Betrayal, I always assumed, required intent. Someone decides to act against you, and does.
The Manchester City verdict changed my mind. Guilty on 114 of 115 financial charges. What stayed with me wasn’t the legal detail. It was the stands. The fathers who passed a season ticket down to their kids. The kit staff. The players who gave everything, believing the pitch was level.
Nobody set out to betray them. They simply weren’t part of the calculation.
That’s the version of betrayal I see most often, and not only in football. I see it in boardrooms. A founder takes a shortcut that feels contained: a number massaged, a promise to the team quietly shelved, a sale conversation kept from the people who built the company. It gets framed as a private decision. It isn’t. It lands on people who never got a vote but gave their loyalty anyway.
We see it with the leaders we elect, too. We lend them our belief, and the words we voted for fade into murmurs.
What I keep coming back to is this. Integrity isn’t about the person in the mirror. It’s about the many who are counting on that person, most of whom will never know when the decision was made.
So when I sit with a founder weighing something that seems harmless, I no longer ask who it could hurt.
I ask: who trusted you before they ever met you?
