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PleaseNotPoll said:
They'll probably blame Lord Seb Coe and some random council members, then move on.
Nobody will be prosecuted and the West Ham owners donating to the Tories won't be mentioned.
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Given the process of lies began in 2005 with UK Athletics falsely claiming they could host the Olympics for £3bn, given there was a quote-unquote Labour government at the time does this mean the BBC will be blaming Jeremy Corbyn for this too?
 
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3-1 City. Really good second half from them. Barca look ragged at the back.
So many chances to score. This could end up anything.
 
For sale.Tired team.Defence worthless.Attack not much better.Not much opposition in their home league.Name....Barcelona!

Seriously.Were they all knackered by that long journey from Manchester Airport or was it because they have qualified top two in their group?

Heaven forbid City are that great????
 
bigsmithy9 said:
For sale.Tired team.Defence worthless.Attack not much better.Not much opposition in their home league.Name....Barcelona!

Seriously.Were they all knackered by that long journey from Manchester Airport or was it because they have qualified top two in their group?

Heaven forbid City are that great????
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City have managed to do what the mighty Alaves did in the league, beat Barcelona.
Alaves did it at the nou camp though :emoticon-0100-smile
 
"Thanks for that Brian" said:
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has ordered an investigation into the finances of London Stadium after being told the total cost of converting the arena for use by West Ham has soared by £51m more than previously revealed. It takes the total cost of the stadium to £752m, all of which has been met by the taxpayer apart from a £15m contribution from West Ham.

Mayor Khan announced his investigation after Sky News learned that the estimated annual cost of moving "retractable" seats, installed to improve the view for football, has risen to £8m, and that moving the seats back and forth for summer events including athletics could take a month.

The original estimate was it would cost just £300,000 and take only five days to move the seats at the end of the football season and another five to move them back after the summer. Engineers now estimate it could take 15 days to move the seats in each direction.

Oh, look.A non-Tory politician has looked at the colossal balls-up and waste of money this stadium represents and wants to know what the fecking hell has been going on?
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The cost of conversion is £300 million or more. This is effectively a cost that nobody benefits from apart from the tenant. I assume the costs of moving the seats back and forth to uncover the track are borne by the taxpayer too.

My main point is what could have been done with £300 million plus apart from going down this blind alley of effectively spending it only for the benefit of the Spammers.

For example, how much would a smaller but purpose built and state of the art athletics stadium cost (with ability to host other events presumably) if it was built from scratch? It seems that sometimes these numbers seem so huge that they are not properly interrogated. The new stadium could have replaced the current stadium, or perhaps (radical, wonder who mentioned this) be built at Crystal Palace. The value of the land at the Olympic Stadium could then be considered, and perhaps even be sold off for development for housing or whatever. That would have been even more money to come back to the taxpayer, or spent on useful local projects - a proper legacy for the people of Newham or the people of the country rather than the owners of a football club.

What I'm basically saying is there should have been other options considered, and if you are going to have £300 million to spend there are a lot more options than were put forward at the time. And that the option chosen seems to be about the worst, for all the reasons we now know, and benefit absolutely nobody but the Spammers. The "rent" they pay of course being an absolute joke - over the 99 year lease it won't even cover the cost of the conversion!
 
PleaseNotPoll said:
Where do they go now? Who'd want to risk taking over, considering the potential damage to their reputation?

Will de Boer or Mancini end up in the Premier League by the start of next year?
Wouldn't bet against it.
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It's a poisoned chalice, 6-7 years ago it was one of the most desired jobs in European football, now you'd have to be desperate and in need of a quick pay day to go there.

Wouldn't surprise me if de Boer ends up in the Prem this season. Sunderland probably won't stick with Moyes if results continue and I can't see Bradley turning the Swans around any time soon so wouldn't surprise me if they begin their search for a third manager of the season down the line.
 
humanbeingincroydon said:
Yet he certainly packed a lot into those 85 days
* Traveling to Norway just to get stuffed 6-1 by us
* Serie A losses to Chievo, Cagliari and Sampdoria
* Europa League losses to Sparta Prague and Hapoel Be'er Sheva
* A very public fallings out with Marcelo Brovovic and Geoffrey Kondogbia

Throw in the remarkable feud between Mauro Icardi and the club's Ultras sparked by Icardi's autobiography, it makes The Damned United look like a fairytale.
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Pretty sure Mancini was still in charge when we smashed them wasn't he? Think it was after our result that he was sacked.

