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hhello hello Testing. Is this thing still on? As we head into the penultimate weekend of the Premier League season, the title race is up for grabs appear to exist. Arsenal are top, with a point in front of them Manchester City. City have a game in hand. Mathematically speaking, nothing has been decided or settled yet.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether this is actually a real title race, or whether we’re just living in a cleverly maintained illusion. After all, it’s been almost three months since City dropped points against anyone other than a direct title challenger. They haven’t lost in the league since December and are on a six-game winning streak. Three more will be enough to retain the league title. Two will do if Arsenal slipped at Old Trafford on Sunday.
Jeopardy, danger, parrying and striking, bumps in the road, seething tempers and fevered brows: these are all the classic ingredients of a title race. Instead, City have effectively avoided them, ripped up the script in favor of a bloodless cruise to perfection.
The pattern here is 2018-19, when City gleefully strung Liverpool along for 15 weeks like some elaborate internet phishing scam, tormenting them with the prospect of a prize that ultimately never came within their grasp. Liverpool lost once all season, won their last nine games and finished with 97 points. City have won their last 14 games and – surprise! – completed in 98.
This season has at first glance looked like more of a scrap, with Liverpool initially making it a three-horse race and several leadership changes as a result of the vagaries of the game. But the meta-narrative is basically consistent throughout: City gradually pick up the pace until no one can live with them.
It is possible that Arsenal’s own challenge will fail with Defeated 2-0 at home to Aston Villa in April. They could still climb their personal Everest and reach 89 points – their highest total since The season of the Invincibles. 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, with a blue flag flying. It could be that the final month of their season was a complete waste of time, time spent in mindlessly convincing themselves that they were chasing something real.
And in that regard, they would hardly be alone. For months, an entire title race industrial complex – frothy pundits, ominous headlines, meandering phone-ins – has been assembled in anticipation of an epic denouement, as if a thrilling finish could just be conjured up simply by magic. Conversely, it’s remarkable how few dramatic twists there were, how little fuss and fury, how little intrigue and mind games that would normally signal a tightening race.
What we get from the City instead is the kind of faint electronic hum you associate with a household appliance you’ve long taken for granted. All united and ready, all tentacles pointed in one direction, all nerve endings calibrated to one focus. Almost the only noise was a kind of rumbling Jack Grealish’s future and potential midfield transfer targets in the summer. This is City’s business and they know it better than anyone.
Beyond that frightening calm. There is a school of thought that City are a club driven by discontent and feuds, fueled by antagonism and scrapping at every opportunity. Perhaps this is true at boardroom level or on the wild frontiers of the internet, where City fans remain unsurpassed in their ability to fuel conspiracy theories and delusional slights, desperate to be hated. But within the four solid walls of that pale blue dressing room, Pep Guardiola has long since mastered the art of turning off the lights, muting the noise, smoothing out the rough edges in pursuit of a frictionless winning machine.
This is evident from the thunderously boring Netflix documentary chronicling their three-time winning season, a show so lacking in internal tension that at one point we’re treated to a few minutes of Grealish talking – seriously – about how much he loves Bovril . “Oh, these Bovrils in Bristol City, now we’re talking,” Grealish sings. “How good is he? Manu [Akanji], have you had Bovril, do you like gravy? I took about eight home with me. I gave them to people. Bowie. Love it.”
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For Guardiola, part of that intense calm comes from experience: not just the knowledge that he’s been here before, but the certainty that another title won’t make or break his legacy either way. “It’s not winning or losing that’s going to change my opinion of this season,” he said this month. “We can lose all four games and that means I don’t trust my players? It is impossible.”
The small wave of injuries from earlier in the season has cleared up, leaving a fully fit squad for the visit of Fulham on Saturday lunchtime. Arsenal, meanwhile, must watch and wait before heading to Old Trafford to play what is technically still Eric ten Haag’s Manchester United. And as much as Arsenal start as favourites, Liverpool have discovered three times this season that a wounded United, under no obligation to win and happy to simply play on the counter, can be a surprisingly dangerous animal.
Either way, at some point – be it on Tuesday or next Sunday – the odds are high that City will toast another title, a sixth in seven seasons, the kind of dynastic dominance that English football fans have always loved to sneer at in other countries. Perhaps now this is the true farmers’ league: a league that has been bought and cultivated and is now reaping at leisure.
The outcome of the Premier League’s 115 charges against City remains something of a distant paradoxical point on the horizon: it never really gets closer, no matter how much time passes. And in any case, City’s ultimate innocence or guilt is really of secondary importance here. The bigger picture is that dominance on this scale, whether won legally or illegally, whether won through state patronage or mastery of the regulatory fine print, comes at a cost to the spectacle as a whole.
Perhaps then, confusion over the title race is something that becomes inevitable when a league starts to revolve so entirely around one club. This is the City universe now, and even when you’re pushing against the walls, it’s never entirely clear how much of it is real and how much is projection.
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