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ETIHAD — Sir Alex Ferguson achieved The Impossible Dream down the road three years before he arrived on our shores, when, at that point in Manchester City’s chequered history, Pep Guardiola’s remit would have been Any Dream Will Do.

Back then, nobody in their wildest dreams thought anyone could come close to matching Ferguson’s accomplishments at Manchester United. In less than half the time, Guardiola has somehow eclipsed it all.

There are those, of course, who will disagree. Ferguson won 13 Premier League titles to Guardiola’s six. Building multiple trophy-winning sides separates Ferguson from most of his peers. Even if the City boss averages more titles per season.

But what really earns Guardiola the throne in the pantheon of greats, just ahead of modern-day United’s founding forefather, is the legacy he leaves at all levels of the game. Since 2008-09, Guardiola has won 467 matches in Europe’s big-five leagues – over 100 more than any other manager.

It was an emotional day at the Etihad Stadium even before Guardiola’s first sighting. His lieutenant on the pitch, Bernardo Silva, was in tears in the tunnel pre-match, ahead of the captain’s last appearance.

"If in the next years you see me, come to me and hug me, I will need it"
"I love you so much"

Pep Guardiola's farewell message for Manchester City pic.twitter.com/vGoW9GLOto

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 24, 2026

John Stones – part of Guardiola’s first City line-up 10 years and 593 games ago – will also be following his manager out the door, with the tears flowing mid-match from him, too.

A record attendance of over 60,000, now the soon-to-be-named Pep Guardiola Stand is open, could barely keep it together.

What Guardiola and his imperious footballing hierarchy have built will stand the test of time. There will be no Fergie-type decline. Players will still want to join this well-oiled unit. Recruitment will remain as well considered as it has always been. That legacy also helps Guardiola stand above all the rest, Ferguson included.

Yet, there was still an overall acceptance that things will never be the same again. How could anyone change how an established footballing superpower views itself?

The pre-match tifo kept it simple: Game-changer. History maker. City forever. As Guardiola emerged, dressed as understated as ever in his plain white t-shirt, he waved to every corner of the ground and nodded to the Catalan flags in the crowd. Just another day at the office.

After Antoine Semenyo nudged City in front, Stones actually had a farewell to forget. At fault for Ollie Watkins’ equaliser, the departing veteran missed his tackle to let Watkins in to seal all three points just after the hour mark.

Not one but two in-game guards of honour followed, to further prove the importance of pageantry over match action. Silva was inconsolable, likewise Stones. Both leaving the patch into the loving arms of a tearful Guardiola.

Nothing could match the numbers lining up to applaud at full-time. Every member of staff donned “Guardiola 10” shirts, former greats such as Fernandinho made their way onto the pitch to pay homage, in line.

Out first, Guardiola stood in the centre circle as his departing coaching staff, instrumental to City’s success, got their moment. Ilkay Gundogan and Ederson were next, returning to the club to get their acclaim, before Silva and Stones followed.

Then, eventually, everyone got the moment they had all been waiting for.

Read more

• Daniel Storey: This is the end of Man City as we know it
• Daniel Storey: Arsenal are the perfect champions for this deeply weird season

As the montage played out, you could hear a pin drop. The man himself couldn’t bear to watch, the words of City’s most famous fans Oasis ringing true: “we’ll see things they’ll never see.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Guardiola’s final speech was interrupted by a raucous “10 more years, 10 more years Guardiola.” Something met with a fierce shake of the head. He has done more than enough.

Even the sign-off was perfect: “it’s been f****** fun.” It’s been more than that.

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STADIUM OF LIGHT – Stop the count and dump the ballot box. If anyone but Regis Le Bris wins the Premier League manager of the year award it will be a travesty.

Others may have lifted the silverware this season, but the Sunderland head coach has masterminded a campaign for the ages at the Stadium of Light. A superb win over an abject Chelsea stamped the Black Cats’ passport into the Europa League, and with it the first European campaign for 53 years for a fanbase who have grown in belief over their best season for a generation.

The scale of the achiement is stupendous. This defeat of Chelsea arrived exactly a year to the day since Le Bris helped them clamber out of the Championship via the play-offs. Four years and five days ago they beat Wycombe Wanderers to seal promotion from League One. It is some story.

Before the season they were tipped by many to go down but Le Bris – backed by the most imaginative response to promotion in recent history – has turned those fears into tears of joy. They haven’t just survived, they have thrived and torn up the narrative that the Premier League is an experience to be endured after achieving promotion.

For the wider game – and with apologies to those in Teesside and Tyneside who will be casting envious glances at this European qualification party – it is a timely and terrific reminder that the sport does not belong to the timid. In 2025 all three teams went down with Ipswich Town basically recruiting a team of Championship all-stars to make sure they bounced straight back up. There were grim warnings about the top tier becoming a closed shop.

"What a finish"

Hume gives Sunderland a deserved lead at the Stadium of Light! pic.twitter.com/vMlXnH4hDf

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 24, 2026

Sunderland went a different route, signing young talent like Noah Sadiki, Robin Roefs and Nordi Mukiele before pushing the boat out to persuade Granit Xhaka that something was stirring on Wearside. It has been an irresistible mix and put to shame the record of Newcastle and Sunday’s opponents Chelsea, who spent big but shrunk.

Sunday brought the brilliant denouement of such a daring strategy. They bullied the Blues, barely giving them a kick in a first half in which Trai Hume volleyed them deservedly in front. Malo Gusto diverted a second past Robert Sanchez – via Brian Brobbey’s shot – and even when Cole Palmer threatened to spoil the celebration they had enough.

Le Bris, who has brought all this together with the understated manner of his hero Arsene Wenger, was typically modest afterwards. It was “top of his managerial CV but of particular pride because of what it meant to the city.

“It’s an important step and shows that anything is possible in football, especially when you are working hard, representing the community and are humble,” he said.

“We suffered at times this season. We had a hard defeat a few weeks ago but we bounced back. I’m so proud – of the lads and the atmosphere.”

How the supporters partied under brilliant blue skies. Before the game fans thronged the streets around the Stadium of Light, the air thick with the acrid smell of red flare smoke.

Ahead kick-off the prize being eyed was eighth and the magical mystery tour that is the Conference League. But results and Sunderland’s own robust, resounding performance soon cleared the way for the much more serious business of the Europa League next season.

Read more

• Kevin Garside: West Ham’s future has never felt bleaker
• Daniel Storey: Tottenham have to seize this moment – I have no faith they will

It brings with it hard cash – £3.5m guaranteed for getting there plus eight group fixtures – but also some difficult choices. Sunderland know a second season in the Premier League will be difficult to navigate and now their recruitment plan must change. They will also have to comply with suffocating Uefa revenue rules.

But the club has already shown that those prepared to dream big can be rewarded. For now they should drink in one of the biggest moments in their history.

It is hard to overstate how historic it will feel in September when the group stage fixtures are drawn. Sunderland’s celebrations are thoroughly deserved.

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At the final whistle on Sunday, a strange mix of heartache, toxicity, disbelief rippled beyond the London Stadium, out to everybody connected with West Ham.

It is not just the end of 14 years in the Premier League. It is the lost years, the staggering demise since the highs of Conference League glory in 2023.

These days Michail Antonio begins each day “thanking God for getting up” after the car crash which nearly cost him his life in 2024 – but before then, he had seen West Ham’s decline in real time and up close.

West Ham fans lay the charge for that at the doors of Karren Brady and David Sullivan – Antonio does not necessarily agree.

‘Potter didn’t understand the culture’

“I just feel like Graham Potter came in and tried to change too much,” he tells The i Paper.

