HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the winners but the days-after follow-up pieces are always authored by the losers.
Hence Manchester City have effectively won another Premier League title and most of the coverage centred on Arsenal. BBC Sport’s first (and now-deleted) tweet after Arsenal’s defeat to Brighton set the tone: #bottlejobs is already trending.
It is, of course, a more complicated picture, because the sense of failure is Arsenal’s success.
Theirs is the second-youngest squad in the Premier League (the youngest, Southampton, will finish bottom) and they challenged for the title having not even finished in the top four since 2016. So the fact Arsenal led the league for so long and briefly sped the title pace from procession to race is an admirable achievement.
They were also the only side to challenge City, something their wealthy rivals couldn’t do. Liverpool looked exhausted from their previous efforts on that front, while Manchester United are only slowly emerging from their own dysfunction while Spurs and Chelsea decided to blow themselves up.
But it’s also true to say Arsenal didn’t deal with the pressure down the home straight. Nine points from a possible 21 is a dreadful closing run, and the context of many of the games makes it all the more galling. To lead 2-0 against Liverpool and West Ham and not to win either was bad, but to then concede three goals and fail to beat Southampton at home was unforgivable.
But consider, too, the level of pressure. Manchester City won all seven of their corresponding games in that run, and since losing to Spurs in February, City have won 13 of their 14 league games.
Across any Premier League season – let alone one lengthened by a mid-season World Cup – squad depth makes all the difference. City’s resources are unmatched, and they have appointed the perfect coach to exploit them. Has anyone consistently made so much from diminishing returns than Pep Guardiola?
Arsenal couldn’t deal with the loss of William Saliba to injury, and without him, their points per game ratio dropped from 2.44 to 1.66. City, meanwhile, could afford to rest Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, John Stones, and Jack Grealish for the weekend game against Everton, which was a vital game in the run-in.
One of the predictable but no-less idiotic rebuttals to City’s depth making a difference is the fact Guardiola makes so few substitutions. It is true – only Everton have made fewer subs in the league this season – but other clubs substitute players to rest them as they’ll be needed in the next game. With the exception of Rodri, City can afford to give players a full 90 minutes because what often follows is a total rest.
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Rodri has played more Premier League minutes than any other outfield player at City this season (2808 minutes), but Granit Xhaka, Gabriel, Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, and Ben White have all played more than Rodri.
Martin Odegaard’s despair last Sunday summed it all up: “It feels like is no hope now.”
The Premier League has never seen a side like this Man City side before, as nobody has ever so efficiently married wealth, depth, tactical sophistication and a maniacal aversion to complacency like this before.
In other words, nobody has ever spent so much money so well before. Arsene Wenger foretold their rise in 2017 when asked for a comparison with his Invincibles. “We had no petrol but ideas, they have petrol and ideas.”
So given all of this, why are we hearing so much about Arsenal bottling the title, when they were just the last to be ground down by City’s deathless machine?
For one thing, it’s a neat storyline.
Sport is often freighted with excess meaning when it described as a “metaphor for life”, whereas in reality it’s a distilled, accelerated parody of life because it ends in a resolution. There’s a winner and a loser; a score or a time but always a ranking.
The definitiveness of the result is what marks sport apart from all of the other grand human pursuits.
Arsenal blowing the title? There’s a story fully told, right up to and including its conclusion.
But Manchester City winning the Premier League months after the Premier League accused them of 115 breaches of financial rules, for which potential punishments may include the stripping of titles?
Well…we might have a cliffhanger here, but we don’t yet have an ending.
The fact of City’s pending legal battle with the competition has been absent from the league’s broadcasters since Arsenal conceded the title on Sunday. Martin Tyler tied himself up in knots when trying to praise Brighton, saying that this is “not a one-team league”, right at the moment City’s dominance was accentuated.
Monday Night Football – unequivocally the best football show on television – reflected on the effective end of the title race by praising City as a “special” team, without once mentioning the context of the whole 115 charges thing.
As for BT Sport: relying on them to discuss the over-arching, serious matters of the day is the equivalent of expecting a dog to drive the car it has been chasing. Our only hope of hearing about it there is if Peter Walton goes truly rogue.
This is consistent with an amnesia specific to football. If a cyclist won four Tour de France titles out of five, was then accused of cheating by the organisers of the Tour de France, would his winning of the very next Tour de France title really be hailed by the media without any caveats or complications?
City deny the charges and will fight to clear their name, as they have every right to do. And they may well win the case, at which point they can celebrate their league title successes all over again.
Man City fans unveil a banner in support of Lord Pannick, part of the legal team contesting the 115 charges. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
But until there’s a resolution to that case, how true a resolution can we really have to this season?
It’s not credible to invoke the 115 charges as a kind of automatic disclaimer every time City get a mention, but nor is it credible to discuss the entire context of their title-winning season without any mention of them.
Raising the 115 charges doesn’t make for spectacular punditry either, given there isn’t a whole lot that can be said rather than then the mention of them. But this doesn’t make them totally off-limits, either.
In the absence of anything emphatic to say about the winners, it’s proving easier to write off the losers, by applying a label to Arsenal they don’t deserve.
