FFP

[VILLA MOLE]

The Premier League is the sum of its parts ,   off you fuck and play meaningless games in the desert

[Baldy]

To protect themselves long term, compromise might be needed by the EPL.

1) If proven guilty, relegate Man City to league 2 for past misdemeanors. The greedy bastards will probably fold.

2) Then introduce new rules to make the EPL more attractive to ultra rich investors. Impose a cap of 150 million a year on transfers allowing for incoming/outgoing players. Forget about FFP and all that confusing stuff.

3) Clubs who hit the 150 million transfer cap (or within 10 million) have to deposit 50 million into a 'holding' account which can be forfeited if any breaches of the rules. Along with a transfer embargo.

The smaller clubs (Brentford, Bournemouth etc) won't like this but they are never going to win the league anyway (apart from 5000/1 Leicester) and it might attract larger investors for them.

I have convinced myself (rightly or wrongly) that Italy and Spain are keeping a very close eye on this whole situation and will be ready to pounce.

Just a thought.

[pablo_picasso]

@villareport
🚨 It is understood that Villa co-owner, Nassef Sawiris, is close to City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak & that he shares frustrations over imposed limits on spending.
@MikeKeegan_DM
 #avfc

If thats true, then that is me done completely with football.

I suppose I will have to wait & see how this all develops & where our flag is planted.

[Monty]

I have convinced myself (rightly or wrongly) that Italy and Spain are keeping a very close eye on this whole situation and will be ready to pounce.

Nonsensical, as it's completely the other way round - nobody at Juve is 'keeping an eye on' selling themselves to the Saudis, for example. The Saudis might want them, which would be a predatory, nigh-on imperialist takeover (is it always is), but the idea that 'Spain and Italy are ready to pounce' is a little like saying the rabbit is ready to pounce on the hyaena.

[sid1964]

So if we cant sell Doug, then who goes before June 30th - we don't want to be starting next season on a minus points total?

[lovejoy]

I think the dilemma the Premier League have is that they want to fight the case but playing it through by kicking Coty out opens a massive can of worms for them and possibly kills the golden goose of the premier league. If they instead just give City a wrap over the knuckles they assume other fans will shout and vent for a bit but life goes on.

For me if they let city off I’d be n advocate f burning the whole thing down. Most likely is a minor punishment eg one season in the championship and as you were.

[Toronto Villa]

@villareport
🚨 It is understood that Villa co-owner, Nassef Sawiris, is close to City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak & that he shares frustrations over imposed limits on spending.
@MikeKeegan_DM
 #avfc

If thats true, then that is me done completely with football.

I suppose I will have to wait & see how this all develops & where our flag is planted.

why would you be done with football if our owner is making a perfectly legitimate point or shares concerns about spending restrictions in the game. Nowhere does it say we are alogned with Man City on charges that they circuvented the rules to gain an advantage. He's not advocating breaking any rules to allow for expansion of the limits. Why shouldn't NSWE be allowed to spend as they see fit through legitimate sources on their combined sporting interests? Mainly us.

[Dogtanian]

Why would kicking Manchester City out, a club that had done fuck all in the Premier league until ten years ago, kill the Prem?

[paul_e]

So if we cant sell Doug, then who goes before June 30th - we don't want to be starting next season on a minus points total?

No one because we don't need to sell anyone before the end of the month, it's nonsense and always was.

[Gareth]

John Percy saying our proposal to up the spending limit voted down….only 1 other voted with us

[chrisw1]

@villareport
🚨 It is understood that Villa co-owner, Nassef Sawiris, is close to City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak & that he shares frustrations over imposed limits on spending.
@MikeKeegan_DM
 #avfc

If thats true, then that is me done completely with football.

I suppose I will have to wait & see how this all develops & where our flag is planted.

It's natural he's frustrated.  Just as we get top 4 we have to sell our best player, same for Newcastle.  FFP is fundamentally flawed, it's supposedly there to protect clubs but in reality it's a glass ceiling to protect the few.  That's not to say I back Man City, far from it, but we need revised guidelines urgently.

[OCD]

John Percy saying our proposal to up the spending limit voted down….only 1 other voted with us

That's surprising, it seemed like others were of the same mind and if anything, thought it didn't go far enough. Just have to hope for Palace's proposal to go through now.