“As a manager, you’ve got to come in and understand the culture of the club. And I just don’t feel like he did. He came in, he got rid of all the senior pros: me, Lukasz Fabianski, Aaron Cresswell, Vladimir Coufal, Edson Alvarez – the captain of Mexico.

“Then within three, four weeks of getting rid of those players and the season starts, the first thing he says is, we have no leaders in the changing room. How can you say you’ve got no leaders in the changing rooms if you get rid of all the leaders? So it was just, I feel like it was Graham Potter, who kind of put the team in bad stead.”

There is still a rawness about the way the forward talks about West Ham, a year after being let go in the aftermath of his accident. He admits having so much “resentment against the club, the owners” that he did not know how he would feel if they failed to stay up.

“I was like, if they get relegated, it’s the only way the club’s going to feel it, the owner’s going to feel it. But now I’ve got rid of all the frustration and anger, I actually feel bad for the boys. I actually want the club to do well now – before I was just angry at everything.”

Brady was ‘ruthless’

Antonio, like many players, says he had a “good relationship with David Sullivan” and Brady. That changed when it came to contract talks following his leg break, suffered as he was hauled from the wreckage of his car.

The accident revealed two very different sides to Brady. She visited him in hospital, bringing him an eye mask. “She was a nice lady,” he insists. “Before the car crash, me and her really got along. Even after that, she was like ‘business is business but if you ever need me, you can call me… She said a couple of things that were quite hurtful towards me, but it was her talking business. When it comes to her business, she’s quite ruthless.”

He was offered a £5,000-a-week contract which stipulated he could not play for the first team and would train with the under-21s.

“If you’re going to give me a contract and I can’t play for the first team, at least give me a contract that’s more than what the under-21s are on. Her response was, ‘well they haven’t broken their leg in a massive car crash. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be’. I was just like, ‘alright’. Thank you very much.”

Days after West Ham finally released him from his contract, he was training in Manchester when he heard the news about Diogo Jota’s death.

Jota’s passing ‘shook me to my core’

“It shook my whole entire body,” he recalls. “I felt myself getting emotional. I couldn’t train. It really affected me massively because at the end of the day, I could have gone. I could have passed myself. It just shook me to my core.”

Antonio’s first encounter with death had come as a teenager. His friend Eugene was a victim of the knife crime that was prevalent in the south London neighbourhood where they grew up. Were it not for an older brother, Antonio believes he could have ended up in a gang because of his reputation for “fighting”.

“When you’re growing up in those areas, gangs have the money, they get the girls,” he says. “When I spoke to my brother, he was like ‘no, never join it, as soon as you do you’re joining a lifestyle you don’t want to be in.”

Read more

• Kevin Garside: West Ham’s future has never felt bleaker
• Special report: West Ham’s £100m abyss – and who could replace Nuno

Antonio’s roots were in Wandsworth and Tooting, but family ties meant he always wanted to play for Jamaica. He was courted by England under Gareth Southgate, the one coach he says has a reputation within the game for treating players like “humans”. But he knew he “wouldn’t be playing much”.

He ended up joining Qatari club Al-Sailiya in March, a move which coincided with the outbreak of war in the Middle East.

“On the first day, all the bombs were hitting, that was scary,” he says. “I was looking out my window and seeing fire from the rockets going past my hotel window. The hotel was shaking. But other than that, it was fine.”

There is every likelihood he will retire there, inspired to seize every opportunity by what happened in that Ferrari: “Tomorrow’s not promised to anybody.”

Michail Antonio was speaking to launch his book “Humans not Robots: when elite sport and real life collide” (Harper Collins, released June 2026)

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TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR STADIUM — Over the last few days, you will no doubt have heard a variance of the idea that Tottenham Hotspur deserved this torturous day. I wanted to sit among their supporters for a few hours because the point is this: the owners may have long had this coming. These people did not.

Theirs is the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. After so much pain endured, it is a happy ending. “Believe, believe, believe,” they were told at kick-off. They will play Premier League football next season and this can never, ever be allowed to happen again.

