Man City boycott by Premier League clubs mooted if expulsion off table

If the Premier League will not punish Man City, should the other clubs just refuse to play them?

Send your views on this (or any other subject including England and Euro 2024) to theeditor@football365.com

We should all just treat Man City with apathy
Assuming as always that MCFC money will circumvent truth just do this:

All other EPL clubs secretly agree to:

Not buy or sell any players to or from MCFC
Not buy or sell any match tickets to or from MCFC
Play youth teams in all fixtures with MCFC and accept meaningless defeats

Agree that 2nd place in league gets the Clean Champions Trophy.

The TV companies will have nothing to report on MCFC and no reason to show live matches. MCFC sponsorship will still go up!

The MCFC players will move to the Saudi League for more oil money.

The MCFC owners will lose interest and give the club back to the real fans and go do their thing elsewhere.

At least we can dream of this world.

Corporate lawyers are the last resort against the truth.
Andrew Scott

…​Fans calling for City fans to boycott their own club. Could the other Premier League sides not boycott City?

This is a truly stupid idea but funny as a concept. City win their case. ‘Yay for them’. Every team they play against from here on out accepts city will ‘unjustly win the league’. All of them agree not to take to the field for fixture against them. And they boycott the match. Everyone losing by the same score line. City win the league having played no one. It would be hugely funny and embarrassing.

Their players would get no game time. No one would want to go there in the future. Second place could bring their own trophy at the end of the season. Problem solved.
JC STFC

MORE ON MAN CITY FROM F365:
👉 Man City explainer: What Premier League rules do they want scrapped? And which rivals support them?
👉 Five options for Manchester City fans after Premier League expulsion
👉 Man City FFP: Three PL clubs back City but one is ‘reluctant to join forces’ as other sides seek expulsion

…​Not written before but always enjoy the mailbox.

Manchester City’s behaviour is clearly disgraceful and their ability to fund “Lawfare” will intimidate a weak Premier League and FA (or any other organisation) and stop the appropriate action being taken (expulsion from the league).

There are solutions though that their intimidation can not stop:

All fans boycott City games – even if their fans turn up, others should not

Publish league tables excluding City and their results – then we will all be clear who the real leaders are

Newspapers, broadcast media and websites stop covering/reporting on their matches. Even if this doesn’t happen with all immediately their increasingly irrelevant matches will lead to it

Might also be an idea for PGMOL to stop taking holidays in the UAE…
Neil, Somerset

…We should all make it clear right now, that any person(player, coach, or anything else) that affiliate with this horrible excuse for a club will be hated and told they are hated at every opportunity for accepting those pieces of silver after this excuse for a football club has tried to destroy the game in this country.

True fans and this includes anyone that supported City before say Mark Hughes, should start a campaign, in fact a war so that no one moves there without the willingness to take the medication English football fans should dish out. Constant booing. Telling them on all their social media platforms what we think of them. Not doing and business with them, even telling them on the street if we cross their paths.

We need to realise exactly what they have tried to do. This could change the game in this country for ever and could even destroy it completely.

Disgusting club absolutely disgusting!!!
Mike Ryan

Sensible retorts to the Man City fans
The mailbox really is the place to be when the football world blows us. It gives us more questions than answers which really is how you want to go through life. Thinking, rather than being spoon fed nonsense. First the nonsense, then the questions:

Levvy Blue is so drowning his cognisant dissonance that he is looking for bikers at motorway services to feed his confirmation bias. Seriously lad, you have spent the last year saying City MUST be innocent because they voted FOR the rules to restrict payments from associated companies. They are guilty and you just don’t care.

The questions from the last few mailboxes:

How can City be standing up against the red cartel whilst also fighting against “the tyranny of the majority”? The voting mechanism allows for the red cartel (not a thing), to have zero power.

How can the Premier League be a monopoly when it is an association of the 20 member clubs?

If City really want owners to be able to put unlimited funds into a club why are they challenging the associated companies mechanism and not demanding that owners are allowed to put unlimited funds into a club as capital?

How can challenging the associated companies mechanism not be linked to the 115 charges for dishonesty when reporting sponsorships from associated companies.

How can the City owners be good for Manchester because of their investments in the community, youth and women’s game if they are going to threaten to pull that support if they aren’t allowed to cheat their way to winning the men’s game?

Why is making fans pay through putting up ticket prices a threat when you are already making so much money off of your totally real fans anyway?

Would City be doing this is they had won the Champions League?

Is the problem in fact, that win or lose everyone just shrugs when its City? They only way to make us care is through their cheating and legal filibustering.

Seriously Abu Dhabi, if you have same cash to spend maybe try setting up an NHS or educating girls.

As for the Premier League, the problem isn’t money, it’s the disparity of money. Man United had more money in the 90s so they won the league, Chelsea in the 00s, City now. This is what FFP is trying to manage. It isn’t right yet however the solution isn’t that City can lawyer f**k the rules into dust. Why would they stop here? If the Premier League can’t use the clubs voting and agreeing to push through rules that City happen not to like then where does this end? Will we see a requirement that the club with the sky bluest kits be guaranteed European places if they miss out?

