Will Erling Haaland be a decent signing when he’s adapted to Pep Guardiola?

Erling Haaland scored five goals to make it 39 for the season, which is half-decent for somebody who has made Man City worse.

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Dear RB Leipzig fans…
Don’t worry too much about that 7-0 drubbing, Man Utd fans will tell you it’s probably the best thing that could have happened.
Rob Carey

Seven up and what’s to come for City
Well, and I stand to be corrected by my fellow Blues, but that’s the best I’ve seen a City team play all season.

Just lovely.

My predictions for the rest of the season, which may indeed see me burned at the stake mind, are as follows:

Burnley to knock us out of the FAC. (Vinnie knows Pep, the staff, and the players. He knows what’s coming and how to deal with it and Burnley are on fire. They’re going to be promoted and they’ll want to make a statement to the rest of the PL).

Arsenal to win the PL but with a really tight finish between them and City. Oh, and if it goes down to the last day, it just won’t have the same weight or potential heart-break as “93.20”. Nothing could.

City to reach the UCL final.

Anything above those three is an absolute bonus.

I’ll be happy with that anyway!
Mark (The number ‘7’ has been quite prominent recently, hasn’t it? GET IN!!!). MCFC

Haal to play for
Just a reminder that Erling Haaland is still in his “difficult first season” for City under Guardiola. But I for one still think he’ll do ok and prove to be a good signing next year when he’s adapted to playing for Pep.
Ben B, MCFC

Harry Kane for £100m is not THAT much
We need to stop thinking of £100 million transfers like it’s still 2009.

Andy Carroll’s 36 million transfer to Liverpool in 2011 would be worth 102 million in “today’s money” (according to totallymoney.com’s transfer index).

We therefore should be thinking of it like this: In 2011, would you have been happy for your club to buy 29-year-old Harry Kane for 36 million? Considering it isn’t our money and considering the growth of clubs’ revenue “streams” since those days, I’d argue it’s worth it. Especially since that year we bought Phil Jones for 18 million.

Also, I can’t be arsed to find it now, but I read something before on the amount that transfer fees took up of a club’s yearly revenue. The takeaway was that Pogba for 90 million in 2016 took up less of the club’s budget than the 30 million for Ferdinand did in 2002, or Rooney in 2004.

Therefore, as useful clickbait as it is, we need to stop acting like 100 million is a lot for big football clubs today.
Silvio (Dan ABU since 83 is correct – Roy Keane absolutely never got booked or sent off) Dante

Let’s talk about the Club World Cup
The World Cup format is indeed terrible.

But want further proof it’s money not sporting competition that drives FIFA?

Europe has 12… yes, 12! spots for the club world cup from 2025.

What is silly, is the club world cup should have a simple qualification route.

The winners of the 4 previous Champions Leagues from the 6 confederations gives you 24 teams.

In recognition of Europe and South America being the ‘football hot-beds’, the 4 previous winners of the Europa League and Copa Sudamericana.

Simple. (Until you get to multiple time winners, which can easily be sorted by *then* using non qualified coefficients)

When will we be rid of FIFA!?
Graham (Seriously 12!)

Everything’s political
To those that are requesting that we should keep politics out of football…that is by its very definition a political view.
Jon, Spurs

The Pitts
Match of the Day had half a million extra viewers on Saturday. Was that because:

a) It was an absolutely enormous news story, covered by every news outlet throughout Friday and Saturday. This was going to be a historic Match of the Day broadcast, with no presenter, pundits or even commentary. It has literally never happened before. It was only 20 minutes long and people were curious to see the outcome of the BBC’s self-inflicted car crash.

b) People don’t like Gary Lineker,.

If you said b), you’re Matt, who thinks himself able to give a nuanced view on the whole situation.
Mike, LFC, London

…I am not here to incur the frothing rage of my dear Gooner “friends” for once. I’m more here to laugh at Matt Pitt’s hilariously uninformed bollocks.

