And so it happened. Although it must be said, it’s exactly what most people watching would expect, respecting the need for some dramatic tension.
As the Premier League season begins to wind down, the front row of players heading into the home game will look reassuringly familiar for Manchester City. Whatever chances there may be of an outsider being in the medal ranks, he appears to have been safely retrieved. The remaining competitors are already trying at full capacity. Eyes squinting, hamstrings creaking, shoulders wearing a blur of silk shorts and skinny leg determination, and Pep Guardiola braces himself for the familiar kick towards the line.
Relating to: Foden dismantles Brentford in outing that will strike fear into title rivals | Jacob Steinberg
Victory at Brentford on Monday night took City to 11 wins and draws in their last 12 matches in all competitions. Kevin De Bruyne, John Stones and Erling Haaland, the three key players in last season’s innovative treble-winning structure, are approaching fully operational status, ready to take to the field together for the first time since June’s Champions League final. And there’s a sense that a wider sky beyond the stands is beckoning.
On Tuesday morning City were listed at 9-1 on the bookmakers’ list; not just to win the league, not just to win the double or treble, but to win the first double treble in history. It’s a measure of this team’s unique precision, their ability to win games while crushing any truly competitive variables that still feels cautious; A feat no other team has achieved seems to be the default option from here on; something that is less likely to happen.
At this point it is worth asking three questions. First, what exactly is at stake? The answer is: sporting immortality. City have 16 league games left to play; There will also be four matches in the FA Cup and a maximum of seven matches in the Champions League. Once they’ve shown their potential, they’re on a routine final surge of treble after treble, six Premier League titles out of seven and their coronation as arguably the greatest team of the modern era. Or actually not at all.
Football has loved an inappropriate comparison for decades. Comparing current success with that of, say, Jock Stein’s Celtic is a journey without map, scale or context. But it is still possible to be great in any era, and this is undeniably elite company. What are we looking at? Bob Paisley-era Liverpool? Real Madrid’s golden age? Johan Cruyff’s Ajax? Franz Beckenbauer’s Bayern Munich? That’s the kind of footprint City could leave behind over the next three months.
For many neutrals, such success in the tiered modern game would convey a sense of economic inevitability; It is also a symptom that something is broken in the way the sport currently organizes itself. Not to mention the 115 unresolved charges for breaking financial rules because no one seems to want to. City deny any wrongdoing.
However, it is worth remembering that nothing lasts forever. It always seems inevitable as periods occur. Guardiola will leave at some point and the excellent maturity of the current team will turn into something else. Other empires will rise. This is a chance for City to get their hands on this thing and suck the sweetness out of it.
At this point the question arises: Can anyone stop them? There is a vague feeling in the Premier League that this opportunity may have already been missed. To date, City’s season has felt like a three-stage adjustment. Part one was a necessary nap, showing De Bruyne and Stones injured and a Haaland-centric team still trying to play out last year’s Haaland-centric structure and stumbled mid-season. The second part came with Haaland’s injury; It might even have been a blessing; A more classically Guardiola-looking team, with Julián Álvarez at centre-back, won 10 of 11 matches in a functional 4-2-3-1. What we have is this: key pieces in place and in good condition, the Death Star priming its devastating beam and preparing to enter destruction mode once again.
There is still a distinct period of danger in City’s encounter. Five of the seven matches in the league between 10 March and 20 April are: Liverpool away, Brighton away, Arsenal at home, Aston Villa at home and Tottenham away. But that kind of running feels like part of City’s strength; Where they won championships instead of losing them. Arsenal also face a difficult final series: five of their last nine games are away at City, away at Brighton, away at Spurs, away at Manchester United and at home against Villa. Liverpool need to go to Goodison Park, Old Trafford and Villa Park.
It is in these moments that the surprisingly coherent architecture of this City project becomes clear, from the vision of ownership to the fundamental fabric of football. It’s a bit overlooked, but there is a perfect harmony between Guardiola’s style, which is based on control above all else, dominating the ball, eliminating variables that could bring defeat, and the billionaire ball model of City’s nation-state owners. It involves creating an impenetrable structure of wealth whose goal is to eliminate the possibility of defeat.
The current City team is the endpoint of this new process; It is the pinnacle of not having to sell any players for 10 years, the biggest revenue in world football thanks to some extraordinarily forward-thinking regional sponsors, and full structural coherence guaranteed. by a politically driven sovereign wealth fund. The precision of the methods and sources is also seen in the details of the match. Arsenal’s centre-backs Eddie Nketiah and Kai Havertz. Liverpool will be desperate for the return of Mohamed Salah and will rely on the seductive chaos ball of Darwin Núñez in the meantime. Meanwhile, City’s reserve striker is the league’s second-best number 9 and their number 1 is the best finisher in the world. The only real option for Guardiola is to decide which weapon to kill you with.
Relating to: De Bruyne searches for the last great treasure to crown his glittering career | Jonathan Liew
Faced with this, a final question arises. It is very nice to watch the city. The players are extremely talented and extremely disciplined. But is it really interesting? Or is it interesting enough? In the coverage of the Brentford match there appeared to be a very conscious effort by Sky Sports to develop a City narrative.
Much has been made of the highly productive De Bruyne-Haaland relationship. But De Bruyne is a hugely creative footballer and Haaland is the most obvious expression of City’s version of sporting inevitability. Sky’s commentators asked how to stop the unstoppable. It turned out not to be so. Haaland scored Phil Foden’s third goal with a beautiful static break and then scored the second by forcing Brentford to double-mark him.
It may be Haaland’s lack of finesse. He may be one of the least interesting brilliant footballers ever created, a superstar defined entirely by his astonishing numbers, the paradox of a non-passing footballer on one of the great passing teams. But it is also in many ways another endpoint of Guardiola’s vision, a point of complete finality and perhaps a decisive presence on both occasions as that double treble looms.