We’ve related examples of how Republicans here in my home state of North Carolina attempt to tilt the playing field ahead of the upcoming mid-term elections. Those efforts continue apace because no disruptor worth their “Stop The Steal” merch waits until Election Day or the tabulating room afterward. Better to leverage for desired outcomes beforehand.
We’ll keep this (relatively) brief, as y’all come to this site for political yammering the way buffet chowhounds go for the steamed veggies. [Ed: I disagree, good sir. The Gheorghieverse contains multitudes!]
The current commotion involves mail-in voting. Thousands of mail-in ballots already have been disqualified because they were deemed improperly sealed, and thousands more are likely to be rejected. North Carolina was the first state to send out mail-in ballots, beginning Sept. 3. That same day, the State Board of Elections issued new rules to county election officials, among them that an unsealed inner envelope was grounds to disqualify the ballot.
The state has a two-envelope system for mail ballots, implemented in 2023 when it adopted a voter ID requirement. The ballot itself is supposed to be inserted in one envelope, with a copy of the voter’s ID tucked into a sleeve on the outside of that envelope. The first envelope is required to be sealed and then tucked into a second, larger envelope and sealed.
Prior to this election cycle, mail ballots in which the first envelope wasn’t sealed but the larger envelope was, were counted. No more. This is all supposedly in the name of “election integrity.”
A woman named Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s voting rights program, attended a public ballot canvassing meeting in one NC county where officials rejected ballots with unsealed inner envelopes. “There doesn’t appear to be any evidence of tampering or fraud or anything,” she told the New York Times. “From my perspective, they’re just tossing ballots with no evidence of a security issue.”
President Griftalot has railed against mail-in ballots for years, especially after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, claiming with zero evidence that they are subject to tampering and fraud. Trump’s critics say that he’s targeted mail ballots because more Democrats vote by mail than Republicans. Indeed, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data and Science Lab found that 37 percent of Democrats voted by mail in 2024, compared to 24 percent of Republicans. The gap was wider during the pandemic year of 2020, when 60 percent of Democrats voted by mail, compared to 32 percent of Republicans. The non-partisan States United Democracy Center, in a study of primary voting in ten states, found that 26 percent of Democrats voted by mail, compared to 18 percent of Republicans in 2024.
In a purple state such as North Carolina, where recent Presidential and U.S. Senate elections have been decided by the slimmest of margins, it becomes statistically advantageous for Republicans to reject mail-in ballots in the belief that it will eliminate a larger swath of Democrat votes. GOP disenfranchisement is simply collateral damage and the price of doing business.
It goes without saying that we’ll be better off when Trump and his coterie of supplicant jizzpuddles* exit the stage. The fear is that the movement he spawned and the mechanisms in place – courts packed with compliant judges on lifetime appointment, state and local election boards increasingly staffed by 2020 election deniers and proponents of the Big Lie, partisan legislative bodies hamstrung by design – will break our system and outlast us all.
* Supplicant Jizzpuddles is the name of Dooger's Swedish Death Metal collective
It is so goddamn refreshing to see Democrats, at long last, finding some sort of spine as the 2026 midterm elections head to a close. Refreshing, and kinda disappointing, because they could've done this years ago and instead allowed Republicans to define toughness as macho posturing bullshit.
Certainly, this newfound lack of fucks to give is primarily the province of newcomers. Like Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who fucking nails it:
how does ohio boy vance keep walking right into the buzzsaw of one of the midwest's most Ancient Tribal Hatreds. dog no one in michigan cares what your OSU ass has to say
Because you're a well-informed and curious bunch, you likely saw today's reporting that the College Football Playoff is nearing an agreement to expand the current 12-team tournament to a 24-team version starting in 2027.
According to ESPN, the revised format will likely have, "...19 at-large bids, the Power 4 conference champions as determined by each league and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team." You should read this as "We're now going to allow 23 Power 4 league members (and their leagues) to have access to the money that's flowing like and oil-field gusher from our broadcast partner and other sponsors." They'll likely say it differently, and make some hand-wavey motions about including non-Power 4 schools in consideration for at-large bids.
At the moment, New Mexico of the Mountain West has the pole position as the highest-ranked Group of 6 squad in ESPN's College Football Power Index - the Lobos are 38th. For the sake of journalistic accuracy, we'll note without comment that the current second- highest-ranked non-Notre Dame team outside of the Power 4 is 51st-ranked James Madison. Good luck with that at-large bid, Dukes!