At full-time, tears of disbelief. Delirious hugs with strangers. Buckets of sweat on the hottest, most fractious day of the year. It takes nearly losing something to realise what it means.

The Russells have been coming here for 30 years. “This week I got the all clear from prostate cancer,” Norman tells The i Paper. “It would have been unfortunate to have a heart attack four days later.”

“This is the most sick and nervous I’ve felt,” says Ben. “Am I allowed to swear?” asks Naomi. “Please Spurs – don’t ruin my f***ing life”.

The news of West Ham’s first goal trickles through with dread. The second half is needlessly delayed. The air is sick with it: “we can’t have nice things”.

They had climbed lampposts and scaled bus stops to welcome the team bus, a sea of navy-white mist and a coronation normally reserved for league champions.

That they lined the streets in such numbers speaks to an unfailing loyalty, when so many have felt exploited, taken for granted, described as “legacy fans”. They have been derided by virtually the entire country and theirs is the last laugh. “Tottenham away, ole ole.”

This has been the home of genuine distress and the relief feels all the more palpable because so much of the pent-up angst has been building for years. The club of Greaves, Gascoigne, Hoddle, Kane, reduced to this. So many fear Tottenham Hotspur will never be what it was.

The fact Spurs fought this battle as the ninth richest club in the world can be cast aside for now. Even the cultural vandalism this grand old club has suffered can be forgotten for a few hours. Spurs are staying where they belong.

On the whistle, a banner called for “change”, one last hollow scream into the void. Nobody is convinced these owners have any inclination to change. It simply cannot get worse.

So it had to be like this, one final scrape over the line from Joao Palhinha. You can feel the air plummet from the lungs in real time as Everton surge forward with nine minutes of stoppage time and Antonin Kinsky is the hero again.

“An overwhelming feeling of relief,” Callum Lidington tells The i Paper. “We deserved that.”

“Once this fades, we cannot forget how close this club came to disaster,” says Ben Overlander. “And slightly painfully,” adds Solly Jackman-Overlander, “we did it the Arsenal way: 1-0, a goal from a corner.”

It has been hard to maintain a sense of humour through all this. On the PA system, they have tried, every home defeat ushered out with Stereophonics, “I don’t know where we are going”, and from Harry Styles, “you know it’s not the same as it was”. Well… quite.

Read more

• Daniel Storey: Tottenham have to seize this moment – I have no faith they will
• Glenn Hoddle: The surreal advice Boy George gave me at 2am

Amidst the misery has been the resurgence of a song I believe is the perfect serenade from any fan to their football team: Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You. I feel glad when you’re glad. I feel sad when you’re sad. If you only knew, what I’m going through.

Nobody has a divine right to be in the Premier League. This is not a nightclub where you get to turn up and say “but we’re Tottenham?” and get in.

So for a dose of realism, from the last man I spoke to in the bar, as neat a parcel of a gallows-humour-riddled Spurs fan as you are likely to meet. “That was good, wasn’t it? We’ll probably get relegated next season now.” Up the Spurs – until next year.

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TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR STADIUM — So little of Tottenham Hotspur’s season has been pleasant that it caught you completely off guard when something went their way. Joao Palhinha’s header hit a post, came back to his feet, hit Jordan Pickford’s stud and then just rolled over the line. Roberto De Zerbi sprinted down the line like one of the former managers who failed here.

Spurs have at least escaped the worst news. For those who pay exorbitant prices to watch football here, that is reason for enormous cheer because what’s the point if you can’t take joy in the momentary exceptions to a nine-month drudgery?

And for one afternoon at least, Spurs looked like a Premier League team with conviction. They hassled a half-paced Everton without the ball and hurt them with it. Mathys Tel made Jake O’Brien look clumsy and unresponsive. Micky van de Ven swept up behind and Pedro Porro and Djed Spence took turns to flee down the right wing.

