So far in our series on sports on television, we’ve already watched with glee as Sunderland plummeted down two divisions and Tottenham Hotspur rode out the Coronavirus to come back stronger. This week, we’re completing the triumvirate of football documentaries from the past couple of years in looking at Manchester City: All or Nothing.
The season that is covered in the documentary is the 2017/18 English Premier League season. Don’t remember it? Yes you do, The Citizens were one of the Teams of the Century that year.
Pep Guardiola’s side were utterly dominant across the season as they amassed a record-breaking 100 points and swept all before them in the Premier League, including their cross-city rivals, Manchester United.
Therein, unfortunately, lies one of the problems with the series that Tottenham and Sunderland’s documentaries don’t encounter – the luxury of unparalleled success.
City come up against some obstacles they’re unable to clamber over in Europe, but domestically, they are ridiculously efficient, and while the process of Pep Guardiola’s management is a thrilling sight to behold, it’s the same each week and by around Episode 4 or so, it starts to get more exhausting than it is for the players or the man himself.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the documentary are the numerous elite methods City have around the football but not on the training pitch. From the state-of-the-art dressing room that is ergonomically designed to leave no-one feeling left out to the level of support and service that the club affords its first team players, the feeling of luxury throughout is staggering. Players have almost nothing to do for themselves other than to play and train. While this could easily be seen as privileged (and it is) it’s also clearly a highly optimal way to manage a football club.
Manchester City are a club that are set up to succeed off the pitch to such a degree that on the pitch they can hardly fail, and while there are the odd wrinkles along the golden path to success, such as United’s comeback derby day victory at the Etihad, the bumps in the road only ever seem to delay The Citizens steamrollering their way to the inevitable destination.
With a star-studded squad, it would be easy to hope for nuggets of gossip between the elite stars of today, but they are preciously few and far-between, with Sergio Aguero’s fond friendship with David De Gea of rivals United about as shocking as it gets.
If you’re looking for people to feel fondness for in the documentary, it may not be the players or management at all, but the backroom boys who were probably power-washing the concrete outside Maine Road in the days before Sheik Mansour’s billions entered the club.
Manchester City is undoubtedly a fantastically successful machine of modern football, but how much it all feels like an operation rather than the beating heart of a City known for its self-deprecating humour is perhaps the hidden message of the documentary. Success can take players and staff to impossible heights, but those heights can look far away from the past rather than linked to it when it comes so quickly.
You can watch Manchester City: All or Nothing right here on Amazon Prime. There are 100 reasons to do so, and more benefits to doing so than not… just don’t expect many plot twists.
