"So Liverpool could sign Haaland for free next week?" Jamie Carragher asked it as a joke. The barrister replied: "Yeah, why not?"
That exchange, broadcast on Stick to Football, cuts to the heart of where Manchester City now find themselves. British barrister Paul Gilroy KC appeared alongside Gary Neville, Ian Wright, Carragher, Roy Keane and Jill Scott to explain something City's board probably doesn't want its players to hear — every single one of them may now have legal grounds to walk.
The implied term that changes everything
The argument hinges on what Gilroy calls an implied term in every employment contract: trust and confidence. It doesn't need to be written down. It just needs to exist. And City's guilty verdict on 114 of 115 charges — covering alleged financial misconduct between 2009 and 2018, including 'sham' commercial contracts — has put that implied term under a legal microscope.
"If you call me a liar and a thief on Tuesday, I can't work for you on a Wednesday," Gilroy said. "A player could say: 'You have breached the implied term of trust and confidence. You are my employer, you have acted in breach of that term, and that entitles me to say I'm ripping up my contract and I'm walking out.'"
He was careful to add that commentators consider this outcome unlikely, and that it depends heavily on how City communicate with their players and what financial arrangements follow. But "certainly a possibility" from a KC isn't something you dismiss.
What this actually means for City
City are expected to appeal before Friday's deadline and continue to deny all charges. That appeal process could drag on — but it doesn't suspend the legal reality players now find themselves in.
Erling Haaland, the most valuable player on the planet by most measures, is the obvious name here. So is anyone else on a long-term deal who suddenly has a lawyer's argument to explore. Any club shopping in the market for elite talent will have noted this development carefully — the contractual landscape around City's squad just got a lot more complicated, and anyone pricing City in futures markets has a new variable to weigh.
Ian Wright closed the segment with a quip about Haaland preferring Arsenal "because of his mates there." Light stuff. But underneath the banter, the legal question is entirely serious, and City's players will be asking their own representatives exactly what it means for them.
