Manchester City's Premier League triumph was inevitable as Pep Guardiola's side proved to be on another level

Pep Guardiola's team officially claimed the title on Saturday after Arsenal lost 1-0 at Nottingham Forest

Manchester City are champions of England once more. That has finally been rubber-stamped but has been so blindingly apparent that this column could easily have gone live moments after they crushed Arsenal's resistance at the Etihad Stadium last month. The aura of inevitability might go yet further back for some, perhaps even to the moment a few weeks into the season that it became abundantly clear that they hadn't whiffed on Erling Haaland, that the most consistently winning club side in world football for the last half-decade had added the elite level goalscorer they hadn't had since Sergio Aguero's powers waned.

City have peaked at the right time -- Wednesday's evisceration of Real Madrid in the Champions League semifinals may ultimately go down as the greatest match in Pep Guardiola's tenure, perhaps even his career -- but they have been building to this point all season long. At the World Cup break they had the best underlying metrics: the most goals, the most shots, the most expected goals (xG), and the lowest xG allowed. All that was up for debate was whether Arsenal had built up enough headroom; given they had not played their greatest rivals, there was always a sense of inevitability, that the eight-point cushion they would supposedly bottle only really existed because they hadn't faced the reigning champions yet.

Since the World Cup the upswing has been vertiginous. Fourteen of their matches in 2023 have been won by a margin of three goals or more, in 33 games they have scored 86 and conceded 22. One might contend that the only two of the latter to be of any real consequence were those conceded to Southampton in the EFL Cup quarterfinals and that the man who has done the greatest damage to City's prospects this season is Nathan Jones, one of the worst managers in the history of the English top flight.