I'm so glad he won the PFA award. He'll never get mass popular recognition cos of the position he plays but it's great other players recognise him.

so i read the article and it has a nice poetry to it but none of the legalese

let me see if i find it here...

oh here is the best explanation:

http://www.dw.com/en/could-rb-leipzi...gue/a-38027087

and

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/s...ague.html?_r=0

basically red bull doesn't own salzburg and can only sponsor. as long as it sponsors below 30% it should be okay.

or so the lawyers say

So all that column and it turned out Red Bull haven't done anything wrong?

wrong?

they're beating bayern 2-1 right now at 28 minutes

they're actually playing better. simpler but better.

bbl

SO, bayer still losing at halftime and ribéry went out with a weird reaction after getting a sorta karate chop under the sternum

dortmund tied 1-1 vs. augsburg is dropping to 4th so far with hoffenheim staging a little massacre of werder bremen, 3-0 at halftime

--

eta: as for the "not doing anything wrong" it depends on what side of the rules they land. they're definitely close to the edge of what's allowed. just not as clearly "over" as the scandal sheets would make it.

holy shit. bayern surmounts a 4-2 score against them to win 5-4 and shows everyone who's boss.

if you didn't see this game you probably should have

dortmund disappointingly ends 1-1 vs augsburg and... i made a mistake about the table positions earlier: they're now tied for 3rd on points, but dortmund ahead on goal difference

Maybe "wrong" isn't the right word. More that the Guardian made a piece about it and it turned out there wasn't anything that could stop both teams being in the champions league.

well there's definitely been some heavy chatter about them being banned, but since ownership is separated by austrian rules that hurdle is cleared. but there are more hurdles.

there's an issue of doing each other "services" through like pricey transfers and cheap loans where there's definitely cooperation, but how far will that affect them is unknown yet. im sure there will be lawyers involved.

and last, since both their major sponsor is red bull, they (or one of them) has to get their rb sponsorship at below 30%. i don't know figures about that but supposedly they're working on it.

i liked the guardian piece for its analysis of the red bull drink image & what not. made me think of godard's masculin-féminin which is actually not boring (he got boring later). with the coca-cola thing. but as for news proper it wasn't very enlightening on the facts of the case.

Indeed. A few minutes ago, he signalled to the bench to be taken off, holding his thigh, then scores a goal waiting for his replacement to come on.




Seriously, there's no excuse. The journalist would've known the facts and simply decided he wouldn't have a story if he stuck to them. I increasingly only turn to the Guardian for its sports coverage. Now it seems that's gone the same way as the rest of the paper.

o man. sorry to hear that! as a rhetorical/opinion piece i did like it but yeah without actual facts it's just a bunch of hot air

and the legal stuff is the actual story of interest here

rb leipzig has formed & lifted itself basically by fucking with the rules-- sticking to them in a way that betrays their spirit. like the member-controlled thing you already know about, where all the members are company employees, etc. (i haven't followed the development of that story lately but they were supposed to open membership a little bit as i recall, though i don't know where that's at). or how they escaped UEFA financial fair play rules by buying up a 5th-division team where said rules don't apply.

if i were a sports lawyer i'd be fucking THRILLED with the adventures of this particular pirate ship. the champions league thing is just another challenge in their long and rich legal history, and they might very well prevail again as they have consistenly in the past. whoever does this for them are not any kind of morons. it's grandmaster-level rule-hacking. but yeah, good reporting is lacking on this front. we're bound to have more news about this come summer though.

You're right about the lawyers. FiFA needs to introduce laws on ownership that have as few grey areas as possible. Easier said than done, obviously, but this new corporate turn in football has to be met with rules that no-longer rely on the goodwill of owners not to betray the spirit of the game. What we have now is a class of owner that has the same 'by any means necessary' attitude to winning as the players they employ: just as someone like Diego Costa plays cat and mouse with the referee, so the owner of RB is his desk-bound equivalent, playing his own game with FIFA. It's something I personally find fascinating but if FIFA loses grip of the situation (and effectively becomes the mouse instead of the cat) the consequences for the game overall will be dire

HAHAHAHAHA... Kid's off the charts!

Some people are interpreting his goal celebration as indicating that he's staying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAr06rufk1Y

Could be. Could also be saying, "I love this club, I'm immensely grateful for the love Arsenal fans give me every game... But I also want to WIN stuff, you follow?".

Of course. I still think he's going to Man City but if that celebration wasn't designed to get people wondering it certainly had that affect.

im watching a bundesliga multimatch and it's fucking bananas

bremen is beating dortmund 3-2 right now (bremen on a roll lately)

and hoffenheim tied 0-0 with augsburg means hoffenheim gets to the europa league's group stage and dortmund doesn't right now

So that's it, Prem over. Best team won, worst three probably went down. No big surprises.

Player of the season: Kante
Manager: Conte
Flop Player: Bravo/Stones
Flop Manager: Gotta say Pep. (or Ranieri?)

kante conte? i feel i've heard of that show before...

Roots?

Anyway, yeah, perhaps not a vintage season in terms of the league overall but plenty of interesting subplots involving key players and managers.

How was the Bundesliga this year? I suppose RB Leipzig were the big story.

So that's the end of the season then? I'm kinda glad, to be honest, I definitely need a few weeks away from football. Gets to the point where fatigue sets in. Well after this week anyway.