History is what happens when you’re busy making plans about how to stop Erling Haaland. After nine months of fractured storylines, the European club season is finally narrowing to a point. For all the broken notes, the time-jumps, the jetlag along the way, we could now be facing an endgame of rare clarity, a moment where the entire horizon turns a shade of sky blue.
Manchester City may still end up with nothing this season, no pots to wave, no bobbing podium huddles. But they are also within a sustained final push of winning it all, of taking that almost-unprecedented treble of Champions League, FA Cup and Premier League.
This thing feels close now. With the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich downgraded to the status of useful aerobic workout, City have a maximum of 14 live games left to play, nine in the Premier League, two in the FA Cup and three in the Champions League. This thing is starting to look, not only possible, but probable.
We have of course been here before. As recently as last spring – and this was not, repeat not, a three-month peyote trance – Liverpool came within two match-days of completing the quadruple, and thereby racking up the greatest season in the history of English club football.
The difference this time around is that City have elevated their game to a rare pitch at just the right moment, a team running through these high-stakes collisions with a kind of light around it, just as everyone else starts to burn and grimace and tie up. The evisceration of Bayern Munich on Tuesday night makes it nine wins in a row, with a combined aggregate score of 34-4.
It also helps that the run-in, while tough in parts, is also quite accommodating. All of the teams City have to beat from this point in the domestic competitions are teams they have made a habit of beating over the past 10 years. Shall we run through this now? Because in isolation (and, yes, none of this is in isolation; we are at the point where nerves, random variables, and luck start to intrude) the numbers really do stack up.
Where exactly is the key resistance coming from here? Brighton have lost 11 of their past 12 against City. Sheffield United have lost their past four, Brentford two of the past three, Manchester United three of their past four. Newcastle have lost seven of their past eight City games. Fulham have lost all of the past 13. West Ham have won zero games against City in 17 attempts. Leeds have lost their past three including a 7-0 and a 4-0. City have beaten Everton 10 times in their past 12 meetings and lost none.
Arsenal present the most obviously formidable opponents, a team that would be on a victory lap of its own by now were it not for City’s relentless pursuit of the sun. But City have also beaten Arsenal in 15 of their past 16 games, including February’s 3-1 alpha dog destruction at the Emirates.
In Europe the only really daunting obstacles left are Real Madrid and Napoli. City didn’t have the teeth to kill Madrid last year. This year they have a player who has scored 12 goals in his past five games. Run the numbers. Factor in form. Would it really be so strange for this mature and thrillingly powerful Guardiola machine to just run straight through all of those games from here?
At which point two questions present themselves. First, how good is this City team in the grander scale of things? What kind of claim on ultimacy, on all-time status are we talking about here if they can succeed in achieving even some of this? And secondly, as ever with an entity that is effectively something new in club football – the will of the Abu Dhabi ruling family as expressed via high-grade possession football – what does this actually mean for everyone else?
The first of these questions is at least very easy to answer. How good are City? Very, very good indeed. It seems obvious that this is the best team in the world right now, and arguably the best the Premier League has ever seen. This is of course a pointless argument to make, because the past can never play the present, because sport constantly evolves. But it is necessary to have it all the same.
The Manchester United team of Beckham, Scholes and Keane was more visceral in its own way, with its homegrown players, its flaws and ragged edges, back in the days when buying Dwight Yorke for £13m was seen as alarming financial overlord behaviour. But they were basically playing a different game, a version of straight lines, highly physical 4-4-2. Arsenal’s greatest teams of the age felt thrillingly modern at the time. Chelsea’s early Mourinho iterations, freed from the constraints of not being allowed to machine gun the world with money, were hard, tough, nasty, brilliant. But the game has evolved feverishly in the last few years. Sport almost always progresses. This City team is the standard. Stick them in a time machine and they’re beating everyone.
Probably themselves too. This current season team has taken a while to adapt to the sharper, narrower, more linear rhythms of Haaland-ism. It was always going to take time. But something has happened on the current winning run. Guardiola teams always evolve. The mature form of his Bayern team was the acme of The Control Years, football as a kind of choke hold, as beautiful annihilation. Three years ago City came close to something similar. With Haaland in the quiver, with less in the way of total control, City have evolved during the season, tightening the backline, using the four centre-back model, finding a referred strength in the need for a little more solidity. Who knows, maybe the false nine, the passing obsession, the delightful overloads were also a problem. There is a level where you just have to defend, and City have five brilliant centre-halves.
In an odd twist, playing a pure centre forward has made them seriously tough to beat, the current mini-run studded with clean sheets. Possession football was always, at bottom, about control, about disarming the opposition, about defence. This team that looks like it can win 1-0 or 7-0 or 4-2, can score and defend in different ways now. It is hard to think of an iteration that beats it.
At which stage, it is necessary to consider question two. What does it mean for football that City are this good, that we have a nation state team on the verge of basically completing club football? Before we get to value judgement on things like good, bad, healthy, beneficial, it is at least necessary to acknowledge that this model is something new. At the Etihad on Tuesday night there was unexpected sense of double take, an obvious contrast between the dizzyingly high stakes of the occasion, the brilliance of the football on show and the essentially “cold” nature of the experience, where the only noise for long periods of the game was from the travelling Bayern fans, broken, at one stage, by the sound of Manchester City fans singing the name of the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. This is, no matter where your loyalties lie, definitely a weird situation.
But then this is not an organic kind of sporting success, a success or a style that expresses anything from the ground. It is instead a top-down version of how to win, imposed by the will of a sovereign state, driven by extreme administrative competence, freed from the usual human failings, greed, lust for glory, with a bolt on internal culture road-tested in Catalonia, in a new-build former municipal stadium, producing a deeply alluring kind of planned perfection.
As City creep closer to a kind of completion, the treble, the total realisation of the project, it would take a complete lack of intellectual curiosity, or a blindly polarised sense of tribalism – ladies and gentleman, we have the internet in the house – not to see that this is at the very least worthy of comment; or to ignore the profound sense of change here. New forms, new dynamics, an Abu Dhabi full house in the year of Qatar. Welcome to the sky blue future.
