Here we are and here we go. It’s that time of the year. It’s all jammed up. Seasons barely divide amongst each other. But the Premier League is about to start. Another year in the league that has now created perhaps the biggest gap from best to second-best football league in the history of the sport. If only in strict financial terms, there probably hasn’t been a difference in power so stark between leagues. Does the late 90’s and early 00’s with Serie A breaking transfer record after transfer record, ahead of La Liga, the Premier League and the Bundesliga count as a comparable period in football history? With the money, the history, the mega-rich owners and the global language advantage, the Premier League is the place to be, the number one, ultimate destination of the sport. And so it will begin this Friday night. Into a season that feels incredibly predictable with Manchester City clear favorites to win again, with Liverpool the only credible threat, with Fulham and Bournemouth at the opposite end of things headed back down the Championship drain, with no one seeming to have much mustered up as of right now to sucker punch its way into the Top-6, and with the last two Champions League spots with four different contenders feeling as the only intriguing and true tossup. But then again, sometimes such clear predictability turns out not being so clear at all.
At the top, at their seemingly infinite peak, head of the table in English football are Manchester City. In 2018 they conquered it all with force, grace and 100 points. They almost reached that exact same mark a year later, this time with Liverpool pushing them all the way to the end. And on track for the “three-peat” is when it finally collapsed. They were gonna be unstoppable again; Liverpool were not gonna be equally relentless because it was all just too absurd, too unsustainable. But the rampaging Manchester City machinery finally got clogged and Liverpool struck – on the bull’s eye. And in the ridiculous and nonsensical times that were the first months of Covid, the idea got floated of nullifying the season – but thank god that only the Dutch and French and no one else went ahead with the stupidity. The Premier League came back and sealed the Manchester City slip, the Liverpool coronation and still in Covid times we would go into subsequently the first full-on almost complete season of empty stadiums. The beginning of that season was when the idea of Manchester City being over, of the “Guardiola Experience” heading towards an inevitable end, became truly acknowledgeable, sincerely a possibility. During those months it even looked like Jose Mourinho’s Tottenham could contend for the title since they led the Premier League almost three months into the season. Crazy times those were.
It all shifted back into place. And that has been the story ever since, with only Liverpool daring to make it interesting again in any sense and keeping our imaginations alive. After winning the Community Shield last weekend, there’s the hints that we so dearly would like to hold on to if we didn’t know any better. The idea that City can be got at, that Liverpool are the ones that can and will do it. But after four out of five seasons of unweathering Sky Blue dominance, it’s hard to actually bring yourself to believe. We are smarter than that of course. We know. But hopefully we won’t.
It's just hard with Manchester City and Pep Guardiola. These hyper-intense coaches don’t have durability, we thought for years. Their detail-obsession too exhausting to keep up with forever, burnout something that will swallow them, the team, the project, the union, the idea. It will have to end. But it turns out, it didn’t. It doesn’t. We’re basically seven years deep into this Guardiola-Klopp era, where not only have they proved to be masterful geniuses of the moment, of the burst and the peak; they have shown that they are also sustainable. The famous squad-tweaks of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United – perhaps the best and most colossal example of the possibility of a one-manager club hegemony football has seen – and apparently Klopp and Guardiola can go on forever now. The future is no more. It is only Manchester City and Liverpool. The guy in casual sweaters and the guy in baseball caps. But with an inevitable tilt towards the former. Because he and City are the ultimate winners of this 38-week marathon that we call Premier League.
What are the strengths, and weaknesses, that makes this all happen the way that it does? The iffy-ness of Ederson as a shot-stopper only ever seems to be safety threat in the Champions League. The sprint needs more bursts of brilliance and improvisation. The marathon just needs more mind-numbing hypnosis-inducing short passes from your savvy midfielder-in-spirit goalkeeper-in-practice. It just needs Cancelo being the system bender and fluid force of nature that he has grown to be as the “left-back” of this team. He now wears the number “7” to add to all weirdness. Because it is still weird, absurd and ridiculous how City have made themselves this good, this unbeatable, this league-deciphering genius of a football team. They have nuance and freak brilliance. They also have Kyle Walker as the contrast to all that is avant-garde about this team but at the same time great enough to have been an ongoing five-year-straight staple of this starting eleven. Now whether it’d be John Stones, Aymeric Laporte, Rúben Dias or Nathan Aké, their defense is no longer a hole in the light, a force of scary and unpredictable darkness behind the glare of Guardiola’s attack.
