City chasing history

Pep Guardiola's team can achieve unprecedented success with another title but face stiff competition throughout the league

- Jim Holden

Pep Guardiola has conquered so many frontiers in football that his place in the pantheon of all-time great coaches is far beyond dispute. This season, though, he will try to boldly go where no manager has gone before and capture the English league title for a fourth consecutive year.

Nobody has achieved this, not even Sir Alex Ferguson, Bob Paisley or the great Herbert Chapman of a century ago. In the long history of the game in England, a hat-trick of three successive championships has happened just five times previously: Huddersfield Town 1924-26, Arsenal 1933-35 (both inspired by Chapman), Liverpool 1982-84 (Paisley, then Joe Fagan), and Manchester United twice in 1999-2001 and 2007-09 under Ferguson.

Manchester City became the sixth club to win three titles in a row last year – guided by the genius of Guardiola – and now have a chance to forge a unique legend. If they can, this would be Pep’s finest glory of all, surpassing even the exhilarating verve of his first Barcelona team. Of the five previous attempts to win four straight English titles, only United in 2010 came close, finishing one point behind Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea.

It will be a formidable challenge, not just because the weight of history deems it to be mission impossible, not just because City have lost their quietly influential captain Ilkay Gundogan after his move to Barcelona, and not just because Erling Haaland cannot possibly score so many goals again, can he? This season the Premier League title race also promises to be much more competitive than last year when a resurgent Arsenal were the only side to pose a threat to Guardiola’s team.