Frank Augstein/Associated Press
MANCHESTER, England — Strip away the jargon and the euphemisms and the disorientating forest of acronyms, tune out the noise from claim and counterclaim and strident denial, pick a way through the laborious detail and the tangled minutiae, and a simple truth emerges: At the very apex of European soccer, a moment of reckoning is coming.
The report last week that UEFA is studying not so much a revamp as a total reset of its crown jewel, the Champions League, is not an administrative story about the format of a competition. The New York Times’s report, on Monday, that Manchester City might yet be banned from that same tournament is not a story about rule breaches or misleading financial declarations or malicious leaks.