Football, Fintech and a Trillion in Trade: British Consul General on Why It’s Vital to Safeguard the ‘Special Relationship’ 

When British Consul General Rachel Galloway was first posted in Washington, her origins in Manchester were of little interest to the average American.

Two decades later, heading up the British consulate in the Southeast, taxi drivers in the U.S. have begun asking the same question she faced everywhere else in the world: Man City or Manchester United?

“You just can’t avoid it, and I’ve been known to say ‘London,’ just so I can avoid the conversation,” Ms. Galloway said during Global Atlanta’s late-January Consular Conversations luncheon, sponsored by Miller & Martin PLLC and hosted by the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. (In this critical matter, the even-handed diplomat didn’t hesitate to pick sides: It’s Man City, she says.) 

While it’s not the only change she’s observed in 20 years, the anecdote illustrates how the U.S. and United Kingdom, longtime trade partners can evolve to find common ground — adaptability the allies need perhaps more than ever amid today’s complex geopolitical landscape. 

What has struck Ms. Galloway is not only the growth of Major League Soccer or the hype ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, indicators of the trend, but also the appetite for soccer’s biggest leagues to the South as an entree into the massive American market.

That was clear when Ms. Galloway a contest between Manchester United and Liverpool FC at the University of South Carolina, a middling performer in college football’s Southeastern Conference whose stadium holds more fans than either global soccer franchise. 

“We can’t comprehend college football — just the amounts of money, the power of it in the region — but again, it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to work together.” 

Ms. Galloway and her team have had a front-row seat to soccer’s wild ride here since her arrival in 2022, with the Premier League Summer Series descending on Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., and the emergence of NBC Fan Zones in places like Nashville. 

“The Premier League absolutely love coming to Atlanta. It’s such a great sports environment. It’s such a great sports city. There’s such enthusiasm. There’s such interest,” she said. “Nobody likes to talk about public transport here, but there’s a train from the airport to the stadium. These things really matter.”

Now, Scotland’s team is eyeing a base in North Carolina for the World Cup, while England sees a chance to come to Atlanta after the group stage (at least, Ms. Galloway hopes, for the semifinal that will cap off eight matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium). 

All this publicity translates into tangible activity — and not just in sports tech companies like Hawk-Eye, a British firm with a Midtown office providing broadcasters with reply and ball tracking tech, or TeamSportz, an AI platform for youth basketball that recently entered the U.S., Ms. Galloway said. 

“We just see it as a fantastic opportunity. It’s a great soft-power win for the U.K. when our teams come here and everyone is interested, but it’s also a fantastic business opportunity,” she said.

Just after her interview, London & Partners announced its latest technology delegation set to touch down in Atlanta March 9-10, seeking insight and connections in their bids to go global through Georgia. (Learn more here and apply to join the reception here) 

Preaching (Shared) Prosperity 

All this goodwill comes at a time of uncertainty in the so-called Special Relationship. While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the first world leader to secure tariff relief from President Donald Trump, their resulting trade deal, known as the Economic Prosperity Deal, has yet to be fully implemented. 

Still, Ms. Galloway said, the quick action in May 2025 in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, “saved jobs” on both sides of the Atlantic. 

On cars and beef, for instance, the U.K. was able to secure a tariff reduction to 10 percent on quotas covering basically the level of existing trade. On steel, the British side says the tariffs were eliminated, while a June memo from the U.S. side said the two were still ironing out the technicalities. 

Either way, it was a major step in calming the waters.

“There were companies that would have gone down within weeks without being able to make that work,” Ms. Galloway said. “It’s a trillion-dollar trade relationship between the U.K. and the U.S. You know, we need to make it work.”

In September, around Mr. Trump completed a historic second state visit to the U.K., the two sides hammered out the Technology Prosperity Deal, which secured 150 billion pounds in commitments from U.S. firms, the bulk of it coming from financial giant Blackstone, but also landmark announcements from Microsoft ($30 billion), Google ($6.8 billion) and many other firms. American chip giant Nvidia said it would deploy 120,000 GPUs in the U.K. and parnter with OpenAI and Nscale, a British company, on Stargate U.K. See the US fact sheet | See the UK fact sheet

U.K. firms also pledged to make key investments in the U.S. in strategic sectors like nuclear energy (new reactors and fusion plans), quantum computing and pharmaceuticals.

Some governmental aspects of the deal were reportedly stalled in December, but those areas where clarity exists are seeing activity, said Ms. Galloway, and private investments go on unimpeded. 

Nuclear energy is a good example of an area where work continues apace, she said.

