The Premier League Still Thrills
Manchester City’s Raheem Stirling competes for the ball with Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk. (c/o Martin Rickett for PA)
THE feat that Manchester City Football Club has just accomplished—and which Liverpool desperately tried in vain to prevent them from doing—was last achieved in 2009, when Manchester United successfully defended its title as champions of the Premier League. Not since then had a team emerged victorious in consecutive iterations of the Premier League, the most followed annual sports competition in the world. It’s tempting to view the years since as a kind of interregnum in English football history. For twenty years, Manchester United had more or less dominated a rapidly changing league, a dominance that evaporated after the 2013 of its long-time manager, Sir Alex Fergusson. Now, nearly a decade later, English football has finally completed its long evolution from a relatively provincial and inward-looking affair in the 1980’s, when Fergusson first arrived, to the hyper-globalized institution of today, with its foreign billionaire owners, its tactical arms races, its unprecedented infusion of sports science and technology, and a global fanbase numbering in the billions.
Alex Fergusson (or "Fergie," as fans called him), the ruddy Scotsman who became the Premier League’s most decorated manager, was never quite a man of his era. His strength was his ability to master the effects of changes initiated by others, better than those who who had initiated them. A case in point was his rivalry with Arsène Wenger, maestro of Arsenal from 1996 to 2018. Fergusson had already been in charge of United for a decade when Wenger, an implacably precise and somewhat dour Frenchman, arrived on the scene and immediately began introducing unprecedented innovations: importing players from foreign leagues, implementing nutrition and training regimes based on the latest science, and allowing a Middle Eastern monarchy to fund the construction of a new home stadium. (The old club, Highbury, was nicknamed the “Home of Football”; the new one is simply called Emirates Stadium.) These changes, revolutionary at the time, are universal in the modern game, not least because Fergusson and practically every other manager copied most of them.
But perhaps Wenger’s greatest contribution was to solidify the notion, fundamental to today’s super-managers, that success in football is a matter of having the right overarching strategic philosophy. In Wenger’s case, it was the attacking, passing-centric football to which he remained committed throughout his career, for better or for worse. By contrast, Fergusson’s different title-winning sides all bore the mark of their manager’s unmistakable charisma, but actually played football quite differently from one another. In twenty-one seasons at Arsenal, Wenger won only three league titles to Fergusson’s eleven in the same period; but Le Professeur, as Arsenal fans call him, can legitimately claim that the modern Premier League is much more a manifestation of his legacy than that of any other manager.
Wenger must have been watching this season with satisfaction. The first two decades of the Premier League produced some memorable title contests, usually two-horse races between his attack-minded Arsenal (or Jose Mourinho’s defensive fortress at Chelsea, or Roberto Mancini’s methodical but artful Manchester City) and whatever the latest iteration of Fergie-ism was. But as the 2018-19 season wore on, it became increasingly clear that, in that august era, we did not yet know what title races could be. The recently concluded duel between Liverpool and Manchester City has no precedent in football history, neither for its razor-thin margins—the lead changed a record 32 times over the course of the season—nor for the astonishing heights of quality the two teams achieved. After 37 thrilling rounds of matches, the winner remained undecided going into the final day (Premier League seasons have no playoffs, and the title is decided by the accumulation of points: three points for a win, one for a draw.) For Liverpool to take the title, it needed to win its final game and for Manchester City to draw or lose. Instead, both teams won, meaning that Manchester City clinched the title by a single point. Liverpool’s second-place haul of 97 points is more than the winning tally in 25 of the Premier League’s 26 seasons, the sole exception being last season, which Manchester City won with 100 points. That fact only adds to the heartbreak for supporters of Liverpool, once the titans of England and Europe but now enduring a thirty-year title drought. A no-less exciting race for third and fourth place was decided only in the penultimate round of matches, after Arsenal and Manchester United each failed to win against greatly inferior opposition. That left Chelsea and Tottenham to take the two remaining English births for the next season of the prestigious Champions League, which is contested by the elite teams of all the European leagues concurrently with their national seasons. The final of the present Champions' League season will be an all-England affair between Liverpool and Tottenham, to be played on June 1st.
