After City's win at Anfield, Jamie Carragher said the title race has two contenders. It is a striking claim in October, and one worth testing.
Jamie Carragher rarely waits for a season to settle before offering a verdict. Speaking on Sky Sports’ Gary Neville podcast after Manchester City’s 3-0 win at Anfield on Sunday, he made a claim that will be quoted back at him in May either way. City and Arsenal, he said, are “the two best teams by a mile, we know that, and no one else is really going to compete with them for the title.” The comments were reported by Football365 on 12 October.
What he actually said
The more interesting line came next. “We want every game to matter but right now it doesn’t,” Carragher said. That is not simply a boast about City or Arsenal; it is a complaint about the league’s competitive balance.
Asked whether he rated City above Arsenal this early, he declined to commit. “I think it’s hard to do that this early,” he said. He pointed instead to City’s wins at Anfield and Old Trafford, and praised Enzo Maresca as a manager. City are unbeaten in the 2026/27 Premier League, according to the report.
The counter-view
The report does not name anyone who disagrees with Carragher’s title view, so it would be wrong to present this as a pundit-against-pundit row. But there is a reasoned counter-position on this site. In Miguel Delaney’s warning that City’s perfect start may count for nothing, we looked at the argument that a perfect start proves less than it appears. That is not a rebuttal of Carragher’s ranking, which could be entirely correct, but it is a challenge to the idea that October form tells us the race is closed.
There is also a simple factual caution. “Two best teams by a mile” is a claim about quality, not about outcome. A league can contain two clear favourites and still produce a surprise through injuries, fixture congestion or a long unbeaten run from a third side. Carragher is describing the gap today; he is not forecasting the final table, and his own hedge on City versus Arsenal shows he knows it.
Why the phrasing matters
Pundits are often accused of manufacturing certainty. This is a case where the certainty is partial and the interesting part is the admission that the product suffers. “Right now” is doing real work in that sentence: it implies that the games between the rest are fine, but the ones that decide the title are not yet live.
That is a fair point about the supporters’ experience. A Premier League season is long, and the argument that a title race can be effectively two-horse by mid-October will not comfort fans of the clubs outside it. Equally, the leaders have to be allowed to be good. City’s record at two of English football’s hardest grounds is hard to dismiss as an accident.
The context around City
None of this exists in a vacuum. The champions are also the subject of an off-field story that has dominated the Sky studio in recent days; we looked at the studio reaction in Neville and Carragher on the City “stain”. Carragher has been among the most vocal pundits on that front. It is a useful reminder that the same voice can say City are the best team in the country and also argue that matters beyond the pitch must be resolved.
The test for Carragher’s claim is simple. If, by Christmas, a third club is within a win of the top two, he will have been early. If the gap holds, he will have been merely right, and the question he raised, whether the league can make its games matter, will still be waiting for an answer.
All quotations are taken from the Football365 report linked above.
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