Manchester City and the lack of a transitional season

With defeats on the pitch and the at Premier League HQ, November has been a difficult month at The Etihad.

To say that this hasn’t been an easy month for Manchester City would be putting it mildly. On the 26th October they recorded their last win in any competition, 1-0 against Southampton in the Premier League. Cracks had been showing for a little while beforehand. They hadn’t exactly been convincing in their two previous matches either, falling behind before coming back to beat Fulham 3-2 and scrambling a last-gasp winner at Wolves.

They’ve now lost five games on the bounce, and they’re eight points adrift of Liverpool at the top of the Premier League. And they’ve been well beaten in each of these five defeats. Bournemouth out-played them, Brighton came back strongly in the second half against them, and Spurs not only knocked them out of the League Cup, but then also absolutely put them to the sword in the Premier League, live on the television, and at their place.

Spurs! Truly, these are strange times.

They’ve been less than convincing so far in the Champions League, putting nine goals without reply past Slovan Bratislava and Sparta Prague but struggling against stronger opposition, taking just one point from their two games against Inter and Sporting; a goalless draw against the former and a 4-1 mauling at the hands of the latter.

They’ll probably get through to the knockout stages of the competition regardless—this new format does nothing if not give the biggest and wealthiest clubs plenty of second chances—but they’re only in tenth place in the enormogroup of 36 at the half-way point, and being that high is entirely a result of games against two of its weakest teams.

Off the pitch the news has been mixed, especially over the last week or so. The Premier League got its way over APT rules, winning the vote of the twenty member clubs by a comfortable margin of 16 to 4 after Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers, who’d previously been believed to be siding with City, switched sides to join the majority. To do otherwise might have been catastrophic for any remaining semblance of competitive balance within the league, and apparently the vast majority of clubs did not wish to jeopardise that. Expect the legal assaults to continue.

Of course, the small matter of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League is the glittering elephant in the room, and with the hearing having started in September and now being expected to last for less than the original ten weeks for which it had been scheduled, an announcement will be expected in the new year. What the findings of this hearing may or may not be, again, expect the legal assaults to continue. Anyone saying with any degree of certainty where this goes next or where it ends up is either pathologically over-optimistic, a fool, or a liar.

There was better news for them in the announcement that Pep Guardiola was to sign another two-year extension to his contract, when it had been speculated that he would be more likely to sign for one further year or even take a sabbatical from the game altogether. There is, of course, a manager signing a new contract to the delight of everybody in the middle of a five-match losing run, but it can hardly be said to be incomprehensible that there was such delight at him staying on.

On the playing side, it feels that they have a lot emotionally invested in the return of Rodri, but that won’t be until next season. And what of the rest? John Stones returned against Spurs, but was withdrawn at half-time. A start-stop performance in a stop-start season. Mateo Kovacic is out for a month, though Ruben Dias should be back soon. Jeremy Doku’s return date is unclear and Oscar Bobb should be back by January or February.

It’s facile to say that they’ve ‘lost the Premier League’ in November, but they’ve left themselves a lot of catching up to do. Manchester City seem stuck in a state of mind that is halfway between needing to move forward and getting lodged in the past. On one level the decision to add an extra two years is a no-brainer, but it isn’t to quite the extent that it was.

It’s not all bad news. Erling Haaland will continue to score a lot of goals, and he is still young. The Academy will likely continue to throw out players capable of building that new generation. But that’s only the medium-term future. Over a shorter term, the team have felt strangely inert of late, lacking the arrogance and swagger that seemed to make them winning feel like an inevitability, even when they were losing. There are younger players, but the core of the team is getting old and at points of late has been starting to look it.

Of course, sympathy levels from the outside will not be high. This is certainly all a far cry from the days of Typical City, the lovable buffoons who never seemed that far from entering chaos mode, of Peter Swales and his astonishing combover, Raddy Antic shooting them into Division Two on the last day of the season, or getting knocked out of the FA Cup by Halifax Town on a freshly ploughed field. And you have to grudgingly admit that the amount of glee being expressed over their current rut is in itself a mark of how far they’ve come.

Of course, Manchester City have monopolised the top of the Premier League for so long that them going on a run like this has a certain novelty about it. And while the Premier League needs its ‘Big Six Crisis Club’, the others aren’t quite getting it right at the moment. Chelsea are ‘any good’ again, as Arsenal have been for a couple of years, while Liverpool have managed the transition from Jurgen Klopp to Arne Slot exceptionally cleanly. Even Spurs, usually purveyors of such rich clown car-related mirth, have twice been the inflictors of City’s recent torment, the latter of which was a result straight from the funniest timeline.

Manchester United completely Manchester Uniteded it at Ipswich Town on Sunday afternoon, but we’ve become so accustomed to this sort of thing that it’s no longer much a surprise; at this stage it’s just another reminder of how much there is work there is to do at Old Trafford. The agony of Manchester United is longer burning, with the secret ingredient of false hope. We shall have to see, whether Ruben Amorim can finally break that cycle.

Regardless of whether this is a blip or not, the fact remains that Manchester City and Pep Guardiola will have to part ways one day, though that extra two years extension does now mean that decisions over the future can be put off for a while. But although most of us have seen Manchester City blip out before, this year’s has appeared more severe than previous ones. The team has looked more tired, more fin de siecle. Another two years of Pep comes at a time when the team could probably do with an overhaul.

Abu Dhabi built the Sky Blue Death Star and everything else effectively for Guardiola. He was the endpoint of those first few years. Now we’re years along from that early transition, the club is fighting every organisation going, and the mood around the place feels different. And whether it’s next summer, in a couple of years time or whenever, it’s going to happen.

That renewal is needed feels more pressing because this season’s team has been atrophying on the pitch. It’s important to remember that these recent defeats were well-deserved, and that their performance against Feyenoord probably won’t tell as much about them as we learn from them at Anfield on Sunday. Defeat in that match would leave them eleven points adrift of Liverpool. That’s a point at which catching up does start to look insurmountable.

There are a lot of people still wondering when the backlash from the team will begin. It may be that they snap back into gear in the Champions League tonight. Pray for Feyenoord? How good are they? How significant is it that one of their wins so far came away to Benfica? They’re fourth in the Eredivisie. Better than Sparta Prague but probably not quite as good as Sporting? Does that sound fair?

What makes Manchester City so frustrating at a time like this is that the evidence of your eyes is contradicting the evidence stored between your ears; it’s the cognitive dissonance of knowing that they’re better than this while they’re obviously, demonstrably not being better than this at the moment.

A month on from their last win in any competition, it feels as though this season is slipping from them, that it may even turn out to be a transitional one whether they want it to be one or not. The team is ageing and the manager has been there a long time. Is the point of a two-year contract to let Pep build the foundations of the next iteration of the steamroller? What is the long-term plan? It’s not entirely clear, whether recent rumours of their decline and fall do turn out to have been slightly overstated or not.

The accompanying image is by Cleria De Souza, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.