The punishment that should worry City fans most isn't the one that makes the back pages. It's the one that quietly empties the trophy cabinet for half a decade.

Talk about the club's pending case has settled into a comfortable groove: a colossal points deduction, maybe as many as 100, served in one go, a season written off, and then normality restored. City's ownership group insists nothing was done wrong. The Premier League counters that the club is guilty of more than 100 charges. The gap between those positions is where the real anxiety lives.

Now consider how the league might actually choose to apply a penalty of that size. Rather than swallowing the whole thing in a single campaign, the points could be spread — 20 docked from each of the next five seasons. That's the scenario with teeth. A one-year hit is a bruise. A five-year squeeze is a different sport entirely.

The reasoning is straightforward enough. Strip 100 points in one summer and you relegate a club that still has most of its stars under contract for years to come. Erling Haaland is tied to the place until 2034, for instance. The squad is deep and young enough that a single year in the Championship would be a detour, not a destination — City would flatten that division and be back in the Premier League by the following season. The league knows this. In its eyes, a clean one-season punishment achieves very little.

So the smarter, crueller play is to stretch it out. Twenty points off the top each year means City almost certainly don't win the title during that window. Not once. Not close. And if those deductions arrive alongside a transfer ban — no signings, current players drifting away, the squad hollowed out season by season — the cumulative effect isn't a bad year. It's a lost decade.

That's the combination nobody at the Etihad wants to contemplate: points bled away over five campaigns while the rebuild is frozen in place. A fine can be absorbed. A ban can be worked around. Both at once, over years, turns a superclub into something far more ordinary.

There are caveats, naturally. City could win their appeal and the whole conversation evaporates. The players, as far as anyone can tell, don't have contract clauses allowing them to walk if the club is found guilty, though selling a few stars to offset a hefty fine remains an option. And a decision on sanctions may not arrive quickly, whatever the rulebook says about timelines.

Which is why the calendar matters as much as the verdict. Supporters might find themselves fretting about all of this more in 2031 than in 2027. For anyone who prefers the league's side of the argument — a Manchester United fan, say — the goal is obvious: crush City's future title hopes, not just their next season.

A single deduction is a footnote. Five of them, with the squad padlocked, is the story.