Sportswash! - Let’s oil stare at Manchester City!

[BOF]

 

[foreveryoung]

3 hours ago, icouldtelltheworld said:

It's a strange decision this year because it's not as though they've had a particularly dominant or record-breaking season. There have definitely been occasions when Guardiola has been the best performing manager in the league, not this season for me though

Remember, theres nothing they cant buy. 

In all seriousness, he is paid 15 million a year with as good as a bottomless pit for signings, numerous fraud charges against his club, and he wins the trophy for the best performing manager in the Prem. You couldn't write it could you.

They wanna be looking at the managers who do perform with limited funds.

Emery has brought in 1 player, Moreno, and took us 3 from bottom, to Europeam football in half a season. He's  really not getting the attention in the media he should be getting, you know if it were Chelsea for example you wouldn't hear the last of it.

[Zatman]

16 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Remember, theres nothing they cant buy. 

In all seriousness, he is paid 15 million a year with as good as a bottomless pit for signings, numerous fraud charges against his club, and he wins the trophy for the best performing manager in the Prem. You couldn't write it could you.

They wanna be looking at the managers who do perform with limited funds.

Emery has brought in 1 player, Moreno, and took us 3 from bottom, to Europeam football in half a season. He's  really not getting the attention in the media he should be getting, you know if it were Chelsea for example you wouldn't hear the last of it.

15 million on the table. Could be 100 million unofficially, we will never know

Another hurdle for the failed drug taker to deal with

[BleedClaretAndBlue]

Remember when cheaters never win meant something 

[HanoiVillan]

It's just made-up numbers to advertise whatever 'Brand Finance' is. 

[LondonLax]

It’s interesting that the Premier League’s top 3 consisted of Guardiola and then Guardiola’s  former assistant manager and Guardiola’s former youth team manager whilst the Championship was walked by Guardiola’s former captain. 

He’s obviously got something working at the moment. 

[BleedClaretAndBlue]

46 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

It’s interesting that the Premier League’s top 3 consisted of Guardiola and then Guardiola’s  former assistant manager and Guardiola’s former youth team manager whilst the Championship was walked by Guardiola’s former captain. 

He’s obviously got something working at the moment. 

Its also interesting that he can be awarded Manager of the Season whilst they are simultaneously accusing them of 115 financial breaches. 

[The_Steve]

On 06/06/2023 at 17:57, BleedClaretAndBlue said:

Remember when cheaters never win meant something 

Just don’t ask who funds them or the 115 charges of rule breaking and failures to comply with investigators. Just a well run club with nothing to worry about. It’s a sickening spectacle. The media lack of scrutiny is a reason for their arrogance. 

[Zhan_Zhuang]

On 06/06/2023 at 17:57, BleedClaretAndBlue said:

Remember when cheaters never win meant something 

You could make a point Real Madrid were the first to do it, goes way back.

All corruption aside whether you like them or not it probably is a fair reflection of the World's biggest clubs. Unfortunately these are the teams the rest of the world wants to see and why they pay good money to watch them.

Brand is everything, social media, sponsorship etc.

[pas5898]

28 minutes ago, Zhan_Zhuang said:

Brand is everything, social media, sponsorship etc.

I normally judge a club size / brand by what I call the Alton Towers clothing scale. Basically what kits do you see children wearing at Alton Towers.

Once it was all Man U, Then Chelsea. Now literally all the little S***'s support Man City.

It's embarrassing and weak parenting. My children have been told to support Villa or move out.

[MrBlack]

3 minutes ago, pas5898 said:

I normally judge a club size / brand by what I call the Alton Towers clothing scale. Basically what kits do you see children wearing at Alton Towers.

Once it was all Man U, Then Chelsea. Now literally all the little S***'s support Man City.

It's embarrassing and weak parenting. My children have been told to support Villa or move out.

Can only assume the kids supporting them have parents that don't like football. 

Not sure how you could simultaneously claim to be a fan of another club, and then buy your kid a man city kit. Funding the cheats that have destroyed football as a competitive sport. 

[Wainy316]

An anti Citeh article with a Villa edge...

