As staggering as their achievements have been over the past half-a-decade or so, it is the scale and the manner of their success that is breathtaking. The season in which they won the treble, Manchester United totted up 79 points in the league. Arsenal, second this season, have 81 with one game still to play tonight. City have 89 points with also a game to play. If they win tonight’s game, they will finish the season with 93 points.
Such has been City’s overwhelming dominance that Liverpool ended the 2020-21 season with 97 points and still finished second. That is the most points a team have racked up in a Premier League season without winning the title.
City have not merely raised the bar. They have changed the game. They have altered the rules.
They have won with a false nine in a side that had no conventional strikers. They have won with a Nordic giant of a goal machine in Erling Haaland who has smashed every scoring record one can conceive of in his debut season.
Fluid, geometric passing, incisive in attack, resolute in defence, versatile, supremely talented midfielders other teams would die for, one of the most stubborn goalkeepers in football, the world’s most successful coach and the flexibility and intelligence to change tactics – and thereby bend the game itself – at will.
Not everyone – with reason – is comfortable with what has made this possible. City are bankrolled by a petrodollar nation state. The Abu Dhabi project is one of the earliest and prime examples of sportswashing – using soft power to deflect from things the autocratic state would not want to be under scrutiny. The project was executed with immaculate planning and ruthless perfection. City recruited Txiki Begiristain, an old Barcelona hand, as football director. Begiristain has a great rapport with Pep Guardiola, who duly joined the club once his sabbatical in New York – after his stint with Bayern Munich – was over.
The stage was set. The club got the world’s best coach, gave him the players he wanted and helped shape a team so vast in resources, and so deep in bench strength, that it can put out two potentially title-winning first teams on the same day. It is a frequent – and not unjustified – criticism of City that petrodollars have offered them an undue advantage.
That they have skewed the market by being able to get whichever player they want for however much money is asked for him. Jack Grealish for £100 million? No problem. (And he is not even a guaranteed starter.) This has made a number of obscenely rich clubs up their own stakes. In the moneyball market, the rest, chasing shadows, have been left behind.
But none of the affluent clubs have the nous and brilliance of City’s planning and play. Look at Paris Saint-Germain, owned by Qatar, another petrodollar state keen on sportswashing, It has never lived up to the hopes its owners had for it. Despite throwing on three of the most high-profile attackers in the world, and having a wage bill comparable to the GDP of a small African nation, they are nowhere near the team they ought to be. Newcastle, into which the Saudis have pumped in a great deal of money, have started well – they will return to the Champions League next season after 20 years. But it is too early to say.
Take nothing away from City. This is the most watchable and complete side playing today. They are the best team in the world. This is a team for the ages.
The writer is author of If I Could Tell You
