Man City stadium ban proposed as punishment as Saudis take higher moral ground

· Football365

There is no end to the Manchester City mails as new punishments are proposed and new ire is unleashed. If you prefer to read love for John Nicholson, click here. And send all mails…

There is no end to the Manchester City mails as new punishments are proposed and new ire is unleashed.

Man City should be banned from Etihad Stadium

> Man City and Etihad Airways have been partners in crime for years – at least, that is how it looks if the financial allegations and findings against City ultimately stand after the appeal. > > If City are found guilty and gaining an unfair financial advantage, then a fine or points deduction isn’t enough. > > My proposed punishment? Ban Man City from playing at the Etihad Stadium for 10 years. Let them play away ALL season long > > The punishment should also affect Etihad Airways. If the club is prohibited from using the stadium, its biggest sponsor should feel the consequences too. Taking away the stadium would hurt both Man City and the sponsor financially through lost exposure, matchday revenue, hospitality and commercial activity. > > Aziz, KSA

Would anybody actually stop watching?

> So I’ve just had the misfortune of watching Sky Sports Sunday Supplement, or as it should have been called ‘the City forgiveness tour starts here’. The only purpose of the show appears to be floating excuses as to why City aren’t punished. There’s the ‘fear of Super League’, ‘fear of lost commercial interest without City’, ‘fear of East Manchester falling apart’ and ‘fear of the greater UK’s geopolitical interests’. It could have been scripted by ADUG itself. > > So is this what we’ll now have then? During the pre-match coverage next week, we’ll have tales of sympathy towards poor City players being caught up in all this, and how they’re the real heroes for stepping out onto the pitch despite that? Or will the commentators give us lines like ‘well thankfully we’re only here to talk about football, and all that process is behind us.’. > > It all comes down to the question which may well now face all of us: when City get out of this, will you actually walk? Will you actually cancel Sky/TNT because it’s a farce, and acknowledge that? Clearly Sky believe you won’t. I hope that they, and the Premier League are massively mis-reading the fans’ actual ire, but maybe I’m wrong and we’re all sheep and in a year’s time we’ll be debating if Haaland is the best striker in history and if Maresca is the actual genius for managing to fit an entire new midfield into a title winning team. > > Ryan, Bermuda (are we the problem?)

> …With all of the (correct) moral outrage related to Man City’s shamming, are we to assume that everyone will be boycotting Haaland in Fantasy Premier League? No, thought not. > > Cheers, > Foldão

Have Newcastle owners taken higher moral ground?

> I’d imagine Newcastle’s owners will be looking at City’s punishment with great interest. > > They may deem it worthwhile to pour £900m into the club in one season and take the punishment knowing that it could be significantly less than City’s if they do it without deception. > > Or maybe PIF will just settle for the ‘moral high ground’. They looked at clubs like City and PSG and how they artificially inflated their clubs’ finances and decided to follow the rules instead. This is not how the global system works or how international sport works but PIF said ‘no, we’re going to follow the rules and respect the history and culture of English football’. Even the prices they paid to sign Newcastle players to the Saudi league were relatively fair. > > If the City PSG and Newcastle aquisitions were partly about diplomacy and sportswashing, PSG dovetailed seamlessly into the corruption of the French political class. City were exposed as deceitful, tacky rulebreakers with no respect for English football culture but perhaps surprisingly the Saudis have shown that regardless of how they operate in an ancient civilization with ancient values, they are able to adapt to different cultural environments and respect the rules of others, even if they would prefer that they didn’t exist and that they could spend their money without restriction. > > I would much rather live in Abu Dhabi than Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha or Dubai but when it comes to respecting our rules, culture and history is it that surprisng that a country with one of the richest cultural histories in the world is the one that understood AND respected English football culture? > > Ben Teacher

