Silence swept from one end of the Etihad Stadium to the other, a wave of realization. The inevitable background noise of a crowd—the rumble and murmur of 20,000 different conversations—gone. Calculations were made. A conclusion was drawn.
For much of Wednesday night, the natural operating assumption was that City would overtake Real Madrid and reach the Champions League semi-finals again. Guardiola’s City created so many chances that victory felt like a real statistical certainty. Even though the tie went into overtime, the game had a strange sense of powerlessness. Manchester City have another chance to get closer. in spite of. The next one will appear soon.
No one seemed to think of any other ending until Bernardo Silva and Mateo Kovacic missed consecutive penalties and City suddenly found themselves on the verge of collapse. The possibility of elimination feels so far-fetched that its arrival is almost a surprise.
Moments later, Antonio Rudiger, shirtless, plunged into the morass of crazed Real Madrid fans. Jude Bellingham leads the hymns in his second language. And Guardiola’s hopes of defending the Champions League trophy were dashed. He stood in the middle circle, looking a little lost. “What else can we do?” he would ask later.
For some time it has felt like City had achieved so much, so quickly, that it had to start inventing challenges to deal with. Can Guardiola win the title without a striker? Yes. So what about a centre-back who is actually a midfielder? Yes. Can he build a team that can score 100 points, win every domestic trophy or achieve a treble? Yeah.
Big goals this season are the inevitable next step.It turns out that cities are pursuing Double tweeter, a phrase that didn’t seem to have entered the football lexicon before this year. Alas, it’s all over now. Manchester City may have to scrape by and become the first team in history to win the English title four years in a row. Oh, and win the FA Cup.
Of course, that’s exactly what the Abu Dhabi Manchester City owner set out to do when he first invested in the club 16 years ago. The aim was always to build a team so successful, so perfect, so complete that simply winning English football’s once fabled double would be seen as an anticlimax.
However, from the outset, we may also suspect that there may have been some misunderstanding. The reward for such dominance in football has not been universal applause and widespread affection. Yes, of course, winning more trophies means winning more fans. But traditionally, this also means making more enemies.
This, of course, has been the experience of English football’s former superpowers. Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United all owe their global fan bases to historic periods of dominance, but the animosity they inspire among almost every other team can be traced to the same reasons. Of course, it’s worth it to them; their global ambition is little more than selling jerseys.
City’s donors, on the other hand, have more complex motives.Abu Dhabi did not buy the club as Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan just real Enter football. It’s a marketing game, a real estate game, an economic game, a mechanism for winning global influence.
But it all more or less hinges on City winning. Mediocrity will not attract investors to your diverse economy, nor will it offset the suggestion that your human rights record may be poor. No. 12 has no hearts. Manchester City’s project can only work if the club becomes a beacon of excellence.
Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Abu Dhabi has invested heavily in players, infrastructure and executives. (Manchester City’s coaching staff and substitutes lined up on the sidelines during Wednesday’s penalty shootout in a show of solidarity: 40 people in total.)
Manchester City’s ownership group overturned all conventions, regardless of the cost, Break every boundary. (It’s also not always particularly concerned with following the rules, The Premier League has charged.) It has established a multi-club network with global reach. It hired Pep Guardiola, the best coach of his generation, and transformed the club to his exact specifications.
It has worked. As their own club-sanctioned slogan goes, Manchester City are “the best team in the land and the world.” It has the trophies to prove it. But strangely enough, there’s no hate in it. For a dominant force, City don’t seem to inspire much animosity.certainly not equivalent to Anyone except United Sports This statement was briefly popular at the turn of the century, and admittedly, it’s a bit painful.
The kindest explanation for this is that the style of play instilled by Guardiola is so fluid, creative and engaging that it’s impossible not to like it. Not to mention that this vastly overestimates the rationality of football, but it doesn’t ring true: Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United also played exciting football. Everyone hates them.
Even more convincingly, perhaps subconsciously, all fans except City’s direct rivals understand that the club is not bound by the same rules as other teams.
Not that City must at some point rebut the 115 accusations of breaching Premier League financial rules that have dogged it for more than a year, but that it is somehow different from other clubs: clean, smooth, scientifically Design with unlimited resources for precision and functionality.The city exists in completely different world.
