Melbourne Heart FC buy out - Man City, Melbourne City FC, etc.

[Tesla]

I have to disagree with people saying it will lead to better Australian footballers being produced. If you want better Australian footballers produced, the league needs to be stronger, and that won't be achieved by further limiting the amount of foreigners in the league. The more talented young players will still come through and turn into even better players with the increased difficulty of breaking into the first team and the higher standard of play once they are there.

Though, I do think it's the right move based on the AFC's restrictions. Hopefully the AFC take a more lenient approach in the future and maybe turn the 3+1 rule into a 4+2 rule or something like that.

Edited February 18, 2014 by Tesla

[cadete]

I have to disagree with people saying it will lead to better Australian footballers being produced. If you want better Australian footballers produced, the league needs to be stronger, and that won't be achieved by further limiting the amount of foreigners in the league. The more talented young players will still come through and turn into even better players with the increased difficulty of breaking into the first team and the higher standard of play once they are there.

Though, I do think it's the right move based on the AFC's restrictions. Hopefully the AFC get less strict in the future and maybe turn the 3+1 rule into a 4+2 rule or something like that.

Then why can we safely say that the NSL produced a fuck load of better young players?

The absence of Overseas players has to have one of the key factors.

Edited February 18, 2014 by cadete

[M13]

There´s no definite answer to the question if foreign players hampers domestic talents or not.. You might point the finger at England of course but given that apart from England the country with most foreign players are Germany who are "The" producer of young talent in Europe today it´s anyones guess

[strider]

who do we realistically think we can bring in ? 

 

Drogba

[NewConvert]

I don't think that the loss of one visa spot will make a huge difference. Right now for me, the quality of the coach matters more than the quality of the visa players - case in point is SFC contrast that with BR or WP. SFC have high profile high quality visa players but a crap coach, the latter two have relative unknowns but better coaching and look at the difference. Coaching matters more followed by good scouting. next year's litmus test will be Berisha at MV under Muscat.

A bigger change will be the compulsory Asian visa player - on this I was undecided but now I think that it limits the clubs for unknown returns.

[belaguttman]

I think that in a club with good scouting, a reduction in visa positions will actually raise the quality of each visa player. 

[Dylan]

I think that in a club with good scouting, a reduction in visa positions will actually raise the quality of each visa player.

and would push the club even further into producing quality younger players through the academy and development programs

[Murfy1]

The empire grows:

 

 

Exclusive: Manchester City secure deal for first refusal on Brazilian talent

 

Ian Herbert

 

9 Feb 2014

 

Manchester City have secured a commercial interest in two Portuguese clubs that will give them a competitive advantage in the recruitment of Brazilian players and may boost future attempts to pass Uefa's Financial Fair Play test.

 

City are providing "scouting, marketing and merchandising advice" at Gil Vicente, a club in northern Portugal, and also pursuing shares in Boavista, the Porto-based club, according to sources in that country.

 

City's advantage in recruiting Brazilian players would stem from a Portuguese immigration treaty with Brazil, its former colony, which confers the same rights on Brazilians as Portuguese workers. City could use the clubs to develop players for whom they are unable to secure UK work permits – then move them to Manchester once they have acquired the requisite experience to qualify for a UK permit, or sell them for profit. Since third-party ownership of players, outlawed in Britain, is also permitted, Portugal provides potential for City to have first call on players who could thus be bought cheaply.

 

Gil Vicente, with seven Brazilians on their books, said the City partnership would bring it "sustainability, projection, prestige" and an "international dimension". Deals with the two clubs may also help City account for some of the huge revenues they have claimed for the sale of their intellectual property to "related parties" – £22.45m in the recently published 2012/13 annual accounts – in order to help pass their impending FFP test. City must show as much revenue as possible to offset losses and come within the FFP figure of £37m lost over the last two seasons.

 

City say they earned the £22.45m by selling scouting and commercial services to their own Melbourne Heart soccer franchise, Manchester City Ladies FC and their New York City FC – City's new Major League Soccer club. But Melbourne was only bought last month and the women's team requires an entirely different scouting system to the men's side.

