Premier League history made – Man City and Pep Guardiola win fourth, consecutive league title

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10th league title for club 

Pep Guardiola and Manchester City made history on Sunday, when a 3-1 win over West Ham confirmed a fourth, consecutive Premier League title for the club. Making them the first club in the history of English football to do so. Now the tenth top-flight trophy in the club’s history and their eighth in the last 12 seasons, Man City can now lay claim to having more league titles than all but three clubs across England – only Arsenal (13), Liverpool (19) and Manchester United (20) have more. Equally, Guardiola’s sixth league title now puts him second on the list of managers with the most league titles in England, level with George Ramsay and Bob Paisley on six each, but still some way behind Sir Alex Ferguson’s haul of 13. 

Despite Arsenal’s best attempts to cause an upset on the final matchday, with a 2-1 win over Everton in front of their own fans, the North London club were unable to take advantage of any potential slip-ups from Guardiola’s team. In a league campaign that would have likely led to silverware in previous years, Arsenal were forced to settle for second place after Guardiola’s side registered just one defeat from the start of December through to the concluding matchday of the season. The final points tally of 91 for the 23/24 season may not match the highs of the 17/18 season when Man City accrued 100 points, but it is still the club’s fourth highest finish in the Premier League era. 

Indeed, grinding out results and finishing top despite the backdrop of some superb competitors goes some way to exemplifying the way that Man City have gone about dominating the Premier League since Guardiola joined the club in 2016. Although other clubs have won it on occasion and the likes of Liverpool and Arsenal have come close in recent years, Guardiola has worked remarkably well to ensure that he and he alone has held a stranglehold over the competition over the course of the last eight seasons.

Sunday’s win was Guardiola’s 304th game in charge of Man City in the Premier League and in that period of time the Spanish tactician has racked up an impressive tally of 713 points and an average of 2.35 points per game. That, remarkably, is almost 60 points more than the next best manager in the English top-flight in that period of time, which is Jürgen Klopp with 657 points from 304 games. Most notably, the Anfield boss has an average of 2.16 points per game. The difference between the two averages, over the course of an entire season, can account for as much as seven points. Which goes some way to underlining why Man City have often come out on top over their Anfield rivals. 

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Guardiola’s record almost means that he is the most successful manager of the Premier League era when it comes to winning points per game. Among all managers that have coached over 100 games in the division since 1992, the former Barcelona head coach comes out on top, with an average that bests Ferguson (2.16), Klopp, Roberto Mancini (2.05) and Antonio Conte (2.03). José Mourinho, often considered one of Guardiola’s biggest coaching rivals, can only boast an average of 2.02 following his spells at Chelsea, Man Utd and Tottenham.