After a dramatic and potentially hugely damaging night for the entire world, the same question is on everyone’s lips this morning: are Manchester City officially now in crisis? Do we need to deploy the badge cracker we, like all media companies, keep on retainer for such eventualities?
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!It might be a bit early for all that. But they have lost their last three games and, with the very best will in the world and absolutely no shade intended, none has been to a particularly top-tier team, with Spurs and Bournemouth getting the better of City before a 4-1 defeat at Ruben Amorim’s Sporting that had narrative out the wazoo. That all combines to make it arguably the worst run City have ever had during Pep Guardiola’s reign of almost unimaginable success.
Let’s have a quick look at some of the very few other dodge-pot runs they’ve endured over these impossibly successful years.
September-October 2016: Six games without a win
UCL: Celtic 3-3 Manchester City
PL: Tottenham 2-0 Manchester City
PL: Manchester City 1-1 Everton
UCL: Barcelona 4-0 Manchester City
PL: Manchester City 1-1 Southampton
EFL Cup: Manchester United 1-0 Manchester City
The first of a few tricky runs during Guardiola’s very first season at City before he had moulded them into the all-conquering machine we’ve all come to know and love so very much over the years, their victories celebrated across the land for their impressive nature and the total absence of anything controversial behind the scenes.
But it didn’t happen overnight. That first season really was one of adjustment, although it is probably worth noting that this particular run of strife did come after Guardiola’s side had won its 10 matches across Premier League, Champions League and League Cup. They weren’t sh*t or anything. In fact, Guardiola’s start in the Premier League is among the very best.
The Champions League draw at Celtic was a doozy, featuring Raheem Sterling scoring for both sides in a 10-minute period, while a key feature of the Guardiola reign – a bafflingly inexplicable weakness against Tottenham – was also established early on against what was, in fairness, the absolute peak of that Mauricio Pochettino side. Home draws with Everton and Southampton are a bit harder to explain away, as was a chastening Champions League mauling on his return to Barcelona.
The Carabao love affair – Guardiola has four titles and presumably a cupboard somewhere chock full of undrinkably disgusting tins of the stuff – was also yet to begin, with an early exit at Old Trafford.
March-April 2017: Four games without a win
UCL: Monaco 3-1 Manchester City
PL: Manchester City 1-1 Liverpool
PL: Arsenal 2-2 Manchester City
PL: Chelsea 2-1 Manchester City
A genuinely costly run, this. Defeat at Monaco saw them go out on away goals in a wild last-16 tie after a 5-3 win at the Etihad, while that Premier League run saw them drop from second to fourth.
Title hopes were already pretty forlorn by the time City went down to runaway leaders Chelsea, while the draws with Liverpool and Arsenal left them scrapping with that pair for the last two Champions League spots as first Chelsea and then Spurs – they really were very good that year – disappeared over the horizon.
April 2017: Three games without a win
FA Cup: Arsenal 2-1 Manchester City
PL: Manchester City 0-0 Manchester United
PL: Middlesbrough 2-2 Manchester City
For all City’s well-earned reputation for becoming genuinely unstoppable as the season progresses, a lot of these (admittedly rare) sketchy runs do seem to come in April. A big part of that, though, is that one perhaps under-discussed City vulnerability is FA Cup semi-finals. They’ve lost four of the buggers under Guardiola, with the first coming against Arsenal in his first season.
That defeat was followed by a couple of Premier League draws in a stuttering league campaign. The second of those draws came against Middlesbrough, whose goalscorers were Alvaro Negredo and Calum Chambers. For some reason we can’t quite pin down, absolutely none of that information feels right.
April 2018: Three straight defeats
UCL: Liverpool 3-0 Manchester City
PL: Manchester City 2-3 Manchester United
UCL: Manchester City 1-2 Liverpool
A harrowing run during the season where City cracked the 100-point barrier in the Premier League. But the Champions League dream died at Anfield with a 3-0 hammering that rendered the second leg – and thus the third defeat of this particular run – somewhat moot.
There’s a philosophical question in there about whether losing the second leg of a tie you’ve already pretty much f***ed in the first leg even really counts as a defeat, but Champions League failure despite obvious domestic greatness was by this point already becoming a theme for Guardiola and City.
The league game between those two Liverpool defeats was more irritating than significantly wounding; the Premier League title was only going one way that season. Losing from 2-0 up to Jose Mourinho isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, though, and did at the time potentially jeopardise that 100-point target. But even with that Etihad mugging United still finished a distant 19 points behind.
A dignified manager wouldn’t bang on about that ‘achievement’, would they? They certainly wouldn’t be insisting on having the medals and trophies if City are stripped of them. Jose Mourinho, to the surprise of no human ever, sees things a bit differently.
But all things considered, while the nature and timing of that first Champions League defeat in particular make this a more damaging run than the current one, there is no sensible way of pretending that losing twice to a Liverpool side that was just starting to realise just how good they could be and a Man United one that was, however distantly and briefly, the next best team in England at that time is as bad a set of results in isolation as losing to Spurs, Bournemouth and Sporting.
April 2022: Three games without a win
PL: Manchester City 2-2 Liverpool
UCL: Atletico Madrid 0-0 Manchester City
FA Cup: Manchester City 2-3 Liverpool
It really does highlight just how hard it is to find even a three-game run of woe for Pep’s City that this one has to do. Sure, losing an FA Cup semi-final is a p*sser for anyone, but it once again came against what was at this time the only English team capable of competing with City over an extended period.
The league draw against the same opponent allowed City to retain a one-point advantage in the title race, an advantage they would hold all the way to the finish line, while the goalless draw at Atletico Madrid actually saw them through to the Champions League semi-finals after a 1-0 win at the Etihad. So that’s really kind of a win, isn’t it? In a way. It certainly doesn’t feel like a regular draw anyway, but if we don’t include it we’ve got not much else.
Really does seem that City might actually have been quite a good football team for quite a long time under Pep Guardiola, you know. This is huge and new information.
