A pretty successful weekend for Manchester United, picking up 3 points on their nearest neighbours...just another 15 to go.
Along the same lines, Citeh are a big club that plays incredible football.
They're FFP cheats, having lied and fiddled their expenditure on transfer fees, wages, image rights, etc. Having obviously cheated, they then threatened UEFA and I'm pretty sure that inducements will have been paid to have officials look the other way. Nobody invests that amount of money to come second and Citeh will use any tactic to ensure they realise their owner's ambitions.
Despite playing fantastic football and winning lots of silverware, they struggle to sell out their stadium at very affordable ticket prices.
Like Chelsea, it's all fake. Having seen Bobby Robson raise Ipswich to superb heights and Cloughie do the same with Derby and then Forest, it leaves me unimpressed.
As documented in this month's WSC, their dodginess that Football Leaks has uncovered is a lot more sordid than that, for example...
* In 2013 the club claimed that Etihad paid £35m in sponsorship for the stadium naming rights, but in fact Etihad paid just £8m - the other £27m was paid via a holding company owned by a certain M. bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan
* An offshore company going by the name of Fordham paid €30m a year in non-specific marketing rights, but it has emerged that €9.8m of those marketing rights are paid by an individual going by the name of M. bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan
* The club failed FFP when sacking Roberto Mancini, as the £9m payoff sent their balance into the red, so their solution was twofold: increase the value of their sponsorship deals, and backdate them to the start of the season - and this happened to be the same year where they were paying 75% of their own stadium naming rights
* As a result of the above, Etihad were said to be paying £67.5m a year for the naming rights of the stadium - yet were still only paying £8m, with the remainder once again coming from the canyon-sized pockets of M. bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan
* In relation to their backdating sponsorship deals to game the FFP system, when a club finance officer queried what was going on he was told by non-executive director Simon Pearce "We can do what we want"
* Club president Khaldoon Al Mubarak outright threatened then-UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino in an e-mail where he stated that, rather than meet FFP regulations, they would "rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world and sue them for the next ten years"