>Manchester City again abrasively drive on amidst it all, absolutely revelling in a 3-0 win at Liverpool, but nobody knows what it will actually mean.

>Few, outside the City fans in the relished moments of celebration, even know what to feel.

>It does highlight the very absurdity of the situation, as the Abu Dhabi-owned club get to have this act of defiance, and the rest of the league gets even more furious about it all.

>City fans, for their part, also got to feel something “real” after the uncertainty over the past two weeks. Liverpool, like everyone else, are waiting for a clarity that now seems essential for this very season.

>It was why the main impression from this game should not be regarding City’s “brilliance”. Really, after two weeks of build-up and debate about the Premier League “brand”, we saw the real damage. This immediately felt untenable.

>It only emphasises the need for this process to be concluded and - above all - why the sanctions should have been announced with the decision.

>That would also add more of an incentive for both sides on the appeals process.

>This is otherwise a farce for the Premier League, a bizarre unreality.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he will release details of his meetings with senior figures at Manchester City following criticism of his comments in the wake of the club being found guilty of all charges related to breaches of the Premier League's financial rules.

An independent commission found City had broken rules over a nine-year period between 2009 and 2018 by creating "sham" contracts with commercial partners to secretly funnel more than £830m into their football operations.

Burnham's previous role as mayor of Greater Manchester has led to questions about his relationship with City's Abu Dhabi ownership, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch demanding No 10 release all details of meetings between the prime minister and senior figures at the club.

"I've been asked by the leader of the opposition to publish details of my meetings, which I'm happy to do and I'm going to," Burnham told the Rest is Politics podcast.

"I will quite clearly put out there everything that I have done working with them in my previous role as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

"None of it is recent, actually, in terms of the meetings I had. I only had one significant meeting, actually, and that was in 2021."

The prime minister initially told the BBC he would be "really concerned" if Manchester City's owners decide to sell up following the guilty verdict before later denying his reaction had "downplayed the seriousness of the findings".

However, some Premier League clubs were so "astonished" by Burnham's stance that sources told BBC Sport they were "concerned" about political interference in the appeal process.

Sanctions are yet to be announced and City have lodged an appeal against the verdict.

t's 2020 and I’m sitting in a plastic chair in a flowerbed at the window of a ground-floor room at a locked-down hospice during the first wave of the Covid pandemic.

Behind that window, paralysed in a hospital bed due to terminal brain cancer, is my wife Helen, just turned 47, and indomitably cheerful despite everything. My phone rings and I can see it’s one of the senior sports desk editors at Associated Newspapers, where I worked at the time for The Mail on Sunday as an investigative sports journalist probing, among other things, Manchester City's financial affairs.

I take the call.

'Hello mate,' he says. 'Are you aware that your home address has just been posted on Twitter by a Manchester City fan, making threats?'

'Erm, no, I haven’t seen that,' I say. 'I’m visiting Helen.'

'We think we should help you get that removed,' he says, adding it is a duty of care issue for the paper. 'And maybe you should flag it up to the police.'

He then says he has asked a senior executive within the newspaper group to make contact with a liaison person at Twitter; this was in the pre-Musk era.

I’d already had six years of regular abuse from City fan pile-ons each time I’d written an article that suggested things didn’t appear to be quite legitimate in a financial sense at their club.

But publishing my home address and encouraging City fans to attack me? This was an escalation.

Within a few hours I’d been assigned a Twitter 'protection officer' who had the ability to suspend the account of anyone who made threats against me within minutes of those landing. She remained my contact person for months as the person making the threats was blocked... then started a new account within minutes, was blocked again... and started a new account within minutes...and on and on.

Did this affect me? Of course.

'At the most traumatic point of my life, with my wife dying and worrying about our two teenage girls, my professional life was potentially endangering us all. When Helen died in December 2020, there was a surreal sense of relief that at least the worst elements of City’s fanbase could no longer torment me over her illness'

But then, in summer 2021, my investigations into City found that they were in a toxic legal conflict with the Premier League over City’s cheating, with both parties seeking legal guarantees that this issue could not be reported.

The Mail on Sunday hired a QC to work on my behalf to argue for an 'open justice' ruling that we, as a free press, should be able to report to the public the basic details that City and the Premier League were still at legal loggerheads. We won, and my story was on the back page of the paper.

At every turn during this process and indeed during all my investigations into City's financial affairs, the club have fought ugly. Their tactics have ranged from ignoring my requests for guidance on a story to accusations of me 'having an agenda', to legal threats to intimidation.

I have long had cordial relationships with City, back to the Kevin Keegan era at Maine Road. I have mates who are City supporters and we can cordially agree to disagree on City's financial affairs.

I have friends who've worked for the club, and some who still do. Years ago I was even invited as Khaldoon's guest to the VIP lounge at the Etihad for game against Norwich. But after 2014 and City's questionable behaviour became obvious via their first punishment, some relationships between me and a few key people at City were fractured, then destroyed. I find that immensely regrettable but I have also felt compelled to write what I can prove.

As for the fans, within hours of my back page story there were messages and posts (just a few but vile) on the most popular City internet forum and social media that I had deserved for Helen to die because of my reporting on City.

What does that do to you? I’m not a psychologist, and all things considered I think I’ve done fairly well since Helen died. But let’s say the result is nothing good.

....

Many City fans have, in recent days, finally come to the dumbstruck realisation that their club’s hierarchy almost certainly did perpetrate a massive fraud for more than a decade. Others remain stuck in the mindset that the war is not over, just as Hiroo Onoda didn’t think the Second World War wasn’t over.

You know who he was, even if you don’t know who he was. He was the Japanese soldier who never believed the Second World War had finished and stayed in the Philippines jungles for 29 years after the war, until 1974, still believing that the 1945 war end was a hoax.

There are many City fans, certainly a sizeable minority, who still have the Onoda mentality that they are innocent and that the war with football’s authorities will end in their success.

My own take is that the fans’ view is influenced from the top, from a plutocracy (a regime where all their power is derived from wealth) where Sheikh Mansour is key and all his lieutenants are key.