MANCHESTER
The Premier League table, as published by NBC Sports, is not complicated. Manchester City: played six, won six, goal difference plus-11, eighteen points, first place. Arsenal, the champions, are second on fifteen. Brighton, the season's early surprise, are third on thirteen. And underneath that simple little table sits the most complicated question English football has ever asked itself: what happens to a title race being won, at a perfect pace, by a club that has already been found guilty?
That is not rhetoric. Reuters reported on Thursday that an independent commission found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against the club by the Premier League, covering financial rule breaches and a failure to cooperate with the league's investigation. City, Reuters noted, deny wrongdoing and have lodged an appeal. So the leaders are simultaneously the best team in the country on the evidence of the season's first six weeks and a club awaiting a punishment that has not been set, on a timeline nobody has published, for offences the commission has already ruled on. Every point they win sits in a kind of escrow. Nobody in the league office, the broadcast booths or the away ends quite knows how to feel about any of it — and City keep winning anyway.
The government stays out of it
The newest development this week is about who will not be deciding City's fate. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has confirmed that the UK government will not intervene in the case, according to Liverpool.com — a statement that landed because of the noise that preceded it. Earlier this month, Andy Burnham publicly said he would be concerned if City's Abu Dhabi owners were to withdraw from the club in the wake of the verdict, a comment that, per Liverpool.com's reporting of talkSPORT's account, caused real unease among other Premier League clubs about the prospect of political pressure entering a sporting process. Nandy's confirmation is meant to close that door: the punishment, whatever it is, will be decided inside football's own process, appeal and all.
Former City winger Samir Nasri, who won the title with the club in 2012, told Canal Plus he is not worried about losing medals and had messaged club president Khaldoon Al Mubarak to offer support, finding the club confident about how the process ends, Liverpool.com reported. Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk, asked about the verdict, largely declined to engage while the process is ongoing, saying his enjoyment of the rivalry was a separate, on-pitch matter. Those two quotes, side by side, are basically the league's split personality right now: inside the City bubble, calm defiance; everywhere else, a careful public silence that fools absolutely nobody.
On the pitch, it is not close
Here is the uncomfortable sporting truth: stripped of everything else, this City team is playing like champions elect. Reuters noted that City underlined their strength last Sunday with a 3-0 win at 10-man Liverpool — a statement result at the ground of a rival, in the first league game of the verdict era, the kind of win that normally settles a title race's early narrative all by itself. Enzo Maresca's side have won every league game they have played. Brentford and Everton sit fourth and fifth, Chelsea sixth — all on ten points, already eight behind — and Tottenham, somehow, are second from bottom with three points and no wins, level with Bournemouth and ahead of only Fulham. It is a strange, stretched table, and at the top of it the gap is already three points and a verdict.
Wednesday night did offer one reminder that City are not untouchable. Paris Saint-Germain, the Champions League holders, came to the Etihad and won 4-2, per Reuters and PSG's own matchday roundup, racing into a 3-0 halftime lead before City pulled two goals back after the break. It ended an eight-game winning run in all competitions for Maresca's side, according to Sports Mole, and it capped a wild Champions League week. Liverpool won 6-3 away to LASK on Wednesday, per PSG's official Matchday 2 results list. Aston Villa beat Fenerbahçe 6-0 the same night. Real Madrid won 4-3 at Roma. Europe, in other words, is chaos. The Premier League, at the top, is not — and that contrast is precisely the problem for everyone chasing City.
Arsenal's margin for error is already gone
Reuters framed the champions' situation plainly this week: with City perfect, Arsenal have little room to surrender points if they are to keep pace. The Gunners are 5-0-1 — their only blemish a defeat — and visit Nottingham Forest on Sunday. Forest are 15th with five points, exactly the kind of fixture a champion is supposed to bank without drama, and exactly the kind that becomes a season-defining banana skin when the team above you never drops anything. Arsenal's comfortable European win in midweek, reported by Reuters, suggests a side in good order. But good order may not be enough. If City's pace holds, Arsenal could have an excellent season and still finish second to a team that might then have the title taken away — or might not. Nobody can plan for that. You just have to keep winning and hope the lawyers are slower than the fixture list.
Gary Neville, speaking on Sky Sports in comments reported by Reuters, gave voice to the wider mood: the uncertainty over City's eventual punishment, he argued, is bad for the Premier League and will hang over it for months, with supporters up and down the country annoyed at watching a team win matches whose significance nobody can yet judge. It is a remarkable position for a league to be in — its showcase race generating resentment not because it is boring, but because it might be provisional.
The weekend ahead
City's immediate task is mercifully simple. They host Ipswich Town at the Etihad on Saturday, with the visitors 10th on nine points under Gary O'Neil, per Sports Mole and NBC Sports' table. City have no injuries and no suspensions to manage, Sports Mole reported: Rayan Aït-Nouri is available again after missing the Anfield trip, and Phil Foden returns to the squad after serving a three-game domestic ban following his red card against Manchester United on September 13. A full-strength, angry-after-Wednesday City, at home, against a mid-table side, with a chance to go six clear before Arsenal play — the script writes itself, which this season usually means City win and the argument starts again.
Elsewhere in the game this week, a quieter story worth noting: Gareth Southgate has ruled out a return to Premier League management, telling an interviewer, in an account carried by the BBC and summarized by The Brief, that he cannot picture himself taking a job in England's top flight — a door the former England manager seems content to leave closed as his post-England life moves toward broadcasting, documentaries and lecture halls. In a week when the league's biggest club is fighting for its future in a hearing room, there is something almost nostalgic about a manager simply deciding the job is not for him.
So the Premier League rolls into the weekend with a perfect leader, a frustrated champion, a government promising to keep its hands off, and a punishment that exists in theory but not yet in points. City will probably beat Ipswich. Arsenal will probably have to win at Forest to keep the gap at three. And the table will keep filling up with numbers that half the country believes in and half the country is waiting to see revised. We have covered title races decided by a point, by goal difference, by a single goal in stoppage time. We have never covered one that might be decided by an appeals panel. Welcome to the verdict era — it is very watchable, and nobody, least of all the Premier League, is enjoying it the way a title race is supposed to be enjoyed.
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