We learned long ago that our thoughtful and logical expression of the flaws in college football's postseason structure is more pointless than Hakeem Jeffries' press releases, but since when do quixotic quests scare us? Indeed, friends, as a gallant knight once said, "Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"
So a'tilting we shall go.
We see your 24 team playoff and raise you even more madness. I give you The All-Encompassing College Football Extravaganza Sponsored by Gheorghe: The Blog. 138 teams, 14 weeks, wall to wall football with nobody left out. Hope springs eternal for every FBS team each year.
Here's how it works:
Each of the 138 FBS teams (or however many there are in any given year) play four games in four weeks from the first Saturday of September to start the season - three against conference opponents and one intersectional matchup. After the fourth week, everyone gets a bye (big week for soccer and baseball programming). Said differently for our fans in the Deep South, On the Fifth Week, We Rest.
Starting in Week Six (we start capitalizing now because NOW IT MATTERS) all of the teams are ranked 1 to 138 and sorted into 32 four or five-team groups for round-robin play. If we take the current rankings from CFB TXT, which aggregates all of the major rating models into a single, equally-weighted ranking, and add some AI magic for the sake of geographical compactness, here's what that would look like today:
The top 22 teams in the rankings would be placed in four-team groups - they only have to play three games as a reward for their performance. Teams 23-32 would be the top seeds in five-team groups. You'll note that we named the groups after legendary college football coaches. We left a few out, for reasons.
The round-robin begins in Week Six, sometime in mid-October, and ends after Week Nine, when the five-team groups complete their schedules. Another bye week to rest (Week 10, if you're scoring at home), calculate the 32 teams that advance to the knockout rounds and their seeds (the seeding process will be a three-day shaman-led smudging ceremony, and we'll only know when it's complete when white smoke comes out of Nick Saban's ears), and spin up the McAfee Mouth Machine of Bottomless Hype.
At some point in the middle of November, the 32-team single-elimination commences, with games played at the home of the higher-seeded team. We get our last four teams (I'd use a different phrase, but that one's taken) at the end of Week 13 in early December.
Teams that fail to advance from their groups realign and play their own tournaments so we can smash more young fellas' heads together for the entertainment of alumni and a few more dollars for our commercial partners. Someone else can figure out the format - it can't be that hard.
We're still arguing in the conference room about the timing of the last two gameweeks for the Really Big Dance. I'd like to keep the momentum going and finish the season by the end of the calendar year. Others (read: money-grubbing gluttons) want to milk the moment for a month as with the current process and give the semi-finalists a month off before resuming the action. I'm right, but I may not win the day. Either way, we get a champion at some point.
You know you'd watch the fuck out of this tournament.
Those of you that are casual soccer fans, especially those of the American variety, may be forgiven if you're not up to speed on the drama that's gripping the game in England. From a scriptwriter's perspective, it really has it all: greed, avarice, riches beyond imagination, geopolitical intrigue, an honest-to-God Viking, lies, deceit. It's missing sex, but given the parties to the drama it's hard to imagine that's in short supply.
Buckle up. We're headed down some rabbit holes.
Let's start with the boring stuff, shall we. In 2020, UEFA banned the Premier League's Manchester City from European competition for two years for violations of the confederation's Financial Fair Play rules (basically, you can't spend more money than you take in over a certain period of time). That ban was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which still chose to level a €10 million fine for the club's actions. Notably, many of the charges were dismissed due to the expiration of the the statute of limitations in UEFA's rules.
Leaked emails and other information from UEFA's investigation prompted the Premier League to initiate its own inquiry into the matter. And in February 2023, the league announced it was charging City with 115 breaches of its own financial regulations from 2009-2018. Importantly, the EPL rules regarding the statute of limitation are different than UEFA's, so that defense no longer served City.
After three-plus years of legal machinations, chest-beating, and denials, an independent three-person commission released its findings ten days ago. They are, in legal parlance, a doozy. The commission found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges, finding (with copious evidence) on 80 of 80 counts that the club conspired to disguise more than £900m (~$1.2b) of direct ownership investment as sponsorships, allowing it to invest far beyond its permitted cap on player investment. 35 of the charges related to failure to cooperate with the EPL investigation, and the commission found City guilty on 34 of those. In its findings, the commission pulled no punches, saying that the club the fabricated "sham contracts" and "rel[ied] on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club's revenues and reduce its costs". In addition, the findings said that "a number of important club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence". Not great, Bob.
TL;DR City intentionally, repeatedly, and persistently violated a shitload of financial regulations and then sought to cover it up via lies, obfuscation, and delays.
Okay, y'all. Take a little break. Enjoy this photo of the aforementioned honest-to-God Viking, City (and Norway) striker Erling Haaland. He's the best finisher in the world right now. City paid around £51.2m in transfer fees to bring him in from Borussia Dortmund (which was a very good deal given his age and talent).
A number of very good football writers (and an increasingly large group of business and hard news scribes) have written extensively on this story, and I don't intend to break any news here, so please seek out Tariq Panja of The New York Times, Rory Smith of The Observer, David Ornstein and Sam Lee of The Athletic, and Miguel Delaney of The Independent. Tom Rennie of SiriusXMFC has been very good on the broadcast side. Trent Crimm is right out.
If you stayed here, we're going to do a shallow dive on Manchester City's history and why this story matters so much from a soccer perspective, then broaden the scope to include figures as far-flung as Liam Gallagher, the richest man in Abu Dhabi, and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
First, the club. Manchester City was founded in 1894. Since that time, the club bounced around among the first three tiers of English football for the most part, landing in the Premier League for good in 2002. Prior to 2008, City won a total of nine trophies in 108 seasons: two first-division titles, four F.A. Cups, two League Cups, and one European Cup Winners Cup (the predecessor to the Champions League). The aforementioned Liam Gallagher and his brother Noel are counted amongst the club's most prominent supporters, are were such long before City's fortunes changed. [That pun was not intended as it was being written, but it is now.]
Since 2008, the club has arguably been the most successful in the world, having brought home eight Premier League trophies, four F.A. Cups, seven League Cups, one Champions League title, and one World Club championship.
Pray tell, what happened in 2008, you ask? You're very smart, reader. 2008 is when everything changed at City, in the midst of a global explosion of football-targeted capital flowing from oligarchs, petrostates, and generally filthy rich folks into what had historically been a sport owned and operated with and by local money.
After a couple of years of financial precarity, City found footballing salvation in August of that year in the form of new ownership. Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (hold on to that little nugget), became one of the first Persian Gulf state-associated entities to buy into the global game. Sheikh Mansour's group followed the path first trod by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who purchased middling Chelsea in 2003 and quickly put that club on a path to on- and off-field growth.
As soon as ADUG purchased City (and named the company City Football Group), it began a spending spree that has continued unabated to present day. The club immediately broke the British transfer record by purchasing the great Brazilian Robinho from Real Madrid for £32.5m (that figure seems quaint now), then a summer later splashed over £100m on Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adabayor, Carlos Tevez, and Joeleon Lescott. They brought in Eden Dzeko the following year (2011), and finally broke through to win a trophy, beating Stoke City to claim the F.A. Cup.
One year later, they won the Premier League in one of the most thrilling final days ever, scoring twice in stoppage time to pull out a win over Queens Park Rangers and cause Noel Gallagher to react like this from a bar in Chile (hold that thought, part two):
The rest is history. Even at this moment, City (who dropped a record £472m on transfers this summer WHILE THEY WERE UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR FINANCIAL FUCKERY) sit atop the Premier League standings, perfect through five matches.
TL;DR Piles of Emirati cash transformed an underachieving locally-supported club into a global behemoth
Okay, I think we're good on the prelude. We've talked about the charges against City and taken a bit of journey back in time to show some context. Shall we talk about where all of this gets a mite bonkers? Oh, we shall.
In the span of little more than 20 years, high-level professional soccer has changed radically from the sport of passionate fans and local communities to a worldwide commercial juggernaut. According to a Forbes analysis, the 20 EPL teams are currently valued at around $30b. Precise valuations from the time Abramovitch bought Chelsea in 2003 are hard to come by (largely because very few people gave a shit about such things), but a bit of conservative (read: we're rounding high so as not to be accused of fudging the numbers like Man City) estimation suggests that the entire league was valued at around $4.9b.
