Only a few weeks ago, the 2023/24 Premier League season looked destined to go down to the wire. A singular point separated Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City at the top of the table in early April, reflecting just how small the gap was between the three title rivals.
A lot has changed since then.
A run of just one win from five matches ended Liverpool’s hopes of sending off Jurgen Klopp in a blaze of Premier League title glory. The Reds are now five points off the pace with just three games left to play. Ultimately, Liverpool weren’t able to keep up the momentum they built over the first two thirds of the campaign.
Arsenal haven’t suffered anything close to the same sort of drop-off, but last month’s home defeat to Aston Villa was costly. Mikel Arteta’s team are still in the thick of the title race and are performing well, yet Manchester City are in control of their own fate and will retain their championship by winning their final four fixtures.
We’ve been here many times before. City have won four of the last five Premier League titles. They can become the first team in the Premier League era to win four championships in a row, which would highlight the dominance Pep Guardiola and his platers have enjoyed at the top of English soccer.
Numerous times, there has been the mirage of a title race. Last season, for instance, Arsenal had a club-record 50 points from their first 19 matches. They set the pace for much of the 2022/23 campaign, but were ultimately reeled in by a Manchester City team that won 14 out of 15 fixtures down the stretch.
The season before that, Liverpool went unbeaten in the second half of the campaign, winning 17 out of 19 fixtures. However, it still wasn’t enough to get the better of City, who finished just as strongly and finished top of the table by a single point. In the 2018/19 season, Liverpool finished on a club-record points tally of 97 – and were similarly beaten out by City who finished on 98 points.
Guardiola has built a title-winning machine. Even when Manchester City appear to have genuine competition, they have the quality to cross the line first. The consistency they have achieved over such a long period is unprecedented at the top of the Premier League and there’s no sign City will ease off any time soon.
A lot of this is down to the strength of their squad. City were without Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland for a long stretch of this season, but were able to keep moving forward thanks to the depth offered by the likes of Julian Alvarez and Bernardo Silva, both of whom would be automatic starters for most other Premier League teams.
But perhaps the most valuable thing that has kept Manchester City at the top of English soccer for so long is Guardiola’s ideology. By having so much control in the majority of matches they play, City have a natural advantage. Defeats happen, but they are an anomaly within the control culture Guardiola has created.
This is something that made Guardiola’s teams at Barcelona and Bayern Munich similarly effective at winning league titles. Remarkably, only three times since Guardiola’s introduction to senior management in 2007 has the former midfielder finished a season without a league title in-hand. In Spain, Germany and England, he has dominated.
City still have some work to do to keep hold of their Premier League crown. Their fixture list between now and the end of the season is somewhat favourable, but an away match against Tottenham Hotspur on May 14 could be challenging. Spurs gave City trouble in a 3-3 draw at the Etihad Stadium earlier in the season.
“We prefer they lose, we cannot control what they do,” Guardiola when asked about Arsenal’s Premier League title challenge and the threat they could still pose between now and the end of May. “There are four games left, I don’t think they are going to lose any points, so we know exactly what we have to do.”
Given what we have seen from Manchester City in the past, they will do enough to finish top of the pile. That has become the defining feature of Guardiola’s time at the club. Even when there appears to be a title race, the 53-year-old is always at least one step ahead of the competition.
