It seems an odd detail now but the first person to find oil in Abu Dhabi was the deep sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, who was employed by a British-run expedition to look for telltale signs in the ocean floor. Modern-day oil prospecting involves satellite imaging and infrared. Back in the 1950s the state of the art was a broodingly handsome celebrity diver in a pair of Speedos.

It worked, though. In those days the Persian gulf was a coral paradise, home to a booming pearl diving trade. You wonder if, down in the glitter and the deep blue shadows, drawing back his hand from the telltale rock formations, Cousteau saw a gleam of something else too, a reflection in his mask of sky blue figures moving on a field of green, vision of some perfect footballing future waiting to be hoisted out of the ocean floor.

Probably not. Cousteau never mentioned it in his films. But then, he never denied it either. And football does seem intent on intruding into every corner these days, parts of the world where the old rules don’t seem to make much sense, where the act of supporting the same team you’ve always supported can present an impossibly mutable sense of right, wrong, loyalty and logic.

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On Wednesday there was a collective sense of shock at the news the British academic Matthew Hedges had been convicted of spying in the United Arab Emirates. His trial lasted five minutes. There was no lawyer present. Hedges was sentenced to life imprisonment. Among most British observers there was an unease at this summary justice. Although, not so much on social media, where concern was mixed with more sceptical voices; voices raising doubts about Hedges’ story, “showing faith” in the lads of the Emirati justice system and generally debating this as though it was a marginal offside decision or a harsh red card.

Naturally you’d assume that these voices of authority were professors of Middle Eastern jurisprudence, or at worst a set of official Emirati propaganda bots. But no. They were Manchester City supporters. Miracle of cause and effect! Watching this happen was like the scene in The Martian where, through great patience and skill, Matt Damon eventually succeeds in growing rows of potato sprouts out of piles of human crap. Nine years, £2bn and three league titles into the project, here it was: the spectacle of “sportswashing” in action.

It is a phrase that has cropped up a bit recently. “The UAE’s enormous investment in Manchester City is one of football’s most brazen attempts to ‘sportswash’ a country’s deeply tarnished image,” Amnesty International said this month, referring to claims of exploited labour and human rights abuses.

Amnesty has been accused of pro-western bias by some and of anti-western bias by others. But whatever your view on claims of torture, it is no secret soft power and reputation management have always been the plan with City. Sportswashing. It sounds possible. But how would that work in practice? Well, here it was in closeup: the unbending loyalties of English club football deployed en masse in defence of something that really does have nothing at all to do with English club football.

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There are, of course, plenty of caveats here. First, the exchange was sparked by a thought-blurt from the TV personality Piers Morgan, the kind of deliberately provocative Twitter comment that tends to bring the worst out of people. And secondly, this is a small minority. Most City supporters seem to have a far more nuanced view.

In any case, what is the “correct” response to all this? There is no model, no approved way to act here. And in isolation it really is a wonderfully seductive wash-job, unprecedented in its beauty, every surface primped and preened and buffed. The football alone is mind-numbingly good, up there with anything the English top tier has seen in the modern age. Oh yeah. Nefarious intentions. We’ll get on to that. Can’t you see there’s a dreamy, feather-footed 6-0 evisceration going on?

Plus, we are all complicit to some degree, just as sportswashing itself is nothing new. Britain’s own historic mania for organised sport is based to a degree on this principle, on spreading its cultural will through the colonies. Fast forward to the Premier League and very few club owners are without blemish. If Manchester City really is a laundromat for the global reputation of the UAE, as Chelsea has been for Roman Abramovich, then people such as me who publicise it are just another bubble inside the drum, a soap-clogged bristle on the far edge of the scrubbing brush.

And yet, there is a question of degree to all things. Whataboutery doesn’t really work here, because there has been nothing like this before, an entire club used to advertise a country, to play a part in a regional cold war of the gulf. Once you start saying, well, Ed Glazer donated to Trump, or going on about Arsenal being sponsored by the Emirates airline, you may as well just drown in moral relativism, accept that there that are no degrees of what is desirable, that “the world” is to blame for things that happen rather than the people in it who do the things.

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Blind tribal consumption is not really going to help here. It is vital to show some kind of individual agency, to be more confident that a football club, which will belong to its fans even when the current age has passed, can survive some actual scrutiny. And to drag the eye away, just for a moment, from the promise of pearls, from all that disorientating underwater beauty.