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Why has there been more talk of Arsenal's 'bottle job' than Man City's alleged financial breaches?
HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the winners but the days-after follow-up pieces are always authored by the losers.
Hence Manchester City have effectively won another Premier League title and most of the coverage centred on Arsenal. BBC Sport’s first (and now-deleted) tweet after Arsenal’s defeat to Brighton set the tone: #bottlejobs is already trending.
It is, of course, a more complicated picture, because the sense of failure is Arsenal’s success.
Theirs is the second-youngest squad in the Premier League (the youngest, Southampton, will finish bottom) and they challenged for the title having not even finished in the top four since 2016. So the fact Arsenal led the league for so long and briefly sped the title pace from procession to race is an admirable achievement.
They were also the only side to challenge City, something their wealthy rivals couldn’t do. Liverpool looked exhausted from their previous efforts on that front, while Manchester United are only slowly emerging from their own dysfunction while Spurs and Chelsea decided to blow themselves up.
But it’s also true to say Arsenal didn’t deal with the pressure down the home straight. Nine points from a possible 21 is a dreadful closing run, and the context of many of the games makes it all the more galling. To lead 2-0 against Liverpool and West Ham and not to win either was bad, but to then concede three goals and fail to beat Southampton at home was unforgivable.
But consider, too, the level of pressure. Manchester City won all seven of their corresponding games in that run, and since losing to Spurs in February, City have won 13 of their 14 league games.
Across any Premier League season – let alone one lengthened by a mid-season World Cup – squad depth makes all the difference. City’s resources are unmatched, and they have appointed the perfect coach to exploit them. Has anyone consistently made so much from diminishing returns than Pep Guardiola?
Arsenal couldn’t deal with the loss of William Saliba to injury, and without him, their points per game ratio dropped from 2.44 to 1.66. City, meanwhile, could afford to rest Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, John Stones, and Jack Grealish for the weekend game against Everton, which was a vital game in the run-in.
One of the predictable but no-less idiotic rebuttals to City’s depth making a difference is the fact Guardiola makes so few substitutions. It is true – only Everton have made fewer subs in the league this season – but other clubs substitute players to rest them as they’ll be needed in the next game. With the exception of Rodri, City can afford to give players a full 90 minutes because what often follows is a total rest.
Rodri has played more Premier League minutes than any other outfield player at City this season (2808 minutes), but Granit Xhaka, Gabriel, Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, and Ben White have all played more than Rodri.
Martin Odegaard’s despair last Sunday summed it all up: “It feels like is no hope now.”
The Premier League has never seen a side like this Man City side before, as nobody has ever so efficiently married wealth, depth, tactical sophistication and a maniacal aversion to complacency like this before.
In other words, nobody has ever spent so much money so well before. Arsene Wenger foretold their rise in 2017 when asked for a comparison with his Invincibles. “We had no petrol but ideas, they have petrol and ideas.”
So given all of this, why are we hearing so much about Arsenal bottling the title, when they were just the last to be ground down by City’s deathless machine?
For one thing, it’s a neat storyline.
Sport is often freighted with excess meaning when it described as a “metaphor for life”, whereas in reality it’s a distilled, accelerated parody of life because it ends in a resolution. There’s a winner and a loser; a score or a time but always a ranking.
The definitiveness of the result is what marks sport apart from all of the other grand human pursuits.
Arsenal blowing the title? There’s a story fully told, right up to and including its conclusion.
But Manchester City winning the Premier League months after the Premier League accused them of 115 breaches of financial rules, for which potential punishments may include the stripping of titles?
Well…we might have a cliffhanger here, but we don’t yet have an ending.
The fact of City’s pending legal battle with the competition has been absent from the league’s broadcasters since Arsenal conceded the title on Sunday. Martin Tyler tied himself up in knots when trying to praise Brighton, saying that this is “not a one-team league”, right at the moment City’s dominance was accentuated.
Monday Night Football – unequivocally the best football show on television – reflected on the effective end of the title race by praising City as a “special” team, without once mentioning the context of the whole 115 charges thing.
As for BT Sport: relying on them to discuss the over-arching, serious matters of the day is the equivalent of expecting a dog to drive the car it has been chasing. Our only hope of hearing about it there is if Peter Walton goes truly rogue.
This is consistent with an amnesia specific to football. If a cyclist won four Tour de France titles out of five, was then accused of cheating by the organisers of the Tour de France, would his winning of the very next Tour de France title really be hailed by the media without any caveats or complications?
City deny the charges and will fight to clear their name, as they have every right to do. And they may well win the case, at which point they can celebrate their league title successes all over again.
But until there’s a resolution to that case, how true a resolution can we really have to this season?
It’s not credible to invoke the 115 charges as a kind of automatic disclaimer every time City get a mention, but nor is it credible to discuss the entire context of their title-winning season without any mention of them.
Raising the 115 charges doesn’t make for spectacular punditry either, given there isn’t a whole lot that can be said rather than then the mention of them. But this doesn’t make them totally off-limits, either.
In the absence of anything emphatic to say about the winners, it’s proving easier to write off the losers, by applying a label to Arsenal they don’t deserve.
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