After full-time in Prague on Tuesday night, the message from the Football Association arrived pretty quickly. Neither the England manager Thomas Tuchel nor any of the players about to walk through the interview area at the Fortuna Arena would be answering any questions about Manchester City.Eventually, however, reality will catch up with the likes of Elliot Anderson, Marc Guehi, Nico O’Reilly and the 166 other players who have represented City in the Premier League since they were first found to have been trampling all over spending rules back in 2009-2010.This, sadly, is a matter from which nobody who wore the club’s pale blue shirt in their era of monotonous on-field success will ever be able to hide.Not Yaya Toure, who sat and talked to the media on a sofa in the plush environs of a Hoboken hotel after being introduced as the club’s highest-paid player during City’s pre-season tour of America in the summer of 2010. Toure had just been lured from Barcelona and, understandably, the money had played a part.Not Sergio Aguero, scorer of City’s most famous goal at the denouement of the 2011-2012 season. Not David Silva or John Stones, who both gave 10 years of service. And now, not even Erling Haaland.City’s acolytes will argue that the club’s recent achievements – such as the 2023 Treble – should be viewed differently given that the club is accused of breaking the regulations only up until 2018. They will say that the 15 trophies won between then and now are ‘clean’. The FA made it clear that Manchester City players such as Marc Guehi would not be answering questions on the 115 charges while on international duty Why would Erling Haaland (right) stay when the club – and executives like Khaldoon Al Mubarak (left) – have been proved wrong in their defiance on the charges?But where did the money come from to lay the platform for all that glory? Would Pep Guardiola and his team have been able to win so relentlessly without the years of ill-gotten investment that had previously been ploughed into a playing squad that was eventually to run rivals such as Liverpool and Arsenal into the dust with such monotony?The answers to the questions are clear and that is why so many City players from both past and present will wear the stain of their club’s dishonesty like so many modern footballers wear a sleeve of tattoos.And that is one of the great sporting tragedies of this miserable catalogue of City sinning. Institutional skullduggery is always like this. It doesn’t just bring down the architects. The fall-out crushes the innocents too.Senior City executives will carry the weight of their wrong-doing for a lifetime but so too will the club’s supporters and players.They are the ones who have been able to pretend for so long that none of this was true, that none of it would ever be proven, that it was all part of a campaign by the established Premier League clubs to keep City in their traditional place some way down the hierarchy of relevance. This, after all, is what their club was telling them.But now that the truth is known, it leaves City’s players in a quite dreadful spot, one in which no sportsman or woman should ever be placed.For if sport is not honest and fair then it loses its legitimacy. If sport is not honest, achievements pale to nothingness. So as City players past and present look now at their medals and awards in their cabinets at home, they may just see them start to rust.The likes of Toure and Aguero and Silva and Stones have no choice but to somehow make peace with it all. None of this was their doing. The likes of Sergio Aguero may start to look at the medals in their trophy cabinet at home a little differently in light of the verdict Why would Elliot Anderson – a young Geordie raised on the sporting values of the North East’s great Wallsend Boys Club – not question the wisdom of turning down other interested clubs?Footballers are not stupid but they know their place. They are paid to play. They will perhaps take solace from the fact that out there on the grass, battle was always fought gamely and fairly. Those memories will remain and sustain them to a degree.As for the modern group, preparing for a clash with Liverpool of all people on the resumption of the Premier League a week on Sunday, what motive is there now to remain at the club that has effectively been lying to them just as much as it has been to the rest of us?Haaland had suitors from all across Europe when he signed for City in May 2022. We know this because City told us at the time. It was a coup, they said. It was proof of the club’s modern standing and power.The great Norwegian has repaid that £50million transfer fee spectacularly in the four years that have followed. The goal tally sits at 169 and counting across all competitions. He has done his bit.But everywhere he goes now, the whiff of this week’s judgement will follow. This is a crime that is not of his making but his achievements now stand as tainted – they will say – and who is to say they are not correct? With that in mind, why would Haaland not feel betrayed? Why would he stay?Why would Anderson – a young Geordie raised on the sporting values of the North East’s great Wallsend Boys Club – not question the wisdom of turning down other interested clubs when he left Nottingham Forest last summer?Why would Guehi – a player of deep Christian faith – not look back and ask himself why he didn’t move to Liverpool as had originally been the plan?Footballers have a remarkable ability to leave the serious stuff in the dressing room when they run out to play. It’s part of the mental strength that enables them to operate under such extremes of stress and public attention. But we should not confuse that with a lack of emotional intelligence. City supporters will carry the weight of the club’s wrongdoing for a lifetime Of immediate concern to City’s current squad will be the prospect of expulsion from the Premier League and what that would do in terms of their income and their standing in the game.However, as they wait for news of punishment and indeed the outcome of a City appeal that will undoubtedly drag this sorry affair out even longer, we should not presume that simple matters of right and wrong don’t matter to them also. They do.City’s players have heard the noise for years and now they know it has its roots deeply embedded in a sordid and embarrassing truth. They have to come to terms with that now and if some of them decide it would be more easily done some place far away from the Etihad Stadium then it would be hard to blame them.