“You didn’t need those 76 points, did you?”

Romanian club Caransebes are hit by the mother of all points deductions. Result: oblivion

When you’ve been deducted 76 points in one season, you know things probably aren’t going particularly well.

FC Caransebes began the 2015-16 season with three early wins, taking them to nine points from five games, but things soon turned sour. They picked up only one win and one draw from a long run of fixtures while debts piled up and 12 unpaid former players took their complaints to the Romanian FA. And when hen the investigations into the club were concluded, Caransebes were deducted 52 points. Fifty-two. two.

“There were a lot of points deducted from Caransebes in every meeting, so we decided to make the entire sanction official together, when all of them were summed up,” the FA’S Aurel Ionescu explained.

The deduction left Caransebes’ hopes of avoiding relegation from the second tier rather slim, given they had already been third from bottom on 13 points and were now on –39. Good luck, lads.

As it turned out, the city’s local authorities soon withdrew all financial support and Caransebes were dissolved.

“Everything was against us,” club chairman Dorin Micsa tells Fourfourtwo. “It all happened at such a speed. We were overwhelmed.”

Not that it has stopped the FA from deducting more points as further complaints about the football club are heard. The punishment has since risen to 76 points, leaving them on –63, a whole 14 points worse off than Sageata Navodari’s final tally from last season, after they were deducted 70 points at the same level in Romania.

The FA have also issued six separate verdicts banning them from the league – just in case they got any ideas about coming back – and their points deduction may not stop at 76 either. Go for it, guys. See if you can get it to minus one million by May.