The converse is true, too: There is a perfectly logical case to be made that F.F.P. is a good thing, that clubs should have to live within their means, that longstanding sporting and social institutions being deployed as vanity projects or soft-power plays or reputation-laundering devices for regimes with questionable human rights records is less than ideal. Perhaps the rules are the rules, and the clubs should have to abide by them, while lobbying to get them changed, rather than just picking and choosing which ones they like.

Equally, maybe the Champions League would be better if Europe’s giants played one another more frequently. Maybe it would be in the best interests of the game if high-profile European games were played on weekends, and domestic fixtures in midweek. Maybe the handful of teams from Greece and Poland and Belgium who make it are just a waste of time.

Or maybe not. Maybe Europe’s elite clubs — who had, after all, conjured an idea for what the Champions League should look like that was eerily, entirely coincidentally, similar to the idea UEFA is currently workshopping — are in danger of overestimating their own place in the firmament. Maybe changing the Champions League is killing the golden goose. Maybe it works as it is, and it does not need to be altered.

It is perfectly feasible to make a case for all of the above, but the question of which of them is most convincing — which of them, if any, is correct — is not the most pressing. It is the fact that these questions have, now, to be asked, that matters most. The significance of the plan to change the Champions League runs beyond its potential impact on domestic tournaments. The consequences of Manchester City’s possibly being banned from European competition run much further than its Etihad Stadium.

In both cases, something far deeper is at stake. These stories, at their heart, once everything else is stripped away — the acronyms and the arguments and all the rest — are about who will get to run European soccer, whose voice carries the most weight, and who answers to whom.