MAY the Association Football be with you ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ Goals & Polls

Gareth Bale looks ready to prove people wrong and work hard to prove the doubters wrong next season

“I’ve got three years left on my contract. If they want me to go, they’ll need to pay me €17m per season.”

“If not, I’ll stay here. And if I have to play golf, I will."

Nailed on Woodwards on the phone as we speak

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Thought he’d end up at City.

Liverpool are sniffing too. Barca is the best option for us i reckon. He’s a Raiola client so we need to steer clear whatever (like he’d take that much of a step down :disappointed_relieved:)

What do we reckon Barça will be spaffing on De Ligt, de Jong, Rodri and Griezmann then? The latter’s salary at Atletico’s meant to be €21m a year after tax (€405k a week), de Jong’s new salary’s meant to be over €300k a week, even PSG baulked at that.

Got to be £600m for the four ALL IN, surely? The fees alone are, what, over £300m. Is Messi off or what? Must be.

Woodwards gonna give them £250m for Coutinho and Umtiti probably

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Nah no way they’re paying de Jong that amount

Not much seems to have been made of the fact he’s currently banned from operating eh…

I mean, obviously there will be loopholes but it’s being completely overlooked with all the transfer rumours

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the press’s reaction to City beating Watford by a fairly flattering margin this weekend. Did journalists decry the death of English football when United did the double? Was there a rending of shirts, beating of breasts and screams of anguish at the skies when Arsenal completed their unbeaten season? They’re all different beasts of course but you’d think City were the first side to couple well-marshalled overspending with a good manager. Or they haven’t been on the end of some absolute merkings over the last few years, both domestically and abroad. Absurd over-reaction wedded to an imagined past from almost every quarter.

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Griezmann’s reportedly taking a pay cut (though obviously he’ll still get loads). But yeah I think their % of their wagebill to revenue is already ridiculously, maybe dangerously, high.

They’re counting on offloading players but when everyone knows they’re desperate I can’t imagine them doing that well. Think part of their problem was stepping up and panicking during that bonkers 2017 transfer window when Neymar went. Clubs have been reluctant to enter a market so overinflated ever since, and they’d be lucky to recoup half of what they spent on Coutinho.

This is the most level headed piece I’ve seen related to all this

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I’ve not really read any of those pieces, but unless they talk about how the only way to stop clubs going the way of Chelsea and City, or even United, is to make all of them worker and fan - owned then I don’t really see the point in those articles.

I mean I guess it’s not that simple, cos iirc Madrid are owned by the fans (I think?), but probably a bit much to expect a football journalist to be calling for full socialism

TBH it did feel like quite a symbolic tipping point, given it should’ve been nine in English football’s flagship cup final. We’ve never really had anything like that before.

Do think part of the tantrums are just due to City being ridiculously good. You can probably make an argument they’re maximising their resources more than any other club in England, which when they’re already by far the highest spenders makes everything feel a bit futile.

plenty of things to call the piece, level headed is right near the bottom

Lots of the good journalism (McGheecan, Montague and Conn shining a light on some pretty important stuff) and the extraordinary teary opinion pieces of the very bad writers (Delaney, Garside, etc) seem to be getting muddled together by a lot of City fans. Delaney’s “i’m not writing a match report because this all just isn’t fair” piece in the Indepenent yesterday was incredible and read like he’d penned it midweek.

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City fans right now

A1ZueF

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Not sure you’re the right one to make that call

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Jonathan Wilson’s article calls for the super league lol. He sounds genuinely distraught.

Arse did beat Villa 4-0 not that long ago. I get that it wasn’t a dignified spectacle (I’d argue that Watford, who gave City a serious game in both their league fixtures, should really be carrying more of the blame than they are), but I also watched another cup final this season which City probably should have lost.

A lot of this froth about the end times is going to look somewhat silly next season, I think. Those seemingly impervious teams who are going to keep on winning forever - regardless of money, you can only hit those perfect blends of luck, management and players hitting their peak that garner you two or three trophies in a single season once in a decade. Almost inevitably, just by regression to the mean, City will have less points again next season, and that slack will be picked up somewhere.

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Tim Sherwood leading N’Zogbia, Kieran Richardson and Tom Cleverley out at Wembley…oof

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people have got too much opinion piece space to fill with their anger now

was much easier in the nineties when United won everything, people called roy keane a cunt, and everyone just got on with their lives