OLIVER HOLT: Man City’s tainting is just a sign of an out-of-control Loadsamoney League

There are those who still cling to the idea that English football has never had such a good time.

They will say, even in light of the 115 charges facing reigning champions Manchester City, that at a time when we have turned inward in so many ways, the Premier League is Britain’s greatest export, that it is our shining light, our world leader .

They will say that in the midst of all our ills and the feeling of decadence that plagues us, it is something to be proud of.

There are elements of truth in that. The beauty and drama of the football that our top flight produces every week makes your head spin.

It is a privilege to see Kevin De Bruyne, Virgil van Dijk, Bukayo Saka, Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford, Bruno Guimaraes, Alexis Mac Allister, N’Golo Kante and many, many others in our stadiums. The thrill of seeing players of that caliber on courses across the country never goes away.

But despite the thrill of contemplating the canvases created by the technical genius of Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, despite the growing reverence for the way clubs like Brighton and Brentford are run, pride in the Premier League and its Goliaths is declining rapidly.

The contamination of City this week is the main act, but it is also a symptom of a league that is out of control, a league that needs to be saved from itself.

For some time now, with each passing day, with each club subsumed as a sports washing vehicle for repressive nation states, each transfer record erased, each new monument to conspicuous consumption established, each new attempt to make super-rich clubs be ever richer, every hoax exposed, every supporter betrayed, the Premier League has gone full speed down the road to hell.

As City prepare for a grim and protracted fight to try to prove their innocence and the government prepares to publish its white paper setting out plans for an Independent Regulator for football, it is clear that the game has sparked a crisis of identity in the midst of its Great wealth.

Sometimes all he seems to represent is the accumulation of money and the waste with which he spends it.

Nobody wants to hurt the Premier League, but it’s time to stop its slide into something for which we must apologize. Is a league that allows countries with fabulous wealth but appalling human rights records to own our clubs something to be proud of?

Does it make you feel good that one of the teams taking part in this season’s first event, the Carabao Cup final, is Newcastle United?

How low we have sunk if we think that the revival of a team owned and financed by Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian state that hacks up journalists with bone saws, laughs at the idea of ​​free speech and relies on misogyny and institutionalized homophobia, represents a sensation -good story for the English game?

This is a league whose top clubs were prepared to destroy that league and the entire fabric of English football by founding a European Super League two years ago. A league that needed the fans to rescue it from itself.

A league whose philosophy seems to have been summed up for a long time by the club executive who wrote, in a leaked email: “We can do whatever we want.” And by drunk oil money fanatics chanting ‘We’re so rich, it’s unbelievable.’

Greed is a good league. Loadsamoney’s League. Is it a league to be proud of?

A league where one club, Chelsea, was able to spend more than the combined outlay of the Spanish league, the French league, the German league and the Italian league in the January transfer window of this year.

A league that thinks that kind of competitive imbalance is healthy. A league shortsighted enough to yearn for that kind of imbalance. A league that thinks that imbalance is success. What does victory mean? Is it a league to be proud of?

A league that rules by checkbook diplomacy. A league that was born from the pyramid of English soccer and that now resists the idea of ​​a more equitable distribution of income from broadcasts with the lower leagues.

A league that is so deaf that it compares itself to Tesco or Sainsbury’s and asks why it should help the Football League corner shops. A league that has forgotten where it comes from. A league that doesn’t want to accept that it’s part of a larger ecosystem.

A league that perpetuates a chasm of wealth inequality between itself and the Football League and encourages those desperate to promote it to ruin in the process.

This season, 25 clubs – 20 in the Premier League and five receiving parachute payments in the Football League – will receive 92 per cent of distributable revenue from the English game (£2.96bn), while the other 67 professional clubs they will receive just 8 percent (£258 million). Is it a Premier League to be proud of?

A league that we celebrate because it has promotions and relegations but in practice it is a closed place.

The Premier League is almost a secretly closed league. Parachute payments paid to relegated clubs take care of that. They lock up an elite group of 25 or 30 clubs and make it increasingly difficult for others to enter.

Forget the idea, loyally echoed by the subservient and obsequious, that the Premier League has proven its fitness to rule by taking on City. In any case, the opposite is true.

That it has taken over a decade for City to be held accountable for the alleged infringements and the fact that City have won more titles since the four-year investigation began is proof of how pathetic the attempts to League self-regulation.

Later this month, the government will publish its white paper setting out the proposals for an Independent Regulator for football in this country that emerged from Tracey Crouch’s much-admired Fan-Led Review of Football Governance.

Some clubs, including Manchester City, welcome the idea of ​​the regulator. Others are terrified of it. They think it could be the end of the gravy train. The only fear many of us have is that the proposals will not go far enough.

An independent regulator could not prevent Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi or Qatar from owning a Premier League club, nor, it is thought, could it force a more equal distribution of in-game broadcast revenue.

However, if the Premier League remains intransigent on that issue, there is at least some hope that the scope of the Independent Regulator will be extended.

Some still solemnly warn us not to meddle in the Premier League so as not to destroy it, conveniently forgetting that if it were up to the owners of the Big Six clubs, the Premier League would already be dead.

The idea that the Premier League’s glaring flaws should be enshrined forever is absurd.

The Premier League’s fear of change, its fear of being forced to take greater responsibility for the health of the English game, may be enough to curb its excesses.

He is so afraid of the specter of the new that he chose this week, the week the white paper was originally scheduled to be published, to throw Manchester City under the bus.

It was a crude ploy that all but the most gullible saw immediately. It must not be allowed to work.

The stain on City and all they have achieved in the Premier League era, the stain on the standard-bearers of our top flight, could not be a more powerful sign towards the conclusion many have already come to: the Premier League, who spent too much time basking in the bonfire glow of his vanities, needs to face up to his responsibilities in the greater game.

A reckoning has been coming for the Premier League for some time and now that reckoning is upon him.