Over the past few weeks, those in Premier League boardrooms have noticed a very distinctive shift.

The previous talk of trying to buy clubs, only for billionaires to realise how few are available, has gradually turned into talk of trying to sell clubs.

Except, that is now even more difficult.

The current calculation is that at least eight clubs - over a third of the league - are either officially or unofficially up for sale in some form.

With some of these, there are actual prospectuses. With others, it’s that an ownership would be open to listening to offers. Some would consider full sales, others merely minority stakes.

The current problem, though, is that there are so few buyers.

The market has changed, but it could offer the opportunity for a wider reset.

That may be dependent on a much bigger story, which is a factor in all of this, following the recent developments surrounding the Manchester City case.

Right now, it’s only a few months since another distinctive story - Jeff Bezos’ consortium buying a stake in Liverpool - seemed to mark a high point of high-level purchases.

The Premier League was at that moment seen as a good area to invest due to how it is uncorrelated to global markets, helping to diversify investment portfolios, and this on the back of a boom of US institutional money buying clubs after Covid.

Many of the same factors are now working in reverse.

The great takeover has become the great sell-off. Or, at least, attempted sell-off.

At “absolute level”, one source describes it to The Independent, no one is buying, and there has been “stagnation” in the market.

Some activity still persists at a fractional/minority level but only if it represents real “value”.

Part of it, one experienced source stresses, is “circumstantial”. No deals are going to get through the Independent Football Regulator this side of Christmas, so there is little movement.

Other industry figures stress that billionaires aren’t as willing to invest, due to ongoing global uncertainty. The one tendency is for such billionaires to invest within US sports. Arsenal’s owners, the Kroenke family, struck a deal to buy the Los Angeles Angels for $4bn in September, while Josh Kushner and Bog Iger pulled off a record-breaking $12.5bn deal for the Los Angeles Lakers in August.

The crisis in the Gulf, among other concerns, could affect flow of money in football given how much investment comes from that region. So many corners of the game are now indirectly dependent on it.

The rumours about Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund’s willingness to sell Newcastle United have been swirling for at least two years.

Perhaps most pertinently, though, many buyers see English football as being in an opposite situation to a half-decade ago.

Amid so many takeovers, it was viewed as “a growing trend”, which is generally seen as the best type of business for such investors to get into.

Now, most clubs do not have growing revenues. The English game is seen as having “topped out”.

That could be made clear in the next broadcasting rights cycle, since the last one in the Premier League saw the price per game drop for the first time in the competition’s history.

The current expectation is that domestic rights will stay around the same level and that international rights will marginally drop - unless there’s an unlikely entry from one of the streaming giants.

All of that only deepens the sense that “the Bs” of Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth are excelling, since they all have superb operations and strategy departments.

Few other clubs have that scope for growth.

There’s then that other looming story: City.

A lot of people are waiting to see how that case concludes, especially since it could see the Abu Dhabi ownership sell up, too.

No matter what happens, the very nature of the City story is viewed as inevitably bringing some kind of reset.

Even in the most basic terms, a usually locked-in Champions League place may be opened, and that for a few years. Financial projections can be altered.

Should City unexpectedly prove successful in their appeal, though, they’re back in the centre of all of this and potentially emboldened.

Many prospective ownerships and investors want to see how this lands before acting.

Another layer is if this leads to a forced sale, and potentially a much bigger discussion about state or state-linked ownership.

If such purchases are restricted, it does change the market. Overall ceiling is lowered.

All of this runs alongside a deeper argument that the introduction of the Independent Football Regulator coming in conjunction with the City case offers a rare opportunity for a reset anyway. And not just a reset.

But, given how both developments have involved discussion about core principles of English football, a proper rethink about what the game actually wants to be; what clubs and owners should be; what their role is.

This very increased focus on executives and takeovers only makes clearer the climate we’re in.

English football has gone from the era of the player, up to 1945, through the era of the manager, up to 2003, into the era of the owner. That is to say, the figures that exert the greatest influence on the game.

As the clearest illustration of this, something has obviously gone wrong if a series of clubs with self-sustainably huge fanbases have entire eras completely defined by who their owners happen to be.

In a properly run game, football outlook would be independent of this.

Instead, you only have to look at the examples of Manchester United under the Glazers, Newcastle United under Mike Ashley and arguably his successors, Liverpool under Tom Hicks and George Gillett… and on and on.

The national sport really shouldn’t come down to the pot luck of which of the one per cent picks you, especially when the Independent Football Regulator has specifically recognised the social importance of the game as a matter of law.

That’s also precisely why any future financial regulations shouldn’t be dependent on owner investment, despite so much agitation.

One of the biggest problems in English football right now is a £300m per annum commercial revenue gap between the wealthiest clubs and the rest.

It has been made close to unbridgeable by a system that, as one source tells The Independent, ensures “a hole below the waterline in competitive balance”.

The wage inflation from that similarly drags football’s entire financial system upwards, forcing high-risk capital investment, and creating more and more stress.

That stress has in turn had the effect of ensuring a fan-owned club like AFC Wimbledon have to consider selling off stakes to private investment, despite the Independent Football Regulator expressly encouraging fan ownership.

The system the regulator oversees instead seems to work against that.

It should be a sign, to go with everything else. There has never been a better moment for a reset.