This is where we are when City have become the most dominant English side in football history. What will we get when City have won 10, 20, 50 in a row? When there is no more football money because no one is watching but somehow City are still getting sponsors far beyond market conditions?
Alex, South London

…I have followed but a mere fraction of the opinions and messages sent in (I think I would need to quit my job to fully do so) so maybe this has already been mentioned but…

There’s a lot of emotion and anger and reference to the other side. City fans claiming they’re victims and being punished for punching through the glass ceiling. That the system is built to keep them down (odd seeing as how they’ve won 4 straight and 19 major trophies since the UAE owners arrived but I digress). Rival fans showing utter contempt and disgust for City that is at least partially (if not mostly) influenced by an inherent distaste for City that would exist no matter what City did or didn’t do.

All of that is complete nonsense and really distracts from the one salient point. Should sponsors be able to pay whatever they want to sponsor an EPL club? Honestly, I think many would first answer “Absolutely! Why not?”. If TeamViewer or Standard Chartered want to pay 3x more than the highest sponsorship previously recorded for the right to adorn United or Liverpool’s jersey, that’s their choice. It may be a bad choice. It may be a gross misallocation of their finances but it’s their choice to make.

And we’re generally accepting of that because the assumption is that there is no inherent alignment of interests between United and TeamViewer or Liverpool and Standard Chartered. They are fully separate entities that are making agreements that they think are in their own best self interest.

But City presents a wholly unique situation that completely destroys that assumption. Take the example of Etihad. It is fully and completely owned by the Abu Dhabi Wealth Fund…which owns a number of different holdings and companies. The government of Abu Dhabi is the SOLE shareholder of the Abu Dhabi Wealth Fund. The owner of Man City is Sheikh Mansour who is a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. That is an INCREDIBLE amount of alignment between Etihad and City.

Etihad isn’t publicly traded (yet). It has no shareholders to report to. Limited obligations to be financially prudent. And its owners overlap immensely with the owners of City. That creates a previously un-encountered situation in which an owner of a club can directly and significantly influence a 3rd party to massively overpay for a product, service, or right than they otherwise would because they can exert influence on how that 3rd party operates.

Forget about the “Red Cartel” or the established order. Let’s just talk about whether we think any club, whether City or someone else, should have the ability to syphon any amount of money they want into the club by moving it from another company that they are incredibly aligned with? Is that something we want to allow?

If the rule is removed, what’s to stop Sheikh Mansour from maneuvering so that 1 of the 3 different wealth funds he currently is a part of (2 as chair and 1 as a board member) “sponsors” City with an outlandish deal that no other EPL owner (other than Newcastle) would ever hope of being able to do? Would you feel the same way if the Glazers decided to have the Tampa Buccaneers sponsor United at 5x market levels as a method to syphon money from one of their companies to another? Or if FSG did the same between the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool?

Are we so blinded by hate towards the “Red Cartel” that we are willing to dismantle them only to replace them with a “Sovereign State Cartel”? Because that’s what will happen. And in 15-20 years time, you’ll see people lament the day that the “game was ruined” when football allowed City and Newcastle to take advantage or a financial rule that no other club had any chance of being able to take advantage of.

And honestly, if after all of that you still land on the side of “Yes, this should happen” then at least be honest as to your reason why. City fans be honest and say “I want this to happen because it will be the lottery ticket that ensures my club’s dominance for decades as it gives my club an unprecedented advantage that only one other club could ever have.”

You don’t care about breaking through the glass ceiling so that others can follow. You only care about breaking the glass ceiling so you can kick the current occupants out and then create a new concrete ceiling behind you so that you can have the penthouse all to yourself. Non-City fans be honest and say “I want this to happen because I don’t actually care if there’s an uneven playing field in English football, I’d just rather see City and Newcastle dominate for next two decades than Liverpool, Arsenal, and United because I hate them so much. I hate them so much, I’m actually willing to make the league less competitive in the future rather than more if it comes at their expense.”

None of this is to say that the established order should be preserved and protected. There are very good rules that can upset the established order that actually increases competitiveness and rewards well run clubs. But removing this sensible sponsorship rule isn’t one of them and supporting it shows your true colors.
Jason

…Typical rehashing of the same tired old arguments from the City lads with no attempt to address the issues at hand. They don’t want fairness. They don’t want everyone on an equal footing. They want their sovereign wealth fund to propel them to 20 league titles in a row.

Think about it. If they just wanted to fast-track themselves to the top they’d have calmed the spending down when they’d become the dominant team with all of the commercial attractions that supposedly come with that. Nope, now they want to change the rules they signed up to in order to blow everyone out of the water financially because they know that even with their bought success all of their commercial ‘superiority’ is built on quicksand.

They say that the PL was inherently unfair, a closed shop with money directed to the red cartel before the great disrupters came along to save the day. The same PL where TV money is distributed equitably throughout the league rather than proportionally to the teams that attract the biggest audiences – I wonder who they are?

‘Oh but Champions League is set up for the red cartel to get all the TV money from that’. The same CL that Liverpool were miles away from when FSG saved them from Administration in 2010. Tell me oh sages – how did Liverpool ever manage to achieve their relative success from 2018 onwards when the great disrupters were occupying 2 champions league spots bought with blood money and dodgy sponsorships?

