Pep Guardiola takes Manchester City back to the future in 4-2 win against Tottenham - The Warm-Up

For fifteen perfect minutes, all the fighting was over. Spurs were beating Manchester City 2-0 at the Etihad, Arsenal were champions-elect, and north London was at peace. One great gorgeous half-and-half scarf of a result, all tied up in a bow.

It couldn't last. The universe is powered by discord and misery, and that's just if you're a Spurs fan. But while the path to the result was a twisty, strange, mildly hilarious one, the eventual result was about what everybody expected. City win by two goals? Sounds about right. Probably won't bother watching.

All that said, City still aren't quite right. Pep Guardiola knows this, which is why Pep Guardiola is trying things. Shuffling, reshuffling. His preferred number of strikers is zero, for ideological reasons, but generally he plays one as a compromise. Here he sent out two in what looked suspiciously like a 4-4-2. History's most deluxe big man/little man combo - Niall Quinn and Kevin Phillips studded with Swarovski crystals.

In the end, City were a bit too fluid and Julian Alvarez did a bit too much running around for this to be a proper Mike Bassett turn. But the lesson of the first half wasn't really the Tottenham goals, except inasmuch as they confirm City's worrying habit of conceding goals in clusters. No, it was the continuation of City's recent lethargy, their inability to spin up to that rhythm where the passes snap across the pitch and the opposition start to shake and crumble.

Hugo Lloris is currently the most nervous creature in existence, a colony of meerkats dressed in a keepers' kit for tax reasons. Send a vaguely threatening shot in his direction and all of his limbs try to run away in different directions. And he had a relatively chill first 45 minutes.

The Warm-Up, like the rest of you, expected sweeping changes from Pep Guardiola at half-time. There were boos! Boos. And what's the point of having the most terrifying bench in the league if you're not going to use it. But instead, the eleven that started were sent back out there to make amends: not so much "Lads, it's Tottenham" as "Lads, you're City".

And so they were, for the first time in a week or so. And Spurs were very Spurs, and Lloris was just as "oh, Hugo" as ever, and the universe corrected itself in accordance with Newton's fourth law: the force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration times its Spursiness. North London can't stand north London again, and all is right in the world.

Well, sort of. The eventual result may have been as expected but the consequences will be interesting. More evidence for the 'Conte should move on' faction in Tottenham's rumbling argument, perhaps. And over on the City side of things, is this sort-of-4-4-2 going to be the long-term solution to the Haaland Problem, if indeed there is such a thing as the Haaland Problem? 'I'll drop Kevin De Bruyne' certainly seems counter-intuitive to the point of active self-sabotage, but hey, it worked.

"Get me Mykhailo Mudryk!" "He's gone to Chelsea." "Then get me his 28-year-old Belgian equivalent!"

On the face of it, there's something a little bit peculiar about Arsenal's apparent transfer strategy. We can only assume that there was something in Mudryk's profile that simply no other promising young player could provide right now. Those blond curtains, perhaps. But up until Chelsea got involved, Mikel Arteta and friends absolutely thought they had a place in their squad for a 22-year-old with a big old price tag and expectations of first-team football. The Project wanted him.

But having failed to spend a large pile of money on an exciting youngster, Arsenal are taking a portion of that money to Brighton, where they will exchange it for Leandro Trossard. Who is 28. And - all together now - who will stay that way until he's 29.

It's all a question of what a transfer is for. Arsenal, having been denied their Mudryk-future, have recalibrated their sights to the present moment. In a funny sort of way, it's almost like Arsenal's staff have had the same realisation as everybody else: they are now in charge of the title race. They are leaders, they are favourites. And so nothing matters now but the charge for the line.

And so, Trosssard: settled in England, settled in the Premier League, available relatively cheaply, and theoretically quite compatible with Artetaball. He comes to make a difference in the next six months, not the next six years, and he won't be expecting to have the first team reoriented around his arrival. The overriding concern for all teams in Arsenal's position is to learn the lessons of the past. First you don't sign Rodney Marsh, and then you don't sign Faustino Asprilla.

Whether or not Marsh can be blamed for costing City the title in 1973 is a question for historians. As for 1996, Asprilla seems to get a lot of blame that might be better apportioned to Newcastle's dodgy defence and Manchester United's ludicrous, Eric Cantona-inspired run of 14 wins in 16 games. But the principle is probably a sound one: if your first team is purring along, don't get fancy. Get sensible.

If Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka are both kidnapped by pirates on February 1, then the lack of a Mudryk may start to look problematic. If Trossard's falling out with Brighton heralds a proper heel turn, and he starts sowing discord in his new dressing room, then this will start to look ill-advised. But if he spends the next few months coming on after an hour, starting the occasional game, and generally taking some of the load from those around him, then job done. There's a title to be won. Next season is next season's problem.

Speaking of Chelsea, did you hear that they're buying Noni Madueke? Speaking of Chelsea, did you hear that they're in for Moises Caicedo? Speaking of Chelsea— oh dear, Todd Boehly's bought the rest of this paragraph.

We're well beyond ridiculous now, heading off into the lands of the baffling. Chelsea are now in a position where they need to maintain a rolling injury crisis, otherwise Graham Potter will have too many options available to him and will find himself overwhel— ugh, sorry, it's happened again.

It's interesting to wonder how involved Potter is in any of this. It's certainly possible that he came into the club, looked at the squad, and said to his new bosses 'Nah, I don't like it. Get me another one.' But that doesn't really jibe with his reputation as a coach: Brighton generally sold when they had to, and otherwise he worked with what— oh come on, this is getting ridiculous.

And it was that reputation as a coach that got him the job in the first place. Not his skills at managing a dressing room filled with superstars of the past, the present and the future. Perhaps Potter is a consummately skilled politician, able to keep everybody pointing the same way whatever the circumstances. For his sake, we hope so. Because he's going to be dropping a lot of players that— what? No! We had a good joke lined up for the end of that one!

Presumably Chelsea are gearing up for a big fire sale over the summer. And perhaps that will balance the books and a new and unified squad will emerge, one of sensible size and unified purpose. Boehly has his eyes on the future. He's thinking six, seven, eight years ahead. So if the present looks like a bit of a mess, well, that's all part of the— sigh. Fine. We'll take a cheque.

Somebody pop the Succession music over this video of Barcelona's players travelling by helicopter, please and thank you.

In a bid to actually understand what's going on with Chelsea, we turned to every football fan's favourite finance nerd, The Swiss Ramble. And we weren't disappointed. By our count, the word "amortisation" appears in this piece 18 times. Must be a record.

"Chelsea have generated an impressive £413m profit from player sales in the last five years, including good money from academy graduates, who represent pure profit. This was by far the highest in the top flight, significantly more than their rivals, e.g. the next highest was Liverpool with £274m."

Do click through to have a look at the fancy words and fancy graphs, but the broad picture seems to be that Chelsea will likely be fine under the Premier League's rules regarding profit and sustainability, and probably okay within UEFA's FFP regulations. For the moment. But they need to sell some players for decent money, and they really, really, really need the Champions League.

Mudryk's signing has confirmed what we all knew: the nineties are back. Curtains! Big jeans! Arsenal being good again! And so we have a request to make of the refereeing community. Please bring back this penalty-giving technique. The old 'jab furiously at the spot while running as quickly as possible in the opposite direction, backwards'.

Also back: the Bundesliga! And it kicks off with a cracker, old money against new. League leaders Bayern Munich travel to RB Leipzig, who sit six points behind in third. In the Championship, leaders Burnley host good-again West Brom.