[Gareth]

The status quo of top clubs want to prevent Newcastle and our owners buying a place at the top table and nothing in it for others below

[The Edge]

Very good article from Mathew Syed in The Times today

Hypocritical City’s only motive was sportswashing but league cheered them in

Panicking powerbrokers now realise the scale of their error – unless these cuckoo owners are expelled from the nest, English football’s whole ecosystem faces collapse
Did they suppose the document would never leak? Did they not count on the brilliant investigative reporters at Times Sport, the best in the business? Did they hope that their perversion of the words of John Stuart Mill, in his wonderful tome On Liberty, would never see the light of day? Or do they no longer care about how they look, knowing that a proportion of Manchester City fans will take to social media to defend the indefensible, turning tribal allegiance into an advanced form of cognitive dissonance?
“The tyranny of the majority” is the breathtaking claim of City. They argue that their freedom to make money has been limited by the Premier League’s rules on sponsorship deals, which forbid related companies (such as Etihad Airways sponsoring a team backed by Abu Dhabi) from offering cash above the commercial rate determined by an independent assessor. They say they are being persecuted, held back by a cartel of legacy clubs that want to monopolise success at their expense.
I am guessing that all fans will see through this comedy gold. City have won the past four Premier League titles and more than 57 per cent of the available domestic trophies over the past seven years. According to my former colleague Tony Evans, this makes them the most dominant side in top-flight history: more dominant than Liverpool in the Seventies and Eighties (41 per cent), more dominant than Manchester United in the Nineties (33 per cent).
Indeed, they are almost as dominant as the emirate of Abu Dhabi, which understands the concept of tyranny quite well having engaged in human rights abuses of a kind that led Amnesty International to question its treatment of immigrant workers and to condemn the arbitrary detention of 26 prisoners of conscience.

But dominance is, as Einstein might have said, a relative term. City want more money than they have at present, more dominance than they enjoy now, more freedom to spend on players (their bench is worth more than the first teams of most of their rivals) so that they can win, what, 40 league titles in a row? That would indeed turn the Premier League from what many regard as a fairly enjoyable competition into a tyranny of the minority.

And this is why the story revealed by my colleague Matt Lawton will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of all but the most biased of observers. The motive of City’s owners is not principally about football, the Premier League or, indeed, Manchester. As many warned from the outset, this was always a scheme of sportswashing, a strategy of furthering the interests of a microstate in the Middle East. It is in effect leveraging the soft power of football, its cultural cachet, to launder its reputation. This is why it is furious about quaint rules on spending limits thwarting the kind of power that, back home, is untrammelled.

And let us be clear about what all this means. An emirate, whose government is autocratic and therefore not subject to the full rule of law, is paying for a squad of eye-wateringly expensive lawyers to pursue a case in British courts that directly violates British interests. For whatever one thinks about what the Premier League has become, there is no doubt that its success has benefited the UK, not just in terms of the estimated contribution to the economy of £8billion in 2021-22, but also through a tax contribution of £4.2billion and thousands of jobs.

Yet what would happen if the spending taps were allowed to be turned full tilt by removing restraints related to “associated partners”? That’s right: what remains of competitive balance would be destroyed, decimating the league’s prestige and appeal.

Remember a few years ago when leaked emails showed that Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the City chairman, “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years”. Isn’t it funny that such people love the rule of law abroad — seeing it as a vehicle for outspending counterparties on expensive litigation — almost as much as they fear it at home? It’s as though City have ditched any pretence to care about anything except the geopolitical interests of their owners. What’s certain is that the Premier League can no longer cope with multiple City lawsuits and has had to hire outside help. In this case, as in so many others, the rule of law is morphing into something quite different: the rule of lawyers.

In some ways you almost feel like saying to football’s now panicking powerbrokers: it serves you right. These people welcomed Roman Abramovich, then stood wide-eyed while state actors entered the game too. They surely cannot be too surprised that the logical endpoint for this greed and connivance is that the blue-ribband event of English football is now fighting for its survival. When you sup with Mephistopheles, you can’t complain when the old fella returns to claim his side of the bargain.

But the dominant sense today is the shameless hypocrisy of the owners of City. They said that they were investing in City because they cared about regenerating the area. They now say that unless they get their own way, they are likely to stop community funding. They said that the commercial deals were within the rules; they now say that the rules are illegal. They said that competitive balance was important for English football; they now want to destroy it. They said they were happy with the democratic ethos of Premier League decision-making; now they hilariously say it’s oppressive.
I suspect at least some City fans are uncomfortable with this brazenness and may even be belatedly reassessing the true motives of the club’s owners. What’s now clear is that cuckoos have been let into the Premier League nest. Unless they are properly confronted or ejected, they could now threaten the whole ecosystem of English football.

That's a superb article.

[andyh]

I have said before, I think the biggest punishment you can give Many City is to take away their power.
They aren’t going to be relegated, so dropping them into League 2 isn’t going to happen.
A points reduction will have minimal impact, unless it’s 20-30 points, which would ultimately make it very difficult to qualify for European competitions.
A fine is utterly meaningless. Even if it were a billion pounds, it wouldn’t help anyone other than the EPL coffers.

The only was to hurt Man City is to take away their voting rights.
Strip them of the ability to influence, shape or guide the game for the next 5 years.

Maybe that would feel like a proper punishment.