It HAD to be said....

Football Meta's amiable and insightful Cormac has become one of my favourite Youtube tactical analysts over the past year or so. And I was particularly glad to see him just drop this video, detailing the shortcomings of the dread 'building out from the back' philosophy. (For me, he doesn't really go far enough in his critque...)

I find this tiresome dogma, which has become almost universal in the Premier League during the past decade, is stifling the life out of the game - it is the new anti-football.

It is painfully dull to watch.

It imposes far too much pressure on keepers and defenders - which, I think, wears them down mentally, undermines their confidence, and utlimately tends to make them more error-prone not just in build-up, but in all aspects of their play. (Because mistakes by a keeper or his defenders often tend to be castastrophic, yielding a goal and perhaps costing the game, their errors are placed under far closer scrutiny than those of attacking players, and tend to be given more weight than their successful defensive actions. And when they are on the ball so much, in dangerous situations, and committing costly errors - or at least coming close to doing so - so often, in almost every game, these poor buggers are often now getting pilloried by the fans.... when it's really not their fault; it's down to their manager's style of play.)

And it is founded on what I believe is a fundamental misconception: the fearful, over-conservative conviction that restricting the opponent's chances is more important to ensuring victory than creating your own. (The problem here is that you cannot play football purely as a matter of statistics, because the element of chance can never be eliminated. Even if you can prevent your opponent from getting any clearcut chances [which is just about impossible], while you manage, say, 10 chances,.... your finishing might not be good enough to convert any of the 10 chances, while your frustrated opponent might yet produce a worldie of a goal out of nothing, or perhaps pick up a soft penalty. This approach does not guarantee wins; in fact, it makes them painfully hard to achieve. If you're content to accept a more free-flowing, 'chaotic' sort of game, in which both sides might enjoy something like 20 chances, you should be able to win - and win more easily, and by bigger margins - so long as you can defend the chances made against you better than the other side defends against yours.)

Even if the core philosophy behind it weren't so misguided, it is still wrong-headed in practical terms. Its supposed justification is encapsulated in the tiresome mantra: "The quicker it goes up, the quicker it comes back." Build-up from the back started because managers like Pep became afraid that long balls out from the goalkeeper were too often resulting in an immediate loss of possession, and the more patient approach was seen as being a way to hold on to the ball more effectively,.... and eat minutes off the clock.

However, that's a very questionable proposition. If your goalkeeper can kick accurately, and if you have some well-drilled routines to create different medium- and long-range passing options for him, and if you have very quick players who can run into space behind the opposing back line to chase down a long ball over the top, or big strong players who can win most of their aerial duels and hold the ball up until other teammates can link up with them,.... there's really not that much of a problem in retaining possession from a keeper's kick. Well, yes, it is always going to be a little risky; and you might end up losing possession perhaps as much of half of the time (at worst...). But so what? Losing possession in the opposition defensive third of the pitch shouldn't be a big deal. You ought to be set up for a quick counter-press to win the ball back again, or at least hamper the speed and ease with which the other side can start to move the ball back up the pitch. And even if they do start quickly on the counter, you should have good defensive midfielders who can snuff out most such moves in the middle of the park.

A loss of possession deep in the opponent's half isn't often going to result in a goalscoring chance against you. A loss of possession in your own final third, however, almost always does.

And we are seeing such turnovers during failed build-up play more and more often in recent years.

Perhaps when building-out-from-the-back first started to appear, there was some clearer benefit to it. It had the advantage of novelty in its favour; and most sides weren't equipped to counter it very well.

Teams were still often only playing with one outright forward, or at most two; and 'high pressing' wasn't yet much of a thing. So, a back-four, or even a back-three, usually had a comfortable numerical advantage in the first line, even without having the keeper step up into the back-line to create an additional passer - and sides playing out from the back could thus usually bypass initial pressure quite easily.

