As West Ham prepared to take the field against Manchester City, Sky Sports invited Sam Allardyce to share the message he had used to inspire the West Ham players. "It's about setting our stall out," Allardyce began, and you knew that West Ham were probably not going to be making history that day.
West Ham’s stall was duly flattened by the City juggernaut with the minimum of fuss, and the title celebrations began. A second title in three seasons, combined with the collapse of Manchester United, means City now stand alone as the dominant club in English football.
The victorious City players heaped credit on their manager, Manuel Pellegrini, who was celebrating his first league title since he came to Europe as the coach of Villarreal 10 years ago.
Samir Nasri believed that the reason City had won the league was the team spirit that the coach had done so much to foster. "I think this team has got a real soul," added the ebullient captain, Vincent Kompany.
Team spirit courses through a club at such moments. Two years ago, in the aftermath of the glorious victory over QPR, the City players even briefly managed to look fond of Roberto Mancini.
They weren’t really, of course, which is why the two executives City imported from Barcelona, Ferran Soriano and Txiki Beguiristain, were already planning to replace Mancini within months of that triumph.
Giovanni Trapattoni allegedly once said that a good manager improves a team by 10 per cent and a bad manager makes it 30 per cent worse. Soriano and Beguiristain feared that Mancini was the second kind of manager. When you considered the club’s economic advantages, Mancini was making managing City look like very hard work.
Over the past five years, City’s net transfer spending has averaged more than £95 million (€116 million) per season, which is nearly twice Chelsea’s average net spend, almost four times Manchester United’s, and more than five times Liverpool’s.
Arsenal, despite breaking their transfer record on the signing of Mesut Özil last summer, have recorded a net surplus on transfers over the last five years.
This year, Pellegrini has proved himself the right kind of manager for a club of City’s means, which is to say, a safe pair of hands.
Settled squad
There have been no wearisome conflicts, no media vendettas against club officials, no training ground photos of an enraged Pellegrini grappling with one of his players. Instead there has been calmness, cohesion, and a settled squad that has mostly played to its potential.
Of course, Soriano and Beguiristain aren’t the only ones in football who understand that when you outspend your rivals to such a degree, winning the league is just about par. That is why nobody will be surprised if Pellegrini is not honoured with the Manager of the Year award at tonight’s League Manager’s Association dinner.
That’s life for the City manager: big salary, great squad, and the quiet irritation of knowing that everyone you meet thinks they could probably do your job, given the chance.
There is plenty of support for Brendan Rodgers to win Manager of the Year, and the Liverpool manager has a persuasive case. Liverpool weren't even expected to make the Champions League, never mind take the title race to the last week and score a club record 101 goals.
Look closer, though, and you find that Liverpool have finished with their worst defensive record in a 38-game season since 1914-15. It’s astonishing that a side that let in 50 goals was still in with a chance of winning the title on the last day.
There’s also the matter of Rodgers having been found wanting at crunch moments in the race.
Steven Gerrard will never hear the end of that slip against Chelsea, but why were Liverpool playing such risky football, with nobody behind the ball, with the score poised at 0-0 in a match they only needed to draw?
Why did they continue to throw men forward against Crystal Palace when they were already leading 3-1 with 10 minutes to go? That night, Rodgers suggested the players’ “game management” had not been good enough, but doesn’t game management have anything to do with the manager?
Bookies' favourite
Pellegrini aside, there are at least two other managers who have done better than Rodgers. The bookies' favourite is Tony Pulis, who took over a bedraggled Crystal Palace rabble that had lost nine of their first 11 matches and whipped them masterfully into line, forging a crack defensive unit that ultimately finished 11th.
Palace were also major players in the title run-in, beating Chelsea and coming back from 3-0 down against Liverpool. If Pulis wins the award, Pellegrini should be the first to congratulate him.
There should, however, be reservations over the negative style of football. Pulis’ Stoke teams always focused more on the position of the ball than possession of the ball. They were hard to play against and hard to watch. Given time, Pulis will turn Palace into the same kind of team.
A contrasting approach is embodied by Roberto Martinez at Everton. His transformation of their style of play, adding a new sense of enterprise and ambition to the workmanlike ethos of the David Moyes era, has been rewarded by Everton's highest points tally since they last won the title in 1987. The fact that he achieved this while making a profit on transfers surely makes him the real Manager of the Year.
