villa turning into horrible cunts.
Football Finance
- Thread starter King Binny
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Villa have been making these noises for a while.
They’re cunts. They’d be fucked if they brought in unlimited spending. We’d be sold to Qatar, others to Brunei and so on. They still wouldn’t compete.
Salah needs to tell this cunt to pipe down and go back to being shitty Villa
If he doesn’t sell the cunt.
Worth pointing out that this will put another huge hole in Chelsea's budget for the 25-26 season. Estimated £50m for clubs taking part.
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It's embarrassing how little due diligence clubs do on these sponsors. I bet Palace never see a penny of that sponsorship money.
I had so many deals like this come to me for sign-off - new company established in Far East or Cyprus (front for Russian money), no sign of any substance behind it, no prospect we'd get paid. Got sick and tired of having the same argument with the commercial teams. And it always came down to "We've got nothing else in this category so we're prepared to take a shot to nothing". Then the directors signed it off, the invoices went out and no money came in.
What's ridiculous about this Palace deal is that they wouldn't struggle to get a legit gambling sponsor, there are loads of them desperate to sponsor football clubs (although I always found the ethics of teaming up with bookies very questionable). They'll have probably locked out the chance of getting some legit income from someone like William Hill to give exclusivity to a non-entity who will likely never pay them. Muppets.
OK then. Contract hits my desk. It's a newly-formed Cyprus company with Russian-sounding owners. The company is proposing to set up an on-line trading platform, people will be invited to download their software and use it to make gambles on forex products - it poses as trading but it is essentially gambling.
I know I'm not going to get anything from basic desktop research / Google (Russians don't use Cyprus because the regime is transparent) and I've had an advisory firm pitching their due diligence services at me for ages and offering to do a free case study, so I turn it over to them. A couple of days pass, nothing to report but they're still digging. Then a couple of hours later I get a phone call - can I do a conference call with their analyst? Sure, no problem.
So he tells me they've been digging into the social media history of one of the shareholders - a guy called Yuri. A few years ago, Yuri had posted something about his step-dad, who is a famous Russian rock star, now more or less retired. Some more digging into the step-dad reveals that his "son", one Nikita Kuzmin (not the bloke off Strictly) had been sentenced to something like 95 years of bird in the States for creating and circulating the Gozi virus (if you Google "Nikita Kuzmin hacker" you can find the details). You'll also find a picture of a spotty teenager in front of a computer screen. And if you look at that pic, and then you look at Yuri's professional-looking LinkedIn photo, well, it might be the same guy.
Anyway, Nikita managed to get a plea deal from the US authorities and got his sentence reduced. Officially, he dobbed in some of his co-conspirators and was re-sentenced to time served. The more conspiratorial theory (not one I personally believe) was that he helped the Feds hack into Iran's nuclear enrichment programme. But here's the thing, there's a gap in Yuri's Facebook posts that co-incides exactly with the period that Nikita was doing time.
So I call the commercial guys who literally have to pull their salesperson off the steps of a plane at Heathrow on the way to meet these Russian guys in Milan. And we get the agent to confront Yuri. Who it turns out IS Nikita in disguise. At which point one of the commercial guys tell me "Well, you could argue that he's done his time and should be allowed a second chance". Yep, a known creator / distributor of a damaging worm (which stole millions of dollars from people's bank accounts) should be allowed to use the club's channels and badge to try to persuade gullible fans to download his latest piece of software onto their laptops. I mean, what could go wrong there?
Thankfully the higher-ups agreed with me, we didn't do the deal, and I got a budget to farm out future contracts I considered too risky so they'd get a third-party review. The adviser established their credentials quite well, I'd say.
maybe i’ve missed this but you do/did actually work in football then @Beamrider ?
To be fair, most of the other stories don't match up to that one.
it's ok, pad the chapters out, include a few chapters about the Salisbury poison plot, stick another chapter in about the plutonium 210 tea spiking and we are golden
Yeah, did 6 years in finance. And it's probably time to confess that, despite pretending otherwise in the past, it was at LFC.
Please don't ask for gossip because I'm not telling (contractually bound).
Although I might drop the occasional no-names story in the future.
haha ok, sorry don’t mean to be nosey i just thought that maybe it was common knowledge on here and i’d missed it
how much do the lizards spend on disposing of dead hookers @Beamrider ?
Surely the NDA has expired?
That's the agents' job.
Seriously, that's what the agents get paid so much for, to clean up the shit without the clubs having to get involved.
They would be the cleaning agents.
Right?
More than my life's worth. The club actually engages PR firms to trawl the web for mentions of anything untoward so they can stay ahead of stories.
I assume they're better at it than a certain Sports Media organisation owned by the NYT
Now remembering why I didn't mention this in the past.
Honest truth is that there is little interaction between the admin and football sides. I only met Klopp once, for example. We were at Melwood for a meeting and he was bored (it was international week) so he came and sat in our meeting and took the piss out of the senior guys. He was everything you see on the TV - warm, funny, modest, charismatic. And he just wants to be around people all the time. None of what you see is an act, that's who he is.
did you get a hug? or is that why you left?
I always say the same thing. When you're on the outside looking in you're desperate to know what's going on. When you're on the inside and know at least some of it, you wish you didn't. I was less of a fan when I worked there than I am now.
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