Defeat for Arsenal at relegation battlers Nottingham Forest summed up a meek capitulation for Mikel Arteta’s men when it mattered. Despite an impressive season overall the Gunners stared down their rivals Manchester City in the eye on the home straight of this enjoyable and tense title race and blinked first. Even with, at one point, a chance to take an eleven point lead at the top of the table, Arsenal simply faded and ran out of steam.
But enough about the runners up. Today is about the champions.
Under Pep Guardiola, City have been carefully constructed into a near unstoppable force. Driven by their manager’s astounding tactical mastery, elite squad conditioning and a relentless winning mentality that runs through the entire squad and football club, Manchester City have established a period of dominance over the past six years not seen in English football since the Sir Alex Ferguson days across town at Manchester United. They will enjoy a champagne evening in what could be historic season.
Five Premier League titles and three league wins in a row is a period of such supremacy it now fairly opens up questions about City’s ranking among the great teams in English football’s long and storied history. Were Guardiola’s team to go on now and complete the treble over the course of the next three weeks, their position among the greats would be assured: only one team in the entire history of the English game has managed to win the prestigious treble of Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League and that is Manchester United in 1999.
Regardless of what happens in those two cup finals, this Manchester City team really is a formidable force worthy of all the praise they receive and more.
100 points in 2017/18. 98 points in 2018/19. 86 points in 2020/21. 93 points last season. And now champions again with 85 points and three games remaining. Near total dominance for more than half a decade.
In Pep Guardiola City have a manager that has done it with style, grace and tenacity, scoring over 100 goals in at least two of those seasons and playing with a swagger and tactical ingenuity that has reimagined how football should be played time and time again.
When you look through Guardiola’s team it is a squad capable of coming up with answers for every scenario you throw at them. Squad depth, check. A goalkeeper who is as good with the ball at his feet as most number 10s, check. A full-back that can go one v one against the world’s quickest wide players and beat them for pace, check. The best midfielder in the league over the last five years, check.
A central defender – John Stones – who is just as comfortable in midfield as he is heading clearances away at the back, check. Wide players in Jack Grealish, Bernardo Silva and Riyad Mahrez that are quick-witted, intelligent, intuitive and full of skill, check. An outstanding midfield ball-winning destroyer in Rodri that can play a bit and score goals too, check. And of course, a dominant monster of a forward breaking goalscoring records for fun in his first year in English football, check.
This season, Manchester City have proved they can do it all. They can play it around you. They say pressing traps for you to fall into. If you sit deep they are intricate enough to find pockets and play through you. If you play high they can stretch the play and go long with the brilliant Emerson in goal pinging pinpoint long passes and Erling Haaland’s speed in behind, as shown when they thrashed Arsenal at the Etihad.
If you try and rough them up they are aggressive enough, with Grealish, Ruben Dias, Rodri and Haaland to get in your face.
And if you think you’ve figured them out, just as many did when they lost at home to Brentford before the World Cup last November, they have a manager that can mastermind a new way of playing and outfox his opponents.
City were trailing Arsenal consistently in the table for most of this season, as far back as eight points behind just over one month ago with ten games remaining. They sold one of their key players, Joao Cancelo, in January and went with no recognised first choice left-back for half a season. Some wondered if Pep was losing his magic touch.
Far from it. He switched to a three man defence, Nathan Ake and Manuel Akanji manning the defence in wide areas. He moved Stones into a midfield position the defender admitted he had never even played before. In the middle of a title race.
The tactical tweaks seemed to reignite City. Pep reasserted his dominance of the dressing room, shipping out star player Cancelo for 18-year-old Rico Lewis. It was a message from Pep to his senior players. We do things my way.
When the title race began to heat up he publicly criticised his players. “We are a happy flowers team, all nice and good,” he said in January after a win against Spurs. “I don’t want to be a happy flower. I want to beat Arsenal. If we play that way Arsenal will destroy us.”
The aim was to light a fire under the whole club, Guardiola accusing the players, the fans and the whole club of going soft in an extraordinary, but calculated and evidently much needed barb.
“We are far, far away from being able to compete at the highest level. I don’t recognise my team.”
“I want a reaction from the whole organisation. Not just the players.”
Since that day, Manchester City have won 14 of their last 16 games and eleven in a row up to last weekend. The fire was lit.
And don’t forget, they have done all this whilst actually making a £67 million profit on transfers last summer, after selling the likes of Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko.
Of course there is the small matter of an outstanding Premier League investigation that does risk muddying the waters of City’s legacy. The club faces over 100 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial fair play rules during the period from 2010 to 2018, and the investigation remains ongoing.
What has happened off the pitch is a matter for another day. But what cannot be questioned right now is the genius we have witnessed on the pitch, led by a manager who is making his case for one of the finest coaches English football has ever seen.
One down. Two to go. Manchester City are deserved champions.