The Current - The Premier League scandal rocking England and beyond

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

After a high profile cheating scandal there are calls for Manchester City, one of the most successful football clubs in the world, to get relegated from the Premier League. The Athletic’s senior news reporter Matt Slater talks about how the potential ramifications from the scandal go beyond sport.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current. podcast. They have lied to the fans. They've lied to the rest of football. They have acted with sheer, I mean, contempt towards the football club that I support. And that, I mean, at this stage, I'm just so incredibly angry. Fans of the English soccer club Manchester City are feeling betrayed. City is one of the most successful clubs in the world with some of the game's best players, multiple cup titles to its name. But now that club is embroiled in a scandal that is being called one of the worst in modern sport. The Premier League says Man City has cheated financial rules for over a decade to the tune of

over a billion and a half dollars. This team is majority owned by members of Abu Dhabi's ruling family. The scandals raising questions about the integrity of the Premier League, about sports washing, foreign ownership of teams, could even entangle UK's prime minister, anti-Burnham. Matt Slater is a senior news reporter with The Athletic and he is right near Manchester in England this morning. Matt, good morning. Good morning.

We'll get to the allegations in a moment, but for people who don't follow the Premier League, just briefly paint us a picture. This is one of the big clubs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they, I mean, look, prior to the Abedobey Takeover in 2008, they were, yeah, one of our big clubs. They weren't, they weren't mega. They were kind of a regional brand.

You know, they'd had lots of success maybe in the 60s and 70s. They'd had hard times more recently. But the most, you know, the thing that perhaps everyone knew about them was they had to share a city with Manchester United. So they were kind of, there was a lot of sympathy for them. There were a lot, lots of Man City fans, not so many outside of the Manchester region. But I think everybody had a bit of a kind of, I wouldn't say soft spot for them, but a lot of empathy, having to sort of share a city with the biggest club in the UK, one of the biggest clubs in the world, Manchester United. And then everything changed when they get an enormous injection of cash. Yes.

Everything did change. They won the owner lottery. And they were basically bought by, as you noted in your intro, Abu Dhabi, the very wealthy Gulf State. And the money started to flow in. Now, I know this is a bit complicated, so I'll try and do this as simply as I can. European football, European sport, really, doesn't do North American-style hard salary caps. It doesn't do that. We have a slightly more laissez-faire approach here. What we do have, though, and this started about 15 years ago, because of concerns over rising debts, club insolvency, a kind of arms race type effect, we introduced a soft cap. So the way to think about it is European soccer clubs are supposed to live within their means. Now, they don't, but they're supposed to.

So you're only supposed to spend on your team via transfers and wages what you can bring in through the business. door. And the three main revenue streams there are obviously broadcast, you know, match day, tickets, what have you, and commercial revenues. And it's this last bracket that is, is the most important one here with this Manchester City case. Because if, let's say, I don't know, Elon Musk owned a club, any club, and he put Tesla on the front of the shirts and said, that's 10 billion, well, the rest of the league, the rest of the football will say, no, it's not. That's not how much that shirt is really worth. We need to have a fair market value. And there's a sort of benchmarking exercise. Now, what Mancities owners did and continue to do is they are

sponsored by lots of Abu Dhabi companies, you know, state-owned enterprises, like, for example, their airline. Etihad, that's the name of the stadium, is the name of the shirt. It's been their biggest sponsor ever since the takeover. Now, what this scandal is all about is in late 2018, German outlet DeSpeagle published some hacked emails that appeared, and I still find it very hard, how anyone reading these emails could come to any other conclusion, appeared to outline a conspiracy at the club to funnel money from the owner via these state-owned enterprises into the club at vastly inflated. values, therefore enabling them to circumvent these financial rules, this soft salary cap. So they could buy the best players in the world because they had an unlimited resource? Absolutely. And they were also disguising some costs as well. So they were getting some of their costs off the book. So that's a bit more complicated. But if we just think about the main allegation, and that is these vastly inflated commercial deals. Now, that is what the Premier League

has spent all these years investigating, UEFA, the European Football Government, but he looks at it as well. they initially banned Manchester City for two years from European competition. Manchester City managed to get that overturned. There's a complicated case. He went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Some of the charges were timed out on a statute of limitations. Some of them just weren't proven. Master City emerged from that, apparently vindicated.

But at the same time, the Premier League has been investigated. The Premier League has done a much more thorough investigation. They've gone for a lot more documents. and that is what blew up here about 10 days ago. The chief executive of Mancetti says this is a conspiracy theory. This case is being described in seismic, kind of apocalyptic terms in many ways when it comes to four. How big of a deal is this? Oh, here, it's very big.

It's been the biggest story. You know, it's been the top story of the news. I mean, there's other stuff going on in the world, of course. But it's the biggest sports story of my career. Because why? A few things. One, because it's a decade of cheating. This has been a saga for a long time. We've known about, like I said, those hacked emails late 2018. They were charged by the Premier League, 115 charges in early 2023. The hearing, 12-week hearing was two years ago. So we've been living with this a long time. And at the same time, Manchester City, haven't just been a good team, they've been the best team. So they have dominated in the same. English football.

