Former Manchester City captain Kyle Walker has become the first player from the club's golden era to speak publicly about the 115 charges verdict — admitting he would probably have to remove his famous "four in a row" leg tattoo if City are stripped of their Premier League titles.
Walker, 36, now at Burnley in the Championship, made the admission while co-hosting talkSPORT Drive on Wednesday. City were found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought by the Premier League over financial breaches between 2009 and 2018, and the club lodged an appeal on October 1. No sanction has been decided yet.
What Walker actually said
Asked what would happen to the tattoo celebrating City's four successive league titles between 2020 and 2024 — a feat no other club has managed in the Premier League era — Walker laughed before conceding, in quotes reported by The Sun: "I'm probably going to have to do that."
He was more serious about the verdict itself. "Let's not hide from the fact that, you know, they've been found guilty, but they're going through an appeal," Walker 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 did and what we achieved in that space of time was probably incredible and probably won't be done ever again. But from the outside looking in, it doesn't look great and we have to address that."
Walker spent eight years at the Etihad between 2017 and 2025, winning six Premier League titles, and said he hopes to keep the ink: "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."
Why City fans have turned on him
The reaction from supporters was swift and furious. As SportBible reported on Thursday morning, fans accused their former captain of feeding the story rather than defending the club. "I can't believe this guy wore the armband," one wrote, while another called him the "worst captain ever" and claimed he had ruined his legacy.
The anger is not only about a tattoo. Walker had already annoyed sections of the fanbase in June 2025 when he said he would have given up one of his Premier League medals to have won the Europa League with Tottenham, and footage of a dressing-room argument with Pep Guardiola in a recent documentary has kept old wounds open. For a fanbase that has circled the wagons since the verdict — a mood Enzo Maresca described when he said City had grown more united after the charges verdict — Walker's honesty landed like betrayal.
On the pitch, Walker has problems of his own. He stayed at Burnley after their relegation last season, but the Clarets have won just one of their opening 11 Championship matches and sit 22nd in the table.
So what happens next?
Everything Walker is joking about depends on two decisions that have not been made. First, City's appeal has to be heard; the club insist the verdict is unsafe and deny wrongdoing, a position Reuters reported Maresca backs completely. Second, a separate sanction hearing will decide the punishment if the guilty findings stand — with options ranging from a heavy fine and a points deduction to relegation and, most explosively, titles being stripped.
The Sun reports that possible sanctions could even reach the four-in-a-row streak of 2020 to 2024, even though the charges themselves cover 2009 to 2018. That is exactly why a tattoo has become a story: it turns an abstract legal process into something a player wears on his skin. City, meanwhile, keep winning — they routed AEK Athens 5-1 in midweek — while the biggest threat to their season sits in a hearing room, not on a pitch.
Beyond the Final Whistle: Walker said the quiet part out loud. Players can defend what they did on the pitch — and they should, because no charge sheet changes what those teams produced — but a former captain admitting the titles might not survive is the first crack in the dressing-room wall of silence. If even the man with "four in a row" tattooed on his leg is planning for the worst, City's appeal matters more than any match they will play this season. Do you think City should be stripped of their titles if the verdict stands? Let us know in the comments.
