“I know what I saw. And I know how I felt.” This was Noel Gallagher’s poetic response to the news that his club, club – the club that we’d followed over land, sea and air for decades, who we’d seen experience the lowest of lows and the highest of highs – had been found guilty by an independent panel of cheating on an industrial scale.

Manchester City resolutely denies the charge that, over nine seasons, it had committed 114 breaches of the Premier League’s Financial Fair Play regulations. Nevertheless, Noel, I’m afraid it may well turn out that we didn’t know what we were seeing.

No one can take away the joy we experienced in winning the eight trophies we claimed in that period – the exhilaration, the exultation, the elation we felt in the moment of Sergio Aguero’s injury-time goal to win our first Premier League title in 2012, or Yaya Toure’s winner in the FA Cup final the year before, or countless other triumphs, small and large. We know how we felt, alright. And it felt good.

These victories were the first, meaningful steps that turned the club – once a music-hall joke and a byword for failure – into a powerhouse of world football, jet-propelled by the financial resources of its owners, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. Again, no one can gainsay the ecstasy of that night in Istanbul in 2023, when we won the Champions League, and, at the final whistle, my daughter and I fell into each other’s arms, unable to hold back the tears. Even so, it’s hard to deny at this point that these gilded memories have in some way been tarnished.

Manchester City is a huge and important part of my life. For starters, it has defined my relationship with my daughter. She first started coming to games with me when she was a young teenager, and she’s still there beside me, a married woman in her mid-thirties. We’ve seen it all, from Liverpool to Leipzig, from Brighton to Barcelona, and every single triumph and disaster wrote another small passage in our joint history.

It has also been a significant element in my identity. I am intensely proud of being a Mancunian – I have always regarded myself as a Mancunian first and an Englishman second – and the club’s own narrative, once unfashionable and down-at-heel, but now prosperous, modern in its outlook and successful, was, it seemed to me, a perfect cipher for the city’s renaissance.

I cannot tell you how painful it is that I now have to employ the past tense when talking about Manchester City’s reputation. To someone who’s not a football fan, this might appear egregious hyperbole, but to borrow from Noel Gallagher, I know what I feel now.

At the very least, it’s embarrassment – having to endure the taunts, the abuse and the mockery (and that’s just from friends, before we even run the gauntlet of opposition fans again). More than that, however, is the repudiation of everything we believed in, all that we loved, everything in which we invested time, money and emotion.

We know that professional football is a crooked game, and we are well aware that the rules which City has allegedly transgressed were designed so that upstart clubs who had come into money were not able to challenge the ruling elite, but still… this club belongs to us, the fans and the city itself, not to Sheikh Mansour, and, if what we are told is true, we have been betrayed and misrepresented. Manchester is a city built on hard work and honest endeavour, not on chicanery and deception.

This sense of betrayal is complicated, because, under the Abu Dhabi ownership, so much has been positive – the investment in the community, the academy, and the women’s game, in particular. And the regeneration of east Manchester, one of the most deprived quarters of the city, would almost certainly not have happened without the revival in Manchester City’s fortunes.

Nevertheless, I woke up this morning, like yesterday, the day before that, and most probably like tomorrow, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s a form of grief. The complex set of values that you believed in, and was central to your life, is no longer alive. Instead, that unflinching attachment was replaced by a number of questions and imponderables.

What’s going to happen next? If, as we are told, the club appeals, how much longer will we have to wait before the final resolution? And if we are exonerated (unlikely, I know), how long before we are free of the stench of malfeasance?

Then, the more difficult ones: How do I feel about my club now? I found myself wondering whether I will go up for the PSG game in a couple of weeks. Will I be able to throw myself into the moment, as if nothing has changed? I somehow doubt it, because something very fundamental has indeed changed.

I’m in a large WhatsApp group of lifelong City fans, and the prevailing mood is anger and dismay, tinged with defiance. “Our history and identity mean everything to us,” was one comment. “We saw them get beaten at Southend on a Tuesday night, and we will be there still, no matter what sanctions may be thrown at us.”

That will undoubtedly be true. Supporting a football club is a gesture of faith, not dependent on whether it is successful or not, and City has endured all kinds of vicissitudes in its past. But this goes to the heart of the issue for Manchester City fans today. Our faith has been shaken. We’ve found out that sometimes things are indeed too good to be true.

Yes, we know how we felt then. But how long will it be before we feel the same again?