So buckle up for a few paragraphs of boring, pathetic whining, from which no good will come.

It was a goal. The ref shouldn’t have blown when he did, and if he’d waited roughly one second longer before blowing his little whistle I am certain that we would have qualified for the Champions League for the second year running.

It wasn’t one man’s mistake, of course. He was woefully inexperienced for the job at hand, having worked under a different set of rules for the majority of his career. On Sunday I was convinced that it was some kind of conspiracy, but, as with most things, it probably just comes down to woeful incompetence. I don’t think the brains behind PGMOL would be able to pull off a conspiracy even if they were that way inclined – they’re just shit at what they do.

(Also, just for clarity – we were dreadful, which just compounded the misery. We didn’t play well enough to win, but that wasn’t for the ref to decide.)

The ramifications for that premature exhalation are massive. £100 million is the figure that is thrown around, but as football fans we’ve become desensitised by that kind of thing. It’s almost meaningless. What it really means, if we are to believe the journalists that are paid to write about these kinds of things, is that we are going to have to make some major sales. That was probably the case anyway, but now it’s more severe.

We have to sell these players to comply with the rules that are set up to protect clubs from themselves. The rules that three of our four rivals for the final Champions League spots have broken in the last few years. To be fair, Chelsea’s was about signing minors, rather than overspending – thankfully they’ve been incredibly measured on the transfer front.

Incidentally, the one club that hasn’t broken these rules is owned by one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes (Is that still relevant? Or has that been normalised now?). One of the teams that took a Champions League spot has definitely broken the rules that we are trying to comply with, but have not yet faced a punishment (Is that still relevant? Or has that been normalised now?)

Anyway, we have to sell these players quickly to meet a deadline at the end of June. And everyone knows we have to sell them quickly. That’s why we can’t just sell our players who have been out on loan – no one will pay big money for them when they know we are desperate. So we can only sell players that will get plenty of interest if we are to receive anything like their true value – our best players.

The big problem is our wage bill. We may only have the sixth-highest wage bill in the league, but we generate a lot less money from other avenues than the other clubs that we are competing with. Plus, a few years ago we hired Steven Gerrard, and while I disagree with many of the restrictions in place, I do believe that we deserved some repercussions for that abomination of a decision – but surely it’s gone on long enough now?

Our goalkeeper will be sold. As will, it seems, one of Kamara (widely regarded as our best player), Watkins (our all-time record goalscorer), Rogers (one of the most exciting young players in the league) or Ramsey (one of our own). Maybe a few of them will go. This is on top of selling Luiz, Diaby and Duran in the last twelve months.

We won’t be able to attract the same calibre of player as Spurs and we won’t be able to spend anything like Manchester United will spend. The five teams above us will strengthen further. We’ll need to be smart – replacing the players we sell with better while spending less. Just like last year.

Also, our fans are bracing themselves for the announcement of ticket prices for next season. Will we be helping to make up the revenue deficit? The money has to come from somewhere, so if there isn’t a buyer for Leander Dendonker, we might have to pay up.

(How much did we have to pay Gerrard to stop being our manager? Not saying it wasn’t money well spent, but it’s difficult to shake off another layer of injustice here.)

There will be some people that see this situation as justice for the controversy surrounding Nyland’s save against Sheffield United, which many claim saved us from relegation five years ago – despite there being nine-and-a-half matches remaining in the season and everything that happened subsequently was directly influenced on it not being given as a goal.

I am actually quite envious of the people that make this argument – it must be lovely to watch a sport that you have never given any actual thought to. Just entranced by the flickering images on a screen and watching those blokes kick the ball really hard.

Will we still be whining about this decision in five years? Probably. I’m still annoyed that Vidic wasn’t sent off. And the fact that I don’t have to add any more details for you to know exactly what I am talking about suggests you feel the same.

I guess the question is – can we use this experience for some kind of positivity? When I have started to get over it, I imagine I will be quite proud of how McGinn and Emery responded after the match. They looked inwardly and said that we hadn’t done enough to win. It would have been far easier to come out all guns blazing, but they didn’t.

They did talk about it, of course – how could they not – but I didn’t get the sense that they were using it to paper over the massive cracks in our performance. Would our rivals have acted in a similar way? Guardiola and Arteta’s heads may have exploded, and the ghost of Bert Millichip would have been barred from the City Ground.

There will be no change within the Premier League, so we will have to keep looking at ourselves to make this work. Channel the frustration in a positive way. There is a lot that we could have done differently all season, so now is the time to start putting it right. We need to massively improve, because, as we’ve seen, if you leave anything to chance (or the authorities) in this league, everything could fall apart.

It’s an unfair game, and the more we understand that, the better chance we have of having some success, however minor that might be. The playing field is not level. The rich will get richer. We will have to work much harder and smarter than the teams around us if we want to get close to beating them. They can afford to make mistakes, we cannot. We just have to accept that.