Are Man City unlucky with injuries or a squad in decline? | OneFootball

If one manager defied what Béla Guttmann described as the “fatal third season,” it’s Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola.

“The third year,” the great Hungarian coach always said, “is fatal.” He claimed that if a manager remains at a club for more than three years, the players tend to become bored or complacent, and opponents start to decipher their tactics. There are occasional exceptions, particularly in weaker leagues, but it seems true that great teams tend to last a maximum of three years at the highest level. This may explain why City’s recent slump, by their own standards, could be more significant than just dropping points or exiting the EFL Cup.

After all, this is Guardiola’s ninth season as manager at the Etihad. In his previous eight campaigns, City has lifted the Premier League trophy six times, including the last four championships in a row, establishing a modern dynasty of epic proportions. Before joining the English club, he spent four seasons coaching his boyhood club, Barcelona, where he won three La Liga titles, and three seasons at Bayern Munich, securing a championship each time, although he took a year-long break in between.

Rumours swirled this summer that Guardiola could be departing after the 2024/25 season; the Spanish tactician is by far the Premier League’s longest-serving manager in an era where the average life expectancy of a coach in England’s top division is 787 days as of May 2024 which is the shortest average tenure in competition history.

In the past, Guardiola was notorious for only signing one-year extensions, allowing him breathing room to decide if he’s got in him to continue. Guardiola, as such, follows the Sir Alex Ferguson playbook of refreshing his squad every summer, a way of rooting out those who may feel content and losing that ambition. Whether he’ll enter a tenth year in north-west England remains to be seen.

Defeat at Sporting CP in the Champions League this week meant that City lost three consecutive matches in all competitions — consequently, they’re out of the EFL Cup and find themselves two points behind Liverpool in the Premier League table — for the first time since doing so between May and August 2021, while in the same season, it’s the first time since April 2018.

Guardiola is now searching for solutions as City will look to avoid a fourth straight loss. “It happened in my first year,” he said. “Sometimes it does. I have to try to find an explanation but sometimes it’s just football, so you have to accept it. Sport is that. Life is that.

“Sometimes we have bad moments but we face the reality. Everyone has to try to be better and we will find it. We are still alive in all competitions and we continue.”

It has naturally led to questions about City’s prospects of winning a record-extending fifth championship on the bounce. Kneejerk reactions aside, there’s a credible feeling given City’s proneness to regularly losing key players through injury and none more so than midfield lynchpin pin and recent Ballon d’Or winner Rodri, who is ruled out for the remainder of the season after sustaining a severe knee injury.

Rodri’s importance cannot be understated. He started more matches (50) than any of his teammates in the 2023/24 season, while he also played the most minutes (4,325). Rodri was the only City player in the Premier League to average more than 100 successful passes per game (103) last season. No one saw as much of the ball as he did, with his 126 touches per 90 minutes, 24 more than any of his teammates in the competition. He also led the Premier League rankings for open-play sequence involvements per 90 (2,000+ mins played), with 8.4.

Tottenham Bournemouth and Sporting — who all inflicted defeats on City in this miserable run — caused problems with quick and direct attacks. Looking at the bigger picture: City have conceded ten more shots from fast breaks than any other Premier League side in all competitions. The rate at which they give up such chances from fast breaks is roughly three times higher than last season. Rodri’s absence is a factor, but he started one of the games in which the issue was most prominent, the goalless draw with Inter Milan, a game that saw City give up four shots from fast breaks.

Even so, without Rodri, they have not entirely collapsed, but City are finding out that in the best Guardiola sides, there is that one midfielder whose energy and discipline has become the kernel around which the rest of the side’s panache is constructed. Also, losing other influential figures, such as Kevin De Bruyne, for large swathes of time hasn’t been helpful.

Rodri aside, they are currently without Oscar Bobb, Ruben Dias, Jack Grealish and John Stones, albeit the latter three should return before this month is out. Manuel Akanji and Nathan Ake are two other players who have experienced time on the sidelines, forcing Guardiola to utilise his squad more. This has led to inconsistency as team cohesion takes a while to develop.

There is a semblance of irony as the Spanish midfielder had, days before his injury, lamented football’s growing fixture congestion and subsequently warned that it could lead to players becoming susceptible to injuries. Guardiola recently compared City’s relentless fixture list to an NBA schedule.

“In the past, the previous ­seasons, we played a lot of games, maybe when we go to the World [Club] Cup, arriving at the last stages of the competition, we’re going to play more than 70 games,” he told reporters.

“And 70 games is like the NBA, but the NBA has four-month holidays and we have three weeks because it’s not this season, it comes from the previous season, the previous season, the previous season. When that happens, you have injuries for a long time. But it’s inevitable, it’s normal, it’s normal that it’s going to happen that. Just handle it and be perfect how many I would say, how many training sessions you have to do to arrive as much as well as possible to the game.”

He even warned ahead of the defeat at Sporting that Man City would struggle to overcome their mounting injury list.

“We know we will struggle and we have to accept that, and it is fine,” he said. “The games will be difficult; in previous seasons it was smooth. Personal reasons, injuries, we won six Premier Leagues in seven years. Things change, we have to accept that.”

The decorated tactician added that if injured players don’t come back soon, his side will struggle to compete in multiple competitions, suggesting it’s more bad luck than a sign of declining quality even if City’s weakness from fast breaks is an issue they must find a way to address quickly.

Guardiola also brushed off Bernardo Silva’s insistence that City are “in a dark place” following the heavy Sporting loss, insisting their display was “really good”.

City have failed to win two of their opening four Champions League games. Despite this, they are still on course for automatic qualification to the knockout stages, and the underlying numbers support the argument that their performances have been better than the results suggest. Domestically, no significant drop-off was observed with the same metrics. City won the Premier League title last season with the division’s second-highest expected goal difference (9.01). They sit in the same place now, just behind Liverpool (10.34)rather than Arsenal.

Clubs consider expected goal difference a key performance indicator, giving City hope that their fortunes could change.

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