Jack Grealish made Manchester City’s soulless treble win possible to like

Well, there it is then. Manchester City have won the treble. Well done, and it’s a miraculous squad – De Bruyne! Gündogan! Being able to bring Phil Foden on as a substitute! Ruben Dias! Ederson! Bernardo Silva! Haaland! – but there was something joylessly inevitable about watching them march to a fairly actionless 1-0 victory in the Champion’s League final, lifting their third trophy of the campaign with visible trophy-kissing fatigue. The Manchester United treble of 98/99 was something like a dozen miracles happening at once. Watching City do it this year has been like watching an office administrator fill out a slightly tricky form.

Except, of course, for that sweet pesky small-shinpadded imp, Jack Peter Grealish. He was fairly anonymous in the final – most of that City team was – but had the wherewithal to admit it afterwards, openly weeping to BT Sports with a, “I played so bad today. I was awful.” He’s clearly had the full Pep Clockwork Orange-style reprogramming treatment, but there’s a small dark fold of his brain that is compelled to wear Gucci at O Beach that even Guardiola can’t touch, and modern football is lacking a lot of that.

Grealish has been a wonderful addition to football since his fame ascended in line with Villa’s promotion in 2019. We live in an ever-dwindling era of elite-footballers-who-also-go-out – as the sport gets richer and ever more high-wire, the athletic gains at the heart of it become more and more crucial and expensive, so slamming sambucas and being Birmingham’s most prolific fingerer is no longer in vogue for a sportsperson. We admire James Milner’s teetotal longevity and anyone who is seen in an ice bath or a sauna or both. We also live in a culture of Instagram “streets won’t forget” clip nostalgia, where long-retired careers are talked about in tutting tones of failure – if he hadn’t got injured! If he hadn’t partied so much! – that bends and warps how we remember tremendous players. Yesterday during my daily doomscroll I saw someone speculate about who the player Ronaldinho would have been if he never partied. Ronaldinho. The World Cup winner Ronaldinho. The man an entire generation of tricksters have tried to emulate since. Ronaldinho. But yeah, what if he never partied. Think how many more Nike crossbar adverts we would have got out of him if he never discovered the red-glowing power of the Parisian underworld.

Grealish defies this current moment of football puritanism, which makes him magnetic in a way that transcends team tribalism. There are shades of Beckham’s mega-fame in the early aughts to it, obviously – floppy hair, a magazine-cover face, the misinterpretation that he’s a sweet-but-slow airhead – but Beckham never had those bulges of sesh gremlin coming out of him like Jack does. What makes Grealish so electrically likeable is he’s so human with it: posing with a tin of Heineken and the caption “let’s fuckin avvvvv it” in the seconds after getting back to the dressing room. “Watch my Gucci bag, fuckin’ hell!”. Waltzing through an airport blasting Fleetwood Mac, not a second of sleep on his face, about to absolutely ruin whatever science podcast Kevin de Bruyne was planning on listening to on the flight. Of course, all this confidence and back-of-the-classroom disruptive glee wouldn’t hit if he wasn’t doing it on the pitch too, but Grealish has taken his game to a different level for City this year after the traditional difficult-first-season-with-Pep, justifying that eye-watering £100m fee with assist and goal numbers for the xG perverts, a foul magnet function in the team that adds another weapon to an already stacked final-third, and a sort of ‘put a baby goat in to calm a large horse’ relationship he seems to have with Erling Haaland.

But it’s not all about the idea that he’d be really good to have a tin in a kitchen at 2a.m. Grealish’s appeal is tempered with true niceness, as well. I really enjoyed his Instagram dedication to his best mate, a nice break from most elite athlete’s ‘great three points today!’ grid posts (a post that also acted as a historical archive of every bad haircut he’s ever had: you have to admire modern footballers who are willing to take true hair risks). The video message he sent to a released Crystal Palace academy graduate (“Hey Jack, it’s Jack here” had a quietly spooky energy to it, mind), a genuinely sweet gesture sent down from the top of the football pyramid to the base. The World Cup celebration he did for a young fan with cerebral palsy. And then he poses with the Champions League trophy like he’s nodding in and out of a K-hole. No one out there is really doing it like him.

This City team is great – one for the ages, without doubt – but soullessly hard to like. And then you look out on the left wing, at a #10 in an alice band with his socks down, flickering along the touchline hours before terrorising a Cheshire nightclub, and you think that maybe, maybe, there’s one small glimmer of humanity there. A team of robots just won everything there was to win, sure. But Jack Grealish was there, too, drinking absolutely every one of their Heinekens on the plane.