The 2018-19 season broadly unfolded in three acts. In the first, Liverpool looked unstoppable, taking 54 points from a possible 60 and assembling the best defensive record in the league. At the turn of the new year, Manchester City’s season was on the brink and Liverpool looked to be on the verge of being uncatchable. But City revived themselves after dealing Liverpool their first loss of the season at City’s Etihad Stadium. (That stadium is named for Etihad Airlines, the second largest in the Emirates and one of the team’s main sponsors.) In subsequent weeks, Liverpool seemed to lose confidence, while City found a relentless groove, and a string of disappointing draws for Liverpool saw them relinquish the lead on March 3rd. With the teams deadlocked one point apart, the last two months of the season settled into a precariously balanced stalemate. Both teams entered each game knowing that anything less than a win would cede the momentum, and probably the title, to their rivals—but, by virtue of their one-point lead, only City held their fate in their own hands. Maintaining the composure and the focus to produce nine consecutive victories is an extraordinary feat for City, while Liverpool can take comfort in having ensured that City needed a flawless performance to win. It was the kind of season that left the winning fans breathing a sigh of glorious relief, the losers heartbroken but unbowed, and the neutrals wondering what virtuous past life they must have led to have been on earth for this homeric epic masquerading as a football competition.
The season’s most compelling drama was, as in days of old, that of the contest of its two leading managers. Representing Manchester City since 2016 is Pep Guardiola, the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest working manager, whose managerial resumé consists solely of super-clubs: Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Manchester City. Tall and slim, soft-spoken and eminently stylish, Guardiola occasionally adds a flash of color to his match-day uniform of black designer sweaters by affixing a small yellow ribbon, the symbol of Catalan independence. In his first season managing Barcelona, in 2008, the then-37 year-old Guardiola revolutionized the sport by introducing his signature playing style and footballing philosophy, known as tiki taka. Best described as the game of endless possession, tiki taka consists in passing the ball in geometrically-perfect triangles around opposing players until they are inevitably drawn out of position, creating an opening to strike. Last year, on the way to the league title, Manchester City deployed a style that is unmistakably tiki taka’s descendant—and scored more goals than any team in the league’s history.
Over the past two seasons, Guardiola has often seemed invincible. But one man has that proved he is not: Jurgen Klopp, who happens to be the manager of Liverpool. Klopp, who arrived a year before Guardiola but, unlike the Spaniard, inherited a badly struggling team in need of revitalization, has brought Liverpool achingly close to the title which has probably eluded it longer than the majority of its supporters have been alive. He is adored by Liverpool fans as much for the humor and the warmth he exudes in public as for his feats on the pitch. The eccentric and emotional behavior typical of his performances during matches is topped off by his habit of running around the pitch after the final whistle, giving each of his players a bear-hug. But Klopp is equally well respected by the footballing cognoscenti: in the space of two full seasons in charge, he has shown the world that tiki taka is no longer the strategic absolute. Klopp’s counter-philosophy, popularly dubbed “heavy metal football,” advocates an exhausting high press to break down opposing formations, not by passing around them but by running straight at them to force a mistake. In Klopp’s first few seasons with Liverpool, a frail defense inherited from his predecessors meant that Liverpool generally won simply by scoring more goals than they conceded. This year, with the team able to rely on new-found defensive stability, Klopp’s heavy metal style has matured, becoming, in the immortal words of one commentator, “acid jazz.” The new Liverpool can turn on the high press when needed, but it no longer has to keep it up for the whole lung-busting 90 minutes of play out the fear that relaxing will mean giving up goals.
