OLIVER HOLT: Man City have been exposed as the most famous cheats in English sporting history. The gory details revealed by the Premier League leave no doubt - nothing less than relegation will suffice for this sinister, dishonest club

The Premier League shoved the owners of Manchester City into a beam of light on a dark stage on Tuesday evening. And the club that has dominated English football for much of the last 20 years stood there, defrocked and unmasked. Guilty of all charges, the League said. But that was not all it said.

In fact, it was the tone of the League’s statement that was the most startling thing about it. They are often circumspect and dull, these offerings. Not this time. This time, it was angry and it was vengeful. 

It gloried in the gory details of the industrial-scale cheating it said City had indulged in for year after year as it duped the rest of football with a ‘disguised funding scheme’.

The anger was in the vocabulary, too. ‘Sham contracts,’ the Premier League statement hissed as it outlined the tactics of the Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club. 

‘Sham commercial deals,' it added later. Sham, sham, sham. Some had been expecting a conciliatory move from the League in the wake of its victory but this was anything but that.

To read that statement was to see the Premier League dancing on the grave of the club that had come to embody its excellence and its appeal. All the exasperation and all the frustration of years of obstruction and intransigence from City’s Abu Dhabi owners as they fought the 115 charges ranged against them came spilling out on that page.

This was an end to patience. This was an end to keeping one’s counsel. This was an end to diplomacy. 

After the accusation, this was the confrontation. The most eye-catching part of it was the revelation of the extent of City’s wrongdoing. This was the juiciest steak the Premier League had to offer and they tossed it out into the public domain with uncommon relish.

‘The purpose of these schemes,’ its statement said, ‘was found to have been to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900million during the affected period, to appear to comply with financial rules.’