But now,.... many more teams are playing with a front-three,... and are regularly pushing one or more of their midfielders or advanced full-backs up on to the opposing back-line as well; sometimes, the numerical advantage is with the attacking team. And even though it mostly still isn't, pressing has become much more sophisticated and well-drilled: teams will choose their moments to press most vigorously, saving their energy for when it can be most effective, most devastating; and they'll target particular players or areas of the pitch, so that, even though they are outnumbered across the whole back-line, they can quickly achieve a crucial overload in the area around the ball.

The slow build-up idea might have 'worked' up to a point, when it was a surprising innovation. But things have moved on, the game has caught up with it - and overtaken it. 

Any tactical idea becomes limiting, self-damaging if it is too obvious, too predictable. And we now see so many managers who are so insistent on the slow build-up that they almost never stray from it, never allow their players to vary the way they play out. And that makes them very easy to 'read', easy to press,... easy to nick the ball off in dangerous positions.

I'm not sure that building-out-from-the-back ever really worked all that well. But it has now clearly become an absolute liability for many teams.

And did I mention, it's SO FUCKING BORING to watch? Aesthetics matter; this is 'the beautiful game', after all. Most fans, I'm sure, would far rather see their team come out on the losing end of a 4-3 humdinger of a game occasionally than watch them grinding out arid 1-0 and 2-0 wins most weeks. I know I would, anyway.

I think, I hope we are now seeing the last days of ponderous slow build-up from the back, in favour of more diverse, dynamic approaches to moving the ball forward from your own penalty area. It's been a long time coming. Too, too long....

Maths!!

Joe Devine narrates this interesting short - posted the other day on The Athletic magazine's Tifo sub-channel on Youtube - about why football is intrinsically much harder to analyse than almost all other sports.

The killer quote in the middle of it comes from Christofer Clemens, the Head Analyst of Die Mannschaft when they won the 2014 World Cup, who once noted ruefully: "We are increasingly convinced that there's a lack of data that provides real information about the things that make you successful in football..."  Even the World Cup winners didn't know how they'd done it!

The main point of the video is that a continuous sport like football is much harder to analyse effectively than one which is more broken up, divided into a series of discrete, short passages of play. In cricket or baseball, for example, there are only so many types of delivery that the bowler/pitcher can produce, and only so many ways that the batsman/batter can respond; and once the fielding side have dealt with whatever happens, the ball quickly becomes 'dead' - the game is paused while the fielding side reset and the bowler/pitcher prepares to deliver the next ball. In football, the ball becomes dead far less regularly, less often; and while some teams will try to eat time off the clock by putting the ball into touch as often as possible, it is common for sequences of uninterrupted play in a field game like football to go on for a minute or two.... and occasionally even for several minutes at a time. The possible patterns of play are thus almost infinitely complex. 

The video points out that there are a few games that are arguably even more continuous in their play: ice hockey, for example, allows for substitutions to be made without pausing the game. What it doesn't go into, however, is that these games tend to have fewer players and/or shorter playing periods - again making the challenge of analysis just that bit more manageable. Most field games have settled on 11 as the number of players; a few, such as rugby have more - but again, they usually have rules which restrict the variety of play. In rugby because the ball can only be passed by throwing, there is a fairly narrow practical limit on how far and how fast the ball can be moved with each pass; also, the ball cannot be passed forwards in that game. In football, almost any part of the body is able to be used for controlling and moving the ball, and passes in all directions are allowed, and it is possible to move the ball when struck with the foot a huge variety of different distances and at different speeds - and even to shape the trajectory of the ball by deliberately applying spin to it. This almost limitless range of potential movement for the ball also means that in football almost every player on the pitch can potentially receive the ball next, whereas in most similar sports there are generally only a very small number of likely receivers. (Stick-and-ball games like hockey have similar fluidity of movement, but are much more heavily biased towards passing the ball in a particular arc of the field.) Thus, even a relatively short passage of play, just 4 or 5 passes, can move the ball enormous distances and involve almost the entire team. There are few other games - probably NONE - which have anything like this level of variety and complexity in their potential patterns of play.

