How Manchester City play: Direct build-up and quicker combinations, but is there too much fatigue?
This is part one of a series running on The Athletic this week taking the tactical temperature at each of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’. How has each side evolved this season, and what are the issues — if any — that need fixing?
With 21 points from the last 27 available in the Premier League — Manchester City are in the kind of form that they could only have dreamed of 12 months ago.
But such are the expectations that have been set during nine and a half seasons of Pep Guardiola that three disappointing draws on the bounce — leaving his side six points adrift of leaders Arsenal — have quickly deflated the mood. Injuries to Josko Gvardiol and Ruben Dias have done little to help, either, before a gruelling run of fixtures, across four competitions, over the next 30 days.
Josko Gvardiol suffered a long-term injury in City’s recent game against Chelsea (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Take a step back, however, and, well, things could be worse. City’s packed schedule means that they are still fighting on all fronts, while the fact that they are anywhere near the top of the table tells us that many of the major malfunctions from last season have been fixed. Compare results from the corresponding set of fixtures, and City are 10 points better off.
The arrival of Antoine Semenyo, one of the division’s most impactful attacking players, also brings plenty of reasons to be excited, another low-block breaker who, along with the singular talents of Rayan Cherki, Phil Foden, Jeremy Doku and Erling Haaland, should provide City with more than enough firepower to break down any side. If they take their chances.
Guardiola knows better than anyone that his side are still in the race, but while in the past it has been controlled, inevitable, attacking football that has sustained title-winning form, he is increasingly relying on energy and individual quality to get his team through an avalanche of physical, end-to-end games.
This, then, is how Guardiola’s City have evolved tactically to deal with a more transitional Premier League.
Wider, more direct build-up play
One of Guardiola’s key innovations to enhance City’s dominance of possession was to bring one or both of his full-backs into midfield when his team had the ball.
It meant that City often lacked penetration down the flanks without overlapping full-backs, particularly last season, but could pack their midfield with technically gifted players who looked to move the ball through the centre of the opposition shape and set up camp with the ball in the final third.
Following an FA Cup quarter-final win at Bournemouth last April, however, Guardiola saw that the running power of Nico O’Reilly from left-back can offer City more thrust out wide, particularly when teams were prepared to step up and apply pressure. Matheus Nunes was installed on the opposite side, and City started to use their full-backs as an escape route, stretching the opposition across the pitch and attacking any spaces that opened up.
Here they are against Fulham, for example, with Nico Gonzalez dropping into the back three to allow the centre-backs to split and those full-backs to push on high.
The Premier League has become increasingly physical, and teams could contain City’s narrower, more patient build-up with strong defensive performances and athleticism in midfield to hit them quickly on the break.
In this new, more open shape, City are still vulnerable to counter-attacks, but they deal with them more effectively than last season thanks to the recovery power of new signings, including Tijjani Reijnders, as well as Gonzalez and their bustling full-backs, while packing more of a punch in attack themselves.
Against Nottingham Forest a few weeks later, City were happy to find their full-backs with direct diagonals into the channels, using plenty of width to bypass their combative 4-5-1.
City worked the ball forward with more speed and had to regroup when the ball quickly came back the other way — ‘riding the rhythm’, as Guardiola called it — but their big-hitting attacking talents came up with the moments of quality required to win in this more chaotic era of Premier League football where teams refuse to be pacified by possession.
We’ve already seen how things can go wrong. While an eight-game winning run saw Cherki, Foden and Haaland hit their devastating best, three frustrating draws against Sunderland, Chelsea and Brighton & Hove Albion were characterised by wastefulness in front of goal.
But Haaland will not misfire for long, and with the arrival of another destructive counter-attacking player in Semenyo, City will create sufficient chances to put these faster-paced games to bed more often than not.
Quicker combination play
With the full-backs high and wide, many teams will stretch across the pitch to try to cover City’s width. That can open up gaps in the opposition press, which City have been trying to exploit by dropping their most technically gifted players into deeper positions to move the ball quickly through the lines.
Guardiola has frequently spoken about the “small spaces” in relation to Foden, praising his ability to receive and handle the ball under pressure and be “aggressive” with his next action.
In previous years, those spaces have been on the edge of the opposition box, as teams — battered into submission by City’s dominance of the ball — have sunk deeper and tried to remain compact.
But managers across the Premier League are happier to press City, meaning the congested areas of the pitch where Foden thrives are appearing further and further away from goal.
