Gary Neville says Man City verdict has 'dragged Premier League through the MUD' and warns England's top flight could suffer same fate as Italy's Serie A

The Premier League is being 'dragged through the mud', with Man City's guilty verdict damaging the top flight's image around the world, says Gary Neville. 

This week's bombshell verdict finding City guilty on almost all charges, benefiting from £900million sham deals and revealing the extraordinary scale of their cheating has sent shockwaves through the sport and wider society. 

Neville thinks the reputational damage to what he calls the 'country's biggest export' could be long-lasting. 

He fears a similar decline experienced by Serie A in the wake of the Calciopoli scandal – the 2006 saga exposing how Italian clubs influenced referees, leading to Juventus being stripped of titles and relegated to Serie B. 

Speaking on the latest Stick to Football podcast, he reflected: 'I'm chilled, this is chilling not celebratory. I support Manchester United, you support Liverpool, you were Arsenal. It is chilling to listen to this. 

'The Italian game has suffered immeasurably in the last 25 years. We played against Juventus, we've alluded to this before, we felt at the time this wasn't right and the Italian... I'm not saying that's going to happen to the Premier League but we always think that we've got an enormous integrity the Premier League, that we are the sort of league that sets the standard and it's other leagues that have got corruption, fraud, doping scandals, match fixing, referee scandals.