Hello, hello. Testing. Is this thing still on? As we head into the penultimate weekend of the Premier League season, a title race does putatively appear to exist. Arsenal are top, a point ahead of Manchester City. City have a game in hand. Mathematically speaking, nothing yet is decided or settled.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether this is actually a real title race, or whether we are simply living through a skilfully maintained illusion. After all, it’s almost three months since City dropped points against anybody other than a direct title rival. They haven’t lost in the league since December and are on a run of six straight wins. Three more will be enough to retain the league title. Two will do if Arsenal slip up at Old Trafford on Sunday.
Jeopardy, peril, parry and thrust, bumps in the road, boiling tempers and fevered brows: these are all the classic ingredients of a title race. Instead City have basically eschewed them all, ripped up the script in favour of a bloodless cruise to excellence.
The model here is 2018-19, when City merrily strung Liverpool along for 15 weeks like some elaborate internet phishing scam, tantalising them with the prospect of a prize which ultimately was never in their grasp. Liverpool lost once all season, won their last nine games and finished on 97 points. City won their last 14 games and – surprise! – finished on 98.
This season has superficially felt like more of a scrap, with Liverpool originally making it a three-horse race, and several changes of lead as a result of fixture vagaries. But the meta-narrative has basically been consistent throughout: City gradually ratcheting up the pace until nobody can live with them.
It may well be that Arsenal’s own challenge foundered with the 2-0 home defeat by Aston Villa in April. They could still climb their own personal Everest and get to 89 points – their highest total since the Invincibles season. They could finish with a record of 16-1-1 in their last 18 games, only to reach the summit and find City already there, beaming at them, the blue flag planted. It may turn out that the last month of their season was a total waste of time, time spent pointlessly persuading themselves that they were chasing something real.
And in this respect, they would hardly be alone. For months, an entire title race industrial complex – foaming pundits, portentous headlines, meandering phone-in shows – has been assembled in anticipation of an epic denouement, as if a thrilling finish could simply be willed into being simply by incantation. Conversely, it is remarkable just how few dramatic twists there have been, how little noise and fury, how little of the intrigue and mind games that would normally signal a tightening of the race.
What we get from City, instead, is the kind of faint electronic hum you associate with a household appliance you have long since taken for granted. Everybody is united and ready, all the tendrils pointed in a single direction, all the nerve endings calibrated towards a single focus. Pretty much the only hubbub has been some rumbling about the future of Jack Grealish and potential midfield transfer targets for the summer. This is City’s business, and they know it better than anyone else.
Beyond that, a frightening calm. There is a school of thought out there that City is a club driven by grudges and enmities, fuelled by antagonism and spoiling for scraps at any opportunity. Perhaps this is true at a boardroom level, or on the wild frontiers of the internet, where City fans remain unrivalled in their capacity to nurture conspiracy theories and illusory slights, desperate to be hated. But within the four hard walls of that pale blue dressing room, Pep Guardiola has long since mastered the art of turning out the lights, stifling the noise, smoothing away the rough edges in pursuit of a frictionless winning machine.
This much is evident from the thunderously tedious Netflix documentary chronicling their treble-winning season, a show so lacking in internal tension that at one point we are treated to several minutes of Grealish talking – seriously – about how much he loves Bovril. “Oh, them Bovrils at Bristol City, now we’re talking,” Grealish croons. “How good is it? Manu [Akanji], you ever had a Bovril, do you like gravy? I took about eight home with me. I was giving them out to people. Bovvy. I love it.”
For Guardiola, part of this intense calm derives from experience: not only the knowledge of having been here before, but the security that one more title will not make or break his legacy either way. “It’s not winning or losing that will change my opinion about this season,” he said this month. “We can lose all four games, and that means I don’t trust my players? It’s impossible.”
The little flurry of injuries from earlier in the season has cleared up, leaving a fully fit squad for the visit to Fulham on Saturday lunchtime. Meanwhile Arsenal must watch and wait before going to Old Trafford to play what is technically still Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United. And as much as Arsenal will start as favourites, Liverpool have discovered three times this season that a wounded United, under no obligation to win and happy simply to play on the counter, can be a surprisingly dangerous animal.
Either way, at some point – be it on Tuesday or the following Sunday – the strong likelihood is that City will be toasting another title, a sixth title in seven seasons, the sort of dynastic dominance English football fans have always liked to deride in other countries. Perhaps this is the true farmers’ league now: a league that was bought up and cultivated, and is now being harvested at leisure.
The outcome of the Premier League’s 115 charges against City remains some distant paradoxical point on the horizon: never actually getting closer, however much time passes. And in any case, the ultimate innocence or guilt of City is only really of tangential relevance here. The broader picture is that dominance on this scale, whether earned legally or illegally, whether earned through the patronage of a state or a mastery of regulatory fine print, comes with a cost to the spectacle as a whole.
Perhaps then the bewilderment about the title race is the sort that becomes inevitable when a league begins to revolve so thoroughly around one club. This is City’s universe now, and even when you push at the walls it is never entirely clear how much of it is real and how much projection.
