by And that’s how it ended. Although it has to be said, with due regard for the need for a little dramatic tension, exactly the way most people seem to have expected it.
As the Premier League season draws to a close, the starting line-up for Manchester City will look relaxed. Whatever chance there may have been of an outsider in the base spots, it appears to have been safe and sound. Boggled eyes, oars squeaking as, on his shoulders, a blur of silk shorts and a thin-legged solution to Pep Guardiola preparing himself for the familiar kick to the line.
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Victory at Brentford on Monday night makes it 11 wins and a final in City’s last 12 games in all competitions. The three key players from last season’s innovative treble-winning structure, Kevin De Bruyne, John Stones and Erling Haaland, are approaching full operational status, ready to appear on the pitch together for the first time since the Champions League final in June. And beyond the bleachers a sense of some wider sky is beginning to beckon.
By Tuesday morning City were listed at 9-1 with the bookies not only to win the league, not just the double, or indeed the treble, but the first ever double. It is a measure of the certainty of this team’s excellence, of their ability to win games while making any sense of competitive variables, that this still feels cautious; a feat that no other team has achieved seems to be the default option from here, which is more or less likely to happen.
At that point, three questions are worth asking. First, what exactly is involved? The answer is: sports immortality. City have 16 league games left to play, as well as a maximum of four in the FA Cup and seven in the Champions League. They live up to their potential and are within a regular final surge of consecutive trebles, six Premier League titles out of seven and being crowned the greatest team of the modern era. Or indeed, ever.
Football loves comparisons that don’t fit over the years. Comparing success now to achievements, say, Celtic Jock Stein is a journey without maps or scale or context. But it can still be great in any era and this is definitely a company of choice. What are we looking at? Bob Paisley – Liverpool era? Real Madrid golden era? Ajax Johan Cruyff? The Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer? This is the kind of footprint that City can leave in the next three months.
For many neutrals such success in the modern league game will have a sense of economic inevitability, also a sign of something broken in the way the sport now organizes itself. Not to mention, because no one seems to want to, the issue of those 115 unresolved charges for breaking financial rules. City denied any wrongdoing.
But it is also worth remembering that nothing lasts forever. Eras always seem inevitable as they happen. Guardiola will leave at some point and the perfect maturity of the current team will be on the verge of something else. Other empires will rise. This is City’s chance, right here, to get their hands into this thing and pull out the sweetness.
When the obvious follow-up question arises: can anyone stop them? There is a vague sense that the opportunity may have already passed in the Premier League. So far City’s season has felt like three steps forward. Part one was a necessary pulse in which De Bruyne and Stones were injured and a Haaland-centric team still trying to play the Haaland-centric structure of last year, collapsing in the middle of the season. Part two came with Haaland’s injury, which could even be a blessing, as functional 4-2-3-1, a team that looked more classic Guardiola with Julián Álvarez as the central striker, won 10 games out of 11 .And now we have this: the main parts are fit and well, the Death Star is preparing its destroyer beam and preparing to enter destruction mode again.
There is still a particular period in danger during the City. Between 10 March and 20 April five of their seven league games were: Liverpool away, Brighton away, Arsenal at home, Aston Villa at home and Tottenham away. But then, this kind of run feels like part of City’s strength, where they win rather than lose titles. Arsenal also have a tough final race: Five of their last nine games have been City away, Brighton away, Spurs away, Manchester United away and Villa at home. Liverpool have to go to Goodison Park, Old Trafford and Villa Park.
It is in these moments that the amazingly coherent architecture of this City project becomes clear, from the ownership vision to the underlying texture of football. It is a little overlooked but there is a perfect fit between Guardiola’s style, which is about control in the first place, mastery of the ball, destroying the variables that could bring defeat and the billionaire-ball model of the nation-state owners of the City, which also. It is about creating a structure of indestructible wealth that aims to eliminate the possibility of defeat.
The current City team is the end point of that new process, the culmination of 10 years without ever having to sell a player, generating the most revenue in world football thanks to some great far-sighted regional sponsors, who have guaranteed full structural coherence. by a politically driven sovereign wealth fund. That certainty of means and resources is to be found in the details of the title entered. Arsenal’s central strikers are Eddie Nketiah and Kai Havertz. Liverpool will be desperate for Mohamed Salah to return, meanwhile relying on the seductive chaos-balling of Darwin Núñez. Meanwhile, City’s back-up striker is the second-best No.9 in the league, and their No. 1 the best in the world. The only real option for Guardiola is to decide which weapon to kill you.
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Facing this, a final question arises. The city is beautiful to look at. The players are brilliantly skilled and brilliantly disciplined. But is it really interesting? Or interesting enough? It was noticeable in the coverage of the Brentford game that Sky Sports seemed to be making a very conscious effort to develop the City story.
Much has been made of the highly productive De Bruyne-Haaland relationship. But then De Bruyne is a highly creative footballer and Haaland is the clearest manifestation of City’s version of sporting inevitability. How can you stop the unstoppable, Sky commentators asked. It turns out you are not. Haaland scored the third goal for Phil Foden with a nice little static set-up, and he made the second forcing Brentford to mark it twice.
Haaland may lack artistry. He may be one of the least interesting footballers ever invented, a superstar defined by his impressive numbers alone, a paradox of the footballer who is not excelling in one of the leading teams. But he is in many ways another endpoint of Guardiola’s vision, another point of absolute certainty, and perhaps the defining presence in both ways as he emerges three times.