 

Analysts are subsequently baffled as to how the new US venture could possibly have contributed so substantially to City's revenues.

 

The new Portuguese ventures may generate intellectual property sales to boost City's hopes of FFP compliance, though both are modestly financed clubs.

 

The deals, which the club declined to discuss this weekend, appear to have been engineered by City's Partnership Sales Manager, Francisco Lampreia, who was formerly marketing director at Boavista. Lampreia and City chief executive Ferran Soriano visited Boavista three months ago and appear to be seeking a share in the club.

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/transfers/exclusive-manchester-city-secure-deal-for-first-refusal-on-brazilian-talent-9117116.html

[Murfy1]

Some interesting points about the Man City philosophy in these articles:

 

 

Manchester City dream of a future as the 'new Barcelona’

 

The Premier League great pretenders aim to match the world’s best clubs. Telegraph Sport finds out exactly how the master plan is coming on

 

Oliver Brown

 

17 Feb 2014

 

From a viewing platform above the Etihad Campus, a £200 million monument to the cultivation of football as the finest craft, the astonishing extent of Manchester City’s ambition unfurls. Across a swathe of brownfield wilderness once home to the Clayton Aniline dyemakers, whose effluvia had turned the ground a toxic shade of purple, 80 acres of the lushest greensward – the giant carpet for a veritable production line of sky-blue starlets – are reaching the final stage of fruition.

 

If the Premier League’s great pretenders do truly aspire to a mantle as the ‘new Barcelona’ then this sprawling talent foundry, lit by pale winter sunshine on the eve of City’s defining confrontation with the Catalans, is the most dazzling manifestation of that dream.

 

Privately, City executives reject the label of ‘Barcelona-fication’. They do not perceive their ‘campus’, their pride and joy linked directly to the Etihad Stadium through a bridge across Alan Turing Way, as a direct emulation of Barça’s La Masia school or the gilded compound at Sant Joan Despí that has superseded it. Instead, the club have drawn inspiration from an eclectic set of 30 templates, encompassing the Los Angeles Lakers, the Australian Institute of Sport, the New York Giants, Nike’s laboratories in Oregon and – almost out of a sense of duty – Barcelona.

 

Brian Marwood, the leading architect of City’s academy structure, talks effusively of replicating the “DNA and philosophy” of the Blaugrana, as if imitation could indeed be the sincerest form of flattery. And yet the notion of copycat tactics is over-simplistic. The Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan-sanctioned vision, of juxtaposing first XI and youth team within a huge catch-all complex embedded in a once benighted corner of east Manchester, was in place long before the Barça brains trust of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain even arrived here.

 

From the initial takeover in 2008, it became clear that the powerbrokers in Abu Dhabi were intent on forging a system far removed from Thaksin Shinawatra’s Eastlands regime. An emirate that has imported its own versions of the Guggenheim and the Louvre to a ‘cultural district’ on Saadiyat Island resolved at the outset to apply the same high production values to a football club.

 

There is a story at City of how, when former chief executive Garry Cook reported for his first day at the office, he asked where the human resources department was, only to be told: “We don’t have one.” Such duties rested, the incredulous Cook was informed, in the hands of “Pam from accounts”.

 

That chaos has given way, in just five years, to the slickest streamlining. Even the arrangement of Khaldoon Al-Mubarak’s ‘chairman’s lounge’, an über-deluxe set of suites inside the Colin Bell Stand, is meticulously configured by Natasha Mullany, City’s ‘head of protocol’.

 

But chief executive Soriano, the urbane 46-year-old whom City waited a whole year to prise from Barcelona, is eager not to project any impression of boardroom remoteness. It was he who decided that on match-days, the top table of executives should dine not separately, but alongside all fellow staff and guests. On the night of City’s scheduled home match against Sunderland, the atmosphere in the lounge is a vibrant one, if slightly subdued by the game’s abandonment 30 minutes earlier due to tempestuous weather.

