Gündogan joins Manchester City heroes in a win for the club’s people

The greatest lie in sport is that winners embody strength and character, that losers embody frailty and brittleness. That victory is the inevitable function of mental fortitude and warrior spirit, and defeat its opposite.

Manchester City’s eighth English league title was clinched at their moment of greatest weakness, in one of their worst performances of the season, from a place where all hope had deserted them. And it felt perfect.

As delirious fans hurdled the barriers and poured on to the great green expanse, as the goalframe into which City had scored three goals in five minutes caved and snapped under the weight of the throngs atop it, you could already sense the events of the afternoon passing into legend. History will lend this game a ring of inevitability. The record books will simply log it as another City title: their fourth in five years, Pep Guardiola’s 10th, another silhouette to add to the mural. We will spend the days ahead chewing over where it was won and lost, what City did right and Liverpool did wrong, what it means for the legacy.

But none of this will really capture the utter despondency that gripped this stadium: the incoherence, the frustration, the rage and anguish of a team and their people staring into the abyss.

Sometimes it can be hard to glimpse the human face behind this sprawling super-club, with its empire of satellites, its bottomless pockets, its frictionless passing triangles, the sense of something pristine and merciless that you will never quite be able to touch. City is money, it’s a political project, it’s art, it’s vanity, it’s power. But like any club it’s also its people, people who suffer and fear like any other. And for 76 minutes City showed us something we have so rarely