Hull City fan Natalie Murphy looks at the claim the Tigers missed out on £99m and wonders whether the final whistle now comes with terms and conditions

If you’re reading this column, the chances are that when you pick up a newspaper, you read it from back to front.

Starting with the latest transfer rumour, injury update or managerial insight, you make your way through the classifieds and maybe even beyond that to where everything that doesn’t involve a whistle is.

Sometimes, though, the dividing line between news and sport can become blurred. That’s why at journalism school, where they teach you things like shorthand, media law and how to develop a bladder strong enough to endure hours standing outside police tape, you have to learn how to cover both.

And, of course, many of the skills and knowledge needed are the same. You can, for example, defame someone in a match report as well as a court report. But when football ends up on the wrong side of the TV listings, it’s rarely because of anything to do with the game itself.

As my journalism tutor, a distinguished sports reporter, used to say, sport is simple. Having started his career in the newsroom, he made the switch to football with great success.

Unlike news, when you’re sent to cover a game, there’s always a clear outcome. There’s no ‘planned’ or ‘hoped’, no ‘may’ or ‘might’, no ‘alleged’ or ‘suspected’. The only qualifiers in most sports reporting are the ones for tournaments.

Make sure you never miss the latest Hull City news and opinion by making Hull Live one of your Google preferred sources.

Admittedly, he didn’t spend any time covering Hull City in the old third division when whole seasons would go by where it seemed like nothing at all happened. But regardless of the standard of play, in sport, whatever trash talking, speculation or hype that goes on before a competition, there is, in the end, a result.

Or is there? A report published this week found Hull City missed out on an estimated £99m because of Man City’s Premier League rule breaches. In what may be the last time they find themselves placed higher in a table than us, only one club – Tottenham – was found to have missed out on more.

There has, and will continue to be, more analysis of what could, would and should have happened over the relevant nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 until the appeal brought by Man City, who deny any wrongdoing, is concluded. Financial fair play has an important place in football. Unfettered spending causes problems at all points of the pyramid. At the top, the competition risks moving from the pitch to the profit margins. At the bottom, the consequences can be such that communities lose the club they have supported for decades.

But neither do I want football to become like F1, with its post-race ratification bore-off of measuring, weighing and checking how much wear there’s been on something called a plank – which doesn’t, apparently, refer to the driver.

What’s next? An asterisk next to the final league standings saying ‘pending financial audit’? If we need to get the likes of KPMG in before we know who’s taken the title then everything really will have gone back to front.