Category: Football (Soccer)

Premier League clubs, and their European rivals, left with a long list of absentees after a gruelling international break

A four-match international break has presented a stress test. “The intensity of the squad, the athleticism of it, really, I think it’s designed for the elite,” said the Wales head coach, Craig Bellamy, on the completion of four matches in 11 days. Elite club coaches would disagree. The Nations League and the wider set of international games staged across the globe have been accompanied by a daily list of casualties, club officials viewing matches through their fingers as players pull up and gesture to the bench.

Hamstring and muscle problems have been rife. Sunderland, for example, will be without Brian Brobbey, a key striker, and Dan Ballard, a defensive mainstay, because of strains picked up playing for the Netherlands and Northern Ireland respectively. Bournemouth, yet to win a Premier League match, have lost Alex Scott for up to two months. His performance for England in their 7-0 victory against Croatia won rave reviews, a young player taking his chance and outshining Luka Modric. It came at a heavy cost. A quadriceps injury that had been diagnosed pre-match worsened. “There was zero risk taken from our side,” said Thomas Tuchel. The Bournemouth coach, Marco Rose, is unlikely to see it that way.

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Responding to articles on the team’s breaches of financial regulations, Mike Alhadeff says Man City got remarkably little for their money, Ed Barrett says Liverpool were robbed of titles, while Neil Smith warns against triumphalism

As the fallout continues from Manchester City’s industrial-scale cheating and we await their appeal (Building of the Pep supremacy is an era that will be defined by sham-ball, 30 September), it probably hasn’t been reflected upon enough how little they got for their money.

Yes, you can look at the six league titles in seven years and the “Centurions” team in 2017-18, all under the aegis of Pep Guardiola. But take a closer look and they were run remarkably close on multiple occasions.

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The spaces can stand both as a rebuke to an era of greed but also a tribute to the Premier League’s hunt for justice

At half-time in the 2014 League Cup final, Sunderland led Manchester City 1-0. Yaya Touré equalised with a casually brilliant 30-yard clip 10 minutes after the break, and City went on to win 3-1. City, we now know from the independent commission, were at the time involved in a prolonged and calculated act of cheating, while Touré, the leaks in Der Spiegel suggested, was being paid via a dual contract to disguise exactly how much City were spending. Although precise details were left to the appendices, the commission’s report refers to payments “not recorded in an employment contract … but instead recorded in a consultancy agreement”.

Had Sunderland won, they would not merely have ended a 41-year wait for a trophy but would have qualified for the following season’s Europa League. It’s possible, of course, that the strain the extra games placed on the squad would have led to relegation in 2015, rather than the familiar trope of sacking a manager, in this case Gus Poyet, midway through the season, and surviving thanks to a bump under his successor, Dick Advocaat.

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• Pinto has witness protection status removed

• His lawyers will appeal and say his situation is ‘critical’

Rui Pinto has revealed he is preparing to leave Portugal because he fears for his safety after being informed that his participation in the country’s witness protection programme has been terminated.

The Football Leaks founder claimed he has received “multiple death threats” and is facing “the serious risk of an assassination attempt against me” after being informed of the decision by Portuguese authorities on Wednesday. That came two days after Manchester City were found guilty of 115 charges by an independent commission – an investigation that was prompted by Pinto’s leaks of thousands of private documents.

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Success under the Abu Dhabi regime made supporters feel proud, but they can only really get those feelings back under new custodians

Amid the hundreds of thousands of words written and spoken about Manchester City being found guilty of serious breaches of Premier League rules, maybe Roberto Mancini’s were the most poignant when he announced it was “not my concern”. Why would it be? He made millions from one of the “sham contracts” and enjoyed his success but his ties to the club started and ended there. Since he has gone there will have been little looking at what was left behind.

The Italian is a microcosm of the modern club, appointed for his expertise and well remunerated for it. Mancini was deemed the best person City could hire and the club, powered by an attitude of win at all costs, accommodated him at great expense in a manner that a damning independent commission verdict concluded circumnavigated the rules.

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• ‘They won the titles because cheating was going on’

• Micah Richards says he is ‘devastated and heartbroken’

The former Manchester United captain Roy Keane said he would throw the “medals in the bin” if he were a Manchester City player after Premier League confirmation on Tuesday that the club were guilty of all charges related to their financial rules and boosted their income by more than £900m after arranging “sham ­contracts” with commercial partners.

City, who continue to deny any wrongdoing, won eight trophies, including three Premier League titles between 2009 and 2018, the period under investigation. Keane said the achievements of City’s players had become redundant because of the “cheating” that took place during that time.

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How can Manchester City be trusted under these owners after they were found to have devised £900m of ‘sham’ contracts?

