Liverpool, Manchester City’s epic Premier League title race reaches its endgame

One of the tightest Premier League title races in history will finally come to a close this Sunday. Will Manchester City or Liverpool finish top?

This has been a month for conclusions, the conclusion of era-defining stories. Spoilers have become the ultimate social media sin, but as far as the yet undecided contest between Liverpool and Manchester City is concerned, there are no spoilers. Not until the final, final whistle sounds on Sunday, anyway.

Neither team will have to contend with an army of the undead or an all-conquering villain with a world-consuming glove, but over the past few weeks and months the Premier League has served up something to rival anything else on the silver or small screen. This season has been English soccer’s very own game of thrones and this weekend will mark its endgame.

In a week that has already seen all conventional wisdom disposed of, with two barely believable Champions League turnarounds witnessed in successive nights, nothing can be taken for granted as the 2018-19 Premier League season reaches its finish this Sunday. In ordinary circumstances, City would be expected to brush aside Brighton just as Liverpool would be to see off Wolves, but these are not ordinary circumstances.

This provides a thread through everything we have seen from the Premier League’s top two this season. In 33 of the last 37 English top flight seasons, Liverpool would be champions by now. They’ve collected more points this season than Manchester United ever did in a single campaign under Sir Alex Ferguson, the most successful manager in the competition’s history. And yet despite all this, they could still finish second best.

They have City to blame for that. When Pep Guardiola arrived in England, they claimed he would enter an environment altogether different from the ones he experienced as boss of both Barcelona and Bayern Munich. They said he would struggle to dominant English soccer in the way he did the German and Spanish game, a notion the man himself reinforced more than once.

How those suggestions look foolish, now. Guardiola has done to the Premier League exactly what he did to La Liga and the Bundesliga, setting a precedent that has proved almost impossible for anyone else to follow. Almost.

Jose Mourinho was the last man to topple Guardiola in a domestic title race. Of course, Jurgen Klopp is very different, both as a coach and a person, to Mourinho. His teams certainly play in a different way, but he could emulate the former Real Madrid boss by bettering the figure who has established a footballing zeitgeist over the past decade.

Real Madrid’s 2011-12 title win was a fleeting moment of upset in Guardiola’s world. Normal service was soon resumed as the Catalan coach went on to win four league championships in his next four seasons. The challenge for Liverpool isn’t just to clinch their first league title for 29 years, as consuming as that objective may be, but to prove themselves as a force. Otherwise all we have seen from them this season will be regarded, in times to come, as an anomaly. A glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless.

Some will argue that Liverpool had the chance to wrap up the title before the final weekend. They did, after all, hold a seven-point lead with 24 games played. However, this does a disservice to a team that has won their last eight Premier League fixtures. If there is a team that has one last push in them, it’s Klopp’s Liverpool.

Was Vincent Kompany’s 30-yard stunner against Leicester on Monday the defining moment in a title race for the ages? Or just like his derby-winning header against Manchester United back in 2012, which was deemed at the time to be the decisive blow in another hard-fought title race, will it be usurped by something even more dramatic? Something else to defy the norms of what is believable? It would be almost unbelievable if there wasn’t. Don’t these sort of things always have one last twist? Fans of fantastical TV and film franchises will tell you.