Manchester City’s guilty verdict brings football’s great sell-off crashing to earth
On the day Andy Burnham spoke of the wrong turn Britain took under Thatcher, football was facing a day of reckoning over its own story of corporate acquisitionIt was somehow fitting that Tuesday’s damning ruling against Manchester City landed in…
By · October 3, 2026 · 1 min read
This article was originally published by
The Guardian World
and is republished here under license.
On the day Andy Burnham spoke of the wrong turn Britain took under Thatcher, football was facing a day of reckoning over its own story of corporate acquisition
It was somehow fitting that Tuesday’s damning ruling against Manchester City landed in the heart of the Labour party conference, in the afterglow of Andy Burnham’s rapturously received prime minister’s speech.
I was there, and read the astonishing 40 pages of findings – that City created “sham” contracts to boost income artificially by £900m – on my phone during a long meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group, where people were celebrating Keir Starmer’s ousting and Burnham’s more leftwing direction.
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