****Soccer is the Greatest Sport on Earth In-Game****

Still with the team, as of now.
Looking like he may be a witness to something. but wtf, great timing on this one.
 
translated from the spanish report

A protected witness of the investigation against the pornography businessman Torbe - Ignacio Allende Fernández, in jail since last April for his crimes of human trafficking with sexual exploitation purposes, sexual aggression, under-age pornography, relate to prostitution extortion, and against public safety, including money laundering and against the Public Treasury – has implicated two internationall football players in the case: David de Gea, currently Manchester United goalkeeper, and Iker Muniain, striker for Athletic de Bilbao.
This woman’s account is being incorporated into the summary of Operation Universal, instructed at the number 29 courthouse of Madrid and which names the owner of sexual-content sites as the head or a prostitution ring which abused Spanish and foreign women, some of them under-aged.
The testimony given to police by a woman caught in the ring, who police reports and investigators name TP3, is key, given that it started the whole investigation, which currently has charged 10 people, among them the presumptive heads of the ring, Torbe and his Ukranian associate Borys Malynovskyi.
The Central Brigade against Human Trafficking of Spain’s National Police gives the woman’s and two other witnesses’ general account a “high grade of credibility” and dismisses “interests that could exist to discredit the people being denounced for economic or personal reasons.
The double declaration given by the witness to police agents details many types of terrible acts done by the ring and includes an episode of supposed abuses in which, according to the account included in the reports, Iker Muniain participated in a centric five-star hotel in Madrid. This victim’s revelations suggest that Torbe guided the witness under the promise that she’d get paid a lot of money to the suite loft, where she met another woman and two football players.
After leaving TP3 in the room with the other girl, Torbe told them that they had to be with the players, having to accept anything they wanted and that they’d be paid a lot of money. After TP3 rejected the order, Torbe grabbed her arm with force, not letting her say anything, and forced her to do anything the two players wanted, maintaining sexual relations with the new girl and her”, writes the transcript of her first declaration, which was done in June of 2015 in Murcia.
The police report that summarizes her account adds more details of that meeting: “The new girl as well as TP3 were sexually abused by the guys, given that if they tried to resist they were physically assaulted by both of them, and after fulfilling the footballers’ sexual desires, [both players] threatened them so that nothing which had just occurred would ever come out to the public. Neither TP3 nor the [other] girl which was in the room received any money for the sexual, physical, etc. abuses they suffered, all the money being kept by Torbe.
In another subsequent declaration, taken on May 6th in a police station belonging to the Brigade against Human Trafficking in Madrid, the protected witness named the football players that had participated in the hotel episode. She said that the protagonists of the supposed aggression in the Madrid hotel room (which at that moment had not yet been identified) were Iker Muniain and a second player also part of the Sub-21 Spanish National Team, and that the meeting had been arreanged by David de Gea and Torbe.

According to the woman, when she entered the hotel suite, she let Torbe know, with the two players also present, that she did not want to participate in that party. She also declared that the two players, at that moment teammates in the Sub-21 Spanish National Team, had asked for no type of recording of the meeting whatsoever so that their football careers wouldn’t be affected.
Before her second testimony to police, the protected witness tried through WhatsApp to get de Gea to identify the other player that had been with Muniain in the Madrid hotel room, and to indicate just how much Torbe had charged for that meeting, since she was never paid. In those phone messages, added to the investigation, the woman is not sure of the second player who entered the room’s name and remembers he was injured. De Gea told her it was a player of Athletic Bilbao but avoided giving her more details. Despite that, the woman ended up identifying on May 6th a player of another team that doesn’t match these details.
The message exchange between the woman and De Gea continued, and the goalkeeper expressed his interest in the woma’s services again, asking her if shed’d be interested in meeting five players of Manchester United, including himself. There’s no evidence that this meeting ever took place. The tone of the conversation suggests the witness was trying to gather proof to incorporate in the charges she’d pressed, given that she wasn’t sure of the name of the player that accompanied Muniain in the room. The only two players she talked to through WhatsApp are De Gea and Muniain, according to the documentation added to the case.
In one of the conversations wired by police and transcribed in the case, an unidentified person asked Torbe for his contacts with Athletic Bilbao players. The businessman answered that two of them had been at a party with two girls.

The Manchester United goalkeeper is again mentioned in another part of the Operation Universal summary. There’s a second protected witness, named TP2, whose account is added to the case on November 4th, 2015, when she sued Torbe for sexual abuse. The girl, 17 years-old, was caught in the ring by a supposed collaborator of the pornography businessman in a pub, when she offered the girl “a lot of money” and gave her a web page to visit in which the girl managed to upload nude photos of herself. Her extortion began there under threat of publishing said intimate photos among her friends and family.
The minor said that she was drugged and raped at least twice by Torbe, once after being picked up at her high school. After one of those episodes, the pornography businessman made her record videos that same day, which according to him would be sent to De Gea and other players, of Athletic Bilbao, to arrange meetings with them
. The analyses made afterwards to determine if she was drugged proved that on the dates mentioned the young girl had consumed cannabinoids and MDMA. Answering the agents’ question, the girl said she only sometimes had tried cannabis but was not a frequent consumer.

