Cup final

United were the better team on the day that's all that matters.

 

I take it you haven't read the charges right? You do realise they are accused of paying both playing and non-playing staff on the football side whose salaries come under FFP/PSR rules lower salaries and then paying them the same amount or more from 3rd party companies which hasn't been disclosed. The players know full well what happening and are as guilty as anyone if it's proven.


And let's be honest here it's not just financial doping that there is a suspicion of with them. If you don't know Pep as a player failed drug tests not one but twice. He claimed it was a contaminated supplement given to him by his personal Doctor on both occasions (Although he also tried a number of different excuses when that didn't work, he was at one point sentenced to jail but an appeal got it reduced to just a ban and fine). This Doctor over a number of years had a few players fail drugs test. Pep's charges were struck off later when it was discovered a rare situation could result in false positives and the samples were too old to retest with the new procedure but this situation was very rare and Pep failed on two separate occasions and his B samples also failed, It is next to impossible for all 4 to have had that situation happen that caused the false positive.

Now when Pep took over Barca he hired this Doctor to be on their medical team. He also hired the Doctror who would later turn out to be one of the main doctors involved in Lance Armstrong's doping scandal. Then a 3rd Doctor he hired had his offices raided, this was a doctor who had worked with most of the top Spanish Sportspeople. Blood samples with no corresponding records but marked with initials, many of which corresponded with his known Spanish sports clients were taken in the raid but before a proper investigation into them could be done including potentially breaking a Spanish doping ring that would have been up there with Russia's a Spanish Judge ordered them to be destroyed.

Now this is important Barca were seeing players returning from injury ridiculously quickly. When Pep left and went to Bayern he was barred from bringing his own medical team and Bayern struggled with injuries. To an extent Pep had many a blazing row with the head of the medical team including saying to him "it cannot be that injuries here last six weeks but in Spain only a fortnight,".

At City he got free reign to choose his medical team plus even who and when players get sent to outside doctors and his players have generally returned much quicker than expected from their injuries (And this season they also only had the 14th most injuries despite playing more games than most teams and having had more players than most involved in international). When a player gets anything more than a minor tweak he actually sends them to a doctor in Barcelona who is a Knee specialist, now if it's a knee injury that makes sense but he sends them to him for EVERYTHING. It's like me deciding to go see a dentist for a broken leg