 

Signs of the club’s increased global reach are everywhere: Jason Kreis, head coach of New York City FC, the club’s US franchise, is in town, while staff talk of having to conduct evening teleconferences in four time zones – from the East Coast to Australia, where City have just acquired A-league side Melbourne Heart, and from Manchester to the Abu Dhabi mother-ship.

 

On high table itself, the chatter is largely in Catalan. Soriano is accompanied by Jorge Chumillas, the kindly chief financial officer with whom he used to work at now-defunct airline Spanair, and during dessert Begiristain comes over to scrutinise Arsenal’s performance against Manchester United on the plasma screen. Their interest in the Arsenal threat to City’s league position is acute and yet it is the prospect of Tuesday night’s Champions League collision with Barcelona, and of reunions with several former compadres in the Nou Camp hierarchy, which looms largest.

 

For this Barcelona confrontation has the feel of a signal moment in the fulfilment of City’s ambitions. Soriano, in his 2012 book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance, identified the 10 global leaders in club football as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Milan, Inter and Bayern Munich. “Others, like Manchester City,” he noted, “are trying to be in that group.”

The time of noble endeavour has since passed. The manner of City’s maiden qualification for the Champions League knockout phase, beating the all-conquering Bayern away, confirms that they belong in this rarefied realm. The next two matches will illustrate how far advanced they are to realising their hope, and in some places the fear, that they can burgeon into the dominant force in Europe.

 

In Manuel Pellegrini, City have the man they want to sustain that quest.

 

Any assumptions that the scrupulously low-key Chilean is a stop-gap figure, an interim appointment until Jose Mourinho next becomes available, are misplaced. In the eyes of Soriano and Begiristain, the 60-year-old Pellegrini provides the perfect antidote to the madness of life under Roberto Mancini, satisfying every criteria they seek in a manager: measured, cerebral, wedded to the pursuit of play of great artistic merit, and sufficiently pliant to tolerate the input of a director of football.

 

Ultimately, it was not Mancini’s failure last season to retain the league title for City that triggered his sacking, but the chaotic culture he engendered. There was the fight with Mario Balotelli, the public traducing of Carlos Tévez, the attempt to import doctors from Lombardy not registered to practise in the UK, and even a mortifying moment where he lambasted communications chief Vicky Kloss to reporters as she stood next to him.

 

City’s rationalisation for removing Mancini – that they desired a more “holistic” environment – invited mocking suggestions that they should bring in the Dalai Lama and hold training talks in air thick with scented candles. While the word might be alienatingly corporate, the ideal is one in which the club are passionately invested. On the wall of the staff refectory there is a montage of photographs, featuring everybody from Soriano to the night porter, under the banner “One team”.

 

Soriano has absorbed enough lessons throughout his extraordinarily varied career, which has comprised banking, venture capitalism and the thwarted efforts to establish Catalonia’s own airline with Spanair, to appreciate that no company benefits from being too rigidly stratified.

 

Those who have served at City through fair weather and foul, from a third division defeat to York to tonight’s engagement against the most feted club team on earth, attest that the working ambience is the best they have known it. Having witnessed the machinations of Shinawatra, the alleged human-rights abuser who would lavish absurd salaries on such useless players as Felipe Caicedo and Nery Castillo, City’s longer-serving, battle-hardened employees recognise a charlatan when they see one. And the Abu Dhabi owners appear very far from that category. Granted, there were mis-steps, not least in their choice of Sulaiman Al-Fahim – a ‘Dubai Del Boy’ noted mainly for his fondness of Lamborghinis – but their enticement of a coveted leader like Soriano reflects a readiness to enlist the best possible candidate for each role.

 

Soriano serves as a corrective to City’s earlier extravagances – the desperate bid by Cook to secure Kaká for £100 million at Milan Malpensa Airport, or the 2008 deadline-day signing of Robinho for £35 million – which all supported a theory they were nothing more than vulgar arrivistes, propped up by petrodollars. Under his guidance, the club’s expansionist impulses are more carefully controlled. The purchase of NYC FC, for example, is an opportunity one that Soriano claims “many others were looking at”.

