It says a lot about the challenges to Manchester City this season that over 100 of the most serious charges from the Premier League did not feel like the biggest hurdle they had to clear.
Pep Guardiola's efforts in December and January to get his squad back into shape after the winter World Cup became more and more exasperated, and reached an unexpected boiling point with Joao Cancelo. Relations between the pair reached such a low that the player - frustrated at being left out of the team one too many times - got into a heated argument with his manager during City's preparations on a matchday and then went back for another pop.
City's manager, as ever, ultimately won; Cancelo was dramatically and drastically shipped to Champions League rival Bayern Munich for the second half of the season, to the surprise of just about everybody in the league. As Premier League leaders Arsenal had strengthened their squad in the January window, City looked to have weakened theirs in an extreme risk to save and recover the harmony in his squad.
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Guardiola had never faced such a public challenge to his authority at City, and while Cancelo was never going to win out against the manager he was senior and popular enough within the squad to leave a question mark over whether the team would also suffer in the fall-out. This was a side struggling too, with Erling Haaland looking short of form and fitness and untested teenager Rico Lewis preferred to Cancelo and Kyle Walker in the search for rhythm and control in the team.
Importantly, the club hierarchy fully backed up Guardiola even as a limp defeat at Tottenham soon after left them feeling all but out of the title race. Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain were all there in North London to commiserate with their manager and reflect on how to turn things around. That relationship would prove important hours later when the Premier League charges dropped.
The allegations, dropped without warning on a Monday morning in events that left the club stunned and unhappy about the 'unprofessional' way it had been 'rushed' out, are of the utmost seriousness both for City and the Premier League. With the club accused of misrepresenting their financial position for almost a decade as well as failing to cooperate with the investigation into that, claims that are wholly refuted by the Blues who have already begun their defence in a legal battle that is expected to take years, it is hard to believe there is an ending that doesn't involve senior executives at at least one of the organisations being forced to leave their jobs.
The club gave the same assurances that they had after the UEFA punishment and Guardiola, helped by the close relationship he has with his bosses, gave an impassioned defence that went above and beyond what anyone expected when he spoke to media about it for the first time. In the squad, there was a general sense among players and those close to them that it made little sense to be pre-occupied over something they had so little knowledge or control over - especially when all agreed there were more pressing issues that they could change.
Whether by coincidence or not, the Premier League charges sparked a change at City. After watching possibly the worst performance of the Guardiola era in the League Cup defeat at Southampton and the continued league struggles culminating in their annual defeat at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, supporters were making peace with the idea that a second-placed finish with the FA Cup if they were lucky was the best that could come from this season.
After a strong start, it had been tailing off. Even before the World Cup, there was a sense that focus was being placed on the wrong things. There was the unseemly spat with Liverpool after the match in October where Guardiola railed against decisions going against the Blues while even after a home win shortly afterwards one player walked past reporters and asked them to hold the referee to account for his decisions.
The players were booed off by some fans when 2-0 down to Spurs in January and then received a rocket from their manager. Four second-half goals was some response, but still not enough of one to stop Guardiola launching into an extraordinary public critique of the whole club in his post-match press conference where he damned them as a 'happy flowers organisation'.
Suggesting that Haaland was at the wrong club was a step too far for Sky pundit Jamie Carragher in February, yet the analysis behind it showing City struggling to link up with the goal machine was spot on. Unsurprisingly, it came during a time when Kevin De Bruyne was in such poor form that he had been dropped to the bench.
As soon as Guardiola sprang to the defence of the club that week, it was enough for more and more fans and for the first time in the season there was a staged greeting from the 1894 supporters group to loudly welcome the team at the stadium before booing the Premier League anthem and roaring their team on. The players fed off the visceral atmosphere, Aston Villa were swept aside, and hope sprang anew.
Three days later, things could not have gone better in north London. Guardiola and plenty in his squad would agree afterwards that they had got away with one at Arsenal where they were not the better team but took their chances when the home team did not to come away with a 3-1 win that put them top of the table on goal difference, albeit having played a game more.
