Friday 17 August 2018 was going perfectly well. There was a weekend trip to see Manchester United at Brighton to look forward to, then things started to go awry with a request from GQ to review All Or Nothing, a behind-the-scenes documentary following Manchester City’s 2017-18 run to the Premier League title.

Manchester United fans are hardly the demographic for the series shown on Amazon and I didn’t even know how to watch it.

“Amazon Prime,” said the editor. “You need to join up.” Ah, they’d finally get me after years trying to induce me to lay out for it. A payment was made, not subjected to a sliver of Luxembourg’s tax before City use my money to put towards their next signing. I wasn’t comfortable, and was even less so when I found out it wasn’t a one-off documentary but an eight-part series following similar successful behind-the-scenes sagas about the All Blacks and the Arizona Cardinals.

Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne walking through the tunnel and interacting with young fans.

In episode one, there’s footage of a large needle being injected into John Stones’ hamstring in a Barcelona clinic. Barcelona’s influence is everywhere in All Or Nothing: City’s injured players visit a clinic there; Barcelona’s Mediapro is a production partner; Pep Guardiola’s background is well known; and there are several other Catalan officials including City’s CEO, Ferran Soriano, and their sporting director, Txiki Begiristain, who played at Barça and was Guardiola’s sporting director.

Injecting a needle filled with fentanyl into my heart while wearing a "Bell Is Better Than Best" T-shirt as I sat down to view would have been preferable to watching nearly eight hours of City storming the league, playing brilliant football and scoring 106 goals... but I needn’t have worried, because Manchester United feature so heavily throughout.

After the first episodes, in which the sweary, intense genius of Guardiola sets the tone and City get off to a flyer and defeat United at Old Trafford in December, there was a strong temptation to cut to episode six or seven to see how Amazon covered the second Manchester derby in April.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and the team celebrate a win in the home changing room of the Etihad Stadium.

So that’s exactly what I did and it was fantastic. The scene is set for City to win the league and Guardiola has told his players to invite their families so they can see it lifted against United.

Emotional City fans on the verge of tears prepare themselves for winning the title against the evil empire of United. After years of watching crap, they can’t quite believe that their club has come to this.

Narrator Ben Kingsley, raised in the United heartland of Salford, sets the scene and City race into a 2-0 lead. And then it all goes beautifully wrong. Within minutes, the commentator states, “City, who’ve not lost at home all season, trail to the enemy.”

The action later cuts to the dressing room (access is superb throughout), where Fabian Delph laments City’s "basics" in a Bradford accent so thick it sounds like "bayyy-six". And the players look sick. It’s wonderful, and a penny for the thoughts of United legend Brian Kidd, a long-time City assistant and proud Mancunian who admitted he came out in a rash when he went south of Ardwick. Manchester, the city, looks splendid on the documentary.

But, of course, City had the last laugh. They won their fifth league title to move two ahead of Huddersfield Town for title wins. Guardiola is a better manager than he was a player – and he was a magnificent player. Back in the dressing room, the players celebrate wins at Chelsea exactly how you’d want them to if it was your team. They're at the top of their game, they come across well and appreciate what’s happening when an always-animated Guardiola says, “This we are living. We are not living this any more in our lives. It’s impossible.”

Manchester City’s Danilo, Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sané and Lukas Nmecha celebrate one of their 32 Premier League wins in the home dressing room at the Etihad Stadium.

City are filmed at their best. They may get even better, they may even reach the Champions League final, which will be as painful for United fans as Liverpool getting there last May.

Recently, a more learned southern acquaintance who specialises in psychology couldn’t understand why I was unable to derive any pleasure from a brilliant game of football involving Manchester City and Liverpool. But he wasn’t raised in Manchester.

Some of my best mates are City – proper pre-2008 home and away City too – but I hope they lose every week and I hope they feel the same about United, though one did text to say he wanted United to win the Europa League to lift Manchester in the dark days after the Manchester Arena terror attack.

All Or Nothing is a step up from BBC World’s 2003 Barça: More Than A Game documentary, which had boardroom access but largely showed a succession of Catalan executives at vast buffets with ever increasing waistlines. It’s slicker than the much mocked Being Liverpool from 2012, too, and is unlikely to cause the hiccups of other "warts and all" football documentaries that damaged the careers of Graham Taylor and John Sinnott because there are so few warts. But how editorially authentic is this City story?

It was filmed at the right time for City, because they were so good last season, but nobody – bar the pantomime villain José Mourinho – comes out of it negatively. The club claim they didn’t have editorial control, but how deep were the programme makers allowed to dig into any stories that may have reflected badly on City? The tension between lifelong fans and glory hunters that any successful club attracts? The lack of youth players given a chance? What really happened between the disenfranchised Yaya Touré and Guardiola?

When respected French magazine L’Equipe was granted access to City in 2017, the club were not happy with the end product, because it didn’t tally with the image they wanted to project. And they told them so. That’s dangerous territory and the lines blur between journalism and PR, with All Or Nothing essentially a slick global marketing tool for City, keen to catch up with United and Liverpool in the popularity stakes. That’s fine for fans predisposed to lap it up, inaccuracies and all, but journalism should go in search of the truth.

Manchester City’s Fernandinho takes pitch-side instructions from manager Pep Guardiola at the Etihad Stadium.

City fan Johnny Marr is interviewed and reels off a list of credible City-supporting musicians before asking, “And who do United have? Simply Red?”

Johnny, you’re forgetting The Stones Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans, New Order, Terry Hall and Richard Ashcroft. And lads like Terry, Ian Brown and Gary Whelan actually go to games too.

Of course, Marr is on the wind-up – and United fans did the same to City for years. It’s all fair game in a tribal, cross-city, derby rivalry.

The accents are interesting. Vincent Kompany, a decent man married to a Salford girl, speaks with a Mancunian accent getting close to Kidd’s pronunciations of "spirit" and "vibrant" when he’s asked to describe what makes this City team special. The yellow ribbon-wearing Guardiola, who has successfully settled his family in Manchester, speaks in Catalan, never Spanish. Coach Mikel Arteta, David Silva and Sergio Agüero speak in Spanish despite years of living in England. That’ll do them no harm with audiences in the Spanish-speaking world.

There are compelling human aspects to the story too – Agüero being a lonely soul who sees his son once a month. Or Benjamin Mendy’s injury and recovery. City’s Emirati chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, speaks very well and there’s a confidence emanating from the structure they’ve put in place which has made City successful on the field.

“You are the best team in the world,” states Guardiola at one point to his players.

Actually, Pep, you need to win the treble to call yourself that.

All Or Nothing: Manchester City is available on Amazon Prime Video now.