On the verge of another Premier League title, City has the air of a machine. But admiring its excellence is not the same as accepting its methods.
All that remains, now, is to fill in the final 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 its last rival standing, Arsenal, slump to defeat at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
Failing that, a single victory in City’s final three games should do it. Most likely, that will come against its first opponent: Chelsea, a team that now essentially functions both as City’s antithesis, chaotic proof that having money to burn is not enough to guarantee success.
In reality, of course, whichever scenario materializes will do nothing more than tie a bow on something that has been a fait accompli for some time. Quite 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 its humbling of the same opponent at the Etihad Stadium two months later.
Pep Guardiola has suggested that neither moment is exactly right. Everything changed, he has said, with an impromptu meeting in the aftermath of a February draw with Nottingham Forest. That was the moment, the Manchester City manager either believes or wants to believe, that his players buckled down, took control, and bent the Premier League to their will.
Or, perhaps, none of that is true. Perhaps there is no turning point to identify. There is a very good chance that the season has simply ended the way it was always going to end, the way that Premier League seasons increasingly tend to end. Perhaps the outcome was preordained. Perhaps we all knew, deep down, how this was going to go.
Regardless, another item will be crossed off the Manchester City bucket list any day now. Only a handful of teams — four, to be precise — 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 this century.
It is an accomplishment that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of only two managers: Herbert Chapman, with Huddersfield and Arsenal, and Alex Ferguson. (Liverpool changed its coach in the middle of its run.) It has long been seen as the ultimate threshold for greatness, the game’s undisputed pearly gate. Manchester City, and Guardiola himself, will now pass through it.
In doing so, City will have reached another milestone in what appears to be a deliberate campaign to build 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 has gobbled up every record it can find, etching its name at the top of almost every one of the sport’s statistical leader boards. It has the most points any team has ever collected in a season. And the most goals. It has won the most consecutive games in a campaign, and had the highest goal difference, and the biggest winning margin.
It was the first team to complete a clean sweep of all four domestic trophies. In Erling Haaland, it can lay claim to possessing the most prolific striker in a single Premier League season.
