Manchester City: Der Spiegel alleges three-year Premier League investigation

Yeah mate I absolutely love a club with 0 fans, 0 culture and 0 identity spending unlimited cash to just dominate everything. Really great stuff.

The club is so soulless they even have to make digital banners rather than the real thing, because they don't have enough fans to make them or bring them every week

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Because unchecked owner-financing distorts the market and puts pressure on non-financially doped clubs to spend beyond their means just to stay competitive. It's also not really desirable for your league to be dominated by what are effectively PR vehicles for Middle Eastern autocracies.

Definitely a Manure supporter writing this lmao.

Before 2008 most neutral fans liked City because they had the actual character and identity in Mancunian football, while Man Utd had a bunch of daytrippers and glory supporters from London.

Pull it

>It's also not really desirable for your league to be dominated by what are effectively PR vehicles for Middle Eastern autocracies.
Imagine supporting a club your entire life and then this user just shits on you and calls your life experience invalid simply because in 2008 it got bought by some foreigners he doesn't like.

I imagine lots of the proper City fans realise what a disgrace it is and stopped going the match, hence why the Etihad is empty every week

>Before 2008 most neutral fans liked City because they had the actual character and identity in Mancunian football, while Man Utd had a bunch of daytrippers and glory supporters from London.
yes that's true and now those same neutrals that used to like City hate them because they are just a rich man's plaything, spend what they like, do what they like, ruin the transfer market with retarded transfers and they still can't fill their stadium

>I imagine lots of the proper City fans realise what a disgrace it is and stopped going the match
So now you've gone from insisting that no City fans exist to saying they do exist, but they abandoned the club? Bit confused aren't you?

>People liked them when they were a small club living within their means
>People dislike them when they're a soulless oil club actively shitting on football and playing with empty, silent stadium every week

Are you trying to suggest this is hypocritical?

People don't mind clubs like Burnley, but if they got bought by Qatar and spent £10 billion they'd be hated too

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>right before the liverpool match
this ain't it chief

As if an investigation was needed

Fuck these oil clubs

You either support small/medium-sized clubs who are punching above their status, or you don't.

If you're constantly banging on about "City got no fans", "City don't deserve to be where they are", "Empty seats", then I'm inclined to think you're a Manure or Scouse fan who judges a football club solely by glory hunter metrics and how many backpacks it sells to Indian schoolchildren per year.

The only clubs that have been hurt by Man City's rise, "fair" or not, are the traditional elite of Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, who feel they have a god-given right to endless titles and don't like the idea of any club whose shirts are blue muscling in on "their territory".

It's obviously not the fans' fault you muppet. Just like the Abramovich situation isn't the fault of Chelsea fans. Even Newcastle fans who've welcomed their new owners ultimately aren't responsible for anything because they're not the ones in positions of power. All these situations are a staggering failure of sporting governance. Football clubs are cultural and community assets - the fact that the FA and Premier League haven't seen any issue with these assets being sold off in this way to all manner of questionable individuals/entities is an embarrassment. The deciding factor a sporting competition like football shouldn't be whether or not your club has been bought by a Middle Eastern autocracy looking to launder its reputation. It makes a mockery of the sport and the mockery of these communities.

Everybody has been hurt by City's rise.

Football is a lot less fun when it's played in an empty stadium with no passion. City actively suck enjoyment out of football.

Nobody wants to see City winning the league by 15+ points every year with 30 first team level players being rotated, and a trophy celebration in front of empty stands

So people used to like the mid table soulful team they were and now hate the gigantic soulless money laundering thing they've become

How is this a bad thing

>Football clubs are cultural and community assets - the fact that the FA and Premier League haven't seen any issue with these assets being sold off in this way to all manner of questionable individuals/entities is an embarrassment.
Should have raised the topic in 2003 or 2008 then. Ultimately, no one did. When Abramovich bought Chelsea the only complaints about it were that he was "buying the league" and this was somehow unfair on a sporting level (probably also because it stopped media darlings Manure/Arse winning more titles). When City were bought out the coverage was much the same.

The moral angle to things has come much more recently. You won't find an article from the BBC in 2003 alleging that Abramovich buying a UK football club was concerning on any kind of moral or human rights level. But in 2022 it's all they want to talk about that apparently normal English people who are doing the normal thing by supporting their familial football club are now directly, personally responsible for supporting atrocities in Ukraine or gay-lashing in Arabia or what have you.

You keep bringing up the stadium. You realise City moved into the COMS (as it was called pre-Arabs) in 2003, long before they were bought out? Do you level the same criticism at, say, West Ham, for moving into a ground that far outsizes their current fanbase size on the taxpayers dime? Or is it only wrong because it's Big Bad Citeh that's doing it?

