The Premier League’s Tour De France Moment >

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On 25 July 1999, Lance Armstrong wrote one of the great sporting stories of all time. A cancer survivor, beating all the odds, coming back to his sport and winning the Tour de France. It is the kind of emotional magic that only sport can produce.

But it was the start of a very different story. One that almost killed the world's most loved bike race, and one from which the Tour de France brand is still recovering. Because from 1999 to 2005, the Tour has no champion. Armstrong was stripped of his seven yellow jerseys for cheating, and cycling's governing body chose not to hand them down to the man in second. Too many of the riders behind him had stories of their own, so the years were simply left blank.

The Tour survived, of course. It still attracts millions of fans, packs the Champs-Élysées and sells TV rights. But for a generation, every breakaway came with a raised eyebrow. Every heroic climb, a quiet question.

Cheating is kryptonite to sport. If what you're watching turns out not to be true, the love for sporting brands fades fast.

This is now the world the Premier League brand finds itself in. The richest football league on the planet is about to enter its Tour de France moment.

On Tuesday last week, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of 114 charges against it, relating to serious breaches of the league's financial rules across nine seasons. That's 2009 to 2018 – the years that built the club's dynasty. Sham sponsorship deals . Misstated accounts. And witnesses found to have been dishonest.

So, what now for the Premier League brand?

Since the launch of its glamorous new era on Sky Sports in 1992, the Premier League has built a brand on elite, fast-paced football, world-leading entertainment, global commercial dominance and, ultimately, unpredictable and unbeatable drama.

But, as some have suggested, is it a house built on sand?

The league has welcomed owners from all around the world whose goal wasn't really about football, or even money. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the owners of Man City and Newcastle are more interested in soft power. National image. A shop window for a country, not a club. And the league let them in. It didn't want that money going to Spain, Italy or France instead. It wanted the best players, the biggest clubs and the richest TV deal on the planet.

And it worked brilliantly. Just like Chelsea before them, via Russia, City's money has flowed from Abu Dhabi right through the league, including into the rivals now queuing up to condemn it.

It's true that these clubs may well have missed out on lucrative and potentially transformative titles and league positions due to City's rule-breaking. But the whole league has benefitted from the extraordinary amounts of money funnelled in.

From a long-term brand point of view, I’m sure Manchester City will be fine.

City's brand was never really built on the past 15 years. It was built on the ones before. This is a club with fans who followed it into the third tier and still filled Maine Road. A club with the Gallagher brothers in the stands and generations of families who stayed through the lean years. Owners come and go. But that kind of loyalty doesn't.

And brand theory backs this up. Scandal hurts “sincere” brands far more than “exciting” ones.

So, theory suggests that the real brand damage may be felt by the league, which, perhaps ironically, brought these charges.

In Italy, when Juventus was disgraced and relegated in the 2006 Calciopoli scandal, the damage didn't stop in Turin. Serie A already had a lot of problems, but the scandal dented belief in the league further, at exactly the wrong moment. It helped the Premier League to take its crown.

Juventus bounced straight back and went on to win nine titles in a row, reinventing itself as a global lifestyle and fashion brand along the way. Serie A is still struggling.

Athletics has taken the same hit. Sprinter Ben Johnson didn't just disgrace himself in 1988. He created a doubt over the sport’s showpiece 100m that never really went away.

The Premier League will survive, of course. But its brand is about to go through its toughest-ever period.

Ultimately, the league needs a reset.

Points deductions, fines and carefully worded statements won't deliver one. It needs a genuine moment of reflection, a look at what its brand stands for and a refocus on why millions of fans around the world love it. This needs to involve a deliberate pivot away from financial unsavouriness and a unified effort to rebuild trust.

The Tour de France went through its own brand reset, rebuilding from the ground up. Starting with new technology and testing to rebuild the credibility of its riders, and then opening its doors to Netflix, letting the world into the team cars, medical meetings and hotel rooms. A sport showing it had nothing to hide was a powerful statement.

Despite its troubles, the core of the Premier League brand is still made of magic.

It just needs to prove, once again, that the magic is real.