The Premier League scandal rocking England and beyond

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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, at this stage, I'm just, 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 scandal's raising questions about the integrity of the Premier League, about sports washing, foreign ownership of teams. Could even entangle UK's Prime Minister, Andy 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, yeah. I mean, they, um... I mean, look, prior to the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008, they were, yeah, o- you know, one of our big clubs. They weren't, they weren't mega. They were kind of a, a regional brand. Um, you know, they had lots of success maybe in the '60s and '70s. Um, they'd had hard times more recently. Um, but the most, you know, the thing that perhaps everyone knew about them was they had to share a city with Manchester United.

Hmm.

So they were kind of, uh... There was a lot of sympathy for them. There were a lot, lot 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 [chuckles] injection of cash.

Yes. Everything did change. They won, um, they won the owner lottery.

[laughs]

Um, and they were basically bought by, as you noted in your intro, um, Abu Dhabi, um, the very wealthy Gulf state. And, um, 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. Um, European football, European sport really, doesn't do North American style hard salary caps. It doesn't do that. You know, we, we have a sort of slightly more laissez-faire approach here. What we do have, though, and this started about 15 years