Manchester City cheating was ‘disgusting’ and they ‘shouldn’t see a single penny’ of Haaland sale

· Football365

The idea that Manchester City were fighting the good fight against the Red Cartel is patently absurd; their cheating was ‘disgusting’.

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

Cheating is cheating

Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. So much so that S. Manchester genuinely believes that State-backed City are fighting the good fight against the evil cartel of the Premier League. His arguments are, of course, utter nonsense.

It’s easy for certain turn-a-blind-eye City supporters to just argue that all they did was spend money. As if they have only been caught over spending the budget. But that’s not true. They have been charged and found guilty of deliberately hiding their spending, deceiving the regulators and deliberately obstructing the investigation. This is not just accidently overspending. It is deliberately cheating and trying to get away with it.

Saying that “City has spent around the same as United and Chelsea in that time and a little more than Liverpool and Arsenal.” is complete nonsense. You have no idea how much Man City have spent. The whole point of the case is that this was hidden from public view.

Say what you like about the cartel and spending. But 13 of the clubs in the Premier League voted for tighter financial controls. It’s pretty hard to argue that this was some sort of elite club conspiracy when the majority of the league were in favour.

Within Europe, although FFP came in after the takeover of City, this was being worked on long before. Uefa had already identified that there was an enormous problem of clubs overspending and not living within their means. The ground work behind FFP was well underway before City’s takeover. It takes an terribly arrogant or deluded mind to believe that all the big clubs got together to put these rules into place to stop City being successful.

And if you are a City fan, consider this. Everyone thinks you are guilty. There is no 50/50 here or even 80/20. No one is defending you. The only defenders of Man City are a group of blinkered Man City supporters. For example, ask football fans of Scotland, or any other country, where they have absolutely no skin in the game. No bias towards Man United or Liverpool or any other club. Able to reason and be unbiassed supporters. Everyone thinks that City are guilty as sin and deserve to be punished.

Maybe, just maybe, you need to stop and think, and ask yourself: “Are we the baddies?”

Mike, LFC, Dubai

S. Manchester with a spectacular and sanctimonious load of shite in the mailbox.

Tries to pitch Man City as the freedom fighter against a cartel. Give me strength.

This ignores that their cheating has probably cost millions in lost revenue and European football for Brighton, Leicester, Brentford, Villa and trophies for Stoke and numerous others. Yes that’s a real cartel of teams that Man City screwed over with their cheating.

Financial rules allow for investment in training facilities so Man City could’ve played a slow game and built from the ground up like the teams above but that didn’t suit their gluttonous owners who wanted success, fame and ego now. They flagrantly and blatantly scammed and shammed their way to false glory at the cost of everyone else and they didn’t spare a thought along the way.

They are cheats. And somehow there are still some idiots standing by pretending they know better, despite an increasingly overwhelming body of evidence.

15 clubs would have to vote for expulsion to make it happen. Who of the other 19 wouldn’t vote for that tomorrow?

Minty, LFC

S, Manchester might do well to remember that plenty of people were querying, quite loudly, how the fk Chelsea were getting their money, when it was so blatantly through ill gotten gains.

It wasn’t even that long before so doesn’t require much of a stretch.

Same can, and has, been said about PSG, whilst there are multiple articles questioning how Barcelona can get away with what they have been, where any other La Liga side, bar the obvious, wouldn’t have stood a chance.

So there are four examples. Stop crying and admit that what City has done has been hugely detrimental to football.

As for Chelsea, I still think they must be pissing themselves laughing despite the fact they also cheated.

Dan

S don’t get it. Manchester City’s ‘crime’ isn’t that they cheated to win all of those ‘trophies and memories’; if you cheated, then by definition you didn’t win any of those trophies and your memories are illusions based on a vacuum of truth.

The real trouble is that they weren’t just your memories. The cheating has robbed us all of that period of games…not just the trophies and the glory, but even the failures are tainted now. The relegations are not real because the playing field was never level…any team that lost to City in that period didn’t, really; they lost to a team that existed outside of the rules that everyone else was playing by.

And while a couple of clubs seem desperate to now claim trophies that they also didn’t win during those years, the truth is that no real fan wants to win retroactive cups in that way. We surely won’t get the warm fuzzy memories that come with winning them, so what’s the point? To fill a trophy cabinet that most fans never actually get to see?

Of the 27 teams relegated during those years, at least nine (the 18th place finishers) might have gone down only because City are cheats; nine 5th-place finishers perhaps didn’t see the CL because City are cheats; FA and Carabao cups involved multiple teams losing to City who might otherwise have beaten a non-cheating City; every team’s league position for nine years would potentially have been one place higher with higher attendant pay-outs.

If you cheat, that simply makes you human. If you refuse to change or admit to your cheating, then the cheating defines you. Own it or don’t, that’s up to you; but don’t sit there thinking the rest of us give a toss about trophies that are long gone, or that we want to burn the etihad or daub the supporters in red paint.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that your lot are going to pay to settle civil suits alone – at least that much, with Euro teams also waiting to sue – will provide enough schadenfreude to keep the rest of us warm for a little while. As for the penalties that the League gives you – that had better start with expulsion, because you don’t simply slap a cheat’s wrist unless you want everyone to start doing it.

