Around Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, everyone has been terribly circumspect about Manchester City these past few weeks. Neither on nor off the record will anyone betray a sense of schadenfreude or pleasure about the reputational damage their cheating has heaped on Qatar’s arch Gulf rival Abu Dhabi.

But it’s hard to avoid the sense that those arriving with defending champions PSG for the Champions League tie at Manchester City on Wednesday night will consider City’s conviction on all serious charges of financial manipulation to be anything less than comeuppance. Go back 11 years and one of the very same Abu Dhabi executives coordinating ‘sham’ contracts pumping £900million into City was revealed by the Mail on Sunday to be central to a plot to blacken Qatar’s reputation.

The machinations, exposed by MoS investigative journalist David Rose, involved a £60,000-a-month contract being paid to London political lobbying firm Quiller Consultants, whose task was to place negative stories about Qatar in the British press.

After a story claiming Qatar was a haven for terrorists had been published, Simon Pearce, Executive Communications Director in Abu Dhabi’s Executive Affairs Authority, emailed a United Arab Emirates security chief with the subject line 'Boom!' Pearce wrote: 'Your highness, I thought you should see this. Latest product of our efforts. Should be a game-changer for UK understanding. More to come.'

The exposure of Pearce, a City board member since 2008, preceded Abu Dhabi’s move to isolate Qatar and boycott its companies, between 2017 and 2021, because of its irritation with the smaller nation’s ambition and refusal to eradicate Islamic politics.

To some extent, relations are repaired now, but Abu Dhabi’s reputation as the more autocratic and aggressive of the two remains and that has just been laid bare in the findings of the independent commission which found City guilty. The consequences mean that the brief, intense 18-year story of Qatar v Abu Dhabi played out between City and PSG - 'the Gulfico' as it's known in the French sports press - may be in its death throes. Who knows when the Qataris’ team will be at City’s stadium again?

The geopolitical rivalry between the two Gulf nation states existed long before the Abu Dhabis arrived at City. Qatar is a fifth Abu Dhabi’s size yet fiercely independent. It refused to become the eighth emirate of the United Arab Emirates, whose capital is Abu Dhabi, on the federation’s founding in 1971 - much to Abu Dhabi’s irritation.

Abu Dhabi always felt that buying City would make it seem so much smarter and more sophisticated than such neighbours. ‘The UAE is different from other Arab countries. People think the Arab world is one, but it is not,’ chairman Khaldoon al Mubarak told the Guardian in a 2009 interview about the Manchester City purchase. ‘This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about.’

For a time, Abu Dhabi basked in football ascendency. Despite securing the 2022 World Cup, Qatar had to suffer watching City beat them to the holy grail of winning Champions League, with their 1-0 win over Inter Milan in 2023, and become the seeming template for global football excellence under Pep Guardiola. Qatar, who arrived at PSG in 2011 with Qatari businessman Nasser Al Khelaifi appointed president, were blinded by superstars’ fame in a way that City were not.

They still see City as their biggest rivals. ‘For PSG, it’s easier to lose against Real Madrid than against Manchester City,' a Middle East expert told France’s L’Equipe last year. ‘And for Al Khelaifi, it’s easier to return to Qatar after a defeat against Barcelona, Chelsea, Bayern Munich.’ PSG’s Champions League quarter final defeat to City in April 2016 was seen as such a national humiliation by Qatar that coach Laurent Blanc was sacked two months later.

But while the two clubs had much in common – including both flagrantly breaching financial sustainability rules through grossly overvalued sponsorship deals with state-funded firms – the way Abu Dhabi and Qatar dealt with their punishments for those offences reflects the fundamental difference between the two. The Qataris at PSG begrudgingly took their punishment and decided to stay within the UEFA tent. The more aggressive Abu Dhabis at City took this as a provocation to go to war with the football authorities.

Nowhere in the cache of hacked ‘Football Leaks’ emails which have ultimately brought City to book do we find naked Qatar aggression or revulsion for authorities who impeded their attempts at limitless state spending. But those same emails reveal the Qataris’ old adversary, Pearce, to be taking delight in attempting to fool both Premier League and UEFA rules. 'Of course, we can do what we want,' Pearce states, when asked if payment dates can be altered to use cash to cover the £10million costs of Roberto Mancini’s sacking in 2013.

It was certainly never a case of overbearing UEFA bureaucrats with clipboards looking to get City and PSG bang to rights. Despite the Gulf state farcical so-called ‘sponsorship’ deals which insulted investigators‘ intelligence – more than £180million for PSG from the Qatar Tourism Authority, whose entire annual promotional budget was only £38m and a £400m Etihad deal to sponsor City which was double anything else sport had ever known – UEFA’s then Secretary General Gianni Infantino cosied up to the two clubs in a fawning way. Leaked emails show Infantino collaborating with both, to make their ‘punishment’ less severe than it publicly seemed.

The radically different ways in which the two responded is charted in the excellent book State of Play, in which journalist Miguel Delaney examines the way huge wealth has taken over football.

City ‘suspected it was all about them’, Delaney writes. ‘They felt shunned at UEFA meetings and their attitude was described as a “level of aggression” way beyond PSG’s.' City were ‘whipping themselves into a frenzy of perceived injustice and perceived bias against them.’

PSG’s Al Khelaifi, meanwhile, accepted a spending cap and fine imposed on PSG and proceeded to become one of the most powerful men in football as head of what is now called the European Football Clubs (EFC) organisation. He made the Qatar-owned club a major controlling influence in European football in the process. While City and the Abu Dhabis were manically immersing themselves in a legal battle of monumental consequence, PSG recruited Luis Enrique and established themselves as the continent’s outstanding team. PSG arrive tonight as back-to-back champions. City have not made it past the last 16 in the past two years.

Sources suggest that the aggression which distinguishes Abu Dhabi from Qatar comes from the top of the state. They say it should not be assumed that Mubarak, City’s powerful chairman, is driving the policy of warfare because, whilst immensely powerful, he is a relative serf in the court of Abu Dhabi’s autocratic Al Nahyan dynasty. If this is the case, City may have has been brought down by the absence of anyone capable of speaking to truth to royal power

There are several reasons why the Qataris of Paris have not been crowing. Al Khelaifi’s leadership of the European clubs group demands neutrality. ‘He is a politician more than ever,’ says one source in the French capital. Al Khelaifi spoke glowingly of City chief executive Ferran Soriano, a fellow EFC board member, after the verdicts.

Qatar’s own history of financial doping at PSG means the club also know they have no moral high ground to take. ‘They have cheated to lesser extent but they are not totally innocent,’ says the Paris source.

The presence of Guardiola at City’s stadium tonight is the latest plank in a calculated PR fightback strategy, ongoing since the 114 guilty verdicts, which Pearce will be masterminding. But even Guardiola cannot mask the reputational trashing. While Abu Dhabi were being pilloried by Liverpool fans at Anfield on Sunday, Qatar were being lauded in the global media for their ongoing efforts as mediators between Iran and the United States. Mubarak kept away from Anfield. His ‘Abu Dhabi is different’ theory has been shot to pieces and make no mistake, Qatar will be taking immense pleasure from that.