MANCHESTER, England \u2014 Erling Haaland called on everybody at Manchester City to \u201cstick together\u201d in the striker’s first public comments since the club was found\u00a0guilty\u00a0of large-scale financial rule-breaking in the Premier League.<\/p>\n
City manager Enzo Maresca also spoke for the first time about English soccer’s biggest modern-day scandal, expressing his \u201ctrust\u201d in the club’s ownership and saying his players \u201cdon\u2019t care too much about the noise.”<\/p>\n
City will play Liverpool\u00a0on Sunday in its first match since the publication of an investigatory panel\u2019s verdict that City artificially inflated its revenue by more than $1 billion from 2009-18 to\u00a0circumvent financial fair-play rules\u00a0that restricted rival clubs in that period.<\/p>\n
City was found guilty by the panel of all 80 of the serious financial\u00a0charges brought by the Premier League\u00a0and could be hit with severe sanctions \u2014 including being expelled from the top flight. City has lodged an\u00a0appeal\u00a0against the findings.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Sky Sports published Thursday, Haaland \u2014 City’s most high-profile player \u2014 said: \u201cWe have to stick together and we have to spread the love to each other. So yeah, stick together, enjoy the ride and smile.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked what his message would be to City fans traveling to Anfield, where a potentially hostile reception awaits the team, Haaland said: \u201cWe have to stick together, we have to stay with each other and we have to stay positive.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter what happens in life, we have always have to have a smile. So we have to stay positive, look ahead and try to win football games and then try to enjoy the situation and the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
City later published an in-house interview with Maresca, who gave his first remarks on the matter with domestic soccer having been on hold for the past three weeks because of an extended international break.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonally I\u2019m very calm to be honest,\u201d he said of City’s situation. \u201cThe club has been quite clear. We trust completely the club. We understand the noise but the focus for us is just what we can control and we can control just the football side.”<\/p>\n
Maresca said the feeling in the squad was \u201cfantastic\u201d ahead of City’s next two games \u2014 against Liverpool and then Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
City has won all seven of its matches this season in all competitions and is top of the Premier League.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe players are just focused on that. They know what we can control is the football side \u2013 they are not worried at all about different things,” Maresca said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know their profession and they know that the noise is there but they don\u2019t care too much about the noise.”<\/p>\n
Maresca is likely to face more severe questioning Friday when he holds his pre-match news conference with reporters.<\/p>\n
Lampard and other managers speak about City case<\/p>\n
The return of the Premier League offers rival team coaches a first opportunity to react to the City case that has rocked the world\u2019s most popular soccer league and is likely to have a major impact on the remainder of the season.<\/p>\n
They weren’t rushing to judgment on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all seen the news. It\u2019s obviously big news,\u201d said Frank Lampard, the Coventry manager who played for City for one of the seasons \u2014 2014-15 \u2014 that has been under investigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cMan City are appealing the situation so I guess my reaction is that: what can you say when an appeal is going on? I\u2019m not inside the story, I\u2019m outside it completely \u2014 I played for Man City a long time ago, for one year \u2014 so we\u2019ll wait and see what the result of the appeal is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bournemouth manager Marco Rose preferred to stay away from the matter, saying: \u201cI\u2019m a football coach, not a politician,\u201d while Newcastle manager Matthias Jaissle said he was \u201cnot able to judge\u201d as a manager of another club and \u201cthere are authorities taking care of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a similar vein, Leeds manager Daniel Farke said there were \u201cmore qualified people … able to speak about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking at the Leaders in Sport conference in London, Leeds chairman Paraag Marathe \u2013 president of the club\u2019s U.S.-ownership group, 49ers Enterprises \u2013 said he believed \u201cthe most just result, I\u2019m sure, will be delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn any sport, you know, everybody wants to play by the same rules,\u201d he added, without mentioning City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MANCHESTER, England \u2014 Erling Haaland called on everybody at Manchester City to \u201cstick together\u201d in the striker’s first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":925656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-925655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}