Eight weeks, 12 games and nine defeats into Manchester City’s descent into the footballing upside down, Pep Guardiola has at least identified the problem.
“We haven’t scored the goals we scored before, and we have conceded the goals we didn’t concede,” Guardiola told the BBC cameras after the defeat at Villa Park on Saturday, speaking in that now-familiar watery, rambling drawl, the voice of a man being encouraged by paramedics to talk about defensive injuries and midfield duels in order to keep himself awake until the ambulance arrives.
So, there it is then. Score more goals. Concede fewer. Win rather than lose. This is the Pep’s razor explanation for a period during which the team that would previously drain the emotional life out of opponents have become not just beatable but zombified, sclerotic and even oddly disturbing, meandering possession-based football as an expression of the death of love, life, hope.
So. How did that happen exactly then? And are we allowed at any stage to blame the manager himself for any of this? As City prepare for the visit of Everton on Boxing Day there are two things worth saying about the run to this point.
Most startling of all is the sheer scale of that drop-off. This is arguably the most profound internal collapse of any champion team in the modern age.
Almost exactly a year ago to the day, a team featuring 10 of the players who were on the pitch at Villa Park defeated Fluminense 4-0 in Jeddah. In that moment City unified the belts, the first club to be simultaneous winners of the Champions League, Premier League, Club World Cup, FA Cup and Uefa Super Cup. The peak had been scaled. There were no other peaks. This was it. All of these things under the sun I will give to you.
There was an understandable triumphalism around this achievement. “The accomplishments on the pitch have been the byproduct of a bewitching and mesmerising style of play,” City’s website concluded, which was perhaps a little overripe in the pared-back Haaland-centred age, but seems doubly striking watching the current XI amble about like unhappy robots.
“The players are still hungry and motivated,” Guardiola assured the world, and for quite a long time this seemed entirely correct. City didn’t lose a game, penalties aside, until the FA Cup final in May. It was 14 matches into this season before they lost another one. At which point, enter: total congealment.
This is the second point about City’s step out over that coastal shelf. There is no obvious explanation for any of this. A team that were all aura, that carried their presence before them like a lance have become an anti-presence, stuffed shirts, straw men.
As ever the explanations tend to divide into the macro and micro view of history. Details will always decide a game. But we remain addicted to our sweeping narratives. So the more hard-headed analysis says: take the Ballon d’Or winner out of any team, chuck in one or two key defensive injuries, and there will of course be a drop-off.
City have dropped 24 points since Rodri’s injury, including the Arsenal game where it happened. This is the key position in any Guardiola team, an absence that affects every other part of the machine. Without that source of midfield control players all over the pitch are being asked to win duels, to chase and harry, to do things outside their key skill set.
Reinsert Rodri over that period and would we really be talking collapse, ghost ships, head scratches, the restyling of Guardiola as some kind of dying Jedi knight?
At the other end of the scale we have the macro theories. First, the cumulative effect of those lurking financial charges. There was a time when the battle against the Premier League seemed to have given City’s project an empowering note of defiance. Here we have the world’s richest club, winning to order at the direction of a monarchical state, free to present itself as the underdog, conspiracy bashers, out there raising its fist and playing the victim, all of which must be oddly liberating, at least for a while.
Footballers have a unique capacity to focus on the job right in front of them. But human beings are not water-tight entities. People talk, make plans, think about their future. Agents never stop agenting. It would be deeply strange if there wasn’t some kind of knock-on effect somewhere in the pipes.
The second theory here is that Guardiola himself is a source of some of this anti-energy. City’s entropy has become chronic since the much-fanfared contract extension. The suggestion, based so far on little more than chat and supposition, is that some of those long-term senior players were actually quite looking forward to a natural change of energy. Guardiola is an exhausting as well as elevating presence. He wins by pushing you to your limits, by instilling total control. Which is fine while you are winning. What does it look like when that point is passed? Like this, perhaps.
But there is also a simpler Guardiola point to be made here. Even the most successful, most influential manager of the age can reach his own outer limits. There is a clear sense of dead air between Pep and his players, a gap for the first time between the team and a coach who has totally defined this project.
The past couple of weeks have brought a preoccupation with Guardiola’s physical condition. Dark talk has swirled about the health of the regent. The body is weak. The state is ailing. We hear about his terrible sleep patterns, his poor digestion, the dry skin on his cranium. This is a man whose body beats and throbs and pulses with football, who is basically an avatar for the job, a host body for an obsession that is out there moving him around, making him leap up, jerking his skinny arms.
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Perhaps the most worrying thing has been the lack of vital signs in recent weeks, the sense of an obsessive in standby mode, in charge of something that has now got away from him. It is a process that may have its origins in that final push to the summit.
The signing of Erling Haaland always felt like a paradox. Here is a coach defined by his obsession with passing football, now accommodating a star player who basically doesn’t engage in that stuff at all, who represents football in abridged form, a machine for scoring. The idea of Guardiola building a team around Haaland remains slightly absurd in isolation, like James Joyce deciding to write a book of world-class knock‑knock jokes.
But then, there was always a deal-with-the-devil aspect to the treble-winning season. Here is a mature team so good it can absorb a player who offers only the final gloss, who will add nothing to the existing rhythms. That team will continue to keep the ball so well and control games so well that it can also carry this disconnected razor edge.
But was becoming for the first time a non-unified entity really going to improve this team in the long run? The notion that Haaland has been a successful addition rests entirely on victory by a single goal in a Champions League final as opposed to defeat by a single goal in a Champions League final without him, a game where Guardiola also torpedoed his own selection.
Haaland is all about the numbers. Here are some interesting ones. In the five previous seasons without him City scored more goals than they have in two and half seasons with him. With Haaland they average 2.3 goals per game. Without him that was up at 2.6. They also concede more with Haaland in the team. What is the point of a killer, a razor edge, if you don’t actually score more goals, something that was true even before the collapse?
In many ways all those micro‑issues come together under the Haaland umbrella. City look tactically aged. The midfield seems porous. Other managers have noticed they are vulnerable to powerful ball-carriers. There is a cause and effect there.
Haaland contributes little in or out of possession. But he is also a drain on those other parts. He makes an average of seven short passes per game. Playing with 10 will eventually take its toll. That referred pain will come out. Why do City’s ageing midfielders look quite so exposed? How easy is it to carry this?
At the same time it is simply accepted Haaland is not someone to build new structures around, to find other ways to win, who is basically given a pass, treated as a kind of captive bear, pining away blamelessly in his leg irons.
The poor signings have reflected this shrinking back, the tilt towards a more pared-back entity. Haaland was the last really impactful arrival, the last to change the way the team play. Josko Gvardiol for £77m has been a qualified success. Before that you’re looking at Manuel Akanji two years ago, Nathan Aké and Rúben Dias four years ago, Rodri in 2019.
There has instead been a stasis during the past 12 months. This a team that remains moored to the simplification that completed it, tethered in ever-decreasing circles around that fixed point at the front.
Players have not improved. The manager has been unable to find other gears, has seemed instead trapped within his own skin. “There’s nothing else to win; I have a feeling the job is done, it is over,” Guardiola said in the moment of ultimate triumph, a statement that seems more prescient with every passing week.
