MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - MAY 24: Fans of Manchester City during the Premier League match between Manchester City and Aston Villa at Etihad Stadium on May 24, 2026 in Manchester, United Kingdom. (Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images)
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MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - MAY 24: Fans of Manchester City during the Premier League match between Manchester City and Aston Villa at Etihad Stadium on May 24, 2026 in Manchester, United Kingdom. (Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images)
All told, there were better weeks from a Manchester City perspective to be facing their biggest rivals from the past decade.
The head-spinning implications of Man City being found guilty on all 80 charges of financial wrongdoing, as well as on 34 of the 35 charges of failing to co-operate with the investigation, are still being digested by all and sundry.
Given that Everton were hit with a 10-point deduction (reduced to six on appeal) for a single, solitary breach of the league's Profitability and Sustainability Rules, the consensus is naturally that Manchester City are, in the words of Father Dick Byrne, due an extra-special forfeit.
It seems likely that they're set for an enormous points deduction, something akin to the number of years in Bernie Madoff's prison sentence. A number so large that even if Erling Haaland scored a hat-trick in every game for the rest of the season, they still wouldn't even finish above Spurs.
Perhaps more intriguing is the question, 'what happens to the titles already won?'
Roy Keane has already advised the City players who racked up medals by the boatload over the past decade and a half to toss them all in the bin. He forsook Michael Sheen's 'Cloughie' voice while delivering this line.
Keane, in his own concise method, made it clear that's what he'd do.
The City players in question might regard that as a preferable outcome to the one urged by the likes of Paul Scholes and Rio Ferdinand - which is, essentially, to hand them over.
While opinion is divided, this is the view of many rival players who missed out on (more) silverware between the years of 2012 and 2024.
Paul Scholes wants the medal denied to him by the Sergio Aguero winner in 2012
That all these league championships from the 2010s and early 2020s should be formally reassigned. Like a poll-topping TD's massive surplus, Man City's trophy haul should now be distributed to the second preferences.
Perhaps - similar to when Rob Heffernan was presented with his Olympic bronze medal in Cork City Hall four years later - there'll be retrospective medal ceremony evenings littering the social calendar in Manchester and Liverpool and north London over the winter months. Probably all streamed live on The Overlap Youtube channel.
Wayne Rooney this week expressed some misgivings about he and his Man United compadres from the 2011-12 squad being awarded another title 14 years later. But Scholes is having none of it.
Thanks to the 'Ageuroooo' moment, Scholesy has had to content himself with just 11 Premier League medals. He's made clear on Instagram that he now wants his 12th.
"Keep hearing ex-teammates saying they want trophies taking off [City] but they don't want their medals… f*** that, I'm a greedy b****** I want my medal," Scholes wrote.
On Talksport, the ever-loquacious Simon Jordan and his sidekick Martin Keown criticised this attitude, with Keown saying that the Premier League titles from those years should simply be 'voided', like the Tour de France in the Armstrong years.
Scholes's considered response to this proposal was "Do one."
The notion that Jose Mourinho might retrospectively be crowned a Premier League winning manager at Manchester United - he would be only the fourth in their history, with Ole the fifth - is certainly one of the funniest potential outcomes here.
Mourinho has, for several years, been insisting that finishing runners-up with Man United in 2017-18 was one of his greatest managerial feats.
Given that they finished closer to Arsenal in sixth than they did to the winners, this was generally assumed to be puffed-up nonsense from a manager vainly trying to contend that his best days weren't a long ways behind him.
It was also read as a commentary on how chaotic the club were that he was able to drag them up to second place, albeit a very distant second place.
But now this claim has to be reinterpreted as an ingenious piece of tactical propaganda in anticipation of this exact outcome.
The Portuguese maestro was playing the longest of long games with this rhetoric. So that one day in the future when City were finally brought to book for their epic financial misdemeanours, he had already implanted in people's heads the idea that the runners-up were in fact the real winners.
Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola on the sideline during a Manchester derby
Alongside this, the formal reassigning of titles to the next best team would mean that Brendan Rodgers becomes only the second English league winning manager from this island after Bob Kyle with Sunderland in 1912-13.
And Steven Gerrard belatedly becomes a Premier League champion at the age of 46, his infamous slip against Chelsea relegated to an amusing but inconsequential footnote.
Man City's hierarchy, of course, have come out swinging on this and are willing to use the various levers at their disposal.
One reason why many casual observers were surprised at the guilty verdicts was due to the legal firepower that City were understood to have brought to bear on the process.
They had, it was said, assembled the most expensive and intimidating legal team known to man in order to bamboozle and frighten the commission into doubting the reams of evidence before them.
Inevitably, the club have lodged an appeal, asserting that a "comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all its positions."
Whatever about the legal battle, they have some serious political heft to deploy.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham's first public statement on the matter was to express concern that City's Abu Dhabi owners might up sticks and take their money elsewhere. He also heaped praise on the City owners for their role in "the building of modern Manchester".
Burnham stressed that he wouldn't intervene in the Premier League disciplinary process other than to note that City contest the outcome and that his own club, Everton, hadn't been treated fairly under the same rules.
Bloomberg reported that Emirati officials have let it be known that the Premier League actions would "have an influence on the bilateral state relationship" between Britain and the UAE. In other words, all that sweet foreign investment may cease.
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 5: Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of Manchester City and Ferran Soriano, CEO of Manchester City during the Premier League 2026/27 match between Manchester City and Coventry City at Etihad Stadium on September 5, 2026 in Manchester, United Kingdom. (Photo by Robbie Jay
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 5: Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of Manchester City and Ferran Soriano, CEO of Manchester City during the Premier League 2026/27 match between Manchester City and Coventry City at Etihad Stadium on September 5, 2026 in Manchester, United Kingdom. (Photo by Robbie Jay
That Burnham was willing to volunteer such a politically unpopular stance - not something politicians are inclined to do if they can help it - is probably an indication of the broader forces swirling in the background.
In Ireland, we know that FDI can be a constraining factor on certain political impulses. This saga has still plenty of time to run and with implications far beyond football.
Man City fans have been strangely quiet since the verdict, as if dumbstruck by it all. One well-worn argument is that the FFP and PSR rules are unfair from the start, introduced at the behest of the traditionally successful clubs, who were keen to prevent 'new money' upstarts from disturbing their hegemony.
This is a reasonable argument, though beside the point in the sense that those rules were introduced and were adhered to by the vast majority of clubs. Witness poor old Aston Villa recently having to weaken their over-performing squad to comply with the regulations.
What of Man City supporters over here? They're a demographic that skews very young for obvious reasons. Will the pre-pubescent kids in their sky-blue Haaland jerseys be tossing them all in the bin, as Keano has urged with the medals? City are not going to be much fun to follow in League Two or the National League North.
Of their (relatively few and far between) adult supporters in this country, Michael O'Leary is probably the most famous. He no doubt sees the whole fiasco as another example of over-zealous regulators sticking their oar in where it's not wanted.
For this cohort, it must be a bracing reminder of the old days, except worse. When City were the bedraggled and slightly punkish poor relation.
For them, it must evoke memories of the time Ireland entered an IMF programme in 2010 and it suddenly felt like the whole Celtic Tiger era was a lie.
Once again, their only memory of true, uncomplicated glory is the time of Franny Lee and Mike Summerbee. At least they can't take that one off them.