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For fifteen years now, Nick Harris, a British sportswriter, has been covering allegations that Manchester City—a perennial winner of the English Premier League, the richest soccer league in the world—was, as he puts it, “cooking the books.” The story, in brief, went like this: from 2009 to 2018, City allegedly engaged in widespread cheating by deceiving the Premier League with more than a billion dollars in sham contracts, which allowed it to spend beyond its limits to acquire some of the best players in the world. Eight years ago, the Premier League officially began investigating the allegations. Two years ago, an independent commission empowered by the league held an official hearing. City—whose majority owner is Sheik Mansour, a multibillionaire Abu Dhabi royal—has waged an expensive, extended fight against the league’s charges.…