>City actively suck enjoyment out of football.
Felt the same when Man U were winning endless titles in the 2000s, with much more sycophantic media coverage and legions of fairweather fans across the country with not a single tie to the city of Manchester.

>Even Newcastle fans who've welcomed their new owners ultimately aren't responsible for anything

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The ironic thing here is City used to have a semblance of soul about them, even with the sheikh money. Watching their fans go into Europe and watch games in the EL and get to finally appreciate it was fun to see. They occasionally do the Poznan etc the soul died after Bobby Manc left

They aren't, he's got that right. How can you hold someone personally responsible for mad shit happening on the other side of the world simply because their football club was bought out?

People go off about plastics and then slander Chelsea, City and now Newcastle fans for being "evil" for continuing to support their lifelong club after it was bought out by ethically dubious people. What on earth do you expect them to do? Switch teams midway through life for moral grandstanding?

Be patient, he's just a little bit slow. He's just now connecting the dots.

This is something that bothers me about English football. The majority of shares should be held by the club/supporters, not some dimwitted callous cunt from fuck knows where.

>So people used to like the mid table soulful team they were and now hate the gigantic soulless money laundering thing they've become
I could respect that viewpoint if not for the fact that:

1. People don't actually say that. The criticism you hear is invariably nonsense about how "City have never had any fans", "City didn't exist before 2008", as if the second the Sheikhs rocked up to Manchester the entire history of the football club up to that point was erased and must never be mentioned again.

2. You can disparage the newer generation of glory-hunter fans without also attacking the character of genuine Mancunians who spent their whole lives supporting the team, suffering through shit seasons, getting mugged off by Man U supporting friends and family members, who don't deserve to be slandered for shit that has nothing to do with them.

I also find the whole "empty seats" debate a bit hilarious considering, if City was as plastic as this lot insist they were, those seats would be filled up every week by tourists named Pradesh and Jongping like Old Trafford or the Emirates are. The lower attendances are reflective of a fanbase that is still rooted in its local area and doesn't have a massive pool of plastics from London, Ireland and Timbuktu to draw upon at every 3rd round cup match or Europa League qualifier.

Holy fuck I can't believe this, I thought City was a legit club that followed financial fair play but this news just shattered my entire worldview.
I might never trust again.

>Muh stadium, muh fanbase
Who cares nigger, i want to watch good football, that's why people watch the sport. No one cares about some inbred fat fucks screaming their clubs name for 90 minutes

>nooo, you're not allowed to spend more money than us!

The fans' fault in this case isn't being responsible for the ownership, but rather the reactions to it and the complete denialist views that things could go wrong.

Look at the shitshow going on at Derby for instance. Their fans were gloating like fuck because "MEL'S GOT THE EFL ON STRINGS!!!!" when they were going really well under Lampard and his Chelsea loanees in 2018/19. None of them ever questioned Mel Morris selling the stadium to himself for that extra £££ that got Lampard, Mount, Tomori and Harry Wilson to Pride Park until he sent them into administration and fucked off.

I've just seen these comments on a Tweet (I know, I know) about Crawley Town being taken over by "crypto bros" that sums it up: twitter.com/joey__burton__/status/1512086414237655040

>The replies to that tweet are worrying as Crawley fans seem happy with it

>Always the way and it’ll be “you’re just jealous” until it eventually goes wrong and then it will be buckets out and we must save the club etc etc.

>This. It's the same at every club, ever - how can we expect football to change if the attitudes of the fans won't?

>Been saying for years that fans are football's biggest problem. All down to education like most things wrong in our world.

>Der Spiegel
Their "star" reporter got caught making stories up.

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>What on earth do you expect them to do? Switch teams midway through life for moral grandstanding?

Unironically I did see a few soibois talking about how they would support Sunderland if the takeover went ahead.
Strangely none of them got any support from any of the other soibois, they just got told to fuck off by chads who couldn't care less how many faggots the Saudis execute.
That whole journalist thing was really mad too. It reminded me of Mandela and how he was a a piece of shit Commie terrorist cunt and then overnight became the godfather of humanity and everyone was crying their eyes out after he died.
Truth be told, I just hate (most) people and they bring it on themselves. I'm the only one entirely blameless where my hate is concerned.

>The fans' fault in this case isn't being responsible for the ownership, but rather the reactions to it and the complete denialist views that things could go wrong.
With Chelsea and City, there wasn't any insinuation that things could "go wrong" in the way they currently are.

Like I said, you won't find articles from the BBC in 2003 criticising Abramovich's human rights record. You won't find articles in 2008 criticising Abu Dhabi's ethical motives for buying an English football club. It simply wasn't something that was talked about. The criticism was on a sporting level and the debate was centred entirely around this idea of whether or not "buying the league" was fair or whether clubs should fight tooth and nail to go up the table without an injection of money like, say, Forest did in the 70s/80s.