That is probably the one place where we scrape and claw for questions, for uncertainty, for hope of fault existing in the Man City perfection. It’s almost passé to stop and talk about Rodri – a shaky cog two years ago that made them miss having peak Fernanadinho as they lost the league to Liverpool – because he’s now the immaculate cornerstone of the midfield, the axis on which the team functions in brilliance. It is a similar story with Bernardo Silva and Kevin de Bruyne. Their realities are a little more complicated, a little more fraught with tricky complexities, as the former seems to aspire to leave Manchester City before, or as he, reaches his peak; the latter was named MVP of the last Premier League but started in little more than half the games of the totality of the season. But it didn’t matter, because Cancelo would finesse into midfield if needed, because Gundogan would pick up the baton with excellent ease, because Foden would drop in there, because Bernardo would just become better and more immense. And if that weren’t enough, Riyad Mahrez will keep doing his thing on the flank. His extraordinarily tight little moves, and bursts, and thrusts, and playful dribbles. This team is so goddamn set. But we reach, we anxiously sift through the clutter of the pure dominance, to find what Jack Grealish and Erling Haaland represent here: The room for miniscule doubt.
With Grealish we found ourselves, at the Community Shield, on that same train ride of philosophical football analysis. The profound question of why X or Y happens. These little, hyper-specific questions – in a hyper-specifically functioning machine, like City are – through which we aim to find out why a player of Grealish’s class and quality doesn’t click. I, at least, arrived at a point of being greatly persuaded and convinced. Grealish is great, he’s awesome… he just plays at a different rhythm and existential style to that of which a Guardiola team, and specifically this Guardiola team, plays. Mahrez was molded onto the machine with time and tender loving care. Jack seems much trickier. And it might never fit properly. But it doesn’t matter. Because Foden will and will take that spot gladly. Or maybe even newly-arrived Julián Alvarez, despite being a striker first and foremost, will click and take the Swiss-knife role of the departed Gabriel Jesús. So at Haaland, clunked onto the system on that “Day 1” the Community Shield represented – isolated, imperfectly functioning – we arrive at the sliver of the idea of it not working; of him being just like the last star-striker from Scandinavia that Guardiola bought. Zlatan Ibrahimovic that is. Pep has vibed amazingly in the end in footballing terms with Eto’o, with Mandzukic, with Lewandowski and with Agüero. Zlatan is the one that got away. The one that actually came but left a year later, scarred and bittered by the Guardiola way of football. Will the all-absorbing Haaland not fit, ego-clash, and be spun out of stardom at Manchester City? It’s just not likely. Because bar Ibra, all the world class strikers that have come into contact with perhaps the winningest coach in the sport’s history have excelled, flourished, led the team to new heights and silly dominance. The ego of Haaland seems much more adaptable to the modern football he’s come up through. The roughness around the edges of his game just doesn’t hold enough substance to promise problems of adaptation. There will be growing pains, here and there, but over there, in the month of May, the pain will be endured by all the defeated rivals. That’s what’s likely.
Nothing of all that will stop Liverpool trying. There’s no lost hope, despite the eye-rolling, exasperating challenge Man City put forth time and again. Liverpool still aim, with all they have, to out-motherfucker them. Last year, when it seemed impossible, when gaps closed but first opened and did so widely, Liverpool came close. They fought, they clawed back, they got within punching distance, but a crazy draw, when a win was really needed, consolidated eventually, shortly thereafter, the Manchester City name onto the title. But here we are. A sort of new-look Liverpool. Without the “sort of”. Two of the original Liverpool Big-3 have been replaced. Sure, Firmino had already been phased out onto the bench by Jota and that was a couple of years ago. But now even Jota is “out”, a new more or less elite weapon for the team’s second unit of operation. And now, Sadio Mane is gone. One of the pillars of 21st century Liverpool, of this great era, of this legendary team. It is now Mohamed Salah, Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez. The evolution.
Nothing has stopped ticking for Liverpool either. Even with third-string goalkeeper Adrián starting between the posts, they were able to beat City. Because over the last year, when we were able to see and understand that not only was the project, the era, not over, but that it was gonna be as good as ever if not better, everything was once again set. The rivalry between these two, after the 2020-2021 derailment with the injuries to Van Dijk et al., was again on track for football boiling point. Between these two teams for which hate and disgust for another is scarce and hard to come by, yet the brilliance of the play, of the strategies, the movements and the flow of football that they have forced themselves to reach, in order to freaking win, has been astonishing. Because that’s the thing, Liverpool last year finally felt like they had a starting eleven and a depth squad maybe, perhaps, possibly not only equal to City’s but even superior. That’s crazy, many people might say. But then you look at Trent Alexander-Arnold being ungodly good on a football pitch, in the half spaces, in the pockets of space, in those small little dimensions where no one can twist, turn, and display themselves and others quite like he can. Or that center of defense, where Joel Matip is as reliable as he’s ever been, but where now Ibrahima Konate might be even better in his place. And there’s Joe Gomez too. And Van Dijk, for whom all his subtle, transparent, almost undetectable mistakes that come from the arrogance of being as good as he is, don’t matter. He’s so good, you’ll end up in his spell. He’s so good, he’ll enchant you. It wasn’t until someone with one of the best football minds that I know, pointed this out to me. How the best defender in the world gets away with so much more than we feel or realize [“Look at the Vinicius goal in the Champions League final; Van Dijk is out of position, and no one pointed it out whatsoever”, he told me]. And, in looking for faults in such a demanding rivalry for this Premier League, or when the going gets even tougher in the Champions League, that might be a small thing to look out for. And yet again: They’re nowhere near as good without him as they are with him. Someone that even still, is very likely the best.
