Assessing Man City's four-peat, Liverpool's goodbye to Klopp, more: Marcotti recaps the weekend

This weekend saw the English Premier League, German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1 seasons come to an end, with Manchester City, Bayer Leverkusen and Paris Saint-Germain all crowned champions. Only the first one was a bit dramatic, though Arsenal's win over Everton couldn't deny Pep Guardiola's side from a historic fourth straight league title. At the same time, Liverpool said farewell to Jurgen Klopp, whose nine-year tenure came to an end with a party atmosphere at Anfield and a 2-0 win over Wolves.

Elsewhere, Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund tuned up for the UEFA Champions League final with very different performances, Juventus fired embattled manager Max Allegri despite a week in which they won the Coppa Italia, and the future is uncertain for Mauricio Pochettino at Chelsea and Erik Ten Hag at Man United.

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It's Monday. Gab Marcotti reacts to the biggest moments in the world of football.

Ultimately, Sunday was somewhat anticlimactic.

Two early Phil Foden goals appeared to send Manchester City on their way to another title. We got some drama when, in the space of a minute, Takehiro Tomiyasu equalised for Arsenal against Everton and Mohamed Kudus' ridiculous overhead kick pulled one back for West Ham at the Etihad. But even then, it was going to take a two-goal swing -- the visitors equalising at Manchester City and Arsenal finding a winner -- to shift the title away from Pep Guardiola's crew. Rodri's goal, just before the hour mark, ensured that would not happen.

It was fitting, then, that those two -- Foden and Rodri -- should score. Foden has been on a vertical rise over the past few seasons, and in 2023-24 he cemented his spot as one of the best in the world. He finishes with 19 league goals, all but two from open play. Only Erling Haaland (20) and Ollie Watkins (19) have more, the difference being that the other two are center-forwards while Foden spent much of the season out wide. That may soon change: He started centrally on Sunday, and with Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva not getting any younger, it's pretty obvious his future is likely to be in the No. 10 role.

As for Rodri, he's the most -- possibly the only -- irreplaceable chess piece on Guardiola's board. His work off the ball has earned him comparisons with Sergio Busquets, which for a certain type of football connoisseur is the highest praise you can get. But Rodri is also a force in possession. He has 19 goals over the past three seasons, which is more than Busquets scored in 15 seasons at Barca. He also had nine assists in the league this season, a ridiculous amount for a guy who spends much of the game shielding the back four.

It speaks volumes about the strength in depth of this side that you can pick out arguably their two best players and neither is named Kevin or Erling, but that's the nature of what Guardiola and City have built. Four consecutive English titles (a record) and six in the past seven years is hegemony, pure and simple, even in these hyper-polarised times, where the gap between haves and have-nots grows greater every year.

Critics will point to the 115 charges facing the club for a whole range of financial irregularities as somehow taking the gloss off these achievements. Make no mistake about it: If they are found guilty, they should be punished severely because many of those charges amount to cheating. And it wouldn't just be an ethical and sporting infraction; in what is now a business, it would be a major case of fraud, with investors in rival clubs having a strong case that City's actions cost them money.

But more than one thing can be true. As I've pointed out in the past, even if all the charges are proved and they cheated their way to their financial might, that might is not significantly greater than that of their competition. Whether your chosen metric is wage bill or transfer spending or both, City's spending is comparable to that of Europe's biggest clubs. It alone cannot and does not explain their success. That's where the credit has to go to Guardiola, to his staff (both backroom and front office) and to the players.

The scary thing is that City can get better. Sure, De Bruyne and Kyle Walker will get older, but players like Foden, Jérémy Doku, Julián Álvarez and Josko Gvardiol can all improve. So too can Haaland, who can be so much less one-dimensional than he has been, if and when Guardiola unlocks his full potential.

We may only come to fully appreciate this City era in years to come.

Wednesday, Max Allegri led Juventus to win the Coppa Italia, beating Atalanta 1-0 in the final. Less than 48 hours later, the club announced that it had parted ways with Allegri following "behaviour during and after the final" that was "incompatible" with the "values" of Juventus and those who represent it.

What behaviour? Let's see.

With his team leading 1-0 in injury time, Allegri got himself sent off for a routine straight out of 1990s WWE. He whipped off his jacket and ranted on the sideline, jaw clenched, and after he got his marching orders, he called out Gianluca Rocchi, the head of the Italian referees. But he wasn't done there. He also insulted and shoved the editor of Tuttosport, the Turin daily paper, whom he accused of "siding with the club." And he shooed away Cristiano Giuntoli, the club's director of football, as well as other executives when they tried to join the postgame celebrations.

He later made up with the Tuttosport editor, was all smiley and jokey with Rocchi after the match and many made light of his fiery Tuscan personality, but clearly a line had been crossed. Not necessarily in the sense that the club were so offended by his bad behaviour that they had no choice but to let him go -- we've seen clubs stick by managers who have behaved far worse -- but rather in the sense that it gave Juventus "just cause" to fire him. And that may mean they will save on the roughly $20 million it would cost to keep him around next season, the final year of his contract. (We kinda have to say "may" because now it's over to the lawyers; clearly, Juve feel they have a strong hand here.)

Allegri's achievements -- mostly during his first stint in charge -- ensure his place in club history is secure. That won't change. But that was a different Juve, with a different president and, most importantly, a vastly different financial situation. And he was simply out of step with Juventus' current reality, not just on the pitch, but in the way he carried himself off it, too.

Paolo Montero will take charge of Juve's final games (starting with the Monday night match at Bologna) and next season, they'll start over with a new boss, possibly Thiago Motta. It's an ugly way for it all to end -- and it will probably get uglier if it goes to court -- but to be fair to the club, this is the opportunity to turn the page it badly needed.

It genuinely irks some folks that many Liverpool fans see themselves as different, and the job of manager at Anfield unlike any other. I'm not sure why: Most fan bases see themselves as different and their club as special; most successful coaches become icons, regardless of where they are. But predictably, some might have been turned off by Jurgen Klopp's Anfield farewell, a 2-0 win over Wolves.

I have no issue with it, because the thing about this whole folk hero thing is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, as Klopp put it: "We decide if we are worried or excited ... we decide if we believe ... we decide if we trust or don't trust."

In other words, if part of the experience of being a Liverpool fan is a sort of populist hero-worship -- before Klopp it was Rafa Benitez for a spell, and of course, King Kenny Dalglish, and before that, Bill Shankly -- then the very act of believing makes it a thing, part of the identity. It's not the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." It's more like, "I believe, so it is."

This understanding of the mindset and the relationship between manager and fans (and city) is what elevated Klopp beyond his achievements on the pitch. He fuelled it not to take advantage of it (though it didn't hurt), but because it elevated the experience for him, for his players and for the supporters. A cynic might say it's Management 101: sell folks on the idea that they're part of a bigger purpose and you will get more loyalty and buy-in. Maybe, but not everyone can do it, and certainly not in the way he did it. Because it takes more than the club crest and the colours and some trophies to generate what he generated among the Liverpool faithful.

What's next for Klopp? I have no idea, largely because I suspect he has no idea, and he was being honest when he said that stepping away was mostly because the tank was going to run dry. Will we see him back in management? Possibly, but I can't help but wonder -- if he decides to stay in football -- if it won't be in a different role, maybe as a club director or with a governing body.

Or maybe he'll just enjoy retirement and, of course, being a Liverpool fan. As he said to the Anfield crowd: "I am one of you now."