When it eventually dropped, it was almost subdued, as events of such magnitude often are; the bang before the sound wave . On Thursday 24 September, the Premier League clubs were given a very short statement informing them that all but one charge in the Manchester City case had been proven. Even that was subject to a stringent NDA.

Cue, the very next afternoon, more noise than English football has ever experienced about anything.

Amidst all of that, and so many questions, right up to what Pep Guardiola was now thinking, a figure even more central to all of this publicly quoted the former Man City manager.

Rui Pinto, as part of a much longer social media post that heralded a “historic decision for English football”, acknowledged an irony in how he couldn’t help remembering Guardiola’s words at his first City press conference.

“Fasten your seat belts,” remarked Guardiola in 2016.

It’s easy to forget, given how long it’s been, but all of football has been braced for this since Der Spiegel ’s publication of those first emails – obtained from Pinto’s huge data cache – in November 2018. If City’s success from that period has deepened an argument that Guardiola is one of football’s most influential ever figures, that is also a description that can be extended to the Portuguese hacker, but for very different reasons.

The road from there to here forms the biggest controversy in the history of European football, involving so many layers, while also offering potential clues as to what next in this long way to go.

Back in November 2018, amid shock at some of the views relayed, including “of course, we can do what we want,” there was a dawning realisation of what the emails appeared to reveal: alleged manipulation of finances through backdated and inflated sponsorship deals with companies related to the Abu Dhabi owners, to avoid breaches of rules. Equity had seemed to be disguised as sponsorship. Investigators for a previous Uefa case that City were forced to settle in 2014 were “incredibly frustrated”. They felt they had been misled.