Now that the sheer scale of Manchester City’s financial breaches has been exposed, it is time for reparations. There are clubs who will seek compensation for the advantage gained from City’s financial doping. But the man who coined that phrase deserves something more valuable than money. He deserves his reputation back.

Arsene Wenger was in Kuala Lumpur on one of those big summer tours he always fought against because playing in 34-degree heat and 82 per cent humidity is not the best way to prepare for an English winter. But it was 2011 and Arsenal needed the money. There were new challenges from freshly wealthy clubs, chief among them Manchester City.

In Malaysia, Wenger focused on the 10-year £400m sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways that would rename the City of Manchester Stadium. As the deal was worth more than 45 times Etihad’s annual profit, Wenger was suspicious. Emirates paid Arsenal £90m over 15 years. Wenger argued the Etihad agreement drove a truck through what was then called financial fair play.

Nothing was done.

In this, Wenger resembles another Frenchman, Christophe Bassons, who during the 1999 Tour de France used his column in to highlight his concerns about doping in the race. He was ostracised by much of the peloton and eventually left the Tour after being told by his team to stop speaking to the media about doping.

Wenger did not leave. He continued to pedal furiously as the leaders pulled away, season by season, transfer deal by transfer deal.

Of course, Wenger stayed too long, measuring his success in FA Cups rather than league titles. Even had Manchester City been removed from the equation, he would not have won another Premier League title.

But it might explain why Sir Alex Ferguson warmed to him in their later years. Ferguson, who once never missed an opportunity for a barbed comment towards the Arsenal manager, came to treat Wenger as a kindred spirit.

Wenger would joke: “It is because I am no longer a threat to him.” But there may have been another reason: Ferguson saw the Arsenal manager as an ally against a common enemy, his noisy and newly wealthy neighbours.

It was in another Kuala Lumpur hotel room, two years before Wenger attacked the Etihad deal, that Ferguson launched a denunciation of Carlos Tevez’s move from United to City.

He would have known the details of the contract, even if we did not: £10m a year for five years, £1m if City made the Champions League and £2m if they won the league. There was a £7.5m signing-on fee and a £7.5m loyalty bonus, which the Argentine did his best not to earn.

All of it was ridiculously unaffordable by any normal Premier League club. All of it was made possible by the money flowing out of Abu Dhabi.

None of his titles will have an asterisk beside them

In terms of trophies, Arsenal were not the club most affected by that money.

If you declared all of City’s results void between 2009 and 2018, the years covered by the charges, only Manchester United and Liverpool would have become champions. The club that arguably lost the most money would have been Tottenham, who would have qualified for the Champions League on four separate occasions.

Yet Wenger spent most of his managerial career battling against financial doping. His big break came when he took a Glenn Hoddle-inspired Monaco to the French title in 1988.

However, despite the glut of millionaires in the principality, the sporting focus was always on Formula One and Wenger’s Monaco was eclipsed by Marseille, an altogether bigger club funded by the media mogul and improbable socialist politician Bernard Tapie.

Wenger loathed losing. He once spent Christmas alone because his first club, Nancy, had lost before the winter break. But he especially loathed losing to a club that employed corruption as a weapon, once nearly coming to blows with Tapie in the tunnel at Marseille’s Stade Velodrome.

In 1993, cash worth £60,000 was found buried in a garden belonging to a Valenciennes player, one of several Tapie had bribed to allow Marseille to win the title. Tapie went to prison and Marseille were relegated.

Nobody at the Etihad will be jailed, but relegation is the least Manchester City can expect.

Read more

Roman Abramovich, the governor of Chukotka who somehow ended up owning the natural gas produced in that part of Siberia, caused Wenger more pain than Sheikh Mansour. The 2003 transfer window, when Chelsea spent £100m in two months, changed football.

Arsenal would be champions that season, but it would be their last stand. Abramovich’s money and the cost of moving from Highbury to the Emirates soon told.

When Wenger retired, he was regarded as a relic who had not won a championship for 14 years and who should have won more than three of them. Perhaps. But none of his titles will have an asterisk beside them.