Manchester City have the best squad British football has ever seen. Now they must dominate in Europe like my Liverpool team did
ManChESTEr City have assembled what, in my opinion, is the best group of players at a football club in the history of the English game and their dismantling of arsenal on Wednesday night proved that fact.
City were like top dogs in a school playground — toying with arsenal and bullying them. The scoreline did not tell the full story. They could have scored seven. It was an extraordinary display of their strength.
This is what the wealth of a Gulf state buys you. With the commercial might of abu Dhabi behind them, they have been able to buy the very best players. When players such as Danilo or Claudio Bravo have not worked out, they have been able to brush off those mistakes like a fleck of dandruff. a mild inconvenience.
With the exception of Kevin De Bruyne, Ederson and Erling haaland, every player Pep Guardiola withdraws to make a substitution is replaced by an individual of the same quality. What a glorious position for Guardiola to find himself in.
The challenge for all the rest is getting anywhere near this team. City are in the box seat to take their fifth title in six years and I think they could go on to dominate for many more.
They have such a strong infrastructure that I do not even anticipate Guardiola’s departure creating a chink of light for their rivals. City can just go and find the next best manager.
Wealth and power such as City’s is now part and parcel of our football, as Middle East countries throw their weight behind teams. newcastle United are a growing force with Saudi money. Manchester United will compete with City to buy the best players, if they come under Qatari ownership.
The game is not up for the clubs who do not have this kind of financial might. But they are going to need every ounce of intelligence and good judgment — and hope for a large slice of luck — if they are to compete with them. as well as arsenal, I am thinking about Liverpool, whose ability to go toe-to-toe with City in recent years has been testament to their extraordinary work during that purple patch of acquisitions from 2018.
Liverpool are crying out for a midfield player but the very, very best ones are out of their reach.
So, they must once again find very good ones, hope they become world-class players and also hope to produce a couple of worldies in their own system, over time. It is not easy when you are up against people with more firepower. But it can be done. The richest clubs are never untouchable. That is the beauty of our game.
WhaT we saw on Wednesday, though, showed how City have taken things to another level. They are fabulous with their passing and moving, of course, but they also went long to haaland and mixed it up. he was getting hold of the ball, bringing people into play, which meant City were starting their passing game in arsenal’s half.
It is easy to be blinded by the talents of haaland and De Bruyne but ability on the ball really takes care of itself with top players such as these two, operating with wonderful football pictures and visions in their minds. City’s work out of possession — being prepared to sprint back and do the hard yards — was, to a man, immense. Once again, Jack Grealish exemplified that.
at Liverpool, we were always told that ‘the team which does the closing down part of the game better than anyone else generally wins the league’. In other words, the team that works hardest is generally the best. City are now that team. a big part of the challenge for arsenal is psychological. I said on these pages two months ago that I felt City had the mental edge on them. are arsenal permanently scarred by the experience of this season? Do they have this seed of doubt in their head that City are so much better than them? We will soon see.
This summer, Mikel arteta needs to bring in players who have a big mentality. They have got to beat City in the games and competitions that really matter, if they are to break the voodoo curse which has seen them lose to this opponent three times this season.
I think City are now firmly in the argument for being the best-ever Premier League side, joining the late 1990s Manchester United and the arsenal of the early 2000s. The next challenge for them is to go on and dominate both Europe and domestic football simultaneously. Only one team have done that — Liverpool in the 1970s and 1980s. Only if they achieve that can we be talking about City as one of the best British sides ever.
They are certainly capable of winning the Treble and their only enemy now is that constant one in football: complacency. For Guardiola, it is about keeping his top players at it; never letting them switch off.
The Liverpool teams I played in were so strong at this end of the season because of the way the coaching team would verbally hit you over the head to keep your feet on the ground. On a regular basis, they called us ‘f ***** g big heads’. From the minute a game finished on a Saturday, all the way through to training the following week, they would pretend they were angry with us.
Guardiola will have his own strategies, though the evidence of Wednesday suggests the mentality is quite all right. This team really are like a bullet train. They are going to take a hell of a lot of stopping.