Nearly a week after the Premier League found Manchester City guilty for 114 of the initial 115 charges brought against the club, it feels as if we're waiting to step across some new frontier.
So damning was the language in the league's redacted report that it really feels as if any punishment is suddenly on the table. The extent to which Man City were found to have broken the rules is unprecedented, and so too will likely be the punishment.
If you asked most reporters, say, two weeks ago about the possibility of Manchester City being relegated, we would've laughed it off. Well, as of today? Man City's relegation odds on DraftKings currently sit at plus-170, which implies odds of about 37%.
Do I think Manchester City are going to get relegated now? Well, I'd say there's something like a one-in-three chance that it actually happens. The team that has won six of the past eight Premier League titles might literally get kicked out of the Premier League. We'd be foolish to rule out transfer bans, stripping of titles, or, really, anything else.
Given that sense of prevailing uncertainty -- of what the punishment might be, of what the league will look like after it happens -- I want to do a little thought experiment. To be clear, I don't actually think that the Premier League is going to eliminate the existence of Manchester City and make all of their players available in an American-style expansion draft, but what, well... what if they did?
I created the draft order based on the number of collective points that each club has won over the past four full seasons. And I broke the tiebreaker between Hull City and Coventry City based on Championship points over the same stretch.