Manchester City are not playing as badly as it looks – but emotion trumps data | Manchester City

Jürgen Klopp knew next to nothing about data before he arrived at Liverpool but his first meeting with Ian Graham, the physicist credited with helping to recruit the team that won the title, could not have gone better. Graham, the director of research at Liverpool, decided to demonstrate to him how the metric expected goals (xG) worked. He went through Borussia Dortmund’s calamitous 2014-15 season, when Klopp’s team had slumped from being second to Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich the previous season to second bottom at Christmas. “Echter Schrott” was the take of the tabloid Bild, which translates as “Absolute Rubbish”.

Graham had a different interpretation, even before Klopp arrived. His data told him Dortmund remained the second-best team in the league. When Klopp signed his Liverpool deal, Graham took him through Dortmund’s eight worst games of the season, demonstrating how unlucky they were.

Klopp grew more and more animated in the presentation. “You saw that game? We destroyed them. It was unbelievable we didn’t score.” Graham hadn’t watched a single minute. He just knew what the data said. “I knew it,” said Klopp. “Well, you didn’t know it,” thought Graham. At least not for sure. Klopp’s footballing gut told him one thing, but results, headlines and the media noise told him he was finished.

Which is why Guardiola may need a call right now from his old protagonist as he takes on Manchester United in the derby on Sunday. Like Manchester City, Dortmund had an injury crisis and had sold key players with their replacements struggling, all of which exacerbated bad luck, making their decline apparently inexplicable.

“Outcome bias is vivid,” said Graham. “What actually happens is vivid and it’s against human nature to consider what might have happened. What Jürgen did in 2014-15 was roll three dice and [repeatedly] get three ones rather than three sixes.”

Because chance outcomes still affect football more than most team sports – which makes it compelling – sometimes there is no meta narrative to a run of form. The story is related in How To Win The Premier League by Graham and is pertinent right now because, by some metrics, Manchester City are top of the league. Yes, you read that right. No one knows more about data analytics than Brighton’s Tony Bloom and the word out of Sussex last week was that their data still has City top of the Premier League for expected goals, essentially a measure of how many good chances you’ve created. That tallies with some open source xG data that also has City top.

Yet your eyes also do not deceive you. Bernardo Silva, Kevin De Bruyne and Ilkay Gündogan are nothing like the athletes they were and a midfield composed of those three, and without the long-term injured Rodri, will leave huge gaps, as was witnessed against Juventus on Wednesday. Likewise Kyle Walker, transformed from the best, quickest right-back in the world to hapless defender in a matter of months. Even a small percentage decline in each player has a compound effect, greater than the sum of those individual percentages. Then the elixir of confidence goes: even Ederson looks like a flappy, unreliable keeper and Erling Haaland starts missing chances.

“It’s a mental issue. We miss the right timing, we miss a ball or lose a duel and you can see we immediately drop, we lose the rhythm,” said Gündogan after Wednesday’s 2-0 defeat, City’s seventh in 10 games.

“They [the opponents] are able to break out and they don’t even need to do much. It has such a big effect on us right now. Doing the simple things as good as possible, quick, clean, fluidly, this is how you get the confidence back. But at the crucial moment, we are always doing the wrong things.”

So what is going on? Essentially, City are worse than before but they aren’t as bad as they look. It’s just that emotion trumps data and is playing havoc with the team’s confidence and the media analysis. “People love narrative,” said Graham.

“If City buy a top midfielder they will be there or thereabouts [in the title race] at the end of the season,” said a sporting director at a rival club. Initially, City had their eyes on Torino’s Samuele Ricci for the long term when Rodri sustained his knee ligament injury. Friday’s financial results revealing revenues of £715m and a £73.8m profit increases the likelihood they will spend big on a more established player for an immediate impact, such as the Liverpool target Martin Zubimendi, who took over from Rodri at half-time in the Euro 2024 final win over England.

For a side that had just won the treble and then four Premier Leagues in a row, City’s trading has been curious in the past two years. From a position of strength, they might have been expected to kick on, but Guardiola looks as though he has remained too loyal to the winners who should have been moved on.

Instead, it was the next generation of players that appeared to incur his ire. “The decision to sell Cole Palmer was based on a degree of arrogance,” said the rival sporting director. “Players win games, not coaches, even if they are the best in the world.”

Theories abound: some that Palmer’s strut off the pitch didn’t suit Guardiola (remember Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s claim that Guardiola likes players to be obedient schoolboys); others, conversely, say the manager chose to sell Palmer after he expressed uncertainty about filling De Bruyne’s boots, immediately after being named player of the match in the Super Cup win against Sevilla in August 2023.

Two weeks later, he was sold to Chelsea, just as De Bruyne sustained the injury that might have cleared his pathway to the starting XI. Either way, Guardiola did not fancy him but his 17 goal involvements this season top Haaland’s 13 goals and one assist.

Then there is the departure of Julián Álvarez last summer. City made a £95m net profit after spending a net £114m the summer before. Even in Abu Dhabi, the books now need to balance, it seems.

“Stopping would do me good,” said Guardiola in an interview this week with a celebrity chef, in which he admitted he was done with the strain of club management. Guardiola made it clear he was speaking about the long term and he intends to honour the two-year contract he signed last month.

In another interview, with the former Italy striker Luca Toni, he also said he sleeps poorly, struggles to digest food and loses his mind at times. Like Klopp 10 years ago, he has never looked more tired and like Klopp, who left Dortmund exhausted at the end of that season to return rejuvenated at Liverpool, maybe the break would do him good.