All in all, not a successful strategy but the club will be playing it again with their appeal in their epic case against the Premier League. City’s argument will be that the vast fees at the heart of this cheating case – the “sham contracts” worth £830m – were not money backchannelled into the club by the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) via inflated commercial deals. Instead, they were top-ups provided by the Abu Dhabi government in order that the Abu Dhabi brands and companies could meet the liabilities for purportedly legitimate commercial deals agreed with City. Deals agreed at levels, the club’s counsel appears to have argued, that these would-be sponsors seemingly could not afford to pay.