Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City winning 15 Premier League games in a row (at the time of writing) is all very nice and records are there to be broken and all that but does anyone else feel a bit cheated that we’re going to have no title race this season.
I mean we’ve not even hit the halfway point of the campaign and already City are 11 points clear, I don’t know about you but as a consequence I’m finding it hard to get excited about this season especially when the sky blue ribbons are already being attached to the Premier League trophy in preparation for the presentation ceremony come next May.
When you look at it Manchester City winning 49 points from a possible 51 is nothing short of stupendous really, then again what is more stupendous is the fact that they failed to beat Everton on the second weekend of the season, the only blot on a very impressive copy book.
I mean picture that, just imagine if Manchester City had won the first 17 games of the season, not just gone undefeated but won all of them. It is quite a frankly ludicrous albeit now moot scenario due to that aforementioned draw with Everton but even 15 wins in a row is still mind blowing.
Now I know you should appreciate great teams in their pomp as you never know when you are going to see something that good again but with the bar being raised higher and higher over the generations surely the bar has reached it’s highest level.
And if that is the case then it just leaves you shrugging your shoulders and thinking “well done I guess” – that amount of wins is the kind of form when you play Football Manager, save it before every game and restart the computer every time a result does not go your way (these heathens do exist)
While it is Football Manager in which it draws the biggest parallels because with £300m spent then you are always going to win out eventually and it is that which has made this none horse race of a season such a non starter in terms of an actual competition this time around.
I’m not one of these fans who thinks ‘oh well it’s left a sour taste in the mouth’ because ultimately the genie is out of the bottle in terms of football and finance, so there is no point bemoaning about a ship that has already sailed but when it distorts competition such as this it does leave you thinking ‘what is the point’
Is this record breaking form just the most purple of patches or is this the new norm because it is all very well them steamrollering over teams but the longer it continues then we are only going to see more and more apathy from fans around the country.
Ultimately what we are now seeing is the flip side of the Leicester fairytale, the Foxes were allowed not literally you must understand to win the league once but this particular apple cart is never to be upset again and the status quo will once again be restored.
That means the new world order of Manchester City and anyone who is lucky enough to be allowed to sit on their coat tails. Spend as much as you can to make sure this aberration never happens again and to be honest for football fans we are all the worse for it.
The reverse of the argument is that the other teams should be doing their bit to close the gap, well you have to ask what else can they do right now apart from the basics of actually beating this football juggernaut which is being driven by Pep Guardiola.
I mean it’s not as if they haven’t thrown money at their own squads, especially in the case of Manchester United but the chasm we are currently witnessing is not entertaining and in the long term is certainly not healthy. Credit must go to City for their performances and however many records they break but it is all just the definition of ‘meh’ at the end of the day.
Until next week for a not so Christmas special.