With that kind of explosive growth comes more interest, and not just in the game. In the case of City Football Group's ownership in Abu Dhabi, that investment included far more than just football. Since 2014, ADUG has invested more than $1b in real estate development projects in Manchester, to generally positive effect. Manchester has been lauded as an exemplar of the potential for smart public-private partnerships to transform cities and communities. Former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has branded the partnership as "Manchesterism".
Andy...Burnham. That name sounds familiar. Ah, yes. He's the new Prime Minister of the UK, having taken office a few short months ago. Just last week he said this at a major Labour Party event: “I intend to take what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth, and drive it from the very centre of government into every postcode in Britain.”
It is no stretch to say that Burnham, who was mayor of Manchester from 2017 until early this year when he stepped down to run for Parliament, owes his entire political rise to ADUB. And when someone owes something, favors tend to get called in when the time is right. Here's an excerpt from an extremely detailed story from The Athletic on Abu Dhabi's complicated links to England:
As he sought to balance a multitude of interests, Burnham ended up in a bind when asked for his view on the possibility of City’s owners being forced out of English football.
“I would be really concerned to lose them,” Burnham told the BBC. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.
“I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad (City’s home stadium) and the campus around it but also into the city.”
The BBC reported that Burnham said “it would be wrong for him to intervene”, yet by giving a view at all, had he already made life more difficult for those adjudicating on City’s sanctions?
I wonder why Burnham would say something like that when, "The initial judgement is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rule. If wrongdoing is affirmed upon appeal, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences*.” was right there.
*This is the statement his spokesman put out in her third attempt to sorta walk back Burnham's initial comments.
The value of trade between the UK and the UAE is estimated to exceed $25b a year. If the EPL hammers Manchester City, which is essentially owned by the UAE, how many wealthy Emiratis (and their less wealthy though still pretty comfortable English business partners) will scream bloody murder.
Here, right in our face, is a stark example of how nation-states are using sport as a way to insinuate themselves into polite society and create immense leverage over the most powerful institutions in that society. The fucking Prime Minister is in a bind, and there's a real possibility he'll lose his job over it. Holy Sportswashing, Batman!
TL;DR This thing has fucking tentacles, man! It's like a real-life episode of The Diplomat, only with soccer and without Rufus Sewell's gleeful scene-chewing.
Go on to the kitchen, grab a beer or coffee, or whatever time-appropriate chemical enhancement makes sense for you. Here's a shot of Everton fans celebrating a close escape from relegation two seasons ago. Same Everton (the club that Andy Burnham has long supported - another tentacle) that was penalized by losing total of eight points in the standings in 2024 for breaches of financial regulations on this order:
Penalized 10 points by an independent commission for a £124.5 million loss over the three-year period ending in 2021–22, which exceeded the £105 million threshold stipulated in the rules. That deduction was reduced to six points upon appeal.
The Toffees were hit for an additional 2 points in April for overspending by £16.6 million during the assessment period ending in 2022–23.
For the sake of journalistic integrity, we must point out that City Football Club has appealed the independent commission's findings, saying in part that the ruling contained "clear material errors, of law, principle and fact and is unsafe".
Those formalities done and dusted, let's talk crime and punishment. First in the abstract and then applied with the acknowledgement that this is very complicated web City's weaved with literal global economic and political implications.
Everton, as we learned above, had to forfeit eight points (while in a relegation scrap) for infractions worth around £36m. If we apply simple math, where each £4.5m improperly applied is worth a point in the standings, City should be on the hook for 200 points.
But Everton was lauded by the Premier League for being forthcoming and cooperative during the investigation, and their issues stemmed more from an accounting fuckup than a coordinated and prolonged fraud.
In a separate similar incident, Chelsea was assessed a two-window transfer ban (meaning they were not allowed to purchase new players at all for over a year) for financial irregularities a few years ago. That after the club itself came forward after the sale to Todd Boehly's Clearlake team to tell the EPL that they'd found some problems while reviewing the books post-transaction. By that scale, City should go a generation or so without being able to purchase players.
The EPL has a few options in terms of remedies in cases like this one, the most extreme of which is expulsion from the top four tiers of the professional football pyramid. The league can choose to deduct points from City's tally (and can do so over multiple seasons). Or, they could relegate the club within the pyramid. (In 2006, Italy's most famous club, Juventus, was implicated in an egregious match-fixing scandal known as calciopoly, relegated to Serie B, docked nine points and stripped of two league titles. A pair of club executives were given lifetime bans from working in Italian soccer.) Finally, any number of financial penalties are on the table, from fines to transfer limitations.
