As Pep Guardiola celebrates at last confirming such a comprehensive Premier League title, there were some figures in the Manchester City hierarchy celebrating with a quieter sense of satisfaction. That’s because they couldn’t help thinking how much this meant to the Catalan himself, how much it vindicated him - and not just because of what happened in the Champions League, or even against Manchester United. It went deeper than that, and further back than that. It went to how very different things were just over a year ago.To get more sport news, you can visit shine news official website.

The roots of such record-breaking brilliance are not just found in record-breaking expenditure, but also Guardiola previously suffering by far the worst results of his career.

City CEO Ferran Soriano and chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak see this season as the first reward for investment in a manager and his idea, as much as an investment in so many transfer fees. That is the wider story of the style of this league victory. It is also a victory for that idea.While a league title should always have been the minimum expectation for the amount of money City’s Abu Dhabi hierarchy have backed Guardiola with, what could not have reasonably been expected was the massive gap between the newly-crowned 2017-18 champions and all of their wealthy rivals. That’s a massive gap in terms of points, performance and - most ominously - the very sophistication of the football.

The genuine feeling is that the three-game dip at the start of April, and the slight diminishment of how they finished the campaign, really doesn’t take away from 10 months of magnificence.

The reality is that manufacturing a gap as chasmic as that took more than money. It took the capability to really maximise that money, and a deeper idea. It also took a lot of confidence, faith and stubborn belief.

That was what Guardiola radiated, and there are a number of specific stories from that difficult winter of 2016-17 that spell this out.City were then in a spell of form that would see them lose four of eight games, and also concede four goals in separate fixtures against Leicester City and Everton. It was a far cry from the runs of wins they have so effortlessly put together this season, while so repeatedly and exhilaratingly putting the ball in the net.

It was also a far cry from the way Guardiola is currently feted.

Aside from facing such poor results for the first time in his career, he was also facing very pointed questions for the first time. His media comments were not met with studied appreciation of a superior football mind, but instead bemused wonder, especially when he came out with lines like “what is tackles?”