City, Brighton and Chelsea campaigns sum up blue Premier League season

Blue was the colour of by far the best team in the land, Manchester City, and their most astonishing player, Erling Haaland; it was the colour of the team who surprisingly fell, Leicester City, and the one who, just as surprisingly, did not, Everton; it was the colour of the year’s biggest implosion, at Chelsea, a club who diminished the reputation of just about all who came into contact with them. And it was the colour of Brighton & Hove Albion, who won the Premier League equivalent of boxing’s pound-for-pound title, and conquered the hearts and minds of neutrals too.

There were other hues, of course, in another compelling Premier League season. There always are. The red of Arsenal, the most consistent league leaders to walk away with nothing; the directionless white of Tottenham Hotspur and hopeless white surrender of Leeds United; the magpie stripes of Newcastle United, doing better, sooner, than anyone imagined; and, of course, the proud claret and blue of Aston Villa, a club who appointed a man to save them from relegation, only to end up, passports in hand, on their way to Europe.

It feels nice to have some fresh names there, too: Newcastle, in the Champions League proper for the first time since 2002-03, Villa in Europe for the first time since losing a Europa League play-off match to Rapid Vienna in 2010.

Pep Guardiola will be the manager of the year, and is still on course for the Treble, but strong cases could also be made for Villa’s Unai Emery, Newcastle’s Eddie Howe, Gary O’Neil at Bournemouth, Roberto De Zerbi at Brighton and Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, even if his team were very much second best by the finish.

The key to judging Arsenal is to remember where they came from and what was expected when the season began. Arsenal were chosen to open proceedings away to Crystal Palace on Friday, August 5, not because their comfortable 2-0 victory was expected, but because broadcasters hoped for a shock, a repeat of the previous season, when Arsenal were again given the curtain-raiser, and obliged by going down 2-0 away to Brentford and plunging instantly into crisis.

Friday, August 5. Seriously? This season has spooled out under two monarchs, three prime ministers and three chancellors of the exchequer, politics being the only industry that makes the position of manager at Leeds look stable and the party well run. Sam Allardyce is now pitching for a permanent job next season, and, with a record of P4 D1 L3 F5 A11, no one can deny his chutzpah - but hey, it’s Leeds. Stranger things have happened.

But start at the top. City’s points total this season is only equal fourth-best of their seven title-winning campaigns in the Sheikh Mansour era - 89 points, the same as in 2012-13, under Roberto Mancini - so why is there so much talk of this being potentially the best version we have seen? It isn’t just about the Treble. Even if City do not emulate Sir Alex Ferguson’s board-sweepers from 1998-99, they will still be placed among the greats. Why? The football, obviously, with its striving for perfection, but also perhaps because of the evolution, not just of players, but of Guardiola as their coach.

We have seen his reimagining of John Stones, the improvement wrangled from Jack Grealish - who now looks a £100 million footballer - the way he has made a stalwart defensive force of the £15 million Manuel Akanji. Yet also how he has managed and utilised Haaland, a young man who arrived with a problematic fitness record and questions around how he would fit into a system that often made a virtue of playing without a striker. Haaland is a wonderful player, but City were in no way conventional. Early on, there were even doubts over whether he had improved them at all.

Those negatives are now answered. Guardiola went against the pursuit of Cristiano Ronaldo two summers ago - and doesn’t that now look like the smart move - partly because he could not work out how to fit him into his game plan. He told the board, however, that if they were insistent, he would figure it out. They wisely demurred.

He had no such qualms over Haaland, however, younger and more of a team player, but it still required more thought than just writing a name on a teamsheet. That is what has made this City team special. Guardiola has always done it his way but this is him showing he can work with his own verve and originality in a conventionally set-out team, playing to a conventional if exceptional No 9. Except with Stones as a hybrid midfielder, and Bernardo Silva on occasions at full back. It’s still Guardiola, after all.

And how not to do it? Look no further than SW6, where it was not just blue Monday, but blue Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well. Has anyone at Chelsea enhanced their reputation this season? Thomas Tuchel perhaps breaks even, but only through an early departure and Bayern Munich’s 11th straight league title.

As an object lesson in how not to run a football club, Chelsea 2022-23 are most certainly up there. Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling owner, even contrived to make the appointment of Mauricio Pochettino seem underwhelming, coming as it did at season’s end against a backdrop of drift under Frank Lampard.

Chelsea reduced a bona fide club hero to the status of sock puppet on the touchline and, as for Graham Potter, traduced his reputation in a matter of months. Potter arrived amid lamentations that securing such a prestigious club job would prevent him from being Gareth Southgate’s successor should the opportunity arrive. Now Potter is a free agent, and a strong case for keeping faith with Southgate is that there is nobody available to replace him.

That is what Chelsea did for Potter this season. He is even airbrushed out of the success of Brighton - who took on the status of everybody’s second team, a role once played by Leicester - because it is hard to compute a man who won four and lost one of his six league games in charge there this season with the manager whose Chelsea teams then ended up making as much sense as the club’s recruitment policy. Their best signing has been Joao Felix - and he’s on loan.

Chelsea had a relegation season in all but name. A club of that size, however, are never going to get relegated. It’s different for Leicester, who have packed so much into their nine-year stay in the Premier League, yet could never feel wholly comfortable with their status. Even the season after winning the league they sacked their miracle-worker Claudio Ranieri out of genuine fear that they might go down. This year they sacked the FA Cup winner Brendan Rodgers, and did.

They are the most expensive squad with the highest wage bill ever to fall from the Premier League, a reminder that, as the Crystal Palace chairman, Steve Parish, pointed out, there are two leagues in the top tier now - the six clubs, probably seven with Newcastle, who cannot go down, and the rest.

Brighton and Villa will play in Europe next season, but their first priority domestically will be to make sure they aren’t relegated. Maybe Leicester forgot that. They won’t again, but it’s already too late.

And Everton? They sail on, if by sail we mean take in water and bail, bail, bail frantically to stay afloat, reaching the harbour just in time before the vessel disappears beneath the waves. It comes to something when Abdoulaye Doucoure, a midfielder whose attitude to tracking back had previously been up there with the Roy kids’ knowledge of astute business strategy, emerges as the hero of the hour.

He swung a boot and this whole rolling, broiling, dysfunctional circus disappeared in a cloud of blue smoke, happy-furious pitch invasions and chants to sack a board who always appear to be on the cusp of departure yet never actually leave.

Sean Dyche immediately came out and gave an impassioned speech on the need for drastic, fast-implemented change. So see you all at Goodison Park this time next year for more of exactly the same.

Yet it’ll be different too, because in the Premier League it’s always different. Arsenal were different, Brighton were different, the return of natural born goalscorers - not just Haaland, but Ivan Toney, Callum Wilson and the magnificent Harry Kane - felt different. The league burnt up more managers than ever before, yet two of the teams who survived, West Ham United and Nottingham Forest, stuck with theirs while the three clubs who went down had ten different bosses, including caretakers, in charge for at least two games this season.

And in the middle we played a World Cup from which some players, Gabriel Jesus of Arsenal for instance, never recovered. And again, because it is the Premier League, we are already anticipating the first game at Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road next season, and wondering how the smallest ground in the competition’s history will cope hosting nine of Deloitte’s 20 richest clubs in the world.

It would have been 11 but two - Leicester and Leeds - will play in the Sky Bet Championship. It’s been that kind of year.

- The Times

Originally published as City, Brighton and Chelsea campaigns sum up blue Premier League season