Erling Haaland’s Manchester City contract runs to 2034, and the extension he signed on 17 January 2025 removed any previous release clauses from the paperwork. Reports since the Premier League verdict also confirm that no relegation clause was written into the deal.
That is the setting for a legal argument that has quietly become the most noticed bit of small print in the Manchester City case. Paul Gilroy KC, an employment law barrister, told The Overlap podcast that English law gives every employee a backdoor out of a contract, no matter how heavily lawyered the front door looks.
The route is the implied term of trust and confidence. It sits in every English employment contract regardless of what the paperwork says, and it binds employer and employee alike.
The ‘liar and a thief’ line
Gilroy put the principle in blunt terms on The Overlap, with his comments then reported by GiveMeSport.
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“You call me a liar and a thief on Tuesday, I can’t work for you on a Wednesday, trust and confidence.”
The practical consequence, in Gilroy’s reading, is that a player whose employer has committed a serious breach of that trust can treat the contract as terminated and walk out, with no transfer fee owed by a buying club. He floated the hypothetical of a City player telling the club he was ripping up his contract and leaving.
Gilroy added that any such scenario remains “unlikely”, and that the outcome would depend on how the club dealt with its squad, including any financial settlements offered.
A separate question from a release clause
The implied-term route is legally distinct from a formal release clause, and the distinction matters because the two have been conflated in much of the coverage. Club sources told TeamTalk that no release clauses exist for Haaland or anyone else in the squad, and that no recognised first-team player has a relegation release clause either.
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City’s public line is that there is no panic in the dressing room and no reason for anyone to consider their future on the back of a possible points deduction. Nothing in Gilroy’s argument changes that in practice. Trust-and-confidence claims are rarely tested in a sporting context because clubs have strong incentives to settle quietly, players have stronger incentives to secure a move rather than start a legal fight, and the legal threshold for a material breach is a high one to clear.
An independent commission ruled on 29 September that City had broken Premier League financial rules across the 2009/10 to 2017/18 seasons, upholding 114 of the 115 charges. The club has until Friday 2 October to lodge an appeal and has said it will use that right. A separate hearing on sanctions, which could range from a fine to a points deduction to expulsion from the division, has yet to be scheduled.
