Manchester City bends the story to its will
The writers of “Ted Lasso,” the critically acclaimed sugary Apple TV comedy, never really cared about reality. After all, the world they created was based on an inherently fantastic premise: an American coach with no knowledge of football who succeeds in the tumult of the Premier League.
It would therefore have made little sense to dismiss the idea of a far-fetched kind of team signing a power of attorney for Zlatan Ibrahimovic just because the owner insulted him in the bathroom, for example, or a dog killed by a wayward penalty kick, or West Ham are invited to take part in a global super competition.
It was therefore remarkable that there was one line that the writers thought they could not cross. At the end of “Ted Lasso” – by all accounts a determinedly romantic and uplifting show, an unabashedly underdog story of empowerment and personal growth and the overwhelming power of kindness – Manchester City still win the Premier League. Even in fiction, City cannot be ousted.
City isn’t the bad guy, not really, in the Lasso Cinematic Universe. That role instead goes to a combination of conventional thinking and West Ham. Pep Guardiola even makes a cameo appearance in the show’s penultimate episode a short, decidedly lassoish homily that winning is considerably less important than his players being good people.
Instead of the villain, City serves as what the show’s eponymous hero calls his “white whale.” It functions as the series’ final boss, a portrait of unchanging sporting perfection, the one adversary that cannot be overcome by Lasso’s moustachioed, good-humoured positivity.
Even if his team eventually beats Guardiola, the victory proves pointless. The following week City go and win the league anyway. Lasso, like so many others, believes that second place is the best result available to everyone else. “So sad,” a character tells Lasso in the final scenes of the show. “City is just too good.”
As part of the analysis, it’s hard to beat. This year, as for five of the last six, City were far too good for anyone else in England. Even trailing Arsenal by eight points in the Premier League, as the season drew to a close and the distance to the finish wavered, City felt like they had the title to lose.
From mid-February – when a wasteful draw at Nottingham Forest sparked a full and frank exchange of views between the City players that Guardiola himself has described as the pivotal moment of the season – until the title was won, City played 12 games in the Premier League and won them all. In that three-month period, as The Independent noted, it was behind in a match only once. The unusual turn of events was rectified after 10 minutes.
Even as it clinched Arsenal, Guardiola’s side had an even bigger prize in their sights. Things went smoothly through both the FA Cup and Champions League, and the prospect of a treble – wins in the league, cup and in Europe – began to creep up on the horizon.
The treble is, in fact, a decidedly English obsession. The 1999 Manchester United team is the only English team to have won all three major trophies in the same season. While the feat has become considerably more common in recent years – Barcelona and Bayern Munich have both done it twice in the last year and a half – it still functions as a trump card, the ultimate claim to greatness.
Its rarity is precious, more to United than anyone else. That last week’s FA Cup final should have pitted the two Manchester clubs against each other felt fitting: here was United’s chance to preserve the club’s honour, to protect its proudest achievement. It held up quite well for about 12 seconds. The last remnant of English football’s resistance melted away. City, as it turned out, were just too good.
However, nowhere has that been made more clear than in the Champions League. That it is fame in Europe that Manchester City’s rulers and paymasters – as well as the coach – crave more than anything else has long since fallen into a cliché.
Winning the Champions League has become Manchester City’s driving force, if it hasn’t always been: the final rite of passage, the final challenge, the white whale. To some extent, this is the goal of the whole project.
Everything – the fortunes spent on players, the state-of-the-art academy, Guardiola’s appointment, the global network of clubs, the allegations of financial rule breaches in both the Premier League and the Champions League, the legal battle, the risk that it all what it achieves may yet be tainted, the distortion of the sport’s entire landscape – will be justified, at least in the club’s own estimation, only if and when City can declare themselves champions of Europe.
City therefore attacked the Champions League with particular determination this season. Bayern Munich were knocked out in the first leg of the quarter-finals. Real Madrid lasted a little longer in the semi-finals, but were beaten at the Etihad in the second leg, the reigning champions both surgically and brutally dismantled.
Guardiola made an exception for that win against Real Madrid – it was, he admitted, one of the very best of his tenure – but as a rule he tends to hold back when given all the superlatives his team attracts. Usually he will always insist that his Barcelona team remains the best he has ever coached simply because it was captained by Lionel Messi. His presence alone, Guardiola believes, automatically takes any team to the next level.
Maybe that’s true: Messi gave Barcelona a miracle, a breathtaking feeling, that no other player – not even Erling Haaland or Kevin De Bruyne – can match. And yet, in the same way, perhaps that makes the team Guardiola has built at City even more impressive. From a coaching perspective, it could be that this is his true masterpiece.
City have, of course, provided Guardiola with the most favorable working environment in the sport. Not only does he benefit from a budget that allows him to sign virtually all the players he wants, but also the kind of full, unified institutional support that can only be a goal for most clubs.
However, that he has used it to produce a team that does not have a single obvious flaw is a testament to none but him. Manchester City, the 2023 edition, is barely getting any chances let alone goals. It scores from set pieces and counter-attacks and long periods of possession. It can hurt opponents on the ground and in the air.
It doesn’t have, as previous versions might have, a ever-so-slight propensity for debauchery, thanks to the seamless integration of Haaland into Guardiola’s side, something that – perhaps more in hope than expectation – many expected to see at least a little are. a challenge when the Norwegian arrived last summer.
But that’s not the switch that defines this Manchester City vision; Guardiola’s main contribution this season lies elsewhere.
Last summer he was a little worried about his full-back capabilities, a key position in his system. Oleksandr Zinchenko had left. His replacement, Sergio Gómez, had initially been referred to the club as an investment for the future. João Cancelo’s form was patchy and his attitude questionable at times.
And so Guardiola came up with a solution. Instead of asking one of his full-backs to move into midfield, as he had done for the past two years, he gave the job to a central defender, John Stones, and brought in Nathan Aké and Manuel Akanji, two of the less prominent members of his squad, to balance things out.
He explained the idea to his players relatively briefly; they had a few training sessions to try and iron out any kinks. And then, a few weeks later, they tried it in a game. There were one or two who felt it was a risk, but it turned out to be worth it: Stones, like Haaland, has emerged as City’s key player.
It is above all that change that has made City untouchable in England and in Europe since the turn of the year. It has already brought two trophies; only Inter Milan now stands in the way of a complete set.
It is therefore curious that it should also – in fact – be one of the most important storylines in the last season of “Ted Lasso”: the coach has an epiphany and everything clicks into place. Of course, that was just a piece of fiction. Guardiola’s success is concrete, factual, real. However, both have the same final conclusion. In the end, Manchester City wins.