Apart from reading like a Daily Mail leader that whines about “Cancel culture” (whilst broadcasting these whines to a multi-million mainstream audience) it features all the prominent whining of the hard right. Whereas refugees, BLM, and social justice advocates are to be repudiated as fifth columns “cancelling free speech”, we should be getting out the violins for the “Twitter mobs” – a faceless, dark underworld mob, who come equipped with….errrr, ah yes, an iPad. 🙄

The part I really want to pick apart is this classic right-wing disingenuous crap that “more viewers watched MOTD sans-Lineker”.
Matthew. This is much in the same way that bystanders will multiply on a street that’s been the scene of a crash: it isn’t a genuine interest, it’s more to witness the wreckage – a morbid human interest.

Mind you, football luminaries like John Redwood, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Jacob Reece-Mogg all tuned into MOTD for the first time! What a boost! 🙄

This is a football site obviously so let’s not get excessively political here, but if you’re going to slate a football legend like Lineker, who’s done a lot of excellent social work through his football platform (unlike that woke, Antifa, tofu-eating Wokerati Marcus Rashford!) then come prepared. Your asinine claim about that moronic Mumford and Sons singer who was “cancelled”? Oh right you mean that political titan who, aside from mediocre ear-assaulting banjo shite, was literally a guest on BBC Question Time, discussing political issues? (He clearly had no grasp of!). What qualifications does he have, aside from bigotry? Why doesn’t he “stick to music” then?

The millionaire white man from Mumford and Sons, who has to stick to making solo music, was invited to the biggest political platform in the UK, to whine about how the Radical cappuccino-sipping Islington lefty (snuck Arsenal in 😂) anti-growth Twitter mob “deplatformed” him.

LMFAO. Cool story bro.
Stewie Griffin (Arsenal look excellent recently. It’s still going to fall apart, isn’t it?)

…In response to Matt, firstly lots of fair points in there. However not sure if he was angling for a bite but call me Steve Guppy because you have one, I just can’t let the MoTD half a million more viewers thing slide….I just can’t. I’ve seen this bandied about a lot by some pretty iffy Characters on Twitter who most probably have never been to a football stadium outside of a corporate event, nor watched MoTD in their entire lives. Judging by the fact Matt is aware of F365 I’m sure he’s not one of them!

Whatever your view on Lineker (personally I support him but I would probably have not phrased it the way he did), everyone knew MoTD on Saturday was going to be a sh*tshow, and tuned in just to see how quite how bad that TV car crash was going to be. I watched the first 2-3 minutes and then ravaged with guilt that I wasn’t boycotting it, and most importantly combined with the sheer dullness made me stick on the Netflix almost straight away.

I guarantee if we’d had the same for the next MoTD without the hosts/commentators the figures would have fallen off a cliff. Almost wish we had one more week of it to prove it, just to shut up the Twitter trolls, as they’ll be relentless now. Although if Jenas & Keown are scheduled for the show I retract everything I just said, just give me those sweet commentatorless, punditless highlights.
Tarqs, Woolwich, NUFC

…I appreciated Matt Pitt’s fairly nuanced mail on the Lineker situation. However I found it interesting that his take on the increased viewership for MOTD last weekend was that it was likely because people hated Lineker as a presenter. That strikes me as unlikely.

Lineker had been the biggest news story in the country for a few days, there was a mass walkout before the show and the program had been confirmed to go ahead without any presenters or pundits. How would that not be an event that millions would tune in for out of sheer curiosity? It was a pretty historic moment and I’m sure even many casual watchers would have checked in. Alternatively, perhaps many people hate the whole format (which Matt alluded to at the end but somehow didn’t link to his earlier point about why viewership increased) or hate some or all of the MOTD pundit team rather than Lineker specifically.

For the tweet in question- I don’t want this to get too political but whatever you think about the policy on immigration numbers or smugglers and all that, I think basic empathy for other human beings should be a given. Even if you believe in much stricter controls on immigration and refugees than Lineker does, I think his point stands that some of the dehumanization language used by the British government (and rightwing media) towards refugees and asylum seekers is dangerous and wrong and completely lacking in compassion and kindness. For me that kind of morality is the most important thing in this discussion and once you decide that it is not important, your country will have lost a bit of its soul.
Turiyo Damascene, Kigali, Rwanda

…Following the mails regarding the BBC debacle I feel the need to write a couple of things and sadly it’s not about how Erling Haaland should be written about like Grendel in Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

When Matt Pitt says Lineker’s tweet was “crass, uninformed and rather juvenile” I wonder which tweet he’s referring to, the one saying Suella’s video about how refugees who don’t drown should be punished is awful or the one asking people to read some stuff by a professor.

