Remember when it seemed like Manchester City might be done? No? Well, OK. A lot's happened since then. I get it. But let's refresh your memory.
This was back, 75 years ago, in late November of 2020. Jose Mourinho was managing Tottenham. (Remember that? Me neither.) Spurs went into the Etihad and won 2-0 thanks to a handful of devastating counter-attacks that City seemed completely incapable of containing. It evoked memories of the ancient times of 2016, Pep Guardiola's first season in Manchester, when the likes of Aleksandar Kolarov, Gael Clichy and Bacary Sagna were scrambling around and failing to understand the basics of juego de posicion.
Following the loss to Spurs, City had played eight matches, won three, drawn three and lost two. They were in 13th place, one spot above Newcastle and one behind Arsenal. Worse still, they'd conceded 11 goals and scored only 10.
Now, soccer is a random, low-scoring game that only occasionally rewards teams for playing well, but even nerds like me were concerned by City's first eight matches of the 2020-21 season. Guardiola had established his new team as Barcelona or Bayern Munich East, a dominant machine that would lose out on domestic titles only if someone else went on an unsustainable hot streak. In each of Guardiola's first four seasons, City led the league in expected goal differential. The two teams that took the title from them, Chelsea in 2016-17 and Liverpool in 2019-20, dropped off significantly the following year respectively, and both needed north of 90 points to win the thing in the first place. However, this didn't seem like just a rotten stretch of luck for City. As of Nov. 25, four teams had posted better xG differentials, and Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham had all doubled up City's number. This was a real decline, over a real sample of matches.
Of course, City didn't lose another game until mid-March, taking 54 of a possible 57 points from their next 19 matches. They won the league title in 2020-21 by 12 points with a plus-51 goals differential; no one else was north of plus-29. And yes, they also finished the year with the best xG differential, too.
So, maybe this would be the year they'd finally lose their grip? They'd have two of the three previous European champions to contend with, plus the team that had finished second the year before. And for most of this season, City were second-best somewhere: points, goal differential, xG differential. That is, until the last three matches: 17 goals for, and three against.
Halfway through their season, no one's scored more goals than City, and no one's conceded fewer. And despite Liverpool looking as good as they ever have under Jurgen Klopp, and Chelsea adding Romelu Lukaku to a team that won the Champions League last season, those two have a combined league-title probability of only 22%, according to FiveThirtyEight.
The league, once again, is Manchester City's to lose. And while the story is the same, the Premier League's protagonist has figured out how to change -- for the second year in a row.
How City -- and the rest of the Premier League -- slowed it all down
Last season, City reinvented themselves by taking it easy and slowing games down to a crawl. If you want to overgeneralize their style over Guardiola's first four seasons, it would be: press and possess.
From 2016-17 through 2019-20, City allowed the lowest opposition pass completion percentage: 73.7%, compared to a league average of 79.3. Another way to quantify the intensity of a press is through PPDA, defined by Stats Perform as "Opponent Passes allowed Per Defensive Action, in the opponent's defensive 3/5ths of the pitch." Over that same four-season stretch, City's PPDA was 9.15; league-average was 12.57, and the league's two other most prominent pressers (Liverpool and Spurs) were right at 10.5.
Thanks to City's peerless pressure, they packed the ball into the attacking end, too. Guardiola's team completed a 72% share of all the final-third passes in their matches; Liverpool's next-best total was down at 65, and Chelsea (61) were the only other side above 60. City had conquered the Premier League by never giving the ball away and then immediately winning it back as soon as they did, just like Guardiola achieved in Spain and in Germany.
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Last season, the empty stadiums, the concentrated succession of games and perhaps the simmering anxiety of being in the midst of an unpredictable global pandemic did something to the way the game was being played. While the Premier League has been slowing down for over a decade, the 2020-21 campaign accelerated the trend.
Since 2008-09, the first full season for which the Stats Perform offers comprehensive data, last season set records for the highest pass completion percentage (81.5), the lowest percentage of passes that went forward (33.4), and the slowest pace of ball movement (1.35 meters per second upfield). While Guardiola's team seemed to reimagine what was possible for a Premier League team over his first four seasons in England, they instead embraced what was happening around them in Year 5.
Last season, City's PPDA shot up to 11.51, which was just the sixth-most aggressive mark in the league. And for the first time under Guardiola, they allowed their opponents to complete 80% of their passes, which was also just the sixth-best mark in the league. While City never moved the ball quickly upfield in previous years, they became the slowest Premier League side in the history of the Stats Perform database, averaging 1.02 meters of upfield ball movement per second of possession.
In January of last year, with City in the midst of what would ultimately become a 15-game winning streak, Guardiola summed up the reason for his team's improvement pretty succinctly: "The only difference is that we run less -- we were running too much. Without the ball you have to run. But with the football you have to walk, or run much less: stay more in position and let the ball run, not you. That's improved in these games."
Previously, City defended their own third by ... not having to defend in their own third. Their key defenders were midfielders like Fernandinho, who would break up counters with well-timed tackles or fouls, along with center-backs and full-backs like Vincent Kompany and Kyle Walker, who excelled at chasing down balls played over the top. But Fernandinho was unfortunately not immune to the passage of time, and their newest center-back, Ruben Dias, who arrived for $75 million from Benfica over the summer of 2020, didn't have the same kind of rangy athleticism of Guardiola's previous options at the position. However, Dias seemed very comfortable with defending in his own third, and so too did City: they completed the fewest proportion of final-third passes in their matches since Guardiola took over (70.2%), and also allowed opponents to complete more passes in the attacking third (55 per game) than ever before.
