Premier League: City running away with it at halfway point
By Cay North
The earlier part of the season had three or four contenders, but now that we’re halfway through, it’s easy to tell which club is the best at the moment.
It’s after Christmas, and just like that, we’re about halfway through the Premier League season.
Enough matches have been played to judge teams without overreacting to small sample sizes, and luck has evened out by now.
The standings at this point are more of an accurate representation of which clubs are good and which ones aren’t. However, there isn’t much of a title race now, like there was at the same time during last season. Manchester United has improved on last year’s results to make it to second place, but they sit 15 points behind their rivals from across town.
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Chelsea is also having a season where their fans will ask about what could have been, despite being a point away from second place. Their failure to contend for the title may be for different reasons.
Drama around striker Diego Costa and manager Antonio Conte followed them into the season, and while their results have been mostly good, their slip ups against clubs like West Ham and Crystal Palace have kept them from competing seriously with City.
Liverpool fans will be happy to stay in the Champions League, but if the season continues as it has, they’ll also wonder if their club could have done better. The club has an elite attacker again, with new signing Mohammad Salah sitting in second place on the league scoring charts. He also has five assists, more than any of the other top scorers.
Still, they’re four points behind Chelsea, and 20 points behind the leaders. The narrative this year is that Salah is leading them to a Champions League spot again, not to the title. If it wasn’t for the dominance of City, though, that would be the conversation.
City is unbeaten and has won 18 straight league matches at the time that this article was written, and that’s the story of the season so far. If they were having a more normal season instead of a historically good one, Manchester United and Chelsea would still be in the title hunt right now.
Clubs like Liverpool, Tottenham, and Arsenal would also have some hope of a late comeback, but right now, it looks like nobody can catch Guardiola’s squad. Their attack in specific is dominant, scoring 61 goals compared to 46 scored by Liverpool.
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There’s still time for things to change, and clubs have suffered second half collapses after hot starts before, but at the moment City is on pace to run away with the title in the second half. The Premier League typically has parity in its title race, but this year, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Not because United, Chelsea, and Liverpool are bad teams, but because they have to get past a club that’s in the best form in the world.