Sportingintelligence: A perpetually sceptical attempt to make sense of sport's relationship with money. Interested in conmen & numbers. Reassuringly grumpy.
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Doing an interview with a Norwegian journalist about City. I picked the location. Pablo Zabaleta just walked past and I shouted “Hey Pablo” and he gave me a thumbs up
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The YouTube version of a pod I recorded 2 wks ago with @DuncanCastles about MCFC case. I was "on holiday" in Cornwall at the time. Hugely gratified about the positive feedback. And if you want somewhere gorgeous to go in Cornwall, go to Watergate Bay.
piped.video/watch?v=NjsJyay0…
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Below is a speech I gave in 2022, at the Play The Game conference in Denmark, about years of covering City's cheating and their "no comment" stance. Fast forward to 13 mins of this video for the start of the speech.
2/2
vimeo.com/721879685
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I was given, by several survivors, a copy of the compensation agreement that survivors were obliged to sign. This include a "tariff" of money they would receive, from £5,000 from one incident of "indecent touching" to £65,000 for years of multiple rape by Bennell. 7/n
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This platform has removed the offending tweet already (I think) but I'm going to leave this screen grab here simply to highlight the regular crap some of us have to endure for doing our jobs
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Pep's been asked the question, in public. I also asked him via the club, several times. Response was always no comment rather than "No". Hope this helps
piped.video/watch?v=6I302sgn…
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What a brilliant paragraph, laughed out loud at the last sentence of it.
City should be stripped of titles and the roll of honour left blank.
theguardian.com/football/202…
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Here's the MoS story as it appears in the paper. And to be clear, it was a minority section of Man City's support who invoked Helen's death in their attacks against me. I rarely even referred to her illness before she died.
The human cost of reporting on Man City’s cheating for 15 years. It’s on the Mail website today and will be in the MoS paper tomorrow (Sunday) but they backed my reporting 100%. That reporting continues on my Substack. Google it for details. dailymail.com/sport/football…
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For insomniacs, the YouTube version of my interview on Saturday morning with @DuncanCastles. We dicuss: guilt or othewide of mcfc, punishment, Burnham, potential actions by regulators and mmuch more: piped.video/watch?v=NjsJyay0…
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This platform has removed the offending tweet already (I think) but I'm going to leave this screen grab here simply to highlight the regular crap some of us have to endure for doing our jobs
Timely reminder of the compassion of some City fans and the sort of stuff journalists probing City have to endure.
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Thus we return to this (authentic and never disputed) email from senior City advisor and senior UAE advisor Simon Pearce to Peter Baumgartner, CEO of Etihad Airways at the time. 2/n
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Here's a section of the IC report that is as transparent as City became after 2014, after their first massive fine, when lies and obfuscation became the norm. From that point it was generally "no comment", or threats, or lies, a playbook they've used ever since.
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This section of the IC report is as transparent as Man City have been about their financial book-cooking since 2014, since when, generally, their approach has been "no comment" or to suggest they were victims of a conspiracy, instead of the entitled plutocratic cheats they are
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Here's a table from the IC report about "the cheating years" and the enormous chasm between what sponsors actually paid and what City claimed, having been topped up by UAE sources, undeclared and against the rules.
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The independent commission's basic (and redacted) conclusions why / how Man City egregiously cheated include this. The most damning charges. City had a "Disguised Funding Scheme". In short: pretending sponsors were paying huge sums but most of the money was coming from elsewhere.
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I’ve been leaked Man City’s Manchester City’s “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence”.
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It was 38 years ago today that Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m gold medal from the 1988 Olympics, for doping, a few days after he'd won it. I spent an evening with Ben in 2013, hearing about his astonishing life. MoS piece from then: dailymail.com/sport/otherspo…
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Brilliant journalism exposing the utter charlatans of Reform. @Nigel_Farage should be toast. He won't be, yet. But crikey what a shower of shit he's leading.
piped.video/watch?v=aXut3s90…
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Central to the case: did Man City receive disguised funding of millions of pounds from Abu Dhabi, as this (really) email from 2013 purported to show? Did they really got £35m from shirt rightw n 2013, and campus naming rights of &17.5m and stadium naming nights of £15m? 2/n
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Isabel was 13 when Helen was diagnosed and 17 when Helen died and made this video. She did it in a few hours. It's one of the reasons that our young people will make the world a getter place.
piped.video/watch?v=lWuudrw-…
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For LFC fans salivating at the prospect of their club (now valued at $7bn or $8bn) or whatever, run by a brains trust including Amit Bhatia, fill your boots with his last foray into football!
piped.video/watch?v=Q22vapBP…
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I'm sure FSG, after getting £1.4bn, will be delighted to have the backing of such a shrewd football investor as Amit with his incredible previous track record in English football.
One of the great (UK) football documentaries was 'The Four Year Plan' about QPR after a 2007 takeover by a brains trust including Amit Bhatia, Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone & Alejandro Agag. QPR's phenomenal success, domestically and internationally, was proof of the pudding
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First caught a FIFA ExCo member red-handed for ticket touting at France 98, when Chuck Blazer was personally knocking out touted tickets at massively inflated prices in a hotel lobby in the south of France. FIFA invoked Henry Kissinger as a spurious explanation! 2/n
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Infantino was looking to take things to a new level, way above and beyond what his predecessor and cronies achieved ...
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Carlos Cordeiro's LinkedIn post earlier today as he resigned as Infantino's advisor was ... pretty punchy.
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Stefan's own view (in private, which he won't ever air in public) is MCFC always asked Abu Dhabi for cash and then tried to make it look legit after the fact. So nothing to see here? I'll look forward to him addressing this on his next TalkSport appearance.
See the timeline of MCFC’s arch propagandist, @slbsn, to see how triggered that faction of the City support have become. Any neutral would be questioning why this is taking so long as opposed to attacking anyone asking why it’s taking so long.
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February 1980: Southampton sign the reigning European Footballer of the Year, Kevin Keegan. RIP Mighty Mouse.
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An internal FIFA memo at the time outlined the charges against him. Here is part of that 2/3
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Brilliant book about a flawed genius by one of the UK’s most underrated sports writers and brilliant journalists of the past three decades, @timrich001.
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This one is only for Ted Lasso fans!
piped.video/watch?v=Sfu0uOVW…
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There was also Madonna at Wembley in 1987 but I sold that one years ago on eBay: a superfan paid something like £200 for the ticket stub, a programme and a copy of her photobook!
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By the early 1980s I had the autograph of every player at all the 92 clubs in the football league. Many of them were photocopied A4 sheets. But not Sunderland!
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I grew up in Nottingham in the heyday of Forest's European Cup-winning years, as a Southampton fan. Clearing out my house of the past 20 years, found this letter from Saints manager Lawrie McMenemy to me explaining why he couldn't open my school fair in April 1981!
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