It was getting on for 1am when they started to board flight BD1858 at Munich airport. Micah Richards and Joleon Lescott played Scrabble on an iPad. For Gareth Barry and James Milner, the game of choice was Yahtzee. Most of the players, though, sat in silence, contemplating what had just happened and what it meant. In his usual position – front row, window seat – Roberto Mancini's face said one thing: "Leave well alone."
As the journalists filed past, Carlos Tevez probably didn't pick the wisest moment to be sharing a joke with Pablo Zabaleta, tipping back his head with laughter, animated, seemingly without a care in the world.
Did he care? It is difficult to know the answer to that, but it says something about the problems Tevez has caused behind the scenes at Manchester City that there are senior people at the club who have suspected for a while something was brewing, and have not completely ruled out the idea that what happened in the Allianz Arena was premeditated.
The truth is City accepted a long time ago that what Tevez brings – the baggage, the bullshit, the occasional moments of brilliance – will always remind us of the gap between someone who is a great football player and a great football man. Until now, though, the good has always outweighed the bad. Sure, it has been a close-run thing at times, but Tevez was always worth the hassle. He could pinch you a goal, earn his team-mates a win bonus, send the crowd home happy, keep the manager in his job.
What happened against Bayern Munich was something else entirely. Roberto Mancini was actually trembling with anger in his press conference. His eyes burned with fury. Mancini has built his persona on being detached and tough. Here, he looked far more emotional than any other time we have seen him in almost two years at the club. It was true, he said, that Tevez had refused to come on as a second-half substitute and, as far as he was concerned, that was it.
"For me, if a player earns a lot of money playing for Manchester City, in the Champions League, and he behaves like this – no, he cannot play for us again. Never. He has wanted to leave for the last two years. For two years I have helped him, and now he has refused to play. Never again. Finished."
Tevez is Tevez and, by now, we all know controversy sticks to him like a tick on a dog, but his record of previous offences does not make the events in Germany any less shocking or dispiriting. And there must be sadness, too, that it has come to this. Tevez should be cherished in City's history as the man who lifted the FA Cup, popular enough at the time that the supporters, for the most part, were willing to forgive him when it turned out he didn't want to take part in the open-top bus parade. The club had to persuade Tevez, with the threat of a fine, to cancel a flight he had booked to Argentina.
Four months on, we now have the faintly ludicrous situation whereby City felt it necessary to call in extra security to meet the squad at Manchester airport in the early hours of Wednesday because of the possibility that supporters would turn up to confront him. Tevez, through a cocktail of staggering ego and self-absorption, has somehow manoeuvred himself into a position whereby, in May, he was lifting the club's first piece of silverware for 35 years and, by September, he needed a police escort to make his way through a largely deserted Terminal 3.
City have to back Mancini now. If they didn't, it would undermine the manager to the point where the Italian might feasibly consider his own position unworkable under this regime. Mancini, undoubtedly, was speaking in the heat of the moment on Tuesday, but his mood had not changed by the time the flight landed back in Manchester, and nor will it.
Mancini will jeopardise his own authority if he should relax his position now. But there's no getting way from the fact it's a gamble. Tevez scored or set up almost half of City's league goals last season. There aren't many footballers who get the ball and go straight for goal like he does. Tevez gets the ball and drives forward. He makes things happen, scores from every angle, every distance. Motivated, he is a great footballer.
Without him, City have only three recognised forwards – Sergio Agüero, Edin Dzeko and Mario Balotelli – and you wonder whether there may be unease in Abu Dhabi about what would happen if, say, Agüero picked up an injury that ruled him out for a couple of months.
But Mancini has come to the conclusion that the situation is only going to deteriorate. Tevez has handed in transfer requests, he has fluttered his eyelashes at potential suitors and he has turned his phone off when the manager of the club currently paying him £250,000 a week wanted a couple of minutes over the summer.
This is a man who craves recognition as the biggest fish in his pond. And this season, at City, he has merely been part of the shoal. Vincent Kompany is the captain these days. Agüero has taken over as first-choice striker. The club's best player? That's David Silva, by a country mile. The player whose name is sung the loudest? Dzeko. Or, at least, it was until the 2-0 defeat to Bayern, when the Bosnian's reaction to being substituted was poor in the extreme and will mean he is dropped for Saturday's game at Blackburn Rovers.
A few weeks ago the Guardian highlighted Gary Neville's comments, from his autobiography, about Tevez from two years together at Manchester United. Neville remembers someone who, in his final year, "started to toss it off a bit in training … was constantly saying his back was sore … He'd become very fond of a massage."
His conclusion from two years together at Old Trafford is that Tevez's ego never recovered from the signing of Dimitar Berbatov. "He's a brilliant striker, as he has proved at City. But I can judge only on what he did in that second season and, to all of us at United, it seemed his heart wasn't in it. He was in and out of the team and he became insecure. He'd been upset by the signing of Berba, and Carlos needs to feel the love. He's not someone who can play one game in three and be happy."
Except there is not much love for Carlos in Manchester any more. Mancini is no longer willing to spoil him and, if the manager gets his way, the authority will come from Abu Dhabi to send the offending player into isolation, without a care for what it would do to his career. A buyer may come forward in January but, then again, they may not. There are not too many clubs out there with the money to sign a player with Tevez's financial requirements, particularly one with his history of moving on every couple of years and, in the process, leaving behind such a stink that when it happens at Eastlands they will need to fumigate the corridors.
At City there has been a tendency in the past to blame his adviser, the ubiquitous Kia Joorabchian, but there comes a time when Tevez, at 27, needs to take responsibility for his own actions. Except, of course, he doesn't seem to think he has done anything wrong. When Tevez was informed that Mancini had said he would never play for City again, his response summed it up. "I was top goalscorer here last season, I always act professionally so it is up to him."
Later, on the plane, Tevez broke off from chatting to Zabaleta to have a go at an unsuspecting member of City's office staff. Tevez could be seen jabbing out his finger, berating him in broken English. The word "respect" could be heard. A couple of times, in fact.
Tuesday began for City with a delegation from the club, led by the life-president, Bernard Halford, the assistant manager, Brian Kidd, and the former captain and manager Tony Book, laying a wreath in the Manchesterplatz to commemorate the Munich air disaster. The following day began with Tevez grinning when he saw the police escort waiting for him at Manchester airport. As one colleague put it (expletives removed): "He doesn't care less."