The video notes that as statistical analysis has become more thorough in recent years, it has started to prove useful in some areas - particularly in identifying the 'skills profile' of individual players, and deciding if they might be a good match for a given squad and style of play (Brighton's business model is founded on this, and they've become very, very good at it). Where it still falls down, and probably always will, is in assessing the effectiveness of tactical approaches, and determining how far they contribute to a team's overall success.

I would suggest that this is not just because it requires one to look at an entire game (or a whole series of them) rather than just individual game actions, and at the team as a whole rather than just an individual player - although obviously that is a massive (and insuperable) part of the problem. Surely, it's also that it's impossible to define with any precision or consistency what team tactice are. They change from minute-to-minute, as players seek to adapt to shifting circumstances on the field; they change as the manager makes in-game tweaks, or galvanises his team to greater efforts with a rousing half-time pep talk; they change with shifting game-states. They change from game to game, as a manager seeks to adapt to a particular opponent. They change from season to season, and even within the course of a season, as managers seek to stay fresh - and surprising to the opposition. And however clear and consistent the tactics may be in the manager's vision, how cohesively and consistently and effectively they are realised on pitch by the players can vary drastically from game to game.... and within a game, sometimes even from minute to minute. Plus, of course, the effectiveness of the chosen tactics always depends not only on how accurately the team impements them, but on the response of the opposition. 

In a fluid game, like football, with an almost unlimited range of possible movement, and long uninterrupted sequences of play.... any attempt to statisticallly analyse success or failure in terms of the overall team tactics is usually going to be doomed to failure. 

Caveat: Unless the tactics are really, really bad! If a team has a really obvious flaw, like Ten Hag's United having such a huge gap between their midfield and defence, because they didn't have the pace in defence to mount a high defensive line, even though their high-pressing style really required that - then, yes, you can see why a team is losing all the time, and the statistical data will expose that flaw too. But when you have two very good teams going up against each other, it's far more daunting to try to disentangle the impact of the tactics from the importance of individual moments of skill from the players. [Maybe Pep's tactics have never been that good, and he's just been saved over and over again by the brilliance of his teams...??]

I'd go further and say that I think you can usually determine the tactical basis of a result in indvidual games via the 'eye test' - watching closely, and analysing multiple different interacting factors at once. It's much harder, usually almost impossible, to reliably draw such conclusions from data alone. And disentangling the impact of 'tactics' - amid the web of other elements: form, fitness, confidence, refereeing decisions, the 'luck of the bounce', the quality of the opposition - in overall results over a run of games.... that, i think, is a very elusive - probably illusory - Grail to be chasing with statistical analysis.

Food for thought.

A corner turned?

Manchester City fans - and FPL managers who own any of their players - seem to be taking much encouragement from their emphatic 6-0 win this weekend.

But is this one success really a sign that their troubles are over? Are they really that much better?

Well, here are some of the potential positives:

Kyle Walker's gone now; that can only be a good thing. His pace and stamina have looked to be waning rapidly of late, and he's really begun to look as if he's past it at Premier League level. His last few performances, certainly, have been quite dreadful (perhaps he's also been distracted by his turbulent private life, or greedy thoughts of getting ready to take the Saudi money in the twilight of his career?), and he had become a liability to the team.

But Ruben Dias is back - that's HUGE, immediately makes them look so much more solid and well-organised and confident in defence.

Ederson's back too. Though Ortega is a a more than competent replacement (probably, in fact, as good as Ederson in most aspects of the goalkeeping craft; an excellent shot-stopper), Ederson is the man the rest of the team have been used to playing with most of the time, so his return to the side will also probably inject some comfortable - and confidence-building - familiarity to the rear of the lineup, a feeling which has been lacking of late. And his stellar distribution adds another dimension to City's game - allowing them the ready option to abandon the slow build-up from the back occasionally and try more direct medium-length or even long balls up the park... with sufficient accuracy to produce a high chance that they will reach, and be retained by a City player. (It does make you wonder why he was out of the side for so long in the first place, though. There may have been some small injury issues behind some of it, but it did look also as if Pep had some kind of a 'problem' with him for a while - a matter of not liking his 'attitude' about something, perhaps?)

