Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Manchester City are having a bit of a time of it. They’ve now lost five games in a row and internet law requires us to come up with five reasons – no more, no less – for why that is so.
And these are they.
Rodri’s injury
Obvious starting point is obvious, but the numbers are entirely insane. It’s barely an exaggeration or simplification to note that City never lose when Rodri plays but very frequently lose when he doesn’t, and he’s been out since September and is almost certainly gone for the rest of the season.
Which all means that while we can just shrug and go “Yeah, he’s real good at the football, isn’t he?” that option doesn’t exist for Guardiola and his team. They’ve got to come up with an actual real-world solution to minimise the impact of that loss or their season is going to circle the drain real fast.
It now seems safe to say that deploying Ilkay Gundogan and his ageing legs (about which more later) in an innovative deep-lying pointing role as he frantically indicates to assorted befuddled team-mates the precise location of whichever threat has just jogged past him doesn’t seem to be working, so it might need some fresh thinking.
There are few teams who could effortlessly cope without the one player, whatever their position happens to be, who knits the whole thing together – look at Arsenal without and with Martin Odegaard over the last few weeks, for instance – but however well-known the phenomenon has become it really is jarring that any one player can make such a monumental difference to the fortunes of a club as hefty and successful as City.
Rodri out for the season: Seven times injuries made the Premier League title race more interesting
Ruben Dias and the Other Injuries
As well as playing a legendary set at Reading in 92, Ruben Dias and the Other Injuries represent a further obvious point of concern for City.
There is a solid case to be made that – and we are most specifically talking about that absolute atrocity of a performance against Spurs at the weekend – Rodri isn’t even the most damaging missing piece of the puzzle.
Even without Rodri they managed to roll on a bit after that Arsenal game and churn out a few results here and there – often unconvincingly, sure – before the wheels fell off. The loss of wheels has arrived simultaneously with the loss of easily their best defender in Ruben Dias.
City have never once conceded four goals in any of his 169 Premier League and Champions League appearances for the club. In his current absence, they’ve done it twice in four games. And hardly covered themselves in defensive glory in the other two either.
Throw in awkward absences at various points for Kevin De Bruyne and Nathan Ake and Phil Foden and Jack Grealish, and a squad Guardiola likes to keep small by design has been stretched beyond its elastic limit.
Everyone has injuries, but Dias, Rodri, De Bruyne is proper ‘spine of the team’ stuff.
Old lags and young bucks
And you wonder how much those first two issues are down to the make-up of City’s squad. An average age of 27.8 doesn’t seem so bad, but it’s a deceptive mean that one. Because City’s squad simply has too few players in that 24-29 sweet-spot peak. Especially when you take out Rodri and Dias from that already under-represented group. Sure, you’ve still got Erling Haaland and Phil Foden at 24, but they’re both having their own struggles at the moment – relative to the absurd top level both possess.
Too many of the remaining key players in this squad are younglings or old heads. And it skews too far towards old head. De Bruyne is 33. Gundogan and Kyle Walker 34. Bernardo Silva, John Stones and Mateo Kovacic all 30.
At the other end of the scale you have huge demands and responsibility being placed on the shoulders of your Josko Gvardiols, your Rico Lewises and the Savinhos of this world. They’re all high-quality young players, but a lot is being asked of them.
The problem of having lots of youngsters and lots of old warhorses but nothing much in between will be a familiar one to anyone who has ever tried to captain a village cricket team. It seems a careless situation for the most successful football club in the country to find themselves in.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Postecoglou, O’Neil, Amorim, Leicester, Man City, Everton and more
Overwork
If you’ll allow us further opportunity to slap on the ol’ hindsight goggles… maybe this was always going to happen. Maybe this was always going to be a weird unpredictable season – something that wouldn’t ever play into City’s hands given the metronomic nature of their success. Maybe all the international football that’s been crammed into the schedule over the last few years via the combination of Covid-delayed 2020 tournaments and the winter World Cup in 2022 had to catch up with people sooner or later.
And City would always be vulnerable to it given a) the sheer number of their players who would obviously be involved in all that football and b) that slimline squad Guardiola likes to maintain.
Nine members of City’s squad have already racked up 1000 minutes of club football alone this season, with Ruben Dias picking up his injury four minutes shy of that mark and Gundogan only a handful of minutes adrift. They really might just be a team that has, for now at least, simply run out of puff.
Playing Tottenham twice
Let’s not make it more complicated than it need be. There’s simply no escaping the fact that 40% of Manchester City’s five-match losing run has come against Tottenham, who we know to be the stupidest football team on earth.
And one of the very best and also stupidest things about Tottenham is the fact they are absolute Kryptonite to Manchester City. They have a far better record against them in the Guardiola Era than makes any kind of sense.
In Guardiola’s time, he has faced Spurs 22 times. Spurs have won nine of those games and drawn a further three and lost only 10. Given the relative success of the teams over that period, with City winning approximately all of the trophies and Spurs none of the trophies, it’s absurdly even. Especially when you throw in the fact that one of City’s 10 ‘wins’ was the 4-3 Champions League quarter-final second leg that definitely didn’t feel like much of a win.
The great irony, of course, is that to every other team pretty much ever, there’s no more invigorating and encouraging sight when in the midst of a terrible run of form than that of Dr Tottenham rolling into town. For City, the best and most successful team of the age, the exact opposite is true. They would rather have faced literally anyone else on Saturday night. We don’t have to explain it – we can’t – we just have to acknowledge its truth.