👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 26 September 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
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☀️ The weekend’s weather: Make the most of a bright day today in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness; tomorrow is going to be overcast and rainy. London will also have a fine day today, but after a decent start, tomorrow the rain will come for you, too, in the afternoon. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
An era corrupted by Manchester City | Crypto tycoons want to (literally) build a new world | Ants on your pudding? | A new undersea war | Booker book inspiration | A border idyll for the price of a city flat
🍸 There’s a tendency among football fans - and I am one - to view everything that happens in the sport as of cataclysmic importance. In a world full of real-world conflict, suffering, danger and opportunity, it rarely is.
But the news on the front pages of most London-based newspapers this morning exposes a sickness at the heart of the game that’s loved by millions, calls into question one of the UK’s greatest cultural exports - its Hollywood - and offers a test not just to footballing authorities, but to government too.
Manchester City have been found guilty of the vast majority of more than 100 charges relating to breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules. That rather dry description doesn’t fully capture what’s gone on: City cheated. Again and again. They found ways to secure and then spend vast sums of money to give themselves an unfair advantage between 2009 and 2023.
During that period, they won the Premier League seven times, the Champions League once, three FA Cups and six League Cups. All those stars: De Bruyne, Silva, Kompany, Aguero, Pep Guardiola himself: they won nothing fairly, because the font of money that fuelled it all, and brought them all in, was tainted.
City deny the charges and will likely appeal.
No penalty has been decided: in Scotland, Rangers were relegated to the bottom of the football league for - arguably - far less, certainly in monetary value. City might face point deductions so severe that they’re also relegated, or even outright expulsion from the Premier League, should the verdicts be confirmed.
But that’s only the start. What happens to the clubs who feel they’ve been denied trophies and success by City’s cheating - will they sue? What happens to the UK’s relationship with City’s owners, who are effectively the Abu Dhabi state? What future for the Premier League, which now gets to reflect on more than a decade of history - an entire era, including some of its most famous moments - now sullied by financial impropriety?
As Martin Samuel says in today’s Times, the verdict is a great victory for justice, but “the best league in the world” is reduced to rubble. There is nothing to celebrate.
And what happens to fans, left realising they spent years watching a distortion, a mirage of competition? What’s the point of it all? Some might just order another pint and say it was fun while it lasted. I wonder how many will just drift away, or go watch a minor league where the worst corruption is a striker with an illicit bet on.
It could be the pin that pops the bubble surrounding the English Premier League's extraordinary success, a cultural backdrop to much of my life, and a league that - I believe - has helped do some good. For that, I’d be sad.
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, including
Meet the crypto tycoons who want to (literally) build a new world
Anyone fancy ants on your pudding? Food inspectors say a restaurant has gone too far
Two new books look at the fascinating undersea cable war that could unfold in the months and years ahead
Looking for books to buy? The Booker Prize shortlist might have some inspiration
Inspect the border idyll on sale for the price of a (posh) city flat
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend.
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