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

It's comparing a drugs cheat to a team winning titles. Lance Armstrong took drugs to enhance his performance so it's suggesting that Manchester City players took drugs to enhance their performance.

How can you not see that?

The team would not exist to win titles as they have been without financial doping, just as Armstrong would have been a different athlete without doping.

But at this point I think you’re wilfully ignoring that point which has been made several times now and has never once suggested that City players are doping.

This is exactly the kind of thing sports journalists should be sniffing around imo.

I'm not ignoring anything. Comparing a drugs cheat to a football club is suggesting the players are doping.

An intelligent comparison would be to liken City as a business to other corrupt businesses.

The comparison is not very intelligent, it's stupid.

Right I'm done with this after this post because none of you seem to understand how comparing a drugs cheat to a football club is staining the players.

What has been proven about City in a court of law?

There's very little chance the players aren't aware of what's going on.

The players are unfortunately stained. But handsomely rewarded so do they care?

If City are found guilty and lose titles the players can blame nobody but themselves.

No player who has moved to City in the last 3/4/5 season and can claim they had no idea

It's worth noting that 14 of the 115 charges Man City are facing are directly on "Failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009-10 to 2017-18."

Lol.

This is the maddest thread I've read in a while. Financial doping like City have done is completely akin to what to what Armstrong did, and to argue otherwise is just pig-ignorance.

City financially cheated by paying through different channels, and hiding money. Whether its with drugs or with money, Armstrong and City both elevated themselves above the playing field through cheating ways.

City would not have the squad they do now if they didn't cheat. The cheating allowed them to bench players that would be walk in's into most PL squads, so they are able to rotate and rest far better than any other team. Remember "Pep Roulette"? That existed because of the wealth of riches on their bench.

That in turn has led to success on the field, which makes it EVEN EASIER to get these players on massive money.

It is quite heartbreaking as a fan of sport to see this level of cheating going on, and no one taking it seriously, or doing anything about it. Personally, I think everytime City play away the home crowds should be booing every touch of the ball, every time City have it. Instead, I fear there's a resignation going on. People have stopped caring as they feel as powerless as the FA comes across.

Ha ha ha - never saw this.

I'd say, yeah, when you're coining it in like the lads are, you definitely feel like you have to play the lottery !!!!!

The Armstrong comparison is absolutely relevant. Everyone knows what's going on, and eventually it'll come out.

Besides the fact that it's a stupid comparison it doesn't relate to anything from 2020 or later which is the period where these titles have been won.

To this point there are no allegations of wrongdoings since 2018. The only charges from 2019 onwards are failure to cooperate.

Michelle Smith is still officially recorded as winning 3 Gold medals in 1996. Nobody in Ireland or in the Sport recognise them as anything other than the result of cheating. Same with City’s trophies for me.

Nobody comes from nowhere to do what she did. No team comes from where City were to do what they did.

Are you suggesting that they only broke the rules to get themselves in a position where they no longer needed to break those same rules? Perhaps that is why they have been failing to cooperate with the investigation.

Its particularly laughable when you consider that for a lot of dopers they are doping outside of competition to accelerate their training, rather than during competition itself.

So how stupid would it be to claim that the doped preparation had no effect on the race itself. To offer that "They weren't doping during the race" as if it mattered. It would be really stupid to claim that.

Yet here we are.

Much like UEFA, they may have felt they had all of the necessary pieces but then the carefully planned charges are made and the process starts. Suddenly the Premier League team find themselves completely outmatched. They're facing off against solicitors who get paid a lot more than they do and have access to an array of manpower and resources the PL team could only dream about. Every single aspect of the charges are disputed, and even the bits that are simple and obvious are being contested for time limitations or other reasons of admissibility. Every meeting organised with City employees to take a deposition is constantly delayed and rescheduled. They take the maximum time allowed to furnish documents and / or request extensions constantly. The process previously agreed is constantly questioned and renegotiated for "fairness".

Finally, they bury the PL team in paper. PL ask for a document and they get boxes and boxes and boxes in return. PL ask for an email, they get a dump of all emails for all employees from an entire department for the whole period in question. They don't want to omit anything, they say. It's not up to them to decide what the PL may find to be relevant.

This isn't the Hollywood movie where the plucky small practice lawyer and his talented assistant with the truth on their side magically overcome these obstacles through sheer ingenuity. The longer it drags on, the more the resource disparity impacts the process. Progress is glacial and the goalposts are constantly shifted. Meanwhile operational realities eat away at the resolve to see it through. City have won another title, another year has passed since the window under examination. The considerations around revenue and TV deals and so on have deepened.

In the end, the PL loses or - at best - get a proposal from City for them to accept a handful of charges for a hefty (but token) fine. The victory is total, money wins.

You are unreal.

An investigation into Michelle Smith raised some serious questions about other swimmers.

People like you hear the accusations and rush to judgement.

Did you know that Michelle Smith's winning time in the 400m freestyle was the slowest winning time since 1980? Did you know that Janet Evans who finished second to her and made the accusations held the World record which was four seconds faster than Smith's winning time in that Olympics.

