Culture
The Briefing: Will City win five in a row? What hurt Arsenal most? Will you remember Mateta?
Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
It was the weekend when we closed the lid on another long and eventful Premier League campaign. Manchester City were crowned champions, Arsenal came up short, and Liverpool said goodbye to Jurgen Klopp.
Here, we will ask whether we should expect City’s record-breaking dominance to continue, if Arsenal can take any crumbs of comfort from finishing as runners-up once more, and if we should all have been paying more attention to Jean-Philippe Mateta.
What chance Manchester City make it five in a row?
It’s basically that old Gary Lineker quote, isn’t it? Premier League football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a football around over 380 matches and in the end, Manchester City win the title.
It is not only six titles in seven seasons for City, but now four in a row, an unprecedented level of dominance in English football history, let alone the post-1992 era. Jack Grealish flicking sky blue ticker tape out of his hair during a jocular Sky Sports interview now comes around as regularly as Christmas.
“This is our period,” declared Pep Guardiola in response to his side making history. Nobody can argue with that and most worryingly of all for City’s rivals is the sense that they could quite easily extend this era of dominance further. After four in a row, what chance five?
That is not a foregone conclusion. City always experience bumps in the road along the way in a title race and even when they are ultimately triumphant, there are sliding door moments for their closest challengers to look back on and curse.
This season was no different in that respect. One win in six between November and December, following on from back-to-back defeats in the autumn, left room for doubt to creep in. All season long, City’s performances have only occasionally equalled the level of those during the run-in towards last year’s treble.
City celebrate their fourth successive Premier League title (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
And yet following that wobble in the winter, Guardiola’s side took 57 of a possible 63 points. They once again overcame a momentary mid-season blip to ultimately reclaim their spot on top. And each time they do, it becomes that little less surprising.
City have established this pedigree over more than a decade. This is the sixth genuine Premier League title race involving them — following 2012, 2014, 2019, 2022 and 2023. City have triumphed each and every time.
That Guardiola’s side have been pushed close in the last three years consecutively is the strongest argument against the idea that a league once widely viewed as the world’s most competitive has become a procession. The swings in fortune witnessed this season prove that is not yet the case.
But even so, the end result was predictable. Ever since that first triumph under Guardiola in 2017-18 — their imperious, record-breaking 100-point campaign — most would have picked City out as title favourites before each following season and, five out of six times, they would have been correct.
With Guardiola committed for at least another season, only minor business necessary in the summer market and no timeframe for a decision on the 115 alleged breaches of Premier League financial regulations (all of which they deny), who would bet against yet another celebratory Grealish interview this time next year?
What was harder for Arsenal — collapsing or coming up short?
There is no good way to lose a league title, no easy way to do so either, but there are some ways that are better than others. Not that Arsenal’s players particularly wanted to hear that once the final whistles had sounded at the Etihad and the Emirates.
Mikel Arteta’s players took their fate hard, understandably so. Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz and Oleksandr Zinchenko joined many of those in the stands by shedding a tear at coming up short.
Their tally of 89 points equals the record for a runner-up in the pre-Guardiola era — the same total as Manchester United in 2011-12. Only Liverpool have taken more and still come second, with a remarkable 97 points in 2018-19.
But like Liverpool that year, Arsenal can console themselves with the fact they pushed City hardest at the most critical stage of the campaign. As many expected, Arteta’s side needed to be perfect down the stretch. They almost were, winning 15 of their final 17 games and dropping only five points.
Can Arsenal recover to finally win the league next season? (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
Last season’s disappointment was of an altogether different character — a lead lost, then a slow death measured out over two wins in eight games and 15 points dropped at the decisive stage. The sense of doom set in gradually.
This time, the knowledge they would not be champions came sharply and suddenly upon learning of City’s victory. That will always hurt more in the moment.
But until the very last, there was hope. And with this season’s stronger finish, there can be greater cause for optimism. This is the third-youngest squad in the league, founded on a core of developing talent, led by a brilliant coach who has learned at the knee of the master.
As hard as it is to back against Guardiola, even the City manager himself said this week that he is convinced Arsenal will be his closest challengers for the foreseeable future. It is hard not to agree after watching Arteta’s side take the champions to the wire.
Is Mateta’s magnificence in danger of being memory-holed?
Did you know that Jean-Philippe Mateta is the Premier League’s joint-top scorer since the turn of the year?
The only players to have matched the Crystal Palace striker’s 14 goals since the start of 2024 are Phil Foden and Cole Palmer, who were named the top flight’s player of the year and young player of the year respectively this weekend.
Now, nobody is suggesting that Foden’s gong should be sitting on Mateta’s mantelpiece instead, but the 26-year-old’s late bloom is the sort of thing that can easily go unheralded in the long run, memory-holed because it happens after the voting ballots have been handed in, the awards have been dished out and the narrative of a season has already been written.
No player has scored more Premier League goals this year than Mateta (Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
That is especially the case on the final day when, with so much happening at once, it is easy for events like Mateta’s hat-trick against Aston Villa and surge up the scoring charts to be overlooked.
There were two goals in Sunday’s games worthy of consideration as the best of the season, with Moises Caicedo scoring from the halfway line at Chelsea and Mohammed Kudus’ acrobatic overhead kick against City.
By setting himself up for the goal, there is an argument to say Kudus’ strike was even superior to Alejandro Garnacho’s against Everton back in November.
At least the Premier League’s official goal of the season award is typically only handed out once all is said and done, which should give Kudus a chance to pip Garnacho to the prize. As for Mateta, he may just have to settle for the 2024-25 Golden Boot.
Coming up
- On Tuesday, Gareth Southgate will announce his England squad for this summer’s European Championship. It is only a provisional squad for now, but we’ll know which players on the fringes have a hope of a place on the plane and which will be watching from their sofa this summer
- Of course, the far bigger deal on Tuesday will be The Athletic’s end-of-season awards, celebrating the best of the best across the Premier League, Women’s Super League, EFL and European football. Mateta may or may not be a winner
- On Wednesday it’s the Europa League final at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium between Atalanta and treble-hunting Bayer Leverkusen, with Xabi Alonso’s side fresh off the back of completing an unbeaten Bundesliga campaign this weekend
- Once the small matter of a Manchester derby FA Cup final is out of the way on Saturday, we can get down to what everyone’s looking forward to over the coming weeks — rampant, relentless speculation on the future of Erik ten Hag
- Defending champions Barcelona will be hoping to win their third Women’s Champions League title against Lyon on Saturday
- And on Sunday, it is what we’re legally obliged to refer to as the most lucrative game in football — the Championship play-off final between Leeds and Southampton
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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