Moneyball won't win the Premiership 2012-13

"I am not a racist and I do not support the ideology of fascism"

http://www.safc.com/news/club-news/2013/april/statement-from-paolo-di-canio

http://www.offthepost.info/wp-content/uploads/1537809205-570x379.jpg

meanwhile in hell

"I do not support the ideology of fascism" is either terrible English or a very carefully worded non-denial. I suspect the latter.

idk the 'not' seems in the right place

And it completely fails to address the salutes, the funeral attendance, the tattoo, the admiration for Mussolini. Basically, it's the Shaggy defence: "It wasn't me!"

What's the funeral attendance? And assuming it is carefully-worded, what do you think should happen now?

Attending funeral of leading Italian fascist.

Oh, I don't know what should happen. I'm just exercising my right to have a pop. It's carefully worded enough that Sunderland's catastrophic backroom staff will doubtless claim it puts everything to bed. Next press conference, though, I bet someone asks: "You say you 'do not support the ideology of fascism'. Does that mean you are not a fascist? If you're not, why did you etc etc"

fascism, okay fine water under the bridge, but some things are unforgivable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeGA7sA8HDw

Really hoping opposition fans have "Your manager's a Nazi" chants ready and waiting to go

that pic of moyes... terrifying.

really looks like he's been on a serious binge.

Finding non-terrifying pictures of David Moyes is a more of a task

Do Toploader now need to make a statement about associating with a fascist?

xxp it's a glimpse into the demonic portal that will open when moyes finally receives his £100m summer transfer kitty

those two cloven hooved succubi alongside him are actually seamus coleman and leon osman in their true forms

I think this is the best column I have read on this week's issue

http://www.standard.co.uk/sport/sport-comment/dan-jones-paolo-di-canios-politics-are-great-for-his-critics-but-they-have-nothing-to-do-with-being-a-boss-8559571.html

I'm guessing that Dan Jones is a white guy. The continued attempts to throw shade at a Jewish man for resigning when his employer gave the top front-of-house job to someone with at least some publicly expressed fascist sympathies is not a good look.

Do you mean a Christian? Not sure why his being white would affect his ability to place himself in the shoes of another white Jewish man.

The "do Jewish people self-identify as white" argument isn't one that the PL thread needs to get into but i don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that someone whose family had to escape the Holocaust might not be as keen to hand-wave away Fascist sympathies as someone whose probably didn't.

No, I agree with you. I just find the shorthand of "white man" for font of all ignorance and prejudice a bit reductive. There are white men who are members of minority groups too, whether by race or sexuality or for other reasons.

No, i appreciate that but when the context is "should someone who has abhorrent views not be questioned about them as long as it can't be clearly shown that they are affecting their work", which gets wheeled out every time a BNP teacher or policeman comes up, the people going "nah, it's fine as long as they're not calling for the kids to be deported in class" do tend to come from a background that wouldn't be affected by less overt expressions of prejudice.

Like if Scotland appointed a manager who went to Orange Order parades and had a Billy Wright tattoo and some chump argued "if he doesn't make Catholic players learn the flute, why does it matter?, saying "i'm guessing he's not Catholic" would be a fairly understandable response.

Agreed. It was just the specific issue I had, not a general disagreement, and based on seeing this more widely used as well as on this thread.

please dont go there

lol

xp

Surely scottish managers have p much been there

Sharivari with fair point, except everybody prob finds it v hard to believe a politician doing anything on actual principle

Surely scottish managers have p much been there

Ha, was going to say :)

yeah jock stein was a terrible man for that

big JOCK aka as the STEINdriver

Did anyone say ALL Scottish managers? I don't believe they did.

the Evening Standard is not mainly about Miliband, that is just how it starts

it is about synthetic controversy and the idea that someone should not be persecuted for his previously stated beliefs which, as the article says, are probably vague, uncertain etc anyway

It will be quite good to see how Sunderland actually play football, soon

It will be quite good to see how Sunderland actually play football, soon

What to wear? The blackshirts home and brownshirts away?

something something RIGHT WING!

Speaks to how shit they are that i cant actually think of a right winger tbh

Hess Brown? idk, they're just not a good club for the puns

Genuinely wonder what Martin O'Neill's politics are, if any

Catholic norn irish solicitor? Id imagine p liberal.

Or are we simply saying that anyone suspected of holding subversive political views, private or not, endangers the famously enlightened spirit of football and thereby justifies hounding them with all the tools of political and media pressure? That’s not fascism. It’s McCarthyism.

McCarthyism not good for Sunderland's Premier League status iirc

raphael honigstein ‏@honigstein
Schürrle to Chelsea not yet done, but very close. €20m.

I basically assume everyone in football is a Tory unless they state otherwise.

Mourinho is reputedly very right wing indeed but no one cares because he knows not to talk about his political views. Di Canio by contrast just looks like an idiot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2006/feb/19/features.review37 this article is interesting if v speculative on Mourinho's politics, e.g.

More significantly, the family's fortunes depended on the stability of the fascist regime. Mourinho's great-uncle owned a factory for canning sardines which, in the days before burgers and pizza, were a patriotic staple of the national diet. After the revolution, the cannery workers expropriated the business; Setubal, the coastal town where Mourinho was born, acquired a communist mayor, and his parents - stigmatised as bourgeois - had to move out of their big house. This sudden, humiliating demotion left Mourinho with unregenerately right-wing views. For a while last year he had a talk show on Portuguese television and his producer promised that he would discuss 'everything except politics'. Despite this reticence, his political sympathies are encoded in the beliefs with which he indoctrinates his Chelsea players. 'The team,' he ritualistically insists, 'is more important than the player.' That's not exactly the same as extolling life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; in fact it's the ideology of Salazar's corporate state, applied to the microcosmic society of the football club that Mourinho regulates.

Managers who extol the individual and consider the team unimportant, how do they get on?

AVB's doing ok

actually Redknapp's the closest to that (certainly not AVB)

xxxxpost to Local Garda

I tweeted your Star/Andy Reid clipping the other day, with h/t to ILX. Just had an email from a Have I Got News For You Researcher saying they want to use it on the programme.

Wow awesome! My cousin tweeted it to me - I'll tell him!

it's p viral now, was your cuz the first to find it?

Didn't realise it had gone round that far - just Googled it and, yes, it's your photo that is appearing on news sites and media comment blogs. Went mental on my feed when Stephen Mangan retweeted me. So Local Garda and his cousing have, officially, started a meme.

My cousin did tweet it as if it was an original tweet. But can't be sure it was him that started it. He has basically no followers and doesn't tweet much.

9.48 on Wednesday

https://twitter.com/odwyerbrian/status/319370748974206976

i'd be surprised if he had it first, maybe he follows the original guy or something.