After a brief pause for relaxation – with Manchester City and Arsenal taking very different approaches – the season now reaches a key moment when everything escalates. How teams prepare for it could make all the difference, says Miguel Delaney in his latest Inside Football newsletter
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The article below is an excerpt from theMiguel Delaney:Inside Football newsletter.
Members of Inside Football and Independent Premium subscribers get the full column – alongside more bonus reporting from inside thePremier League – every Friday. Become a member for just £3 a monthhere.
Even in rare moments of relaxation, thoughts couldn’t help but turn to the “other lot”. Pep Guardiola was away on Sunday, enjoying a surprise trip to his old club, Serie C side Brescia, but was, of course, made aware of what was happening with Arsenal.
Then, no sooner had Mikel Arteta enjoyed the relief and euphoria of that victory over Spurs than the Basque was asked whether he would be following the Manchester City manager’s suggestion in what was a very rare midweek without a match.
Guardiola had joked after their 2-1 win over Newcastle United that he wanted his squad to “take a lot of caipirinhas, daiquiris” during their three days off.
It’s hard not to wonder whether that was pointed, given that a commonplace comment on Arsenal after the 2-2 draw at Wolves – said with some degree of seriousness by pretty senior football people – was that the squad actually needed a good old-fashioned “night on the lash”. That was because they looked like they needed the release, as well as the different kind of team bonding that comes with such an admittedly anti-sports-science pursuit.
Like the City squad and most modern players, though, very few Arsenal players actually touch alcohol in any way. That’s just not the game in 2026. Far more are quite religious and keen to read the Bible.
To Arteta’s credit, he is understood to have handled the fall-out from Wolves well. Seeing that the squad was down – to the point that there were arguments between some of the players – he again sought to point to the positives, to turn the thinking around. Arteta reminded them that, at any moment in the last few years – or even in their dreams as youngsters – they would have loved a position like this: five points clear in February.
And, as after the defeat to Manchester United, it worked. By the north London derby, they were focused and intent on making up for Wolves.
The subsequent wins from both of the top two, as well as the rare lull that followed, were probably narratively fitting for the wider story of the title race.
Because, from next week, it all gets very real. The race becomes the run-in. The two already have tough fixtures this weekend – with City travelling to Leeds United on Saturday before Arsenal host Chelsea – in what now looks like suitable stage-setting for another very rare occurrence on Wednesday: both teams play at the same time, with Arsenal going to Brighton and City hosting a durable Nottingham Forest. That’s certainly going to create quite an old-fashioned dynamic, and a proper back-and-forth on the night.
After that, it’s down to single digits in terms of games left, and that unique dyad that develops in a title race, where the actions of one team cannot but affect the other.
Such a dynamic may even be amplified to extreme levels by the potential of Arsenal and City meeting in all competitions in the last three months: one grand series for everything; an almost unsustainable level of tension.
That very prospect may well prove too much even for the Premier League’s famous sense of narrative, given some of the signs already coming out of both clubs over the past few weeks…
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Miguel Delaney's Inside Football newsletter lands in your inbox every Monday and Friday
Miguel Delaney's Inside Football newsletter lands in your inbox every Monday and Friday (The Independent)
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The instructions that saw Arsenal destroy Tottenham Hotspur
The secret of Bodo/Glimt’s Champions League upset of Inter
Fifa’s World Cup response amid violence in Mexico
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