 

Rival Major League Soccer clubs have expressed at whether the New York fan base can support a second franchise, next to the existing Red Bulls in New Jersey, but City are pressing ahead in their annexation of the US market with a rare fervour. Already the partner club have a substantial Manhattan office close to Grand Central Station and are understood to be targeting a stadium site in the Bronx, harnessing the passion of local Hispanic constituencies, in time for their first match next April.

 

Claudio Reyna, the ex-City midfielder who combines popularity at the club with a respected record as US Soccer’s technical director, is installed as the perfect salesman as NYC FC’s director of football. The addition of Melbourne Heart to their global empire represents a further significant step, raising a possibility that future academy products could move between continents, spending their entire careers playing for teams under the club’s care.

 

But it is the central citadel of the Etihad Campus that constitutes City’s most emphatic statement of intent. Spanning 15 full-size pitches, on-site accommodation for 32 first-team members and a 7,000-capacity stadium for youth-team games, it affirms a commitment – bred by Barcelona, who fielded eight homegrown players in the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley – to form a self-perpetuating centre of excellence.

 

To think, this is a tract of land once earmarked for the country’s first ‘super-casino’. Here in the districts of Beswick and Harpurhey, among the poorest communities in the country and which until recently did not even have their own sixth-form college, the gambling plan was not exactly a masterstroke of sensitivity. One City source goes further, asking: “Honestly, can you think of an idea more reprehensible?”

 

The alternative, we are soon to discover, is a gleaming bastion of one club’s determination to elicit both respect and disquiet from their rivals as they ascend to European football’s grandest stage. The new Barcelona? Not exactly, but Manchester City are an institution who could soon be very much more than the sum of their exorbitant parts.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-city/10644870/Manchester-City-dream-of-a-future-as-the-new-Barcelona.html

 

How Manchester City embraced the Barcelona blueprint

 

Sid Lowe

 

18 February 2014

 

Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano arrived at the Etihad with a philosophy born at the Camp Nou for sustainable brilliance

 

There is a glint in Joan Laporta's eye as he recalls the conversation he had with Pep Guardiola in the spring of 2008. The decision had already been made that Franck Rijkaard would not continue beyond the end of the season and Barcelona's then president called in the B-team coach to tell him that the board thought that he, a 38-year-old with no first-team experience, was the ideal man to take over. "And do you know what he said to me?" Laporta grins. "He said: 'You haven't got the balls'."

 

As it turned out, he did have the balls. But the decision wasn't just about courage, it was also rooted in conviction and calculation. Laporta considered Johan Cruyff but had been persuaded otherwise and a thorough search began. The sporting director had played with Guardiola in Cruyff's "Dream Team", closely monitored Barcelona B and came increasingly to see Guardiola as the best candidate. Not just for who he was but also for what he represented: former ballboy and captain, defender of a particular style and promoter of youth. "We chose a philosophy," Laporta is fond of saying.

 

Manchester City did too. Barça's sporting director was of course Txiki Begiristain, now at the Etihad, and Laporta's vice-president in charge of economic affairs was Ferran Soriano, now City's chief executive officer. The first call came in December 2011. Soriano met Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan and Khaldoon al-Mubarak in Abu Dhabi but with his company, Spanair, in a process of liquidation, he declined. When he eventually agreed in summer 2012, one of his first calls was to Begiristain. Now comes a blast from the recent past. "I'd have preferred a different opponent," Begiristain said after the Champions League draw, "but I'm happy to see old friends again."

 

The assumption that City simply copied Barcelona's model, air-lifting it in, is facile and flawed. So is the theory that signing Soriano and Begiristain was merely a prelude to signing Guardiola, although no doubt they would have liked to. Much of what City are building pre-dated their arrival but the official line sounds very like Barcelona when it talks of a "common football philosophy that links the youngest academy boy to the most senior first-team player," that includes the heart of the gigantic Etihad Campus development, the City Football Academy.

 

Yet Sheikh Mansour did see in Barcelona's model something that dovetailed with his vision and goes beyond the football: from international expansion to the opening of new markets, from youth development to revenue creation there are parallels. It may be over-simplistic, but here there's a temptation to say that City, like Barcelona, want to be likeable; to avoid being seen just as arrivistes.

