Manchester City’s dominance deserves to be celebrated
Manchester City were crowned Premier League champions on Sunday to conclude the most relentless title race in history.
One-hundred and ninety-five. That is now, officially, Manchester City and Liverpool’s combined points total this season, 14 more than the combined total of the first and second-place sides in any other season in the Premier League era, including the three when there were 22 teams in the league. Ninety-eight of them belonged to City; 97 to Liverpool.
There are crueler ways to lose a title, as Liverpool well know, but perhaps none more perplexing. Jurgen Klopp’s side now lay claim to the third best season in the Premier League era, the best top flight season in the club’s history. Teams this dominant, teams who lose once all season, teams who finish on 97 (97!) points aren’t supposed to come second.
The enlightened take on all this seems to be that Liverpool didn’t lose this title. City won it. They didn’t bottle anything. They won their last nine matches. Consecutive draws against Leicester and West Ham, when the race was still theirs to lose, weren’t the result of stage fright, but normal byproducts of the mid-winter grind all Premier League challengers must endure.
All of this is true enough. There’s no question Liverpool are one of the best teams in Europe (they may yet be crowned literal champions of Europe). They’re young, they have an excellent manager and they’re one of the best run teams in the sport. There’s cause for optimism almost everywhere you look.
Klopp knows this, and has been typically positive through it all. As he said in April about the prospect of his side finishing with 97 points, “if that’s enough, then perfect. If not, we cannot change it. And we didn’t lose it here or there or whatever. Very smart people will come out and say, ‘yeah, if you would have won against Leicester you would be champions.’ It’s all bulls**t.”
Still: 97 points, second place. That hurts. Of course it does. It is the glorious stupidity at the heart of all elite sport: We watch it to appreciate excellence, and then dismiss as failures everyone but the winners. We love it because of the journey, and evaluate it based almost exclusively on the destination.
That might be very dumb indeed, but no one ever said this was supposed to make sense.
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On the other side of all this, of course, is Manchester City, who are in the even stranger position of being both the most dominant team in the history of top flight English football, on the verge of a historic domestic treble, and for many people, it seems, a bit of a disappointment. They are, if anything — talk about glorious stupidity — too good.
Where Liverpool’s challenge was defined by moments of high drama — late goals, late own goals, late Jordan Pickford-assisted Divock goals — City’s campaign has been aggressively serene. Even when they lose, they should win. When they win, they win so easily as to remove any sense of tension from the game whatsoever.
Because City’s success is the result of unprecedented spending power, because they’ve failed so often in the Champions League, because of the reprehensible politics of their owners, and their many violations of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules, it’s easy to revel in their failure, to dismiss their success as the bare minimum given their many, let’s say, advantages.
This is, perhaps, to be expected, and there are legitimate reasons to be unsympathetic to the club given the current ownership. But none of that changes how good this team are. We have truly never seen anything like them. Their win against Brighton on Sunday was City’s 18th in their last 19 league matches. That’s 54 out of 57 possible points in the run-in.
The underlying numbers are even more impressive. They recorded fewer expected goals than their opponents in only two league matches all season (away against Leicester, at home against Liverpool), per Understat. Their expected points total was almost seven higher than Liverpool’s. They were, in short, the best team in the league.
When City became the first Premier League side ever to collect 100 points last season, people said they needed to win the title more than once before they could be compared to Alex Ferguson’s great Manchester United sides, or Jose Mourinho’s first Chelsea team, or Arsene Wenger’s Invincibles.
They’ve now won it twice in a row, with the two highest points totals in Premier League history. They hold almost every record — goals, goal difference, points, wins — a team can hold. Perhaps they need to win the Champions League to earn the appreciation they deserve, but their place in the record books is unlikely to be taken for a long, long time.