General Premier League Thread 2023-24 Mod Note in op 27/6/23 And 21/05/24

Boring league

And do people really believe

Casemiro is on same wage as Haaland, That Varane makes more than Grealish, That Mount makes more than Foden, That Maguire makes far more than Walker and Ake, That Osana makes more than Ederson, That Bruno makes more than Rodri, because that's what City claim in their official declared wages for 2024.

Total sham

That makes it beyond argument: this City side is the best English football has ever seen. The wall of money bought history, and then deployed an army of solicitors to avoid being held to account. I am reminded of all the sniggering and disdain they received between the takeover in 2008 and the first title in 2012. How silly that all seems now in retrospect.

This title has been inevitable for weeks, but really the inevitability stretches back years. Their grip on the league deepens every year as their world leading youth system produces more players; as they buy whoever they feel they need every summer; and as they manage to keep whatever players they want to keep (a feat Utd and Liverpool at their best couldn't manage).

The sickening part is the media choosing to be complicit in all of this. The headlines should be about the 115 charges and little else. But the media will fawn, Drury will wax lyrical and Sky will swoon for hours. It is completely soulless and hollow. A mid tier English club unable to sell out its stadium after a full decade of dominance now indisputably the best to ever do it. Whatever.

What have allegations seven years old now have to do with the current playing squad of City? Were any of them even there in 2017? KbB possibly.
Current City team has cost less than utd or Arsenals current team. Good recruitment, coaching and bottle has them where they are. Am sick of hearing the begrudgery towards them. Lucky tonight but all great teams need luck at times too

Does it need to be explained to you why serious allegations of financial rules being breached repeatedly during the formative years of the City dynasty are directly relevant to their current dominance? It really is pretty obvious, I must say.

Absolutely everything.

Obviously

Thanks to the Mods for Villa thread name update😁

Do you actually think that Man City were actively cheating on June 30th 2017 and then on July 1st 2017 just decided to stop and say 'lets not cheat anymore'.

Pull the other one.

Their manager is a cheat and the club is a cheat.

Their titles are absolutely meaningless, I could care less, fair play to arsenal they gave it a good go, ran them to the wire but you just can't compete. 97 points Liverpool got and didn't win it, it's ridiculous

Grealish has played like Antony for 2 of his 3 seasons, he cost 100m. City have had plenty of flops, but they don't get much attention because there's another 60m player in their position to slot in. Doku has been largely rubbish this season and nobody has bat an eyelid

Well for a start we have no idea what City are paying in wages as their declared books hold as much water as a siev.

They aren't worth the paper the are written on

…… Yes?

Saw this on Twitter….

City’s fourth title in a row is right up there with Lance Armstrong’s 4th straight win in The Tour.

Apt.

Tottenham supporters area an absolute embarrassment.
The chant of "Stand up if you hate Arsenal" small mind mentality. Same crap West Ham fans sing to Tottenham.

They will never get achieve anything with this mind set, Postecoglou now sees what he's up against.

I'd be slow to blame the Spurs fans. It's a feature of the game that everybody knows City are cheats, and nearly everyone would like to see them lose, but it would always be worse if you're biggest rivals win. City's league titles don't count in anyone's book apart from City fans (and Sky) but your biggest rival winning on the other hand is very sore.

The Spurs players all tried their best, and that's what's important.

This isn't down to his fluffed chance yesterday, but a separate point that seems to be missed by all analysts and most fans (apart from Spurs fans) is how poor-to-mediocre Son has been for most of the season (I wouldn't have noticed either but for dipping into the Spurs thread throughout the year).

He's scored 17 goals, mediocre na'h.

Some people come up with totally stupid comparisons

How anybody could think that's similar is beyond me.

The club is crooked but the players haven't cheated.

Ah the players have moved to the club and accepted payments from the club (possibly through multiple sources to keep the official wage bill down)

Unless of course you think that only ever happened with Roberto Mancini and never with any of the players…

Strange that Sergio Aguero spent the best years of his life playing for Man City on less wages than similar players around the world.. No?

Wasn't there a stage where Aguero was on like 150k less per week than De Gea on their "official" wages?

Any player who has played for City since 2008 is guilty by association

I would consider not following the rules that they signed up to cheating.

Personally, I would advocate for a system that allows owners to pour money in as long as they parent company of the club assumes the risk, and for there to be a maximum amount of money they can invest that’s calculated in some way to general football/league valuation.

But City haven’t just been spending to compete, they’ve been spending to dominate. Everything they’ve been doing, with over the odds sponsorship from a company with extremely close links to cities owners(and that’s putting it lightly), to creating fake crypto companies for additional revenue has been to ensure that nobody else can compete, because it’s simply not possible for other clubs to follow that model to create a level playing field.

And because Cities huge revenue is essentially generated outside of football, it makes everything worse for other clubs. Players become almost immediately more expensive when one club can chuck 100m at a player to warm the bench, with the club receiving the money overpaying for replacements which trickles down to other clubs. Which means normal clubs need to find additional sources of revenue, which means increased ticket prices, merchandise etc.

Everything City is doing is to the detriment of football, they’ve broken 115 rules that we know about and gave spend the entire time using an army of lawyers to delay and obfuscate. I hope the book is thrown at them.

It's a perfect comparison.

It's not a comparison between Armstrong and the City players. It's a comparison between Armstrong's doping and City's financial doping.

The players haven't cheated, that we know of. I have my suspicions about some players at City but I won't speculate. But with Pep's methods, who knows.

Pep was a convicted performance enhancing drug cheat himself when he was a player.

The same doctor who supplied him those drugs was then appointed to his Barcelona team when Pep was managing there. And then there was his time at Bayern Munich where Pep used to complain that the same injuries that would last 6 weeks in Germany could be healed in a fortnight in Spain.