The Golden Steamroller makes it six out of seven

The broadcasters tried to inject a sense of jeopardy into it all, but the last day of the Premier League season ultimately ended very much as expected.

At its heart, the Premier League is a push and pull between two wildly conflicting visions of what football should be. On the one hand, it is big business and wild west capitalism in extremis. Big business requires predictability, while wild west capitalism aspires to private monopoly rather than the competition that it claims to cherish. Competition is a only a means to obtaining this dominance.

But on the other hand it is also sport and a part of the light entertainment industry and, since both of these require a degree of competition—or at the very least an illusion of competition—television viewers were left with the strangest cognitive dissonance on Sunday as Manchester City won their sixth Premier League title in the last seven years. The words weren’t matching the pictures.

Before the match everybody knew the rules of engagement. If Manchester City won at home against West Ham, they’d be the champions. If they failed to do so and Arsenal beat Everton, Arsenal would be the champions. How might the size of this occasion, the culmination of a season that started last August, affect things? Was it reasonable to have a higher than normal anticipation of something unexpected happening?

It took 79 seconds for the illusion of final day drama to be punctured. They tried, bless their hearts. In the commentary box, there was a valiant attempt to run through the permutations in the hope that we might all continue to see them all as equally likely, but within twenty minutes it was 2-0 and looked very much as though West Ham were already half-way towards the airport for their summer vacation.

But in a sense, it was entirely appropriate that the PFA Player of the Year should have stamped his identity so comprehensively on this match within its first twenty minutes. This has been Phil Foden’s season and we have all just been living in it, and there is a striking irony to that fact that, for all the talk of mega-millions of pounds having been spent, of the alleged rules circumvention and of those 115 charges, that the title ended up determined by a young lad from Stockport with a haircut more readily associated with half-drunk cans of Relentless who cost City the princely sum of nothing.

Meanwhile at the Emirates Stadium, the atmosphere flattened for a while. There’d been a march of defiance toward the ground by the home supporters before the match. What else are you supposed to do before the game when you’ve got to rely on a machine failing, and that machine just happens to be the goddam Terminator? Give up, and risk the quiet leading to the players not even keeping to their end of a bargain that they probably can’t win in the first place, or create a bearpit and hope for the best? Arsenal supporters went for the former, but it was always likely to be fragile and 79 seconds was all it really took.

The five minutes before half-time brought a flurry of activity at both grounds. Everton, a team in decent form who were giving Arsenal more of a game than West Ham were giving Manchester City, scored at The Emirates. There was then a three-minute interregnum while “bottlers” memes were finalised and pencils sharpened, but within three minutes the commentators were getting excited again.

But then West Ham scored against Manchester City and Arsenal hauled themselves level within sixty seconds of each other. Coming within such close proximity of each other, this sudden narrowing of the gap between the two teams could be pored over for a full 15 minutes, with an extra layer of intrigue (on social media: hilarity) added when a rumour started flying around The Emirates that West Ham’s goal had been an equaliser, an authentic retro touch from the days when some dodgy bloke with a transistor radio was by default the oracle of what was going on elsewhere. Nice to see The Arsenal winding back to an authentic 1950s vibe.

But try as the broadcasters might, the jeopardy never really returned. The Etihad was quietened by the start of the second half, but shortly before the hour Rodrigo scored their third goal and from there on we were all running down the clock a little. Kai Havertz scored on 89 minutes to make it 2-1 to the Arsenal, but this definitely wasn’t the way they liked it. Defiance could only get them so far. The jig was up, and everybody knew it.

In Manchester, meanwhile, a relatively small number of men in their 40s seemed determined to show the global television audience that, even though this was their fourth title in a row, they could still drink from 8am on the morning of the final day of the season and gurn until their temples looked as though they had worms living in their foreheads by crowding around one corner in anticipation of a fun pitch invasion upon the final whistle.

But when it came, the final whistle could only really be responded to with a shrug unless you supported one of these two teams involved. We talk a lot about the golden steamroller that is Manchester City and their dominance of the Premier League in recent years, but on this occasion Arsenal had ended the season on 89 points, short of what has been considered the 90-point marker that you need to have a realistic chance of winning it these days. Had they got the 92 points that Liverpool ran up in 2021, Arsenal would have won it.

So, Manchester City win the Premier League for the sixth time in seven years while the three promoted teams are going straight back down and two of the three clubs coming up to replace them went down a year earlier. It was, strangely, a good season for the Class of ‘81. Aston Villa, champions that year, return to the top tier of European club football for the first time since 1983. Ipswich Town, First Division runners-up and UEFA Cup winners that year return to the Premier League. But if you’re looking for jeopardy, that’s about your lot.

Liverpool’s season was overshadowed by an announcement that came to pass on its final day. Manchester United were bad and will miss out on European football next season unless they win the FA Cup. Chelsea were worse but then improved towards the end of their season, yet still may sack their manager. Spurs were really good, then kinda sucked, and then had their now apparently annual weird falling-out between the manager and the fans.

Brighton and Newcastle both wilted under the weight of having to support European football and Crystal Palace, who always finish 12th, finished 10th, making Oliver Glasner their joint-most successful manager since they finished third in 1991. West Ham were unable to build on winning the Europa Conference League but still finished in the top half of the table.

Bournemouth slightly over-achieved, Brentford maybe slightly under-achieved. Fulham and Wolves finished 13th and 14th, which you already knew without looking. Everton and Nottingham Forest both underwent forms of breakdown during the season which were the responsibility of their club owners but which were blamed by supporters on unsubstantiated claims of ‘corruption’. This ‘corruption’ ended up not being anything that relegated them. Everton in particular have an uncertain financial future, but that’s their own responsibility, really.

Of the three relegated teams, it says something for how low expectations for them were in the first place that Luton ended up making more of a fight of things than they did. Vincent Kompany is not the new managerial messiah that he’d been painted as being. Sheffield United may have bigger battles to fight next season, considering the persistent stories concerning the health of the club over the course of this season. And as ever, there were considerably more interesting stories going on elsewhere in the game.

See you in August?

We’ll see.