It’s notable how deep Foden, along with Cherki and even Doku, have been dropping to collect the ball and combine with their attacking team-mates, often clustering together to help City play their way out of pressure with quick, one-touch football. It’s a far cry from the rehearsed patterns and patient, positionally rigid approach of seasons gone by.
In the build-up to Haaland’s second goal against Bournemouth, for example, we can see that wide in-possession shape, with Bernardo Silva filling in at right-back while O’Reilly drifts inside.
In frame two, Gonzalez punches the ball through to Foden, who rotates with Doku to drift into a pocket of space. Cherki also recognises the need to drop deep, and receives a first-time pass from Foden, who has drawn centre-back Marcos Senesi into midfield with his movement.
With three quick passes — including two first-time balls — Haaland is sent through on goal. Their quick combination play exploited the opposition’s high press.
City’s opening goal against Liverpool also serves as an encapsulation of those ideas, a game in which Doku — traditionally a touchline-hugging winger — starred in the small spaces in a hectic central role.
The possession starts deep in City territory, with O’Reilly backed into the corner by Mohamed Salah.
Sure enough, Foden is on hand to help out, picking up the ball from his full-back and skipping away from three challenges to poke the ball through to Gonzalez.
A few passes later, Doku jinks past Dominik Szoboszlai, before Gonzalez bursts through a gap in the Liverpool squeeze, plays a one-two with Cherki, and sprays a ball out to flying full-back Nunes, who has space to attack.
It’s the kind of move that has made City exciting and unpredictable to watch this season, a passage of play fuelled by individualism and instinct to drift into areas of the pitch to support team-mates. See how nine Liverpool players are pulled towards the ball in frame five above, much in the same way that Real Madrid would drag City all over the pitch with their “off-the-cuff” attacking moves under Carlo Ancelotti.
Minutes later, when City are in more settled possession, that same setup emerges to allow a simple ball down the line to Nunes, who has space to whip in a cross for Haaland to score.
This is a Guardiola team, so there is still an underlying structure, with his players occupying specific zones to allow for familiar passing patterns and approach play.
But with more athleticism and duel-winning ability in midfield, City can improvise during the build-up phase to ride the increasingly frantic rhythm of the Premier League.
Fatigue and injuries: Can City keep it up?
City are clearly better equipped to fight fire with fire, but tired legs later on in games are threatening to undermine that progress.
Digging into tracking data from SkillCorner, the high-intensity distance that City cover per 60 minutes of ball-in-play time — metres run at 20km/h or more — is up by around 18.2 per cent, an extra physical burden that has landed on a core group of players.
Since the last international break in November, six players who have played over 75 per cent of all minutes in the Premier League, Champions League, Carabao Cup and FA Cup, while Gonzalez and Haaland have both started 12 of those 14 games.
Rodri is back but his minutes being managed carefully (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Guardiola’s preference for a smaller squad, coupled with injuries to Dias, Gvardiol and John Stones in defence, as well as Mateo Kovacic and Rodri in midfield, has placed serious demands on midfielders to cover ground and centre-backs to hold a high line in increasingly intense games.
Against Chelsea, and with Rodri restored to the side, it looked as if Guardiola wanted to control the game with less drastic, surging movement from his players, returning to a familiar possession style as they dominated the ball and forced their opponents into a deeper shape.
Unlike in previous weeks, Nunes tucked in to form a back three with the ball, while O’Reilly pushed on down the left. It allowed Rodri to receive the ball higher up and dictate the play, and although City often looked a little lopsided, they saw 66.8 per cent of the ball and took a one-goal lead into half-time thanks to the movement of Reijnders in behind.
After the break, however, as the visitors sacrificed winger Estevao for box-to-box midfielder Andrey Santos, Chelsea imposed themselves more on the game, diminishing Rodri’s influence and challenging more aggressively for the ball. That led to a more open contest, and as legs began to tire and City spurned their own chances on the break, the momentum slowly turned Chelsea’s way.
A similar pattern unfolded against Brighton, while City almost let a 5-1 lead slip in the final 30 minutes away to Fulham. While expected goals data places City as the second-strongest defensive team in the first halves of Premier League games this season, they are 11th for the same metric after the break. Even rock-bottom Wolverhampton Wanderers have conceded fewer ‘big chances’ than City’s 27 in their second halves.
We’ve already seen that City can string together big win streaks playing blow-for-blow football, but whether it’s a sustainable approach for the long season remains another matter.