What happened is in the 2010s western countries got addicted to the whole "social justice" nonsense and, as a consequence of it being forced into football, journalists started seeing an opening for a new way to attack the likes of Chelsea and City by accusing them not just of sporting wrongdoings, but moral ones also.

In Chelsea's case Abramovich's buyout probably saved them from a Leeds-style fate that would have shortly followed post-2003 as the club under Ken Bates didn't have the financial muscle to keep hold of the players like Terry, Gudjohnsen, Lampard, Zola etc who had established them in the top 6. Terry was said to have verbally agreed a transfer to Liverpool before Roman's money arrived.

How can you fault fans for being excited that their club was saved from plummeting down the divisions by a buyout? If Abramovich had bought Leeds in 2003 instead and stopped them sliding down the table and imploding, I suppose the fortunes of each club would be reversed.

>Cheating all the other clubs playing by a set of rules is kosher because those rules don't allow for my oil state to buy the league and make a farce of the competition

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Mate, pull your finger our your arsehole

The only Jewish-owned clubs right now are Man United and Tottenham.

It was the implication of the jewish mindset in that post I was going for, rather than suggesting that Abu Dhabi FC are owned by jews.

>establishing rules to keep the big, rich, media-friendly clubs as big and rich as possible isn't jewish
>circumventing those rules apparently is jewish
Ah yes.

this cope lmfao

Imagine being a lapdog for the footballing equivalents of Apple, Amazon and Disney and somehow thinking you're the good guy.

It’s more Jewish to have the same Jews in power monopolizing the league

you need to stop digging this is really embarrassing

>get found guilty
>appeal it
>kicked into long grass until 2045
>quietly dropped

Support your local team.

You got some coverage like that in papers like the Guardian (theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/03/russia.football) and fans certainly were ahead of institutions like the BBC on this sort of thing (I remember a well known Arsenal blogger being threatened by Alisher Usmanov's legal team for publishing blogs about the shady shit he'd been involved in).

I don't buy this argument that the powers that be were completely ignorant at the time - they just chose to turn a blind eye before signing off on the sale of key assets in our cultural industry. And that was a dereliction of their duty as guardians of the sport. That's a travesty and we should be doing everything we can to return those cultural assets to respectable ownership.

>There's not a single person on the planet who believes Man City genuinely have higher commercial income than Man United and Liverpool
Idk man, you underestimate how fickle supporters are. Honestly wouldn't suprise me nowadays (at least in englnad) if man city has a fair few "neutral" plastics (I acc see a fair amount of man city shirts nowadays, I even see a fair amount of psg shirts). I saw Gary Neville post that thing about the commercial income, but the fatal flaw in that statement is assuming man u and liverpool have a divine right to the highest income. Income is tied to on-pitch success, in the 50s everton had more fans than liverpool and man u weren't MASSIVE until the 90s. Man City have had success for the last 10 years. Makes sense they have the highest income. Plus they have marketable stars like sterling, foden, de bruyne, heck pep adds prime barca to that. Honestly as much as I hate city (and I do), I don't think they fiddle the books as much nowadays as they did in like 08. Their heights have kinda come from being run REALLY, REALLY well. I am surprise lpool doesn't top them, but lpool's brand is less marketable. Not tryna be offensive, and I know they have lots of bandwaggers, but they kinda have a reputation of only being for the scousers (even tho everton are more scouse imo), so guess that shoots the commercial income in the foot

+ this is kinda hard to explain but man city kinda are helped to be marketable by of man u, people are already familiar with that team and cause of the similiar names + familiarity = marketability. So man city gains all that familiarity with none of the baggage.

that club bears no resemblance to City tho.
Old, win fuck all propah City. But then again, neither do most of the other PL clubs. its all relative.
both stadiums (City and West Ham) are leftovers from large events, Commonwealth for COMS and Olympics for West Ham. They'd both be empty or demolished otherwise.
>just sayin

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The cope in this thread from the sole man shitty fan is pathetic and amusing. He types entire essays as replies to multiple anons poking fun at this soulless onahole of a club of some oil arab and seethes about how the "shitty doesn't have fans" line is a false statement, but no one can change the fact that they made pathetic digital banners and even removed about 2k seats from their generic stadium just so they could have EXTRA room for advert banners KEK.
Peak, peak soullessness.

I'm not a Man City fan and I want to see that. I want them to win absolutely everything in order to maximise the amount of seething from gloryhunters and plastics. Newcastle doing it would be also be acceptable.

pepe... are we the baddies

you're absolutely right and wasting your time.

Would all the PL fans here agree that the TV money their league gets is ruining the rest of European football then? Or is it only money from brown people that's not allowed?

wtf no its still 2009, commercial growth only happens in the 90s when it makes my team big

thankfully I’m a big dicked chad that supports the new sunday league Man. City founded by fans and not the sheikh’s personal toy