One thing I wonder about is - as far as investments go, surely this is small fry for the UAE.
The other side of it is, though, it’s the most visible of their investments and Al Mubarak is fronting it, and he is effectively the PM of the UAE.
I still think the UK government should take a hard line here though and say:
You have your national interests, and we have ours. And the Premier League is our biggest cultural export. You can’t distort it like that.
Are they really that arsed
Yeah because they are still financially doping you absolute rube.
If it is apparently possible for a middling club to scale to the size of Madrid inside of a decade, then why isn’t it more common?
Are we supposed to believe that the City owners are world-historical business geniuses?
Yeah exactly, the US were completely right to say: the PGA is a huge cultural asset and you can’t buy it.
I have no idea why no politician as of yet has said:
The Premier League is a massive cultural asset, under no circumstances can you distort it like that.
Imagine if the US bought Norwich and pumped money in illicitly for ‘prestige.’ Everyone would rightly recognise the absurdity and they would be laughed out the room.
@El_Cunto76@GlenosaurusRex What’s your model for how football should be run? Put Newcastle aside for a minute. How would your model help Plymouth?
Is your model just - ‘hope Elon Musk or Kim Jong Un takes your club over’?
If you bought a business, would you also give away a large proportion of its revenue to smaller clubs?
No. But that’s what the likes of Liverpool and United do with the TV money.
Football teams are co-dependent. Nobody watches them to play on their own. They agree to collective rules to balance collective interests.
City have decided they don’t like those rules and have cheated.
Every sport in the world has spending restrictions.
@KCkevin_cityzen I’m sure we could get North Korea to invest in places if we allowed them to break rules across multiple domains as well.
This is the double edged sword of dodgy money. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
Most revenue came from gate receipts, up until the 90s.
The clubs in the big industrial towns, with big populations, therefore had more revenue and spent more. This was organic money and not the result of a sugar daddy.
Liverpool dominated the league and Europe in the 70s and 80s, but did not have a sugar daddy.