ETIHAD STADIUM, MANCHESTER — Shortly after midday, the woman staffing the bar at Jimmy's in Ancoats, just to the northeast of Manchester city centre, had two uninvited visitors.
"I was expecting it to be busy, but just not this many already," she explained to two police officers, both unenviably dressed on the hottest day of the year. "Well, we just want to make sure things don't escalate," one of the officers explained.
Jimmy's is on the corner of Cutting Room Square, which is framed by several bars and restaurants, very much at the heart of one of Manchester's hippest locations. Around a 25-minute walk from the Etihad Stadium, the square has become the meeting spot for Manchester City fans ahead of the final home game of the season.
Two of those sun-kissed lunchtimes of liberal refreshment preceded final-day title triumphs: against West Ham in routine fashion in 2024, and in shaving-years-off-your-life fashion against Aston Villa in 2022.
There was no such jeopardy on Villa's return four years later. City's 1-1 draw at Bournemouth on Tuesday night ensured Arsenal walked out at Selhurst Park today as champions. But this was a different type of party, one nobody was about to miss due to a lack of sporting jeopardy.
"John Stones crying so much keeps setting us all off," said one City fan, who expressed relief that Sunday could simply be a celebration of departing heroes Stones, Bernardo Silva and Pep Guardiola. He added this might simply be "copium", but there was undeniably an upside to the title race slipping away. It allowed for a beautifully widescreen day under a perfectly blue sky. The police need not have worried; this was all love.
Two club legends 🩵 pic.twitter.com/Tiya1bR6Ln
— Manchester City (@ManCity) May 24, 2026
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Stones has cut an emotional figure during his City farewells this week, both on an extended video interview on the club's in-house channel and when embracing Guardiola as the England defender had a mosaic of himself unveiled at the City Football Academy, where a training pitch will be named after him. Ilkay Gundogan, Joe Hart, Yaya Toure and now Silva have also received that honour.
He was definitely clear-eyed as Guardiola delivered some finger-jabbing instructions during the first-half hydration break after Antoine Semenyo gave City the lead. The manager was slumped in his chair, brow furrowed, when the goal went in. When Guardiola talks about just sitting down to watch and enjoy football, it sounds like the toughest adjustment of his forthcoming sabbatical.
A zoomed-out take on 20 trophies (Guardiola includes Community Shields; go with it) in 10 seasons is one that takes full account of City's wealth, state-linked ownership and all the advantages this has bequeathed the Pep project.
This should be acknowledged, but any suggestion it has meant a lack of struggle, toil and all the other muck-and-nettles stuff is wide of the mark.
Guardiola was keen to highlight how he aspired for his teams to live up to Manchester's traditional industrial work ethic in his goodbye message. "You are not there," Guardiola told Sky Sports this week when talking about the impact the intensity of his work has had on his family life. "You are part of the furniture."
pic.twitter.com/NxIag2NvH1
— Dom Farrell (@DomFarrell1986) May 24, 2026
No two players exemplify the sense of struggle quite like Stones and Silva. For Stones, it was initially a battle against perceptions that he was too weak to be the ball-playing centre-back Guardiola required. After that box was emphatically ticked, it became a battle against his own body.
Once Guardiola decides a player has outlived their usefulness, there is usually no way back. Stones found himself in that predicament in 2020 but refused to yield. He gelled perfectly with new arrival Ruben Dias to form the bedrock of City's run to Premier League glory in 2020/21. Two seasons later, he gave the team a new dimension on their treble charge as a centre-back roving into advanced central midfield positions.
He was the best player on the pitch in the Champions League final against Inter Milan, doing exactly that. It wasn't in the same bracket as Lionel Messi's unveiling as a false nine to short-circuit Real Madrid in 2009 for Guardiola's Barcelona, but it is one of the coach's most famous signature innovations. Stones was a worthy main character.
Bernardo's struggle wasn't because of injury; it was because he is never, ever injured. And Guardiola adores him. So, he just played and played and played. It meant he was the standout performer in some of the titanic jousts with Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool, and that he scored both first-half goals in the 4-0 Champions League semifinal demolition of Real Madrid in 2022 — truly the night Guardiola's City touched perfection.
Bernardo 👋 https://t.co/xZ8cViU6PY pic.twitter.com/4dcDOwCGxf
— Dom Farrell (@DomFarrell1986) May 24, 2026
It also meant that when an injury ravaged, ageing team collapsed around him last season, Bernardo played and played and played. Back to a dry, crumbling well throughout a bleak winter. It led to premature commentary concerning a player over the hill. This season, the Portugal international has been superb, deservedly lifting the Carabao and FA Cups at Wembley. It was weirdly fitting that, after he was applauded from the field with a rousing guard of honour and hugged by a tearful Guardiola, City conceded the decisive goal to Ollie Watkins almost immediately.
Silva will leave a giant Swiss-army-knife hole in this team that incoming manager Enzo Maresca must navigate. It's impossible to know exactly how things will feel at the Etihad Stadium next season, even acknowledging what looks like careful succession planning. Other than that, it will likely feel very different indeed.
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But that's not why John Stones — unfortunately culpable for both Villa goals, although no one in blue cared whatsoever — and so many others of a City persuasion have found themselves misty-eyed this week. Losing a few more football matches, winning fewer trophies... big deal. Although this will change with the passage of time, the majority of matchgoing City fans still remember and revel in the Before Times. Their old anthem of self-deprecation, "MCFC OK!" ("We never win at home and we never win away"), rang out after Watkins scored.
And that maybe gets to the nub of it. What people get out of supporting a sports team varies from individual to individual, but it's all underpinned by collective memory and collective experience. And 10 years is a long time for one man, one true giant of modern football, to spend in one place. Stones and Silva shared 10 and nine of those years with him, respectively. It's a decent chunk of a lifetime.
Because for all the old-stagers who would happily bore Guardiola rigid with tales of Paul Dickov against Gillingham in 1999 (scratch that, he wouldn't be bored — he's now a giant British football nerd who loves Neil Warnock), there was a healthy smattering of young fans in their early teens directly in front of the press box who will remember nothing before Guardiola. Tell them about the time City had five managers in one season in 1995/96. Unlike Pep, they would be bored.
In the farewell address that Guardiola wrote himself, he gushed about Manchester's working class and trade union heritage. It is hoped that the expanded North Stand bearing his name will have tickets priced to take care of that demographic in the 21st century and the next generation of fans. City have erred in that regard over recent years and, under sustained fan-group pressure, are in the early stages of a course correction.
Guardiola spoke of his pride that his 95-year-old father, Valenti, would see his name on the North Stand. Valenti had young grandchildren when his son moved to Manchester. They're all young adults now. His wife and Pep's mother died during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. So, so much real life has happened, for the Guardiola family and every family inside this now 60,000-capacity arena.
From love to death and everything in between, there's going to the match. A silly thing, but a vital thing. Most reassuringly of all, a constant thing. On Sunday, Manchester bade farewell to three pillars, who leave beautiful and eternal memories.
Those memories give sport its meaning and make children wonder why the grown-up next to them is crying because John Stones has the microphone on the pitch and is telling them, "this will always be my home" with tears in his eyes.