The recipe for delicious intrigue in contemporary English football consists in the fact that Pep Guardiola is statistically the winningest manager working in Europe today, but Jurgen Klopp is his kryptonite: no other manager has managed to meet him more than five times and emerge with more victories than defeats. Last season, Klopp’s Liverpool sent Manchester City crashing out of the Champions’ League on the way to reaching final of the competition. There, ecstasy turned to heartbreak, as Real Madrid emerged 3-0 victors following a controversial game-ending injury to Liverpool’s talismanic striker, Mohammed Salah. But Klopp’s side also finished 4th in the league, 25 points behind Guardiola and City. The implications of Liverpool’s enormous improvement over the past year, while Manchester City has maintained more or less the same level (or rather, has failed to improve on its own extraordinary standards) is fodder for giddy speculation about what wonders next season might hold—though to hope for a more enthralling contest than this one would surely asking too much of the sporting gods.
Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola during Manchester City’s clash with Liverpool on 3 January. (c/o Getty Images)
But there are more differences between Klopp and Guardiola’s sides than just playing philosophies, the most important of which concerns money. Liverpool is hardly an underdog in this regard: its owner is the Fenway Sports Group, whose other major franchise is the Boston Red Sox. But the team’s heavy spending this year, doled out mainly on a revamped defense, was largely financed by the sale of the Brazilian midfielder Phillippe Coutinho to Barcelona for a record fee of £107 million, against the £11.7 million Liverpool had parted with five years earlier to acquire him from relative obscurity. That return on investment, combined with exploding revenues from merchandise and other fanbase-related sources, means that Liverpool’s current financial windfall is, to the extent possible under today’s hyper-financialized, oligarchic regime of sports management, earned on merit.
Meanwhile, Guardiola and his team owe their considerable financial latitude to Manchester City's majority owners, a purpose-built private-equity firm called Abu Dhabi United Group, which has strong ties to the royal family. ADUG’s purchase of the club in 2008 when it was a middling side that had only recently regained top-flight status was arguably one of two landmark moments in the Premier League’s twenty-first-century evolution (the other was Chelsea’s acquisition, in 2003, by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich). It took four years following ADUG’s initial investment for Manchester City to win the league title; two years after that it won a second. Last season, as City sealed a third title, this time by a record margin of twenty points, it seemed that the combination of Guardiola’s mastery and Abu Dhabi’s largess was at risk of turning the Premier League into a copy of the French Ligue 1, in which all competition has evaporated thanks to Qatar’s massive investment in Paris Saint-Germain. Happily for fans of the game everywhere, this year’s title race has dispelled those fears in style.
It takes nothing away from Pep Guardiola’s accomplishment to acknowledge that Klopp and Liverpool have done more with less. To the extent that economics enters the media’s coverage of football, the financial disparity between Liverpool and Manchester City is often masked by (witting or otherwise) acts of omission or de-emphasis. Much has been made, for example, of Liverpool’s purchase of the central defender Virgil van Dijk for £75 million, an unheard-of fee for the services of a defender. Van Dijk’s performance in the year since his arrival has seen his peers vote him the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) Player of the Year, the most prestigious individual honor in the Premier League and usually the domain of star attacking players. But less-discussed has been the fact that Manchester City has shelled out fees of between £47 and £57 million for defenders on four separate occasions in the last three years, none of which players are currently guaranteed first-team spots. This level of routine spending on supporting players is something that Liverpool, itself one of the world’s wealthiest football clubs, cannot possibly hope to match. To counter City, it must instead rely on cultivating talent from the ground-up. Van Dijk is joined in Liverpool’s starting defensive line-up by Trent Alexander-Arnold, a twenty-year-old graduate of Liverpool’s youth academy, and twenty-five year-old Andy Robertson, who played in the Scottish Third Division and then for Premier League minnows Hull City before joining Liverpool in 2017 for £8 million. Both players were recently voted into the PFA Team of the Year, alongside Van Dijk and ahead of their Manchester City counterparts.
