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Hello! A monsoon hit Old Trafford. Make your own jokes about Manchester United and lifejackets…
Coming up:
😕 Split loyalties in the Premier League’s final week
🌧️ It never rains, it pours as Man Utd abandon annual player awards
👋 PSG bid a tame farewell to Mbappe
🏴☠️ Germany’s pirate club reach the Bundesliga
Title time: Premier League permutations
The Premier League loves a final-day decider (as do the league’s TV rights holders). This season’s title race has given us another one.
Arsenal’s win at Manchester United yesterday — gutsy display, gutsy result — takes everything to game 38. It’ll be Arsenal or Manchester City on Sunday and to look at the strength of both teams, their rivalry seems set in stone for a few years to come.
No such tension in the fight to avoid relegation. That’s essentially over, in predictable fashion.
Here’s a recap:
- Arsenal lead City, who have a game in hand. Technically speaking, it’s advantage Pep Guardiola. Forget Liverpool. We’re down to two horses.
- A win for Aston Villa against Liverpool tonight would earn them the last Champions League spot, ahead of Tottenham Hotspur.
- Burnley followed Sheffield United into the Championship over the weekend and Luton Town will (almost certainly) join them. It’s a depressing picture — all three sides who were promoted in 2023 have failed to survive.
Matches and motivations
We’ll get some good, old-fashioned Premier League nose-holding over the next 48 hours as fans cuddle up to whichever club is most expedient to support.
Tottenham Hotspur will look for Liverpool to beat Villa to keep them in the hunt for Champions League football. Arsenal will then hope Spurs, their north London rivals, can turn over Manchester City on Tuesday. If that happens, Mikel Arteta’s team go into the final weekend with the title in their hands.
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That prospect might be enough for some in Spurs’ crowd to quietly pray for a City win against their club, to stop the Premier League trophy from heading to the Emirates Stadium — particularly if fourth place is wrapped up by Villa tonight.
On the beach?
Financially, the Premier League season is never done until it’s done. Prize money increases with each finishing position in the table and we’re talking about £3million ($3.9m) per place, so it’s worth slogging to the end.
But it’s human nature. Who can blame clubs with nothing to play for if they go through the motions — or, as football parlance has it, look like they’re already on the beach?
There’s no real science here but our writers had a go at working out which teams were mentally on holiday over the weekend. There’s a lovely line in this piece: that dead rubbers are like playing Hungry Hippos on the last day of school. Happy memories.
📺 Aston Villa vs Liverpool, 3pm ET / 8pm UK; USA Network, Sky Sports Main Event
Rain and shine: Cup glory, pranksters and cancelled awards
We’ll start with the good news: Manchester United have won the Women’s FA Cup for the first time. No messing around in a 4-0 thrashing of Tottenham at Wembley.
But closer to home, storm clouds gather. The rain came down in biblical style during the men’s defeat to Arsenal, ruining Erik ten Hag’s dapper suit and proving the saying that the best time to fix the roof is when the sun shines.
The catalogue of tinpot developments at Old Trafford is in a league of its own. If it’s not a leaky stadium roof or the club’s food hygiene rating being dropped to one star, they’ve got a prankster on their team bus. And that’s before you get to the pitch.
The latest news is that Casemiro’s jogging led to the crucial concession against Arsenal and, after the game, Wayne Rooney suggested some players have downed tools. To top it all, the player-of-the-year awards have been cancelled. The club say this is so they can concentrate on the FA Cup final. Cough.
🎙️ Everyone has a view on what’s going wrong at Old Trafford, including David Beckham. He’s been talking exclusively to Andy Mitten on The Athletic’s Talk of the Devils podcast.
Mbappe & mixed emotions
The Parc des Princes waved farewell to Kylian Mbappe, taking in his final home game for Paris Saint-Germain. Beforehand, he let out Europe’s worst-kept secret by confirming he would leave in the summer.
PSG are about to lose one of the best players they will ever have. Despite that, the tributes to Mbappe were lukewarm — almost transactional, which maybe reflects the nature of PSG themselves.
The conclusion you reach is that the Mbappe era (yielding no Champions League titles) has left everyone slightly unfulfilled, including him. And forgive PSG’s crowd if they think his club career will be better defined by what comes next — at Real Madrid.
Left-wing winners: St Pauli’s principles, promotion and ‘death head’ flag
Nothing says ‘take us as you find us’ like a club choosing brown for the colour of their shirt. That’s St Pauli — the team newly promoted to Germany’s Bundesliga. Based in Hamburg, they don’t bow to the mainstream. They use a skull-and-crossbones logo as their emblem, but they’re left-leaning in a political sense, so you’ll find the ‘Totenkopf’ (Death Head) brandished on rainbow flags.
St Pauli are big on sustainable kit manufacturing and affordable tickets. But football-wise, they’re not there to be patronised. They’re a cult outfit with a purpose.
GO DEEPER
St Pauli: Bundesliga promotion and leftist principles combine (with 'death head' flag)
Around The Athletic
- Liverpool owner Fenway Sports Group is going Full Metal Jacket with its rebuild, bringing back ex-sporting director Julian Ward and making the captivating hire of Pedro Marques as director of football development.
- Klopp is in his final hours at Anfield. Oliver Kay has written about where it all began for him — the German village of Glatten.
- Carlo Ancelotti’s the boss. Real Madrid’s title celebrations turned him into a cuddly teddy bear.
Quiz answer
Friday’s quiz question asked who was missing from this boyband: Arjen Robben, Ilkay Gundogan, Cristiano Ronaldo, ??????? and Mohamed Salah. It’s Antoine Griezmann — one of the last five players to take a penalty in a Champions League final (excluding shootouts).
(Top photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
