There is potentially a future Premier League in which there are no financial controls – without any limit on spending, without any regulation of the size of commercial deals negotiated with entities under the same ownership – and the demolition of the current system by Manchester City’s legal challenges is certainly doing its best to hasten us there.

Both City and the Premier League claimed a victory after October’s initial ruling that found three aspects of the APTs were unlawful, most notably around the deliberate exclusion of shareholder loans, which is when a club borrows money from its ownership group, usually interest-free.