Kyle Walker has admitted he would probably wipe his ‘four in a row’ leg tattoo if Manchester City are 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.
It remains to be seen whether the club will be stripped of their titles after they manipulated their financial accounts to the tune of £900million via ‘sham’ contracts.
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.
Walker Walker says he will probably get rdid of his ‘four in a row’ tattoo if Manchester City are stripped of their Premier League titles
The former England star revealed his tattoo – one of many that he has – last year
‘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 insist 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 say 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 note, 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’.
The panel also found that City committed multiple breaches of its duties of co-operation and good faith in that it failed to assist the Premier League’s four-year investigation, triggered by the emergence of club emails obtained by a hacker.
Indeed, City had ‘made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the PL investigation’.
