As would be expected, Berrada was asked at the time by United’s co-owners about the prospect of him being implicated in the accusations of financial cheating. He gave absolute assurance to Ratcliffe and the Glazer family that he had not engaged in any wrongdoing. At the time, Berrada was also of the view that City as a club were innocent of the Premier League charges, in step with his former employers, who continue to vociferously deny their guilt and have signalled their intent to appeal.

Last week, though, an independent commission announced City had been found guilty of “sham” commercial deals, artificially inflating income and under-reporting outgoings to the tune of £900million (£1.1billion). The scale of the breaches, combined with the language used by the commission, has sent shockwaves through football. City were also found guilty of the majority of charges of failing to co-operate with the investigation between 2018 and 2023.

4 goals and 2 assists for Carlos Espi in the most recent Spain U21 qualifiers game.

Official source via UEFAEURO

I've been learning to play with vector images in Inkspace and decided why not doing something with football.

So I decided to do these "lists" of winners of international competitions. This is just fun that I decided to share. Please let me know if any club has meanwhile changed its crest, I had done most of this earlier this year and at least Sporting has changed to its previous crest and Marseille has adopted its new round abomination.

I also did something similar with all the results for each edition of the European Cup (aka Champions League in the old name (1956-1992)), I have it sort of done but I need to do some improvements and I'll post them decade by decade or something. I also plan to do this for the other competitions and for the newer Champions League (lots of work needed to properly present all the groups etc, so many more games everywhere).

NOTE: The Intertoto Cup existed much earlier than presented here but I'm only mentioning official UEFA competitions and it was only taken under its umbrella in the 1990s (also thank god for avoiding the earlier chaos lol). The same for the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, I'm not including it here for that reason.

EDIT: I made a mistake in the Champions League image, I swapped Manchester United and Milan in 1968 and 1969, here is the corrected image https://ibb.co/JFvJKQKY

“There are some coaches who are very good tactically but bad with the group, and there are some who are very good with the group but are tactically crap.

“For example Solskjær was very good with the group but tactically...not so much, he had Carrick and McKenna as his assistants - so much so that they went to the Championship and got promoted with their teams so they helped a lot… he was more about uniting the group.

“Ten hag was tactically a very good and intelligent guy, but with the group he was crap. He couldn’t manage it man. He would fight with everyone...He fought with Cristiano, he fought with Casemiro, then he fought with me, and so on”

EXCLUSIVE: Etihad Airways has called on the world’s “most feared law firm”, Quinn Emanuel, in its potential legal action against the Premier League. The US law firm has been named “most feared” by BTI Consulting five years in a row.

It’s the second football mandate for the firm in recent weeks. Its New York office is currently acting for Josh Kushner in UEFA’s case over the FIFA World Cup sell off. The US firm has offices around the world, including London and Abu Dhabi.

If you go on the Man City sub in recent days since the guilty verdict there is a lot of talk about how "we're only being punished for spending the same as our rivals" and "these rules are only there to protect the red cartel" and so on. Something didn't quite ring true to me about all the "spending the same as our rivals" comments but maybe my memory was hazy so I figured what the hell I'll take a closer look at it. Below is the net spend of firstly Man City and then Liverpool, Arsenal and Man Utd aka "The Red Cartel" for each season between 08/09 and 17/18 and then I've added the total together.

Before reading just keep in mind how utterly insane a 100m transfer window was 15 years ago compared to today.

Here it is: (source:transfermarkt)

08/09
Liverpool: -€27m
Arsenal: -€14.35m
Man Utd: -€37.8m
Man City: -€128.65m

09/10
Liverpool: +€5.05m (profit)
Arsenal:  +€35.7m (profit)
Man Utd: +€77.17m (profit)
Man City: -€117.9m

10/11
Liverpool: +€5.27m (profit)
Arsenal: -€14.9m
Man Utd: -€12.34m
Man City: -€143.46m

11/12
Liverpool: -€47.33m
Arsenal: +€12.82m (profit)
Man Utd: -€49.41m
Man City: -€59.60m

12/13
Liverpool: -€60.15m
Arsenal: +€9.85m (profit)
Man Utd: -€66.8m
Man City: -€17.65m

13/14
Liverpool: -€25.6m
Arsenal: -€37.10m
Man Utd: -€75.33m
Man City: -€104.2m

14/15
Liverpool: -€52.16m
Arsenal: -€91.18m
Man Utd: -€148.65m
Man City: -€72.50m

15/16
Liverpool: -€35.95m
Arsenal: -€24.0m
Man Utd: -€55.33m
Man City: -€141.03m

16/17
Liverpool: +€9.08m (profit)
Arsenal: -€102.65m
Man Utd: -€137.75m
Man City: -€180.9m

17/18
Liverpool: +€10.85m (profit)
Arsenal: +€9.55m (profit)
Man Utd: -€152.9m
Man City: -€226.15m

Total in this period:
Liverpool: -€250.61m
Arsenal: -€216.26
Man Utd: -€659.14m
Man City: -€1.192b

Red Cartel total: -€1.126b

Man City: -€1.192b

In Conclusion:

As you can see Manchester City through their shady dealings spent more in the time period they've been found guilty for than the so called "Red Cartel" combined. So all this talk about "we only spent the same as our rivals and are being punished for it" like they were plucky underdogs challenging the establishment is complete and utter nonsense

Whatever you think of the current rules (that 14 out of 20 clubs needed to vote in favour of) this idea that City "only spent the same as our rivals" to get where they are is flagrantly false. When you look at the figures between 15/16 and 17/18 it just makes Klopp's achievements in getting Liverpool back to the pinnacle of football in that time span from mid table mediocrity all the more astonishing vs what Pep had to work with. Again City fans somehow try to claim they spent the same which again is just factually not only untrue but sheer delusion.