How bad could it be, really? How serious can a breach of arcane financial regulations be, really? Just how damning can accountancy be? Even after Friday’s revelation that Manchester City had been found guilty of all but one of the charges brought against them by the Premier League, it was perhaps difficult to grasp the scale of what that meant. After the publication of the independent commission’s findings, there can be no doubt: the commission found that Manchester City cheated, that they did so deliberately, and that they have sought to cover that up with a campaign of calculated misinformation.

City continue to maintain their innocence and issued a statement insisting that “the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”. It referred, once again, to “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of all of its positions”, and, again, insisted that “the club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence”.

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• Soriano: the case is based on ‘a single false accusation’

• Club to appeal after verdict on more than 100 charges

Manchester City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, has said the guilty verdicts against the club for breaches of financial rules are based on “a single false accusation” and a “Premier League conspiracy theory”, as he maintained City’s innocence.

It was confirmed on Tuesday that City, according to an independent panel, had artificially inflated revenue and reduced costs by more than £900m over a nine-year period through “sham” sponsorship deals, which were mainly funded by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club. In a video sent to City staff after confirmation of the guilty verdict on more than 100 charges, Soriano said the club would appeal and fight the case.

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• ‘Sham’ contracts helped inflate revenues by £900m

• Commission finds club guilty over nine-season period

Manchester City have been found guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules over a nine-season period, the league has announced.

The league also said an independent commission had found City guilty of the majority of charges in relation to its failure to cooperate with its investigation.

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• ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable … I don’t think we deserved it’

• Manchester United finished second to City in 2011-12

Wayne Rooney does not believe it would be appropriate for Manchester City to be stripped of titles for breaching Premier League financial rules, even if it gave him another Premier League winner’s medal, as that would be unfair of the City players and staff whose endeavours secured success.

City are waiting to find out what sanctions they will face after being found guilty of more than a hundred charges, with an array of potential punishments on the table. Rooney was part of the United squad in 2011-12 that finished second to City on goal difference after Sergio Agüero’s last-minute winner secured the Premier League trophy for Roberto Mancini’s side on the final day.

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When transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, the way the club was allegedly run offers a bleak vision of a world driven by brute power and wealth

The cache of leaked emails and documents that would eventually lead to the crisis in which Manchester City are now embroiled was published by Der Spiegel in 2018, and often it was the tone of the club’s communications that was as startling as their content. Of City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a trusted adviser to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, it was said that he would “rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years” than accept a fine.

In the same tranche of documents, City lawyer Simon Cliff asserts that “Uefa doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression”, and threatens the governing body of European football – who were pursuing City over alleged financial irregularities at the time – with “the destruction of their rules and organisation”.

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Manchester City have come out fighting against the guilty verdict but the Premier League faces questions of its own

Nothing is over, nothing is done. Or at least not judging by the bravura, balls-out confidence of Manchester City’s chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, who remains convinced the past three days of whiplash are simply the drumroll before the big reveal, prelude to some clinching piece of evidence that will swish away the initial finding of guilt on the Premier League’s 100-plus charges.

This appears to be the official City position right now. Rope‑a‑dope litigation. Scooby‑Doo justice. A verdict that is simply exposition, buildup to that moment where we finally get to rip off the zombie mask and reveal the cranky old amusement park owner underneath, with his bulging ring‑binder full of irrefutable evidence of City’s innocence.

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• Coach alleged to have been paid for advisory work

• He also claims the club is ‘not guilty’ despite verdict

Roberto Mancini appeared to admit having “a double contract” while managing Manchester City, but insisted the club are not guilty after being found to have breached ­Premier League financial rules.

Mancini led City to their first ­Premier League title in 2012 during his four-year spell in Manchester. Now in charge of the Italy national team, he described the scandal surrounding the club as “not a problem that concerns me”.

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Premier League could be hit hard by aftermath, while Manchester City fans may know they took 30 years to recover from a guilty verdict in 1906

So it turns out none of that was real. Nothing that happened in English football between 2009-10 and 2017-18 that involved Manchester City actually happened. City beating Manchester United 6-1 at Old Trafford? Fake. Sergio Agüero’s 94th-minute winner to clinch the title in 2012? A figment of the imagination. That season City reached 100 points? Bobby Ewing dreamed it in the shower.

Without those successes, City wouldn’t have been in the position they were for the past eight seasons (and 35 of the charges relate to a failure to cooperate with Premier League investigations between 2018 and 2023). The 14 successive wins that took them to the league title in 2018-19 would not have happened without what went before. Neither would the Treble of 2023 or the record four league titles in a row.

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