In September and October last year, with what we now have to say is slightly unfortunate timing, Saracens issued a series of short videos to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of “The Saracens Way”, the cultural transformation that is said to have turned them into one of the most irresistible forces in the history of English club rugby union.

“The Saracens Way, quite simply, is the club,” Will Fraser beams into the camera. A former flanker who retired through injury, Fraser now sells Brand Saracens to a bulging catalogue of corporate clients. For a competitive day rate, including lunch and refreshments, Fraser and a current Saracens player or coach will instil in your company the cornerstones of the Saracens winning ethos: cultural change, strong values, an emphasis on happiness and making memories. “If we create good people,” Fraser explains, “we create good rugby players.”

Of course, it was not just fund managers, insurance giants and private schools prepared to invest wholesale in the promise of their own Saracens-liveried epiphany. To read back some of the more reverential media coverage the club received during its glory years, knowing what we do now, is to be reminded of the way dominant sports teams are often accorded a fantastical quasi-shamanic quality, their every trait sanctified, their every twitch scoured for valuable learnings that might benefit the rest of us.

The secret of Saracens’ success? It was the creche at the training ground, allowing players to work in a family-oriented environment. It was the microphones attached to players at training to improve communication. It was the team-building holidays to Budapest and Munich. It was the philosophy round tables where the club psychologist would initiate discussions of Descartes. It was the wolves that the then-defensive coach Paul Gustard brought to a team meeting to illustrate the club’s “pack” mentality.

The Saracens Way was sold to us as an ideology, almost a lifestyle: a triumph of culture and values, of innovation and fresh thinking. For journalists and corporate bookers it held an instant, sticky appeal: Imagineer Your Way To Success With This One Weird Trick! For some of the sport’s more supercilious fans, seeing the likes of Brad Barritt and Owen Farrell taking on business degrees provided a handy contrast with those thick, vulgar round-ballers. And yet perhaps there was another lesson to be learned from Saracens, one that can really be appreciated only now the club have been found guilty of persistent salary-cap breaches and are facing relegation and ignominy as a result.

It was telling, after all, how few of the treatments of Saracens’ unprecedented era of success mentioned its position as one of the Premiership’s financially dominant clubs. Underwritten for more than two decades by the multi-millionaire Nigel Wray and his family, who have absorbed immense debts in order to drive investment in the club’s infrastructure and academy, Saracens have enjoyed a long-term stability that most other clubs have not.

Saracens beat Leinster in May to win their third European Champions Cup in four seasons. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images

Throw in almost £50m of written-off loans and the good fortune of a huge, affluent catchment area in north London, Hertfordshire and Essex, and perhaps you will understand why Saracens’ rivals are less than impressed by the news they have broken the salary cap in each of the previous three seasons and are scheduled to do so again this season by – according to some reports – more than £2m.

This was the real One Weird Trick: not quite as widely discussed, perhaps, and a little less sexy than wolves and Descartes, but perhaps the single most crucial factor in those four Premiership titles and three European Champions Cups. None of which, of course, is to play down the graft and ingenuity of the club’s players or coaches, or the very decent work its foundation has done across north London, or the success of its talent pipeline, or the shambolic handling of the case by Premiership Rugby. All of these can be true at once: rugby’s governance structures are scarcely fit for purpose; wealth is not the only determinant of sporting success; other clubs may well have broken the rules over the years; some of the biggest victims of this transgression will be the club’s own players and fans; Saracens financially doped their way to success.

There are parallels, perhaps, with the trials of Team Sky, that other feelgood British success story whose massive budget, lack of transparency and casual attitude towards sporting ethics were elided by an unquestioning media and a wider lack of curiosity. And to this day Saracens retain a small deranged core of press cheerleaders who regard their crimes as little more than a form-filling oversight, ignoring the potential for even a small overspend to distort the market: a marginal gain, if you like, but one that offers a decisive edge on your rivals.

From the Champions League to Test cricket to Team GB: where money flows success often follows. But as a country we don’t really like to talk about that. We don’t like to talk about the ways in which financial clout can tilt the playing field, stockpile talent, buy political influence and favourable media coverage, hire batteries of lawyers to deter legislation and squash competitors.

Instead we would rather talk about winning mentalities and virtuous cultures, about creches and team-building jaunts. To do otherwise, after all, would be to tear down the illusion that still props up the narrative of sport in this country: that through talent, hard work and innovation alone, you too can stand atop the podium. It is a maxim that has never been true in society and is rarely – if ever – true in sport. Anyone telling you different is probably trying to sell you something.