Manchester City loves to give rivals hope right before snatching it away. The four-peating Premier League champions started each of those consecutive title-winning campaigns with whimpers, relatively speaking, dropping at least eight points in Premier League play in each of them by about mid-November. Each of those stretches of (relatively) subpar play gave hope to everyone who supports a fellow title contender or simply (and justifiably) hates City's whole deal. But, as the saying goes, it's the hope that kills you, and City eventually crushed those hopes in each of those four seasons.
Right on time, the present day Citizens have entered the late-fall point of the schedule mired in a funk. Right now City sits in second place on the league table, having dropped 10 points in its first 11 matches. After a strong start to the campaign, the Mancs have hit the skids hard recently, currently stuck in a four-match losing streak across all competitions. The latest blow came in a come-from-ahead 2-1 loss to Brighton on Saturday.
Going backwards in time from the Brighton loss, City also got taken apart 4-1 by Sporting Lisbon in the Champions League, lost to Bournemouth 2-1 in the league, and lost 2-1 to Tottenham in the League Cup. For a team as high-flying and high-scoring as City usually is, getting only one goal in four straight matches is not a recipe for success. This is where the club's problems start this season.
Put simply, Manchester City isn't converting its chances. Aside from Erling Haaland, who has 12 goals on 12.19 expected goals, every key player for City has under-performed the statistical expectations. Bernardo Silva, Jack Grealish, new signing Savio, and the returning Ilkay Gündogan have all combined for zero goals through 11 matches in the league on a combined 5.31 xG. Last year's Premier League player of the season Phil Foden has three goals in the Champions League, including the opener at Sporting before everything went to shit, but he has also failed to get on the scoresheet in eight league appearances, a far cry from the 18 Prem goals he bagged last season. It also doesn't help that City sold Julián Álvarez to Atlético Madrid over the summer and never replaced him, leaving Haaland as the roster's only true striker.
It should be noted that all of these players scored plenty of goals last season, and, with the exception of Gündogan at Barcelona, they all over-performed their respective xG along the way. It's unclear, then, whether the current goal-scoring drought is a temporary fluke or a regression to the mean after last year's hot streak. But the issue's with the team's play goes deeper than statistical anomalies. City's entire offense feels stagnant and its defense feels disjointed, and the best explanation why has just one name: Rodri.
There was a bit of hubbub when the Spanish defensive midfielder won the Ballon d'Or last month, and while it mainly originated from an aggrieved Real Madrid apparatus, it's fair to say that Rodri wasn't a slam-dunk pick for the sport's biggest individual award. But if there were any doubts about Rodri's central importance to the best team in the best league in the world, those should be cleared up now seeing how mightily City has struggled in his absence.
Let's backtrack a bit. After winning the Euros with Spain this summer, Rodri entered the Premier League season nursing a hamstring injury. Upon his return, he was able to play in three matches: one half as a substitute in a 2-1 win over Brentford, all 90 minutes against Inter in the Champions League, and 21 minutes against Arsenal on Sept. 22, when he suffered a torn ACL that will keep him out for the remainder of this season. It's fair to summarize all that by saying that City has not had the Rodri it has grown accustomed to in his tenure with the club, and the performances have slipped accordingly.
Rodri is the engine that makes Manchester City's luxury automobile purr like a kitten. He is the spine of the team on defense, he is the mastermind of the team's possessions, and he is even a legitimate threat in attack in his own right, scoring eight goals and adding nine assists in league play last season. While Haaland rightfully gets plenty of attention for his prolific goal-scoring, and Foden got the accolades for his consecrating season last year, it was Rodri who drove City forward, somehow doing the job of a destroyer, shuttler, and creative attacking midfielder all at once, and doing so without any noticeable drops in form.
To circle back to this season, Rodri's absence has led to City's entire playing style falling apart. It's hard to believe that a team as rich in both money and depth as City could so falter without one player, but there's no one quite like Rodri in world soccer. This is what makes this current slump feel more ominous than in years past; there's no replacement who could possibly make up for everything Rodri does in the midfield, and so Guardiola has to get by with trying to recreate him in aggregate.
His main route towards this goal has been to give Mateo Kovacic a similar role to the Spaniard's. While Kovacic has been one of the few truly bright spots for City this season—three goals on two shots per game is a solid account for a midfielder—he simply can't contribute in the same ways on defense. Guardiola has lined up Rico Lewis, the 19-year-old academy product, next to Kovacic in hopes that the youngster can help fill the Rodri-sized hole, but that's not fair to Lewis, both due to his inexperience and his diminutive size. He doesn't have the physical traits to get stuck in and break up attacks in the same ways, and it has shown. And when Guardiola sits Lewis and leaves Kovacic in the no. 6 role alone, well, that's how you get a 4-1 loss to Sporting.
Now, this isn't to say that the Premier League title race is over or that Liverpool, currently five-points up after a rousing 2-0 win against Aston Villa on Saturday, is a lock to win it all. Manchester City is still Manchester City, and as long as the club doesn't get sent to the dark ages by the pending Financial Fair Play charges (a possibility!), it will likely still be there in the end fighting for the title.
Haaland might tend to disappear in the toughest matches, but he's still an assassin against the vast majority of teams. Foden will likely round back into form after a disappointing summer at the Euros and his slow start to the club season. And I haven't even mentioned Kevin De Bruyne yet. If there's someone who can single-handedly revitalize City's attack, it's a healthy and locked in De Bruyne, though it remains to be seen how long he can be that at this point in his career. Silva, Savio, Grealish, and Gundogan should score some goals, and City has gotten surprising productivity from defenders John Stones (two league goals) and Josko Gvardiol (three). There is also the January transfer window, when Guardiola will surely agitate for a defensive midfield signing to try to mount City's usual second-half charge.
It would be foolish to totally discard the possibility of City winning something like 13 of its last 15 PL matches and thereby romping back to the title, but the underlying signs have never been less auspicious for City during this current stretch of title-winning dominance. The ball isn't going into the back of the net with as much ruthless efficiency as usual, opponents are hitting back on counter-attacks at a much deadlier rate, and everything feels much more difficult than it has in the recent past. Chalk it up to Rodri's absence, or to the fatigue of this much domestic supremacy, or just to some bad bounces, but it's getting harder to see a path forward for the Citizens that doesn't end with the club reduced to what, for them, is an ignoble fate: just another good side fighting for wins rather than steamrolling their way to them.
