The Man City scandal is the biggest in sporting history – but is it a good day for football?

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As all of the continent’s biggest clubs gathered in Copenhagen, their executives couldn’t help trying to catch a glimpse of one man. Ferran Soriano, in his usual role representing Manchester City at the European Football Clubs general assembly, was described as looking like “a walking statue”.

Some counterparts even felt that he was repeatedly putting headphones in his ear to appear to be on the phone, so he wouldn’t have to engage in awkward conversation.

Whether true or not, Soriano had arguably said enough. While the rest of the world was by then poring over the Premier League independent commission’s excoriating decision in the City case, the club had issued a video to staff in response. It somehow went even further than the official statement, which had remarkably described the panel’s “opinion” as “unsafe”.

Soriano referred to “a conspiracy theory” while insisting City will “take all necessary action to protect the club and seek compensation from any party that tries to damage it now”.

Many executives noted that the Catalan wasn’t blinking, as they themselves could barely lower their own eyebrows.

Sources also state that, despite this attempt at reassurance, many staff were “perplexed” by the video.

It isn’t hard to see why. The aggression of this response, after the emphatic nature of the Premier League’s decision, seemed too extreme a digression from English sporting culture. This feels too far.

Even on social media, it was evident that many fans were properly angry at the ownership for the first time. It was as if this was tapping into something deeper.

The club’s name was being blackened, toxified.

One description of the response was already doing the rounds in football circles. It wasn’t “defiant”, as City might have imagined, but “deluded”. There didn’t even seem to be the same fear of City’s immense legal might.

Was it really £100m worth of fees for… this?

When will the irrefutability of the comprehensive body of evidence become apparent? If it hasn’t been presented, it is going to take exceptional circumstances to introduce it to any appeal.

Of course, that might be precisely when such legal might become apparent. There does remain the possibility that this is overturned, that City’s lawyers outline a problem with the process. Maybe an appeal to the High Court even brings the farce of a retrial.

City might well shove talk of “delusion” down people’s throats. Except, will anyone actually swallow it?

If City end up overturning another case on the basis of process or a technicality, as with the 2020 Uefa case, rather than the strength of the evidence, it will change very few minds.

This has been too comprehensive. It also marks another major difference from the Uefa case, since the decision has actually been published.

Everyone can see what appears to be evidence of industrialised cheating. Maybe the most sophisticated system of industrialised cheating football has ever seen.

That is why, given the sport’s unique global popularity, this could well be the biggest ever sporting scandal. Half of the Premier League’s history is open to revision, like the Tour de France. Even in football terms, it feels like the only comparison is the Qatar/Russia World Cup bidding scandal.

This, of course, has the same geopolitical dimensions, given the stakes for Abu Dhabi.

The manner in which City’s playbook is an extension of their owners’ – and how the state responded to issues like the defiance of arms embargoes in Yemen and Syria – should not be forgotten. The sense now, as intimated in the leaked emails that sparked all of this, is that they would be willing to bring the whole Premier League down if they cannot play in it in the manner they like.

Or, as City lawyer Simon Cliff once said of Uefa, the risk of “the destruction of their rules and organisations”.

It does at this point look like what the owners are often described as: spoiled royalty, too accustomed to absolute power.

If this appeal does go on for years, as Soriano also said this week, it would make a joke of the Premier League. No City game, after this outcome, could take place in anything like a normal football setting. There’d be a cloud of uncertainty over everything, the belief in the final result on which sport is dependent totally distorted.

Would the ownership or club leadership care… even to a small extent?

It is as you arrive at such questions that it is impossible not to wonder how absurd it is that we are even at this point; that football let interests like an autocratic state in; that a mere sport – popular as it is – is wrestling with powers way beyond itself.

This may not just be a reckoning for this iteration of City, then, but also a reckoning for an entire era of football and the Premier League. It is an inevitable end-point for former chief executive Richard Scudamore’s regulation-light, ownership-model-neutral stance.

Existential problems were allowed to go so deep that they were eventually going to burst out.

This was always the great threat, that those figures more mindful of the game’s responsibility and integrity always warned of.

But can it actually go on?

For all the residual fear of Abu Dhabi’s might, the threats that they can wield with real geopolitical edge, there is also a sense this is actually too much.

The situation already has echoes of Enron, or News of the World; that this is all too toxic.

Put bluntly, City’s name has been sullied for a generation. A club is always separate from the owners, but they have been dragged down.

For all that fans have revelled in glory, and even acted with hostility to anyone criticising the ownership, City are victims of this too.

Was all that glory, tainted as it now is, worth this?

It is almost like a grotesquely caricatured version of the old “typical City”, that the club will somehow see something go wrong. Here, they’ve gone from a position of unparalleled power at the peak of the game to this, an emotional nadir and so much uncertainty.

Might the ownership decide to sell? As one geopolitical expert says, “The one thing that Gulf autocracies like Abu Dhabi won’t accept is embarrassment or shame. But will they use up political capital to preserve City when so much else is at stake? They already lean heavily on the UK to ensure they evade accountability in Sudan.”

Might the independent football regulator look at the scale of this and decide that this is as rogue an owner as you can get, and force a sale?

And, from all that, there’s another question.

Is this a good day for football or a bad one? Maybe it’s both. Maybe the club ending up owned by a fan trust is one virtuous outcome. As a football scandal, though, this is all on its own.