Arteta on watching 1.5m fans at the parade, which he says meant more than the trophy: “It is like creating a beast and monster inside you.” [@garyjacob] 🐉
You didn’t win. You refused to co operate and provide evidence. There is a statute of limitations for prosecution in UEFA. That doesn’t exist in the PL.
You can keep pushing this boat down the river as long as you like. In the end you will pay the piper. The long you drag it the worse the punishment.
For 9 years, Manchester City broke the rules they had signed up to follow, disguising owner funding as sponsorship revenue, concealing the true scale of player and manager remuneration, and then failing to cooperate properly with the Premier League’s investigation for years.
An independent commission has now reportedly found them guilty on 114 of 115 charges.
You cannot voluntarily enter a competition, agree to its rules, systematically break those rules, spend years fighting the process designed to hold you accountable, claim you were innocent and that you followed the rules, and then, when you are found guilty, suddenly retreat to “the rules were bad anyway” while accusing everyone else of playing the victim.
You don’t get to benefit from the competition, ignore its regulations when they become inconvenient, obstruct the investigation into what you did, and then portray accountability as persecution.
And calling everyone else “victims making excuses” while defending one of the most extensively documented scandals and acts of cheating in Premier League & sporting history is extraordinary.
It’s industrial-scale cope.