Happy one-year anniversary! How has it been? How do you feel? More, or less, in love? Have you counted down the days? Are you happier, wiser, more centred, like a man in a porridge advert going for a soulful morning run in a sunlit cul-de-sac?

Perhaps, to offer another perspective, you feel so viscerally nauseated at the prospect of leafing through the pre-planned partisan responses to a highly complex piece of legal wrangling there’s a danger your own intestines will liquefy and snort out of your nostrils straight into the toaster. Who knows? Maybe that was the point all along.

Either way, as of this week it is one year since the start of the Manchester City charges tribunal. Remember that old thing? The 115 charges, later upgraded to more than 130. Remember the sense of something urgent and real in train, but which already feels like a period piece, the kind of thing you might see on a clip-based nostalgia show, like Ocean Colour Scene or the Ebola virus?

A year is a long time in tribunal world, not least because if you follow football in any way you are ultimately paying for it. As such that anniversary probably deserves to be marked in some ceremonial sense, like the Torajan tribepeople in Indonesia who exhume their dead every year and dress them in new clothes, have a chat and pose for family photos. Perhaps we should be out there dusting off Lord Dyson or similar, sticking a cigarette between his lips, parading him about in a sedan chair.

Except, the Torajans don’t do this solely out of fondness or love, but also out of fear, reverence for the gods, anxiety over future rice harvests. And this feels about right for the Premier League at the end of its year of vast expense and gruelling mental fatigue, all of it shot through by now with the sense City have already won this process, in more ways than one.

This has by now become something of a joke on the football periphery. Why has it taken so long? The charges relate to financial reporting, employee remuneration and profitability and sustainability regulation. How hard can it be to resolve this?

Actually very hard, and this is normal. As someone with a professional insight into the process of corporate law, there is, to use a technical term, masses of complex bullshit to wade through. One semi-dead case at my old law firm had been going on for eight years, much of that time taken up dusting off files in a south-coast hangar and aggressively ranking local seafood restaurants.

But this is, of course, very far from a joke. By now that basic expanse of time is significant in itself. Time is money. Lots of time is lots of money. It has been estimated the Premier League’s bill for legal expenses over the past five years could be as high as £200m. The Nottingham Forest and Everton stuff has also happened. Chelsea are even now dealing with historical regulatory breaches under the ownership of an oligarch widely viewed as Kremlin-connected that, frankly, nobody could have foreseen and that’s all just fine.

It is also important to state explicitly that there is no evidence Manchester City have used complex litigation tactics to delay and wear down their opponents. Nobody has any cause to say this. There is a word for that tactic which is not, as far as anyone knows, in play here, and that term is lawfare, a practice familiar to rich and powerful entities faced with inconvenient regulation.

We know from defamation law what a Slapp suit is, also known as strategic litigation against public participation, described in the UK parliament as “a suite of litigious techniques, designed to intimidate, suppress and destroy” those in its path. Cases become endlessly complex. Related claims are submitted. Settlements are dangled, costs weaponised. You do want the pain to stop, don’t you?

This process has been identified by parliament as a threat to democracy, also known in some circles as “the tyranny of the majority”. Again there is no evidence City have any interest in this, or are doing anything other than defending their right to go about their business.

A leaked email said Manchester City chair Khaldoon al-Mubarak ‘would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue for the next 10 years’ than submit to Uefa’s financial prodding. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AP

Well, there’s only arms-length and disputed evidence, such as the leaked historical email from Simon Cliff, City’s legal kingpin, that suggested the club’s chair Khaldoon al-Mubarak “would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue for the next 10 years” than submit to Uefa’s financial prodding. There was the unrelated comment in October 2024 that the league’s plan to update its rules rather than collapsing them was “an unwise course [which] would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs”. Again. You do want it to stop, don’t you?

There is also the no doubt unintended consequences of City’s subsequent legal challenges to the associated party transaction rules, which both sides have claimed victory over, City despite failing on most of their points (again, this happens: just raise lots of points).

It was hard to understand exactly what the ultimate intention was here. The Lawyer magazine has noted City were “particularly eager for shareholder loans to be calculated retrospectively under the new rules”, despite having previously voted in favour of existing rules on that. This will now not happen. It would explain in part why the league feels it came out relatively unscathed, because this would have basically tied it in knots, a potential review of every loan to every club by every shareholder, a process that could have effectively collapsed its ability to function.

And this is all unsustainable in the long term. It’s a nightmare for the Premier League, which is not a legal entity but a light-entertainment production company whose rules are written in clear type, agreed to by everyone, and not really intended to be countered quite so aggressively. It’s a nightmare for its chief executive Richard Masters, who must have thought he was becoming a TV rights administrator, not a wartime prime minister. The clubs gave his predecessor a golden goodbye as a thank you. Masters’ key gift so far is a series of fraught legal briefings and, probably, an ulcer.

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By now City and their world-class squad of legal experts have the Premier League in a corner, intentionally or not. Even if they are substantively punished, which increasingly just feels unlikely given the timeframe and the brilliance of City’s legal team, there remains the threat of an appeal. Come. Keep coming. Follow us into the plains towards Moscow. How deep are your coffers? How strong is your will?

It’s the opposite of sport, and of the flawed but necessary machinery of semi-regulated capitalism

Plus the past year has coincided with a general shift in the landscape, threats to boundaries and delivery systems, other mega-competitions mushrooming up. Do you really want to pursue and potentially discredit your eight-time champions like this? Is your product really so robust and discrete you can afford the consequences?

More widely this already feels like a victory for the dominant paradigm in every other part of modern life: a victory for billionaire culture, for the idea of rules as a suggestion for the powerless.

And also for populism, for hard power masked by obfuscation. There is something wretched about the hot-button shouting tagged to the legal process by City’s mouthpieces, a rag-bag of stuff about elites, cartels and victimisation of the overclass.

Chuck in the free-market libertarian nonsense, the “commercial freedom” ideas parroted around this issue by people who don’t understand what a free market is (clue: it’s not a government spending above market on its propaganda project. This is market distortion. This is the command economy, chaps).

But then, this is just a glimpse through the lens of the autocratic billionaire life. This is l’état c’est nous. It’s the opposite of sport, and of the flawed but necessary machinery of semi-regulated capitalism. It skirts around the essential, as-yet unprocessed question of why a government would want to own a football club in the first place.

By now the best outcome for English football as a business entity is probably a settlement and a fudge. In realpolitik terms, everyone just needs it to stop. There is a suspicion, unfounded in hard facts, that there has already been horse trading around this, which may or may not be possible given the basic notion of an independent tribunal.

What does seem certain is the outcome will not harm City’s project in any real sense, that the prospect of punishment has already lent it purpose and drive, binding adversity, conspiracy waffle, victim energy. Booing the overclass, raising your fists to the cartel, this is all deeply exhilarating. Twelve months on it is hard to see an outcome where even losing, nominally, technically, has any real meaning.