Speaking of which, when speaking of best, does it get better than Rodri, De Bruyne and Bernardo? Well, perhaps Fabinho, Henderson and Thiago Alcántara does. My god. No wonder, really, when you see these two teams do the things that they. Wondrous it is, but a mystery as such, probably not so much. “Look at their midfield and you’ll see how good a team is”, goes the saying. It will be difficult to muster enough imagination with which to picture two teams for whom this is truer than these. Because with Henderson, as with Van Dijk’s occasional overconfidence, or with many of the cogs at the Etihad that function even better than they should, something terrifically interesting happens. It’s not just about all these players being otherworldly talented, which is the case with many; it’s about how the complexity and refinement of the structures and the quasi-perfection with which both managers have them operating. Of course, you, the individual, must be good enough to hang in these teams. But once you’ve cleared that bar, the team will make you flourish. And that’s the case, the most, I believe, with Jordan Henderson. A player not as “footballingly flexible” or dexterous or great at decision making as others but that still has a bunch of intangibles (as well as many tangibles, evidently) that make the recipe to win work. And work. And work. And everyone else’s quality makes him better in turn. And everyone smiles. I mean, how couldn’t you with a team that pivots around Fabinho and Thiago? The defensive marauder that is still as graceful as they come for that position and then the ultimate attacking finesser. There’s no talking of grace in football without mentioning Thiago. Fabinho and him – they’re so complementary they were able to take Liverpool last year to such brilliant new and different levels, that you just couldn’t have great confidence in their possibilities of winning it all. That is how good they are. That’s how much they push this team forward.
And it is at the forward positions where it at all changes – where, for as unfathomable as it may be, they might be the best they’ve ever been. If it all goes to plan, if Díaz continues to be his same genius-from-the-heavens self, if Núñez adapts to the jump from Portugal to England to become the true heir to Suárez and Torres, this will be the net best and most devastating Liverpool’s frontline has ever been. Let’s not forget, furthermore, that Salah has come off another fantastic year. Yes, it did dwindle, his wheels seemed to subtly spin post-World Cup qualification elimination, but off the heels of the anticipated mega-contract that he so sought out from Liverpool, this is his time, to take the league and the competition by the scruff of the neck, with that ease that few have, and cement his legacy while he’s still in and around his footballing peak. If it all clicks, just 70% as good as it clicked with Mané and the best of Firmino, this is the team to sprint right there with City to the title and… win it.
We omitted left-back and goalkeeper. But we know that neither will be of any concern. If anything, the concern will be that Andy Robertson’s backup, Kostas Tsimikas, the scorer of the winning-penalty against Chelsea for the FA Cup, is a little bit better of an attacker. Yet in the de facto starter, in Robertson, they still have a better defender and a Liverpool all-time great. And Alisson, who is already that too, is better than Ederson. Just slightly worse at foot-(ball)-work and so much better a shot-stopper. He could be the slight difference when down the final stretch of the season they the look up to the sky, for some ethereal something to fall, to break in their favor and break, once and for all, and only if ever so slightly, the Man City Machine. I’ve said, in my season predictions, that Liverpool will win the title. Because I like to against the grain in these moments when it is fairly easy to do so. Your vanilla-flavored kind of edgy. So the title of this essay, of this piece, is more the logical pessimist speaking than the dreamer I am a heart. The title is more the ironic know-it-all in me that likes to bend and relativize and be able to seem smart while behind the façade also being dreamy.
A scenario, a road to the Premier League title, in which the script tilts and surprises us all, will be more fun than a dominant fifth championship in six years – and even more fun would be for someone completely out of the City-Liverpool polar-existence to win it. However, leaving that kind of cuckoo dreaming aside, judging on last year, and on both of our main protagonists being ready and set to go at each other’s throats with their trademarked sporting ferocity, it’ll be close, it’ll be tight. Manchester City’s infinite ability to keep their god-tier, machine-like mechanics going and going, to win every stupid game, even if it’s just one more than Liverpool, will most likely take them to yet another Premier League title. But hope is still in season that this season it will… be different than the last.