Right now, police have not yet cited the football players mentioned by the protected witness on her last May 6th testimony. The ones who have recently appeared in court are many of the victims and on June 16th all of the people charged will do so.
The case details in five volumes the suffering the girls caught by the ring had to go through, some of them originally from Ukraine, where filming pornography is prohibited, and who Torbe and his Ukranian associate used to record hardcore scenes. In most of the cases the women were lied to. Some of the women stayed at an office of Torbe, where they remained secluded. Some recordings had to be interrupted, the heads of the ring confessed in the wiretaps, because the women started crying and sometimes threw up.
In the police reports added to the summary of the case since it began, investigators highlight the businessman and porn actor’s way of operating, looking for women in desperate economic states (one of them asked Torbe for a €600 loan so her mother wouldn’t be evicted) and afterwards extortioning them so that they’d prostitute themselves, threatening to share intimate photos of them with their friends and family.
Eldiario.es staff has tried to contact De Gea who avoided any statements through an official spokesperson. Iker Muniain’s agent, Txus Medina, assured this newspaper: “We know absolutely nothing about this matter, no one from the police nor the court have contacted us to gather any type of information whatsoever”.
 
I think on a National USA level though soccer is way up there

like US soccer gets better ratings than USA basketball even doesnt it?
 
<3 euros... not sure I love the 24 team format with a few of the teams that got in, but doesn't get much better than Euros
 
it was soft but a good call

as Taylor says, lazy challenge by Evra

Greizzman coming off for Coman
 
it was soft but a good call

as Taylor says, lazy challenge by Evra

Greizzman coming off for Coman

Agree it's a penalty, but would love to see some sort of other solution than a PK for those kind of fouls. Stuff on the edge of the box, not clear scoring opportunities, etc. Maybe it's a "PK" from the 18. Maybe it's a set piece from the spot of the foul. I don't know, but sometimes you have to call the foul but a PK seems like just too much.
 
Agree it's a penalty, but would love to see some sort of other solution than a PK for those kind of fouls. Stuff on the edge of the box, not clear scoring opportunities, etc. Maybe it's a "PK" from the 18. Maybe it's a set piece from the spot of the foul. I don't know, but sometimes you have to call the foul but a PK seems like just too much.

its a valid point but I'm not sure how you make this work, and the line gets too blurry for whats soft and whats not. Where do you take the free kick? outside the box? Only solution is making the box smaller but that's not a real option either.
 
Agree it's a penalty, but would love to see some sort of other solution than a PK for those kind of fouls. Stuff on the edge of the box, not clear scoring opportunities, etc. Maybe it's a "PK" from the 18. Maybe it's a set piece from the spot of the foul. I don't know, but sometimes you have to call the foul but a PK seems like just too much.

sorry didnt read your whole post. Indirect free kicks are of course part of the game so its an option. The main thing is, whats soft and whats not
 
sorry didnt read your whole post. Indirect free kicks are of course part of the game so its an option. The main thing is, whats soft and whats not

indirect inside the box is only called on goalie fouls, and only some certain, rare ones at that.

[FONT=&quot]1. Takes more than four steps while controlling the ball with his hands, before releasing it from his possession.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]2. Touches the ball again with his hands after it has been released from his possession without touching another player.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]3. Touches the ball with his hand after is has been deliberately kicked to him by a teammate.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]4. Touches the ball with his hand after he has received it directly from a throw-in by a teammate.[/FONT]
 
indirect inside the box is only called on goalie fouls, and only some certain, rare ones at that.

[FONT=&amp]1. Takes more than four steps while controlling the ball with his hands, before releasing it from his possession.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]2. Touches the ball again with his hands after it has been released from his possession without touching another player.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]3. Touches the ball with his hand after is has been deliberately kicked to him by a teammate.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]4. Touches the ball with his hand after he has received it directly from a throw-in by a teammate.[/FONT]

yes I know what they are, I am suggesting though that they are the possible solution to these soft penalties inside the box rather then a chance a from the spot.
 
dont think it should change at all

its cut and dry inside that box

the USA handball the other day vs colombia would've been another example of a "non-pk" penalty in my book. sure, i see it would be hard to make the call on a lot of these in real time, but a pk is sooo valuable it seems like there should be more grey area.
 
Can you imagine? Home country. national stadium. You win it. Opening game of the Euros. Awesome finish.
 
Can't believe ESPN doesn't have announcers at the games. They are announcing this game from the studio in Bristol
 
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