and instead the eastern separatists made a push on Kyiv backed by undercover Russian special forces. In that situation I wouldn’t be surprised if NATO would provide the Ukrainians direct assistance in the form of special forces and air strikes, rather than meekly allow Putin to install a puppet regime. If the conflict then gets bogged down and lots of civilians die, does that make NATO barbarous monsters?

I don’t think the formula is as simple as “bloody war = bad”. WW2 was an incredibly bloody war but most consider it justified on the part of the Allied forces at least.

A large scale war of conquest is very different from supporting a proxy in a civil war, no? That’s why Russia wasn’t sanctioned too badly after 2014, even though they literally grabbed a load of territory from a neighbour and murdered everyone on board a civilian airliner in the process.

I don't think this is a helpful comparison, for several reasons.

Firstly, if Ukraine were responding to an insurgency *within its own borders*, it would have a greater claim to the legitimate use of force, as indeed it has had in the fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. Saudi Arabia is not reacting to an insurgency within its own borders, but committing war crimes in a neighbouring state.

Secondly, the phrase 'if the conflict then gets bogged down' is hiding a multitude of horrors. Both parties to the conflict have committed a wide array of war crimes, but since we're talking about the government of Saudi Arabia, we will focus on those they have committed, including the use of indiscriminate air strikes on civilian areas, deliberately bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, fishing boats, wedding parties and other obviously non-military targets, blockading the country's ports (and in the process creating a famine), the use of child soldiers, and the sexual abuse of detainees. If we were supporting a party to a conflict that was perpetrating these horrors in Europe, I would not support that either.

Thirdly, the stakes here are simply not World War 2; the Houthis have bombed targets in Saudi Arabia (inevitably, as the Saudis made themselves party to the conflict) but have no intention of conquering land in Saudi Arabia and could not do so in any case. The Houthis have committed plenty of their own crimes and are not 'the good guys' but they are not comparable to Hitler, in either their actions or the danger they present.

Supporting one side of a civil war can still be a crime, just as much as an invasion can, especially if a government's involvement is serving to prolong and worsen the war, and therefore the humanitarian catastrophe.