Before we get to what we think will happen, let's discuss WWGD, shall we? Simply put, the punishment for City should be commensurate with their transgressions. That means City Football Group should face consequences far beyond any ever levied at the highest levels of the game.
The scale of the alleged rule-breaking is massive, orders of magnitude beyond any previously uncovered. It was clearly done with intent in full knowledge that it was against the rules of the competition. During the investigation, City and its hired legal guns obfuscated, delayed, and prevaricated while ADUG and Emirati leaders made thinly-veiled economic threats against the UK. City approached the entire process with arrogant disdain, as if they were confident that there would be little to no consequence to its actions.
In our perfect world, the punishment, then, has to hurt. On the field, on the balance sheet, certainly, and in a way that lays bare the UAE's naked attempt to burnish its global credentials through sporting achievement and tarnishes its image in the same way sport elevated it in the first place.
Recognizing that there's no practical way to remove City from the league in the middle of a season, here's what Gheorghe would do:
Immediately apply a 40-point penalty to City for the 2026-27 season. They'd stand at -25 points with 33 matches to play and need 60 points from those matches to have any chance to avoid relegation, which as we'll see will be fruitless.
Announce that regardless of where they finish in the final standings, City will be relegated to the English League Championship for the 2027-28 season, where they'll begin with a 20-point deduction.
Apply that same 20-point preseason deduction at the beginning of each of the following four seasons, regardless of what league City found itself in.
Allow all City players who wish to unilaterally void their contracts and become free agents at the next transfer window. Don't blame a players one iota. They shouldn't be punished.
Prohibit any new transfer activity for the next four windows, other than signing free agents.
Those are all in the Premier League's jurisdiction. I assume we can get the English Football Association (FA) and UEFA on board, so we'd add these punishments.
Effective immediately, City should be banned from all non-EPL competitions in England for the next four years. Effectively, the FA Cup and the League Cup.
Additionally, City should be dismissed from the 2026-27 Champions League and banned from the next three.
That seems a hefty price to pay, but I don't think it unwarranted.
TL;DR Gheorghe would throw almost all the books at City.
Now, back to the real world. What will actually happen?
The Premier League is in a bind. On the one hand, they're already facing pressure from political forces to account for ADUG's good works and the UAE's status as a key trade partner for the UK in their decision-making. And on the other, the integrity of the competition is at stake. If City receives something perceived as a slap on the wrist, every other club will know the rules don't matter for the rich clubs, and the lawsuits will fly thick and fast.
Consider Tottenham Hotspur, which finished fifth in the EPL (and behind City) in 2010-11, 2012-13, 2014-15, and 2023-24? In each of those seasons, that finish missed Champions League qualification by one place, costing Spurs millions of dollars that meant they couldn't compete in the transfer market for the kind of talent that could take them to the next level. Over and over again. Would they have cause to sue?
What about any one of the dozens of teams relegated between 2009-2018 in what would have been proven a rigged competition? Leicester City's in the third division now. Think they're not ripshit?
And on and on. Individual players who lost out on wages and bonuses because their team didn't qualify for European competition? Cause for action, maybe? Coaches who were sacked because they couldn't compete with City? See you in court, motherfucker!
No, I don't envy the EPL at all.
After all those words (3,150 of them, dashed off in a rush. Meth is a hell of a drug.), I think the final answer comes down to the same thing it always does. As the bards of Staten Island sing, cash rules everything around football. Once the appeals are exhausted and City found guilty, ADUG will come to the table with an offer. They'll agree to accept guilt, sacrifice a couple of executives, and pay a massive fine. Money is truly no object to them.
The EPL will have leverage, but not all of it. They can't face the rest of the teams and the public without extracting some kind of concession. So the sides will agree that City will take a 20-point penalty this season to spare the EPL from the embarrassment of City hoisting the trophy too soon, and spend the next season in the League Championship, roster intact, with no points penalties going forward. Two windows of transfer bans will round out the consequences. So it's not a slap on the wrist, but it's nothing close to what City deserve.
And Andy Burnham and Sheikh Mansour will enjoy a really excellent cigar at some point not too far in the future.
Posts
