So Long, Pep

When I wrote my last post, about Arsenal's Premier League win, I talked about Pep Guardiola's departure from Manchester City as a done deal, though apparently it hadn't been completely decided yet at that juncture. It was subsequently confirmed, though, and so today marks Pep's last day in charge of Man City, after ten seasons in charge and oodles of trophies.

How many trophies make up an "oodle"? He won the Premier League six times, the FA Cup three times, the League/EFL Cup five times, the Champions League once, and the Club World Cup once as well. Not counting the Community Shield or the UEFA Super Cup, that makes 15 major trophies in ten seasons. Only in two of those seasons (2016-17 and 2024-25) did City fail to win a major trophy (though they won the Community Shield in 2024).

Compare that with his tenure at Barcelona, where he won the league three times, the Copa del Rey twice, the Champions League twice, and the Club World Cup twice, for a total of 9 major trophies (again, not including Supercopas de España or UEFA Super Cups). And then there's Bayern Munich, where he won the league three times, the DFB-Pokal twice and the Club World Cup once, for 6 trophies.

His trophies per season at Barcelona were 2.25, at Bayern he won 2 per season, and at City a comparatively paltry 1.5 per season, though it's fair to say he had a similar level of dominance in each league. I've said I don't think the Premier League is as competitive as some make it out to be, but it's also true that the Bundesliga is pretty much a closed shop and the Spanish league is not that far off - six league titles in ten seasons, including one where they dominated so heavily that City racked up 100 points, is pretty impressive, no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, but his time at City elevated Pep into a cultural figure, such that he made an appearance in Ted Lasso and felt impelled to weigh in on topics like the war in Gaza or Catalan independence. His time at Barcelona was fortunate enough to coincide with Lionel Messi's, which made Guardiola something of an icon among fans, but coming to City felt a little bit like raising his profile globally. Which sounds weird, but because so much of world culture is in English, and so much of what isn't in English still looks to the Anglophone world, means that when he came to England, his face would become instantly recognizable.

Now, I don't know any Man City fans personally, so I can't vouch for how they see him, though I suspect many on the blue side of Manchester have named their children Pep in the years since he came to their club. But I think I can confidently say that, global cultural figure or not, Pep didn't make himself as associated with the club as Jürgen Klopp did at Liverpool - Klopp seems to have bought into the Liverpool ethos more readily than Pep did at City, and so became a beloved figure among the fans. I don't know if Guardiola's as associated with City, which is funny when you consider that the hierarchy at Manchester City is heavily Catalan precisely so they could bring Guardiola on.

That also points to one of the big criticisms I've seen leveled at Guardiola: that he's always played on easy mode. He cut his teeth at Barcelona, one of the world's richest clubs and the place where he learned to play the basics of the style he popularized; then he moved to Munich and Germany's most successful club, kicking off a run of 11 successive league titles; before taking the reins at a petrostate-backed sports washing project. I once watched an interview where a pundit suggested that Jose Mourinho, Guardiola's main rival in Spain, was a better coach because Pep had always managed such dominant clubs - I think that pundit might reconsider given Mourinho's subsequent performances at Manchester United, Spurs and elsewhere, but there's something to the criticism.

Certainly it's hard to imagine how well Guardiola would get on if he suddenly found himself managing a team in League Two, where the budget to buy the best player for every position just isn't there. Though it's also true that Mourinho always benefited from managing the biggest and/or richest teams too.

None of this is to say that I don't rate Guardiola. I absolutely do, more than Mourinho or Klopp, if I'm honest. Klopp may have become more of a local hero (and more of a local hero than a lot of preceding Liverpool managers, it has to be said), but he didn't upend the game the way Guardiola did at Barcelona or City. One of the podcasts I listen to mentioned how when Pep came to England, the style of play was more basic than now, but in 2026, even teams down in the lower leagues set up in the same way as Premier League teams, with play flowing out from goalkeepers in a way it never did before. 

I'm actually quite excited to see where Guardiola ends up next. He seems not to have ruled out managing in England again, but I hope he doesn't - big-name managers who come back always seem to end up plunging down the table until they find themselves relegated to the Championship (see Rafael Benitez at Newcastle). I'd actually like to see Pep take over in Italy, so that he can work his magic at one of the big clubs there - even potentially win a Champions League again. My preference would be for him to pitch up at Juventus, of course, but I can't deny that it would be exciting to see him in the dugout at Napoli, for example.

