The Premier League fixture computer, an instrument that has acquired a kind of mythology in this competition, will on Sunday 24 May do the simplest thing it has ever been asked to do. Ten kick-offs. One time. Three o’clock.
Arsenal lead by six points with three to play.T1, Premier League Manchester City sit second, two games in hand, a visit to Everton on Monday and Brentford at the Etihad on the Saturday before the curtain.T1, Premier League Arsenal’s goal difference is +41, City’s +37.T1, Premier League If the two clubs finish level on points, goal difference and goals scored, the league belongs to City on head-to-head.T1, Premier League The Premier League itself has flagged the run-in as a candidate for the closest title race in its history.T1, Premier League That sentence is the kind of thing leagues say to sell a Sunday. On this occasion it is also true.
The choreography of a final day, when it actually matters, is a thing English football has always done well, and Sky Sports has, since the late nineties, turned into a kind of broadcast theatre. The split-screen will be back. Ten pictures, ten captions, one running clock. Producers in Osterley have spent the last fortnight game-planning shot lists for nine of the ten venues and a tenth, the title-deciding camera, that they will not finalise until the Saturday evening before. Geoff Shreeves will be at the Emirates, in all probability, because that is where the trophy is most likely to be lifted. The Etihad will get its own dedicated lens. The other eight matches, between them, hold every other story of the season.
The relegation knots are the second screen. Three sides will go down. The bottom is alive with arithmetic the broadsheets will set out properly later in the week. What matters for the choreography is that two of the relegation-threatened clubs are hosting Big Six visitors on the final day, and a third is at home to a mid-table side that has nothing to play for, which is its own kind of trouble. A relegation goal scored in the 78th minute at one ground will, in the Sky control room, fight a title goal scored in the 82nd at another for the top half of the screen. This is the part of the day that television cannot script.
Arsenal’s three remaining games are domestic in shape and continental in pressure. Mikel Arteta has a squad he trusts, a dressing room that has been here before and lost, and a goal difference that is, quietly, his ace. Plus four on City. Not nothing. In a season where two clubs have spent eight months separated by the width of a cigarette paper, plus four is the cushion that allows a 1-0 to do the work of a 2-0. Arteta will know that. He will not say it.
Pep Guardiola’s two games in hand are the pivot. Everton on the Monday is the harder of them, on paper and on form; Sean Dyche’s side have made Goodison a difficult night this spring, and the visitors will arrive without the luxury of a draw. Brentford, the following Saturday, is a fixture City have, in the recent past, taken seriously and won. Six points from those two would put City three behind Arsenal going into the final day, with the head-to-head tiebreaker still in their pocket. Four points would leave Arsenal champions before the 24th. Three or fewer and the title is, mathematically, decided early. The grid of possibilities is narrower than it looks.
The 3pm simultaneous kick-off, for those who have not lived through one, has a particular quality of silence in the press box. Phones are face-up. Producers’ voices in earpieces are the only thing you hear. The first goal at any of the ten venues changes the temperature in all of them; a stadium 200 miles from a title-decider can feel a goal at that title-decider through the visiting fans’ phones before the home fans know it has gone in. Old hacks describe the feeling as standing in ten rooms at once. It is the closest the league office, in its quiet way, comes to a piece of theatre.
There is a reading of this season in which Arsenal, having held the top of the table since November, will simply finish the job, and the simultaneous final day will be a coronation with light entertainment in the corners. There is another reading in which City, who have spent fifteen seasons making other people’s coronations awkward, win the next two and walk into 24 May needing a result the last fifteen years say they will get. Both readings are honest. The Premier League’s own framing, that this could be the closest title race the competition has staged, leaves room for either.
What Sunday 24 May will look like, then, is ten matches and one question. Producers in Osterley already know which camera will hold the shot when it is answered. The fans walking up Avenell Road, or up Tameside, or up Goodison Road, do not know yet whether they will be inside the picture or beside it. That part of the day is still being written. The fixture computer has done its share. The clubs, between now and the last whistle of the season, will do theirs.