The results don't really surprise me though, I looked at Inter's squad last night and with Icardi and Perisic aside, I don't see a legitimate top class player amongst their ranks, few good players like Banega, Handanovic and Candreva but nothing that screams "he'd do great in the Prem!". Think to a few years back when they were boasting guys like Eto'o, Sneijder, Maicon, Zanetti, Cambiasso, Samuel, Vieira, Zlatan etc, it's a joke what they're fielding right now.
 
vimhawk said:
The cost of conversion is £300 million or more. This is effectively a cost that nobody benefits from apart from the tenant. I assume the costs of moving the seats back and forth to uncover the track are borne by the taxpayer too.

My main point is what could have been done with £300 million plus apart from going down this blind alley of effectively spending it only for the benefit of the Spammers.

For example, how much would a smaller but purpose built and state of the art athletics stadium cost (with ability to host other events presumably) if it was built from scratch? It seems that sometimes these numbers seem so huge that they are not properly interrogated. The new stadium could have replaced the current stadium, or perhaps (radical, wonder who mentioned this) be built at Crystal Palace. The value of the land at the Olympic Stadium could then be considered, and perhaps even be sold off for development for housing or whatever. That would have been even more money to come back to the taxpayer, or spent on useful local projects - a proper legacy for the people of Newham or the people of the country rather than the owners of a football club.

What I'm basically saying is there should have been other options considered, and if you are going to have £300 million to spend there are a lot more options than were put forward at the time. And that the option chosen seems to be about the worst, for all the reasons we now know, and benefit absolutely nobody but the Spammers. The "rent" they pay of course being an absolute joke - over the 99 year lease it won't even cover the cost of the conversion!
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One of the problems in all of this has been the interests of another part-time Tory Politician, Seb Coe. During the bidding process of 2011, which should have been a decision taken in the interests of the Council Taxpayers of London, Lord Coe's open-minded view was:

"The bid was very clear and unambiguous. This was a community facility, multi-sport, track and field. I'm prepared to revisit my words that day but I genuinely don't recall a whole heap about bulldozing down a publicly funded facility, replacing it with a Premiership football club and inspiring a generation of Tottenham season ticket holders, however many there may be on a waiting list. We must be really clear here. What we pledged in Singapore was not ambiguous."

Yes, your Lordship, it was unambiguous but everyone knows that Olympic stadiums are a useless white elephant. At most, there are 2 major athletics meetings in London per year. No other usage for such a large venue brings in money like football and that money should have been used to start to reimburse the London public purse. Munich tried to use their stadium as a football stadium, however, the experience for the supporter is terrible. Bayern Munich have moved as a result. Most of these things lie empty and unused and eventually they are knocked down because there's no proper use for them. The only thing keeping Beijing standing is that it's going to be used for the winter games in 2022. Atlanta's is used for baseball. Athens has fallen into disrepair.

Now that wouldn't bother his Lordship. Oh no, his interests were a little more short term. He wanted to be President of the IAAF. To ensure a win in that 2015 election, he was advised it was imperative that he not let the proper economic decision be reached re Stratford as he'd banged on for so long about the post-Olympics legacy in London in his election wins as Vice President of the IAAF in 2007 and 2011. So, he campaigned vigourously against the sensible view of knocking the original down and building something that fulfilled its purpose, without declaring the reason for his support.

He won the IAAF Presidential election against Sergei Bubka by supporting a project that kept some minimal athletics use, at eye-watering expense to you and me, and also, via the little matter of employing Papa Mussata Diack, a central player in the athletic doping scandal and currently wanted by Interpol in relation to those actions. He delivered the votes of African delegates, who had previously voted for his father, now the disgraced former IAAF President, which swung a close result Coe's way. The ridiculous multi-purpose stadium fiasco also had the added bonus of assisting Tory Party contributors, Gold and Sullivan and the whole vile nepotistic arrangement was concluded by Karren Brady extracting a Peerage and a seat in the House of Lords out of her employer's Tory friends.

