Manchester City defy chequered history of the modern title defence to vindicate Pep Guardiola’s tough love

This year Guardiola has proved a different point, about whether Manchester City – or any modern post-Ferguson team – could win the Premier League twice in a row

The first time Manchester City tried to defend the Premier League title, in 2012-13, they never got close to Manchester United. They finished bottom of their Champions League group, the players turned on Roberto Mancini, bored of his abrasiveness, and he was sacked after they lost the FA Cup final to relegated Wigan Athletic. City finished the season being managed by Brian Kidd, and ended up trophyless, with 78 points.

The second time Manchester City tried to defend the Premier League title, in 2014-15, they never got close to Chelsea. They got nowhere in any of the cups, they looked old, tired and slow, like a team in need of fresh energy. They finished the season with Manuel Pellegrini still in charge, but ended up trophyless, with 79 points.

It looked like a trend. Manchester City could buy great players, good enough to take them up the mountain, but they could never stay there. Because you cannot buy hunger, the sustaining daily hunger that drove the greatest teams of other eras. Like Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, who won 13 Premier League titles over a 21-year span. Six times they successfully retained the title. Twice – from 1998 to 2001 and 2006 to 2009 – they won it three times in a row. This was the standard of relentlessness City had to aspire to, but which they had never shown a glimmer of before.

There was a theory in the game that a team like City could never have that hunger. Because they were just an array of expensively bought individuals, rather than being built on a homegrown base. And that no team like that would ever have the unity and mentality to keep winning and winning and winning.

Back in 2014 Slaven Bilic, then manager of Besiktas, explained this to The Independent. “Every team that was dominating, in the league or in Europe, had a core of home players,” Bilic said. He pointed to Manchester United, building on the core of the ‘Class of ‘92’ with the signings of Eric Cantona, Peter Schmeichel, Roy Keane and the rest. “The same with Barcelona. The same with Milan. They add to the core, added Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard. For me, the likes of Man City or Paris Saint-Germain, they are not for me like those teams. They can do one season where they are doing well, then they are down, then they are up.”

That had certainly been the story of Manchester City this decade: good one year, bad the next. It told the story of Chelsea too, at least since the consecutive titles in 2004-05 and 2005-06, in Jose Mourinho’s first spell there. Every subsequent Premier League title had led to a big drop the next year. The 2009-10 title, the Carlo Ancelotti double season, led to a 15-point drop and Ancelotti’s dismissal the next year. The 2014-15 title led to the Mourinho Season, the most spectacular implosion by a champion in football history. Mourinho was sacked in December with Chelsea in 16th. They finished in 10th, with 37 points less than the year before. Even after the Antonio Conte title season, 2016-17, Chelsea fell away the next year. They finished fifth and Conte was gone.

This was simply the way of the modern game. No-one had retained the title since Ferguson’s United in 2009. As if only he could inspire the mental strength required to win twice in a row. As if when he retired in 2013, those old values went with him. And now the task of keeping modern millennial players motivated year after year to stay on the game was impossible. Back in 2015 Mourinho doubted whether his Chelsea team could be “serial champions” like he was, and it felt like an indictment of a whole generation, of players who could win once but not again and again and again.

This year Pep Guardiola has proved all of that wrong. Last season, his first Premier League title, was about a comprehensive intellectual vindication. Total scientific proof that his style of football – 71.9% possession for the season – could work in English football. And work better than any other style of football had ever worked before, as City won 32 Premier League games, scored 106 goals and finished with 100 points. The first centurions in English top-flight history.

Vincent Kompany lifts the Premier League trophy (PA)

This year Guardiola has proved a different point. Not about whether his football would work over here. But about whether Manchester City – or any modern post-Ferguson team – could win the Premier League twice in a row. He has proven a point about character. About whether a squad like this, bought rather than grown, could keep fighting even after getting to the top. And about whether modern players – their mentalities always called into question – could be as consistently hungry as those of the older generation.

Manchester City have finished this season with 98 points, the second most ever, two behind the record that they set themselves. With 32 wins, the most ever, joint with last year’s record. With 95 goals, 11 behind their 106 record. Everything we spent the last decade thinking about the unretainability of this league, and the unrepeatability of top performance, has been knocked out of the park.

So what happened? The first reason is that City simply had to, that they were up against a Liverpool team far better than anyone expected, a team that deserves to be recognised as one of the best of the modern era even though they finished second. Liverpool overperformed expectations by a good 10 points this year.

But that is still more of a ‘why’ than a ‘how’. The answer is not so much quality or depth or any of the things that we knew City had, that they had last season, or before that. But about mentality and application and drive. That is how they managed to repeat their feats of last year. Not relaxing because they were on top, not handing their title over to a Liverpool team that has been better than anyone anyone expected, but chasing this title as desperately as if it was their first.

Senior officials at City say that they have never seen as much focus and character from a City side in the modern era as what they have seen this season. This is the opposite of what we have come to expect from champion City sides. And it is a vindication of the daily intensity and demands of their obsessive manager.

When City won the league last year – in far more comfortable circumstances than these – Guardiola promised that he would have to be far tougher on his players this season. To fight against precisely the same problem of complacency and relaxation that has sunk City title defences in the past. Because the players would naturally believe as reigning champions that this year “when you have to do five metres, you just make three”. So Guardiola would have to be “more difficult, harder” on them to drive that complacency out. “I have to be more into them and control more the players,” he promised. “The time they arrive at training sessions, what they have to do with the ball and without the ball. If they don’t, they will be caught out, more than this season. Our relationship will not be so friendly.”

Guardiola during a lap of appreciation (Reuters) (REUTERS)

So this season Guardiola has been tougher on the squad than ever before. Players’ media and sponsor appearances have been restricted and run by the club. Guardiola’s own behaviour in meetings has been more intense. It has served to drill into the players that they cannot afford a single slip, as made the long tightrope-walk that this season has been.

What Guardiola wanted was “a team every day like a machine”. And that is what he has got. Look deeper into the statistics, beyond the goals, wins and points, and you see a team which has repeated last year’s 38-game body of work with unusual precision. City’s Expected Goals for the season, the best underlying measure of performance, has gone up from 80.2 to 83.6. Their Expected Goals against has gone up – 23.9 to 24.75 – but only just. But their passing accuracy is the same, they have faced fewer shots on target, and played more passes into the opponents’ box.

But the story of this title is not that City are good, or even that they are measurably better than any other Premier League team ever. We all knew that last year. The question was whether City could perform this well two seasons in a row. Whether they had the character and attitude and focus to repeat their performance. Whether this generation of players, or any Manchester City team, could follow up on success rather than just resting on it. With 98 points and a second title in a row, Guardiola’s City have answered.