Manchester City vs Arsenal promises to be a Carabao Cup final filled with intriguing subplots

We have a Carabao Cup final on our hands. Manchester City will play Arsenal on March 22 as both sides look to win the first major trophy of the season, quite possibly set against the backdrop of a Premier League title race.

By the time the two teams meet at Wembley, they will have played six more top-flight games each, by which stage anything could have happened.

City and Arsenal are hardly locked in a battle at the top of the table, given the number of points they have dropped so far in 2026. Mikel Arteta’s side no doubt look the stronger at the moment, helped by the fact they won at the weekend and City drew at Tottenham Hotspur while showing some familiar flaws.

But their rivalry is a fascinating one, not just because recent meetings have tended to have a say on where the title heads — which will surely be the case this year, too — but because of the sheer amount of animosity that has crept in over a relatively short period of time.

From Erling Haaland bouncing a ball off Gabriel’s head and telling Arteta to “stay humble”, to Myles Lewis-Skelly imitating the Norwegian’s celebration when Arsenal won the following fixture 5-1, there is plenty of spice in the meetings. It does not take much to imagine things boiling over in a cup final.

There is also the potential for both sides to meet in the Champions League quarter-finals, which would mean that of each team’s five matches in the period from the Carabao Cup final at the end of March to the league game at the Etihad Stadium in mid-April, they would play each other four times. City’s other game would be against Chelsea.

Guardiola dismissed the idea that a mere two games in a month would be anything like the famous run of three El Clasicos inside 18 days — featuring his Barcelona and Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid in 2011 — but he did acknowledge the extra Champions League meetings could at least be possible.

“No, that was three or four times in one week; this time it’s an eternity,” he said following his team’s semi-final against Newcastle United, a 3-1 second-leg win earning a 5-1 victory in the tie.

“But yeah, it can happen, of course, the Carabao Cup (final) we have to play already, we don’t know what is going to happen in the Champions League, and I don’t know if in the Premier League the fixture is already there. When the good teams arrive at the last stages, you can face them, so it is what it is.”

He was, though, far more fired up when asked about the challenge of facing Arsenal.

“I love it,” he said. “I love it, especially when you play finals.” He also talked about Arsenal’s ability in duels — “they are fantastic”, particularly at making their opponents “uncomfortable” in such situations.

They have certainly made City uncomfortable in recent years: Guardiola’s men have not beaten Arsenal since the 4-1 victory at the Etihad in April 2023, when they went on to win the title and the treble. That is nearly three years ago.

Since then, the games, other than the resounding 5-1 at the Emirates last year, have been extremely tight; the rest were draws, barring Arsenal’s 1-0 win in October 2023, which came via a late deflection.

Perhaps the biggest indication Arsenal have by far the more settled squad was the fact they forced City into parking the bus when the two teams met earlier this season, a tactic Guardiola and some of his players have insisted they never set out to do, rather it was something forced on them.

The idea of a Guardiola team digging in was unheard of, and it was only a year earlier that Arsenal, albeit down to 10 men, were clinging on for dear life themselves. Both games ended in draws, with the attacking team finding a way through in the end.

For all that the games between City and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were the highest-quality matches in English football, and while there was no love lost between the fans, there was never a sense that the players did not like each other. That is patently not the case with City and Arsenal.

“In my experience here in England, Liverpool have won two league titles and we’ve won six, so I’ve never experienced Arsenal winning the league,” Bernardo Silva told TNT Sport Brazil last week. “But the truth is, at the moment, they’re in a better position than us.” That said, Bernardo irked Liverpool at the time, too.

Victories in these matches are hard to come by, and any at Wembley would be highly cherished.

Winning the League Cup is often seen as the springboard for any new project, largely because that is how Mourinho viewed it when he was Chelsea manager 20 years ago.

Arsenal already have an FA Cup win to their name under Arteta anyway, but that was five years ago and they would no doubt take incredible momentum from beating City at Wembley, no matter what the state of play in the title race.

City, of course, will be looking to do the same. They do not quite ‘need’ that springboard in the same way, given the amount of trophies they have won over the years — the final will be Guardiola’s 22nd visit to Wembley for cup matches since he arrived in 2016 — but they have a very new squad, and any victory would be considered lift-off for their new project.

City have been to so many finals that only the very biggest set the pulses racing, and this one will be big. Arsenal fans will be motivated for it.

And then there is the huge potential for the outcome to have a say on the title race itself. For all that Arsenal look far more settled, confident and robust this season, the points gap at the top of the table does not reflect that feeling. It is only six.

If City were at their previous levels, that would probably look small, but they are not, and the big question in the title race relates not to Arsenal’s own bottle, or lack thereof, but to whether City will actually be there to punish them if the league leaders do have another wobble or two.

Those questions may be answered well before the two teams meet at Wembley in six weeks’ time, but almost anything that happens in the title race — whether they are neck and neck or one team has pulled away — will only make the League Cup trophy itself more important. And these games have come to feel pretty big already.

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