 

There is also a need to make their economic position sustainable:financial fair play demands it. "Sustainability has always been central to Sheikh Mansour's investment in City," the statement ran when they unveiled academy plans. "The long-term future is dependent on the ability to recruit and develop young players." When Sorriano was at Barcelona he calculated that every home-grown player who reached the first team had cost the club ¤2m. "Good business," as he put it.

 

When Laporta's board won the elections in 2003 Barcelona had gone four years without winning a trophy, the debt stood at ¤186m and salaries accounted for 88% of their income. Soriano was obsessed with bringing that figure down to 50%, a mantra he repeats in Manchester. Barcelona's income was only the 10th biggest globally and, according to Soriano, they risked becoming a "medium" club. Soriano later wrote how every club, every business, needs a "Visionary"; a "Doctor No", who imposed realism; and a "Back", someone who carries the team in practical terms, a doer. That message, too, is familiar to staff at City.

 

Outgoings would be cut but more importantly Barcelona had to increase income. Soriano talked often of kick-starting a "virtuous circle", for which risks had to be taken. Another, related word used often was "mediático": Barcelona needed players who generated media and marketing interest, particularly internationally. Only 23% of their average TV audience was national and, Soriano noted, supporters could be captured through allegiance to key players. Laporta had campaigned on a deal with Manchester United to sign David Beckham.

 

Ironically City's CEO admitted that the model Barcelona followed was United's. "I saw David Gill once and confessed that we'd taken inspiration from his marketing and commercial strategy to make Barcelona recover. I said thank you to him," Soriano wrote in 2009. "And 'inspire' is a euphemism: what we did really was directly copy everything United did well."

Beckham did not arrive, Ronaldinho did. As it turned out, it would have been impossible to sign a more likeable player. He was a good one too. The Brazilian was Fifa world player two years in a row. "He changed our history," Xavi Hernández said. "He was more a boardroom signing than ours," Begiristain admitted.

 

Barcelona also sought to repackage and express the notion of "Més que un club" (more than a club) for an international audience. It was rarely defined with precision. Rather, it was projected in as something broad, a little nebulous, as something "good", a reflection of the club's "values". The sponsorship of Unicef was the result, explicitly designed to give an idealistic look to the club's identity. A commitment to a "spectacular" style contributed too. But, Soriano admitted, "A good footballing product is a team that wins." He even had a formula for it: (CxE)T. Commitment multiplied by balance to the power of talent. Soriano wanted players hungry for success, who'd not yet won much.

 

He insisted, too, on the style. Barcelona drew up a nine-point checklist of the attributes managers needed, with each point fleshed out. It began with "respect for the sporting model" and included references to the style of play, the idiosyncrasies and "values" of the club and the importance of youth development. For Begiristain, "talent" or technical ability had to predominate. "Good play starts from the back," he explained. "At least one of the centre-backs has to be able to play, for example."

 

When Rijkaard was struggling in the first season, Sandro Rosell, then one of the vice-presidents, agitated to sack the Dutchman and sign Luiz Felipe Scolari, rejecting the style that now seems so entrenched. As Soriano told Graham Hunter for his exceptional book Barça: "[Rosell and his group's] idea was that this kind of football, the Barça style, was outdated. We lost [to Chelsea] and they said: 'You see? We should hire a Scolari-type manager and bigger, stronger players.' The magic we achieved was to say: 'No, that's not who we are. We play spectacular football and will not deviate.'"

Rijkaard continued and won two league titles and the European Cup. By 2008 Soriano and fellow directors thought the hunger had gone and the search for a new manager began. Begiristain had focused on Guardiola but was initially reluctant to say so, staying open-minded. There was a process to undergo, one that took him to Lisbon to meet José Mourinho, guided by that same nine-point checklist.

 

The meeting was three hours long, with Mourinho offering a detailed analysis of how to remedy the team's ills and insisting he would play a Barça style. Begiristain was impressed but harboured doubts, not least that the Portuguese would start fires, inside the club and out. That footballing "identity", the concept, weighed heavily too.

