“No team has ever won four consecutive Premier League titles… Yet.” In the past fortnight, Pep Guardiola has referred to the fact that the four-peat was the motivation of his post-treble Manchester City, insisting that this only dawned on them in the spring. But the aforementioned slogan, printed in capital letters and in a large black font, was the de facto motto from October, when it was first displayed in the first team meeting room.
So when Guardiola declared last week before the crucial trip to Tottenham that “we didn’t think” about making history until recently, when it “ignited something in our brains”, Guardiola used the media to remind his players that they were still 180 tantalizing minutes away from becoming, without a doubt, the greatest team in English football history.
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The epigram was written by the classic Guardiola, a manager who constantly comes up with new ways to inspire the players and himself. City reached the new milestone in late September and early October after suffering two of their three league defeats. Guardiola, as so often in a campaign plagued by setbacks, took action.
What happened on September 23 was the trigger for this action: Rodri was shown a red card for holding the throat of Nottingham Forest’s Morgan Gibbs-White. City’s crucial squad was suspended for three games, all of which were lost: the Carabao Cup outing against Newcastle (1-0) and league games at Wolves (2-1) and Arsenal (1-0).
A Guardiola mantra is that all titles are different and whoever has just finished can lay claim to his most hard-fought title, with the biggest bump happening right at the start. This followed a pre-season that was hardly trouble-free as captain, Ilkay Gündogan, left for Barcelona and Riyad Mahrez joined Al-Ahli for £30 million. Then, after a summer tour of Japan and South Korea with hologram images of Erling Haaland, Rodri, Jack Grealish and Kevin De Bruyne placed on top of the team bus arrival in Tokyo, as if City were riding through a futuristic Blade Runner-esque evening, and the penalty shootout defeat to Arsenal in the Community Shield on August 6, 23 minutes after the title defense at Burnley, disaster struck.
De Bruyne retired with a serious hamstring problem and was replaced by Mateo Kovacic, a £25m signing from Chelsea in June, who had been on the bench alongside Josko Gvardiol and signed for £77.6m from RB Leipzig the Saturday before. City beat Burnley 3–0 (Haaland scoring twice, Rodri once), but in Athens the following Tuesday, before the UEFA Super Cup final against Sevilla, Guardiola said De Bruyne could be ruled out until the New Year.
He was. The 32-year-old then wore a City jersey on January 7 as a 57th-minute substitute in the 5–0 FA Cup third round win against Huddersfield.
Deep inside the Karaiskakis Stadium, Guardiola had said: “The injury is a big loss, Kevin has specific qualities. You can lose him for one or two games, but for a long time it is very tough for us. But you have to look ahead.”
Guardiola did just that, reaping the benefits of his upbringing from Phil Foden, from star player to first-team fixture, with the Stockport lad replacing De Bruyne as City’s commander-in-chief. The 23-year-old’s first goal of the season came against Forest on 23 September and by the end he had a career-high 19 (including two in the title win against West Ham on Sunday) and eight assists, for which he was picked. month the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year.
Before Guardiola’s intervention in October with the four-peat slogan, the first crucial moment of the campaign came on July 17, when players returned for pre-season training. This was 37 days after Rodri’s goal defeated Internazionale in Istanbul and achieved the holy grail of Champions League glory, a triumph that left Guardiola feeling that “it’s over, there’s nothing left”.
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But he regrouped and on a warm summer day at the Etihad Campus he had to look into the eyes of his players and smell, to use a favorite term of Guardiola, as they too remained hungry. Within minutes he knew that the high notes had not dulled their ambition and he was sure they would be there again when it counted.
Four months later, the proof came at just the right time. After the 6–1 win against Bournemouth on 4 November, City failed to win their next four league matches: draws against Chelsea (4–4), Liverpool (1–1) and Spurs (3–3), and 1– 0 lost at Aston Villa on December 6. This left them fourth after fifteen games, six points behind Arsenal.
Despite Haaland going down at Villa Park with a foot injury that ruled him out for five league games, another defeat would not destroy the season as City stringed together a sparkling unbeaten run of 23 league matches. The manager’s feeling on that first day of training in July was bookended by Rodri’s statement at the last of the Premier League, after Arsenal finished second for the second year in a row.
Rodri’s observation reflected bewilderment at the way Mikel Arteta prepared his team for a draw at the Etihad Stadium on March 31, despite having 68 points after 28 games, one more than City. If he had sent his team out to win even if they failed, it would have been a message that City’s ruthless winners should respect.
Instead, Rodri stated that they realized Arsenal were afraid to win. He pointed to his head and said, ‘The difference was this. When they faced us at the Etihad I saw them and said, ‘Ah, these guys, they don’t want to beat us, they just want a draw.’ And that mentality, I don’t think we would do it the same way.”
If the more than 100 Premier League charges related to alleged financial impropriety, which City deny, stick as potentially seismically damaging, then Pep’s boys have achieved temporary immortality by doing what Huddersfield (1923-26), Arsenal ( 1931-34), Liverpool (1981-84) and Manchester United (1998-01 and 2006-09) failed: discover the fire to go again and claim a quartet of championships in four golden, consecutive seasons.