If you hadn’t got round to reading the independent commission’s 40-page report just yet, here are the headlines. From 2009 to 2018, Manchester City cheated, repeatedly and systematically, cooking the books to the tune of £900m. Abu Dhabi pumped money into the club in the form of “sham” sponsorship agreements to artificially inflate revenues. Club officials disguised payments to hide spending. They submitted false accounts, concealed the truth and lied to investigators.

During the nine-year period, City’s revenues swelled from £87m to £500m, an increase of 475%. By comparison, Arsenal’s revenues grew 73% and Manchester United’s grew 112%. It enabled City to transform from the Premier League’s middle reaches to assembling a world-class squad of players paid more than Real Madrid. Sergio Aguero, scorer of perhaps the most famous goal in Premier League history, earned around £16m a year.

Evidently, City didn’t much like the rules. They weren’t perfect, but they were agreed by all the clubs not only to align with Uefa but to encourage sensible spending, establish fairer competition, prevent hyperinflation of wages and stop clubs doing exactly what City did when they stripped rivals like Arsenal and Aston Villa of their best players, distorting the game into an even more extreme battle of financial muscle. City signed up to the rules, then deliberately broke them.

To use just one example from the commission’s report, take image rights. City set up a company called Fordham Sports Image Rights Ltd, which was “little more than a front for Abu Dhabi United Group”, the private equity company of City owner Sheikh Mansour. Fordham bought image rights from City for £24.5m, a hugely inflated fee against the market, which the club booked as revenue. Incredibly, City also used the Fordham vehicle to buy licences to sell the rights in the first place, so that they could be sold to… Fordham.

The commission wrote: “The closed-circle arrangement … was thus a) A further device by which ADUG funds could be paid into the Club in a manner that concealed their true origin, and which enabled the Club to pretend that such funds represented operating income in its financial statements and FFP returns, and b) A device by which ADUG funds were to be used to meet what were in reality Club liabilities, enabling the Club to remove operating expenses from its financial statements and FFP returns.”

Perhaps just as breathtaking as City’s cheating has been their response. Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak strongly reiterated their innocence in a letter to fans . CEO Ferran Soriano told staff, during a bizarre video in which he didn’t blink for three minutes, that City are the subject of a “conspiracy” and would fight on. “I know this can be a bit of a distraction,” he told them, while Rome burned around him.

Statements from the club remain strangely defiant, despite the tranche of evidence and guilty verdicts that have now been made public. The club seems paranoid and unhinged from reality, and if this was someone you knew you’d stage an intervention. Manipulation, lying, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, a grandiose sense of self-worth: these characteristics were famously listed by the Canadian forensic psychologist Dr Robert Hare as the traits of a psychopath.

City will now appeal. They still insist they retain “a body of irrefutable evidence”, even though their evidence has been entirely refuted by an independent panel. They will be dogged to the very end, and as if we needed proof, there was even the detail that City tried to stop this report being published and that the commission had to go through an appeal process to do so.