He might also come and manage the England national team, which feels like it would be a mismatch for his talents. His career is based on meticulous training with a team he's built in his own image, whereas at a national team he'd have to make do with whoever has that country's citizenship and he'd have them only a few days per month for qualifying campaigns. Which isn't to say it'd be fun to see what happened if Pep did manage England, but I just don't think it'd bring the dominance many are expecting.

As far as the future, it's been noted that Mikel Arteta, at Arsenal, learned his trade from Guardiola, which makes this campaign a fitting capstone to Guardiola's time in England. Another fitting capstone is that Pep's replacement at City will be Enzo Maresca, another Pep student. Though given what I've heard about Maresca's tactical inflexibility, I suspect he won't be quite as dominant as his mentor was.

It's unlikely that there will never be a Premier League manager as dominant as Guardiola, but I think I can say that none of the current crop seems like they'll be as dominant or influential on the way the game is played. But I'm eager to see the next chapter, for Pep, for City and for the Premier League as a whole.

Arsenal Are 2025-26 Premier League Champions

It's funny how the football league system works: because teams earn a certain amount of points for wins and draws, the aggregate of results over a season can make it so that a team wins the league through results elsewhere. So it was today with Bournemouth's draw with Manchester City in the Premier League, which handed victory to Arsenal despite them not even playing today.

Of course I've been following the league eagerly all season - both from general interest and because of my participation in various Fantasy Premier League mini-leagues. And it's been fun watching the ups and downs of Arsenal's campaign, with the constant question each week of whether this would be the match that Arsenal fucked up, or if it would be when Man City turned on the style and steamrolled to their inevitable victory. Despite a couple of hiccups, neither of those things happened.

I'll admit I haven't always been convinced by Arsenal, or by their manager Mikel Arteta, over the last few years. I think that's partly because I memory-holed the fact that they came second in each of the past three seasons, but also because they came second in each of the past three seasons, including one memorable year when they threw away not one but two sizable leads over City to lose at the very end of the season. 

It also felt like every season was the same thing with Arsenal, the same problems of not scoring enough goals, because they never seemed to have a good enough striker. Ironically, this season was kind of the same, as they win the league with the fifth-lowest goals tally (I think in the Premier League era). Much was made of their ugly style of play and reliance on set-pieces, particularly corners, but another way of looking at it is, for whatever reason this strategy clicked and was enough to keep Arsenal ahead of their competitors pretty much all season.

The thought that strikes me is that Arsenal seem to have broken the City-Liverpool duopoly of the last couple of seasons - the last time a team other than those two won the league was Chelsea in 2017. Arsenal winning this year bolsters the argument - which I don't entirely buy - that the Premier League is the most competitive big league in Europe. There's some truth to the argument, because the EPL isn't dominated by one big marquee team (like Germany or France) or by a pair of dominant teams (like Spain), but also, in the previous eight seasons, City won six titles, including an unprecedented four in a row.

The reason people think the Premier League is more competitive is because the pool of teams that can challenge for the title is larger than in Spain or Germany. There used to be talk of the "Top Six" teams in England, which were City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Manchester United. No matter that when this designation was coined, Liverpool hadn't won a top-flight title since 1990, or that Spurs hadn't done so since 1961 (and the less said about Spurs this season, the better). Arsenal also hadn't won since 2004, the Invincible season, and United hadn't won since 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson's last in charge.

It's worth noting that all of these teams have challenged for other big trophies in these past few years, even if they haven't always been competitive in the league. Liverpool won the Champions League in 2019, beating Spurs in the final, and Spurs won the Europa League last season against Manchester United. Arsenal have also qualified for Europe most seasons since their last title, so they've been doing well.

By comparison, since 2018 only two teams have won the Bundesliga (Bayern Munich and, just once, Bayer Leverkusen), two teams have won Ligue 1 in France (PSG and Lille, also just once), while in Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid have won most of the titles in that same period (and yes, the one-time outlier is Atletico Madrid). The only moderately competitive league in this same period has been Serie A, where there have been four winners (Juventus, Inter, Napoli and Milan), of whom all but Milan have won multiple titles.