The dismal story of modern football can be summed up in two words: Manchester City | Phil Mongredien | The Guardian

Quote

 

The dismal story of modern football can be summed up in two words: Manchester City

Champions League glory is within the grasp of this team of well-heeled superstars. But I remember when football was an actual competition

On Saturday 11 October 1975, my dad took me to my first ever football match: Aston Villa (hooray!) against Tottenham Hotspur (boo!). I would be lying if I were to claim that I could remember much of the game now. I was so captivated by the spectacle, and particularly the unimaginable noise of 50,000 people shouting vaguely in unison, that I spent much of the time looking anywhere but the pitch.

That day marked the start of a ritual for the two of us that would endure until I left home at 18. Every other Saturday Dad would drive us to the ground from our home in Nottingham, with the radio tuned to Birmingham’s commercial station, BRMB, which always had a more partisan, Villa-centric take on sports reporting than the BBC.

Upon walking the final mile to Villa Park, we’d head first to the club car park, where the players and managers of both sides would each have to fight off an army of hangers-on, pre-teen autograph hunters and – once – gangland enforcers apparently looking to collect a debt from a player. Andy Gray, Brian Little, Martin Peters, Alan Hudson, Bobby Robson … reader, you may not know them, but I harassed them all, and still have the written evidence.

 

And what a time to become obsessed with football, and Villa in particular. Masterminded by unsmiling manager Ron Saunders, they were just about to embark on a remarkable renaissance that within seven years would see them win the league for the first time since the Edwardian era and then top that by winning the European Cup.

 

They were halcyon days; certainly they were more egalitarian. At the start of every season there would be seven or eight teams that could legitimately fancy their chances of winning the league. At the time, Liverpool were the best team in the country, but they were far from infallible. In 1975-76, they did come out on top, but only by a single point from QPR, and they only won 55% of their fixtures.

Fifty years later, that element of unpredictability seems like a relic from a distant age. Now, Manchester City – who take on Inter Milan in Istanbul on Saturday in a bid to win the Champions League for the first time – are indisputably the best team in the country. Indeed, they have just won their fifth league title in six years. During those six seasons, they won an astonishing 76% of their league matches. Bookmakers are understandably offering very long odds on any other team usurping them next season. Fans of other clubs now spend their summers wistfully wondering whether they might dare to dream of finishing as runners-up.

Yes, each of City’s players is phenomenally talented. Yes, as a team they play absolutely beautiful football of a calibre that I couldn’t have imagined in the 1970s, as I watched Villa’s no-nonsense centre-half Ken McNaught boot the ball out of the ground one more time. But how has this happened? In a word: money. In 2008 the club was bought by a private equity fund owned by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. They proceeded to spend their near limitless petro-funds hoovering up many of the world’s best players, as well as the best coach.

Of course, the arrival on the scene of the Abu Dhabi United Group wasn’t the starting point for domestic football’s transition from race to parade. The Premier League was seemingly formed in 1992 as a means of concentrating wealth and power among the biggest clubs. But the gradual abandonment of any pretence of there being a level playing field happened rapidly after the takeover of, first, Chelsea (by Roman Abramovich in 2003) and then City. Ultimately such stifling dominance of the game by one team, such a yawn supremacy, is hardly healthy for a game that relies on some degree of competitiveness.

This thought came to mind as I watched City demolish Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final last month and heard the commentators and pundits on BT Sport insist that “we all” would be hoping that they would go on to finally win club football’s biggest prize.

But just who is this “we”? Away from the TV studios, many football fans actively loathe the way that City’s financial muscle has distorted the English game over the past 15 years. Having succeeded in making the Premier League so boringly predictable, extending that chokehold to Europe by beating Inter on Saturday would hardly be something to celebrate.

And that’s before we even get to the more than 100 financial doping charges brought against the club by the Premier League earlier this year – which they vociferously deny. As long as this enormous question mark is hanging over whether they reached their position of dominance by effectively cheating, why would any neutral want them to (further) prosper?

