Please remember that you must not express your feelings about the Belfast atrocity until the political establishment has told you exactly how you are supposed to feel. That's how it works now.
We banned the use of CVs and background checks for recruiting in Germany. It's discriminatory as not everyone had the same opportunity to have a good background, especially refugees.
My daughter's teacher is now an illiterate Libyan slave-trader and my wife's gynecologist a serial rapist from Haiti.
Equity is non-negotiable in my progressive utopia and if this means getting brain surgery by a retarded Somali car mechanic then so be it.
Have a wonderful day,
Wolfgang
When gangster Chris Kaba was shot by a police marksman, Neil Basu called it a "watershed moment" & announced the "black community don't trust policing at all".
But when Henry Nowak bleeds to death in police handcuffs, we mustn't talk about it because it's "divisive".
Hypocrite.
This is a nice reminder for everyone who pretended they’d known about handball rule 2.1b all their lives and anyone who didn’t was an imbecile…
Michael Salisbury got it wrong, and so did you.
VAR
I enthusiastically welcomed it. Was sold on the higher percentage of right decisions so we could all go home knowing football justice had been done and we could concentrate on which player was crap instead.
But I was wrong. Woefully and completely wrong.
Waiting 5 minutes for a decision to be made alone means the system isn't fit for purpose. Why? Because I sat with TV producers who said everything would be wrapped up in 10-30 seconds. It has literally taken the spontaneous joy from the most important part of the game. A goal.
Then, one thing completely blindsided me and many others.
Subjectivity.
I thought there would be science and a nailed on guarantee of a successfully and universally accepted decision. How wrong we were. Instead, arbitrary lines are drawn that simply can't with any certainty say whether a player is offside or not. So a human in a portacabin, 200 miles away only does what the referee can do, make a best guess.
Likewise handballs, dives, any penalty decision to be honest. A subjective decision decided out of stadium allowing an increasingly small and poor refereeing pool a get out of jail free card. Instead of them making a shit decision and owning it, they just pass it on 200 miles away so 3 men in a portacabin can make a shit decision instead. Lunacy.
For the love of the game, let's go back to investing in getting more referees, respecting them so that they join the trade and don't feel constantly abused. In short, treat them like rugby referees. Ultimate respect.
Then, fuck VAR off, it's ruined the game, made it petty and chaotic, and taken that one ingredient that you simply can't replace, instantaneous joy.
As a player and fan I accepted a referee making a bad decision in a game in the same way I accepted fucking up a shot or pass. We're all human.
Let's get back to that, humans doing their best, everyone walks away from the ground accepting that and less unrealistic pressure put on officials to be perfect when perfection doesn't exist in any walk of life.
VAR stinks. A system designed to help is a massive hindrance and it's about time pundits, fans, players, referees, clubs put pressure on authorities to get rid of it. We only need goal line tech, the rest can and should be refer refereed by humans making their best judgement. A best judgement that was over 98% right( audited fact pre VAR).
Enough is enough, fuck it off.
Manager of the Season.
Manage 15 games at a Manchester United that's spent another trillion ,come on in, your name's on the list.
Manage 3 seasons at Villa, 3 semi finals, 1 final, 2 Champions League qualifications using half a dozen players who played in the Championship, you can't come in.
A decision so laughable that when someday Unai is nominated, I hope he tells them to fuck off.
A mockery of what achievement versus caretaking is.
There was a time when a European final belonged to the supporters who dragged their club there.
Not anymore.
When Aston Villa were handed roughly 11,000 tickets for a Europa League final in a 70,000-plus stadium, the number itself told the story. UEFA can package the event however it likes — “festival of football”, “European showpiece”, “global celebration” — but the modern European final is no longer built around supporters. It is built around clients.
The supporters fund the journey. The corporates inherit the destination.
Villa fans will have spent thousands following the club across Europe. Flights, hotels, time off work, loyalty schemes built over years. Yet when the final arrives, huge sections of the stadium are reserved for sponsors, hospitality guests, executives, delegates and “neutral” allocations that often end up on resale sites within hours.
And supporters are expected to accept it.
UEFA’s defence is familiar. Sponsors fund competitions. Broadcasters need space. Hospitality drives revenue. All true. But football crossed a line when the event surrounding the final became more important than the supporters inside it.
The optics are awful because fans can see it themselves.
A finalist gets 11,000 tickets while corporate packages costing thousands remain available. Genuine supporters scramble through ballots with lottery-like odds, while neutral areas fill with tourists taking photos during the warm-up.
And UEFA wonders why resentment grows.
Supporters are constantly called “the lifeblood of the game” until ticket allocations are discussed. Then they become an inconvenience to work around premium inventory.
Football did not become Europe’s dominant sport because sponsors created atmosphere. The noise, colour and emotion UEFA sells globally every season is generated by match-going supporters — the same people increasingly pushed aside at the biggest games.
The “neutral fan” concept is perhaps the biggest fiction of all. In theory it promotes access. In reality it fuels resale markets, inflated prices and thousands travelling ticketless out of desperation.
UEFA could change it tomorrow. Finalists could receive 70 per cent of the stadium combined. Corporate sections could shrink. Hospitality would still exist.
But that would mean sacrificing revenue.
And modern football has shown repeatedly which side wins that argument.
#AVFC #scfreiburg
The answers to many modern problems are simple but politically incorrect.
So instead of solving anything, everybody pretends they don't know what's going on, and spend years misdiagnosing the issue, talking in circles, and wasting time.