On the field, it was business as usual. Under Todd Boehly’s ownership, Chelsea’s transfer policy has been a bit like a toddler urinating on a wall, and there was never a genuine possibility that a squad of expensively assembled misfits would take three points off the winning machine that is Manchester City under Pep Guardiola. Chelsea had their moments, as you will when you can buy players of such quality, but the discordant noises from Raheem Sterling’s camp after he was left out of the squad to play his former team are indicative of the challenge that Enzo Maresca faced to put a coherent playing philosophy in place.
Erling Haaland’s delightfully deft footwork for the opener and Mateo Kovacic’s spectacular long-range effort against the club that brought him into English football gave City the points, and the relative closeness of the match stats – Chelsea had 48 per cent possession and 10 shots to City’s 11 – shouldn’t obscure the fact that the defending champions always seemed to have a gear in reserve. Remember too that this was without Rodri, now undoubtedly their most important player.
Despite the mess that is Chelsea’s recruitment, not too many teams will leave Stamford Bridge with three points this season, and this was an early-season marker from Guardiola and his team, even as most pundits talk up Arsenal’s chances of denying City a fifth title in a row.
But, to borrow from Julian Barnes, there is already a sense of an ending. No team has ever dominated English football like Guardiola’s City – not even Bob Paisley’s Liverpool or Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. But Guardiola’s contract runs out in the summer of 2025, and there is still no news of an extension.
Kovacic, Kevin de Bruyne, Ederson in goal and Bernardo Silva are on the wrong side of 30, and it’s impossible not to make a link between Julian Alvarez’s big-money exit to Atletico Madrid and the continuing uncertainty over Guardiola’s future. But ‘will he stay or will he go?’ is far from the only question vexing City fans.
A few months ago, even as Everton and Nottingham Forest were both fined and docked points for breaching profit and sustainability regulations, the cynical view was that City, with a flotilla of elite lawyers and the limited wealth of the Abu Dhabi Football Group behind them, would somehow avoid such punishment.
Back then, you might even have got odds of 2000-1 against City being relegated after a huge points deduction. Though they faced 115 charges of fiddling with the old Financial Fair Play regulations, the consensus was that they were now simply too big to be punished.
That mood has changed drastically over the summer, especially after a British election that saw the Labour Party return to power in a landslide. Millions of fans who want to stop the English Premier League becoming a billionaires’ playground tend to vote Labour, and there will be intense pressure on individual MPs to bring more stringent ownership rules into play.
The upshot of this climate change has been simple. Ladbrokes Coral, founded way back in 1886, are a bookmaking institution in the UK. This season, they are offering odds of 500-1 against Arsenal or Liverpool being relegated. The odds against City? A mere 10-1. According to Ladbrokes, City are twice as likely as West Ham (20-1) and Brighton (25-1) to take the drop.
There is no way a firm like Ladbrokes would offer such odds without having a clear idea of which way the wind is blowing. After a decade of domination on the pitch, City’s sins of omission in the accounts books – at least, according to their detractors – may be catching up with them. On the field, little may have changed. Off it, the storm clouds overhead are getting darker by the day.
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