THE STRAITS TIMES
SINGAPORE – Six trophies in the past two years, yet now an invincible Manchester City are staring at a wretched run of eight losses from their last 11 matches.
In sport, fortunes can change quickly. But rarely as swiftly as City’s, a club who for much of the last decade have dominated English football with six league titles in seven seasons.
Today, with nearly the same players and manager, they are unrecognisable. Suddenly the team led by captain Kyle Walker look weak and vulnerable, and their tactical guru Pep Guardiola hit by sleepless nights and a loss of appetite owing to their losses.
Just 25 games into the season, City have lost more matches than they did in each of their last two campaigns.
The Citizens sit fifth in the English Premier League, nine points behind leaders Liverpool – who have a game in hand – and are also in danger of an early exit from the Champions League.
It could get worse when they head to Villa Park to take on Aston Villa on Dec 21, a fixture which they lost last season.
This is unchartered territory for Guardiola, a perfectionist and serial winner with Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City – he has 39 trophies in total – who has never experienced anything like this. City last went through a similar slump in 2006, when Stuart Pearce was in charge.
The Straits Times takes an in-depth look at why City’s machine is breaking down this season.
Distractions aplenty
While a long-awaited hearing into 115 breaches of Premier League rules by City has concluded in early December, the club are still waiting to see if any action will be taken against them.
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Guardiola in August dismissed claims the case would affect his players. But given that City face severe sanctions if found guilty, it is possible that it has been an unwelcome distraction.
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But it is on the pitch where City have come unstuck.
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Injuries are a big issue, especially on their defensive end.
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John Stones has been able to make only seven appearances in the league, two more than fellow defender Nathan Ake, while Manuel Akanji, Walker, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and Kevin de Bruyne have missed games due to injury or illness.
To compound matters, it was confirmed on Dec 20 that Ruben Dias is out for up to four weeks with a muscle issue, while there is uncertainty over the fitness of goalkeeper Ederson.
Many pundits attribute City’s dip to the absence of the injured Rodri, the team’s midfield anchor and recent Ballon d’Or winner, but Michel Sablon, the former technical director of the Royal Belgian Football Association and now a technical consultant with Fifa, told ST that the Rodri factor is an overly simplistic reason.
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Sablon said: “The system of Guardiola is not based on one player. Their results and even the effectiveness of each player are an outcome of the system. One player alone cannot be the difference between losing or winning games.
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“Rodri is one of the best midfielders of the world, but losing him will not make such a drastic difference. A team can be less effective when the quality of the player in a position changes, but it cannot lead to total collapse.”
Confidence crisis
Injury issues notwithstanding, just one win in 11 games is dismal, given the star power and talent that still exist within City’s ranks.
Examining the team’s mental state may offer a clearer and more insightful picture.
Edgar Tham, chief sport and performance psychologist at SportPsych Consulting, has seen first-hand what happens to wounded teams.
Tham was roped in by the Football Association of Singapore to help the national team ahead of their 1998 Tiger Cup triumph.
The Lions went to Hanoi on the back of lacklustre results and little fanfare. In 1997, the Lions won only one out of 13 matches all year.
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Although the Singapore national team and City are clearly not in the same league when it comes to level of competition and standards, Tham stressed that regardless of a team’s calibre, a series of losses can significantly damage confidence.
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Tham said: “When confidence or belief is low, subsequent behaviours tend to be hesitation and lessened effort. The (Lions) players appeared less assertive and hesitant during training. There was limited communication among players and they were also scared or anxious about not meeting expectations, and they didn’t dare take risks during training and even in matches.”
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This was echoed by City midfielder Ilkay Gundogan after their 2-0 loss to Juventus on Dec 11.
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Gundogan said then: “(Confidence is) a big part of it and that’s a mental issue as well. If we miss the ball or lose a duel, you see that we drop immediately and we lose our rhythm.”
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Former Manchester United goalkeeper Mark Bosnich told ST that confidence would be fragile within City as they are in a situation that they have never experienced.
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He said: “The vast majority of players and the manager have never gone through anything like this before. It is not in their culture and they must be wondering ‘what is going on?’ It erodes your confidence.
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​“Whether you pick tomatoes, work at McDonald’s, or if you’re a CEO of a top company, when your confidence starts to dip, it becomes very difficult to function normally and in a highly competitive environment like the Premier League. A dip in confidence will show in your performance and then your results.”
Blame game
On a TED Talks Daily podcast, How to Survive a Losing Team, neuroscientist Ian Robertson explained that losing can cause feelings akin to physical pain.
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Robertson said: “This emotional reaction to losing, which in the brain corresponds to a decline in dopamine activity in the brain’s reward network. And it’s actually very close to some of the pain centres of the brain. So it feels like pain.”
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​Sport psychologist Lim Han Ee said that regardless of the sport, when a team suffer consecutive losses, players can start to point fingers at one another, which can erode confidence further.
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“Some teammates will start playing the blame game. They start to voice out that a certain individual has made a mistake or has not been in the position he needs to be in,” said Lim, who is the founder of Emerge Performance, a firm which helps organisations enhance team effectiveness.
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“When these conversations start emerging, and if they perpetuate, then it impacts the trust and cohesion within the team. Individuals will start to play for themselves, rather than for each other, and that’s the beginning of the collapse of a team.”
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Tham added that losses can cause doubt to creep in, affecting City’s players and leadership and “might even lead to more conflicts”.
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That has been seen on the pitch for City, with midfielder Bernardo Silva blasting his teammates in a post-match interview following the loss to Manchester United on Dec 15, saying his teammates “played like Under-15s”.
Opponents smell blood
At their peak, Guardiola’s men had the ability to exhaust their opponents to the point of surrender.
But now teams go into matches against City with belief.
Even in games where City looked to have it sewn up, things have gone awry. After leading 3-0 against Feyenoord in the Champions League, the game ended 3-3.
Against United, City conceded twice in 115 seconds as three points became zero. Bosnich said: “Manchester City, for so long, have had a target on them because of their unbelievable success. Now as they falter, the opposition teams, they can smell the fact that the players aren’t quite at it.
“So now there is this wonderful opportunity for these other teams who are facing City. It must be a terrible place to be in at the moment for City.”
What’s next?
Lim said that the team will need to “address the issues in a very open and transparent way” to start seeing improvements.
He added: “What they need is to be on the same page, hold each other accountable. They cannot control how the opposition play. But they can control how they train, how they relate to each other, how they show up for each other.”
Several pundits have in recent times urged Guardiola to loosen the shackles on mavericks like Grealish, with The Telegraph’s northern football correspondent James Ducker stating that the manager’s “safety-first approach has blunted his (Grealish’s) edge”.
Tham said that if he was working with City’s team, his approach would be to try and “foster a positive environment” immediately where players are allowed to “express themselves without fear of failure”.
Sablon added: “Guardiola will not change the style. But it is a system that demands perfection from the players and they must rise to this challenge again.”
Although City appear more vulnerable than ever, their ability to shift into high gear when it matters leaves some still expecting them to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
Bosnich said: “It would not surprise me at all to see them win the Premier League, nor would it surprise me to see them win the Champions League. Because those are things they can aim for to prove those who wrote them off wrong.”
Time will tell if Guardiola and his City players can turn the corner. For now, rival fans are relishing in the downfall of a once-mighty team.
Does anyone feel sorry for the champions? Some would say there are 115 reasons not to.