The bile comes, as sure as the sun: accusations that the news media is in league with a mysterious “cartel” of clubs, and also with UEFA, to bring down City. The rhetoric has only intensified in the last week, since UEFA threw City out of the Champions League for two years, not simply for breaking the rules of Financial Fair Play but also for misleading investigators.

The club, of course, vehemently asserts its innocence. It will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and perhaps beyond, with what it has called “irrefutable” proof it has done nothing wrong. Its fans believe it, unquestioningly. This is all, they say, a witch hunt.

They make that clear to journalists on social media — most often in the form of harmless abuse, though it is occasionally more troubling — and to UEFA, now seen as City’s persecutor, in real life.

City’s fans have long jeered the Champions League anthem because of the perceived vendetta against the club; during the team’s game against West Ham on Wednesday, some brandished signs declaring the organization a mafia. Further demonstrations are planned for the visit of Real Madrid in a few weeks’ time.

This is not how victims are supposed to behave, this defiance and rage, but that is precisely what City’s fans are in all of this.

Supporting a sports team is not — though it may seem like it, to nonbelievers — a straight consumer choice. It is, instead, part of our composite identity. Often, quite a large part. There are parallels, according to some studies, to how we regard our gender, our sexuality, our ethnicity. (Though it is not, we should at this point concede, quite as important.)

It may not be integral to who we are, but it is integral to how we see ourselves. A team’s success and failure is seen as “self-relevant,” as Daniel Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State University, put it.