MANCHESTER, England – All that’s left now is to fill in the last few administrative details. Manchester City may not need to kick another ball to claim the Premier League title for the third time in three seasons should their latest rivals, Arsenal, suffer defeat at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
Failing that, a single win in City’s last three games should suffice. Most likely that will face its first opponent: Chelsea, a team that now essentially function as both City’s antithesis, chaotic proof that having money to burn isn’t enough to guarantee success.
In reality, of course, whatever scenario unfolds will do nothing but tie a snare to something that has been a fait accompli for some time. Where the turning point of this season came is open to interpretation. It may have been City’s dismantling of Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in February. Or humiliating the same opponent at Etihad Stadium two months later.
Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he said, with an impromptu meeting in the wake of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager believes or wants to believe, when his players stepped back, took control and turned the Premier League to their will.
Or maybe none of that is true. Perhaps no turning point can be identified. Chances are the season ended the way it always should have ended, as Premier League seasons are increasingly ending. Perhaps the outcome was predetermined. Maybe we all knew deep down how this would go.
Either way, there’s another item off the Manchester City bucket list any day now. Only a handful of teams – four to be exact – have ever won three English titles in a row: Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United, twice, in the early part of these century. .
It’s an achievement that has so far been the exclusive domain of just two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed coaches midway through the game.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold to greatness, the game’s undisputed pearly white gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, are going through it now.
In doing so, City have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate campaign to build up a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that this is the greatest club side England has ever produced.
Over the course of Guardiola’s six-year tenure, City have gobbled up every record they could find and etched their name at the top of nearly every one of the sport’s statistical standings. It has the most points a team has ever accumulated in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign and had the highest goal difference and widest margin of victory.
It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. With Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to owning the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season. At some point, that caveat may not even be necessary: Haaland needs five games to score 12 goals and pass the all-time high water mark. If he doesn’t do it this year, he might do it next year.
In fact, City’s domestic supremacy is so great that it must now seek further and further distant horizons to conquer other worlds. Take on Manchester United in the FA Cup final and Inter Milan in the Champions League final and City would have their own treble, that most storied and sacred achievement, something that has only happened once in English history.
After that, his ambitions turn into the vaguely fantastic. No team has ever won four English titles in a row. No one has ever won seven games in one year, or done a quadruple. No English team since Nottingham Forest have retained the European Cup. Perhaps City can try to become the first team to win a game in zero gravity, or with just their left feet, or with a line-up made up solely of people named Neil.
It has become a reflex to suggest that this is just the nature of football. There is, as former Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany put it, always a bogeyman, a team that sits at the top of the pile, that towers over the landscape, that sucks up all the oxygen. “It’s never been any different,” Kompany told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month. “Liverpool was an ogre. Manchester United was an ogre.”
There is some truth to that logic, but not the whole truth. In its years of plenty, in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool was undeniably a wealthy club: in the years before broadcast revenues and television deals and money-guzzling worldwide tours, it had the only advantage available, being a big-city team in a big-city stadium.
But it wasn’t drastically richer than most of its rivals. The challengers were sometimes Manchester United and Leeds and Everton, but they were also Ipswich and Derby County and Nottingham Forest. The hierarchy of the game was much flatter, the layering was not nearly as rigid.
Twice, between 1977 and 1991, Liverpool held the British transfer record, but only for a sale: first Kevin Keegan to Hamburg and then Ian Rush to Juventus. At the time, West Bromwich Albion, Wolves, Forest and City were all spending more money on a player than ever before. Liverpool did not break the £1 million mark until 1987.
United’s primacy was much more modern, much more recognisable, built on the club’s commercial weight. However, it’s worth parsing one of the phrases that entered the sport’s lexicon during that period: Fergie Time, the idea that umpires generally gave United as much time as it took in a match to get a find a way to escape disappointment.
That was of course not true. The reason why United developed a reputation for late winning goals was because of the character and resilience of Ferguson’s hugely gifted team. But the idea still stuck.
United were the dominant team of its time. However, it was possible that fans of the opposition fooled themselves into believing that it was all down to luck, to the grace and favor of those in power, and that if only the fight was fair United would get their comeuppance .
The same cannot be said of Manchester City. All those records, the monopoly it has come to exercise over the history of the game, point to a kind of hegemony that English football has not experienced before. Not only have City redefined what it takes to succeed in the Premier League, they have also redefined how the game thinks about excellence. His dominance feels more extreme than anything that went before it, largely because it is.
And yet the response to that was not the disgust aroused by Liverpool and United – an animus so powerful it has been passed down from one generation to the next – but a kind of resignation. Guardiola’s playing style is widely admired. The beauty of his team, the ingenuity of his ideas, is highly praised.
However, the club’s success itself somehow feels cold, clinical, distant. Manchester City has the look of a machine, both in the way the project is built and in the way the team plays. It should come as no surprise, then, that it should provoke much the same emotional response. This is a state-backed enterprise of bottomless wealth and grand vision. It may not be easy to love, but it is even harder to resist.
City’s advantage is not, as is often lazily suggested, that it can spend more than anyone else, although few teams can afford the one that Guardiola has at its disposal. Manchester United have squandered hundreds of millions in the transfer market. Chelsea too. Liverpool pledges almost the same salary to his team.
The advantage is in the consistency. City are rarely, if ever, forced to sell a player on anything other than their own terms. That’s what, like anything else, sets it apart from all its peers. Many clubs have a plan. City is the only one privileged to pull it off without the unwanted interference of reality. It is a club that does not operate under the same pressure as everyone else.
However, that is not the same as not playing by the same rules. It is undoubtedly a coincidence that the run of form that will end with Guardiola’s side claiming another title began after the club was charged with 115 counts of rule-breaking – over a decade ago, the entire period of his reign – by the Premiership.
That cost retains the ability to change, at a fundamental level, all of the most and firsts and best that City has built over the years. The titles, the trophies, the records – they all depend on that case.
It’s as good as it gets for fans, for the game, to swallow the idea that a club owned and operated for the purpose of advancing the interests of a nation-state is acceptable. It’s pretty much possible for the television networks and media outlets that rely on that rolling soap opera to wallow in whatever moral gray area they can find.
However, it would be much more difficult to apologize and explain and, above all, accept that a team felt that the rules it had signed up to didn’t really apply, to decide that it shouldn’t be subject to the same restrictions as everyone else. Manchester City claim a third title in three seasons. It’s on the verge of a treble. It has written its name alongside almost every record English football has to offer.
What it has done in recent years is obvious to everyone. How it will be remembered has yet to be decided.