That list of league winners across the top four leagues, plus France, is a who's-who of extremely rich clubs. It's worth remembering that for all the talk of Manchester City's alleged financial doping (what's happening with those 115 charges, btw?), the richest teams win the richest leagues, and they also win in Europe. Chelsea didn't win a Premier League title until Roman Abramovich contributed his billions, and both City and PSG are effectively petrostate sportswashing projects, so of course they have a lot of cash behind them.

There's perhaps a temptation to suggest that Arsenal winning this season is a David vs Goliath style triumph against football's one-percenters, but no, let's keep in mind that Arsenal are themselves in the one-percent. Indeed, the title sewn up today is Arsenal's 14th in their history, which makes them the third most successful club in terms of league titles won, after Liverpool and Manchester United. Arsenal may not have won as many leagues as their stature implies, but that's only because some club has always come up with even more cash than them to buy their way to league success.

(Incidentally, Arsenal have also won 14 FA Cups, which is more than any other club, so they have those trophies to fall back on too)

In terms of what's next for the Gunners, I'm even more excited to see how they'll do in the Champions League final against PSG at the end of the month. And looking farther forward, I found myself sizing them up against their league competition next season - Man City will have a new coach, in Enzo Maresca, Xabi Alonso will be new at Chelsea, and Michael Carrick will have entrenched himself more at Manchester United (unless they decide not to hire him after all?). All of these teams will have the summer to rebuild and realign their playing styles, as will Liverpool, which may yet have a new coach in the dugout come August.

Arsenal have already vowed to keep improving, which will hopefully make for a better title defense than what Liverpool mustered this year. Without getting too far ahead of myself, I'm looking forward to seeing how they get on next season.

Objectivism is Immoral

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

I'm really not a fan of Randian objectivist libertarianism, so the quote above has always resonated with me.

I remember in college I had a friend who identified as libertarian explain to me what exactly it meant. He said that, in his view, the government shouldn't own any land, so a libertarian government would immediately sell all public lands off. When I pointed out that meant that all the national parks would get sold to logging and mining companies, he shrugged and said that was just how the market would work. And that's when libertarianism lost me forever.

I've spoken before on this blog about how I'm big on rule of law. I believe I'm also on the record as being not the biggest fan of large corporations that distort markets and do what they want. Libertarianism would give us a lot of corporations doing whatever they want without worrying about downstream effects, and without being beholden to regulators or accountability.

The downstream effects thing is particularly important. In the objectivist view, companies shouldn't have to reckon with negative externalities, but that just means that everyone else would have to. But because the federal government would be effectively nonexistent ("small enough to drown in the bathtub", as many right-wingers like to say), cleanup wouldn't be the responsibility of taxpayers: there'd be no regulatory or centralized bodies to clean up oil spills and mining disasters and whatever else would happen. We'd just have to deal with the after effects of all these disasters individually.

If you don't believe me, Senator Rand Paul's reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that poisoned large sections of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was, "Sometimes accidents happen." This was, it needs to be noted, in reaction to the US government attempting to make BP clean up its mess. Paul is possibly the most objectivist member of either house of Congress - it's no coincidence that his first name is "Rand", after all.

Without imputing further motives or ideology to a sitting US Senator, I just want to reiterate how immoral that viewpoint is. In that worldview, a pharmaceutical company that poisons its customers would suffer no consequences, and the victims - or rather their next of kin - would have no recourse. And if you think that's a far-fetched example, look up the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisoning of 1937, which killed 100 people and led to the introduction of toxicity testing for food and drugs.

About the only good thing about libertarianism is that it doesn't mind people smoking pot, but unfortunately, most libertarians in the US are also Republican voters, so we get the worst of both worlds: libertarians who want to control what you do in the privacy of your own home, but who don't want to stop companies killing you in the course of doing business.

This is why it's so concerning to see the Liz Truss-Javier Milei wing of politics running rampant all over the world. And why it was so concerning to see people talk about Milei's policies as "interesting" back in 2024, after Donald Trump was re-elected, because some of Milei's shock treatment in Argentina has seen reductions in inflation, albeit at the cost of higher prices for individual households, but that was because Argentina was a basket-case, economically. When Liz Truss attempted to push through unfunded tax cuts in the UK in 2022, she spooked the markets so badly that she lasted just 45 days.

