Burnham vows to publish all Manchester City dealings after guilty verdict prompts Badenoch challenge

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised to publicly disclose every interaction he had with Manchester City during his tenure as Mayor of Greater Manchester, after Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch challenged him to publish the full record of his dealings with the club.

The pledge comes in the wake of an independent commission finding Manchester City guilty of breaching Premier League financial rules across a nine-year period spanning 2009 to 2018 — an era that coincided with the club’s rise to domestic dominance and has since prompted calls for title stripping.

Speaking on the Rest is Politics podcast, Burnham sought to draw a clear line between his civic relationship with the club and the football governance questions now facing it. “I’ve been asked by the leader of the opposition to publish details of my meetings, which I’m happy to do,” he said. “I will quite clearly put out there everything that I have done working with them in my previous role as mayor of Greater Manchester. None of it is recent, actually, in terms of the meetings I had. I only had one significant meeting, and that was in 2021.”

Burnham also pushed back against attempts to link the investment relationship between City’s Abu Dhabi ownership and Manchester with the separate football misconduct findings. “The football issues are different from the investment issues,” he said. “I think everybody should separate the investment issues because they’re not the same thing.”

The Prime Minister had already attracted scrutiny earlier in the week when he described City’s Abu Dhabi owners as a “huge partner in the building of modern Manchester” and said he would be “really concerned” if they were to exit the club following the verdict. Downing Street subsequently clarified that Burnham regarded the judgement as serious and believed those found to have committed wrongdoing should face consequences.

Manchester City continue to contest the findings and have lodged an appeal. On Sunday, they returned to action with a 3-0 win at Liverpool — their first match since the verdict was announced — a result that kept them at the top of the Premier League table.