This has been the end game all along. This is what modern Manchester City has always been about. To be here not only as champions but to be more than that. To occupy a different level from all others. To dominate and rule. To be different from everyone else. To be better.
And now they are here. No treble yet. The coming weeks will deliver that or else. But their position as the dominant force of English football is secure. Five Premier League titles in six seasons. Not since Manchester United opened the Premier League season by winning eight of the first eleven stages have we witnessed anything like this.
It hasn’t been easy for Pep Guardiola and his team this season. Winning the league won’t be like that. But they made it look like, beating Arsenal in another of the end-of-season charges to reach this day of sunshine, the players smiled and rested as champions with three games to spare.
It is not possible to sit here at the Etihad Stadium and not think of past glories. Last year it came down to the final moments of the final game against Aston Villa. It was a day of drama and racing pulses. And then there was the first. It’s been eleven years but it doesn’t seem like it. Roberto Mancini’s team were title innocents then. The sun also shone that day but the football did not. They ended up with Sergio Aguero in the death.
But that’s all different. None of that is this. They are theatrical tours. Here yesterday seems to be the destination. Almost fifteen years of Abu Dhabi ownership was building up to it, a day when City’s grip on the English game was so tight it was hard to imagine it being released.
Pep Guardiola’s side provided the blueprint for total league dominance at Man City
Chelsea gave the champions a guard of honor before kick-off on a sunny day in Manchester
City later lifted their fifth Premier League title under Pep Guardiola – unlikely to be the last of his tenure
It is, of course. Wheels turn and seasons end. But now to witness City at their best is a glorious thing and fits on a level with rivals Chelsea.
Because this is what the London club once had in mind, when Roman Abramovich put his fortune at the London club’s disposal two decades ago and his chief executive Peter Kenyon vowed to ‘turn the world blue’. Chelsea threatened to do so. Five league titles and two Champions Leagues represent a significant return in all currencies. But dominance? No, that didn’t come. In fact, only once in two decades – under Jose Mourinho in 2005 and 2006 – have Chelsea won back to back league titles. That, as much as anything, tells us how difficult it is and by extension how wonderful Guardiola’s City really is.
Successive titles are hard enough while hegemony is another level again. Simply because someone else always comes along. For Sir Alex Ferguson and United, it was Leeds and then it was Arsenal and then Chelsea and now, most annoying of all, their neighbours.
For City that one person, most consistent, is Liverpool. It’s times like this – with Arsenal falling apart – that you realize just how good Jurgen Klopp’s team have been to try to keep up with what has been built in east Manchester. One day, Liverpool may look back and see themselves as the biggest casualty of City power. This is a team that in a four-year spell finished three Premier League seasons with 92, 97 and 99 points and won just once.
That impressive statistic points to City’s strength as much as anything. United, in winning thirteen modern titles, have breached the 90-point mark only twice. However, City have normalized what was once a remarkable success and as well as being the best football team in the country, the psychological hold Guardiola’s side now have on the rest of the Premier League is perhaps we have not seen before.
Liverpool’s success in 2020 in the Premier League has become even more of a miracle in this era of Man City
Although far from the side of today, Chelsea saw success after the 2003 takeover but never created a hegemony in football.
To get here, City changed to shape themselves into something acceptable to Guardiola. Certain intentions and stated philosophies go out the window. That’s what you do when you have a stellar coach. Give it. But that doesn’t mean that everything will fall apart when he leaves.
That is the hope of clubs like United. But it may be a hope that clings to nothing. City grew and developed as an operation during Guardiola’s seven years. How many mistakes are they making in today’s transfer market? Kalvin Phillips, who started his first league game for the club he joined last summer, looked rare. But defender Manuel Akanji and Nathan Ake point to a new intelligence.
They are worth £35m between them while yesterday’s sale of Raheem Sterling to rivals bears the mark of a club and a coach who recognize when a player is off the boil and are brave enough to do something about it. Sterling earned his place in Chelsea’s guard of honor for the new champions here and that must have hurt a bit.
City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak (left) watched the team’s first match as champions
The league win keeps Guardiola’s side firmly in the hunt for a historic Treble this season
For sure, City must win their Champions League final against Inter Milan in Istanbul next month if domestic achievements are not to lose some of their luster. Meanwhile, 115 Premier League charges remain unpaid. If some of that sticks, we can start looking at most of it differently. History will judge City in an alternative light if they prove they played by the league’s financial rules.
But until that day comes we will judge the City by it, by what they do on the field. It was the twelfth Premier League win in a row. During that run they also beat Bayern Munich and Real Madrid with frightening ease in Europe.
Are Guardiola’s City the best Premier League team we’ve ever seen? It’s almost impossible to tell and while a treble of league, FA Cup and Champions League would strengthen their case, it doesn’t matter.
What they are now is everything they want to be. When the Abu Dhabi blueprint was drawn up in early September of 2008, this is exactly what it looked like.
News/Image Sources: Daily Mail