Seven titles out of eight at one point. They did four years in a row, which no one's ever done before. They won a treble. They won the Champions League and the League in the Cup here. They've been brilliant. Famous players, famous managers. They've changed the game. And then you have the whole, you feel like beyond football angle.

This is not just an Elon Musk type figure or a hedge fund or whatever, or Roman Abramovich, an oligarch. This is a state. It's Abu Dhabi. It's Abu Dhabi. one of the UK's, you know, big trading partners, and this is where this story, this story is firing off in all kinds of directions, but one of them is potential impacts on, you know, UK's GDP. And then you've got the city of Manchester itself. So it is true that Abu Dhabi has massively changed Manchester. That's, that's, everyone can see that. Abidabi money has also changed East Manchester. The parts of Manchester that Manchester that Manchester City has, sits in. That was a very prior, well, it had been ignored, very post-industrial, not a great deal happening there. Successive governments had failed it, and there was a lot of land there waiting

for someone to do something with it. Abadabee. Now, they got the money, they got the land on very, very good terms. The city council, you know, certainly opened the door, but everyone, you know, Anyone could see the change with their own eyes. Is that how the UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, gets caught up in this? Because, of course, he is formerly Mr. Manchester, the mayor. Yeah, he absolutely is. So this is, again, and one of these sort of ripple effects. A lot of the reason why he is our Prime Minister is because he's been able to say,

I was Mayor of Manchester, and Manchester outgrew the rest of the UK. So we've been bumping along about 1% growth for a while, like lots of other sort of Western economies. But Manchester's been outgrowing the rest of the UK. It's been growing at about 3%. And he talks about mangrovesantism. He talks about the fact that he's been able to get things done. He's been able to cut through red tape.

He has been able to build things. Yeah, he has. I mean, I live near there. But a lot of the stuff he's built has been with Happy to have his money. So part of this is about what that money does. And there's been a lot of concern, and it's not just with city, other clubs as well of international money coming in and perhaps changing because it's association of its association with something like soccer changing how people look at where

that money was coming from and the term that gets used is sports washing when people talk about that what does that conversation look like in light of the story well it's it's a conversation that we've been having for a while now it comes and goes and of course it's come back now um i almost sort of feel we're kind of post-sports washing here in the UK, because it's, if you believe in it, it's worked, right? So it's quite interesting that you played a clip before of a Manchester City fan, saying how disappointed he was with the club's ownership. I would say that right now that's a minority view. I know that, I know that, you know, social media isn't always the best gauge,

but if you were to look at social media, it's very much the other way. It is lockstock, behind the owners. This is a conspiracy against us. This is the more established clubs that they call the red cartel, because they wear red, Liverpool-Mouth United Arsenal, has been gangning up us for ages. We've been the disruptor club. We've disrupted

them, and they've been trying to get us, and now they've got us. And that, I would say, is the loudest voice here. Now that is, now, now, now, is that not what sports

washing is all about really. They won. They have won. Because you have, football is so tribal. Sport is so tribal in every country. But I don't know if it's particularly here, but it sometimes feels that way. And what you are buying is you are buying almost the kind of, at times it feels like a sort of bot army that could be mobilized on your behalf to speak your talking points.

But even if it's not that, you are buying. you're buying people's goodwill, you're buying people who just will, at a moment like this, instinctively side with you. Now, this is so important for Abu Dhabi. They're effectively being called. We haven't really got into the ruling yet. The ruling was so damning. First of all, it was bigger and worse than we expected. You know, I've been following this for years.

this independent commission whose names have been protected which I think serves a lot have found I put a number on it one they've put a number on it so there's nine years worth of cheating to the benefit of mentioned city

to the tune of 900 million pounds which I think is one and a half billion Canadian dollars huge amount which is more than some clubs were earning so there's that but two the language used is very undiplomatic it accuses

people of lying, of misleading, of misstating, of concealing, it's a conspiracy to obfuscate. The language is scathing. Now, they're not like naming names, because a lot of the names are redacted, and it does appear, I think, an attempt to kind of insulate senior abidabulators. But the implication is clear. You have lied and cheated. So if that's, I have to let you go, but if that's the implication that they cheated, they won all these things and they cheated. What happens to the club? There's suggestion that, that, you know, the titles could be stripped, they could be sent down into lower divisions, the club might be sold off for parts. Just very briefly, what do you think is going to happen? Well, I don't know.

Is the briefest ask I can give you? They're appealing, and I think they'll continue to appeal, so there is a sort of football process that the appeal is in, and there's a timeline for that. But can the league let the cheaters win if it's proven that they cheated? Well, good question. Good question. I mean, I think it will come down to an appetite here to do we go backwards? Do we start stripping titles like we would for dooping and Olympic medals? Do we do punishments that are forward-looking? What is a fitting punishment for a decade worth of cheating where they won so much? Where would that end?

At what point would we say there's potential damage here to the product to the UK? You know, that's where we're at now. Matt, good to talk to you with this. Thank you very much. You're welcome. It's a wild story. Matt Slater is senior sports reporter with the athletic. He was just outside of Manchester, England.

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