All was set up for them to romp to the title again, especially when Arsenal twice trailed to Villa in the early kick-off in the next match, only for the issues that had dogged the team in recent months to come crashing back at Nottingham Forest. It was actually one of their best performances of the year, yet Haaland had another off day and Forest exposed the sticking-plaster tactic of playing Bernardo Silva as a sort-of left-back to leave Arsenal on top of the table again.
Here came another critical juncture of the season. The players met to hammer home the message that they were one more bad result away from being out of the title race and had to start being more clinical, while Guardiola - a man famed for his love of midfielders hence shoehorning Bernardo in at left-back - hatched the four centre-back plan that would win City the league.
Nathan Ake, Manu Akanji, John Stones, and Ruben Dias became the back four of choice, with Walker and Aymeric Laporte forced to watch most games from the bench as the City boss went against two of his key concepts at City in full-backs and ball-playing centre-backs in order to have four 'proper' defenders. They were all big and physical enough to protect Ederson's goal, while also adding something else to the team - you could make a case for each of the four being the most important player in the revival this season.
But then there is Rodri, and Bernardo Silva, and De Bruyne, and Haaland, and Jack Grealish, and Ilkay Gundogan. The contributions of Riyad Mahrez for a few months after the World Cup cannot be forgotten either, while it was young Lewis who Stones and others took their cues from.
And that is the point. Some players have been excellent for longer than others but every single one stepped up when it matters; with their backs against the wall knowing they were one draw away from the title slipping away, City amassed 40 points out of 42 after losing at Spurs as part of a 24-match unbeaten run in all competitions to grind an excellent Arsenal down. Mikel Arteta's side have topped the table for almost 90 per cent of the season, yet ran into an unstoppable force at the Etihad in April as adversity brought out the best in City.
Critics will moan that a fifth title in six years was inevitable given the resources available to Guardiola, and risks turning the Premier League into a one-team league. The reality is that Arsenal could easily have come out on top in this battle had one more result gone against the Blues when they were down, not to mention that several other teams in the division have chucked hundreds of millions of pounds - more than enough to win the league - but haven't spent as well or played as well as City.
Don't let the end result hide what has gone before it, and even if rivals are turned off by City's trophy domination don't let them equate that to Guardiola's side being boring. Haaland and his record-breaking goals have been such a box-office addition to the league that opposition fans are desperate to watch him in action while demand for tickets at the Etihad has never been higher, with every league game this season sold out.
Haaland and his teammates could also be seen in action more than anybody else given City matches comfortably see more of the ball in play than any other team in the division; an Opta study this month found that the Blues have offered on average nine minutes more of football every week than high-fliers Newcastle. City could yet pass 100 league goals in a season for the third time under Guardiola.
This season has been another triumph for the manager. Haaland may be a phenomenal goalscorer but getting the best out of him still required considerable changes from the way both he and the rest of his teammates were used to playing, while the boldness first to use Lewis and then to move semi-permanently to a back three with Stones pushed into midfield will go down as tactical brilliance.
Even more impressive than that has been the man-management to rouse these players from their winter slumbers to bite back against a hungry young Arsenal team that were racing away with the league. Guardiola not only retained the support and motivation of his squad when he made the brutal call on Cancelo, but also maintained good relationships with senior players such as De Bruyne and Kyle Walker while keeping them out of the team before picking the perfect moment to bring them back in.
All came together at the end, and if it was nice for 55,000 fans to get to see their team lift the trophy it was fitting for the team to be crowned against Chelsea - a rival who have spent an extortionate amount of money but come up short- (embarrassingly short, with less than half of City's points total) because their thinking and application has not been anywhere near as joined-up.
City face serious battles ahead, both on the pitch and in the courtroom, but for now the only shouting in Guardiola's face will be the jubilant celebrations of another hard-earned trophy that adds further to the legacy of a team that does not look in the mood to stop any time soon.
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