It is to the Premier League’s great credit that we haven’t had an inconsequential Premier League title winner in 12 years; not a single champion that doesn’t either have a romantic story attached to them or are clearly definable as one of the great English teams.
You have to go back to 2013/14 for the last unmemorable Premier League winner, when Manuel Pellegrini’s Manchester City emerged from a three-way tussle to lift the trophy, despite nobody really remembering anything about that team or who even played in it. Luis Suarez’s surge and Steven Gerrard’s slip are the iconic pictures of that season.
It is starting to look like 2025/26 will have a similar punchline, will be remembered more for the agonising miss of the runners-up than anything particularly special about the winner. This has all the hallmarks of being dubbed the Arsenal year, not unlike Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool in 13/14 or Kevin Keegan’s rant back in 1996.
Newcastle United’s meltdown is probably the most accurate comparison, should Arsenal lose the title to Man City, because despite the accusations that the Gunners are essentially the polar opposite of Keegan’s ‘Entertainers’ there is a similar sense of angst and theatre emerging, amplified, as it was by Sir Alex Ferguson, by Pep Guardiola repeatedly suggesting his players can relax, have a drink, go on holiday.
But all of a sudden, following Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final win against Southampton, that narrative is under threat. The possibility of a Man City English treble, something only ever achieved once before in top-flight history (by Guardiola’s side in 2018/19), could force us next month to alter history, to edit in post the perception that this is a nothingy Man City side.
In truth the rewrite happens fairly often, and is the real reason why each of the last 11 Premier League seasons appear to have such a neat-and-tidy narrative behind them. For a very long time in 2023/24 it looked like Arsenal’s year, and only when Man City got over the line did we package it as the glorious, record-breaking fourth in a row. In 2021/22 it felt like Liverpool’s, it really did, but again history erases that feeling.
And when the retrospective shift in our perceptions happens in late May, it’s possible that the season will be hastily repackaged not as an Arsenal bottle job but as the birth of Guardiola’s Man City 3.0: the beginning of another cycle of dominance.
It’s a story that might even convince Guardiola to stay. It is widely understood he will be leaving this summer, but his decision appears to have been made long before it seemed realistic City could end on a high. In fact, his celebration of the EFL Cup final victory read like relief that he can look back on his final year with silverware to show for it.
A treble surely changes the calculation. In Gianluigi Donnarumma, Nico O’Reilly, Antoine Semenyo, Rayan Cherki, and Marc Guehi, Guardiola has assembled a new spine of a young side that could begin a fresh wave of domination over English football.
It isn’t just a case of having refreshed the squad, but the tactics, too. For well over a year now Guardiola has mused over how to adapt to English football’s advancement through the positional play he brought to this country and into a more transitional game of man-to-man pressing and high turnovers. At long last, he has done it, creating a Man City team more entertaining and individualistic than any he’s put together before.
If City win their final five Premier League matches and the FA Cup final against Chelsea, Guardiola might just remember why he enjoys managing this club so much. That special feeling, the fruition of a project, won’t be available to him anywhere else, not with the same resonance as it does after a decade in Manchester. It might just be enough to trigger a change of heart.
Why go out on a high when the hard part – the evolution – has been done? Better, surely, to stay for another cycle, extend the contract again, and hunt down a second Champions League trophy.
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