But there is a recourse, albeit improbable and outlandish, that fulfils all the criteria of restitution, if not retribution. The new football regulator has the power to strip rogue owners of their position and force them to sell up. This sounds like a good punishment. But market intelligence suggests City are worth about £4bn now, compared with about £200m when the Abu Dhabi United Group took over in 2008. What kind of punishment enables the perpetrators to walk away with a 20-fold profit on their investment, much of which can be attributed to their cheating?
No, City should not be sold; they should be taken back. Requisition. Nationalise. Give them some patriotic name such as the Great British Manchester Football Club.
Something has happened. Quick, steal it!
Note what he really is saying. It’s worth £4 billion. Thaty’s *why* we should not just punish them but must steal it.
As much as it pains me to admit it, the Jerries have the right idea.
No one may own a professional footie team outright in Germany. 50% is the maximum, the rest has to be split amongst fans as shareholders. The half-owner has the controlling interest, but has to get everything passed through the AGM.
Some are owned by companies :Red Bull with Leipzig, Bayer used to own two clubs : Leverkusen and Uerdingen, but had to give one up ( Uerdingen is in Krefeld ). Bayern Munich owns itself via a listed company.
But it can go wrong. My team, 1860, were kept afloat by some dodgy Jordanian millionaire. He didn’t like the 50% rules and also by the sounds of things ran out of cash. 1860 were forcibly relegated to the non-league.
Who cares? It’s not monopolising oil or wheat.
“Methinks he doth protest too much.”
All I get from the article is Liew is not a Man City fan.
Agree. Football. NFI.
Football. NFL. ‘Merican style.
No, they don’t have the right idea!
They’re a nation with over 80 million people and the biggest economy in Europe. And yet, the same team has won their league 13 out of the past 14 seasons, about to be 14 out of 15. Only one of their teams has any chance of winning the big one and only one other is in any way capable of being competitive in the knockout stages. Their teams don’t have a chance of winning the other European competitions either. That have major, major cities, Hamburg, Berlin, with no competitive teams.
Why? Because nobody in their right mind is going to invest in a club only to be told by fucking skinheads, sorry, fans representatives, that they can’t do this, can’t do that and aren’t acting in keeping with the “spirit and tradition” of the club.
No, the Kraut mode is shit. Our model is great, which is why the politicians eye it enviously and are making their plans to kill it, sorry, “regulate” it.
Their teams don’t have a chance of winning the other European competitions either
You make that sound like a Bad Thing.
Yes, my friend, I do. The sheer impact of the English teams on European competition says it all for the strength of the English league.
Fat lot of good it has the national team.
Because they’re not really English teams?
So do 1860 still ground share with BM now that they have been relegated?
Gone back to their tramshed in Giesing.
The whole ground share lark was a complete disaster. The then chairman of 1860 was sent down for a couple of years for bribery and corruption concerning the franchises inside the stadium.
You’ve just reminded me of when I was serving in Germany there was a presenter on BFBS radio who was a bit of a laugh and enjoyed pushing the boundaries. Bear in mind it would be listened to by the lower ranks and senior officers’ wives so it could be quite easy to offend so the boundaries were quite tight.
Anyway, he used to love reading out the German football results and always had great fun whenever Wankum played.
Apparently in Tamil ‘lingam’ means penis. Which is a bit unfortunate since most of their surnames end in ‘-lingam’.
I thought ‘romesh ranganathan’ was the term for penis.
When I took a look around the Allianz some years ago I was interested to note that the 1860’s fan shop was as big as the BM one.
Dont know if it is still there, but they had a shop opposite the Hofbraeuhaus. It was massive.
1860 is the ‘proper’ Munich team. Bayern is for the glory seekers 🙂 Their crowds were still pretty big in the 3rd Division. Todays home match against Ansbach was sold out (15,000).
It was also my local team, it was only a few UBahn stops away.
By the way, this another facet of German football, that is worth remembering. 1860 had to be relegated because they couldn’t afford the licence to play this season. It is a kind of promise that they are financially viable.
Another team that was local to me in the south of Munich was Unterhaching. They could have been promoted into the 3rd Div last season, but didn’t have the dosh, so they opted to stay in the Regional League.
Nobody bats an eyelid at the idea of the state owning a park or a motorway or a museum, or taking over a failing train company or steelworks or bank.
Um, park or possibly museum, fine, but for the rest I’m batting my eyelid to the point of RSI.
I’m looking forward to Man City being run by the British state though. They might have trouble fielding a team if the players haven’t completed their mandatory diversity, equal opportunity, and eff and safety training.