Hating other teams has always been as much a part of football fandom as supporting your own. These days my personal hierarchy of revulsion is determined by how morally bankrupt a club’s owners are, rather than more traditional factors such as local rivalries or whether or not Lee Bowyer was playing for them. Indeed, since Newcastle’s takeover by the sovereign wealth fund belonging to Saudi Arabia – a country that dismembers dissenting journalists, although you’d be forgiven for thinking this is less important than Kieran Trippier’s free-kick prowess – they have seized the role of apex supervillains. (Clubs can be rehabilitated: throughout the Abramovich years, I despised Chelsea, now they’re just funny.)

Cheering on foreign opposition against English sides is certainly not any kind of new phenomenon, either – after all, if you really loathe a club, why should that not extend beyond national boundaries? In the mid-1990s, Arsenal played a cynical, but successful, brand of anti-football, characterised by defensive tactics and gamesmanship. When they were defeated by Spain’s Real Zaragoza in the 1995 Cup Winners’ Cup final thanks to a sublime last-minute Nayim goal, it wasn’t solely fans in Aragon and Tottenham who were celebrating. And if there was a funnier moment in the whole of 1975 than Dirty Leeds unluckily losing the European Cup final to two late Bayern Munich goals, well, I’ve forgotten it.

Nowadays, the continent’s biggest clubs are effectively interchangeable, aggressively marketed, multinational brands. Almost all of the world’s best players, whatever their nationality, belong to a small cabal of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish clubs. Whereas once an occasional glimpse of a top European side felt like an exotic treat, TV coverage has made the football world much smaller. This season, for instance, UK broadcasters have shown AC Milan more times than Villa. Is it any wonder that matches between English and international clubs have lost any element of “us v them”?

With such familiarity with the top continental leagues, there’s not even English exceptionalism as a reason to cheer on City on Saturday. Indeed, in today’s interconnected world it feels curiously parochial and old-fashioned – Brexity, even – for neutrals to insist on supporting English club sides in European competition.

“We all” want Manchester City to win the Champions League? Not in my name, sadly. Forza Inter!

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by Wainy316

[villa4europe]

Thats really well written about something that I think a lot of fans feel but no one seems to want to say

Also seems like we're on the knife edge between everyone else being labelled as bitter and the reality that man City have made football shit and no one wants them to win in general think that will become a mainstream thing next season

Actually a shame that it wasn't a bigger article

[Lichfield Dean]

11 hours ago, Wainy316 said:

An anti Citeh article with a Villa edge...

The dismal story of modern football can be summed up in two words: Manchester City | Phil Mongredien | The Guardian

That rarest of things - a pro-Birmingham, anti-Manchester article in the Guardian. Treasure this day, for we may never see the likes again.

[The_Steve]

Nauseating read which understates just how much the UAE has sportwashed Man City and grossly underscores their huge financial doping.

One tiny paragraph FFS:

FFP trouble

City’s performance off the pitch proves to be more tumultuous. In February 2020, Uefa announces a two-year ban for City from European club competition after “serious breaches” of financial fair play regulations between 2012 and 2016, a decision later overturned by the court of arbitration for sport, which clears City of “disguising equity funds as sponsorship contributions” and which reduces a €30m fine to €10m. However, in February 2023, the Premier League charges City with breaching its financial rules on more than 100 occasions between 2009 and 2018. A ban, points deduction, and a fine all remain a possibility going forward. City vehemently deny any wrongdoing, and in May 2023, Forbes values the club at just under £4bn ($5bn).

What's the Forbes valuation got to do with their FFP breaches? The bias is unreal.

[sne]

It's about as impressive as when Kim Jong-un wins a golf tournament in North Korea.

[GlobalVillan]

[NurembergVillan]

Drunk, sky-blue Mancs are merrily singing their way through the streets of Stockport this afternoon.

I wish it was us winning loads of trophies, but not the way that they've done it. So many of them just don't give a shit either. They just want the silverware.

I hope they go the way of Trump and Johnson. It is said that pride always comes before a fall.

[VillaJ100]

3 hours ago, GlobalVillan said:

Shouldn't that year be 2009?

[HanoiVillan]

Well they were always going to manage this eventually. The optimistic take is maybe it means Guardiola will leave sooner I suppose.