The English Football Thread

[Magic Lamps 11,677]

2 hours ago, MoroccanBlue said:

Dele Ali banned for one game due to his coronavirus tweet. 

Great. Misses United match 

Corrupted fA swooping in to save Utd a CL spot. I still don’t get why such a political Organisation like FA is allowed to run the PL. should be managed by a commercial organisation in which every club has same voting rights. Like in Germany where DFB who are just as corrupted have nothing to say over DFL who are running the league. 
Still, might have dodged a bullet. Spurs are better without Ali anyway.

[Atomiswave 6,072]

32 minutes ago, Magic Lamps said:

Corrupted fA swooping in to save Utd a CL spot. I still don’t get why such a political Organisation like FA is allowed to run the PL. should be managed by a commercial organisation in which every club has same voting rights. Like in Germany where DFB who are just as corrupted have nothing to say over DFL who are running the league. 
Still, might have dodged a bullet. Spurs are better without Ali anyway.

When the chairman of FA comes out and says that epl needs udt being successful and at the top then you know the shit stinks. And ever since it came about that city will get banned they did their utter best to hand them a CL place....thats not by coincidence. When big money started coming in it was bound to get corrupted...goes hand in hand. Its rotten to the core.

[killer1257 3,282]

I think Spurs played better without Alli before Covid 19 started

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[Vesper 29,202]

Premier League player names to be replaced on shirts by Black Lives Matter

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/11/premier-league-shirts-to-show-support-for-black-lives-matter-and-nhs-minute-silence-coronavirus

A minute’s silence will be held before each match in the first round of the restarted Premier League to honour those who have died with Covid-19. Heart-shaped badges paying tribute to NHS workers will be embroidered into team kit, and various measures of support for the Black Lives Matter movement were also agreed upon at Thursday’s meeting between top-flight clubs.

The Guardian understands that the league will have no problem if players or teams wish to take a knee before games, as some clubs have done before recent friendlies. The names on the back of players’ shirts will be replaced, for at least the first set of games, by the words Black Lives Matter, following an initiative driven by club captains this week. One club explained that their kit staff had been primed to order shirts reflecting the change.

Black Lives Matter badges are also likely to be displayed on shirts, along with their NHS equivalents, although their exact placement is yet to be finalised.

The issue of what happens if a player removes his shirt to reveal a slogan in support of the movement was raised, after referees expressed concerns about the appropriateness of issuing a mandatory yellow card in such cases. Officials are expected to be asked to use their discretion.

 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

16 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Premier League player names to be replaced on shirts by Black Lives Matter

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/11/premier-league-shirts-to-show-support-for-black-lives-matter-and-nhs-minute-silence-coronavirus

A minute’s silence will be held before each match in the first round of the restarted Premier League to honour those who have died with Covid-19. Heart-shaped badges paying tribute to NHS workers will be embroidered into team kit, and various measures of support for the Black Lives Matter movement were also agreed upon at Thursday’s meeting between top-flight clubs.Europe's major leagues prepare for restart – Football Weekly Ext

The Guardian understands that the league will have no problem if players or teams wish to take a knee before games, as some clubs have done before recent friendlies. The names on the back of players’ shirts will be replaced, for at least the first set of games, by the words Black Lives Matter, following an initiative driven by club captains this week. One club explained that their kit staff had been primed to order shirts reflecting the change.

Black Lives Matter badges are also likely to be displayed on shirts, along with their NHS equivalents, although their exact placement is yet to be finalised.

The issue of what happens if a player removes his shirt to reveal a slogan in support of the movement was raised, after referees expressed concerns about the appropriateness of issuing a mandatory yellow card in such cases. Officials are expected to be asked to use their discretion.

 

This shit wont help in the end, you need a proper system installed, proper punishment instilled and most of all proper training and psycological tests done.

[Vesper 29,202]

The whistleblower whose leaks led to Manchester City’s Champions League ban

https://theathletic.com/1866642/2020/06/12/whistleblower-hacking-manchester-city-rui-pinto/

To his enemies, he is a criminal. A bandit with a laptop and an anarchist’s lust for chaos.

To his supporters and sympathisers, he is a hero, a moral crusader who was brave enough to shine a light upon the shadowy hinterlands of the world’s favourite sport.

In the world of Rui Pinto, the man behind the Football Leaks revelations, nothing is ever cut and dried. He has gained access to tens of millions of private documents yet he is adamant he is not a hacker. His lawyers call him “a great European whistleblower” but he also stands accused of attempted extortion. To describe him as a complex character would be to undersell things by an order of magnitude.

