The title race should be done. All logic says it’s already over. Arsenal lead Manchester City by two points which means two wins in their final two games of the season would seal the title – and those two games are tonight against Burnley, who have been relegated, and, on Sunday against Crystal Palace, who will be preparing for the Europa Conference League final three days later. It’s hard, frankly, to imagine a better pair of fixtures for Mikel Arteta’s side to play at this stage of the season.
City’s games appear harder. On Tuesday they play away at Bournemouth, who are still fighting for Champions League qualification, whether by claiming fifth above Liverpool, or by taking sixth and hoping Villa win the Europa League but finish fifth. (It makes little sense but, under Uefa regulations, if Villa finish fourth and win the Europa League, there would be no sixth Champions League slot for Premier League clubs.) Man City finish at home against Aston Villa, who will just have returned from Istanbul and a Europa League final.
All sorts of specious psychological theories are applied to these end-of-season games. Do teams with little or nothing left to play for put in the same effort? Or do they perhaps play with a greater freedom? Palace manager Oliver Glasner, whose side lost 3-0 to City last week, was explicit in saying his first duty is to do what is right for his club; putting on a good title race is not his responsibility.
Villa’s Unai Emery, in similar vein, rested players earlier this month against Tottenham before his team’s second leg of the Europa League semi-final; Spurs won that game and clambered above West Ham in the race against relegation as a consequence. That is the right, the privilege even, of clubs who have achieved their principal goals; in that Glasner is surely right. It’s a quirk of the calendar and inevitable in any league system – which is why random fixture generation within certain parameters, mainly to do with safety and the demands on police forces, is essential, why the Premier League was right to stick to its protocols on rearranging games in this crowded climax to the season despite the frustration of City, and why rearranging fixtures to give sides free weekends before big European games, as the French league did for Paris Saint-Germain, undermines the integrity of the competition.
But if Glasner does rest players before Palace’s game in Leipzig against Rayo Vallecano, perhaps the fresher reserves, desperate to claim a place in the side for the final, will overperform. Perhaps Villa, elevated by European glory or inspired by the fury of defeat, will reach new heights.
Could Burnley upset Arsenal? It’s unlikely. They haven’t won in 11 games and are without a league win at home since October, but they played well enough last weekend in drawing with Villa. With Scott Parker gone and relegation confirmed, there could be a sense of release. And fans will have stopped fretting; all they have left this season is the thought of enjoying an uproarious farewell to the Premier League by having an unexpected impact on the title race. That’s all City now can hope for, and their goal-difference is one better than Arsenal’s, which means that that Arsenal drawing one of their two remaining games would probably be enough to give City the title were they to win both their fixtures.
There is a history of teams with nothing to play for finding motivation in specific games, whether through professional pride or simply because soccer sometimes goes that way. In 1994-95, for instance, Blackburn won the league because Manchester United could only draw at West Ham, who had nothing to play for. Blackburn themselves lost at Liverpool, who were playing only for Uefa Cup qualification and whose fans clearly wanted Blackburn, managed by their former hero Kenny Dalglish, to pip their great rivals to the title. Or in 1971-72, Derby won the league after Leeds lost at Wolves, who had nothing riding on it, and Liverpool drew at Arsenal, who were marooned in upper midtable with no targets left.
But perhaps the biggest single factor this season is Arsenal’s mentality, and the pressure that any side challenging for the title must feel, especially after a 22-year wait. Arsenal, it’s true, have seemed more robust in the weeks since the wobble that saw them win only one of six games, culminating in defeat at City, but the real test might come tonight if it’s still 0-0 after an hour against Burnley. Certainly they did not play with any great fluency or conviction in their 1-0 win at West Ham last week.
That’s the hope to which City must cling, but the reality is that this title now is Arsenal’s to lose. But the title race can do strange things to teams.
On this day …
Eintracht Frankfurt were a very good side in the 1959-60 season. In the European Cup semi-final, they’d beaten Rangers 12-4 on aggregate. But on 18 May 1960, in the final of that competition, they ran into Real Madrid at their absolute peak. Madrid had already won the first four European Cup finals, but this was probably their greatest side, constructed by their sporting director Emil Östreicher, a Jewish Hungarian who had escaped a labour battalion in Ukraine and then, hiding in a synagogue in Budapest, fled through a window in just his underwear when it was raided by local fascists. After the second world war, he had set up a bar and restaurant which became a haunt of soccer players. Through that, he began working at Hungarian club Kispest and, when the uprising erupted in 1956, he helped keep the players sage outside Hungary, eventually finding a role at Madrid, and signing the greatest Hungarian of them all, Ferenc Puskás.
In front of 127,000 at Hampden Park, Puskás scored four and Alfrédo Di Stéfano three as Madrid, despite going behind, won 7-3 in one of the greatest exhibitions of soccer ever seen. An 18-year-old Alex Ferguson was enraptured, but raced out at the final whistle to get to the front of the queue for the bus home, only to find the streets deserted; almost everybody else had remained behind to salute the five-time champions.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition
