He has personality. That’s why City had to replace him.

Yeah it has jumped the shark a bit.

In simple terms the sport is administered incredibly poorly. From rolling over for state ownership to the referees on matchday the whole infrastructure is unfit for purpose.

Yeah he needs to not say one fucking thing about officials.

Why ‘already’? He’s in his thirties. His status was already settled.

There’s no innocence to prove. Loads of this stuff was already admitted when UEFA was going after them.

You’re not supposed to, but especially with United away games for example you’ll find there’s plenty of reds in among the home fans. It’s not technically allowed, it’s definitely not safe, but people do it all the time. I’ve done it a few times, I expect other fans of big clubs do it.

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Bottom line is don’t be a dick and don’t get caught, because there are plenty of parts of plenty of grounds where you’ll wish the stewards threw you out if you get caught by the home fans.

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I mean they won’t kill you or anything but you might get a bunch of locals dogpile on you and give you a shoeing. I’ve seen a few in my time but you really have to do something idiotic like celebrating a goal to provoke a violent reaction.

Good luck to Burnley and Leicester.

Lawyers will certainly have a go. Whether they succeed or not, that’s up to the courts. It has been done before and it’s usually expensive.

You have to be able to make a case that the cheating directly screwed you over, so if you’re complete crap and would have been relegated anyway it’s a long shot.

Frankly if a team attempts to deceive the league they ought to be automatically relegated.

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Everything else is a footnote.

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I’m less concerned with what Everton did than the fact that they tried to hide it. There needs to be the utmost transparency and if a club is evasive, if they are dishonest, hit them hard.

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In this case the punishment means nothing anyway. Everton are not getting relegated and they weren’t winning shit anyway. Pretending it’s an outrage is ridiculous.

They let it get out of hand and now it’s too big to ignore.

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You can tell that the thinking early on was that City would just be one more club in the title mix and it might make the league better to have more teams fighting over the title. The hope was clearly that this problem would never arise because the imbalance would never become so pronounced.

This was a very dumb idea. It was obvious that a country would dominate in a league of football clubs. It’s hilarious to me that anybody for a moment thought they wouldn’t. Your favourite sports franchise, your favourite movie studio, your favourite billionaire weirdo - not as powerful as a nation state. Not even close. And that’s vastly more true when it’s a despotic oil state.

‘We’ve got a good crop of youngsters in our academy’ versus ‘They’ve got an Air Force an a seat on the UN’.

‘Our owner got a letter of apology from the PGMOL because of an offside goal given against us’ versus ‘Our owner had eighty people executed today*’.

The nation state owners need to go. And the Premier League is going to have to bite the bullet and deal with the City problem. They should probably also deal with Newcastle before that becomes a problem.

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*That was the Saudis, and it was more than eighty. The point is the imbalance.

The people to ask would be Juventus fans. That club cheated its arse off, got caught, got stripped of a title, got relegated, came back and generally isn’t viewed with anything like the disgust it probably merits.

The agenda against VAR is in no small part something the referees have created. They’re fucking it up on purpose so they can get rid of it.

Easily Ole. We had some wild (and great) results. We won trophies with Mourinho but I don’t remember too many great games. With Ole we’ll always have Paris.

It’s Giggs and it’s not even close.

I love Totti, the gorgeous bastard, but Giggs, holy fuck, such a ridiculous career.

Man’s out there winning titles for United twenty years apart. Any cup worth winning he’s probably won it at least twice. He scored United’s greatest ever goal. He played a million games.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and of course contemptible behaviour breeds contempt, and he’s a complete dick, but it takes something special to be irreplaceable to a club that successful for that long.

I’m not buying the ‘Chelsea Are Actually Good And We Were Just Kidding’ narrative from the media. They still struggle with a low block, they still concede a lot of goals, obviously they are not relegation fodder but I’m not going to start taking them seriously just because of one crazy game against City*.

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*Plus City before Christmas are a different animal.

There are some really good answers in this thread.

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I’d echo what others have suggested about the death of the trequartista. Gone the way of the sweeper. Players are faster, pitches are effectively smaller, presses are better coordinated, so you can’t be pulling the strings that high up the pitch unless you have a borderline supernatural level of skill.

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That’s not the only way to play a ten of course, but it’s clear from context that is what they mean.

The Daily Mail can’t help but lie can they?

Dude was released. There was no rescue involved.

Regarding refs I was talking about Pep at Barca.

Because nobody gives a fuck.

Like seriously, if you’re an editor at a website or whatever, you’re going to get more hits with “Something Something Manchester United Bad Something Something” than literally anything that could ever be going on at Burnley.

And last I saw, Manchester United were indeed Bad, so coverage of Burnley doing a Norwich will always be limited.

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That and as mentioned, Burnley are simply doing a Norwich, it’s not big, it’s not interesting and we see it every time Norwich get promoted. Manager will be gone by Christmas, they’ll be on the beach until May and spend the parachute payments trying to do it all over again.

To be fair we don’t know what Keane would do with infinite money and the referees paid off.