This much, however, is crystal clear: Pinto is unlikely to slip into irrelevance any time soon.

For a start, we are still feeling the aftershocks from a series of exposes published by German magazine Der Spiegel, based on information shared by Pinto. Manchester City, who are awaiting a verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport on their appeal against a two-year Champions League ban, can attest to the far-reaching consequences of Pinto’s actions — UEFA’s original investigation into the club began shortly after documents and emails obtained by Pinto were published in November 2018.

Then, there is Pinto’s own legal situation, which continues to be the source of much controversy, particularly in his home country. The 31-year-old spent over a year in custody in a Lisbon prison after being extradited from Hungary in March 2019. During that time, the number of charges against him grew from six to 147, before being reduced to 90. In April, he was released on house arrest, without access to the internet.

He has yet to stand trial.

---

Pinto grew up in Vila Nova de Gaia, on the rolling hills opposite Porto, Portugal’s second city. As a boy, he was obsessed with football, holding a special passion for FC Porto. His mother died when he was 11. In the years that followed, he became distracted at school, preferring to stay up late at night on his computer.

Hindsight can be a blunt instrument but those who knew him seemed to sense something different about him, even then. “It’s very, very difficult to characterise Rui,” one of his former teachers told the New Yorker. “If he wanted it, he would probably be the best pupil from the class but he was not.”

This chimes with the image painted by Christoph Winterbach, one of the journalists at Der Spiegel who later worked on the Football Leaks stories. He describes Pinto as an “autodidact” — someone who felt his intelligence was best cultivated alone rather than within bounds set by an authority figure. “Rui certainly is a deep, self-conscious thinker,” says Winterbach. “He embraces a do-it-yourself mentality. He very quickly grasps and remembers the context of complex matters.”

All of which goes some way to explaining how a history undergraduate — he never finished the degree — with no formal IT qualifications could end up obtaining and sifting through the data that formed the basis of the first set of Football Leaks in 2015.

At that stage, Pinto was living in Budapest, working as an antique dealer. He was publishing on a rickety Russian blog platform and says that his information had been leaked to him by disgruntled football insiders. It was the start of a tidal wave: by the end of 2018, he had supplied Der Spiegel and their partners in the European Investigative Collaborations group with more than 70 million documents, rewriting much of what we know about the business of football in the process.

Look at the clubs and individuals mentioned in the investigations and it is not difficult to understand why Pinto might be regarded by the establishment as an irritant at best, a walking time bomb at worst.

There were frothy tales about bizarre clauses in players’ contracts: a “no red boots” rule imposed on Rafael van der Vaart by Real Betis, for instance, or Liverpool’s insistence that Roberto Firmino could be sold for £98 million two years before the end of his deal at the club… as long as the buying club was not Arsenal. Even more amusing was the suggestion that Real Madrid had played down the scale of the transfer fee paid to Tottenham for Gareth Bale and preserved Cristiano Ronaldo’s status as the world’s most expensive footballer in 2013.

Then were the knottier, more consequential stories on the tax dealings of Ronaldo, Jose Mourinho and Mesut Ozil; on the movement, led by Bayern Munich, to start a breakaway European Super League; on City and Paris Saint-Germain’s compliance with financial fair play; on a rape allegation against Ronaldo. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it hints at the scale of the waves made by one man (Pinto has repeatedly claimed that he did not work alone but responsibility for the leaks has thus far fallen on his shoulders alone).

Bayern Munich denied being involved in breakaway discussions, UEFA dropped their case against PSG and Ronaldo, who has always denied the rape claims, has never been charged.

Yet Pinto’s supporters argue that the weight of the legal case against him is in large part down to his revelations about Benfica, Portugal’s biggest team. They claim that a sequence of explosive emails released in 2017, appearing to reveal widespread corruption at the club, prompted a web of officials sympathetic to the Benfica cause to close ranks. Benfica have always maintained the corruption claims are groundless.

Ana Gomes, a politician who represented Portugal in the European Parliament for 15 years until 2019, has been one of Pinto’s most vocal advocates. “Rui Pinto revealed things about all of the big clubs in Portugal,” she says. But she adds that as Benfica are the best-supported club in Portugal, they have an advantage even within the justice system.