Matheus Nunes is still struggling to adapt to the full-back role, but he's an intelligent and versatile player who should be able to master it eventually. And anything is an improvement on Walker....

Dropping Rico Lewis is also probably going to make the team stronger. I am a big fan - as Pep evidently is - of his enthusiasm and workrate, his game intelligence, the incisive contribution he can make in advanced midfield areas. But he's still very young and inexperienced, and he just doesn't have the physicality to be able to dominate in individual duels; playing him as a makeshift full-back, particularly when out-of-touch Walker was on the other flank, or alongside on the right of the defence, was asking for trouble. He had, unfortunately, become - yet another - obvious defensive weakness that opponents can ruthlessly target.

Gundogan and Kovacic playing together as a double-pivot, and trying to sit a little deeper, does appear to provide the potential for a little more solidity in central midfield.

Kevin DeBruyne is starting to look something like his best again now. It has taken a while for him to get his 'match-fitness' back, and his contributions in his first few games back from injury had been rather intermittent. But in this one, he was a constant threat and supplied three assists.

And damn, yes, Erling Haaland is looking as though he has definitively rediscovered his scoring touch. (Although I've always tended to think that there was never much wrong with his form or confidence. He'd just been starved of service while the rest of the team was floundering so badly over the previous couple of months.)

And perhaps best of all, Phil Foden has not just got his scoring boots back, but seems to have rekindled his joie de vivre as well. This is the first time in a long while we've seen him looking so happy and confident, showing such exuberant joy on the pitch.

And a lot of people are also saying that the arrival of the pacey Egyptian forward Omar Marmoush could have a transformative effect for City in the near future. Adam Monk of FourFourTwo rates his prospects with the club very highly. He does appear to have a skills profile and versatility somewhat similar to the departed Julian Alvarez - perhaps enabling him to sometimes play alongside Haaland as a strike partner, as well as to fulfill a number of different attacking midfield roles through the middle or on either flank (rather than being merely an emergency replacement for Haaland).

Yes, there's a lot to take comfort from there. But I believe there are many, rather stronger counter-points:

Well, that victory was only against Ipswich; and Ipswich were really, really poor in that game - just gave up the ghost after the first couple of goals. Proving that you're not one of the four worst teams in the League isn't really evidence of any seismic shift in performance.

Dias still doesn't look quite 100% - and you worry if Pep might be rushing him back into the fray just a little bit, perhaps putting him at risk of a recurrence of his injury. (So, indeed, it would appear! The poor bloke broke down during the PSG game just a few days later, and had to be withdrawn at half-time. Ooops!)  Also, excellent though he is, he can't hold things together at the back entirely on his own; he needs Stones and Ake to be back in action too.

Matheus Nunes is not a natural full-back, and is struggling to adapt to the position at the moment (it's probably not helping when Pep switches him from one side to the other), and he has been making a lot of mistakes thus far. Also, it just seems to be a bit of a waste of his talents; it is quite baffling that Pep doesn't seem to fancy playing him in his best position in central midfield - especially since that is the area of the pitch where his worst problems are manifesting themselves. [JJ Bull of The Athletic recently suggested that he'd do better to reunite with Ruben Amorim at Manchester United and play in a double-pivot with Manuel Ugarte there.]

While Rico Lewis has occasionally looked a bit of a liability defensively, he's nevertheless been one of City's best players this season, and it is therefore, I think, unfortunate to abandon him completely. There ought to be a way to make use of him in a more advanced role.

Gundogan, unfortunately, now looks hopelessly out-of-his-depth at the top level, just does not have any legs any more. Pep seems to be guilty of a misplaced loyalty here, or an exaggerated gratitude for his past contributions, or is perhaps overrating the value of experience. Playing Gundogan as a defensive midfielder now has much the same effect as Casemiro has whenever Amorim is forced to field him at United: it's just an open invitation to the opponents to come marauding through the central areas at will.