 

It looks obvious now; it was risky then. Mourinho was the safe bet. Laporta and his board had the balls. Here again are the parallels. Sacking Roberto Mancini was not popular, just as turning down Mourinho was not. But Begiristain had played under Cruyff and still adopts an almost reverential tone when he talks of the Dutchman as a "fearless" manager whose response to problems was "always to be more attacking". Guardiola, a Cruyffist, lacked experience but fitted the idea.

 

Xavi is among many players who see similarities between Pellegrini and Guardiola. "We're asking the new manager to build a squad and also a football concept and a way of working that will last 10 years," Soriano said when City turned to Pellegrini. "This was a long-term decision taken with a lot of careful analysis. I was worried about the image we were giving the world."

 

"One of the reasons I came here was Txiki," Pellegrini said. "I chose City because I was convinced they knew my footballing model. Managers have to deliver the spectacle fans want, especially at clubs that invest a lot of money signing the world's best players. I'm not an iluso [a naive dreamer]: if someone says you're going to win 1-0 playing badly, fine. But I believe you get better results playing well. It's not about mortgaging your results for a sterile beauty."

 

And that's the crux. Soriano admitted that he wanted five titles in five years. As for Begiristain, not long before joining City he said: "Barcelona are attractive because of their style but without the titles that would mean nothing."

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/feb/17/how-manchester-city-embraced-the-barcelona-blueprint

 

It's interesting to see how both football style AND results are crucial. Also, everything seems to be meticulously long term. The FFA announced yesterday that A-League licences will be extended for 20 years (meaning owners of clubs have certainty for 20 years), and I can't help but wonder if Man City influenced that decision or helped fast-track it, as it took many by surprise.

 

I also think Txiki's reverence for Dutch football is interesting, and that description of Pelligrini's qualities sounds like a fairly apt description of JVS IMO...

Edited February 18, 2014 by Murfy1

[Shahanga]

The Begeristain - Cruyff connection is interesting.  Cruyff seemingly being some sort of mentor to JVS wouldn't do him any harm at the job interview.

[jw1739]

I still can't believe that we are a part of this dream! Inspirational reading. 

[Murfy1]

I still can't believe that we are a part of this dream! Inspirational reading. 

 

(Out of likes) completely agree. It's remarkable to remember that we are so directly connected to the top echelon of football.

[Melburnian]

Yep, reading Pelligrini's description I cant help but think JVS is in pole position.

[mulhollanddrive]

Imagine Frank Rijkaard / JVS manager and technical director.

[Tesla]

I have to disagree with people saying it will lead to better Australian footballers being produced. If you want better Australian footballers produced, the league needs to be stronger, and that won't be achieved by further limiting the amount of foreigners in the league. The more talented young players will still come through and turn into even better players with the increased difficulty of breaking into the first team and the higher standard of play once they are there.

Though, I do think it's the right move based on the AFC's restrictions. Hopefully the AFC get less strict in the future and maybe turn the 3+1 rule into a 4+2 rule or something like that.

Then why can we safely say that the NSL produced a fuck load of better young players?

The absence of Overseas players has to have one of the key factors. You said it yourself, only in the last couple of seasons has the standard of the league been higher than the standard seen in the NSL. Not to mention a range of different factors that have worked against the development of young players in the a-league until recently, no national league for over a year I really think set back a lot of young players, no youth league until the last few years, no youth academies, stupid 4 sub benches until this seasob, only 8 teams in the league for a while, only 20 odd games a season for a while, etc.

Edited February 18, 2014 by Tesla

[M13]

Well Tesla.. Sounds like the time is absolutely right for Heart to take a step forward there, just add money and know how

[HEARTinator]

Honestly, when you've been sustained on a diet of bread&dripping it's very hard to BELIEVE someone who says that it'll be toast&jam from now on. This is all too good to be true - sounds more like fantasy football TBH.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Any City fans at the game tonight...? They'd be spewing with how the game went.

[M13]

You mean how the ref absolutely loved us..?

