Sunday should feel like an event. Anfield, packed to the rafters, Liverpool against Manchester City. Instead, there is a question hanging over this fixture that no amount of noise from the Kop can drown out: does any of it actually matter?

It is the standout match of the weekend by some distance, and Sky Sports clearly agreed, slotting it into the prime 4:30 pm Sunday slot. Liverpool hosting City at Anfield is always box office, but this particular encounter arrives wrapped in circumstances that are genuinely unprecedented in the history of English football. An independent panel has found City guilty of the overwhelming majority of serious financial breaches put to them, with revenues reportedly artificially inflated by something in the region of £830m. The verdict landed like a bomb. Their next match? Anfield. You truly could not write it.

City are appealing and remain publicly confident they will overturn the outcome, which is, ironically, the only thing that gives Sunday's result any real significance at all. If the appeal fails and City are expelled from the Premier League, their results this season would be expunged. Every goal, every point, every victory wiped from the record. That includes whatever happens on Sunday afternoon, which means supporters paying well over £100 a ticket could be watching a match that is ultimately declared null and void. That is not a comfortable thought.

Set the legal drama aside for a moment, and what Liverpool face is a genuinely formidable test. City arrive with a perfect record after five Premier League matches, sitting top of the table. This is the stiffest challenge the current Liverpool side has faced, and it comes at a point where the home side will be without two forward players who have been in fine form. The atmosphere, though, will be ferocious. The Kop is not going to need much motivation on this particular afternoon, and whilst the City players themselves have not been accused of any personal wrongdoing, they will walk into a stadium that has every reason to let its feelings be known.

For Liverpool, three weeks of international football has done nothing to soften the hunger for a proper domestic fixture. This is the kind of Sunday afternoon that reminds you why you follow the game, even when the game is busy reminding you of its worst instincts.

The broader picture is harder to ignore. City's manager will send his players out as though the independent panel's verdict is a minor administrative inconvenience, still perched at the top of the table, still conducting business as usual. The Premier League's own rules make immediate suspension impractical, which means everyone is expected to simply get on with it, and the appeal process will almost certainly be stretched across as long a timeline as possible. This is English football's way: absorb the scandal slowly enough that the outrage dissipates before anything definitive is done.

That might be the most frustrating thing of all. Sixty thousand people will fill Anfield on Sunday, millions more will watch around the world, and the Premier League will pocket its television revenue, and the whole machine rolls forward regardless. The game's ability to carry on with a shrug, no matter what is swirling around it, never stops being remarkable.

Enjoy Sunday for what it is, because nobody in that stadium will be thinking about expungement tables once the whistle blows. But when the final whistle goes, that question creeps straight back in: what, exactly, did any of that count for?