And Mateo Kovacic, bless him, is a fantastic progressive No. 6, great passer of the ball, dangerous when pushing forward himself - but doesn't have a defensive bone in his body; he completely lacks the all-around awareness, the instinct to spot danger that is required for a stopper role. Persisting with him as a Rodri replacement is the main root of City's current problems. And those problems are NOT going to go away unless they can acquire a top-class defensive midfielder in this transfer window. (And I think they might have to settle for a loan deal on that - because who's going to transfer into a club to be a perpetual understudy to someone like Rodri for the next five years?)

DeBruyne still doesn't look 100% fit (not sure if this is so, but I read somewhere that he might have a small hernia - much like the problem that so impeded Son Heung-min last season; not a major disability, but a constant, niggling inhibitor of performance). And he's starting to show his age. It is probably not reasonable to expect him to ever quite regain the pinnacle of performance he was demonstrating a few years ago.

Haaland, of course, could still deliver some big goalscoring returns. But he's not the kind of player who - like Salah or Palmer or Mbeumo.... - creates chances for himself out of nothing; he needs good regular service. And I fear he's still likely to be often lacking that from this City side. Moreover, game states can have a big impact on patterns of play and on a striker's mentality: there's a lot of extra pressure on the main goalscorer when you're chasing the game - and City look like they might still quite often be chasing games.

I am a huge fan of Phil Foden, and I - more than anyone! - really hope that he has turned a corner this season, that he has ironed something out in his relationship with Pep that has restored his confidence, and that he is going to continue now to play with the effervescence he showed last Sunday. But that hope is still fragile. Phil thrived on the security of being an almost invariable starter for most of last season, in DeBruyne's absence, and on being given the responsibility of being the club's primary playmaker. And he thrives on being able to play in central areas as a highly mobile No. 10. If Pep is going to constantly swap his starting position around, and mostly ask him to play out wide on one of the flanks, I fear this new flowering of goalscoring form may soon wither again.

And I think it may be unreasonable to expect Omar Marmoush to be The Messiah to redeem City. He has not been an especially prolific scorer (apart from one very hot streak for Frankfurt earlier this season); in fact, until he moved to Frankfurt just under 18 months ago, he was almost entirely unacquainted with the goal. And, you know, the Bundesliga isn't exactly the same level of competition as the Premier League: even its top clubs would probably struggle against most of our leading teams; the majority of teams in that league would struggle in the Championship.

And, ahem, City now have one of the toughest runs of fixtures coming up that any side - certainly any top side - has to face in the second half of the season (along with two crunch games to try to avoid the ignominy of Champions League elimination at the group stage... and the dear old FA Cup). They might have a real struggle for points from now until some time in March: Chelsea, Arsenal, Newcastle, Liverpool, Spurs (terrible at the moment; but a bogey team for City in recent years), and Nottingham Forest is an horrendous sequencc. Brighton, Manchester United and Crystal Palace - and a fighting-for-their-lives Leicester - might not be a pushover after that either. The way City were playing up until a few weeks ago, it would not have been outrageous to suggest they might lose all of them. And I'm afraid I still think it's very likely they'll lose at least half of them.

So - NO, sorry; I am not at all convinced we've yet seen any clear sign of a City renaissance.

[And sure enough, the very next night they got absolutely torn apart by Paris St Germain. Despite rather fortuitously opening up a two-goal lead in the first half, they were outplayed for almost the whole game and ended up getting spanked 4-2.... and it might have been much worse.  City's problems are deep-seated and persistent. They might be capable of significant improvement.... but they're not about to get GOOD again any time soon.]

A week further on, they have scraped through into the knockout stage of the Champions League - but only by the skin of their teeth! Again, City can't take much comfort from a fairly dismal performance against Club Brugge: they were regularly cut open by the Belgian side on the counter-attack, conceded the first goal... and very nearly went behind again when Greek forward Christos Tzolis cracked a low 20-yard shot inches wide of the post - with Ederson rooted to the spot. If that one had gone in, I doubt if City could have found a way back into the game. 

