MANCHESTER, England – Now just the last few administrative details need to be sorted out. Manchester City may not need to kick another ball to clinch the Premier League title for the third time in three seasons should their last rivals, Arsenal, suffer a defeat at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
Failing that, a single win in City’s last three games is enough. Most likely this will come up against the first opponent: Chelsea, a team that now essentially acts as the antithesis for City, messy proof that having cash to burn is not enough to guarantee success.
In reality, of course, any scenario will do nothing more than bow out something that has been a fait accompli for some time. Exactly where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been because City dismantled Arsenal at Emirates Stadium in February. Or the humiliation of the same opponent two months later at the Etihad Stadium.
Pep Guardiola has hinted that neither moment is quite right. Everything changed, he said, with an impromptu meeting after February’s draw against Nottingham Forest. That was the moment the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, his players giving in, taking control and bending the Premier League to their will.
Or maybe none of this is true. It is possible that no turning point can be identified. There’s a very good chance the season just ended the way it was always meant to end, as Premier League seasons increasingly end. Perhaps the outcome was predetermined. Maybe deep down we all knew how this was going to turn out.
Regardless, every day another item is removed from Manchester City’s wish list. Only a handful of sides – four to be precise – have ever won three consecutive English titles: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United twice earlier in this century.
That feat has previously only been reserved for two managers: Herbert Chapman (with Huddersfield and Arsenal) and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed coaches mid-season.) It has long been considered the ultimate threshold of greatness, the game’s undisputed pearl goal. Manchester City and Guardiola himself it will happen now.
In doing so, City have achieved another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate campaign aimed at creating a vast body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club England has ever produced.
Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City have gobbled up every record they could find, putting his name at the top of almost every sport’s statistical leaderboard. It has the most points ever accumulated by a team in a season. And most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a season and had the highest goal difference and winning margin.
It was the first team to clean-shoot all four national trophies. With Erling Haaland you can claim to have the most dangerous striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, that caveat may not even be necessary: Haaland has five games to score 12 goals and surpass the all-time high. If he doesn’t do it this year, maybe next year he will.
In fact, City’s domestic superiority is such that she must now search ever more distant horizons to conquer other worlds. Beat Manchester United in the FA Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would have their very own treble, the fabled and holiest feat unique to English history.
After that, his ambitions turn to the slightly fantastic. No team has ever won four consecutive English titles. Nobody has ever won seven competitions in one year or completed a quadruple event. No English team has been able to defend the European Cup since Nottingham Forest. Maybe City could try to become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, either just left footed or with a lineup made up entirely of people named Neil.
It has become a reflex to claim that this is simply the nature of football. There’s always, as former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, an ‘ogre’, a side that sits at the top of the pile, towering over the landscape and sucking up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”
There is some truth in this logic, but not the whole truth. In its triumphant years, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool were undeniably a wealthy club: in the years before radio revenue, television deals and lucrative world tours, the club had the only advantage of being a big-city team, and that was a big-city stadium.
But it wasn’t significantly richer than most of its competitors. His challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The game’s hierarchy was much flatter, the layering not nearly as ossified.
Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the UK transfer record, albeit for just one sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg and then Ian Rush to Juventus. During that time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City spent more money on a player than anyone before. It wasn’t until 1987 that Liverpool broke the £1m mark.
United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognizable and based on the club’s commercial importance. However, it’s worth analyzing one of the phrases entering the sport’s lexicon during this period: “Fergie Time,” the idea that umpires generally gave United as much time as was needed in a game to complete a path to find a way to avoid disappointment.
Of course that wasn’t true. The reason United gained a reputation for scoring late winners was the character and resilience of Ferguson’s prolific team. But the idea stuck anyway.
United was the dominant team of its time. However, opposing fans were able to delude themselves that it was all down to luck, at the mercy and favor of those in power, and that United would get their punishment if only the fight were fair.
The same cannot be said for Manchester City. All those records and the monopoly it’s beginning to exert on the game’s history suggest a kind of hegemony that English football hasn’t seen before. City have not only redefined the requirements for success in the Premier League, they have also redefined the way the game thinks about excellence. Its dominance feels more extreme than anything that has come before, largely because it is.
And yet the response was not the revulsion that Liverpool and United inspired – an animosity so strong it was passed down from one generation to the next – but a kind of toleration. Guardiola’s style of play is widely admired. The beauty of his team and the ingenuity of his ideas are praised enthusiastically.
However, the club’s success itself somehow comes across as cold, clinical and distant. Manchester City seem like a machine, both in the way the project is set up and in the way the team plays. So it should come as no surprise that it evokes roughly the same emotional response. This is a government sponsored corporation with limitless wealth and grandiose vision. It may not be easy to love, but it is even harder to resist.
City’s advantage is not, as is often lazily claimed, that they can spend more than anyone else, although few teams could afford the squad that Guardiola has at their disposal. Manchester United has wasted hundreds of millions on the transfer market. Chelsea too. Liverpool invest almost as much salary in their team.
The advantage lies in the consistency. City are rarely – if ever – forced to sell a player on terms other than their own. This is what primarily sets it apart from all of its competitors. Many clubs have a plan. The city is the only one who has the privilege of getting the job done without the unwelcome intrusion of reality. It’s a club that’s not under the same pressure as everyone else.
However, that is not the same as not playing by the same rules. It is no doubt coincidental that the form that will end with Guardiola’s side clinching another title only began after the club were charged with 115 rule violations – dating back more than a decade, the entire span of his reign – Premier league.
These charges retain the ability to tweak, at a fundamental level, all of the “mosts,” “firsts,” and “bests” that City has accumulated over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records – they all depend on this case.
It is entirely possible for fans of the game to accept the notion that a club owned and operated for the purpose of furthering the interests of a nation state is acceptable. It’s entirely possible that the TV networks and media outlets that rely on this rolling soap opera are luxuriating in every moral gray area they can find.
However, it would be much harder to apologize and explain and most importantly accept that a team felt the rules they were committed to didn’t really apply and decide they didn’t need to be subject to the same restrictions like all others. Manchester City will win their third title in three seasons. It’s about to triple. It has written its name alongside almost every record English football has to offer.
What it has achieved in recent years is visible to all. How it will be remembered has yet to be decided.