It’s an old law of storytelling that the more powerful the character or obstacle, the more it needs some small, sort of ridiculous flaw to keep hope alive. Achilles had his heel. The Death Star had that exhaust port. Manchester City, football’s own destroyer of worlds, have… a rear wheel gone slightly wobbly on the left side of their defence?
It’s not much to hang a game plan on. Even in their injury-depleted state, Pep Guardiola’s band of mecha warriors are the toughest team to score against in the Premier League. If there was one easy trick to beat them, they wouldn’t have gone almost five years without losing back-to-back league games. But they did just lose — twice! — to Wolves and then Arsenal, and if you look closely, there seems to be an early consensus shaping up about where to take a swing at this season’s version of the team that won the treble only four months ago.
Much more than in the previous five seasons, opponents are now attacking up their right side — City’s left.
The graphic above shows where City’s opponents attempt passes, compared to each zone’s average across the past six Premier League seasons. In 2021-22 and 2022-23, you could see the midfield turning blue as Guardiola dialled down his team’s high press to stay close in the middle, allowing opponents to play the ball around their own pinkish third instead.
This season, a new pattern is emerging: teams are steering their possession from left to right, putting all their chips on red to attack one particular corner of City’s defence. The shift has been strikingly consistent across a full third of the pitch.
As you’d probably expect, a lot of that traffic is coming from long balls — mostly diagonals — hit over the top of City’s compact mid-block defence. Teams have always tried to do that kind of thing against them, but never with this much success. Compared to the first eight games of other Premier League campaigns, City have allowed more long passes to their left flank this season (29) than last season (11) and the one before that (16) combined.
This isn’t happening on the other flank and it’s not just some accident resulting from playing a bunch of right-side-dominant teams in a row. When City’s eight opponents have faced other teams, they’ve passed about the same amount in both directions. It’s only when they meet City that everyone suddenly leans long to the right.
So what’s going on here?
City’s lavishly expensive new left/centre-back, Josko Gvardiol, is a finalist for the 2023 Ballon d’Or and is often called the best young defender in the world. His minutes have mostly come at the expense of the less heralded Nathan Ake and everyone agrees that either one of those guys is a better defender than City’s left-back before them, Joao Cancelo. Somehow the club keep upgrading that side of their defence but get worse.
One problem may be Gvardiol’s sheer confidence as a defender. He spent the past two years with Germany’s RB Leipzig, where players are often taught to “forecheck”, or jump in front of an opponent to cut out an anticipated pass. It’s an aggressive technique that works well when the whole team are pressing together, but a defender who closes down too much in isolation is liable to get turned by an attacker’s double move — dropping to the ball and then sprinting in behind.
You’ll often see Gvardiol in risky situations like this:
Of course, football is a team sport, especially in defence, and there have been some other changes that affect City’s left flank.
Historically, the left-back and left centre-back only account for about half a team’s defensive actions in that part of the pitch. Another chunk of a side’s ball-winning usually comes from the defensive and central midfielders, but that has dried up for City this season, with Rodri serving a three-game ban (which covered those two defeats) and Ilkay Gundogan gone to Barcelona. Their replacements, especially Mateo Kovacic, tend to be skilled ball-handlers who lack the same defensive bite and long experience in Guardiola’s system.
Speaking of a lack of experience, nobody has been picked on more than 21-year-old Jeremy Doku, a dribbling specialist fresh from France’s Ligue 1 who has been asked to slot in for the low-key defensively excellent Jack Grealish. You can practically see the motherboard overheating as Doku tries to work out his precise positions, triggers and angles in City’s intricate pressing schemes in live time.
All of this is exacerbated by a lack of pressure up front.
City’s gradual retreat from all-out high pressing over the past few years has made them harder to play through, but when they fail to close down the ball it makes them easier to play over. They’ve been especially cautious this season about chasing backward passes — a common pressing trigger that can also be used as bait — but that allows opponents to play out of pressure, back to a defender or goalkeeper who has time on the ball and a good view of the pitch. That’s dangerous.
Against Wolves three weeks ago, who targeted City’s left flank more intentionally than anyone else this season, completing seven of nine long passes in that direction, we saw how all of their little problems on that side can add up to a big one.
The play here starts promisingly enough, as Julian Alvarez closes down a defender and pokes the ball away from him, but it rolls back to the goalkeeper and a disinterested Erling Haaland decides not to chase it.
Goalkeeper Jose Sa slips the ball around Haaland to Maximilian Kilman, who is free to dribble out of Wolves’ third as Doku, searching behind him for help, tries to figure out whether to track the wing-back, Nelson Semedo, or close down Kilman.
Ake is playing left-back for City here and he’s the voice of experience calling for 18-year-old Rico Lewis to shift over from midfield and put pressure on the ball, something Gundogan or Rodri would have known when to do.
But it’s too late. By the time Ruben Dias shows up to support Ake, a completely unhurried Kilman is lobbing the ball up the sideline to an unmarked Semedo. Wolves have got in-behind on City’s left flank and a few seconds and deflections later, they’re in the lead.
The solution to City’s problem on their left flank isn’t as easy as benching one player for another or changing the formation — the kind of fix we expect a manager to make overnight. With so many new players settling in on that side, it could take weeks or months of training before everyone is comfortable enough to seal the gaps — just long enough to leave a glimmer of hope for other teams.
Who designed the exhaust ports on this thing, anyway?
(Top photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
