🚨💣BREAKING : Michael Oliver could reportedly face scrutiny over allegations that he was paid £20,000 to referee in the UAE in 2023. 👀⚠️
Oliver and other referees reportedly allegedly accepted payments to officiate matches in the UAE during the middle of the season. 💰🇦🇪
The claims are now resurfacing following the recent developments involving Manchester City’s financial case. 🔵👀
These remain allegations, and no wrongdoing by Oliver has been established based on the claim provided.
Across the nine seasons they were accused of not providing accurate information, Manchester City spent £1.943billion on wages, over £100m more than any other English club. In 17 Abu Dhabi-controlled years to the end of 2024-25, their combined wage bill was £4.963bn.
At Manchester United and Chelsea, the next-highest combined bills in England, the figure is around £600m lower. It is a staggering difference.
Since 2009-10 (the first season the charges relate to), the Premier League has dished out more than £6bn in merit payments to 42 different clubs. City received £559.6m (9%).
They have played in the Champions League every year from 2011-12 onwards, achieving qualification in eight of the nine years the charges spanned.
Such qualification naturally means others missed out. On that particular measure, Tottenham Hotspur were worst hit, landing one spot outside of the Champions League on four occasions during that spell. Their Europa League earnings from those occasions totalled a combined £28.8million; City made £141m from the Champions League in the same seasons.
It is not just those fighting for titles or European spots who may feel they’ve missed out. What of the beaten cup finalists? What of the clubs who might have avoided relegation if City’s results were scrubbed out?
📝 @CWeatherspoon_
https://t.co/dn2EFw7AUp
🚨💣 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐏𝐞𝐩 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝟐: A Story of Drugs, Referees, and Dark Money in Football 📰⤵️
Imagine a story so massive it makes the Lance Armstrong scandal look like a warm-up act.
It starts with a single player, spans three countries, and exposes a decades-long trail of destroyed evidence, miracle doctors, and institutional corruption.
CHAPTER 1: The Shadow of 2001
Before Pep Guardiola was the master tactician, he was a midfielder for Brescia in 2001. That year, he shocked the football world by testing positive twice for the banned anabolic steroid nandrolone.
His defense blamed contaminated multivitamins prepared by Dr. Ramon Segura—the exact same physiologist working with Frank de Boer when he also flagged positive for nandrolone that same year.
Though Pep fought the ruling for years and was ultimately fully cleared on appeal in 2007, the pattern of surrounding his squads with high-intensity, hyper-aggressive medical setups was established early.
CHAPTER 2: The Barcelona Miracles and Operación Puerto
When Pep took over Barcelona in 2008, he immediately brought Dr. Ramon Segura onto the official medical staff.
At the same time, Spanish football was shadowed by Operación Puerto, a massive anti-doping raid uncovering blood bags containing EPO.
Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes taunted in court that naming his football clients would force Spain to strip its own Champions League and World Cup trophies.
Yet, the Spanish judge refused to allow the names to be made public, ordering the blood bags destroyed under doctor-patient confidentiality. The paper trail was burned.
CHAPTER 3: The System Expands — Financial Doping and Negreira
Winning was not just happening on the pitch.
While the public focused on recent league investigations, Spanish prosecutors exposed the Negreira Case—revealing Barcelona paid millions to José María Enríquez Negreira, vice-president of Spain’s refereeing committee.
When asked to produce the physical scouting reports they claimed to be buying, the club struggled to provide clear evidence. They had been paying the boss of the referees.
CHAPTER 4: The Bayern Friction
When Pep arrived at Bayern Munich, his aggressive medical demands clashed instantly with the old guard. He insisted on bypassing local staff to fly injured players directly back to Barcelona for specialized treatments.
This sparked an explosive fallout with Bayern’s legendary physician, Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, who walked out over Pep’s demands for record-breaking, unnatural player recovery times.
CHAPTER 5: Manchester City and the Ultimate Machine
At Manchester City, the strategy reached its final form. Following the independent panel's historic verdict finding City guilty on 114 charges for breaching financial regulations, the full scale of the operation has been laid bare:
— Financial manipulation to bypass FFP and buy infinite squad depth.
— Medical anomalies, with key stars constantly flying to Barcelona to see specialists and recovering weeks ahead of normal biology.
When Samir Nasri was caught receiving illegal IV drip treatments in 2016, it was framed as an isolated mistake.
Mike Dean, the Referee that officiated Man City vs QPR that day:
“Once QPR found out they were safe.. I still can get my head around why they [QPR] kicked the ball straight back. I couldn't get that.”
The man who invented the operation that saves babies born with blue-baby syndrome had no medical degree, no college degree, and was listed on the payroll as a JANITOR.
He guided the first operation from a stool behind the surgeon's shoulder, telling him where to cut.
Vivien Thomas. He had been saving to study medicine when the 1929 crash wiped out his savings and the bank holding them.
He took a job as a lab assistant at Vanderbilt for a janitor's wage, because that was the classification available.
Within a couple of years he was running experimental surgery — developing techniques, performing operations on his own, training surgeons.
He moved to Johns Hopkins with Alfred Blalock in 1941, where he was still paid as a janitor and had to enter through a back door.
He was the only Black man in that building not carrying a mop.
He worked out the surgical fix for tetralogy of Fallot — the condition killing infants who turned blue and died — and built the instruments for it.
The first operation on a child was in 1944. Blalock, who had never done the procedure, asked Thomas to stand behind him and talk him through it.
The surgeons on the paper became world famous. Thomas was not credited.
Hopkins hung his portrait in 1971 and gave him an honorary doctorate in 1976. Generations of surgeons he personally trained insisted on it.
He was paid as a cleaner while inventing heart surgery.
Cucumber skin has a higher silica concentration than most collagen-support supplements.
The skin you peeled off and discarded was the part doing the most for skin elasticity.
A HISTORY AFRICA MUST NEVER FORGET. 🇨🇩
During the reign of King Leopold II over the Congo Free State, the Congolese population suffered severe forced labor, violence, mutilation, and widespread fatalities within a system primarily focused on the extraction of resources, particularly rubber.
Images and stories from that time are a painful part of Congo’s history. But did the world ever truly address the suffering of the Congolese people?
Were victims given justice, descendants meaningful reparations, and the Congo's full story remembered as it deserves?
History is not meant to reopen hatred. It is meant to preserve truth, remember the victims, and help humanity avoid repeating its darkest chapters.
🇨🇩 Congo remembers. Africa remembers.
What do you believe the world still owes Congo: truth, justice, recognition, reparations—or all of these? 👇🏿
‘Manchester City did everything they possibly could to swerve their way out of this.’
@AidanMageeTV discusses some of the charges that the club has been found guilty of by the Premier League.