Getting ahead of one journalist’s reaction to Manchester City’s likely treble triumph next month
For a moment last night Pep Guardiola appeared to be moulding spacetime like putty in his hands. Gesturing on the sideline as he spoke to oncoming substitute Julian Alvarez, it felt like all of reality was bending to his will, that the instructions he was giving were actually just previews of a future he could already see, eternity stretching out in front of him as it would to a Tralfamadorian.
By this time, the treble was won. Manchester City were 2-0 up and cruising in this weirdly flat game thanks to İlkay Gündoğan and Riyad Mahrez. The oles from high up in the Atatürk accompanied each City pass like rites being administered in a coronation ritual for this genuinely great side. The noise rushed down and dispersed out through the stadium’s exposed end which siphoned it off into the heavy Istanbul night.
Guardiola and City have succeeded in rationalising the world’s most popular pastime. This seven-year exercise in eliminating risk, jeopardy, and everything irrational, has reached its inevitable end. Everything in its right place.
Of course, there are caveats. City’s über-professional hunting down of a flailing Arsenal side in the league looks from the perspective of now like a historical inevitability. But City spent the long middle part of this stretched-out season looking like they might phone it in after winning those titanic battles with Liverpool, the equivalent of Jacques Anquetil seeing off Raymond Poulidor only to lose to a seal on a unicycle.
There were flings with imperfection, with beauty, for the ‘intangibles’ to take control: backs-to-the wall comebacks were required against Palace and Spurs. Anfield did Anfield things to City. Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and a banter-era Antonio Conte took points off Guardiola, and Nathan Jones denied them a possible quadruple in the League Cup. Chris Wood scored at one point, which was fun.
These are throwaway footnotes in the canon now. In the season’s final quarter, City compressed Arsenal in the manner that their players do the opposition when they have lost the ball, blue antibodies converging on and neutralising the foreign red object. Guardiola’s goodwill with his former mentee ran out: he is the Nucky Thompson to Arteta’s Jimmy Darmody.
On the pitch, City did not undergo any kind of revolution this season in claiming the treble, they merely fine-tuned what was already an exercise in near-sublimity. In possession they create geometric shapes from passing lanes which constantly morph into others before the observer can even make them out, trapeziums into diamonds into triangles. Kevin de Bruyne strides around, all colour and right angles. Fizzing all around him, Gündoğan and Bernardo Silva prove the theory of perpetual motion in a closed system. Erling Haaland’s record-chasing has inadvertently introduced the TikTok generation to Pathe news clips of Dixie Dean, Fred Morris, Joe Smith: strikers who played in an era when England had never lost to European opposition.
The fifth part of their defining quintet of home victories (United, Leipzig, Bayern, Arsenal) came against Real Madrid, who they not so much beat in a football match as they did deconstruct their reason for being and then send the analysis back to them in a shared Google Doc. Erving Goffman would have liked City; they are the JL Austin of football.
Manchester United put up more of a fight in the FA Cup Final, a kind of legacy act trying to defend the honour of their fabled ancestor deities like Norse soldiers, but they couldn’t cope with City’s relentless motorik rhythm. For United, this week was the realising of their worst fears, their Ragnarök.
The 115 charges levelled against City by the Premier League will be neither proved nor disproved any time soon, despite Guardiola’s wishes for a speedy process. On this, the Abu Dhabi United Group and the manager do differ. The City ownership’s gunboat diplomacy in its dealings with the footballing authorities can be handily reframed as an overdue pushback against the ‘Cartel’ deep-state of established clubs. This unavoidable context surrounding City’s achievements should continue to be highlighted by a responsible media, although it won’t go down well: you’ll get a less frosty reception at an Etihad presser if you turned up in a Just Stop Oil t-shirt clutching a can of paint.
Setting that aside for a second (which really ought to be the tagline for this thing), there is a wider question with the game which many neutrals may be feeling increasingly: who is this all for? City’s exploits this season and their domestic dominance are not without precedent in the English game, but its coupling with the smokescreen of creeping corporate discourse does give it a flavour of Football Realism, Big Football’s lackeys imbuing a sense within ordinary fans’ heads that there is no alternative. Cry more, Ronay! How’s that copium?! If you want a picture of the future, imagine an overly caffeinated posh twenty-something in a 90s football shirt on a livestream shouting at you to place an accumulator, forever. Performative, mawkish, cynical, it seems to say to those outside football’s elite: you can never attain this, but you must respect the greatness.
This all goes on while we play host to proxy displays of hard power by nations fighting a kind of cold war in the Arabian Peninsula. Leaders in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, possibly soon to be joined by Qatar, use the Premier League as a stage to enact their psychodramas, and there is a sense here of just feeling fortunate to be involved in it all. Isn’t it nice that they see us as important enough, as worthy? Isn’t it pretty great optics? This is Global Britain. All that matters is that as we are invited to the summit, getting the exclusive sit-downs with the strongmen, happy to play host to something totally out of our control or comprehension. On the pitch in Istanbul after the final, Guardiola said that this is an era ‘we are all so lucky to be living through’. Do you feel it?
Co-Opter 