“I know what I saw. And I know how I felt.” This was Noel Gallagher’s poetic response to the news that his club, my club – the club that we’d followed over land, sea and air for decades, who we’d seen experience the lowest of lows and the highest of highs – had been found guilty by an independent panel of cheating on an industrial scale.

Manchester City resolutely denies the charge that, over nine seasons, it had committed 114 breaches of the Premier League’s Financial Fair Play regulations. Nevertheless, Noel, I’m afraid it may well turn out that we didn’t know what we were seeing.

No one can take away the joy we experienced in winning the eight trophies we claimed in that period – the exhilaration, the exultation, the elation we felt in the moment of Sergio Aguero’s injury-time goal to win our first Premier League title in 2012, or Yaya Toure’s winner in the FA Cup final the year before, or countless other triumphs, small and large. We know how we felt, alright. And it felt good.

These victories were the first, meaningful steps that turned the club – once a music-hall joke and a byword for failure – into a powerhouse of world football, jet-propelled by the financial resources of its owners, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. Again, no one can gainsay the ecstasy of that night in Istanbul in 2023, when we won the Champions League, and, at the........

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