So, nearly as much has been spent on creating a **** football and ridiculously expensive athletics venue, as would have been spent on having purpose-built versions of both. This has been done at the expense of all of us mugs in London who pay Council Tax. Still, what's the relevance of all those hundreds of millions in our money in comparison to having a corruptly-elected British President of the IAAF?
 
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"Thanks for that Brian" said:
One of the problems in all of this has been the interests of another part-time Tory Politician, Seb Coe. During the bidding process of 2011, which should have been a decision taken in the interests of the Council Taxpayers of London, Lord Coe's open-minded view was:

"The bid was very clear and unambiguous. This was a community facility, multi-sport, track and field. I'm prepared to revisit my words that day but I genuinely don't recall a whole heap about bulldozing down a publicly funded facility, replacing it with a Premiership football club and inspiring a generation of Tottenham season ticket holders, however many there may be on a waiting list. We must be really clear here. What we pledged in Singapore was not ambiguous."

Yes, your Lordship, it was unambiguous but everyone knows that Olympic stadiums are a useless white elephant. At most, there are 2 major athletics meetings in London per year. No other usage for such a large venue brings in money like football and that money should have been used to start to reimburse the London public purse. Munich tried to use their stadium as a football stadium, however, the experience for the supporter is terrible. Bayern Munich have moved as a result. Most of these things lie empty and unused and eventually they are knocked down because there's no proper use for them. The only thing keeping Beijing standing is that it's going to be used for the winter games in 2022. Atlanta's is used for baseball. Athens has fallen into disrepair.

Now that wouldn't bother his Lordship. Oh no, his interests were a little more short term. He wanted to be President of the IAAF. To ensure a win in that 2015 election, he was advised it was imperative that he not let the proper economic decision be reached re Stratford as he'd banged on for so long about the post-Olympics legacy in London in his election wins as Vice President of the IAAF in 2007 and 2011. So, he campaigned vigourously against the sensible view of knocking the original down and building something that fulfilled its purpose, without declaring the reason for his support.

He won the IAAF Presidential election against Sergei Bubka by supporting a project that kept some minimal athletics use, at eye-watering expense to you and me, and also, via the little matter of employing Papa Mussata Diack, a central player in the athletic doping scandal and currently wanted by Interpol in relation to those actions. He delivered the votes of African delegates, who had previously voted for his father, now the disgraced former IAAF President, which swung a close result Coe's way. The ridiculous multi-purpose stadium fiasco also had the added bonus of assisting Tory Party contributors, Gold and Sullivan and the whole vile nepotistic arrangement was concluded by Karren Brady extracting a Peerage and a seat in the House of Lords out of her employer's Tory friends.

So, nearly as much has been spent on creating a **** football and ridiculously expensive athletics venue, as would have been spent on having purpose-built versions of both. This has been done at the expense of all of us mugs in London who pay Council Tax. Still, what's the relevance of all those hundreds of millions in our money in comparison to having a corruptly-elected British President of the IAAF?
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I think that you can have a multi-purpose stadium, as it's been done in other cities, but it should've been designed as one.
They're still not ideal, though. Even Hertha are constantly rumoured to be leaving the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.

It's clear to anyone who even vaguely pays attention to this sort of thing that the Spurs bid was the most sensible.
I'm glad that it didn't succeed, but I also suspect that they'll end up using it in the future for West Ham.
The current compromise suits nobody and the story is just going to run and run.
 
vimhawk said:
For example, how much would a smaller but purpose built and state of the art athletics stadium cost (with ability to host other events presumably) if it was built from scratch? It seems that sometimes these numbers seem so huge that they are not properly interrogated. The new stadium could have replaced the current stadium, or perhaps (radical, wonder who mentioned this) be built at Crystal Palace.
Click to expand...

Ask Levy.
He still probably has the costings/capacity info for the rebuilt Crystal Palace stadium
that was part of the ENIC bid.
 
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