Just in case you have been living under a rock over the last week, the Premier League have charged Manchester City with an astonishing 101 breaches of their financial rules.
In short, should an independent commission find City guilty of the charges, the club will be viewed to have systematically cheated the system since their big-money takeover back in 2008.
As of right now, no punishment is off the table - whether that be a fine, transfer ban or even expulsion from the Premier League altogether. City could even have Premier League titles or domestic cups taken off them, as Juventus did following the Calciopoli scandal of the 2000s.
The concept of history essentially being re-written like this - if the breaches did in fact take place of course - got us thinking. Specifically, what would English football have looked like if City's apparent infractions hadn't taken place?
What if the Citizens were not able to blow their competition out of the water with league-high wages, record infrastructure investment and huge transfer fees? What if they weren't Premier League big dogs, merely a small fish in a giant pond?
Here are ten things that might have happened on that alternate timeline...