Now, the book. The answer is The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports, by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Two Wall Street Journal reporters telling the origin story as a heist: the 1992 breakaway from the old Football League, Murdoch's satellite dishes making a television product out of mud and rain, Abramovich arriving at Chelsea, and — most pertinent to you — Abu Dhabi's purchase of Manchester City, the very machinery that would eventually assemble a team around your Norwegian. It's the single best on-ramp to why the league is what it is.

When you want deeper soundings, David Goldblatt's The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football — the Premier League as a mirror held up to post-Thatcher Britain: money, class, race, the fates of the industrial cities whose names the clubs still carry. Goldblatt is the game's great historian-sociologist, and of everything here it's the volume most likely to sit comfortably within reach of your Weil.

And note the comedy: the answer has been load-bearing on your desk all along. Simon Kuper — currently supporting your monitor by way of Barcelona — wrote Football Against the Enemy and co-wrote Soccernomics. Wrong league on the plinth; right author for the culture.

One caution before you commit: English football treats club allegiance as effectively irreversible. You choose once, and the choice is understood to be for life — switching is regarded somewhere between divorce and apostasy. So: is it sky blue for City, then, or is Haaland merely the gateway?