Which reminds me, I have to complete my Equal Opportunity training and working from home checklist this weekend. Heaven forbid I should actually get some work done.
Aren’t parks usually owned by the local council?
Parks and museums would be better run privately.
Go to an indoor play park. There’s no graffiti. Nothing broken. Because it’s policed. Parks used to be but councils decided to have a bunch of people sitting around doing meetings instead of employing park keepers.
And private museums have to deliver what people want. The shift to free museums means the paymaster is the state, so they’re all infested with politics. Quelle fucking surprise, there’s another exhibition about female painters they scraped out the bottom of the barrel
Back in my childhood days (1960’s) parkies were usually someone with a disability or other, but gainfully employed rather than on benefits. The park near me was lovely, but when the 1970’s arrived, parkies were gotten rid of and the park got trashed on a regular basis by yobs. It was regularly done up again by the council but I wonder what the cost difference was…….
I know that a job is a cost, but what if the cost of not having someone in the job exceeds the cost of the job?
Security adds value. How much? Dunno.
But you also have to consider what is lost. People don’t want to use the park. That makes them poorer. Could you run a cafe and make some money from more ice creams?
Those disabled parties had usually been disabled during the war and there was a lot more respect in society and it cut both ways.
Now, whenever you see one of the jobsworths on X or YouTube all you want to do is punch them in the mouth.
Parkies not parties, effing autocorrect.
Yes, I remember the Parkie in Scott Park, Burnley, was affectionately known as ‘Stiffneck’, and no doubt from his age it must have been from WW1 where he acquired his disabilities. How the world has changed since 4 and 5 year olds in Burnley could wander around the park on their own, having escaped from the crowded roomful of adults watching The Coronation on the only TV in the street, to be chased ineffectually by dear old Stiffneck waving his stick and limping after them.
No doubt Burnley has changed since 1953. Perhaps a present-day resident could tell me if it is better – and no, I don’t mean ‘more diverse’.
Like Blackburn, Burnley is edging ever closer to majority Pakistani. Given their propensity for block voting, they already control the council.
A job is not a cost, except to narrow-minded accountants. A job has a cost. It also has a benefit. When the benefit exceeds the cost, it makes sense for you to have that job. If the cost exceeeds the benefit, then no job.
The trouble is that in common usage, only narrow-minded accountants separate the two. Everyone else thinks of jobs as a benefit.
Hence people talking about how many jobs will be created by starting a new and inefficient project, or how many jobs will be lost by shutting down an inefficient business, or moaning about how automation or new technology or new business practices will destroy jobs. It’s essentially the same error the Luddites made. Mechanisation of agriculture and manufacturing would put all the farm labourers and weavers and skilled artisans out of work, making society poorer they said. Bad policy arises from such economic errors.
It all comes from the common belief that it is jobs that make us rich, when it is actually production. It’s like arguing that higher gas bills will keep us warmer in winter and higher grocery bills will keep us fed. The cost and benefit usually go together, so we pick one to represent both. You can’t get gas without paying the gas bill, and you can’t get groceries without paying the grocery bill, so ‘gas’ and ‘gas bill’ are interchangeable: – two sides of the same coin. But it sounds crazy to be saying you want higher gas bills. Saying you want more jobs, rather than more of the stuff that jobs produce, is equally crazy.
Things go wrong when the production and its cost don’t move in unison. We can create lots of jobs by employing half the people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in again, but it doesn’t produce anything. We can destroy jobs with a robot that does all our work for us. What perversion of logic is this that people can prefer the former to the latter?
Saying “jobs are a cost” is a way to draw people’s attention to the error in a memorable way. It jerks them awake, makes them want to argue, engages their minds to understand the issue. If you then decide to define a job to be cost and benefit and the net balance between the two, and everyone has the same understanding, then fine. But that’s not the default. Most people see jobs as a benefit, and the more jobs the better. Until they stop doing that, we’re going to carry on saying “jobs are a cost”.
Charles, I posted this before:
You employing a plasterer to plaster a ceiling for you is a cost, to you.
Being a plasterer and being paid to plaster a ceiling is a job, to them.
But, the plasterer who might otherwise have gone down the pub with his mates can’t, because he has a job to do, so it’s a cost to him too.
So jobs are a cost aren’t they……..
No. Quite obviously not. The plasterer that I employ has a cost, but also I end up with a plastered ceiling. There are two stupid ways to view the transaction: you can claim a job is a benefit (typically by noticing that the plasterer gains wages), or you can claim that the job is a cost (by seeing that you have to pay wages). But they both are defective in viewing only one part of the transaction.
