Harry Maguire has been charged by the FA following his red card against Bournemouth, which is a bit like reporting that water has been charged with being wet. At some point we have to stop treating these as individual news events and start recognising them as a lifestyle choice.

Actually, the numbers say Maguire's disciplinary trajectory at Manchester United is one of the most reliable statistical phenomena in modern football. Since arriving at Old Trafford in 2019, the man has accumulated red cards, yellow cards, and various supplementary charges with the consistency that most players reserve for, say, completing passes. His card-per-minute ratio in the Premier League would make a UFC fighter blush.

I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

Since the start of the 2019/20 season, Maguire has received more FA charges than some clubs have received trophies. He has been sent off, cautioned, warned, spoken to, and presumably tutted at by every official in the top flight. If collecting disciplinary sanctions were an Olympic sport, Harry Maguire would be on the podium with a gold medal and a three-match ban for celebrating too aggressively.

What makes this latest episode particularly delicious is the context. Manchester United, a club currently spending money like a lottery winner with a head injury, have invested considerable resources in their defensive personnel. And yet their most high-profile centre-back continues to treat the laws of the game as more of a suggestion. A light guideline. A mood board, if you will.

The Bournemouth red card itself was, by Maguire standards, relatively standard fare. A challenge that looked fine if you were watching from the International Space Station, and looked absolutely catastrophic if you were the referee standing six metres away. There is a particular brand of Maguire foul that exists in a quantum state: simultaneously a perfectly reasonable tackle and a clear sending-off offence, depending entirely on which angle you view it from. Schrödinger's lunge, I believe they call it in the physics community.

Now, I should be fair. Maguire is not the worst disciplinary offender in Premier League history. That honour belongs to a long and distinguished lineage of players who treated Saturday afternoons as an opportunity for light assault. But what Maguire lacks in individual severity, he makes up for in sheer relentlessness. The man is a metronome of misconduct. You could set your watch by it, assuming your watch only tells the time in yellow and red.

The FA charge adds an extra layer, of course, because it suggests whatever happened was deemed insufficiently punished by the on-field dismissal alone. Which raises the question: what exactly did Maguire do that the red card didn't already cover? Did he give a sarcastic thumbs-up on the way off? Did he stop at the tunnel entrance to deliver a brief TED Talk on the decline of refereeing standards? I suppose we'll find out when the independent panel convenes, adjusts their reading glasses, and adds another page to what must by now be a fairly thick Maguire file.

Manchester United, for their part, will presumably back their player, issue a carefully worded statement about respecting the process, and then quietly have a word. They've been here before. Multiple times. They could automate the PR response at this point.

The real question is whether any of this matters in the grand scheme of United's season, which has been the footballing equivalent of a controlled demolition that nobody remembered to control. One more Maguire suspension is a drop in an ocean of problems. A rounding error on a spreadsheet of catastrophe.

But the numbers don't lie. And Harry Maguire's numbers tell the story of a man committed to testing every boundary the FA has to offer. At this rate, he'll have his own wing at Wembley. Not a hospitality suite. A courtroom.

I'll keep the spreadsheet updated. Something tells me I'll need to.