“We took a whole delegation from this region with people from Georgia — utility companies, politicians, the Public Service Commission — to the U.K. in the fall to talk about how we can cooperate,” Ms. Galloway said. 

U.K. officials, she said, are waking up to the opportunity in the Southeast U.S., in part thanks to lobbying up the chain from the consulate to the embassy in Washington and beyond.  

“They don’t know what’s happening with Oak Ridge (National Laboratory). They don’t know about (Plant) Vogtle,” she said. “There is just going to be so much opportunity in this area to work together, and the barriers that have previously existed in this industry have been lifted.”

Similar discussions are being held between the U.K. and Southern counterparts on securing supply chains for critical minerals. 

Of course, the two countries won’t see eye-to-eye on everything: The U.K. has pushed ahead with state-level agreements on wind energy with North Carolina and California even as the Trump administration has called the technology a “loser” and downplayed climate change.

For Ms. Galloway, this is an invitation to look beyond the headlines at the substance of the relationship. 

“I’m not going to sit here and pretend that in this current international environment, the trade environment, is smooth, but we as the U.K. are just continuing to negotiate issue by issue, item by item, and we’re doing it on the basis of what companies like yours and companies in Georgia, in the region, tell us that they need,” she told an audience of about 100 guests in Gwinnett, including some British investors like Moneypenny, JCB and Sage.

These deals, of course, come as the U.K. continues to pursue its own Modern Industrial Strategy, unveiled in December 2025 with detailed plans of action for eight high-growth sectors, including creative industries, clean energy, defense, financial services, life sciences and more. See the plan here

“The areas aren’t a surprise, but they’re about how we’re driving investment into the U.K., how we’re building the right skills that we need, and these deals are part of it,” she said. 

“Why did Google, Nvidia, Sage, who are in the room, announce these big investments in both directions in September?” she said. “Because they see the opportunity — the fact that the U.K. is the largest tech industry, after the U.S. and China, is startling, when you think about the size. Foreign investment into the U.K. in just tech is larger than the next three European countries added together, so we are seeing success, but we want to be doing it with one of our biggest allies and someone whose industry is interlinked with us.”

Foreign investment into the U.K., in just tech, is larger than the next three European countries added together.

british consul general rachel galloway

The Need for NATO

Despite all the efforts to link their economies, Mr. Trump gave a stark reminder in January that business is not carrying on as usual in the trans-Atlantic alliance. 

While he finally ruled out the use of force to take Greenland during a combative Davos speech, in an interview the president downplayed the sacrifices United Kingdom troops in prior U.S. conflicts. 

For many, the assertion was particularly galling given that the U.S. is the only ally ever to have invoked NATO’s Article 5, the stipulation that renders an attack on one as an attack on all members, after the 9/11 attacks. 

Ms. Galloway has a bit of perspective on this, to say the least: She was posted in the U.S. just after the terror attacks, and she would later join be sent to wartime Afghanistan as the British government’s civilian representative in Helmand province, where her car was blown up by suicide bomber. Thankfully, she was unscathed, and she went on to work on counterterrorism and other issues in North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring, eventually becoming the U.K.’s Middle East negotiator at the EU in Brussels (pre-Brexit, of course).

Fast forward a few years, and she became ambassador to North Macedonia, a country that was in the process of joining NATO. 

“They became the 30th member of NATO. We thought they’d be the last for considerable amounts of time, and then the world shifted again,” she said, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

North Macedonians felt exponentially more secure, and not only that, but they exuded pride that Sweden and Finland wanted to join “our organization,” as they now called it. 

In a region where the threat is so close, both geographically and historically, it’s hard to not to see the importance of what Ms. Galloway called “the most successful alliance in history.” She remembers a conversation with one Eastern European interlocutor who recalled his own conscription into the Soviet army.

“It really, really meant something to them,” she said, noting that while Mr. Trump had a point in calling out NATO partners’ failure to meet defense spending obligations during his first term, it was “damaging” to relations to criticize troops that shed blood alongside Americans. Just a few days before Ms. Galloway’s talk, in what looked like an effort to smooth over the uproar, Mr. Trump took to social media to praise “brave” British troops who fought with the U.S.

“We have weeks with a lot of noise, not just created by newspaper headlines, but created by actions,” Ms. Galloway said. “But I believe that it is in the greater interest of the international community and the West for NATO to survive and continue to be this incredibly strong and successful organization. And that’s what we’re working towards, and we’ll continue working towards it.” 

Much like she never envisioned the U.S. embracing soccer, Ms. Galloway never believed she’d have to defend NATO here — more evidence of the need for diplomatic dexterity in a less-than-predictable world. 

• Learn more about the British Consulate General here.