Operation successful; patient died

> There seems to be an increasingly popular argument among some Everton, Villa and other supporters that the City case should either result in City escaping serious punishment or, at minimum, provide the opportunity to kill off the FFP/PSR rules supposedly designed by the Big Six to keep everyone else down. > > Fair enough. PSR is imperfect and there is a legitimate argument that revenue-based restrictions favour clubs with historically larger revenues. > > But what exactly is the alternative? > > - 1. Scrap FFP/PSR and let everyone spend what they want > > I’ve already bored everyone with this one. A financial free-for-all doesn’t liberate Villa and Everton; it overwhelmingly benefits City and Newcastle. > > Their ultimate financial backing operates on a completely different scale from even extremely wealthy private owners. Eventually the rational private investor reaches a limit. State-backed ownership need not encounter anything resembling a limit. > > So, the most likely result isn’t glorious competitive equality. The Petrostate Pair win an awful lot, while our old friends in the Red Cartel hoover up much of what’s left because their revenues and resources still dwarf most of the league. > > The other guaranteed winners are players and agents. Football has rarely encountered a huge new influx of cash that hasn’t rapidly passed through to wages, transfer fees and commissions. > > The obvious criticism of revenue-based controls is that the biggest clubs start with the biggest revenues, making them difficult to catch. There’s truth in that. Although it’s worth remembering that Liverpool went from financial crisis and being hundreds of millions behind Manchester United to overtaking them competitively while operating under FFP. > > But let’s accept the criticism anyway. We need restrictions, but perhaps they shouldn’t be linked to revenue. > > - 2. Introduce a spending cap > > This is superficially attractive. American sports use caps successfully, so why not football? > > Because football isn’t an American closed league. > > Where do you set the cap? At Manchester United’s spending level? That does nothing for competitive balance. Everton’s? Bournemouth’s? Ipswich’s? > > And what happens when Ipswich are relegated and Leeds promoted? Do Championship clubs operate under the same cap? If not, you’ve created another enormous financial cliff edge between divisions. > > Then there’s Europe. > > A Premier League-only cap low enough to create genuine domestic equality potentially turns English clubs into second-class citizens in the European transfer market. The best players don’t have to accept your salary cap; they can go to Madrid, Munich, Barcelona, Paris or elsewhere. > > So do we impose the cap across Europe? At what level? Premier League revenues? Eredivisie revenues? Scottish Premiership revenues? > > A genuinely equalising European cap would either massively constrain the wealthiest leagues or give clubs in those leagues an enormous advantage over everyone else. The same would happen within leagues – I’m assuming the fans arguing this one want it to be true equality for all not just set at a limit that brings them into the Big 6? > > There’s also promotion and relegation itself. Salary and spending caps work particularly neatly in competitions where the worst team gets a high draft pick rather than relegated. > > Create genuine NFL-style parity in the Premier League and you have to accept its other side: Everton or Villa might be just as capable of going from champions to relegation candidates as going the other way. How enthusiastic are wealthy owners about investing hundreds of millions when sporting equality also means a substantially greater risk of dropping out of the league entirely? > > And finally: enforcement. > > We’re currently discussing what happens when clubs faced with relatively modest financial restrictions employ every conceivable accounting device, exploit loopholes or allegedly simply disregard the rules. > > Good luck introducing a hard salary cap. > > - 3. Kick out the Red Cartel > > This is perhaps my favourite. > > If Liverpool, United, Arsenal and whichever other clubs we’re currently including in the evil empire are the problem, kick them out and let everyone else get on with it. > > In other words: give those clubs the Super League their owners wanted. > > Brilliant. > > Those clubs wanted a Super League precisely because they believed their enormous global support could generate considerably more money if they stopped sharing so much of it with everyone else. > > Premier League broadcasting income is distributed far more equitably than in many major European leagues. The enormous global audience attracted partly by its biggest clubs produces money that is then shared throughout the competition. > > Remove a large proportion of those global eyeballs and what happens to the next television deal? Sponsorship? Overseas interest? > > Liverpool, United and Arsenal aren’t simply taking money out of the Premier League ecosystem. Their global popularity helps put money into it. > > Perhaps that’s irrelevant. Football isn’t about balance sheets, after all. It’s about winning things. > > So Everton win the Premier League after Liverpool, United and Arsenal have disappeared into their European super-competition. > > Does it really mean the same thing? > > No Liverpool supporters whose noses can be rubbed in it? No Old Trafford away win? No Arsenal title race? > > Football’s great rivalries derive much of their meaning from beating the people you desperately want to beat. City understood that perfectly with “Welcome to Manchester”. Newcastle supporters beating Barcelona were still singing “Are you watching Sunderland?” > > Winning isn’t just about possessing a trophy. It’s about who you beat to get it. And no it doesn’t go the other way – Super League doesn’t become less interesting because of a lack of local rivalry because Super League is aimed at global audiences who want to see Liverpool v Real Madrid not Liverpool v Crystal Palace. It’s not romantic. I don’t like it. But that is modern football. > > And here’s the final irony. > > Suppose Villa thrive in this brave new Premier League. They dominate it for several years, grow their revenues and global following and become its biggest club. > > How long before Villa’s owners want access to the vastly richer competition containing Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern, Liverpool and Manchester United? > > That’s why proposed versions of the Super League quickly developed ideas involving a Super League 2 with promotion and wider access once the original closed-shop concept became politically toxic. > > The uncomfortable truth about the Super League episode is that supporters of the six English clubs involved were rightly furious. But the other fourteen clubs weren’t exactly delighted at the prospect of being left behind either. > > Because they understood what losing those clubs would mean. > > So we’re back where we started. > > Unlimited spending disproportionately benefits the clubs with the richest ultimate backers. > > A genuine hard cap creates enormous practical problems in an open, international football system. > > Removing the biggest clubs damages the competition you’re supposedly trying to make more valuable and ultimately gives those clubs precisely the breakaway they wanted. > > None of that means PSR is perfect. Far from it. Change it. Allow ambitious owners greater scope to invest. Find better ways of preventing historic revenues becoming an impenetrable moat around established clubs. > > But “PSR is flawed” isn’t itself a financial regulatory system. > > If we’re going to tear the existing one down in the name of competitive balance, somebody eventually has to explain what replaces it, and those fans arguing for it need to realise that there is an increasing ‘operation successful, patient died’ quality to their proposals. You are solving the problem of a Big Six by handing football to a Petrostate Two, and/or crippling the Premier League’s ability to compete with Europe, and/or removing the clubs responsible for much of its global appeal and expecting your club to be the successful exception to all of that. > > Lindsay

Read the original

Related