[ad_1]
OIn this week’s episode of the Rest Is Football podcast, the Manchester City midfielder Rodri was asked if he ever imagined himself following Pep Guardiola and becoming a coach. “No,” comes the firm reply. “I see Pep and I don’t know if I want that for the next period of my life. I see Txiki’s face and I like it better. Cleaner and calmer.”
Of course, Rodri has made no secret in the past of his admiration for City’s director of football, Chiki Begiristain, and his desire to pursue that career path once he retires. Still, there is a slightly reproving quality to his words. Imagine being so hardworking, so relentlessly dedicated to your work that even Rhodri he starts thinking, Wow, boy, I ate a lot.
And of course we have to assume that this interview was recorded before the 3-3 draw against Feyenoord in midweek when Guardiola emerged for his media duties with red patches on his scalp and a small cut bleeding from his nose, looking like a man who had just had a stapler fight and lost. He joked about the self-harm that he later apologized. None of this, right now, really screams “dream job.”
Meanwhile, City are increasingly shambolic in defense and increasingly clueless in midfield, Erling Haaland seems to have forgotten how to score in the Premier League and there is the small but real possibility that in January they will be found guilty of serial rule-breaking , stripped of their league titles, relegated to amateur football and indelibly linked to one of the most scandalous episodes of cheating ever seen in modern football. Anyway, welcome to Anfield!
Even if City’s predicament looks reassuring in the short term – still second in the table, with the possibility of closing within five points of Arne Slott’s Liverpool side on Sunday afternoon, with injured players still to return – then the circumstances that created it, are anything but. In a way, the latest iteration of English football’s newest blue-chip rivalry is a chance to examine why these two clubs seem to have ended up on wildly different trajectories.
Still it was Liverpool who were supposed to be on the mend, City the model of stability and composure, Liverpool the club prone to big swings in form and intensity, City the cold winning machine that racks up points without ever seeming to get out of fourth gear. But in retrospect, the cracks in City’s edifice have been building for some time: a product not only of their legal problems but also of recruitment and retention mistakes, a culture that has somehow ossified, frozen, become a little too comfortable, a little too happy with yourself.
Take their struggles in midfield: a problem brought into focus by Rodri’s injury, but which they have also tried to address in previous transfer windows. Calvin Phillips, Mateus Nunes, Mateo Kovacic arrived in the summer of 2022 and 2023. for a combined cost of more than £100 million. Ilkay Gundogan was re-signed this summer, a free transfer but on wages likely to be in the region of the £320,000-a-week he was earning at Barcelona.
None of them have ever looked like a lasting option for a club aiming to be the best in the world. Nunes is not good enough; Kovacic is not fit enough; Phillips neither good enough nor fit enough; Gundogan, a 34-year-old man with all the intelligence but none of the sharpness he possessed in his prime.
You can look through some of City’s other recent transfer deals for similar anomalies. Spectacularly misguided call for Cole Palmer to be released at Chelsea after securing three Premier League starts in three seasons. Allowing Julián Alvarez to leave in the summer without an obvious replacement and thus placing almost all of the attacking burden on Haaland.
Of course, injuries have been a problem this season. But City teams of the past always managed to survive the loss of one player because system was king. Who plays up front in a Haaland-centric team if Haaland gets injured or suspended? Phil Foden? James McAtee? Bernardo Silva on the shoulders of Oscar Bob?
Liverpool, by contrast, have built resilience in almost every position. Obviously, players like Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk are largely irreplaceable. But their absence would not in itself necessitate a change in style or approach. Connor Bradley has established himself as a good replacement for Trent Alexander-Arnold. Alexis McAllister is in rich form, but nobody will panic if Curtis Jones steps in for him.
after the promotion of the newsletter
How did Liverpool get this far? Largely by making decisions that caused them very short-term pain. Carefully dismantling their famous front three when he probably had a few years left in him. Signing almost the entire midfield – Mac Allister, Wataru Endo, Dominik Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch – within eight weeks in the summer of 2023. Trusting academy players like Jones and Bradley, giving them the right minutes in the right games.
There have been times under Jurgen Klopp – notably the 2020-21 and 2022-23 seasons – when the entire structure seemed on the verge of collapse. There were disasters, dips in form, rumblings of discontent among the fans. But somehow there has always been a thread of identity, a recognizable sense of mission, principles to live by. Klopp was the spiritual leader of the club, but he was never interested in controlling it on a micro level: always open to new ideas, always aware enough to know what he could do himself and what was best delegated to the experts.
City, by contrast, is a club that revolves almost entirely around Guardiola’s vision: the strategy to bring him in first place, an infrastructure built to his exact specifications. A style of football that is more authentically Guardiola than City ever was. The players he wants and none of the players he doesn’t want. A small team because he likes it that way. There are, of course, worse strategies than betting on the most brilliant and gifted coach of your generation. City’s trophy haul is testament to that.
But this means that over time the collective begins to acquire the character of the individual. As Guardiola has aged and changed, so have City: more pragmatic, more dogged, more bombastic and obsessive, preoccupied above all with the protection of heritage instead of building a new one. In a way, City became a temple to celebrity, the decadent star vehicles they were winning, fatally dependent on the enduring individual genius of Haaland, Rodri and Guardiola himself.
One way or another there is going to be a payoff. It could come in the summer, it could come from the lawyers in January, it could even come to Anfield on Sunday, where another capitulation or embarrassment is sure to hasten the sense of chaos and disintegration. Guardiola has just signed for another two years, but in a strange way the clock is already ticking. The mistakes of the past have led City to their unremarkable present. What others might already be doing?
[ad_2]
