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Reply | City Punishment
at 15:34 30 Sep 2026
- You think cheating is "a technicality". Fortunately the vast majority of people disagree with you. City deliberately set out to cheat on a massive scale and so deserve to be punished proportionately.
- The City model is unsustainable because they lose hundreds of millions of pounds on an ongoing basis. So, if the world stops burning oil, the royal family lose interest, or if there is a coup in the UAE, then they go bust in their current form.
- In contrast, Liverpool's is a sustainable model built on fans, which tend to be lifelong. But that sustainability would be threatened if there were lots of cheats like City.
- Doncaster v Yeovil will always attract a lower TV audience than Liverpool v Man U.
- You don't have the right to tell me what I "should" do, but I agree with you on some of the other issues in football. |
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Reply | City Punishment
at 14:58 30 Sep 2026
It's a good question, but there's a difference between your examples. The main difference is that one is a sustainable, fan based business, and the other isn't.
You regard foreign fans as inferior, or plastic. I don't think that's fair, but either way, in business terms their money is as good as the money from local fans. Football is a business and Liverpool make money from the PL, which makes money from selling TV rights around the world. Those TV rights go for big money because the likes of Liverpool and Man U have millions of fans around the world. That's a sustainable model.
If China was allowed to buy 5 clubs like Doncaster Rovers and Yeovil and pour billions in so that they took over the PL, lots of bad things would happen. One is that the TV audiences would go down, so incomes go down. Another is that genuine businesses would stop investing in the PL. There would be no point to it. If China then walked away, the PL would have no business left at all. It's unsustainable.
I get your question, but if I was running the PL, I would also want it to be run on a sustainable basis, so I would want rules like the current ones. This sustainability is also the ethical choice because people's livelihoods are involved and you want an environment where people can invest and plan for the future with some degree of certainty. |
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Reply | City Punishment
at 13:59 30 Sep 2026
Not sure what's difficult to understand here but Man City broke the rules. There's no evidence, or even allegations that Liverpool, Man U or Arsenal did. They are completely different. Perhaps you don't like the rules but that's irrelevant here. What matters is who played according to the rules and who didn't.
Btw, it's highly unlikely that other big clubs would have done the same as City because they have no incentive to. The owners of those clubs are interested in making a profit. They have no interest in pouring hidden money into the clubs at a loss, as City did. The likes of Fenway Sports are successful businesses.
In contrast, City's owners are the Abu Dhabi royal family. They have no interest in making a profit from City. They want to use it to promote Abu Dhabi and the UAE. Their incentives are to make a loss on City in order to best promote the image of the UAE by winning competitions, and probably also enjoy their royal pet project. What else do you spend money on when you have it all? |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 22:10 29 Sep 2026
He's misleading people already if you think people won't have to give up their houses to receive social care. That would be phenomenally expensive. Where would the money come from to replace the hundreds of thousands of pounds that it can cost per person?
In 1999 the government (Labour) set up the Sutherland Commission to look at setting up the same thing as this National Care Service. When they looked at it they decided it was too expensive, so the idea was binned. That was in 1999 when the country was much better off and running a much lower deficit. God knows how we're supposed to be able to afford it now - probably by lying about the true costs. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 21:51 29 Sep 2026
Hi cock breath, I'm glad you've been thinking about me.
Not surprised to see you haven't got anything intelligent to say. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 18:46 29 Sep 2026
Yes I'm referring to all those public sector workers. It's not a criticism of individual workers, it's just a statement of fact that the organisations they work for are failing to get any better, despite all the technology available and all the investment that has been thrown at them:
https://taxpayersalliance.com/
According to the ONS (itself a government body) UK public sector productivity increased a pathetic 1% between 1997 and 2025. In contrast, over the same time, total UK productivity increased by 35%. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 17:37 29 Sep 2026
Sorry but you're right, that is simplistic. One of the big problems we have in this country is the inefficiency of the public sector. Private sector productivity keeps improving but public sector productivity goes nowhere. As always in economics, this is due to incentives. The private sector is incentivised to be efficient or they go out of business (like in your example). In the public sector the incentive is to spend every penny of your budget or you won't get as much next year. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 17:31 29 Sep 2026
You are right, we need to get away from welfare state dependency. Some of this is because the economy isn't growing and generating jobs, but too much is down to people making a choice to live on the sick etc. instead of working. Meanwhile, we're told that we need waves of immigration to staff the jobs that keep basic services running, plus illegal immigrants make dangerous journeys, without stopping in safe countries, drawn in by the generosity of our benefits system.
Unfortunately, the only way to stop all that is to make a life on benefits less attractive and make it pay less. If there was a nicer way to solve the problem that would be great, but there isn't. People bleat about inequality, but we actually need to have more inequality between people on benefits and people who choose to work. We don't need Andy Burnham, we need a government that will make this kind of tough decision. |
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Reply | Andy Burnham's speech
at 16:34 29 Sep 2026
It's just more BS. He says that removing the link to earnings from the state pension “will generate significant savings which we will use to build up our National Care Service.” This is nonsense. It won't save anything like enough to pay for what's been talked about and it's misleading to suggest otherwise. But then he says that the state pension "will hold its value relative to earnings over time". Say what?? Either the state pension loses value relative to earnings - so there are some savings - or it doesn't, in which case there are no savings. It's basic logic.
