There was a time when Liverpool against Manchester City meant everything. Now it is difficult to say whether it means anything at all.

Cast your mind back to the title races that had the whole country gripped. Both clubs surpassing 90 points, two of the greatest managers the Premier League has ever seen pushing each other to extraordinary lengths, producing football that genuinely felt like the pinnacle of the English top flight. Those were contests that mattered, and everyone who watched them knew it. The players, the atmosphere, the stakes, all of it felt earned.

The key ingredients of those battles have largely gone now. The managers, Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah, that era is behind us. But the absence of familiar faces is not the main reason Sunday's meeting feels hollow. The real reason is far more uncomfortable to sit with.

Manchester City have been found guilty on all but one of the charges brought against them by the Premier League relating to financial misconduct and non-cooperation. An appeal against those findings is yet to be heard, though expert opinion on City's prospects is gloomy, given the extent to which the Independent Commission dismantled their arguments. Potential sanctions, points deductions, expulsion, the stripping of titles, are all being discussed, but none of that will be resolved any time soon.

And so we are left watching a fixture wrapped in a question that nobody can honestly answer. If City sit top of the league and go on to win the title, will they keep it? Should Liverpool be aggressively chasing second place on the basis that there could eventually be a reallocation? These are not abstract philosophical puzzles, they are the practical reality of what supporters are being asked to navigate every single week right now, and it is a farcical way to watch football.

Liverpool, it should be said, have chosen to quietly let the appeal process run rather than make any kind of formal stand. That is a reasonable position, but it has had the uncomfortable side effect of placing the burden of a public rebuke squarely on the supporters, the very people who have arguably been hurt most by City's wrongdoing, having been pipped to the title on the final day of the season on three separate occasions across the last twelve years.

Asking those supporters to deliver an angry verdict on behalf of English football whilst taking part in a contest that may ultimately prove illegitimate is, frankly, not a fair ask. Sunday will produce dramatic images, bold headlines, and plenty of noise, but it will all be framed by what is happening off the pitch rather than on it, and that is not why any of us fell in love with this sport.

Nobody grew up dreaming of reading about endless legal challenges, diplomatic pressure from foreign powers, or unhelpful interventions from the Prime Minister that risk undermining due process. That wider distortion of the game is perhaps City's most significant crime of all, and it points the finger at the individuals behind the decisions rather than the club as an institution. The Premier League and the Independent Football Regulator both hold powers to assess the fitness of owners and directors based on integrity, financial soundness, and competence, and it is difficult to see how senior figures at City clear that bar given what the Independent Commission found.

The IFR's ability to force a sale may yet become the most relevant tool in this whole saga. But that does not resolve anything this Sunday, or next week, or the week after that. We are in a prolonged, uncomfortable limbo, watching a competition that one of its biggest members appears to have participated in without honouring the basic obligations that make competition meaningful.

For all the attempts to sell this weekend's fixture as a grudge match with real edge, it is hard to manufacture genuine enthusiasm for a contest that feels every bit as much of a sham as the years that preceded it, and the longer this drags on without resolution, the harder that feeling becomes to shake.