When they were cheating they had no global brand to sell so they had to make sham contracts to generate funds. Once they started winning stuff they built a global reputation and network of clubs that gave them a platform for more legitimate sponsorship.
I guess.
You wonder whether it still happened for a few more years though. Or even until last year perhaps. I imagine it was a hard habit to break.
I would imagine law firms are falling over themselves to represent any team that was in the Premier League since 2008.
See the PM is praising City owners. It's starting...
I refer you back to my comments months ago about the "Independent" Football Regulator.
So much of the development of Manchester is linked to these guys, he can't afford for them to be kicked out. The actual game of football is largely irrelevant to the Premier League, as we've been discussing for a long time now.
This is going to be interesting on the geo-political front. What we are seeing is the consequences of our stuff being sold off to foreign interests for cold hard cash. These guys expect to do whatever the fuck that they want, in exchange for their investment. It has impact at the GDP level.
Whenever I look at our country, and in microcosm our football, all I can think is 'you don't want to start from here'.
We can do what we like because we built some schools.
And folks still think the punishment will be severe?
Not just what they did, future development of Manchester will also be threatened by the departure of these owners. They don't do that stuff out of the goodness of their hearts (and neither does ours for that matter).
