Paul Fennessy

AS ARSENAL’S match with Brighton came to a close on Sunday and any remaining tension in the Premier League title race evaporated, Sky commentator Martin Tyler made a curious statement.

“One of the great appeals of the Premier League is it’s not a one-team league,” he said.

A considerable portion of the evidence suggests otherwise. Man City are about to win their fifth Premier League title in six years. They are also strong favourites to secure the FA Cup and, to a lesser extent, the Champions League.

True, the title race has been close this year and Arsenal could theoretically at least still be champions.

Yet in the Bundesliga, Bayern lead Dortmund by a single point. In France, PSG are just two points better off than City in the sense they hold a six-point lead, although, unlike the English side, they don’t have a game in hand.

Would the French or German equivalent of Tyler be able to argue with a straight face that the Bundesliga or Ligue 1 is “not” a one-team league because they have had a relatively close title race this year?

Yet Sky Sports’ coverage has historically been prone to hype over substance, and so perhaps Tyler is simply toeing the party line and adhering to the all-important mantra of not disparaging the product.

You could even argue that Ligue 1 is more competitive than the Premier League on the basis that they had an unexpected title winner more recently, with Lille crowned champions at the end of the 2020-21 season.

Not to suggest that the situation in France is particularly healthy though, with PSG on course to win a ninth title in 11 seasons.

Similarly in Germany, barring a late mishap, Bayern are set to win an 11th consecutive title — not even the perpetually derided Scottish Premiership has been as one-sided in recent years.

You could reasonably argue that England is not quite at the level of the aforementioned competitions yet — there have, after all, been five different champions in the past decade, and Arsenal would have made it six in 11 years.

And it’s true that historically in football, there have often been dominant teams who rack up trophies on a regular basis.

Yet the scale of the dominance feels different in the modern era.

Should they win their remaining fixtures as expected, this will be the fourth time in six seasons that City have finished with 90+ points (their other recent tallies of 81 and 86 weren’t especially far off either). 

Before the Pep Guardiola era, the 90-point barrier was broken on just four occasions during a 38-game Premier League season — three times by Chelsea (04-05, 05-06 and 16-17) and once by Man United (08-09).

So what this City team are doing is genuinely unprecedented in a way that does not reflect well on the top flight’s competitiveness.

Moreover, usually when the title race remains alive at this stage of the season, it creates a truly thrilling spectacle, such as the 1995-96 season when Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle blew such a substantial lead or even when City themselves memorably won their first Premier League title with a last-gasp Sergio Aguero goal in 2012.

Yet there is something machine-like about Pep Guardiola’s side that leaves most neutrals cold.

Despite Arsenal having an advantage for a large portion of the season, the prospect of City failing always felt unlikely.

Granted, there were setbacks earlier in the campaign, but then the reigning champions did what they nearly always do — namely, they got their act together in the second half of the season and won 13 of their last 14 league matches. Since the turn of the year in fact, they have dropped points in just three out of 19 fixtures, losing to Tottenham and Man United while drawing with Nottingham Forest.

Somewhat similar to Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool before them, Arsenal, if anything overachieved for much of the season before effectively imploding in the last few weeks with a series of disappointing results amid an exhausting, unforgiving schedule.

Really, though, the gap between these two sides is greater than the points differential suggests.

When they met last month, City prevailed 4-1 against the Gunners — having also beaten them 3-1 in February — and it barely felt like a contest that night.

The champions can also afford to rest several key players on a regular basis, whereas Arsenal really struggle when someone as influential as William Saliba is out of the team.

And yes, City undoubtedly deserve credit from a purely footballing standpoint for their abundance of intelligent acquisitions beginning with manager Pep Guardiola and the team of people who work alongside him to maintain City’s oft-flawless tactics and excellent record in the transfer market.

But there are nevertheless pertinent questions worth considering long-term in tandem with City’s remarkable success.

Will the club suffer a significant dip when Guardiola, widely regarded as the world’s best coach, eventually does leave?

What will be the outcome of the Premier League investigation into City’s alleged financial breaches? 

But assuming things don’t take a dramatic turn for the worse in either of the two aforementioned scenarios, another state-backed project, Newcastle, is perhaps the best long-term hope of challenging the Etihad outfit and in the process, quelling renewed calls for a European Super League as the only viable solution to a broken English system.

But even the Magpies, for all the improvements they have made this season, are still surely at least a few years away from being able to pose a credible threat to the relentless and increasingly formidable City dynasty.