Why Have Manchester City Struggled This Season?

At the beginning of the season Manchester City were favourites to win the title according to the Premier League odds. At the time of writing Pep Guardiola’s find themselves in 5th place, 23 points behind the league leaders and out of Europe.

It’s a sad state of affairs for City, especially considering the near total domination that the team have had domestically and on the continent in recent years. So what has gone wrong for Manchester City this season? How have they gone from one of the greatest club sides in living history to also-rans in less than a year? 

To answer that, we’re going to take you back in time to Wednesday 28th April, 2010 and the Camp Nou where Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona were hosting Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final.

Why? Because it was the defining moment in Pep Guardiola’s career and in it we find the core reasons for Manchester City’s current demise.

What Happened to Pep that Night in Barcelona?

Pep Guardiola’s mind exploded that’s what. From the dugout he watched his team – widely regarded as one of the best in history – absolutely dominate an Inter Milan side who were reduced to 10 men after 28 minutes.

Yet despite monopolising the ball and created 7 times as many chances as their opponents, Barcelona crashed out of the tournament. Yes, they won the game 1-0 with a late Gerard Pique strike, but the damage had been done in the first-leg.

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(This remains the most important moment of Pep Guardiola’s managerial career.)

Reflecting on that exit later on Pep Guardiola developed a phobia and it is one that has defined his career ever since  - a fear of the counter-attack.

In a bid to overcome that fear and find a solution to it he embarked on a sabbatical in 2012 that saw him move to the United States and study chess amongst other sports, to find the answer to his counter attacking phobia.

Following discussions with Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and detailed analyses of basketball and rugby, Pep felt fully equipped to face his fear head on and put his newfound theories to the test.

German Exposure Therapy

When Pep Guardiola joined Bayern Munich in 2013 there were plenty of confused people in football questioning his decision. To those that know how Pep operates, his move to Germany made complete and total sense.

Germany is the global leader when it comes to counter-attacking. Gegenpressing by its very nature is the act of turning defence into attack and, even those teams to the lower end of the Bundesliga, are better versed in counter attacking than the majority of sides in England, Spain and Italy.

So for Pep, his move to Bayern was two things. It was exposure therapy to his fear of counter attacking and it was also a laboratory, somewhere for him to go and formulate a bullet proof defence against the counter attack.

It is here that he adopted his fabled inverted full back tactic by bringing Phillip Lahm into midfield. The tactic worked and then inexplicably, Pep gave into player pressure in 2014 and jettisoned this safety first approach in the second-leg of the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid.

The result was a humbling 4-0 defeat in which the Germans spent the majority of the game sprinting frantically back towards their own goal. That result merely hardened Pep’s resolve to refine his counter-attacking safety mechanism.

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(Pep listened to his players and removed his counter-attacking safety net for this game. The result?  A 4-0 counter-attacking masterclass from Real Madrid.)

The Final Piece of the Puzzle

Fast forward to 2019. With Pep Guardiola now at Manchester City, he is still not content with his inverted full back system as a fool proof guard against the counter-attack. It has failed him too many times, notably against Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool.

His next move is to bring in Spanish midfielder Rodri, who he recognises as not only one of the best defensive midfielders in the world but the closest thing possible to an anti-counter-attacking safety net.

Over the coming years Pep refines his system to include more centre backs, some of which can step into midfield and the others which can provide a solid, central block in the final third. It’s going great, Manchester City win four titles in a row and a Champions League and then… Rodri gets injured.

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(It was only right that the man responsible for solving Guardiola’s counter-attacking issues scored the winner in the Catalan’s first – so far – Champions League success with City.)

Suddenly the central piece in this great project of Pep Guardiola’s is taken from him and the rest of the system crumbles to pieces. City are back to being killed on the transition as their coaches house of cards comes tumbling down.

In his bid to avoid the counter attack and eliminate the thermal exhaust port weakness on his footballing Death Star, Pep has failed to think of a Plan B, building his entire world around doing Plan A better.

And that dear readers, is why Manchester City have struggled so much this season. Their key players, the man who makes them invulnerable and the man who is the culmination of 15 years work from one of the greatest coaches of all-time has been injured and in his absence, his team has crumbled.

Whilst Pep prays for Rodri’s return and a resumption of Plan A, he’d better get busy working on a Plan B. If he doesn’t, this issue will come back to haunt him again.