It was a disgusting act – for billionaires to cheat at a game into which millions of ordinary people invest so much of their souls and existences. It wasn’t an attempt to level a playing field, it wasn’t done to avenge some great wrong – it was greed and ego writ large, and fk the fans while we’re at it. Disgraceful, as it attempting to defend it.

G

Really looking forward to seeing S.Manchester taken to task in the next mailbox, that’s going to be fun!

“We didn’t cheat, we only broke lots of rules”

Bring it on

Clive LFC

They knew

Dear Editor,

Years ago the great comedian Bill Hicks turned the pieties of the intellectual elite upside-down by claiming that he was, unlike them, for the war, but against the troops.

That’s how I feel when I read people saying, don’t blame the players or managers for Man City cheating. Come on. They knew. Roberto Mancini knew when he was getting paid a double salary; their agents knew when the money showed up in their bank accounts; and, after 2018, thanks to the email leaks, anyone who joined City (Pep included) knew they were joining a corrupt organization. They were just happy to benefit from the cheating.

Did they win on the pitch? Of course they did. But they joined a club with the best starting 11 (and best second 11) in the Premier League because they wanted to win, and because they didn’t care that they were going to do it by cheating–as long as they didn’t have to cheat themselves, they were happy to take the money and the fruits of the cheating that took place.

F them, and f Man City, and f all the journalists who spent time glazing up the club while mocking the various pretenders to the throne for not having the bottle, the tactical or financial nous, or the sponsorship income to compete.

Strip the titles. Strip the honor. Burn it to the ground, and ban state ownership of clubs forever.

Ciborium (Against the club, against the players, against the sycophantic journos, against Sky Sports for taking more than an hour to take up the Ornstein report, against Michael Oliver reffing in the UAE. Basically I’m an unhappy person.)

Anyone that thinks or says the man city players on the field won those games and titles and not the overspending by the club is oblivious.

The initial overspending/cheating caused and created more. Better players came in and won, which was the impetus for more spending and more players. And on and on.

The team deserves to be punished way more and greater than they will.

And if by chance they get relegated and players do get sold off to other teams, that sales revenue had better not go back to city. The proceeds should be put in a fund and then proportionally divided amongst the teams directly impacted by losing to them over the years.

For every loss, x% of the sales revenue.

Put it this way, do you really think Haaland would have signed there if city weren’t already top of the table?

They shouldn’t see a single penny of his sale.

Mark

Get rid

I remember, after watching the movie “All The President’s Men” (one of the best movies ever btw) I became absorbed by Watergate and read everything I could find about it. What truly astonished me was that the break-in was actually a relatively minor and insignificant incident in what was a vast conspiracy being perpetrated by the Nixon Administration involving virtually all branches of government. The level of corruption and abuse of power was wilful, extensive and systematic. History shows us that time and again, these people either think they won’t be caught, they’ll be able to wriggle out of it or they simply don’t care.

So while we are all clutching our pearls debating suitable punishments, no one is asking the bigger question… does anyone seriously believe MCFC stopped there? Doping issues followed Pep Guardiola both as a player and coach in both Barcelona and Bayern. Mike Dean has already admitted to standing in the centre circle Morris Dancing or Moonwalking. Clattenberg I believe accepted bribes abroad. Does anyone think doping and bribing match officials were red lines MCFC were unwilling to cross? It puts Aguero’s 157th minute winner in a slightly different light doesn’t it?

The MCFC ownership makes Abramovic’s indiscretions seem like philanthropy in comparison and it’s not like they are going to take their spanking and behave are they? Surely the question needs to be asked if they meet the “fit and proper” test.

The one thing they have craved is legitimacy and by having a seat at the table they have had, and used that power and influence. The only thing that will really hurt them is taking their chair away and removing them as owners.

Adidasmufc (Though I must say, a deduction of 114 points would also have a certain poetic justice to it)

Trickle-down economics

Further to Manchester City’s verdict, obviously a lot of clubs and their fans feel aggrieved and believe City’s trophies should be awarded elsewhere. However, the money spent by City during this period has filtered down throughout the football pyramid and affected outcomes everywhere.

For example, there is another, much smaller story that illustrates just how complicated football’s financial ecosystem can be.

It starts with Jack Grealish and ends with Ben House.

In August 2021, Manchester City paid Aston Villa £100 million for Grealish, at the time a British transfer record. Villa embarked on a major rebuild that summer. One of the players they signed was Danny Ings from Southampton for a reported £25 million. Southampton, having lost Ings, then bought Adam Armstrong from Blackburn Rovers for around £15 million. Later that month, Blackburn spent around £500,000 to sign Tayo Edun from League One Lincoln City. Lincoln’s recruitment model involved developing and selling players and reinvesting the proceeds. A few months later, in January 2022, they went shopping considerably further down the football pyramid. One of the players they bought was Ben House, a 22-year-old striker playing for Eastleigh in the National League.

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