For all that his team’s travails might be a quite literal head scratcher for Pep Guardiola, the why of Manchester City’s travails is as remarkably straightforward as the what. There is nothing about this great crisis, somehow worsened even as the losing streak ended on Tuesday night, that was necessarily unimaginable. Even in their brilliance, City have danced closer to trouble than they might have realized.
The root cause lies with Guardiola, as of course does almost every explanation for why they have been the best club side on Earth for most of the last eight years. More specifically, the problem is that, for several years now, City have indulged Guardiola’s preference to coach the smallest squad he possibly can at a time when they have the financial muscle to carry two elite players in every position. Julian Alvarez, Joao Cancelo, Riyad Mahrez, Cole Palmer, all have been allowed to depart since the start of last summer, with only partial replacements. A club with revenues over $870 million really shouldn’t be in a position where there is no one to back up Erling Haaland, or where a pre-season injury to Oscar Bobb has a meaningful impact on their squad options.
Their sheer winning over the past two seasons has obscured the precipice they have been striding alongside. Around 14 months ago Bernardo Silva was in and out of the XI, Kevin De Bruyne was sidelined and John Stones was nowhere to be seen. The formula that had delivered that first Champions League was looking all the harder to apply. Fortunately, Haaland was on hand to paper over the cracks and City could lose just few enough games. When Haaland himself went down in the winter, the fixture list was just about kind enough to them until De Bruyne’s return.
Through it all, the most important player in City’s setup remained the tempo setter and ball winner at the base of midfield around whom the rest of the team would pivot. Trim back Guardiola’s cadre of playmaking eights or (latterly) mountainous center backs and it would be fine. There was always a Fernandinho and then a Rodri. The fringes would buckle but the center held.
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City can’t stop the most dangerous attacks
Not anymore. Without Rodri, who hopes against hope that he will return from his ACL injury before the end of the season, this team has been in crisis. The obvious starting point might be the beginning of a five game losing streak bookended by Tottenham wins, one that hardly feels like it has eased given that a 3-0 lead over Feyenoord in the 75th minute on Tuesday somehow resulted in a splitting of the points. In reality, however, this wobble goes further back to when City were just scraping by Wolves, Fulham and Southampton. In the games since Rodri’s exit City’s record is a tame six wins, two draws and five defeats, their aggregate goal difference of plus three swollen by beat down wins in the Champions League over Sparta Prague and Slovan Bratislava.
The expected goals (xG) tallies for and against would suggest that City are suffering from some good finishing by their opponents and poor by themselves (more on which later), but the margins have shrunk such that the English champions are altogether more vulnerable to a dollop of variance. A team that routinely beat up its opponents by an xG and change per game is shading its Premier League contests by 1.85 non-penalty xG to 1.6.
That latter number is the real cause for concern for City, the sort that would almost certainly preclude a serious title challenge. Once more, it’s not hard to see where the problem is. Routinely teams are able to draw a press from City that doesn’t have the snap of the pre-Haaland days, work the ball around and fizz a pass through the lines to get their forwards going at a scrambling defense.
Take Sporting’s equalizing goal on Champions League Matchday 4, a throw in worked around a fairly ragged City midfield before first Hidemasa Morita and then Geovany Quenda are able to drive passes through the lines, unleashing Viktor Gyokores to strike.
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A few weeks later, Feyenoord were scoring a pretty similar goal at the death. Between those games Tottenham had had a go at it too, drawing City up and up and up before Radu Dragusin goes long and Spurs are in for James Maddison’s goal. It’s a recurring trick, one that Guardiola seems powerless to stop.
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And when these moves reach completion, they result in devastatingly effective shots. In the past four seasons the highest average xG value of opponent shots had been allowed by Liverpool in the 2022-23 season. It shouldn’t be that surprising that some of the more dominant sides in the Premier League give up better shots than most. If you’re a team like Liverpool or City you’ll often have eight, nine or even 10 players in the opposition half, on those occasions where the other team break away there may not be much between the ball and the goalkeeper.
“In the way we play, you have to accept that there’s going to be more opportunities for other teams to have a counter,” said De Bruyne on Monday. “You can’t do high pressing and not leave space behind, we know that. At the moment we’re not dealing with it in a good way. It’s always going to happen.
“We’re always going to give a chance away. This is the way we play. We have to accept that. We’re giving it away too many times. When they’re coming in front of our goal it’s basically a goal.”
No wonder. The shot profile being allowed by City is still cataclysmically bad. The average shot in the Premier League since the start of 2020-21 is worth 0.113 xG. That Liverpool side mentioned above allowed shots with an average value of 0.14. City this season? 0.165. By a margin of 16 percent, the average shot allowed by the champions is the worst of the 2020s. Look at all those great big green (and red) bubbles. It’s like an outbreak of chickenpox localized around Ederson’s six yard box.
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That these so often come on the first occasion that City come under pressure only serves to knock Guardiola’s men further off their stride. “It’s first attack, first goal, second attack, second goal,” said Kyle Walker last week. “It knocks the wind out of your sails. I thought we had chances as well, but they finished theirs and we didn’t take ours.
