Fred Done had been a bookmaker for more than three decades, with more than 100 betting shops across the north west of England, before he unwittingly stumbled upon a brilliant but expensive way to make more people aware of his brand.
In March 1998 he announced he was paying out early on the Premier League title race. Manchester United were 11 points clear of second-placed Blackburn Rovers and 12 points clear of third-placed Arsenal. Both of the chasers had games in hand — three in Arsenal’s case — but, as far as the bookie was concerned, it was all over.
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What happened next should serve as a warning to anyone rushing to declare this season’s Premier League title race a formality now that Manchester City are two points clear at the top. Manchester United won just two of their next seven matches, while Arsenal won their next 10 and were confirmed as champions with two games to spare, going on to win the FA Cup for good measure.
Done calculated that paying out early had cost his firm £500,000 (about $623,000 at today’s exchange rates). Was it worth it for the publicity? “Definitely not,” he insisted. But it happened to be a drop in the ocean at a time of huge growth for the firm, now known as Betfred with an annual turnover of billions of pounds.
The early pay-outs kept coming, usually well-judged (backing Chelsea just seven games into the 2005-06 season and Leicester City with seven games left in 2015-16) but occasionally not. In 2012 Manchester United moved five points clear of Manchester City with seven games remaining and Done paid out again — only for Manchester United to stutter and hand the initiative back to their neighbours, who ended up securing their first league title in 44 years in the most dramatic circumstances imaginable.
The point is that these things happen. Or rather they used to happen back in the days when there was more jeopardy and fallibility in the title race. You would have to go back a decade to Steven Gerrard’s and Liverpool’s infamous slip against Chelsea at Anfield in April 2014 to find the last time a team blew a winning position in the final few weeks of a Premier League campaign.
So Done probably felt he was on safe ground when he announced on Monday, less than 24 hours after shock defeats for Liverpool and Arsenal at home to Crystal Palace and Aston Villa respectively, that Betfred was paying out on Manchester City — a £750,000 pay-out with, according to the bookmaker, “no danger”.
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But surely the danger — to Manchester City and, by extension, to publicity-seeking bookmakers — is that the margins in this sport are thin and that, at this time of the season, faced with a congested schedule and excruciating tension, slip-ups and setbacks can happen even if, in the era of Pep Guardiola, we have become conditioned to think otherwise.
In a team sport, it can be hard to know when to ascribe mistakes to failures of nerve, concentration, technique or anything else. Has Liverpool’s loss of composure in front of goal over the past two weeks been a question of nerve or is it simply a case of Mohamed Salah struggling to recover his rhythm after an injury lay-off and Darwin Nunez… well, being Darwin Nunez?
But “choking” under pressure is a long-established phenomenon in elite sport. In a 2013 paper for the International Journal of Sport Psychology, Drs Christopher Mesagno and Denise Hill defined it as “an acute and considerable decrease in skill execution and performance when self-expected standards are normally achievable, which is the result of increased anxiety under perceived pressure”.
Think Greg Norman at the Masters in August 1996, starting the final round with a six-stroke lead over Nick Faldo and ending up five strokes adrift. “I’m probably the only guy in the world who thinks, ‘I don’t know if I can hold it’,” he reportedly told sports psychologist Rick Jensen at the time.
Think Bill Buckner’s error at first base for Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series as the fabled “Curse of the Bambino” began to look irreversible. Buckner always put it down to a “bad bounce” — and certainly the television footage gives that some credence — but he had spoken before that World Series about “the nightmares (…) that you’re gonna let the winning run score on a ground ball through your legs”, which hints at the anxieties that are there in the background when the biggest, most pressurised games come around.
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Or just look at what is happening in the Championship, with Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Leeds United all so impressive all season in the battle for two automatic promotion places… and then suddenly afflicted by nerves in the final weeks of the campaign. Between them they have one win, three draws and five defeats in the last three rounds of matches.
The most infamous “choke” of the Premier League era was Gerrard’s slip against Chelsea.
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Even he struggles, a decade on, to explain whether he lost his nerve, his focus or just his footing.
But what seems certain is that Gerrard and his team-mates appeared “choked” by the setback, the free-flowing football that had taken them to the brink of the title suddenly replaced by self-doubt — both that day against Chelsea and again after the tide began to turn against his team at Crystal Palace eight days later.
The forgotten aspect about the Gerrard slip is that it had taken a series of “chokes”, to one degree or another, to put Liverpool into a position where the league titles was theirs to lose.
Arsenal were top for much of that season but then came a nine-game run that brought two wins, three draws and four utterly chastening defeats (including 5-1 at Liverpool and 6-0 at Chelsea). A 14-match unbeaten run (11 wins, three draws) took Chelsea to the summit but then they lost three games out of six between mid-March and mid-April. Manchester City were the bookies’ new favourites but they lost 3-2 at Liverpool and then drew 2-2 at home to Sunderland. Only then was the baton passed to Liverpool, who dropped it before City gratefully picked it up and ran all the way home.
