Premier League title contenders: Why this is Manchester City’s year
You know, we often spend the summer imagining that next season is actually going to be the one that delivers a proper four-way Premier League title fight. Does it happen? No, it never does. I mean, we somehow delude ourselves into thinking it might…but it actually might happen in 2025/26.
Here’s our four-part series looking at the potential champions. Arsenal have had their credentials lauded and Chelsea have been tipped for the top. We’ve even gone so far as to say Liverpool have a sniff. Today we complete our quartet, with Manchester United City.
Are the team that’s won six of the last eight Premier League titles contenders to win it this season? Feels like a very stupid question really. But is it in fact stupid like a fox?
Really, the sheer scale of the uncertainty around what Man City are in 2025 is at the absolute heart of why we’re even able to kid ourselves there might be a four-way title battle in the first place. There have been plenty of times in those eight years when even wishing for a title race at all of any kind has felt like the foolish dreams of a sweet summer child, given the scale of City’s dominance.
That dominance no longer exists. That aura of invincibility no longer exists. The absolute raging certainty that even in the unlikely event that City did find themselves a handful of points behind at Christmas that they would then just simply go on a run of 18 wins and two draws in their next 20 games to put everyone back in their place is gone.
That the question ‘Are Man City title contenders?’ feels less rhetorical than at any time since Pep Guardiola really go his feet under the desk is matched by the existence – also for the first time since that moment – of the phrase ‘third favourites Manchester City’.
And that is exactly where they deserve to be. Liverpool won the league last season and have spent the thick end of £300m upgrading that squad. Arsenal were far better than City last season and now have an actual real no-fooling striker in their squad.
City have to be considered less likely than either of them to win the league. This in itself is intoxicating, because the problem with City – for everyone else – was that when they were the best team there was an utter certainty to it. When they got themselves clear of the pack you knew they were not going to be caught.
We can’t yet say that about Liverpool or Arsenal. Liverpool haven’t retained an English league title since 1984 and Arsenal haven’t won one since 2004. Either one of those teams could go off and win the league at a canter, but neither carries the certainty that existed around Peak City.
But we’re not any longer dealing with Peak City. We’re dealing with Rebuild City, where doubts exist everywhere you look, up to and including Pep Guardiola himself.
It really does feel like the start of this season is vital for him. If City start slowly and drift out of meaningful title contention early, does he have the energy and heart to stick it out? He was awful weary at various points last season, and has already spent far longer than he did at either Barcelona or Bayern Munich before understandably needing to take a step back from the relentlessness of it all.
What last season’s struggles did do, though, was allow City the opportunity to roll the dice in January and begin an obviously necessary regeneration six months early, and that might prove significant in a season when all the big contenders have undergone significant change.
City – despite being the team most obviously in transition, most obviously at the start of a new cycle with your Kyle Walkers, and above all else your Kevin De Bruynes now part of the club’s history rather than present – do have a curious kind of stability from being able to start the process far earlier than they would have been had they stayed in contention through last autumn.
Instead they had a bizarre spell where they found it quite literally impossible to win any game at all. And it weirdly might have done them more good than remaining the fight but coming up short.
They have been able, for instance, to fully integrate Omar Marmoush into the team. The players and manager all have a far clearer idea of what they want to be this season and may even be oddly refreshed by last season’s failures. It might be that City needed that trophyless season just to provide a truly clean break between the two iterations of Pep’s side.
And despite everything else, City also still have Erling Haaland. It’s a very obvious point, but no weaker for that. For all the obsessing over centre-forwards, for the need to have a proven and reliable No. 9, City still have the best one there is.
Even in a quiet season of struggle by his utterly absurd and too-easily-normalised standards, he was outscored by only Mo Salah and Alexander Isak.
Isak remains the only centre-forward in the league you could even sensibly consider choosing in place of Haaland and he remains, for now, outside the clutches of City’s likelier title rivals.
City’s summer business has been less overtly showy than that of Liverpool or Arsenal but does appear to be cut through with the sort of shrewdness for which the club’s outsized circumstances mean they too often get little credit.
It’s still asking a lot for a year-one rebuild project to deliver instant success. But when you have Pep Guardiola and Erling Haaland and an unexpected six-month headstart, asking a lot is not anywhere near asking the impossible.