But if Manchester City’s pecuniary advantage cannot be held against Guardiola, questions can and should be asked about provenance of the club’s lush finances. In March, UEFA, the sport’s European governing body, announced that it was launching a formal investigation into allegations that Manchester City F.C. violated financial fair-play rules between 2012 and 2016. The allegations concern an apparently fraudulent contract issued in the name of the club’s shirt sponsor, Etihad Airways, which was actually a cover for funds that came straight from the club’s majority owner, ADUG. This type of manipulation, which is essentially just money laundering, is a fairly common tactic among team owners because it allows them to circumvent a UEFA rule that limits the percentage of a club’s budget that can come directly from its owners, an ostensive check on the power of superrich owners to further drive up inequality between clubs. The scale of the purported laundering—on the order of £60 million just in 2015–16—combined with the fact that Etihad Airways and ADUG are essentially both arms of the Emirati government, makes Manchester City’s case particularly egregious. Leaked internal documents published in Der Spiegel appear to show that the fraudulent transaction did, in fact, occur. If the investigation concurs, Manchester City could face a maximum punishment of exclusion from the Champions’ League for two seasons.
Financial impropriety is so widespread at the sport’s highest levels, and accountability historically so scarce, that such a ruling would be watershed moment in the fight for better governance and transparency in football. However, there is little likelihood that the investigation will result in a ban: football’s governing bodies are themselves notoriously corrupt, much more so than the clubs they oversee. That, combined with the damage that City’s absence from the Champion’s League would do both to the UEFA brand and to a club that really only cares about European glory at this point (and whose fans would be apoplectic if denied a chance to watch them play) means that such a drastic step will almost certainly not be taken. A superficial fine is the far more likely outcome.
It is an unfortunate reality that the achievements of Pep Guardiola and his players may well be propped-up by unsavory business practices, and it is understandable that fans and commentators prefer to focus on the spectacle of the season itself. Indeed, whatever the realities of their boardroom politics, Manchester City and Liverpool ultimately have much more in common than what sets them apart. Both are dynamic clubs at the peak of their sporting success and prestige; both play breathtaking, high-scoring football in accordance with the strategic philosophies of their respective super-managers. And as much as these two great sides typify the modern game, they equally represent the modern world at-large. Both teams feature players of more than a dozen nationalities in their team lineups. Liverpool’s two star strikers, Salah and Sadio Mané, are African Muslims. In the test that their presence represents for the historic blight of English football racism, the public has passed even in an era of Islamophobia supercharged by Brexit. Salah’s post-goal routine of briefly prostrating himself in prayer has even prompted fan tributes, ranging from chants of “I’ll be muslim too” to one multiethnic group of supporters presenting Salah with a prayer mat after a game. English players both white and black feature prominently in both teams, many of whom formed the core of the England team that saw a revival at last summer’s World Cup under manager Gareth Southgate. (Speaking of his team’s broader role in society, Southgate told a journalist last summer, “We are a team that represents modern England, and in England we’ve spent a bit of time being a bit lost as to what our modern identity is.”)
In a season where literally a single goal across 38 games could have been decisive for the final result, it is reductive, almost fatuously so, to speak of a “defining moment” as sportscasters and journalists are wont to do. But, if one were pressed to pick a dramatic high-point, a good choice would be Manchester City’s January 3rd victory against Liverpool. As soon as the match ended, commentators were proclaiming it the best contest of the season. Broadly speaking, Liverpool played better in the first half, Manchester City in the second, and City slightly better overall, but neither was able to dominate any stretch of play of more than about five minutes, something which is has become extreme rarity at this level of the game. Before Sergio Aguero opened the scoring for City shortly before half time, the best chance of the game had been Liverpool’s. A sublime sequence of passing in the 18th minute released Sadio Mané through on goal, where his fizzing shot first deflected off the inside of the post, then ricocheted goal-wards off the diving City keeper, only for it to be acrobatically punted off the line by center-back John Stones. The players looked around wildly: for a goal to count, the entirety of the ball has to cross the inner edge of the goal line, which it looked to the naked eye to have done. But the referee, checking his wristwatch for input from an electromagnetic sensor behind the goal, blew his whistle for play to continue. Mané looked dazed, aware, perhaps, of the magnitude of such a miss in the context of the season. The Premier League later made public that the ball had fallen short by a ludicrous margin of 11.2 millimeters. Manchester City went on to win the match 2-1, saving their title and dealing Liverpool what would be their sole defeat of the season.
