The Premier League is back this weekend, snapping out of an international break that had followed a 30-game, 79-goal autumn rush — and, in the view of the Guardian's Barney Ronay, it is returning into a place English football has never quite been before. The serial champions, he writes, must now be regarded as "the authors of a 10-year sham supremacy", and the competition must work out how to carry on in what he calls "the new era of post-verdict unreality".

Ronay's column opens with a mock apology from the internet — "It turns out you were right. It was actually a simulation all along" — before wondering, only half-jokingly, whether Vinícius Júnior has been "replaced by a handsome, baffled-looking waxwork". Welcome, he writes, "to the weirdest weekend of them all. We are now post-judgment, post-statement, postlapsarian."

'What is real now?'

There is, Ronay argues, no precedent for this. Even total confusion feels brittle while Manchester City "maintain their complete state of innocence and deny all charges". He notes that "City's appeal defence appears to be based around the government giving them money", reading it as "implied confirmation that the club is the propaganda tool of an overseas state" — the implication being, he quips, "that Kyle Walker, for example, has basically been a civil servant all these years". From there comes the joke that the United Arab Emirates should have six stars on its national team jersey, "one for each title. They even look like asterisks."

Beyond the legal backstory lies the presenting problem: how to sell this as entertainment. "How do you structure a Match of the Day now?" Ronay asks. "What's the balance in the edit of bus-rage, taunting banner clips, managerial evasiveness content, versus the trivial stuff on the pitch with the balls and goals and men in shorts?" The affair, he writes, has created an existential problem in which "the key questions in English football are no longer things such as who will win the league" but instead: "What is real now? What was real then? What will be real in the future? Will something that seems real now become unreal later?"

"The key questions in English football are no longer things such as who will win the league ... They are instead: what is real now? What was real then? What will be real in the future?"

To capture the strangeness, Ronay recalls visiting the Yas Marina Formula One track in Abu Dhabi: a pristine, boulevarded circuit where, past the final corner, "the hanging baskets stopped dead. The sprinklers cut out. The pavement ended. The next step took you straight into sand and dead space. Beyond the main stage the Yas track was a set, an imitation of life. And it turns out this is basically what Abu Dhabi was doing to the Premier League in the years 2009 to 2018: creating a product, a simulacrum, a pop-up." The result is a blurring of edges in which "an AI video of Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince scoring the Özil goal against Ludogorets seems just as real, just as plausible as City's 6-0 thrashing of Watford in the FA Cup final." Seen that way, this is an extinction-level problem: "Being real is, in the end, all sport actually has."

Anfield, a 'requiem for a dream'

It feels fitting, Ronay writes, that City's first date in the new unreality is Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday — "one of the great Premier League fixtures recast as a kind of ceremonial shame-event, a requiem for a dream". Liverpool "have a clearer sense of grievance than most, having been deprived of league titles three times on the final day by a club that was colouring outside the lines". Across City's next 14 league games they will face three teams "who have reserved the right to sue them", raising the question of "how can these occasions be seen as credible acts of sport?"

Even the banter culture is out of date. For the past 12 years, City at Anfield has been soundtracked by the "Steve Gerrard / he slipped on his arse" incident, a source of public pain that defined the late-stage career of Liverpool's most beloved modern captain. "Except, we now know the actual story is the club that finished above them were cheating. It turns out this is the first stage of football grief. Poring over the endless counterfactuals."

Re-running the ledger

Those counterfactuals are stark. Ronay lists "the five league titles won on the last day of the season" and the 1-0 FA Cup final victory against Stoke, coached by "a man with two contracts", with the winning goal scored by a player linked, by close association, to "the book-cooking regime". Then there is the wider fallout: Inter losing a Champions League final "by the narrowest margin" to a club that "appear to have built their own era out of cheating on their income", before being thrashed two years later by another nation-state team — with Simone Inzaghi "shunted off the set" and "in Saudi now. Just get on the train."

The structural damage runs deeper. City spent nine years "flooding the zone with government-backed transfer funds (€1.2bn in those nine years: miles out in front), skewing the money supply in every league in Europe" — including "the extra £20m disbursed at the last moment to drag Kevin De Bruyne out of the Bundesliga". At home, Spurs missed the Champions League by one spot four times, "always in City's slipstream", and Ronay wonders whether Manchester United "would have signed Rasmus Højlund without that steamrollering model of Erling Haaland-era success?"

The Guardiola problem

How, too, "to reprocess the deep cultural influence of Pep Guardiola?" The Catalan's "genius as a coach ... is still real, irrespective of the gradient of the playing field", Ronay writes, but "nothing succeeds like success. Winners get to rewrite history." Even the Football Association's England DNA pathway "was basically a Pep document, predicated on the undeniable evidence of his winning way. The method is still good, the detail unarguable, the tactical blueprint pure. But that 10-year spell in England was also supercharged by cheating." The mourning of "the legend of the Catalan brain trust" — the hours spent studying a "pure and monk-like dynamic" — now reads differently: "Yeah, fine. But also chuck vast amounts of hidden cash at it." Not to mention "the hundreds of articles, podcasts, academic studies, fan tributes and personal tomes about purity, legacy, style, the glory that sailed above all other questions".

A documentary that aged in real time

City's supporters, Ronay argues, "are entitled to some space here, a chance to effect their own reckoning", even if elements of the support responded over the years "with bizarre levels of aggression to any questioning of the process". It is also "normal to believe what you're told, not least when it includes the profound transformation of the thing you love".

Nowhere is the narrative U-turn sharper than in the club's own documentary series A Beautiful Obsession, which has become "a far more interesting watch now, like The Sixth Sense when you know the ending". Pep is portrayed as a tunnel-vision obsessive, "most often staring at a whiteboard covered in magnets while the world turns beyond his line of vision" — which now reads as "some kind of willed seclusion, Prospero on his island, rough magic starting to fray as reality crashes on to the shores". Episodes one to four were framed as "a Viking funeral for the age of Pep", but are now "an unwitting farewell to something else too". In his final appearance, Pep is shown quoting Kipling: "triumph and disaster are both impostors."

The surreal backdrop to Sunday's Anfield reunion remains that City continue to deny all charges, with the punishment phase of the process still to come. As Ronay put it in September, in the immediate wake of the Premier League's guilty findings at first instance, whatever punishment the club and its sovereign-wealth-fund owners receive, one fact stands: "everything is tainted now."