To be honest it looked like a 0-0 game until the penalty.. but Champions league games are so much about team experience, which is why even clubs that struggle in their domestic league can do well in the CL if they are used to play there on a regular basis.
As for City we´ll learn, there´s no hurry really..To quote Khaldoon, "we don´t expect immediate success, building a team takes time. But our goal is to improve a bit every year.."

[belaguttman]

Any City fans at the game tonight...? They'd be spewing with how the game went.

deMichelis was a strange choice, I know Pellegrini rates him and brought him over from Malaga but he's too slow at this level and was always going to be caught out. A tight game though, City had its chances even with 10 men.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Aguero was the missing piece in City winning...

[Shahanga]

Despite what the bloke on ESPN kept saying it looked a free kick (not pen) to me.  

[malloy]

Despite what the bloke on ESPN kept saying it looked a free kick (not pen) to me.

100% FK contact started outside of pen box. Does not matter where he fell

[MaliMate]

Despite what the bloke on ESPN kept saying it looked a free kick (not pen) to me.

100% FK contact started outside of pen box. Does not matter where he fell

What about jersey pulls that start outside the box and continue inside? Seen them given before.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

If the contact starts outside the box, and continues inside the box it's a pen... It was a pen!

[Tommykins]

No, its wherever its deemed to be a foul by the referee. If the referee deems it the start of the tackle to be illegal when its outside then its outside the box. If they deem it to be foul only once they're inside the box, then its a penalty.

[HeartinHobart]

Cannot see how this is being discussed. 100% red card but clearly was a free kick outside the box. No Penalty.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Initial contact looks like it was outside the area, but the FIFA rule is: “if a defender starts holding an attacker OUTSIDE the penalty area but continues holding inside the penalty area, the referee shall award a penalty kick”.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Read the FIFAS rule... What youre going to make your own up? Lol it was a penalty, just like the commentators both said after the replay was shown.

[Tommykins]

Initial contact looks like it was outside the area, but the FIFA rule is: “if a defender starts holding an attacker OUTSIDE the penalty area but continues holding inside the penalty area, the referee shall award a penalty kick”.

 

That's a pretty long bow on 'holding' I'd say.

[cadete]

Read the FIFAS rule... What youre going to make your own up? Lol it was a penalty, just like the commentators both said after the replay was shown.

I diidn't see the incident,

I dont care about the incident,

But clearly from what your saying it must of been a free kick outside of the box.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Hey do me a favour because I don't no you... Can you ask your mum, were you born a dick head? Or did you grow in to one? Cheers!

[cadete]

Hey do me a favour because I don't no you... Can you ask your mum, were you born a dick head? Or did you grow in to one? Cheers!

 

Seriously did you find that on Comeback.com or something.

[Bannon]

essedon

[malloy]

Initial contact looks like it was outside the area, but the FIFA rule is: “if a defender starts holding an attacker OUTSIDE the penalty area but continues holding inside the penalty area, the referee shall award a penalty kick”.

The penalty was not due to holding, so I don't see how that is relevant. The contact which brought down the player occurred outside of the box. It was a free kick not a penalty.

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

The contact continued into the box! Was there any contact in the box? Or just outside it???

[MaliMate]

Initial contact looks like it was outside the area, but the FIFA rule is: “if a defender starts holding an attacker OUTSIDE the penalty area but continues holding inside the penalty area, the referee shall award a penalty kick”.

The penalty was not due to holding, so I don't see how that is relevant. The contact which brought down the player occurred outside of the box. It was a free kick not a penalty.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2562462/GRAHAM-POLL-The-referee-right-penalty-clear-red-card.html?ITO=socialnet-twitter-mail_gpoll&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=socialnet-twitter-mail_gpoll

Also asked a teammate last night who is a ref. clear penalty & red.

But hey what would they know.

[carlings]

lol

[MUTD/MLBHRT/ESSNDON]

Fuk me thank you! It's like I'm arguing over chalk and cheese.

[carlings]

Fuk me thank you! It's like I'm arguing over chalk and cheese.

I will not fuck you.