By contrast, I'm heartened by the example of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who's managed to fix a lot of quality of life issues like fixing potholes and clearing snow off the streets, while also balancing the budget without cutting social programs that people rely on. Instead of the libertarian view that the government can't do anything well, Mamdani's example is showing exactly how government is well-placed to fix certain things that the free market can't. I hope he'll manage to continue on like this, because government works when lawmakers understand what normal people need - libertarians can never understand that, and so they'll only ever offer cuts to regulations and services, all while everyone's daily life gets worse and worse.

Which is, as I say, immoral.

Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!

RIP Gerry Conway

Just saw the news yesterday that veteran comics pro Gerry Conway had passed away at the age of 73. That feels a bit untimely, given how long he's been in the comics biz, and the fact that a lot of other celebrity deaths these days come later in life.

I know Conway's work indirectly as the creator of Marvel's Punisher - a character that he initially seems to have intended as an antagonist, and about whom he was unhappy that the right wing had coopted the skull motif. I also knew he was the writer behind the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man, a story that I haven't read in its original form but which is so iconic that it formed the basis of several Spider-Man movies.

One place where I did encounter his work directly was his run on the Justice League of America in the 70s and 80s - I have a bunch of issues he wrote of the team in its original-ish incarnation, as well as the Detroit  era team that gave the world characters such as Gypsy, Vibe and Vixen, all of whom had some role on the CW's Arrowverse shows.

I'm also currently reading Conway's work on Daredevil, from the early 70s. He was the third main writer on that book, after Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and if Conway's run isn't as heralded as the later run by Frank Miller, it's still fascinating, given that he made Daredevil and Black Widow a couple for a while, even going so far as to give her top billing alongside Daredevil the original series.

Another fun fact is that Conway wrote a bunch of TV scripts, including for Law & Order. For me, the TV credit I'm most excited about is the Batman: The Animated Series episode Appointment in Crime Alley, which is one of the best episodes of that show.

More recently, I followed Conway on Twitter (before I left that platform), and loved seeing his takes on politics, which were always pretty spot-on.

As I mentioned, Conway worked for Marvel and then DC way back in the 70s, making him just a generation or two removed from the classic Silver Age cohort of creators. That longevity meant, as Kurt Busiek noted on Bluesky yesterday, that Conway ended up writing almost every major character or team from the Big 2, as well as for a great many publishers over the decades. He may not have been one of the biggest names in the business, but that impressive bibliography means he knew what he was doing.

It's just a shame he's not acknowledged in the credits of the new Daredevil show! I hope for the last episode of Season 2 they'll acknowledge him - it'd be a nice gesture.

Catching Up With the Bendis Run on X-Men

In my ongoing read-through of the X-Men oeuvre on Marvel Unlimited, give or take a few series here and there, I've just finished the two-year run by Brian Michael Bendis on Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men. Bendis took over after the Avengers vs X-Men crossover, which he co-wrote with a bunch of other creators, and his issues focused on the fallout of that storyline up until the eve of the next big crossover event, Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars.

(I fully expect to write a blog post about Secret Wars, eventually)

I've spent the days since I finished Bendis's run on those books considering their legacy. Overall I liked them better than I expected to, and better than some of the stuff that came before AvX, though it also feels a little unfinished - which it is, because apparently Bendis left the X-books early due to not wanting to get involved with another big X-crossover later on. His Uncanny issues focused on Cyclops and his mutant revolution, with a group of new mutants that seem not to have done anything interesting since, while his All-New issues focused on time-displaced versions of the original five X-Men (don't ask), plus their professor Kitty Pryde and Wolverine's clone/daughter, X-23.

I think I liked All-New better, for a few reasons. One is that I liked the art better overall - the series started out being drawn by Stuart Immonen, a creator whose work I remember from DC back in the 1990s, and was later drawn by Mahmud Asrar, whose work I know from later issues. I also preferred the mix of characters - the original X-Men get to see their futures, and because everything is so screwed up, they go off in their own directions for a while and do interesting things, sometimes independent of each other. And finally, X-23 has become one of my favorite characters, so I feel that adding her to any book classes it up quite a bit.

This wasn't my first time reading part of Bendis's run, by the way. A friend gave me a bunch of back issues of both series a few years ago, which was my first update on what was happening in the X-books since the end of Grant Morrison's New X-Men. I was taken by the idea behind All-New X-Men back then, and some of the stuff in Uncanny was cool, too, though I think the Matthew Malloy/Last Will and Testament of Professor X storyline was a bit of a whiff. The new characters introduced by Bendis and artist Chris Bachalo didn't make as much of an impression, and there were so many of them that they didn't get much development.