There were lots of performative screams after tackles by players who have spent far too much of the season not making enough of them. There were some nerves when news filtered through that West Ham had scored. But mainly it was… competent? Lo and behold, it worked. Note to self: try this again.

Tottenham fans have done all they can this season to try and force change, on and off the pitch: bus welcomes, pre-match and post-match protests, begging underperforming football misanthropes to be better and angrily telling them that they are letting everybody else down. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t – but they earned the right to cheer in exultant relief.

Those who pay to wear this shirt, rather than get paid or charge others, are the only ones who get that pass. Those trusted as guardians of the club have not earned that privilege. This is a construct entirely of their own making, a self-implosion that took Spurs from the Champions League to the edge of the Championship in months.

You might consider “Big Six” to be an outdated moniker in the age of Aston Villa overachievement and Newcastle United owned by the Saudi state; it isn’t. The latest revenue figures cover 2024-25, a season when Spurs weren’t even in the Champions League. Their revenue was £581m, a full £190m above any club outside of that VIP club. “Big” refers to income generation and thus advantage, not performance.

Which is just as well, really, for that hints at the great scandal of this Tottenham Hotspur failure. The clubs within the established financial elite don’t just have the greatest spending power as a one-off. But when they get things wrong repeatedly, they remain insured against the worst calamities because of that spending power.

Despite all of those advantages being carved into stone, Spurs have finished in the bottom four of the Premier League in consecutive seasons. This is not a club in financial disarray and so forced into austerity and slumping as a result. Tottenham were given a golden ticket and they are left with only scraps of dog-eared paper.

To finish 17th once with this club and this team is careless – to do so twice is an act of gross negligence. And it can only be on the leaders: Enic, Vinai Venkatesham, Johan Lange. Different managers, different styles, different players, same grim mood. Those at the top of the food chain determine the survival of those below them.

Where is the realistic faith in this improving? If you can mess this up this badly twice, despite so many warnings and so many mileposts along the sorry journey, why would it suddenly click now? Relegation, although a sorry indictment of pathetic underperformance, would have forced the entire thing to be ripped up. The fear is that deeply unimpressive people will now try to tweak their way out of this.

If so, Tottenham will make little progress. They may get a few less injuries, win a few more games and have a manager who stays a few months longer than the others. It seems unlikely that they will find themselves in this position again, although we said roughly the same a year ago and it got worse.

But until the leadership changes, either through being forced from their positions of power or by being forced to confront their own failures head on with systemic change that begins immediately, this is deckchair rearrangement on an industrial scale.

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Arsenal may have already clinched the 2025-26 Premier League title, but there is plenty still to play for in several hotly contested fixtures across the country today as another enthralling season in England’s top flight reaches its final act.

Multiple spots in Europe are still up for grabs, some between clubs going head to head this very afternoon, while at the other end of the league table Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham take to the field in their respective homes knowing only one of them will survive relegation.

There is a full slate of games kicking off at the same time, as is customary for the last day of the campaign, and we’ll have eyes on the action across the country to deliver all the latest updates and expert analysis, right here.

Follow The i Paper’s live blog for updates from the final day of the 2025-26 Premier League season.

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There is no such thing as an undeserving champion, at least not until independent commissions or courts make their judgements. But holding out for 22 years, finishing as runners-up three years in a row and combining it with an impeccable run to a Champions League final all at once? That counts as a biggie.

Glorious triumph is viewed through two prisms, both quite different to the other. The first is as a simple mark of success, an in-the-moment judgement. In this snapshot in time Arsenal were the best and nobody can argue it.

The second is triumph as the completion of a redemption arc and it’s often here where the sweetest fruit can be picked. It asks us not just to look at where champions got to, but where they came from. Only Leicester City’s arc is more storied in the Premier League’s last 20 years than Arsenal in 2026.