The 2011-12 season had seen something similar. Manchester City had led from the front for almost the entire campaign, but between mid-March and early April they faltered badly, winning one game out of five and handing the initiative to Manchester United. After a 1-0 defeat at Arsenal a football writer not a million miles from here mused in The Times of London about a “knockout blow”, saying that “mathematically City are still in the hunt, but spiritually they have waved the white flag”.
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It felt like a fair observation at the time, particularly given the nature of their performance that day, featuring a crass red card for Mario Balotelli in the closing stages. But what followed, again somewhat forgotten in Premier League folklore, was a Manchester United blow-up: a defeat at Wigan Athletic and a 4-4 draw at home to Everton (from 4-2 up with seven minutes left). And when Manchester City, having quietly got back on track, beat them in the derby at the Etihad Stadium, it was back in their hands with two games remaining.
Even then, there was time for a truly spectacular choke. Needing to beat relegation-threatened Queens Park Rangers on the final day, they went 1-0 up before falling 2-1 down in the second half and, for 25 minutes or so, appearing dumbfounded, dominating possession but looking unsure how to use it. The composure and incisive quality they were known for had deserted them. As captain Vincent Kompany said in the club’s 93:20 documentary, “It just felt like we completely threw it away.”
And then it happened: an Edin Dzeko equaliser in the second minute of stoppage time before Sergio Aguero struck two minutes later to turn that numb, nauseous feeling inside the Etihad into something like euphoric disbelief.
Sometimes it is not about whether a team will hold their nerve as the stakes are raised and the pressure intensifies. It is about whether they will rediscover their composure when, almost inevitably, things go awry.
Even Guardiola’s all-conquering Manchester City team, on course for a sixth Premier League title in seven seasons, have found themselves staring into the abyss in the final weeks of title races.
In 2018-19, with Liverpool chasing them right to the wire, they produced a nerve-fraught performance at home to Leicester City in their penultimate game and seemed to be running out of ideas when Kompany, in apparent desperation, let fly from 30 yards and scored the goal of his life with 20 minutes remaining. On the final day, away to Brighton, they fell behind but hit back immediately and won 4-1 to retain the title.
On the penultimate weekend of the 2021-22 season Manchester City found themselves 2-0 down at half-time at West Ham United. They forced their way back onto level terms, but still Riyad Mahrez missed a penalty in the final minutes. A week later, needing to win to see off Liverpool once and for all, they were 2-0 down at home to Aston Villa with 15 minutes remaining… only to hit back with three goals in five minutes — Ilkay Gundogan, Rodri and Gundogan again — and end up as champions again.
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It is a different matter when a title race is a procession, like those enjoyed by Manchester City in 2017-18 and Liverpool in 2019-20 or indeed Bayer Leverkusen in the Bundesliga this season. But when the pressure is on, with two or three teams challenging for the prize, the susceptibility to doubt and human error seems far greater.
That is what Arsenal and Liverpool will be praying for: hoping that Manchester City slip up in their final six games (two at home, four away) and that, if that happens, they will have recovered from their own setbacks and put themselves in a position to capitalise.
The strong temptation is to say there will be no slip-ups, that Manchester City, like the most formidable long-distance runner, have once again timed it to perfection and will simply cruise home from here. Take a look at the three tight title races they have had previously under Guardiola (competing with Liverpool in 2018-19 and 2021-22 and Arsenal last season) and you will see they rarely drop a point in the run-in when the pressure is on.
Even the jolt of elimination from the Champions League by Real Madrid on Wednesday evening has been widely perceived as a boost to City’s domestic ambitions — a lighter schedule, more time to recover mentally and physically between matches — rather than the apparent body blow suffered by Arsenal the same evening. Few would be shocked if it turns out that way, but it is far from a certainty.
This Manchester City team has not looked as imperious and as flawless as some of those that went before. And history — even their own recent history of almost uninterrupted success — tells you that even if Guardiola’s team are clear favourites now, there will be moments over the next few weeks when energy is lacking, when frustration mounts, when mistakes arise and when the usual inspiration feels suddenly elusive.
If anything, Arsenal’s and Liverpool’s experiences on Sunday underline the precarious nature of this title race in which, even now, they are only two points behind. The big question this season is not so much whether Manchester City will win out from here but whether, if the champions drop points, either Arsenal or Liverpool have the quality and the mentality to capitalise.
Mistakes will happen. At this stage of the season it is all about which team makes fewest — and ensuring that, if and when those mistakes happen, a slip or a stumble does not become a fall. Either way, it seems safe to predict a few anxious moments ahead, not least for one Manchester bookmaker.
(Top photos, from left: Declan Rice, Erling Haaland and Mohamed Salah; Getty Images)