This sentiment was captured perfectly by Dario Minden, spokesman for Unsere Kurve, the umbrella group for organized fans in Germany, who tried to explain why (to some extent) Bayern Munich are almost more good win the Bundesligaand not anyone else.
Of course, Bayern also has a huge financial advantage. It’s also a different animal in the eyes of German fans compared to fans in other countries. “If Bayern wins,” said Frankfurt fan Minden, “almost no one can win.” The success of direct competitors, peers, may sting, but there’s no need to wonder why lottery winners have better ones than you house.
But even this understanding feels incomplete.Last week, Barney Ronai Recommended by The Guardian The feats of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo changed the standards by which we judge players. Their excellence was so consistent, he wrote, that one bad game was enough to expose their successors to charges of fraud.
Perhaps Manchester City has also changed the way we evaluate clubs. Guardiola’s side have not lost a single game in their last 28 games. (Failures in penalty shootouts, neither mentally nor technically, count.) Midfielder Rodri hasn’t lost a City game in more than a year. None of these things are normal.
But Guardiola and his players have made a habit of changing, like Messi and Ronaldo, our expectations of what it takes to win titles and what it means to be “good.” In doing so, they change—raise—the standards that others are held to.
So when Arsenal, Liverpool or any other team perform poorly, the focus tends to be on their alleged flaws rather than on City’s unassailable status. There is no opportunity to breed new hatreds—if there are old ones to maintain.
In the coming weeks, despite losing to Real Madrid, City are likely to complete another double, create another piece of history and set another high bar. Understandably, its fans will celebrate, while fans of its defeated opponent will mourn. For most people, however, the wave of realization doesn’t seem to be over yet.
select few
So, the tournament the world has been waiting for is finally here Starting to take shape. No, Not that one.nor that. This is the expanded FIFA Club World Cup, which, like all other major football tournaments, will be held in the United States in 2025.
Strictly speaking, as a journalist Early In the 1940s, I should have strongly opposed the concept of expanding the FIFA Club World Cup. For example, the fact that the idea came from Gianni Infantino is usually a red flag. There’s one very obvious problem: The huge sums of money the tournament is expected to bring in for the 24 participating teams appears to be a windfall that could significantly distort domestic competition, especially in Asia, Africa and South America. .
Still, I remain largely agnostic. Giving more teams from outside Europe the opportunity to meet teams from Europe – and yes, giving them financial incentives – is a positive step. This could help teams like Palmeiras (one of the confirmed South American entrants) keep their players away from European control for a little longer, which is a good thing.
But even so, the list of European players seems a little strange. They were selected based on their performance in Europe over the past four years, according to FIFA criteria. A maximum of two teams are allowed per country.
That makes sense in theory, but it means Juventus, who aren’t currently one of the two best teams in Serie A, will be one of the faces of Italy that has been the punchline for much of the past two years. Chelsea will be one of Italy’s representatives. Represent the Premier League with your head held high. Porto and Benfica are also there, which feels like it might be a step beyond the status of Portuguese football.
Any new tournament needs immediate legitimacy to survive. By definition, those who aspire to a world title must feel exclusive and selective – an accurate reflection of the balance of power in football over the past four years. With all due respect, the prospect of Chelsea facing Juventus in next summer’s quarter-finals is indeed unlikely.
admirable honesty
Ilkay Gundogan will probably shout a foul like no one else. He could have blamed the referee. He could have raised his eyebrows and suggested that Barcelona had been eliminated from the Champions League by some evil alliance of dark forces. After all, this type of rhetoric has come up so frequently at the club in recent years that you could only assume it was part of its media training.
Instead, Gundogan turned his anger on his teammates. Of course, he didn’t name names, but he made it clear that he believes Ronald Araujo only has himself to blame for being sent off against Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday. João Cancelo foolishly conceded a needlessly cheap penalty; whoever should have stopped Vitinha on the grass from 20 yards spent around five minutes before his game-changing goal Time will choose his position, and he may do better.
Players, managers and executives – and everyone involved in football – often take shortcuts. They make excuses and look for scapegoats. (The fact that the blame is often placed on referees is a major factor in the toxic environment officials now work in.) Ultimately, this doesn’t sit well with the image of professional athletes. This is your performance. Own it. Admit your mistakes, admit that you could have done better and tried harder. As Gundogan has proven, it’s very refreshing when you do that.