And their ultimately fairly comfortable win over Chelsea at the weekend was a bit of a head-scratcher - really more down to Chelsea being surprisingly lacklustre rather than City being at all brilliant. They are still looking... well, not just a pale shadow of the team that dominated every competition in the the last few years, but a completely different team; a much, much worse team, a really rather shambolic team, who look like they could not just get beaten but properly spanked by just about any half-decent side. In his post-match interview on Sunday, Pep was again extremely downbeat; positively careworn and depressed-looking. And he came out with one of the most self-damning remarks I think I've ever heard from a Premier League manager, when he said, "Without the ball, we are one of the worst teams. We need the ball to survive."  No, even Pep doesn't think City are any good again yet. They're hanging on by their fingernails, only occasionally giving themselves a chance in games by trying even harder than usual never to give the ball away. But no team manages never to give the ball away; and, at the moment, every time City give the ball away, they look like they might concede a goal.

The trouble with Pep

 

Pep Guardiola is, of course, one of the most innovative and influential coaches the game has ever seen; and - until a few months ago! - pretty much the most successful. But all of that has suddenly changed with City's remarkable meltdown since the end of October.

I am not particularly surprised by this turn of events; well, surprised, perhaps, by its suddenness and its catastrophic severity, but.... the only big surprise for me is not that it's happened, but that it took so long to come around. I think the seeds of Pep's self-destruction have been apparent for a while, and are inherent in the management 'style' that has brought him so much success thus far.

Here, I think, are some of the main reasons for the spectacular collapse we've seen unfold at City:

1)  The adamantine ego. Pep's strength of personality, his massive self-confidence and force of will, are obviously among the key factors in his exceptional success as a modern football manager. But they also evidently make him a rather prickly character, not always easy to get along with. And he has sometimes appeared to be rather petty in his dealings with his players - the very public spat with Yaya Touré being the most conspicuous instance, but surely not the only one. His rather brutal dismissal of Joe Hart (even before he had anyone decent to replace him - Willy Caballero, remember him?!), the protracted sulky controntation with Touré, and the frequent sidelining even of such giants in the team as David Silva, Sergio Aguero, and Vincent Kompany (although there were injury issues etc. behind a lot of that, it did often seem that he was reluctant to make use of them even when they were available) made it appear that he was prima-donna-ishly attempting to set his own stamp on the club by ostentiatiously shunting aside all the core contributors to its previous success. And some of the players who've left City during his reign - notably Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling - have expressed a dissatisfaction with their treatment by him.

2)  The finicky perfectionism. "Don't let 'perfect' become the enemy of 'good'," a wise old saying goes. And I think this might be Pep's tragic flaw - or one of them. It's another thing that not only may occasionally harm results, but potentially harms his relationships with players... and fans. When you see Liverpool players being interviewed about their time under Klopp, you don't just see professional respect and gratitude towards the man, but something like adulation. When Pep's City players talk about him, there's usually a lot of positive emotion there too - certainly the respect - but it doesn't generally sound quite so warm; and it's often undercut with hints of exasperation at his obsessiveness, his perhaps excessive attention to 'small details'.

3)  The 'over-thinking'. While I wouldn't question the astuteness of Pep's understanding of the game in general, there have clearly been occasions where a compulsion to tinker with his tactical set-up has proven to be unnecessary and detrimental. At least two or three times, an undue 'respect' for the opposition in the latter stages of the Champions League has prompted a drastic change in approach which backfired and led to a premature exit from the competition.

