Dion Fanning: The game is rigged and best move is not to play

Along with Arsenal and Liverpool, City were knocked out of Europe this week, but their exit was not accompanied by the vituperative response that accompanied the failure of the others.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. Pic: Martin Rickett/PA Wire.

The seminal 1983 movie WarGames captured the spirit of those uncertain times. A teenager, played by Matthew Broderick, uses his PC’s modem to hack into his school computer, allowing him to alter his grades and the grades of his friend.

He continues to impress her by showing how he can hack into the mainframe of computer game companies to play their new video games before they’re released. As his modem scans for other computer networks, he is unaware that, following a reluctance from some military generals to authorise nuclear launch codes during a drill, decision-making power for nuclear war has been handed over to a computer.