Pep Guardiola walks into unthinkable £10m Arsenal glitch with Man City

As late as November, you would have got good money on not a word of Pep Guardiola's first press conference of the week mentioning Arsenal.

You might not have got much money in what is a pretty niche market, but still: the top two sides in England for the last two years are playing each other on Sunday and nobody mentioned it to Guardiola on Tuesday. It went by without a mention, and nobody batted an eyelid.

Add it to the list of very strange things to have happened this season, but good luck convincing anyone at the beginning of it that Club Brugge at home was going to be more important to City this week than Arsenal away. Welcome to 2024/25 Manchester City.

There's a bit of Arsenal to it as well in the fact that Mikel Arteta's side have struggled more than anybody thought either. They still have a chance of catching Liverpool in the Premier League but their efforts have been more concentrated on refereeing conspiracies and the different trajectories of different balls.

With City down in fourth place, their trip to the Emirates will not have any kind of the heat that their last two visits have had - or the feisty 2-2 at the Etihad in September when it still looked as if both would be the main players again in the title race. The two clubs still don't like each other very much, but the prizes they are fighting for are not as big.

The blunt new reality is that City can afford to lose on Sunday and still qualify for next season's Champions League, whereas if they do not beat Club Brugge on Wednesday they will be dumped out of this year's Champions League without the past safety net offered by the Europa League. No win means no European football for at least eight months.

That would hurt City's pride, but it would also hit