The seriousness of the club’s 115 charges by the Premier League leaves no room for a result that lets everyone live with outcome

Let’s start by going back to December 2016. And a gathering of the world’s media in London to hear lurid details of how more than 1,000 Russian athletes cheated across 30 sports with the help of spies, a cocktail of steroids mixed with whisky and vermouth, and massive state interference.

First the law professor Richard McLaren tells us that London 2012 was “corrupted on an unprecedented scale”. Then he reminds us that, at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, an agent from the FSB, Russia’s security service, was disguised as a plumber and used a mouse hole in the walls of an anti-doping lab to switch drug-tainted samples for clean ones.