IAN HERBERT: Grubby emails, an army of lawyers and a flagrant contempt for rules... When will Man City take a long, hard look at themselves and realise how deeply unattractive they've become?

The club provided a mere 79-word response to the Premier League’s announcement that it was charging them with 100 breaches of its rules. Yet they actually had the temerity to claim they had provided ‘extensive engagement’ and a ‘vast amount of detailed materials’ to those investigating their conduct.

That was laughable. So impossible has it been to extract the necessary documents, that the Premier League was forced to go to court last year and launch an arbitration process to get them. City employed barristers to challenge that process, arguing that the arbitrators would be biased against them.