Bernardo Silva made plain where he believes Manchester City\u2019s fiercest competition lies ahead of a Premier League meeting with Arsenal. He insisted Liverpool \u2014 not the Gunners \u2014 remain the benchmark for Pep Guardiola\u2019s side, pointing to a period when Liverpool were genuine title challengers before Arsenal\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n
Between 2018 and 2022 the two clubs were virtually inseparable in the table. Liverpool amassed 357 Premier League points in that span while City recorded 358. City claimed three titles to J\u00fcrgen Klopp\u2019s solitary triumph in 2020, and Silva used that recent history to underline his view of who truly challenged City for honours.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur biggest rival by far is Liverpool,\u201d he told Sky Sports before City take on the Gunners on Sunday afternoon, \u201cbecause those are the guys that always competed with us for titles, and they also managed to win titles.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you definitely see a team like Arsenal over the years getting better and better, and being able to start fighting for those titles, even though they haven\u2019t yet reached that level of achieving it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Silva also downplayed Manchester United as a title threat since Sir Alex Ferguson\u2019s retirement 12 years ago, describing United as opponents mainly because of proximity. \u201cI would say that Manchester United has been going through quite a difficult phase for their club over the last years\u2014it\u2019s a rivalry because we’re in the same city,\u201d he shrugged.<\/p>\n
The Gunners\u2019 last meeting with City was emphatic. Arsenal ran out 5\u20131 winners at the Emirates, a defeat Silva summed up bluntly when he admitted \u201cwas a really bad time for us.\u201d Rodri, reflecting on that result, added: \u201cNow we have a bit of revenge for Arsenal, because we were in a bad moment and they took advantage of that,\u201d he warned. The pair meet again in north London with those recent chapters in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bernardo Silva says Liverpool remain City’s main rivals as Arsenal prepare for north London rematch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1056,969],"tags":[1054,1055],"class_list":["post-2964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-man-city","category-premier-league","tag-rivalry","tag-title-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}