“It’s little details that amount up to big problems. We’re not winning 50/50 challenges; passes are going astray. We all take accountability for this, and we have to turn it around as soon as possible.”
Walker is certainly finding these times as trying as anyone. After all, how many of these flying runs through the heart of the City defense does he snuff out when he is at full pelt? Or, should that be a sentence in the past tense? The best case for Walker, like so many of his teammates in their 30s, is that a few injuries and a heavy game load are taking their toll right now. When you see the 34-year-old waiting for the moment he can catch Timo Werner, only to realize it’s not coming, it is hard not to suspect a deeper problem. The oomph just isn’t there anymore.
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A stuttering attack
He isn’t the only one whose engine doesn’t rev like it used to. In his first go round at the Etihad Ilkay Gundogan was all late darts into the box, good for a goal every two or three league games, while still offering a strong first line of defense in the opposition’s final third. Whether awaiting a cutback or snuffing out a break at source, the German was always well placed just behind the attack. On his return from Barcelona, he looks like, well, a 34-year-old. The defensive production has taken a pretty sizeable drop off: fewer ball recoveries, interceptions and tackles.
His attacking output has also declined. Previously Gundogan was good for nearly two and a half shots per 90 minutes at an average 0.38 xG over his final three Premier League seasons. This season it’s one and a half shots, 0.17 xG and not a league goal in sight yet. He is not the only player in a funk. Shifted into a more interior role, Phil Foden has struggled to deliver anything like the quality of shots he had last year and seems intent on punting himself out of a slump. He, Savinho, Jack Grealish, Bernardo Silva and Jeremy Doku — the wide options for City this season — have contributed one Premier League goal between them.
That will change. After all, their combined xG is 5.63. A proportion of City’s crisis is a rough run of finishing luck, a team that in Rodri’s absence has turned 28.2 xG into 25 goals. Guardiola’s sides routinely overperform their xG — having the very, very best players will do that for you — and he seemed to have something of a model obliterator in Haaland. City’s travails are writ large in the Norwegian’s first extended run of below par finishing in sky blue, just seven goals of 12.5 xG. Given he is still getting nearly six shots per 90 amid the slump, there shouldn’t be anything to particularly worry about in terms of the No.9. His goals will come if someone can make shots for him.
If they don’t, City are really in trouble. Their offence simply hasn’t diversified beyond Haaland, who has nearly half their xG for the Premier League season. It is only natural to tilt your offense towards the best finisher in the sport but little is being created for anyone other than the big man. Out wide nothing seems to quite be clicking. More and more at least one of Walker and Josko Gvardiol are pushed high like more orthodox fullbacks, but that hasn’t prompted the likes of Savinho and Doku to push inside and get shots.
In the early weeks of the season it looked like City were going to be as effective as ever in creating the archetypal goal of Guardiola’s tenure, the pull back towards either the third man runner or the big guy up top. That byline menace has been fleetingly observed in the last few months, four chances created from pull backs since the end of August and not a single goal scored.
Is there a fix? In the draw with Feyenoord Guardiola found his wide overloads in other ways. With Gvardiol sitting deeper and Rico Lewis inverting into midfield the two advanced midfielders, Phil Foden and in particular Matheus Nunes, were tasked with drifting wide to aid their wingers. There were flashes of something like the old City in Nunes’ driven low cross for Haaland to score. Gundogan even found the net with a deflected volley.
Can De Bruyne save City?
Most encouragingly of all, De Bruyne got his most minutes since September. While much of this, and so much else around City, has focused on one of the top 10 in the world talents they’ve been missing, there has been another one. So far this season the best playmaker of his generation has managed just 462 minutes of football.
De Bruyne might really be a one man salve for what ails City’s attack. It was De Bruyne and Haaland that did most of the creating and shooting while powering the attack all the way to the treble in the spring of 2023. It isn’t just the gaudy creative qualities of the Belgian that City are missing. Watch him up close and you will see a true leader on the pitch, the sort perfectly prepared to set standards and quite visibly bawl out those who don’t meet them.
“When I came back I felt really, really good the first five games I played and then I had a little thing against Brentford that I thought wasn’t good. It ended up being way, way worse than I wanted to be. I couldn’t kick a ball. I wasn’t able to move freely or do what I needed to do to play.
“I know if I was feeling good I could help. It’s not a nice feeling. It seems like we’re not really dealing with the moments when it goes bad. There are moments like in the Tottenham game where we’re doing really well, creating chances but the main issue is both boxes.
“In this run we let ourselves down. We seemed not really soft, but we lost it a little bit.”
Then again the return to peak powers of a 33-year-old whose fitness has never quite held up since he tore his hamstring in the 2023 Champions League final is not something anyone ought to rely on. De Bruyne might have swung the title race in City’s favor when he came back last season, but assuming he’ll do it once more in what might be his final run of games with the club is a gamble this generously resourced club didn’t need to take.
Maybe De Bruyne does stay fit and fix the attack. Perhaps Rodri makes a miraculous return in the spring. That’s a lot of hoping for a team who can really afford not to leave such matters to chance.
