Pep Guardiola’s insistence on an attacking philosophy is costing Manchester City

For the first time in his 12-year career as a top-level manager Pep Guardiola’s dominance has slipped.

Manchester City Pep Guardiola gestures on the touchline Picture: AFP.

Pep Guardiola is one of the greatest coaches of all time, maybe even the best. Sixteen months ago, when Manchester City clinched the English Premier League trophy on the final day of the 2018-19 season, he had won eight of the past ten league titles that his teams had contested and just recorded the two highest points totals in EPL history. But since then something interesting has happened. For the first time in his 12-year career as a top-level manager Guardiola’s dominance has slipped.

His City team have lost ten of their past 36 league games. That’s one more than Bayern Munich lost in Guardiola’s three seasons in the Bundesliga, and one fewer than Barcelona lost in his four seasons there. And although Sunday’s defeat by Leicester City was the first time that a Guardiola team have conceded five goals, it was the fifth time since last September that they have conceded three. What’s going on? Is this a run of bad luck, are individual errors to blame, or is Guardiola’s cashmere football unravelling on the rusty nail of the Premier League?

One thing that has always been true of Guardiola’s sides is that they are excellent defensive teams without being defensive teams per se. There is little emphasis on pure defending in Guardiola’s style: remember, this is the man who reinvented goalkeeper as a playmaking position and said after a defeat by Leicester in 2016 that he wasn’t a “coach for the tackles”. Instead, his teams stop the opposition scoring by starving them of possession, containing the play in their half and thereby minimising the amount of shooting opportunities they can create.

The corollary of this is that if you can beat Guardiola’s high press there is space in behind his defences to attack. Because of this, his teams are liable to give up relatively high-quality chances, in small quantities, but usually they have managed this trade-off successfully. In his four seasons at Barcelona, they conceded an average of 0.74 goals per game. At Bayern, that figure was a miserly 0.57. In his first three seasons at City, it was a still-very-good 0.78. But since the start of last season, City have conceded a fraction over a goal per game.

Although City are still restricting their opponents to a handful of chances (since the start of last season, they have faced an average of 7.4 shots per game, the fewest in the league), the quality of those shots has become a problem. In Guardiola’s first three seasons, the expected goals (xG) value of the shots City faced hovered between 0.09 and 0.10, right around the league average. Last season, however, the value of the shots they conceded was the highest in the league, at 0.12 xG. Too often, they are leaving goalkeeper Ederson at the mercy of clear chances.

“It became significantly easier for their opponents to pass through their defence and get one-on-one with the goalkeeper (last season),” James Yorke, head of analysis for the football analytics company Statsbomb, notes. “Across the previous two seasons, they gave up 21 shots from through balls and conceded three goals. Last season they gave up the same amount of shots (from through balls), but in one season rather than two, and conceded seven goals.”

Although City haven’t conceded from a through-ball this season, we can see that this vulnerability to passes in behind hasn’t gone away. At one point it City’s first match of the season against Wolverhampton Wanderers; Kyle Walker, Nathan Ake and Benjamin Mendy were at one point all standing on the halfway line, while John Stones was slightly deeper, meaning that all Joao Moutinho had to do to was put Daniel Podence one-on-one with Ederson by playing a simple pass into space.

This lack of co-ordination between a back four playing together for the first time speaks to another issue with Guardiola’s defence: erratic personnel choices. Last season Guardiola made a cumulative 144 changes to his starting XI, the most in a Premier League season. Since the start of 2020 he has only twice named an unchanged defence from one league game to the next.

Playing at the back in a Guardiola team is incredibly difficult: it requires a substantial contribution to the attacking build-up play and also involves defending a huge amount of space in transition. It is a balancing act that requires intelligence, discipline and recovery ability. At Barcelona, Guardiola had Carles Puyol, Gerard Pique, Dani Alves and Eric Abidal. At Bayern, he had Jerome Boateng, Dante, Joshua Kimmich and David Alaba. City’s defensive cohort, with the exception of Laporte, is not of the same calibre, despite the club’s extensive recruitment. And so Guardiola’s defence is caught in a vicious cycle: the individuals aren’t quite good enough to do what is required of them but the manager compounds the problem by fidgeting between different combinations.

In his biography of Guardiola, Guillem Balague writes: “Pep is in search of the absolute ideal, an unattainable quest ... He does not give ground readily on any matters pertaining to his football philosophy.” This uncompromising idealism has been a strength of Guardiola’s but it is fair to ask whether his present squad might benefit from a more flexible approach.

It was fascinating to hear, in Rodri’s interview after the Leicester loss, how Guardiola’s philosophy rubs off on his players. Sniffily describing Leicester’s counterattacking approach as “not the way I like to play”, he added: “I don’t know if it’s our fault or their strength . . . but we try to go for the second, the third, that makes us lose balls and concede.”

Contained in that whinge was a note of truth: City keep playing in the same way, no matter the state of the game. When they were winning in matches last season, their expected-goal differential (the difference between the goals they are expected to score and concede, based on quality of chances) was +30.3, compared with Liverpool’s +13.1. But while Liverpool have only dropped five points from winning positions since the start of last season, City have dropped 12. Whereas Liverpool know when to put a lid on games, Guardiola’s team keep pouring forward.

“The numbers imply that Liverpool are far more pragmatic when they get into (winning) positions than Manchester City are,” Yorke says. “Guardiola’s ideas around football are far more strict than Klopp’s. (City) could be a bit smarter.”

City this week completed a deal for the Benfica centre back Ruben Dias: the ninth defensive signing of Guardiola’s tenure. Finding players who can reinforce the principles that underpin their manager’s style of play has led City to keep opening the chequebook. A much more open question, and one that may decide if City find a way out of their malaise, is whether Guardiola can bring himself to shut up shop.

The Times