Manchester City are almost certainly the best football team in the world right now, and are poised be crowned Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League winners within the next three weeks, achieving parity with the Manchester United treble of 1999. These achievements are the culmination of a 15-year project which has elevated the club from underachieving also-rans to the dominant force in global club football, completely displacing and eclipsing their local rivals Manchester United as English football’s superpower in the process. There’s a real possibility that this could be the beginning of an era of total City dominance over the Premier League in the same vein as Bayern Munich, PSG or Barcelona.
There is a huge amount to admire about City. To say otherwise is delusional. The club have planned and recruited extraordinarily well over the last decade-and-a-half, both on and off the pitch, attracting the best operators in the sport at board level by appointing the La Liga-winning triumvirate of Ferran Soriano as CEO, Txiki Begiristain as director of football, and, of course, Pep Guardiola as manager. Together, the’ve assembled an all-star squad of industrious, generational talent which has enjoyed an almost unbroken rising trajectory, without suffering from the same egos, managerial churn or drama that has encumbered some of their rivals, especially post-Ferguson Man United.
They play a style of football so efficient and effective that it looks, at times, as if the club is coached by ChatGPT, not Pep Guardiola, the closest human equivalent the sport has to a tactical AI. They’ve revolutionised and, let’s be honest, pretty much “completed” football in many ways through Guardiola’s tactical brilliance, a refinement of Cryuff’s “Total Football” combined with elements of Ralf Rangnick’s “Geigenpressing”. So far, so admirable.
Context, however, is key. Some of the main reasons we love football, and indeed any sport, are spontaneity, emotion, jeopardy, and triumph over adversity. The fulfilment of tribalistic tendencies hardwired into every human being. The derivation of a common identity from shared success and hardship. The ethos and values represented by the team you adore. When considering City’s achievements, there are a few questions that are helpful to keep in mind. What adversity have City had to overcome to get to where they are? What is their identity and history? What values do the club claim to represent? What legacy will their success leave? Are they loved, or simply admired? The answers to these questions are problematic, at best.
If Man City do go on and win a treble, the footballing world that exists beyond their insular, limited supporter base will react with indifference, the shrug of a shoulder or a roll of the eyes. Why? Because the entire City project is completely and utterly contrived. They’ve reached their current position, not through the patient, organic, unpredictable rollercoaster of competition, but by weaponising the almost limitless funds available to their owners. In 2008, the club had the blind luck of being chosen by United Arab Emirate politicans as a sportswashing conduit through which they could project largesse and soft power, while polishing the rough edges from their state’s reputation for human rights abuses. It will also serve as vindication for the way in which the Premier League has shamelessly pimped itself out to foreign nations, allowing them to infiltrate and pervert the economics of the sport, and worsen the already massive financial inequalities within the game
As regards their on-field exploits, as innovative and effective as Guardiola’s tactics are, they are anti-football. They seem to be designed to extinguish what little entropy and jeopardy is left in the game. There are times when it feels as if you’re watching a weird kind of ballet recital starring 11 automatons who play an endless succession of precisely choreographed passes, lulling the opposition into a dull stupor until eventually Erling Haaland eventually taps it in. You get the sense that if Guardiola could just field 11 midfielders, he would. It’s almost as if he’d rather turn football into another sport. Maybe if it was my team playing this way, I’d feel differently, and that these are just the salty words of a disgruntled United supporter. But then, I look at some of Man City’s own fans, and even they look bored, so bored and presumptuous of success in fact that they often fail to turn up at supposedly enormous milestones in the club’s history.
I’ve struggled for ages to describe City. Words like sterile, clinical, and soulless have sprung to mind, but I think that weird feeling I get watching them is a sense of dissonance or disconnection between the club’s stature and history pre-takeover, and the resources it now has at its disposal. As awful as the new owners of Newcastle are, I at least get why they chose to buy Newcastle, a big northern club with an equally big supporter base. If Noel Gallagher bought City, I’d get that too, but City were a failing mid-table club with a very dodgy owner when they were sold to the UAE. There’s also an incongruity between what the club claims to be, and what it is. There is nothing intrinsically Mancunian or English about them now, and if you transplanted City to another part of the world, I doubt you’d need to change very much beyond the name and kit.
Maybe this is where my moral relativism should kick in. There are very few “decent” Premier League club owners left. Man United have spent as much on players as City in the last ten years, except they had no idea what they were doing. Newcastle are almost to certain to start flexing their newfound financial muscle in the coming transfer market. There is just something offensive about the City project that I can’t quite put my finger on. Anyway, here’s hoping that Ten Hag and company can torpedo their treble and win a the mickey-mouse double. That really would be something.
