£400m later, did Man City get any better?

Behold yonder xG trendline, and rejoice! (Unless thou art a Manchester City fan.)

I probably can’t write a full piece in Shakespearean, so allow me to indulge in a bit of gloating instead.

Around this time last year, I wrote my first piece for The Transfer Flow, a review of Manchester City’s January 2024 signings. In it, I looked at their attempt to bring down their squad’s average age while addressing pressing issues, and raised questions around Nico González’s signing. Fast forward to the summer, when I wrote our Manchester City season preview, and pointed to various signs of concern surrounding their high press.

Perhaps surprisingly, Manchester City still seem to be facing the same issues despite having spent about £400m on transfer fees alone in the last 55 odd weeks. Given their incredible track record of sustained success over the last decade or so under Pep Guardiola, one has to give them a lot of the benefit of the doubt in almost all sporting regards. Having done that for the last year, I now feel it is time to question whether they actually are on the right track.

On-pitch issues

Manchester City were expected to have a challenging time with their press this season. The addition of players like Rayan Cherki and Tijjani Reijnders around a striker who doesn’t offer a lot of consistent intensity out of possession in Erling Haaland was always going to limit the team’s potential, and so it has proved. Their PPDA has dropped to 12.6 as per Opta Analyst, placing them in the bottom half of the league between sides like Wolves and Brentford.

A second dimension of this issue is that City’s centre-backs are neither the strongest in duels nor the best shielded, so they can be gotten at relatively simply if they look to step up very high and commit to an intense press. This was demonstrated a few times early on in the season, including in the 2-1 loss to Brighton in which the Seagulls found a lot of joy with a direct approach after the hour mark.

Given the circumstances, I actually think they’ve generally done a decent job with their out-of-possession setups by finding a good balance. While their PPDA is on the lower side, they still have the highest start distance (basically the average distance from their own goal that they regain possession in open play) in the league at 44.3 metres, as well as the third-most pressed sequences. I would assume that these numbers are somewhat inflated by their counterpress, but they nevertheless reflect a good enough higher block and selective pressing strategy.

However, the need to maintain this balance means that City cannot go all-out with their press and suffocate teams to the same extent that they used to. As a result, they’ve had matches like the 1-0 loss to Aston Villa, in which they conceded 19 minutes in yet shared possession almost evenly. As recently as a couple of years ago, this would have seemed impossible.

As aforementioned, though, this was pretty much all foreseeable. So, my hypothesis coming into the season was that Manchester City would lean into transitions more, using the speed and skill of their star attackers to get the better of opposition defences in such more even games. They certainly have done so in certain periods, but on the whole, they do not seem entirely committed to this approach.

All the stylistic metrics still show City to be the least direct team in the league. They have the slowest direct speed, highest passes per sequence average and the longest sequence time average in the division. However, their attack no longer seems as irresistible against deep blocks. One of the reasons behind this definitely is their overreliance on one goalscorer, but the shift in the league’s meta and teams’ greater comfort in a low block surely also plays a part.

This tension between City’s favoured style and the direction of the Premier League’s tactical evolution is at the heart of what seems to be a bit of an identity crisis for the club. This weekend’s Manchester derby perhaps epitomised their issues, as they failed to take advantage of an open start to the game, largely unsuccessfully attempted to establish control, ultimately got hit on a counter and never looked like being able to get back into the game thereafter. In fact, this was the first time in almost eight years that City failed to score or create chances worth at least 1 xG altogether in a league match in which they kept over two-thirds of possession without any sendings-off.

Recruitment questions

Manchester City’s on-pitch issues have clearly at least partly been caused by some questionable recruitment decisions. In fact, I would argue that they have made significant mistakes in two straight seasons, which is also something that would have seemed impossible just a couple of years ago. It is worth noting that their sporting director changed last summer with Txiki Begiristain being replaced by Hugo Viana, but I don’t know how much of a role that has played.

To run through the major mistakes, I will start with a semi-annual reminder that Nico González is not nearly as good as Rodri was.

Of course, hardly anyone is as good as Rodri was in 2023/24 — including Rodri himself. The Spanish international has been getting back to his best in terms of passing lately after suffering a couple of further injury setbacks, but he clearly does not have the legs to be a rock-solid transition-killer anymore. This is another part of what has limited City’s attack, as they are being forced to be more cautious with just how much they throw forward.

Clearly, it would only make sense for City to try and replace him in the aggregate, but they look set to go a full year without making a second defensive midfield signing. Instead, though, they recently elected to spend over 60 million of the king’s finest on Antoine Semenyo.

This can easily be called an objectively bad decision, as Kim has previously outlined. But in City’s case, this is made even worse by the fact that they are effectively putting him in ahead of Omar Marmoush, who had a really good impact after joining midway through last season and looked an excellent partner for Erling Haaland in more open games.

The fact that the Egyptian international has been allowed just a touch over 200 minutes on the pitch this season is perhaps another reflection of City’s aforementioned identity crisis. This inevitably also has an impact on their transfer business, as some recent reports are suggesting that the ex-Frankfurt forward could already be looking for another move just a year after moving to Manchester.

What next?

One year on from a record-breaking January window, Manchester City have already spent close to nine figures on transfer fees and do not look to have improved a particularly great deal. They have managed to keep their defensive numbers to a good level after they had ballooned out of control before the turn of the year last season, but this has perhaps partly come at the cost of their attacking consistency.

The one clear improvement they have managed to make is that the average age of their squad has come down by two full years. Locking down players like Cherki and Haaland on long-term contracts is obviously a huge plus, as it means that they can always be close enough to a title-winning level as long as they manage to mitigate other issues.

So, the defining moment for City could well come when Pep Guardiola heads for the exit. His departure has always seemed a matter of when rather than if in the last couple of years, and although his current contract runs till 2027, there is a chance of him leaving this summer. Who they hire next and how he navigates the clash between the club’s typical style of play and the Premier League’s meta will likely determine their ability to bounce back.

For the moment, though, Manchester City simply do not look like serious Premier League title contenders, and there hasn’t been anything to suggest that things will be meaningfully different by the end of this month.

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