Premier League fans have been used to the phenomenon of one team dominating their favourite competition. The most famous, of course, was that of Manchester United, who won the competition thirteen times in twenty-one seasons under Sir Alex Ferguson.
Their domination, which included two spells of winning the title for three seasons in a row, followed that of Liverpool, who were the pre-eminent English team from the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, when the Premier League had not yet been created.
Yet no English team has been able to create the same dominance that we have seen in other European countries. Paris St Germain, for example, have won six of the last seven Ligue 1 titles, and earlier this century, Lyon exerted a similar monopoly. Bayern Munich have sat at the top of German football for seven seasons, while Juventus have won Serie A every season since 2011-12.
But are we at the beginning of a similarly dominant dynasty in English football? Under Pep Guardiola, Manchester City have won the Premier League in consecutive seasons, with energetic, attractive and irresistible football. City topped the table with 100 points in 2017-18 and won it again last year with a total of 98. Those two points-hauls represent the two highest in the history of the competition, beating Chelsea’s return of 95 points under Jose Mourinho in 2004-05.
Fans tuning in to watch this year’s competition on SKY will once again be talking about which, if any, of their rivals can stop City. But only one team, Liverpool, have come close to surpassing Guardiola’s side. Their 97 points tally last season would have been enough to win the Premier League in all but the last two seasons in its history, but they were unfortunate to come up against the most dominant team the competition has ever seen (though the Champions League trophy was pretty impressive compensation for Jurgen Klopp’s men!).
But Liverpool aside, none of City’s main rivals appear ready to challenge them. Chelsea are rebuilding under a new manager, Manchester United and Arsenal are likewise in transition, while Tottenham have not come close to overtaking City in the last two seasons and there is no reason to believe that the same set of players under Mauricio Pochettino would be able to do so this time round.
Bookmakers have no doubt about the City dominance. They are regarded as 4/7 favourites by many sportsbooks, with Liverpool generally 3/1 and the rest nowhere. What will be particularly worrying for City’s rivals is that as well as having greater financial resources than their challengers, the best manager and the most effective team, they have also developed the ability to grind out results under pressure, as they showed last season when they won their last fourteen games, knowing that just one slip-up could hand the title to Liverpool.
With that added steel, City have all the qualities in place to embark on a prolonged period of domestic dominance, which is why no sports fans checking out the best odds on Bigbetbookmakers.com can afford to overlook them in the 2019/20 Premier League title winning market.