Michelle Smith's winning time in the 1996 Olympic 400 metre freestyle would not have got a medal in the 1988 Olympics and won the silver in 1992. She would not have won a medal in the 1995 world championships.

Michelle Smith did improve a lot but the others regressed more in the run up to that Olympics.

Its a bit like the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100 metres. Ben Johnson was the villain but Carl Lewis failed a drug test at the American trials before that Olympics but his ban was hushed and then overturned. Six of the eight athletes in that race failed drug tests at one stage or another. Calvin Smith was the real champ but Lewis has the gold medal.

Back to the swimming, there is no doubt that a number of the finalists in 1996 regressed massively, and quite suddenly, before that Olympics.

So while Michelle Smith improved significantly the only reason she got gold was the failure of the others to swim anywhere close to their best times. Drug testing had just become more stringent, as proven by the amount of athletes banned in 1996.

So while it's entirely possible that Smith did enhance her chances illegally she passed the same tests as the others.

I can't be certain of anything from that Olympics but you'd have to suspect they were all at it in advance of that Olympics but stopped a few months before it.

The position is similar in the other events she won at that Olympics.

By default nobody in those Olympic events should have a medal so they belong to Michelle Smith or nobody.

Anyway back to City. Everybody agrees that they did a lot of dodgy stuff. We have to be careful though. There's no charges for anything in the last five years so we can't go around spouting that they were breaking or flouting the rules during that timeframe.

I do have a problem and it's how these rules came into existence. The big, rich clubs were behind these rules to prevent anybody from passing them out. United pretty much had a monopoly on things through the 90s.

They complained about Jack Walker spending money to improve his beloved club. The emergence of Chelsea was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The rules are in place now and it's pretty apparent that City have broken them. And that's wrong and they should pay for it but I don't think they will.

I'm of the opinion though that there should not be any rules. You should be allowed to spend whatever you want to. I believe everyone has the right to do what benefits their business and help it grow and become more valuable.

I'm not defending City with that last comment. I'm just saying that there should not be a situation where a club is huge and can spend far more to bring in players than all other clubs. Every other club should have the right to be able to spend money to try and become as big or bigger than the biggest, most popular clubs.

I'd guess those internal rules and internal penalties must still comply with the external law of the land, even international law.

As a trite example in your job you may break an internal rule, be subject to an internal inquiry & penalty, and ultimately an internal firing. But you still have recourse to external bodies at each step of the way who'll decide whether all that internal stuff is legal, was done via proper procedure, was justified etc. The obvious example being a Workplace Tribunal to appeal a firing. But imagine unlimited wealth (many 1000s of multiples of that of your employer) - you could use those external forces to absolutely halt the internal process in it's tracks from the start.

FFP wasn't simply introduced to benefit the established big clubs.

Unbridled spending like you're in favour of was putting clubs under pressure, not every supposedly rich owner was actually able to afford to finance football clubs the way they were trying to and the clubs were left carrying the can.

The problem with what City have done is that they essentially circumvented not just FFP (they avoided penalisation by UEFA by virtue of a time bar) but also have to answer questions about other irregularities and potential under the counter payments to players and managers.

That isn't a fair practice, in doing so City have put themselves in a position where they are now able to win the league virtually every season, this damages the Premier league over time who are already under pressure from the proposed super league which City were a leading proponent of.

The Premier league have a right to bring their participant clubs in line with each other, they have pursued Everton and Forest as exemplars of what they process of punishment for these types of breeches should be.

Whatever about stripping of titles or perceptions by rival fans, Manchester City should rightly be held to account for what they have done. The sooner the better.

Classic!

Aren't these based on the same charges from UEFA? Except now City don't have the benefit of running to CAS and there's no time barred possibility.

You'd expect that the reason this is taking so long is that the Premier league are getting all their ducks in a row.

There's nothing wrong with VAR the technology but absolute state of the way it's used in the PL is awful.

I've said it before but there should be tech guys running the system and not refs backing up their buddies.

Arsenal, United and Newcastle have spent more on transfers than City over the last five years.

Over the last ten United spent most followed by City.

There is no excuse for United not being able to compete with City

The UEFA system works very well tbh. This is an English issue

VAR was never meant to make sure that decisions become objective, it’s a human process that gives referees more information on potentially game changing decisions, no more than that. If a referees call isn’t obviously incorrect then just stick with the referees decision, it’s simple and works well in other sports.

But the implementation in the PL is awful, and more importantly, it has shown just how weak referees in the PL are. They really struggle with following the process at a basic level. New rules are followed for a week or 2 before a ref forgets to do it, then it just stops being followed. VAR either goes missing or spends 5 minutes looking at the same footage. If they get a call wrong their first instinct is to go on the defensive instead of learning from it.

Removing VAR doesn’t address the root cause and will result in more bad calls.

Since I wasn't one to moan about decisions before VAR I can guarantee you I wouldn't be moaning about them after VAR either.

Which you will probably ignore and just pretend that you are talking about some imaginary other people who are against VAR, which just makes your big claim unprovable nonsense.