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For all the comments on Pep Guardiola’s scratches, some senior figures in football were a bit shocked by the image. That even extended to the top levels of Liverpool, who Manchester City travel to face on Sunday.
It was certainly unusual, but these are unusual times. The 3-3 collapse at home to Feyenoord made it even clearer that City’s form is more than a blip. In the space of just five games, Guardiola has suffered a worst ever league defeat, a worst ever run of losses – with four becoming five – and a first ever game where one of his teams squandered a three-goal lead. A 3-0 advantage over Feyenoord at home was supposed to be the sort of situation where form self-corrects but it just saw more calamitous error. Those at Liverpool have been comparing it to Jurgen Klopp’s 2022-23 season, which the German felt he just couldn’t leave as his last campaign at Anfield. The same club can now make it even more torrid for City. They sense opportunity.
So does pretty much everyone that faces the champions right now. It feeds into this striking feeling about City’s form. Every time you think it can’t possibly get worse, it does. That alone has been a shock to confidence, that is compounding everything.
As much as Liverpool are fairly comparing that to Klopp, the closest parallel is in Jose Mourinho’s 2015-16 campaign at Chelsea. That was the one that Antonio Conte coldly referred to as “the Mourinho season”. For all that the Portuguese has fallen since then, one of the reasons that period was so jaw-dropping was because such vulnerability had never been witnessed in Mourinho’s career before. He was still seen as Guardiola’s grand rival at the top of the game, with his teams impregnable where the Catalan’s were irresistible. Both had that air of invulnerability.
No more. Nine years later, Guardiola is now going through what Mourinho did, but there feels even more to it.
It is not just about a historic manager’s previous aura. It is also about what City are as a club. As a state project who have subjected English football to the most intense period of dominance ever seen, a drop like this just didn’t seem possible.
City seemed too well run, too wealthy, too structurally imperious.
And yet it is the very nature of that project that might also have made this strangely possible. The Abu Dhabi takeover happened at the start of Guardiola’s first season at Barcelona, in 2008-09, which made it inevitable the new City hierarchy would seek to emulate the most admired team in the game. They quickly realised it wasn’t just about appointing Guardiola but building the club in his image, so he had everything required to succeed.
That is spectacularly productive if he is succeeding. If he’s encountering regular defeat for the first time, however, it’s suddenly even more of a problem. So much is wrapped up in the manager.
The build-up to Guardiola’s contract renewal had already brought the first suggestions that it might be time to consider alternatives, that there was a danger of even a football thinker as vibrant as the Catalan going stale.
Now, it is as if the manner that City understandably indulged Guardiola has had unanticipated consequences. The Catalan has always insisted on small squads because of how he needs his teams to be so psychologically honed, which is fine if the group stays fit.
Rodri’s unfortunate injury seems to have instead caused a team that is so tightly wound to unravel. Any club would miss a Ballon D’Or winner like that. It still shouldn’t have led to a drop-off like this. It shouldn’t have led to an Eredivisie side putting three past you with 15 minutes to go, having already conceded four to both Sporting and Tottenham Hotspur, respectively. The sense of a perfect storm has been compounded by injuries to other prime stars like Ruben Dias, meaning most of the key players left are close to 30 or beyond.
That creates more issues than just a visible lack of intensity, or Kevin De Bruyne being consigned to the bench while Ilkay Gundogan struggles to run back.
It leaves a group that have largely worked under Guardiola for years, with all of the risk that involves. This is where the parallels with Mourinho’s final Chelsea season are perhaps most relevant. The Portuguese found that he just didn’t have the same effect on his players because they were burned out by his intensity. In a potentially similar way, Guardiola has always had a respect-hate relationship with his players. He isn’t warm, and his own intensity – which is more internalised than Mourinho’s – can grate.
It got so bad in City’s treble season that he eventually had to have a clear-the-air meeting. The players were won around, in a way they almost always are, because they ultimately appreciate that Guardiola is a genius who will make their careers better. That can only go on so long, though, especially if those same players have won everything. The dynamic can also go even further the other way. It was striking how Guardiola’s unnecessarily fraught reaction to Feyenoord’s first goal psyched his own team out. That did not look a squad at ease. A previous assurance evaporated into errors, like Ederson’s rush out.
All of that forms one possible reason why Guardiola can’t seem to arrest this right now, and why they are even missing his core principle of pressing intensity. He badly needs some of his prime players back, which he may well see with Ruben Dias’s return for Sunday.
That is hugely important, and this is Manchester City. There’s still an awareness they can respond and go on a run, but it’s impossible not to wonder whether there is something more going on. The Premier League hearing weighs over City’s entire season. That can’t go ignored indefinitely. The build-up to Sunday’s game brought even more headlines about how the hearing won’t be concluded until the middle of December.
It is known that such talk has made its way to the dressing room, no matter what players say publicly. Has that started to affect them? Has it affected business? It is conspicuous that, in a transfer window before a season where they could yet be relegated, City’s only business was one signing from within their ownership group, in Savinho, and a former star, in Gundogan. Is this why the squad hasn’t been refreshed as substantially as required?
Potential signings will presently think twice. One high-profile target who felt City were an option told his camp the situation there “is too fluid”. Could this be an issue if they try and spend in January?
A lot of that is almost too much to think about at this moment. Guardiola’s problems are much more immediate, and fascinating in their own right.
One of the game’s historic geniuses instead has to think his way out of a situation he has never faced before. That was what Mourinho found in 2015-16, but this is still unprecedented. That’s why Guardiola himself feels it so intensely.
Liverpool, on supreme form of their own, can make it even worse on Sunday. It was already one of the biggest games of the season. It may now form the story of the season.
