And now it's official: according to the Premier League's three-person independent commission, Manchester City have been found guilty of inflated revenues and lowered costs through "sham" sponsorship deals, self-dealing image rights contracts with phony companies and off-the-books payments. This inflated reporting enabled them to disguise more than £900 million as legitimate commercial revenue over a nine-year period when, in fact, it was nothing more than the owner, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), dipping into the family coffers.

In so doing, they severely breached the Financial Sustainability rules laid out by the Premier League and UEFA -- regulations they publicly endorsed and claimed to support. Along the way, among the 100+ charges they were also found guilty of false accounting, failing to cooperate with investigators and failing to "act in the utmost good faith." All in all, a breathtaking set of findings.

After Friday's news that City had been found guilty had broken, but was not yet official, City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak issued a statement Saturday saying "our confidence and intent in proving the club's innocence is just as strong as when this began." He also made reference to "irrefutable evidence," which felt odd when he knew it had been refuted just 48 hours earlier by the independent commission.

What was new was some of their arguments. Most striking, perhaps, is how they justified the fact that between 2009-10 and 2017-18, they claimed to have received some £949.94 million in commercial revenue from Abu Dhabi sponsors, but only £119.25m was actually paid by the partners themselves. The rest came from ADUG.