Winning is not enough for Manchester City to move on from this crisis | Jonathan Wilson

It’s not just that the club’s recent charges themselves are unprecedented – it’s the language used to describe them too Sign up for our free newsletter here The language of football is a fine and highly nuanced dialect. The majority of people involved in the game speak it with a high degree of sophistication.

Minor deviations from the familiar, almost imperceptible to outsiders, can set off alarm bells: what’s really going on there? Why isn’t he happy? What’s she hinting at? But it’s an argot developed to talk about football, and when applied to other subjects, it can sound extremely jarring. Erling Haaland is one of the brighter, more engaging…