This is how it feels to be City: Man City owners' fraud punishes players and fans more than Premier League ever can

The sports media industry is almost unrecognizable to the one I walked into in June 2008, fresh out of university, taking a trainee role at the Press Association. The UK's national news agency lived by the motto "fast, fair and accurate".

But those were simpler times, back when Twitter was still called Twitter, and a niche micro-blogging website few people had heard of. One convention in the British sports media at that time was that neutrality was paramount.

You knew who everyone else in the newsroom supported, but they wouldn't broadcast it. You certainly wouldn't do anything as vulgar as celebrate a goal in a press box while on assignment at a match.

That stiff-upper-lip aspect still holds. It's always funny for English writers to witness their European or Latin American counterparts giving it the full business at international tournaments.

Anyway, after three months in the job, I was a Manchester City fan on the sports business desk helping to cover the huge, staggering news that Manchester City were to be bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, transforming the immediate horizons of the historic English club beyond all plausibility. But I certainly wouldn't have written any sort of cloying, florid, first-person column about the takeover.