Manchester City are set to be sanctioned this season but have at least a few months to rack up points before then
Manchester City's manager Enzo Maresca celebrates on the pitch after the English Premier League football match between Liverpool and Manchester City at Anfield
Enzo Maresca celebrates Manchester City's win over Liverpool
View Image
The Premier League were already well aware of how difficult Manchester City are making it for them. Whether it be CEO Ferran Soriano, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak or leading lawyer Lord Pannick, there are a string of formidable opponents who are doing everything in their significant power to turn the significant defeat they are staring at into an unlikely victory.
After this weekend, the league can add Enzo Maresca to the list. Any suggestion that the current City side would be impacted by the guilty verdict was rubbished inside 90 minutes at Anfield that ended up with the visitors toying with their beaten prey.
As has been on display across the season, Maresca has already inspired a togetherness on the pitch at his new club and afterwards he was as punchy as his bosses. His target for the team, he basically said, was to make sure that for all the noise around his side when they kick off City fans are the only ones singing at full-time.
Sunday's win may ultimately be meaningless, of course. Unless the club manage to convincingly win their appeal, they will be sanctioned this season and almost certainly face a points deduction.
However, it is unlikely that punishments will arrive before the appeal so any penalties will still be at least three months away. There is a lot of football to be played before then and a lot of points to be won.
With a perfect record of six from six, City are currently on course for, obviously, 114 points this season. They won't get there but they could easily challenge for the title and still be in first place when any punishment comes.
The later the punishment is in the season, the messier it is for the Premier League because any points deduction will more directly impact Maresca's side. It may well be that the number would be so big that it would effectively relegate them immediately, but if it is not it will be tricky.
For instance, a 60-point penalty may be deemed fair at the start of the season as a tally that almost certainly would relegate City. Yet if the number needed to survive was closer to 30 than 40 and Maresca's team were exceptional they could pull it off.
That situation is very different to what could be facing the Premier League towards the end of this campaign, where 60 points may still be the fair number yet it was clear that this City team would already have the points on the board to avoid relegation. There would be a desire from many to make the punishment more severe, but that would be moving away from a fair weighing up of the sanctions.
Given City have been found to have been systematically cheating to the tune of an extra £900m invested in the club over nine years, they wouldn't have much of an argument with the rest of the clubs that they were being treated unfairly.
But the current state of the Premier League table should not come into the mind of the independent commission when deciding on a punishment, so it would be obvious if - unless a points deduction was absolutely enormous - the number was almost precisely the one needed to definitely confirm relegation, or the loss of a top-five place, or whatever it ends up being.
The Premier League needs City to drop off if the current level of fury around the league is also to tail off, but with Maresca around that does not look likely any time soon.