4)  The constant 'evolution'. Now again, this isn't an outright bad thing: it's a good thing.... that can be overdone. The ability and willingness to develop the team's tractical system, to respond to new challenges from rivals and stay continually fresh (and surprising to opponents) is admirable... up to a point. But Pep seems to have been introducing a radical change of approach almost every season, and sometimes even a series of significant tweaks within the course of one season; and this is perhaps a bit too much, a bit too often. It makes it sometimes hard for the team to get settled in a particular system. And, even more importantly, it can make it difficult to recruit appropriate players - if there's an uncertainty about how the team will be playing next year, what kind of profiles they'll be needing. It probably also makes many players reluctant to accept a move to City - my climactic point here, soon - because they realise that, however good they are, they might soon become redundant under Pep's latest scheme. One year he likes attacking full-backs; then he suddenly decides that they're obsolete, and he'd rather play 3 or 4 (or 5?) centre-backs instead; then he thinks full-backs might be OK after all, but he wants them to invert into deep midfield rather than pushing up the flanks; then he decides that maybe he'd like at least one of them to join the attacking line, but more centrally rather than out wide....  It is head-spinning. (These switches of approach have been particularly pronounced in defence; and this is maybe part of the reason why there has been such a revolving door of top international defenders passing across City's books in recent years: Pedro Porro, Angelino, Eric Garcia, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Aymeric Laporte, Joao Cancelo - all unceremoniously shown the door!)

5)  An ultra-conservatism in selection.  While 'Pep Roulette' has become a notorious concept in the world of FPL (the idea that almost any City player is a risky pick because Guardiola's squad rotations can be so frequent and so unpredictable), this distracts us from the deeper truth that in many ways Pep is extremely reluctant to make certain alterations to his team. Most of his changes come in the defensive positions, or among his wide attackers, where he's usually had multiple options; but in other areas, he's often appeared to be afraid of giving key players a rest. OK, we can see that players like Ruben Dias, Rodri, and Kevin DeBruyne are 'irreplaceable' - but you have to try to do without them occasionally, both for the sake of their stamina, and for the harmony of the squad... giving the 'fringe' players enough minutes to keep them happy. Between these two extremes - rotating like crazy in positions where he's got multiple options, and being unwilling to rotate at all in positions where he's got a vital player - many of his squad have sooner or later become disenchanted and sought a move. I mentioned at the end of the point above some of the defenders who've got fed up of him (or he of them...); but there are perhaps even more examples among the attacking players who eventually tired of the limited or erratic minutes he was giving them - Leroy Sane, Riyad Mahrez, Ferran Torres, Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus, Julian Alvarez. This problem is perhaps particularly noticeable in regard to promoting youth team talents to regular starting responsibility. Poor Phil Foden is still being regularly dropped or constantly shunted around different roles (despite having just been 'Player of the Season' last year, when he was mostly able to take the responsibility of the central playmaker, due to DeBruyne's extended absence), and perpetually having to play second-fiddle to DeBruyne whenever he's fit - after 4 or 5 seasons as a more-than-capable understudy, he still hasn't been given the confidence-boost of a regular lead role in the team. And I kind of feel he's been a fool to stay there so long: his career - particularly in the international arena - could probably have blossomed more at another club. The example of fellow Academy graduates like Jadon Sancho, Morgan Rogers, and - most trenchantly - Cole Palmer, who left City for better things, must surely now rankle with him. (And one wonders how long youngsters like Oscar Bobb and Jason McAtee, and even current Pep darling Rico Lewis, will stick around, given this history of being glacially slow to fully integrate younger talents.)

6)  The chronic risk-aversion. While Pep's City have sometimes been quite exciting to watch, it's usually been because of the outsanding individual creativity they have at their disposal, rather than the overall style of play. His relentless stat-crunching, the arid quest for optimum efficiency, the preference for hanging on to the ball (even if you're not going to do much with it!) rather than doing anything that might slightly increase your chance of conceding a turnover.... these things often make for a rather dull and robotic experience for the spectator. And possibly for some of the players too; I suspect that could also be the reason so many attacking players have become disillusioned at City and left in the last few years. (Jack Grealish was the club's most expensive acquistion to date, at a reported fee of £100 million; but he couldn't get a regular start for Pep until he'd learned to be a 'defensive' winger rather than an attacking one! I love Jack, but he is a bear-of-very-little-brain; the move to City was not good for his career, and he should not have taken it.)

