They let it get out of hand and now it’s too big to ignore.

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You can tell that the thinking early on was that City would just be one more club in the title mix and it might make the league better to have more teams fighting over the title. The hope was clearly that this problem would never arise because the imbalance would never become so pronounced.

This was a very dumb idea. It was obvious that a country would dominate in a league of football clubs. It’s hilarious to me that anybody for a moment thought they wouldn’t. Your favourite sports franchise, your favourite movie studio, your favourite billionaire weirdo - not as powerful as a nation state. Not even close. And that’s vastly more true when it’s a despotic oil state.

‘We’ve got a good crop of youngsters in our academy’ versus ‘They’ve got an Air Force an a seat on the UN’.

‘Our owner got a letter of apology from the PGMOL because of an offside goal given against us’ versus ‘Our owner had eighty people executed today*’.

The nation state owners need to go. And the Premier League is going to have to bite the bullet and deal with the City problem. They should probably also deal with Newcastle before that becomes a problem.

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*That was the Saudis, and it was more than eighty. The point is the imbalance.