And trying to combat the view that jobs are a benefit is not best done by making the same stupid mistake in the opposite direction. Those that see jobs as a benefit will have little difficulty seeing the defect in claiming that jobs are a cost, without thereby being elightened with respect to the defect in their own position.
Sorry mate, you’ve lost me……..If it’s that fucking complicated you must be indulging in so much mental gymnastics to prove your point you must be wrong.
A self-employed plasterer is not a cost to his employer. The wages of an employed plasterer *is* a cost to his employer.
I’m afraid I cannot say that in words of one syllable because “plasterer” has three syllables
At least if it were owned by the state it would be required to correct the disproportionate number of blackfellas on the playing staff and the shortage of Indians and Chinese.
“But market intelligence suggests City are worth about £4bn now”
That’s now. Before any punishment has been handed down.
Somehow, I don’t think anyone is likely to pony up four bil for a Championship or League 1 club.
Apart from that, I was wondering just how long it would be before someone suggested nationalisation.
“Come on you dismal greys!”
If it’s “worth about £4bn now” then it aint “failing” …
(Also, google tells me that they invested an additional 800m which makes the 20x into “only” 4x)
“But market intelligence suggests City are worth about £4bn now”
Utter bollocks.
They made a £9m loss last year. Previous years, about £80m profit. 2% in good years? Might as well get a global ETF.
Football isn’t a business. It’s a Little Platoons thing. Sure, you might make a little profit but being the best matters in a way that say, restaurants don’t. You can be Nandos or Le Manoir.
And to win means an arms race with other clubs doing the same thing. Footballers earn crazy money because there’s two clubs fighting over then with deep pockets. So a ton of money goes out the door.
These Arabs think they’re diversifying out of oil but getting absolutely shafted.
Weirdly… coming 6th is the best way to make money. You don’t spend so much on players but you still get into the lucrative Champions League.
State-owned team, state-owned regulator, state-owned broadcaster…no, I see no conflicts of interest there at all.
It may all be worth it, if only to see the drawn out grievance processes whenever they want to fire a manager.
I remember saying to a bandwagon-jumping US fan how I couldn’t wait for the oil bubble to pop and these teams to wind up like Leeds. (I’m a Bayern fan since my German family are from that part of the world. The 50% thing has been tough for the Bundesliga to keep up with the rest of the leagues on a European level.)
This was a year that Leeds were still in the Championship, and he made a comment about how it looked like they were going to be promoted. The guy’s also one of the few idiots who liked the idea of a Super League.
“Kill them and take their stuff.”
I reminded a leftie blogger this week of the biblical injunction Thou shalt not steal. Do you know, he censored it.
City ‘were’ worth £4bn, up until the point they got caught. Now maybe not so much. There’s a significant chance the club will be relegated multiple leagues, fined a huge amount of money (the £900m of disguised income has been mentioned) and face having to sell most of the players they own because the FFP rules lower down the leagues will prohibit them turning up at Scunthorpe with a squad worth £1.4bn (and a wage bill to match). And said players are hardly going to want to spend the most productive years of their careers on a tour of the crap towns of the UK (Walsall, Doncaster, Stoke and Southend to name but as few), or enjoy getting lumps kicked out of them by every team they play who regard them all as cheats, so will probably all demand transfers anyway.
So anyone buying them is going to face an immediate cash demand for the fine, and the basic disintegration of the club as an footballing entity. But also be prohibited from injecting money to keep it running, as FFP rules mean the club must live within the revenue it can generate. It would be a brave billionaire who pays much for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the top players have an escape clause in their contracts that allows them to move as free agents if City are relegated.
“ (Walsall, Doncaster, Stoke and Southend ” any reason two of the four ‘crap towns’ are in Staffordshire?
And anyway, Noddy Holder is from Walsall.
Because Staffordshire is better at foot ball than making money since low-paid foreigners learned how to make passable-at-first-glance copies of Wedgewood
Why stop at just the one franchise? Why not just nationalise the lot?
I might actually take an interest in the British Leyland of soccer, popcorn in hand!
Manchester Socialist-Nationalised City Workers F.C.
You mean Manchester Burnham FC
Who is going to pay £4bn for a club which is going to be rerererelegated??
Can’t call it ‘great british’ though. This person is going to find themselves cancelled by their fellow lefties soon;)
If the value of the club increase 20-fold then its making a lot of money. Losing that income stream is gonna hurt.
If it wouldn’t then they would have sold off and pocketed the money already.