I’ve asked this a few times but if FFP was created to maintain the status quo of the red cartel why is it implemented in League 2?
James Outram, Wirral
(we know this arbitration is separate to the 115 charges but it is a desperate attempt to stretch the PL’s legal resources and muddy the waters – if they win this they can then make the legal case that the old rules weren’t fair and therefore they shouldn’t be ‘tried’ for them)

Man City have already won
As I was perusing the comments from the Mailbox over the last few days, I couldn’t help chuckle as they reminded me of the mob trying to burn the witch in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Well if you children could settle down and take your seats again, I will explain to you that, in the adult world, this is what is going to happen… nothing.

The last time I looked, the legal process still operates under the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” so the charges have to be proven. The club will inevitably appeal and so we will begin the “Trump saga” of appeal after appeal to various courts to delay. Meanwhile the club will be re-structuring to circumvent the rules legally in the future.

Even if, after all that, they are proven guilty, what punishment will fit the crime? I know you all want to burn the stadium and hang all the players but let’s be realistic. Fine the club? No problem. Relegate them. They’ll be back in a season or two. Take away their trophies? No professional player will touch those medals. Dock salaries? Off to the Court of Human Rights we go. Ban them from Europe? Super League here we come.

The reality is, in football and in life, entities dominate. Bayern have won, what, ten of the last eleven Bundesliga titles and Germany has that “50% +1” policy in place. When did the top one or two clubs in Spain, France, Holland, Turkey, etc. NOT win their respective leagues? Outside of Football, Hertz and Avis dominate the rental car business, Boeing and Airbus, Microsoft and Intel, Apple and Samsung, etc, etc, etc.

The irony is, you had your chance to change this multiple times but each of you only thought about how it would benefit your own club. Us MUFC fans welcomed going public and now Radcliffe. Liverpool fans looked down on us until they got American owners too. Did no Chelsea fan read how the Oligarchs made their money?

So please stop your moral hand wringing unless ALL of you, get together and lobby your politicians to change this sh@#show we have all created.
Adidasmufc (If we don’t do something now, within 5 years, Amazon, Apple, Musk, etc. will be buying clubs and that will mean Super League on Pay-Per-View.)

UEFA wouldn’t let Man City move to France
I like JazGooner’s suggestion/query about Manchester City leaving English Football and joining Ligue Un instead, it would be great to see Qatar’s PSG up against Abu Dhabi’s City each year like an oil state-backed Old Firm. Unfortunately there is precedent for why it can’t happen.

Geneva is a city on the border with France. (To be fair, it is hard to be a city in Switzerland without also being a city on the border). People often work in Geneva while living in France, while those living in Geneva often do their grocery shopping across the border due to cheaper prices. Most border crossings between the countries have rarely/never been manned since the late 90s and the whole Schengen Area thing, and even if manned, police simply wave ~90% of people through.

In the late 2000’s/early 2010’s, a club named ETG from tiny French towns near Geneva began to win promotions up the pyramid, through good results, mergers and some financial backing from Danone (parent company of Evian water). It became necessary for the club to make plans for what to do if they were promoted to Ligue Un, as the grounds available to them in their direct local area did not meet the relevant requirements.

However, also in the late 2000’s, Switzerland had recently hosted Euro 2008, and built a 30,000 seat stadium for it in the outskirts of Geneva, a mere 4km away from the French border and 8km from what can be seen as their local area. All of the relevant authorities approved of ETG’s proposal to play in Geneva… except UEFA. Their explanation was “The organization of football on a basis of national territory constitutes a fundamental principle and a well-established characteristic of sport” (my own somewhat-direct translation, not sure how to make it sound more natural though).

So anyway, there you have it: Manchester City’s dear friends at UEFA would need to approve the move. Not to mention PSG/Ligue Un, which is also a funny hypothetical to imagine.
Oliver (if this mail wasn’t long enough, there’s an article about ETG available on These Football Times) Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland

Credit to Conor
I don’t think Conor is being given the right kudos in the media for keeping quiet and only offering his support to the shambles that is Chelsea.

The leaks to the media are that he hasn’t signed a contract, but no contract has been offered. Same as the internal slander Mount went through, only leading to the moronic elements of the Bridge to boo his return.

Why should a homegrown player be forced out on a transfer that suits the club’s financial needs? Conor is well within his rights to either sit out the next year and force the clubs hierarchy to offer a contract on par with the players he has out played, or leave on a free to a club of his choice on a financial package that benefits him, not pander to this consortium that have no regard for players, staff and fans committed to the club.

The fans have made clear their desire to keep players they connect to, who mean something to the paying crowd.

Sadly English football is moving towards American franchise sports, where we’ll spend our time comparing sponsorships and our stadium revenue.

Bleak times, sadly my sole joy from the season was seeing the lovely grounded Bellingham celebrate with his family.

Hopefully we see him and his family celebrating the Euros in the summer.
Paul (Chelsea to see Sarri ball 2.0 till Lamps is rehired in Feb ‘25)