How Arsenal’s Premier League title hopes have been given huge boost by Man City nightmare

For the past few years, Manchester City have done the same thing season after season – they play well but not overwhelmingly so for the first half of the season, then Pep Guardiola makes some tactical tweaks or changes his starting line-up around a little, and they go on a completely dominant run from around January right up to the end of the season and win the title, usually pipping Arsenal in the process. It’s worked for four years in a row, and there’s no reason it should be any different this time – is there?

Last season, City didn’t suffer a single Premier League defeat after losing 1-0 to Aston Villa in early December. Indeed, they only dropped any points at all three times in the entirety of 2024. Following a comparatively modest start which saw them endure back-to-back defeats to Wolverhampton Wanderers and Arsenal in the autumn and then fail to win four times on the bounce between November and December, they found their usual gear change and barely skipped a beat for the remainder of the season, with crushingly inevitable results.

This time, there could be a wrinkle for Guardiola and his team that makes the usual narrative a little tougher to follow. The Premier League fixture list was released on Tuesday and had a nasty surprise for the reigning champions in the shape of a brutal run through February which neatly coincides with the part of the year in which they usually hit their straps and start steamrolling everyone around them. This time, that won’t be quite so easy.

After ending January with a home game against Chelsea (a fixture whose difficulty level is almost impossible to gauge at this point), they face their closest challengers Arsenal on 1 February at the Emirates and things don’t get too much easier – which is rather good news for Arsenal themselves.

On 15 February, City host Newcastle United. A week later, it’s Liverpool at home. Then, in midweek immediately afterwards, they have to travel to Tottenham Hotspur, a team who have tripped them up at key moments on a few occasions in the past. It’s a run of four games – perhaps five, if Enzo Maresca can really get things going at Stamford Bridge – that could well decide whether City can break their own record and become the first English team to win the national championship five times on the spin.

Of course, having such a tricky run in the middle of the season does mean that their run-in isn’t too daunting. Their final five fixtures are against Aston Villa, Wolves, Southampton, Bournemouth and Fulham, and given how well Guardiola’s teams are usually playing by the time April rolls around, it would be a brave fan who bets against 15 points from that sprint towards the line – but if they start with their usual slight slowness, then 15 points won’t be enough unless they nail that fraught February run.

At first glance, that might be the single trickiest month any of the obvious title candidates will face this season. Arsenal will have their own challenges, but whenever you see a couple of tough games in a row the matches either side look a little less scary. Certainly, there is no point at which they face five consecutive teams with genuine ambitions at a European placing or more.

If City do their usual trick of starting slowly – relatively slowly, anyway, and it’s very relative the way they do it – then Arsenal could be presented with a massive opportunity to carve out a lead in February should they win that game at the Emirates. Given that Mikel Arteta’s team took four points off their title rivals in 2023/24, that isn’t such a distant prospect.

Of course, some games will prove to be trickier than they appear at the start of the summer transfer window and some teams we assume will be good will struggle. Perhaps, by the time we reach spring, hosting Newcastle and Liverpool won’t look like a genuine challenge. Maybe Arsenal’s games against Crystal Palace and Bournemouth in April and May will be against sides challenging for Europe, and the complexion of their run-in looks different. The Premier League is, by and large, predictable enough but there are always one or two teams who surprise one way or the other.

But Manchester City have been somewhat predictable, in their own way, for a while now. They take a little while to build up a head of steam, and that flatten everything in their path. But that method won’t be quite so easy this time out, and that could hand the initiative to Arsenal at a crucial moment in the season. There are already 115 reasons that City might find it a little harder to win the title in 2025 – perhaps there are now 116, and perhaps Arsenal can finally take advantage. Only nine months before we find out…