After a year-long pursuit, City finally caught up to the league’s top team on Wednesday. With less than ten games remaining, City is now in position to win the Premier League for the third time in a row.
Manchester, United Kingdom It’s hard to say with certainty just when Arsenal realized everything was finished. After Manchester City’s opening goal, which came just 370 seconds into a match that had been promoted — for weeks — as the Premier League’s big championship clash, there was probably still hope.
following John Stones’ second goal, which was scored on a satellite delay following a video review not long before halftime, there may have been a glimmer of hope left. After all, the final few months of a season call for mental acrobatics, leaps of faith, and the ifs, buts, and maybes that soccer pompously refers to as “permutations.” A sketch might work. Perhaps a tie would keep the possibility alive.
But the third objective was distinct. Rob Holding of Arsenal stood after the third with his hands on his hips and a blank expression. Gabriel Magalhaes knelt down on his haunches and appeared to be thinking about what grass feels like. Thomas Partey began to firmly clap as a sign of support for his teammates.He succeeded in two before giving up.
The third goal, scored by Kevin De Bruyne, killed any remaining glimmer of hope for Arsenal, burnt their memory from the Earth, and salted the earth to prevent them from ever resurfacing. By the time Erling Haaland made it 4-1 with his hair flowing behind him, it was difficult to imagine there had ever been any chance.
Despite playing two more games than Manchester City, Arsenal still leads the Premier League by two points. Despite the fact that the team’s coach, Mikel Arteta, is unwilling to concede just yet because “I have been in this country for 22 years,” he remarked, “and I have seen how quickly things shift,” that lead now appears to be a mere formality brought on by a shattered chronology or scheduling anomaly.
In sports, there are no guarantees. 2 points, however, are not nearly enough to be sustained through the end of the season in late May, according to logic and previous experience. Arsenal and Arteta suffered a setback against Manchester City on Wednesday. There was more taken away from them than simply hope. The irrational hope that the Premier League may win its first championship in over 20 years was disproved.
Naturally, there will be a temptation to argue that Arteta and his staff caused all of this, both inside and outside of Arsenal. Had they not spent the last three weeks letting the lead they had built up throughout the season to be lost, things may have turned out differently.
At Liverpool, Arsenal had a two-goal advantage and drew. At West Ham, it had a two-goal advantage and drew. At the Emirates, it gifted Southampton, a relegation contender, a two-goal lead before mounting an inspiring comeback and drawing. Arsenal was found deficient at the crucial point in the season when the great distinguish themselves from the merely good, according to reasoning.
Kinder observers would draw attention to a number of mitigating factors: The Arsenal team is one of the league’s youngest and is progressing faster than expected. William Saliba, the cherubic cornerstone of the defense, went down with an injury just when the team needed him the most. He has been severely missed. His absence has shown that Arteta does not currently have the resources to continue.
All of that, though, amounts to believing a lie, falling into the trap of thinking there could have been a different outcome than the one that will play out over the coming weeks, and giving in to the delusion that Arsenal — or anyone — could ever have genuinely done enough to defeat Manchester City.
Manchester City is not just the best team in the Premier League; it is the best in the Premier League by a gap that is so wide, so clear, and so deep that it cannot, in all practicality, be bridged, as it demonstrated rather neatly against the team that it identified as its key rival from the earliest days of the season.
To a large extent, there are three schools of thought regarding how that was accomplished. One theory holds that Pep Guardiola’s coaching, which is without a doubt brilliant, and the team’s nearly perfect hiring practices are the foundations of City’s dominance.
Another, less kind, might claim that it was mostly built by spending about $1 billion on some of the best players in the world, creating a team that isn’t any deeper than its competitors but is of such a caliber that none of them can compete. (Kalvin Phillips, a stalwart of the English national team at the time, was acquired by City last summer. Perhaps you forgot.)
The third, and most damning of all, would mention that the club is currently under investigation by the Premier League for 115 financial rule violations, all of which are vehemently and repeatedly denied by City but may still cast doubt on all of its accomplishments over the past ten years.
But whatever the reason, the result is clear. The team of Guardiola is now on track to win the Premier League for the fifth time in six years and the third time in a row. Manchester United is the only other team to have achieved it. Only one other English team, also Manchester United, has captured the illustrious trifecta of the league, F.A. Cup, and Champions League. City may accomplish both in a single year.
Without a doubt, it is the dominant force of its time. Its combination of wealth, power, and intelligence—what the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger memorably referred to as “petrol and ideas”—has swept all rivals aside. In an unsuccessful attempt to keep up, Manchester United has gone through three managers and hundreds of millions of cash. Spurs and Chelsea. Liverpool maintained their focus for five years before crumbling.