Although it worked, it wasn't likely to keep working.
Welcome to the Joao Cancelo era
City won the league easily in the end in 2020-21, but last year's vintage produced the second-worst goal differential (plus-51) of the Guardiola era and the worst xG differential (plus-44.3). Their third title under Pep was as much down to the inadequacies of their rivals -- Liverpool and Chelsea each played one-half of an elite season each, thanks to an injury crisis and a coaching change respectively -- as it was to their adaptation to a changing roster and environment.
Their search for a striker last summer seemed a pretty clear admission of the fact, and even their defeat in the 2021 Champions League final was a minor cause for concern. After conceding an early goal to Chelsea, City dominated possession, but just couldn't ratchet the pressure up like they would've in the past. Rarely had anyone been able to take a lead and then just keep a Guardiola team at arm's length in the way that Chelsea did. Playing slow works -- as long as you're winning.
City never got that striker, failing with Harry Kane (among others), and although Guardiola will still tell you they need him, it's not totally clear that they do. At least, it's not clear that a soccer team can function at a higher level than City have achieved so far this season.
Through 19 games, only one other team in Premier League history has produced a better goal differential (plus-38) than this year's City: the 17-18 centurions, who were already at an absurd plus-48 at this point in the season. However, City's xG differential is currently on pace to be the best since Stats Perform started keeping track.
Put another way, City are already up to a plus-33.7 xG differential. Last season's team? They were plus-44.3 ... for the entire season. There are still 19 games left to go in this one.
So, what's changed? A couple of players, to start.
Aymeric Laporte, Bernardo Silva and Joao Cancelo have all seen their Premier League minutes increase by at least 25%, compared to last season. Since arriving midway through the centurion season, Laporte seemed to be the skeleton key to City's success -- they were brilliant with him, defensively fragile without him -- but he fell out of favor with Guardiola last season after the tumultuous start and featured in only 35% of the Premier League minutes. That's up to nearly 75% this year, and his presence in the lineup over John Stones seems like it's allowed City to claw back some of their aggressiveness from years past.
After looking to move teams over the summer, Bernardo is also back in a big way. He has played 89% of the minutes, compared to 61% last season. The 27-year-old Portuguese Swiss army knife has mainly played in the midfield, where he does two things that make up for the team's lack of a striker: gets on the ball in the box and creates goals. Silva's nearly at a goal or an assist every two matches for the season, and he's averaging nearly six touches in the penalty area per 90 minutes. That rates in the 99th percentile for midfielders and would still be an above-average mark for a forward. He was just named to European Sports Media's Team of the Month for November.
One thing Bernardo does not do is pass the ball forward, but his fellow member of the most recent ESM Team of the Month, Cancelo, more than makes up for it.
After playing 67% of the minutes last season but not being chosen to start the Champions League final, Cancelo has become City's most indispensable and most used outfield player (94% of the minutes) this year. He's taken 400 more touches than any other City player in 2021-22, and he's second among all players in Europe in both progressive passes and progressive carries.
Employing a fullback who can do all of that on his own has freed up both Bernardo and Ilkay Gundogan, City's third member of the ESM Team of the Month, to get forward and make up for the club's lack of a striker. It also allowed Kyle Walker to hang back -- just 0.7 total expected assists in over 1,000 minutes -- without dinging the attack and thus strengthening the back line.
And so, the result is a hybrid of the first four years of Pep in the Premier League, with the slow motion of last season. City's opponents this year are completing 79% of their passes -- a slight decrease from last season, but still only the seventh-best mark in the league. And City are moving the ball upfield at only a slightly faster pace (1.06 meters/second) than last season. But their PPDA has dipped back down to 10.6, and they're dominating the attacking third like never before, averaging a 75.6% share of the attacking-third passes in their matches -- the highest mark of the Guardiola era.
Essentially, City are able to turn their opponents over in the attacking third, and they're also able to defend more passively in their own half when the press doesn't work or just doesn't engage. But since they have Cancelo and an army of attacking midfielders who never give the ball away in place of a more traditional striker, the ball rarely ever reaches the Manchester City defensive third. Even though the press isn't as active as it was in Guardiola's first four seasons, City are allowing 11 fewer passes in their own third than last year and fewer than in any season other than 2017-18.
If that sounds weird, it's because it is. This really shouldn't work. You're not supposed to be able to pile that much of the match into the attacking third unless it's paired with a hyper-aggressive press. You're also not supposed to be able to lead the Premier League in goals scored without a single player hitting more than seven at the midway point of the Premier League season. You're not supposed to get better when Raheem Sterling and Kevin De Bruyne start playing fewer minutes. And you're not supposed to be able to flourish when your club-record signing, Jack Grealish, plays barely half of the available minutes and scores only two goals and gets two assists.
Given the ongoing search for a striker, City and even Guardiola himself didn't think it would work this well, either. But thanks to as much money as any club in the world, a roster of flexible, interchangeable pieces, and the most adaptable manager in the modern game, it's working as well as it ever has.
City have won more games in a calendar year than any English team in the history of the sport, and if they score once in their upcoming match against Brentford, they'll break that record, too. The scariest part? Based on the trajectory of the past few months, 2022 might be even better.