Manchester City verdict reopens old wounds for Arsenal supporters as Wenger is vindicated
Once upon a time, on 19 May 2024 to be exact, exactly two years before Mikel Arteta was finally confirmed as the latest Arsenal manager to win the Premier League, I was travelling up to north London on a sunny Sunday afternoon to meet my mate James Craddock.
As the date may suggest, Arsenal had just played their Premier League game at home to Everton. James was there and, obviously, I wasn’t. The 1-0 win we got that day would have seen the mother of all celebrations kicking off, if only another result had gone our way.
However, with Phil Foden scoring after about 90 seconds, it never even threatened to go our way. I don’t suppose anyone ever really believed West Ham were going to take points off Manchester City at the Etihad anyway. Unfortunately, as long as the possibility existed, however small, the left hemisphere of your brain couldn’t quite discount it.
Texting James to let him know I was on the move at Crystal Palace, he replied:
“My hero. Hopefully I’ll have stopped crying behind my sunglasses haha”
At the same time, I was involved in an emotional WhatsApp debate with my uncle Stephen, who saw no glory in us finishing second.
The 89 points we had achieved, bettered by precisely one team in 140 years of Arsenal history, was not good enough. The incredible run from matchday 21 through 38, which saw us drop five points out of a possible 51, counted for nothing.
The thing is, now, I can look at that run and see, with objectivity, that Stephen was right. 89 points, while incredibly impressive, counted for nothing because Manchester City, the Premier League champions, got 91.
He got something wrong, though, as did I.
I thought, 68, 85, 89, we were bound to keep improving. Stephen said “it will go to 90 points next year and City will have 92”.
As it happens, we both fell off a cliff, Arsenal and City, not yet me and Stephen, that came later, and Liverpool coolly nipped in and took the title away from both of us.
But in Stephen’s WhatsApp to me, I think he got at something which had been the case for most of the previous decade.
Whatever level your club could get to, Manchester City, a bit like Mondo Duplantis, could just raise the bar that little bit higher. Like anyone who grew up a football fan in the 1980s, I struggle to empathise with Liverpool Football Club. I mean, why wouldn’t I? They won the lot, every season. At least, that’s what it felt like. Hmmmm, sound familiar?
But when you’re looking at a football club who get 97 points out of the 114 available to every Premier League club at the start of a league season, and that club finishes second, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for them.
Jurgen Klopp might rightly feel that his efforts in creating one of the standard-bearers of Premier League football have not been properly rewarded. Three 90-plus point seasons yielded one Premier League title. Given that, as I said above, Arsenal have only made 90 points once, ever, it’s easy to sympathise with Liverpool’s plight.
The bar was raised to an unobtainable height by Manchester City and we now have the confirmation of what was suspected all along: they cheated.
Like you, I’m sure, I was struck by the strength of the language used in the Premier League statement. The repeated use of the word “sham”, the talk of dishonest witnesses, the absolute smorgasbord of misdemeanours committed, culminating in the headline accusation that City inflated their revenues by £900 million.
There was no caveating this, no soft-pedalling. A process which has taken in the entire period in which Arsenal have been trying to wrest the league title from the North West to north London has resulted in the most damning indictment possible of the Cityzens.
And I think about the jibes I, and I am sure you, have had to endure over the years, from people who are friends and people who are not.
It started in 2023, when Arsenal stood on the brink of winning the Premier League title, only to lose William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu for the season in the same match and watch Manchester City reel off 12 wins in a row, guaranteeing themselves a third Premier League title in succession, on their way to the treble.
I had to listen to so many people tell me how we’d bottled it. They were all at it. My mates in Leeds, my mates here in London, including my Everton-supporting bestie, Lukey. I suppose he was right, but he is the same person who has been wondering, for years, when these City charges were coming down and why Everton had been given a points deduction for a £20 million breach of the PSR rules in place at the time.
It never really seemed to occur to Lukey, bless him, that while City had John Stones, Ruben Dias, Nathan Ake, Aymeric Laporte, Manuel Akanji and Kyle Walker to call on at centre-back, Arsenal’s back-up for William Saliba was Rob Holding.
I’m not going to blame Rob Holding for Arsenal blowing two-goal leads at West Ham and Liverpool. Nor am I going to blame him for Arsenal being 2-0 down to soon-to-be-relegated Southampton, at home, after 10 minutes.
I will say, though, that if we had just one of those City players I mentioned above, we might not have been in that situation.
If Manchester City did not have such a battery of centre-backs available to them, other than Laporte, they all made 20-plus appearances in the Premier League, would they have been able to put that 12-match winning run together?
Without the inflation of their revenues, would City have had these players available to them? I think we can take an educated guess at the answer.
Would Arsenal have buckled in the heat of that title race, had they not been chased by football’s version of The Terminator?
On a gorgeous, sun-kissed May day in the Clock End, Jo, James and I serenaded Granit Xhaka on his final appearance for the club. We roared our defiance along with everyone else. There was honestly a period of singing in the second half of this game, as the sun began to set, that I’ll remember for the rest of my days.
Then we wandered off down Holloway Road and, as the sun set, Upper Street. The final day of the 2022/23 season really does stand as one of my favourite days at the Arsenal.
But it could, and should, have been so much sweeter.
Jo, James and I should have woken up on Monday morning in an Upper Street gutter, not parted company in civilised fashion on Sunday evening at the Islington Business Centre.
Slightly different circumstances, obviously, what with me travelling from home. But I arrived on a Holloway Road absolutely teeming with Gooners. Making my way to The Lamb, I found James with his companions for the day and he had indeed stopped crying.
The mood was, rightly, one of immense pride in the team, albeit tinged with sadness that, again, we had just fallen short. The 49 points we’d taken from the second half of our season were not enough in the face of Manchester City’s 51.
Again, I think of my uncle and his belief that whatever we did, it was never quite going to be enough and, while he was eventually proved wrong, his position actually seems like it was quite logical at the time.
Of course, none of this happened without the knowledge that City were being investigated for financial irregularities, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
I know, in writing this, that I am describing explicitly first-world football problems. But the sadness felt on those two days, one year apart, can never be completely eradicated. Nor can the memory of how the stress of both wanting something so much, and having different viewpoints about how likely we were to get it, caused me and my uncle, grown men, to fall out for a while, after the away game at Bournemouth in 2024, if you’re interested.
Stephen and I have, of course, reconciled our respective footballing positions. The fact that Arsenal did finally find a way past Manchester City, despite their huge and, we know for sure now, unfair advantage, obviously helped in that regard.
I am so glad we got to do so while the self-serving Pep Guardiola was still at City.
Even more so that the odious Bernardo Silva was still there, along with Rodri.
It was very hard to watch Bernardo Silva’s needless, awful challenge on Martin Odegaard last week and not think of how Silva and his City compadres have got away with so much in our games over the years, with Michael Oliver in particular.
I also think of Arsene Wenger, once spoken of by David Dein as having to operate with “one hand behind his back”.
In the end, with both hands tied behind his back, he was reduced to shouting into the void about “financial doping”, a once visionary man turned into a punchline.
It seems oddly fitting that the Premier League statement on City came in the same week that we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Arsene’s arrival on these shores, belated vindication for the man.
Nicole Holliday posted this video on her Instagram of the man himself with Dennis, Thierry and Wrighty. A reminder of the memories Arsene gave us.
A post shared by Nicole Holliday (@nicolehollidayx)
How will Manchester City fans look back on this time in 10, 20 or 30 years?