Burnham and the Labour party generally just don't understand that it's the economy that pays for all their spending and the economy is being strangled. The first priority should be to stop strangling the economy. Only when that's done should he worry about new spending. Some might be impressed by emotional speeches, I'm not. I would prefer one with some hard truths, honesty and logic. |
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Reply | City found guilty.
at 20:23 25 Sep 2026
This might mean that 4 clubs are promoted from the Championship this year., with Schity going the other way. Getting to the play off final might be enough to be promoted. |
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Reply | Rob Edwards
at 12:46 25 Sep 2026
I agree that others knew. Will Salt's direct boss (head of the analyst team?) must have known, even just to sign off his expenses. If that person kept it quiet and didn't tell Spors then he would would have been sacked when this blew up. But no one has been sacked, so that says Will Salt's boss did what any sensible person would do and asked Spors if we should be doing this. So Spors knew and agreed to it.
The blame has all gone on Tonda and he is the main guilty party, but others must be guilty too. |
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Reply | England U21s
at 12:26 25 Sep 2026
The problem is the opposite. The general public couldn't give a tiny 2 s**ts about this. Even the ones who follow football, they either don't know, don't care or follow the big clubs who are the ones that benefit.
I agree that it's disgusting but probably only 1% of the public would say so without the issue being explained to them. If you just asked them what they thought were the big problems in football, very few would mention it. |
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Reply | Will there be any pubs left?
at 17:26 23 Sep 2026
You must be buying from the wrong dealer. Yes, purity has doubled:
https://www.substancemisuseres
I didn't say it was cheaper habit than drinking. I said that it's about 4 times cheaper than it was 10 years ago, due to the combination of street price and purity, all of which is driven by bigger global supplies. As a result, consumption has gone up a lot. We know that for sure because there's an ongoing programme that tests sewage water for different drugs.
If the price of a pint had come down in the last decade in the same way that cocaine has, a pint would cost 87p today. If that had happened, then I suspect people of all ages would be drinking more pints. |
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Reply | Will there be any pubs left?
at 14:07 23 Sep 2026
I'm not so sure that's a factor for your regular local boozer. Maybe for the city centre, wine bars and nightclubs, but regular pub drinking has always been mostly about mates, work mates and families rather than pick up joints. |
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Reply | Will there be any pubs left?
at 13:51 23 Sep 2026
Yes they take more drugs, but why? Again it's the cost. Much more cocaine is produced globally now. In the UK the street price per gram has halved over the last decade, while the purity has doubled. That means you get 4 times the bang for your buck.
Meanwhile the cost of a pint has gone the other way, so it's inevitable that youngsters now spend more on drugs and less on pints. If the cost of a pint was now 25% of what it was a decade ago, while the price of drugs had gone up significantly, then this wouldn't have happened and young people would still be going to pubs. |
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Reply | Will there be any pubs left?
at 12:14 23 Sep 2026
Yes, it's basically impossible for pubs with the taxes, energy and staff costs. More will close. It's even worse for businesses that have to compete internationally because e.g. our industrial electricity prices are about double what businesses in the EU or US pay. You can't compete on that basis.
It's also true that youngsters don't go to the pub in the way that previous generations did, but you have to ask why is this happening? Inevitably the cost of a pint is a big factor. Older people carry on because it's what they've always done, but younger people look at it and think there are better ways of spending money. |
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Reply | Tall Paul Onuachu Comes Clean About His Time At Southampton
at 10:28 23 Sep 2026
How can he be "the worst centre forward" when - after RM left and he was given a chance - he became the clear first choice at centre forward in preference to the likes of Arma and Archer? If they were better centre forwards then why didn't they show it on the pitch or in training?
Arma did well for Saints overall, but as a centre forward he did not. As a centre forward he was mostly terrible, and in the view of 2 successive managers, he was worse than Tall Paul in that role. Also, he was only ever any good in the Championship, which is a big step down in quality to the PL, where Tall Paul played. If Tall Paul had played in the Championship he'd have got bucket loads of goals. As for Archer...
Clearly Tall Paul was a better centre forward than either of them. |
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Reply | Worst Ever Saints Centre Forward
at 15:28 22 Sep 2026
Yeah but he always looked a bit rudderless (or ruddy useless).
p.s. always a good idea to check your spelling in a post about someone else's spelling! |
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Reply | Worst Ever Saints Centre Forward
at 12:48 22 Sep 2026
Neither Downs nor BBD are centre forwards. They're utility strikers (call them inside forwards if you prefer) that we've played in the middle, sometimes because we didn't have any centre forwards available.
Downs needs space, not the attentions of a centre back. He also said that the weakest part of his game was heading, which doesn't sound like a centre forward to me.
BBD has always played best on the left, which is where he played well for Derby last season. |
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