In the tribalistic world of Portuguese football, it was no great surprise that Pinto’s motivations were called into question. The fact that some of the Benfica emails were first sent to Porto, their main rivals, did little to persuade Pinto’s critics that he was not simply trying to cause trouble, perhaps even to the benefit of his own team. Beyond that, there were two obvious chapters in his story that seemed to cast doubt on his moral rectitude: a 2013 police investigation into two suspicious bank transfers that led to an out-of-court settlement with Caledonian Bank and the alleged attempted extortion of a third-party ownership fund named in Football Leaks (Pinto has protested his innocence in the latter case).

The alternate view, of course, is that Pinto was simply holding power to account — that he should be treated as a whistleblower and protected by the state. Revered, even. “Rui Pinto should be the pride of Portugal,” his French lawyer, William Bourdon, told Publico magazine earlier this year. There have been protests in Porto; a group of supporters snuck into parliament in March to shout for his release.

“He is already seen as a hero by many in Portugal,” says Gomes. “But I hope that the legal system does him justice. He may have committed some crimes but they must take into consideration the extraordinary public service he has done.

“I have the impression that his work with Football Leaks was very important in the development of his political conscience, his understanding of what a whistleblower is. Today, I do not doubt that he is well aware of what he has done. I do not doubt all that he acted in the public interest. It was a conscious act of citizenship.”

Winterbach, who travelled to Lisbon to interview Pinto late last year, echoes that view. “Rui’s love for football and his disdain for the dirty business surrounding the game seems genuine to me,” he says. “He never tried to influence the spin of the articles that were written based on his material. He just wanted lots of journalists to work with the data [and run with it]. I believe his idealism has not been shattered yet.”

---

The outlook for Pinto appears to have improved slightly in the past few months. The stance of the Portuguese authorities, who were initially more focused on building the case against Pinto than using his information, has softened. It has been reported that he was moved to house arrest after agreeing to provide the passwords for 10 hard drives that the police had seized but had been unable to decrypt.

News that Pinto was behind Luanda Leaks — the release of a slew of documents that pointed to questionable financial dealings by Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman — has not harmed his reputation. “I think Luanda Leaks has been very important,” says Gomes. “It showed people that it wasn’t just about football — that this wasn’t motivated by rivalries between fans.”

Then there was a recent interview given by Luis Neves, the director of Portugal’s national criminal investigation agency, who hinted that a more collaborative relationship could be in the offing.

“Throughout my life, I have worked with collaborators, people with whom we have created bonds of confidence, who bring us information that is very relevant,” Neves told newspaper Diario de Noticias. “Pinto is a relatively young, educated person who is concerned about protecting society — about questions of equality and social justice. That is important.

“He will respond to the court, which will decide which crimes he did or did not commit, what punishment he will face. My hope for Rui Pinto, like anyone accused of a crime, is that he can return to a normal life.”

It might be slightly too late in the day for that. It also seems unlikely that this tale will draw to a quiet close whenever Pinto does take the dock. “This fight is far from over,” he told Der Spiegel in December, and to hear Winterbach’s memories of that meeting in the prison is to get the sense that Rui Pinto may not be done with the world of football yet.

“I remember him storming into the room, beaming with joy to see us,” says Winterbach. “He’s very charismatic and even in that stressful situation, you could see the twinkle in his eyes.

“He avidly follows everything that happens in the football world and he’s ready to make his case in front of the court.”

[Vesper 29,202]

Friday June 12 2020 Football Nerd

United and City are quick off the mark. Newcastle are not By Daniel Zeqiri Saint-Maximin will want to help Newcastle mend their reputation for slow starting   Such is the football fan's inclination towards baseless optimism, every supporter will believe their team is uniquely well prepared for the Premier League's resumption. In the absence of performance data from training sessions, is there any evidence to suggest which teams will be fast re-starters? The only available comparison to a three-month hiatus caused by a global pandemic is the break between seasons in non-tournament summers, and how teams begin the following campaign in August. The importance of flying out of the traps has changed over the course of the Premier League era. Sir Alex Ferguson famously remarked that title challenges begin in February and Manchester United were masters of timing their run, like a champion jockey keeping a horse on the bridle before picking off the field in the closing furlongs. Arsenal lost four matches before the turn of the year when they won their first title under Arsene Wenger in 1997-98, with 13 victories in 14 games propelling them to the summit in the second half of the season. This pattern changed when Jose Mourinho arrived at Chelsea in 2004, who prepared his team to start the season in top gear. They won consecutive titles by establishing early leads and holding their rivals at bay. Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp have taken things to another level, setting a relentless pace and making 100-point seasons feasible. Based on the opening day fixtures from the past five seasons of domestic football, City and United have been the best starters winning all five games. Of course, some of the 20 teams currently in the Premier League have had seasons in the Championship during this period but their results have still been considered.   Unsurprisingly, United have the best opening day record across the Premier League era, losing just five of 28 and beating Chelsea and Leicester City in their last two openers. Chelsea have punched below their weight on recent opening weekends. A 2-2 draw at home to Swansea in 2015 was the start of Mourinho's demise and two years later they were beaten by Burnley at Stamford Bridge. This season, Frank Lampard's reign began with a 4-0 loss at Old Trafford. Arsenal are another team who tend to teeter on the brink of crisis every August due to injury problems or a transfer saga. They have lost four of their last seven opening day fixtures - including home defeats by Aston Villa and West Ham - but have had some difficult starts including Liverpool and Manchester City at the Emirates. By far the worst starters however, are Newcastle United, with just one point from their last five opening day fixtures. That includes their season in the Championship under Rafael Benitez when they lost their first two games - away at Fulham and at home to Huddersfield. Newcastle's last two opening day fixtures have been at home to Tottenham and Arsenal, losing both.

