Gavin Cooney

AND SO ARSENAL have once again absorbed the experience of trying to beat Manchester City to the league title. 

It’s like the bird who mistakes a clear pane of glass for an open window: you charge giddily and full-blooded toward what you think is a limitless expanse of hope and freedom where anything and everything is possible and then splat. You were walled in all along. 

Maybe it’s why City are called the Sky Blues. 

Tuesday’s fitful win at Spurs was moment City pulled down the window for this year. 

Now all they have to do now is to beat a beached West Ham at home, it is inconceivable they won’t win the league. 

So City fans will bask in another season end of satisfaction, while Arsenal supporters will console themselves by mingling their disappointment with pride for their team, having inherited Liverpool’s rueful bargain. If we did this is in any other era . . .

But the rest of us will feel close to nothing. Another City league title. A first ever four-in-a-row and a sixth in seven seasons. If you want a picture of the present, recent past and likely the future, imagine a City-branded boot stamping on a human face. (Or at least as human a face as any Premier League club wears.) 

City are the fitting champion of football’s NFT era: another thing footballers both active and retired tell us has an inherent value despite the fact that value is not immediately apparent to anyone else. 

You can acknowledge City’s dominance and you might even be impressed by it, but you won’t be moved by it. 

The machine’s discrete parts are there to be appreciated: the utter originality in how Guardiola views and manipulates the game and the independence of Kevin De Bruyne’s creativity; the renegade streak to Phil Foden’s brilliance and the gratuitousness to John Stones’ skillset; the sheer extent of Rodri and the terrifying efficiency of Erling Haaland. 

But as a whole, City’s triumphs are the stuff of corporate excellence. This is a group of brilliant people brought together in a slick environment successfully meeting their annual KPIs. 

There is success but there is no glory in this. There is no sense of improbability, of stricture or limits, of overcoming the odds. There is no sense that the achievement means anything beyond the achievement itself. City’s victories are the natural course of logic, and everyone involved is brilliant and motivated enough not to get in each other’s way.

There was glory in what Guardiola achieved at Barcelona, where he was the leading figure in a movement that conquered the game on the strength of their original ideas alone. It was preachy and sometimes sanctimonious but it was undeniably organic. Tiki-taka and La Masia were the products of a specific means of Barcelona thinking, with a lineage that stretched back to Johan Cruyff. 

City, by contrast, are a synthetic building project. They wanted success and so they did what the rich can do: they looked at the most obvious expression of success elsewhere and they bought it. They hired Barcelona’s best executives in Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano, who then built the optimum environment for their coach. 

There has been rich praise for what City have built, but in truth they have merely reassembled elsewhere. They belong in a category with the replica Sphinx in Las Vegas and the Place Vendome in Qatar. 

Of course it has been wildly successful: City are a rare example in football of great wealth being spent without the guardrails of administrative incompetence. 

As a result, English football has never seen dominance like this before. Alex Ferguson bent the entire game to his will but never as relentlessly as City have. Even he took an odd year off to spend time with Eric Djemba-Djemba and Bebe.

If they beat West Ham at the weekend, City will have averaged just shy of 90 points per season across all of Guardiola’s eight seasons in charge. Only 10 other sides have broken the 90-point barrier in the history of the Premier League, and Liverpool did it twice to finish second to City. 

During this era, City have won The United-patented Treble, a domestic treble, and are now two wins away from a third double. The depth of their squad can be judged by the fact Cole Palmer was on its fringes and then went to Chelsea to contend for Player of the Season.  The influence of Guardiola is profound: the Arsenal and Leicester managers learned at his side, the Manchester United manager worked around him at Bayern, and the incoming Liverpool manager is a card-carrying believer.

So City are racking up unprecedented success, but to what end? It is undeniably thrilling for everyone associated with Manchester City, but it leaves most others cold. Worse is that all of these victories hang in this seemingly endless 115-charge-netherworld, the resolution of which continues to exist as some vague speck of a promise on a distant horizon. 

City fans will of course take one look at this piece and scoff, but they are a small constituency among the audience who tune in to the competitions in which they play. The reality is their ruthless success doesn’t stir the soul of any of those viewers. TV companies have responded by quietly excising the very notion of the general fan, instead stocking punditry panels with partisan representatives of each of the clubs involved. (To that end, Micah Richards claiming after the Spurs game that he is a “neutral pundit” felt like a piece of perverse performance art. The first line of his bio on X reads ‘Man City ambassador.’)

City’s bloodless excellence rolls on and they show no interest in stopping. But as their rivals keep on slamming into the window pane’s false sky, the rest of us will wonder whether it’s time to switch off and go outside.