7)  That one big gap in his experience. Although Pep's revolutionised the modern game and won all the silverware there is to win.... he hasn't previously had a long tenure at a single club; in fact, he's now been at City for longer than he held his three previous coaching jobs combined. Thus, he's not had to deal much before even with 'succession planning' to replace a few key players, much less with remaking an entire squad over the course of half a decade or a decade. And this is the challenge he's now facing at City. The age balance of the squad is all wrong: DeBruyne is 33 and increasingly injury-prone, Walker and Gundogan are now 34, and appear no longer to have the legs for top-level competition, Bernardo Silva and John Stones are 30, Ake and Akanji will soon be turning 30; there are a lot of great young talents in the squad, but only a few - like Dias and Grealish - are in their 'prime' of mid- to late-20s. Now, player recruitment might be partly - or entirely?? - outside of Pep's control; these days, the Director of Football at a club often takes the lead on transfer trading (it is perhaps not coincidental that City's DoF, Txiki Begiristain, will be stepping down at the end of this season, after more than 12 years in the position). But many of City's acquisitions in recent years have been excessively expensive and ludicrously unfit-for-purpose (Jack Grealish?? Kalvin Phillips??). And the club has signally failed to procure any credible emergency back-up for Rodri or Haaland (they desperately need a 'Plan B' for the next time the big Viking gets injured, beyond trying to play Foden or Silva as a 'false 9'....).

But wait, does all of this tie together into some over-arching flaw in Pep's Manchester City? Yes, I think it does. 

The tactical aridity and the apparent distrust of attacking flair (too 'risky'!); the often thorny relationships with some players; the frequent reluctance to give regular starts to younger players (or players new to the club); the numerous seismic shifts in the tactical formation; the over-frequent rotation in some positions and complete lack of it in others; the large number of dissatisfied players leaving the club - these factors all contribute to Manchester City not being such an attractive destination as you'd expect it to be.... with its unique record of success in the English game and internationally, its revered and peerlessly innovative coach, and its near-bottomless coffers. Some players just don't want to go there, because they see how difficult it can be to get in the team, to stay in the team.... or to play the kind of football they enjoy playing, to 'play their own game' in this team. (You think Lamine Yamal or Nico Williams or Jamal Musiala would ever consider a move to City?? No way!!! Not if they have any sense, anyway.)

And the core failing I see in all of this is.... an exclusive focus on one-game-at-a-time, rather than the medium- or long-term good of the squad and the club. It seems to me that Pep is so afraid of failure in any single game that he can't bring himself to contemplate playing a 'non-ideal' eleven.... or a 'non-ideal' (in his view) formation and gameplan. Even if DeBruyne, in his dotage, is still better than Foden, you need to rest him more often - to get the best out of Foden, and encourage other young players coming up through your youth ranks. And you might have more chance of capturing a good alternate for Rodri if you showed a willingness to occasionally play a double-pivot - allowing both to play alongside each other - even if that's not your conception of an ideal system for this next game. Damn, yes, sometimes you have to be willing to put out a slightly 'weaker' side or utilise a slightly 'weaker' system for the long-term good of the squad. Pep has never done this; and so the City recruitment team have found it difficult/impossible to attract the new players they need for cover and rebuilding. And 'suddenly'.... everything's falling apart. Suddenly?? No, it's been a long time coming.

Oh, and there is one other Premier League manager who seems to me to demonstrate almost all of these same qualities! Unsurprisingly.... it is Pep's 'Mini-Me', Snr Arteta. Last summer's transfer window, when four fantastic young back-up players all quit in a huff, and the club was unable to land any of the big names it was after (well, not the crucial ones, anyway: I think Calafiori will prove to have been a good acquisition, but he didn't seem all that essential), was a disaster for Arsenal, leaving them with a significantly weaker squad than they had last season. And why did that happen, Mikel?

And DON'T FORGET The Boycott:

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip