Friday, October 23, 2026 - Former Manchester City captain, Kyle Walker, has admitted he will clean off his 'four in a row' leg tattoo if the club is stripped of their Premier League titles.
The Man City legend won six league titles with the club and
last year revealed his inked tribute to their record run of consecutive crowns
between 2021 and 2024.
Daily Mail Sport has reported that City are primed for a
huge points reduction, which would relegate them to the Championship, after
they were found guilty of breaking financial rules between 2009 and 2018.
Asked by talkSPORT if he would get rid of his tattoo, Walker
said: 'I'm probably going to have to do that.
'But you look at the likes of the great Man United squad,
and they never managed to get four in a row. So there's only a select few of us
that can say that we won four.
'I'll try and keep it on, but hopefully we don't get the
things taken away.'
He also said: 'As a player, all I can say is that all we did
is go out and play our best football as a team, and I will defend the players
for the rest of my life.
'I feel that what we achieved in that space of time was
probably incredible and probably won't be done ever again.
'From the outside looking in, it doesn't look great, and we
have to address that.'
Walker was on the books with City for eight seasons, having
joined from Tottenham for £45m in 2017, and was elected captain after winning
the Treble with them in 2022/23.
The right-back, who now plays for Burnley in the
Championship, has previously admitted to talkSPORT that City's title-winners
don't want to talk about the situation.
'It’s something we don’t want to talk about because we want
to be looked upon as winning them trophies, winning them the right way,' he
said earlier this month.
City insists they are innocent and are appealing the verdict
by an independent panel, which found them guilty of all the serious alleged
financial breaches.
In a lengthy statement, the Premier League says City
arranged 'sham contracts (which misrepresented the true agreement between the
parties) with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on
"sham" agreements with others, to artificially inflate the club's
revenues and reduce its costs'.
It also says the club falsely altered the financial picture
at the Etihad to the tune of £900m. The club had agreed exorbitant sponsorship
deals with a number of companies, but those sponsors only paid part of the
fee.
The rest was propped up by the Abu Dhabi United Group
Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club.
As the Premier League noted, this allowed City to
'artificially inflate the club’s revenues' and therefore spend more under
Premier League rules. The higher the revenue a club records, the more they are
permitted to spend.
Moreover, further 'sham' deals, funded by ADUG, allowed the
club to 'record lower operating expenses than it actually incurred'.
The Premier League say that revenues were inflated and costs
reduced to the tune of £900m in an attempt to comply with spending rules. The
result was that the club 'filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state
of its finances from its auditors and football regulators'.
It added that the club was 'significantly in breach of both
the Premier League's and UEFA's spending limits' during the time period in
question, 2009-2018, when it won eight major trophies.
Had City reported accurately, 'it would have been in breach
of both the League's and UEFA's spending limits by a very substantial amount'.
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