General Premier League Thread 2022-23 - mod note in OP 12/03/23

Agree totally with you on the clubs stopping their arrangments with bookies the thing is though players having gambling problems is nothing new. It was happening long before bookies started sponsoring clubs. Too much money at a young age, too much time on their hands and you can put bets on any event/match/eurovision/general election etc in seconds with the app. What could possibly go wrong? Every player getting their 1st professional contract should be made to read Paul Mersons book before they sign.

This will remove any lingering doubt that this city team, corrupt finances aside, are the best of the PL era.

Sorry, I've no faith in Inter.

I'm no city fan but the only charges against are from the premier league. The game tonight is a UEFA competition.

Scuppered any possibility of moving to a bigger club.

This City* side are the product of years of investment by Abu Dhabi. The true nature of that investment will probably never be known. Everything they have done is most likely going to be tainted by the investigations into them. What Utd did, what Liverpool did, those achievements will always be greater than what City* have done or ever do.

The Premier League is dead as an entity. 5 out of 6 wins for City* The gulf between top and bottom widening. 100+ allegations against City* and if they are found guilty then it just means the 6 years were a con.

The only true deterrent to stop what City* have done is to punish it appropriately, strip them of titles won if they are found to have won them through financial doping. And relegation.

Stripping titles is the only appropriate punishment if the PL genuinely wants to deter Newcastle and potentially Uniteds owners doing the same. They are buying prestige in the form of titles through systemic cheating, whether it be though inflated sponsorship deals, under the table payments or just making up betting/crypto sponsors.

A fine would be pathetic, points deductions won’t make the slightest bit of difference and even relegation would be an inconvenience, they’d be straight back to challenging the following year.

For every year they’ve been guilty of cheating should be a year they have a title chalked off. It’s a complete slap in the face to other teams who worked incredibly hard to put a title charge together to be denied by rampant financial bullies.

If the PL don’t deal with this in the correct way it will have huge ramifications not only for the PL but for football globally. Anything that Abu Dhabi can consider the cost of doing business means any state owned team can spend as much as they like without having to worry about punishment, which will ultimately break the football economy having a handful of teams generating money in a way it’s simply not possible for other teams to replicate, all while setting the prices for players to a ludicrous degree and making everything more expensive for everyone else.

It really cannot be overstated how much of a scourge state owned clubs are on the football landscape.

I think the Italian FA v Italian clubs is more of an equal fight though.

EPL and FA are clearly big institutions, but they are a tiny speck compared to the power behind the oil clubs. It'd be John Grisham or Erin Brokovich stuff trying to take them on. It could be done, but prepare for a lot of expense and hassle and the odd dead body.

The EPL is so far ahead of the rest that you can see the quality of players arriving at "mid-table" clubs has vastly improved.

Man City* are so far ahead of the EPL that they* sell their off casts to Arsenal, 2nd in the EPL, as nobody in Europe can compete.

If the charges aren't enforced we could be looking at 5,6,7 or more in a row, and as I said before, trying to imagine the EPL without Klopp. Take Liverpool out of the tables and you are left with Man City* winning by 19, 16, 15, 12, 19 and whatever they* do this season. This would be No.6 in a row already.

Never happened in English football administration history.

I know it was match fixing and not financial stuff but Juve got titles stripped and the Scottish done Rangers a lot harder than anyone expected for financial stuff.

Speaking of Juve if they win the Europa league that will be the 2 big European trophies in the hands of clubs under financial investigations (assuming City also win)