Football is a game of fine margins. A goal-line clearance, a missed penalty or a controversial call from the officials can change a match, a season, a career.
This season’s Premier League has been shaped by moments which could easily have gone another way and shifted the course of history.
Here, we pick out 20 sliding-doors moments, where the fates of footballers and football clubs have been flipped and how it may otherwise all have panned out differently…
No prizes for guessing the most important sliding-doors moment of the season. Rodri had spoken of his “worries” about the demands of the fixture list in the week ahead of his season-wrecking knee injury but few would have predicted such an epic collapse from Pep Guardiola’s side in the absence of Spain’s Euros winner.
City had tried to manage his fitness, delaying his first Premier League start of the season until that ill-fated appearance against Arsenal in September. A one-man team? There’s little doubt that if Rodri had stayed fit, the Premier League title race and City’s season would have gone very differently.