I do recall being a little annoyed on learning back then that Bendis had taken on the X-books - I guess I'd formed a kind of negative impression of his Marvel work since Ultimate Spider-Man back in the early 2000s. Having now read his issues of these books, I know that negative impression wasn't fair, and it does make me want to go back and read more Miles Morales, whom he created after I stopped reading the Ultimate books.

That said, a check on Reddit revealed that a lot of fans don't seem to rate Bendis's run on these books so highly. They cite the kind of damp-squib ending of Uncanny and the abrupt end of his time on the books as reasons why the run feels half-baked compared to some other writers' tenures. And definitely Bendis isn't ranking anywhere near Morrison or Hickman for me, to say nothing of Claremont - but as I mentioned, there are aspects that I liked more than, say Ed Brubaker's time or even Kieron Gillen's tenure. The fact that Bendis explores how Cyclops has gone to an extreme position in his fight to protect mutants is fascinating. I also appreciate how the justification Bendis has Cyclops give for killing Professor X doesn't ring true - because it should feel like BS.

The upshot is, now that I've actually gotten a better look at Bendis's work in the context of the regular Marvel Universe, I'm more eager to check out his work on books like Avengers and the Dark Reign storyline. It also makes me think I should have another look at the Ultimate books, especially the ones written by him, rather than those written by certain other creators. It's good to be able to revisit certain prejudices about a given book or creator, and to discover stuff I want to read next.

10 Years Since Leicester City Won the Premier League

I finally got a chance to listen to the Totally Football Show's episode looking back at Leicester City's history English Premier League triumph in the 2015-16 season. They published it a week or two ago, but my podcast listening was disrupted for a while, so I wasn't able to listen to it until this weekend. It was a good reminder of that exciting campaign, if a little sad to also consider the stuff that's happened to Leicester City since then.

I followed it all from this side of the Atlantic, because I'd moved to the US by then. In a way it was better to follow it like that, because the results were there to look at when I woke up on weekends, and the Guardian's Football Weekly was usually ready when I woke up on Monday mornings to catch up on their discussion of the weekend's action. Though it also must have been fun to be a football fan watching Leicester City's campaign unfold as it did in real-time.

The podcast talks about all the stuff that made up the ingredients for Leicester's season - from assembling a team of genuinely good players from unlikely sources, to the hiring of Claudio Ranieri after a sex-tape scandal involving the son of the previous manager, Nigel Pearson. But it also makes the point, which I didn't know, that Leicester's form for that title-winning season was actually a continuation of the end of the previous season, when they'd been anchored to the foot of the table for most of the year and only pulled themselves out of the relegation zone in the last couple of months of the 2014-15 season.

Which leads to speculation about whether Pearson could have overseen the run at the title, or if he was too conservative to go for it. That question can't be answered, but it's also true that when Leicester hired Ranieri, he was coming off a disastrous four-match run as the manager of the Greek national team, which had ended after his team had lost to the Faroe Islands. That was on top of Ranieri's reputation in England as the "tinker man", who always futzed around with his lineups to the detriment of actually winning stuff - and it has to be said, he'd never won a league title until that season with Leicester.

One thing that the podcast didn't go into too much detail about, although they did touch on it, was how that season turned Tottenham Hotspur into one of the "big six" sides for many years, on the strength of players like Harry Kane and Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen, among others. It feels odd to think about when you consider that Spurs are in active danger of relegation - as I type, they're in 18th place in the league table, a point off from safety, having conceded a late equalizer in this weekend's match.

Spurs are, in a way, traveling along a similar trajectory to Leicester City, which saw a lot of things go well that season, but neither team was able to capitalize on those positives in subsequent seasons. Leicester suffered some off-pitch tragedy as well, such as when their owner died in a helicopter crash right outside the stadium, but there were a lot of decisions that didn't pan out as the club's executives hoped - and Spurs did it to themselves as well, in hiring a selection of managers post 2016 who each left the club weaker than when they left - last season's Europa League triumph notwithstanding.

Leicester's story is one that repeats itself every few years, at different league levels: a team that overextends itself to chase success, and then finds itself suffering relegation and financial chaos. But, even though Leicester is currently in danger of relegation to English football's third tier, at least they can boast that their grasp for the stars actually paid off and led to a league title.