It is worth considering how, in an earlier era, a referee’s having to make such a close call without the aid of technology would have affected the season's place in collective memory. Based on the camera replays and the positioning of the referees to the ball, it seems likely that Mané’s strike would have been given as a goal, which might well have meant Liverpool winning the title at the end of the season. The subsequent arguments between fans over whether that decisive goal had been legitimate—arguments that, in the absence of the objective judgement of technology, would remain unresolvable—would have meant the season taking on a legacy akin to that of the 1966 World Cup Final, where the available grainy footage of England's winning goal against Germany appears to show, though not conclusively, that the ball never fully crossed the line. Goal-line technology, introduced to the Premier League only in 2013, has confined an entire category of intrigue and ambiguity to history.
During the 2018 World Cup, in Russia, the journalist David Runciman ruminated in apocalyptic terms of the looming spectre of the next World Cup, to be hosted by Qatar in 2022. “Perhaps [the 2018] World Cup won’t be the last tournament when we are able to tell the difference between an international football match and a video game,” Runciman mused. “But it might be the last one when we still care.” Indeed, the prospect of the world’s great footballing nations sending their representatives to play in climate-controlled stadiums that rise like shimmering mirages out of previously uninhabited desert, the matches overseen by a dizzying array of technology that is meant to establish truth for the referees even as endlessly-repayable ultra-HD footage blurs the line between illusion and reality for viewers at home, is a disquieting one for those who feel an attachment to what was once known as “the game of football.” More important is the fact that the extraordinarily corrupt 2010 FIFA congress that awarded the World Cup to Qatar, a nation that has never qualified for the World Cup and that has since been accused of using slave labor to build stadiums for the tournament, remains one of the great underreported scandals of recent international politics. It was also a watershed moment for club football: it was at the 2010 congress, for example, that Nikolai Sarkozy, then the President of France, flatly offered to muster UEFA's support for the Qatari bid if, among other contributions to the French economy (think buying dozens of airbuses), Qatar would buy his favorite club, Paris Saint-Germain. The theory that football explains the world is a nice thought on the surface, but if it really is true, it is a pretty dismal commentary on the world.
Over the past decade, it has been fair to wonder whether football as a whole is headed for the predicament Runciman foretold in relation to the 2022 World Cup. As mega-wealthy clubs grow in global appeal while smaller ones fade into irrelevancy, will competition within national leagues become a thing of the past? Will uncertainty about results be confined solely to the Champions’ League, that hyper-commercialized, surrealist domain of oligarchic playthings? Is the very centrality of gameplay at risk of being supplanted by questions of money, global publicity, and the incorporation of data and new technologies? Such fears are well-founded, and they may yet be realized in the future. But two recent events in the English Premier League have given hope that that future is still some ways off. The first was tiny Leicester City’s winning the league title in 2016 against bookmaker odds of 5,000-to-1, which can plausibly be called the greatest upset in the history of any sport. The second was this season’s title race, the most closely contested in recent memory. Liverpool and Manchester City have shown that the challenges facing the sport are also opportunities to be seized: that the potent mixture of globalized team structures, cutting-edge sports science, strategic innovation, and personal dynamism can produce a reaction that is not only impressive to conceptualize, but also exceedingly wonderful to watch. Liverpool and City have shown that the game still has vibrancy when it was at risk of being sacrificed at the alter of vapid commercialism, integrity when it was wading through a sea of corruption, and suspense when its contests were increasingly forgone conclusions. In short, they have proven that football can still thrill.
Against the odds, this year’s Premier League season resisted pre-figuration by the back-room dealing of elites. Football historians will debate what metaphor best sums the season up: a battle of attrition, a cold war of ideologies, a chess match between super geniuses, and so on. But perhaps a season such as this is best eulogized in the most literal of terms: it will be said that it was decided by 11.2 millimeters.