That, however, is expected to be the only way that this all ends with City's owners selling up. For all the fears that have been raised about Abu Dhabi executives effectively taking their ball and going home, even a City that had been heavily hit by sanctions would be a better business opportunity than trying to repeat the model with a different club.

"A lot of discourse written on Gulf owners of these football clubs, be it PSG or the Emirates, it buys into these small-minded stereotypes of Arab people," explained Ross Griffin, a professor at Qatar University and Middle East Editor for The International Journal of the History of Sport. "One of those stereotypes is that they are petty, impulsive, fragile, egotistical and that is not the case.

"It’s bloody hard to buy a football club, particularly one in the Premier League. If they were to sell up, with the exposure and profile and revenue that a club like City bring, to do it again would cost untold billions - if it was even possible. We’ve seen it with the Saudi model in Newcastle that it’s just not possible any more with PSR after FFP so you can’t just inject hundreds of millions - rightly or wrongly! - to get that success.

"To say that they’d sell up because their egos are bruised, that’s nonsense. They are astute businessmen who will say let’s take our kicking here, take the punishment and come back as strong as ever. If we can stay in the Premier League, win the Champions League that would help us to keep our players and we might be able to get back immediately. I’d be shocked, absolutely shocked if there was any serious talk of them selling up because it wouldn’t make any sense.

"There will be no selling of that club. They may not have the profile yet of Real Madrid, Liverpool or United but if you compare where they are now from Maine Road watching Uwe Rosler and Terry Phelan, it just wouldn’t happen. You don’t give away the golden goose like that. These people are highly trained business men and what they do is make money.

"Deducting points and trophies would hit home more but the City owners I would imagine would be very measured in response. If the appeal doesn’t work, they will take the punishment and rebuild, try and keep the core of the team and rebuild into a very prominent presence in the Premier League."

Such a stance will be easier because of the absence of pressure that City's owners would face closer to home. Any talk of City's cheating being a source of major embarrassment for their owners in the Middle East is overblown, both in the UAE and neighbouring countries.

As previously reported, any private enjoyment that Qatar would take from it would be less than the concern for their ongoing investment in Paris Saint-Germain. When placed in the business that the UAE conducts and the controversy that it has already courted in recent years, this footballing scandal would be a footnote and much bigger issues have not stopped the state from becoming more prominent on the world stage.

"This is damaging, but in some ways the UAE is a Teflon state. And it is a Teflon state because it buys the Teflon," James Dorsey, academic and author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, tells the Manchester Evening News. "How bad this is for the UAE is going to depend on to what degree Britain responds to threats of withdrawing investment.

"Go back a few years where you had the scandal with the company in Switzerland, Alp Services, a Geneva-based company with intelligence and public relations run by a former Swiss intelligence agent. The Emiratis contracted them for millions of dollars to target hundreds of individuals and organisations in Europe that were allegedly fronts to the Muslim Brotherhood.

"You would think that for most countries if they had a scandal like that they would suffer serious damage that would take significant time to repair. It hasn’t done so. Look at the UAE support for the far-right in Europe with Russia or Hungary or whoever. You would see major reputational damage being done - again, it hasn’t done so."

With their reputation unlikely to nosedive whatever the outcome is for City, there will still be value in the investment of the football club. And as well as the global network of clubs that has been created - helping diplomacy and trade - there are also significant ties to Manchester and the Etihad Stadium.

Part of the £300m redevelopment around the North Stand has been about turning the stadium into an entertainment destination all year round, and the owners are also major shareholders in Co-Op Live next to the ground - a premier indoor concert venue that has Harry Styles signed on as an investor and recently hosted an audience with US president Barack Obama.

Coming next year to the same area will be a new venue for Mamma Mia: The Party, an interactive dining experience based on ABBA's music that first launched in London in 2019 and currently stars Peter Andre and Sam Bailey at the O2 Arena. Tickets for that are around £130 and the plans for Manchester are to have 600 seats per show, which would also rake in money.

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As much as City for fans may mean going to the match every Saturday with friends or family or inflatable bananas, those at the club responsible for making money are coming at it from a different perspective. As CEO Ferran Soriano said in 2023, the percentage of UK supporters is less than three per cent of the overall fanbase.

That's why seats in the ground, empty or filled, are a tiny enough part of the commercial possibilities of owning a football club - especially at City where matchday revenue has never been enormous and prices have been frozen - for it not to matter greatly if every game is a sell-out or not. Guilty or not guilty on appeal, unless City's owners are forced out of the club they still have millions of reasons to stay involved.

"The Premier League isn’t just about the guys who show up on the terraces, it is now a global brand. If you were an Emirati owner, you would know that a game where City are playing Liverpool is broadcast everywhere from Hong Kong to Vancouver and there are fans all over the world shouting for City," Griffin tells the Manchester Evening News.

"It’s a very parochial view to still see it as a game that you still go to on a Saturday afternoon and have a few pints. The rest of the world grows up watching it on TV and it is much more in the entertainment sphere. The Premier League is a business, as much as people like to believe in an ideal of sport.

"It’s a spectacle. It’s there to generate profit. I watch NFL fervently and that cottoned on decades ago that this game is a spectacle and a business and you have to treat it like that: business first, sport second. There's a reluctance in British culture to look at football in the same way but other countries are more than happy to look at it in terms of a business model."