[Vesper 29,202]

 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

https://www.goal.com/en/news/liverpool-wont-go-down-as-one-of-the-great-all-time-english/1we67i0efqe9m1cwblj2rkfec8

This wont go down well at scouse land....though spot on he is for once.

[Laylabelle 9,406]

Its lovely but so bored of hearing about them lol. Yes it'll be empty..yes they'll eventually one day have a parade..should we all be jealous at their year no! Do find it funny how they seem to think the reason the were calls for the season to be called off is so they wouldn't be champions. Itd be interesting but more to do with people dying and all...

[Magic Lamps 11,677]

1 hour ago, Atomiswave said:

https://www.goal.com/en/news/liverpool-wont-go-down-as-one-of-the-great-all-time-english/1we67i0efqe9m1cwblj2rkfec8

This wont go down well at scouse land....though spot on he is for once.

One thing in the article is incorrect tho. Liverpool will be the 6th different champion in the pst 16 seasons which is a fair enough degree of competitiveness. Esp if you look at how shit ManU and Arsenal former serial Champions are now. And a story like Leicester’s would lot have been possible in La Liga or Bundesliga

[Vesper 29,202]

4 hours ago, Magic Lamps said:

One thing in the article is incorrect tho. Liverpool will be the 6th different champion in the pst 16 seasons which is a fair enough degree of competitiveness. Esp if you look at how shit ManU and Arsenal former serial Champions are now. And a story like Leicester’s would lot have been possible in La Liga or Bundesliga

Arse have 2 titles in the last 20 years, none in the last 16

2001–02, 2003–04

3 overall EPL titles

we have the same amount of league titles in the last 15 years as Arse have in the last 49 and counting

between  the 35 years 1952/53 and 1988/89 they did win one, in 1970/71, but we also won one in that time frame

so I would not call them 'serial champions*

FA Cup winners, yes, they are serial winners there (8 times a winner from 1992/93 to 2016/17) 13 overall (English record)

and if you go back the 1930's then yes (they won 5 out of ten titles in that decade)

Manure are (or were) serial League winners, so agree there

[Vesper 29,202]

Newcastle takeover in doubt as WTO fire Premier League approval warning over £300m deal

https://www.shieldsgazette.com/sport/football/newcastle-united/premier-league-warned-over-newcastle-united-takeover-wto-report-2885584

A report into piracy allegations reportedly has a warning for the Premier League as it considers a proposed takeover of Newcastle United.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is set to publish its findings after investigating Qatari complaints about the illegal streaming of sports in Saudi Arabia.

Qatar-based broadcaster beIN Sports, which is blocked in the kingdom despite owning the Premier League rights for the country, has objected to the £300m deal. Chief executive Yousef Al-Obaidly said in a letter: It’s no exaggeration to say that the future economic model of football is at stake.”

According to a leaked legal summary, the report claims that the Premier League “would be acting inconsistently with its own decisions and factual evidence as part of the WTO proceedings” if it approved the takeover.

[Milan 17,878]

The English football is well and truly back   Did you see the goal line technology and VAR utter fail? Poor Sheffield.

[Jase 43,479]

Well.....

 

[Milan 17,878]

Why the hell did not VAR intervene, that is beyond me.

[Laylabelle 9,406]

And game one...and there's controversy..

[Milan 17,878]

1 minute ago, Laylabelle said:

And game one...and there's controversy..

They are really making sure that the English football will be talked about A LOT! straight away lol.