There’s been a lot of clickbait discourse about the spectacle of Gary Lineker’s tweets, most of it ignoring the core issues and the worst of it being so frightfully unhinged I feel sick. The tweets in question were anything but remarkable and as far as I’m aware amounted to him typing “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.” and “A thought provoking thread that’s worth a couple of minutes of your time:”.

The awful thing was Suella Braverman in a choppily edited Home Office video making spurious claims to justify punishing the most vulnerable people in society while referring to them as a collective of small boats.

The thought provoking thing was a thread by Tanja Bueltmann, a professor of migration & diaspora history, which is a good thread and can be summed up as saying that the dehumanising language used to refer to refugees and the dehumanising actions following such language have all been seen before, most harrowingly in Germany in the 1930’s.

To simplify things and keep this short(er), Suella Braverman is saying that some people are less than people, they should die in the sea or be interned in detention camps and should not have the right to asylum.

For some context, in late 1948 Neil Warnock was being born in Sheffield, further east Antonin Panenka was being born in Prague and somewhere in between in a little town called Paris, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the UN. This happened because some other things had happened between the 1930’s and 1948 which created a lot of refugees but nobody can remember what that was and any lessons which were learned from it have been reduced to “Wokeness” and “Marxism”.

Following the UN’s charter the European Convention on Human Rights came into force in 1953 and established a court of human rights in Europe, the UK government are currently trying to get out of that convention so that they won’t be bound by the court or its findings if they do bad things such as classify undocumented refugees as illegal and use them for “free labour” in Cumbria’s new coalmine to boost the economy. Suella Braverman is leading this charge, saying things like “I think sometimes the jurisprudence from the Strasbourg court is at odds with the will of Parliament or British values more generally.” in moves which the UN refugee agency described as “very concerning”.

Professor Tanja Bueltmann is saying that calling some people lesser, or less than human, as the ever wonderful John Barnes also pointed out, is in fact very bad for humanity as a whole and particularly bad for the most vulnerable marginalised people who tend to end up being exploited, driven to flee or killed en masse in pogroms and whatnot.

Back to Matt’s opinions, which are interesting, from thinking the viewership numbers of the ersatz show as prompted by the curious novelty of the MOTD fiasco prove the unpopularity of Lineker as a presenter to wondering why more people aren’t defending hateful bigots on the internet like some defend Lineker when he says refugees are people. Sorry Matt but I’m not sure you understand the meaning of the words nuance or asinine. Furthermore, if whether you see other humans as people or not can be termed a political opinion then the politics you’re talking about is fascism.

Anyway, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Reub

…I write in response to the email from Matt Pitt in today’s Mailbox, with which I have a few issues, despite its balanced and sensitive handling of a complex issue, its moral and intellectual sophistication and the erudition of its author’s laudable, if sophomoric, worldview.

You see, I am very, if not extremely, Right Wing (God is with us, strength through joy, blood and land etc.) and I don’t believe in free speech, especially when it is used to impede the state in its solemn duty to protect us from those who would overthrow us.

As such, I demand F365 apologise for publishing Matt’s email, retract it from the Mailbox and refrain from publishing such unpatriotic and traitorous views from the same contributor in the future.
Sue Ella (Freedom of speech supposes a constituency in which real debate is possible. That constituency cannot be composed of lunatics.)

Race wars
While it was good to hear that the man who racially abused Brentford striker Ivan Toney on social media was banned from every football ground in the United Kingdom for three years, and handed a four-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, it doesn’t exactly tackle racism.

Punitive measures alone, although welcome, don’t exactly get to the root of the problem, and certainly don’t help to eradicate it. Until we understand what makes a young man think it’s perfectly acceptable to racially abuse someone, and challenge that thought process with a view to changing their behaviour, then it will continue.

No amount of fines, or banning orders, will make a racist change their views. It merely moves them somewhere else to become someone else’s problem, and helps no one.
SF