This campaign hasn’t just been the culmination of very good players doing very good things. It is the final step of a 20-year journey since Arsenal moved to the Emirates Stadium. That coincided with Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal finishing outside the top two for the first time in eight years and the rapid disintegration of modern rivalry with Manchester United. First Arsenal fell, then United did.

Those post-Highbury years were noisy in the wrong way, enforced comparative austerity as reality bit and supporters griped. Until 2013, Arsenal had even never spent more than £15m on a player. Chelsea, the face of new power, signed 11 for more than that before Arsenal did for the first time.

Instead, Arsenal became the inadvertent face of elite club atrophy, a club that players left to win major trophies rather than joined. The seven straight last-16 exits from the Champions League: hard-luck stories against Barcelona, AC Milan and Monaco before the 10-2 aggregate defeat to Bayern Munich that felt like a club’s soul being burned. This is all for all of that.

This title is in part a victory of circumstance, although that is a compliment. Arsenal surely performed better in 2023-24 – more points, more goals scored, more fun had along the way but far less at the end. The difference is that Manchester City didn’t get 91 points this season. You put yourself in the right position enough times and you pray that at least once it will be enough. Arsenal flourished through the “buy a ticket, win the raffle” principle.

This has not been a vintage Premier League season, in terms of quality or entertainment. But why would Arsenal give a damn about that? They built a squad that they believed could be controlled and consistent and they were proven spectacularly right. They became a mirror of the league itself and that’s why they won.

There will be questions around the style. Arsenal will likely be the lowest-scoring Premier League champions since 1992-93. They continually maximised the advantages of attacking set pieces in an industry that hasn’t quite worked out how to deal with them. Their manager shunned the tactical idealism of Wenger in favour of arch pragmatism. Arteta too was proven right by the end result.

All season we have been reminded that the Premier League is tightening up, a true anyone-can-beat-anyone season. The financial gaps clearly still exist, but English football’s economic dominance dictates that even the worst clubs in the division have several excellent footballers. The team in 16th has Elliot Anderson, for goodness sake.

Which makes Arsenal’s ruthlessness more impressive. Manchester City, with the deepest squad and the best coach, dropped 23 points in 28 matches against teams outside the top six and lost three times. Liverpool, the defending champions, dropped 32 points and lost six times. Arsenal dropped 10 points and were unbeaten. That was the difference.

This was a triumph of mentality, then. Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard, the two supposed attacking jewels, have started 25 and 16 league matches, Kai Havertz just seven. Viktor Gyokeres struggled for most of his first campaign back in England.

And Arsenal did this with their only previous experience being heartache and unrequited ambition. Of the 11 players with 20 or more league starts, none had ever won a title in a top five European league. The manager hadn’t either, as a player or a manager.

Most of all, we thought we knew what Arsenal were. It was always a constructed parody to declare them bottlers; these things usually exist in shades of grey. But to come so close and finish so far has to colour your psychology.

After the defeat at home to Bournemouth, Arsenal stared their own failure in the face once again. This title is for that too. Never overlook the resilience to accept that people doubt you and to prove them wrong while the world watches your struggle as a sport within the sport. And we’re supposed to criticise the method of this feat?

Read more

• Daniel Storey: Arsenal took your hate and won the title with it
• Seven controversies that won Arsenal the title

I hope that Arsenal supporters enjoy this title to its full extent. Winning major trophies should be a familial experience but this season has contained more than a whiff of us vs the haters, like the Father Ted “And now we move onto liars” speech. Live in the moment. Forget the Champions League final, at least for a day or two. Bask in the realisation that a superpower has been toppled.

And when thoughts of the future are permitted, let them only be tinged in red, white and gold. Arsenal have won a league title. They have seen off Pep Guardiola. They have built from so far back and the length of the fight means that they are best placed to fight many more.

A new, post-Guardiola age of the Premier League is beginning. Arsenal will start it as the champion club. And nobody will remember how it was won in five years’ time.

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