The very thing which used to set the Premier League champions apart from the rest is now increasingly becoming their biggest weakness
It was less than four months ago that Pep Guardiola was asked what he valued most in his Manchester City players. At the time, City had won nine of their first 12 matches of the season in all competitions while remaining unbeaten. They looked very much capable of winning a fifth-consecutive Premier League title and had snatched results against Wolves and Arsenal with late goals. The coach's response is worth re-visiting after City took a 2-1 lead against Real Madrid with 10 minutes remaining at the Etihad Stadium and turned it into a 3-2 defeat.
"They have an incredible mentality," Guardiola said at the time. "Most of them are so strong, so competitive. There’s a tendency to relax, I always have this concern when we win again. What is it going to happen? A drop after you win. But I don’t see it. I don’t see it winning or losing, performing well or bad. I don’t see this factor of dropping. Everyone pushes each other. They push me and push my staff with ideas, with new things. If I don’t like it, they accept it well because it’s for the team. They forget immediately, win or lose. They’re on to the next, what’s next? They’re true competitors."
How far away that statement feels right now. Because if there is one thing that sums up Manchester City at the moment, it is their mental fragility.
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Jurgen Klopp called his Liverpool side the 'mentality monsters', but more often than not, City had the mental edge over the Reds, pipping them to the Premier League title on three out of four occasions when they duelled at the summit. City have won six league crowns in the last seven years, amassing 18 trophies on Guardiola's watch. But something truly remarkable has happened to City this season.
They have lost no fewer than five matches in 2024-25 from winning positions, as many as in the previous four seasons combined. Madrid's late turnaround from being 2-1 down in the 80th minute to 3-2 up in the 91st was emphatic and stunning, but it did not come out of the blue.
It was not even the latest turnaround of the season to cost City. Guardiola's side were leading against Manchester United until conceding Bruno Fernandes' penalty in the 88th minute, only to then see Amad Diallo net a winner in the 90th. The Cityzens chucked away a 2-0 advantage at Paris Saint-Germain to lose 4-2, while also losing from winning positions against Sporting CP and Brighton. City were leading at the Amex Stadium until the 78th minute, but by the 83rd they were behind.
City have also thrown away leads in matches they have not lost, for example when they were 2-0 up at Brentford last month but drew 2-2 after conceding in the 82nd and 92nd minutes.
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City's tendency to collapse has been particularly prevalent in the Champions League. They have shipped eight goals in the last 16 minutes across five of their nine games in Europe's top competition. Their most spectacular surrender was actually in a game they did not lose, the 3-3 draw with Feyenoord, but it sure felt like a defeat, as they squandered their 3-0 advantage by shipping three goals between the 74th and 89th minutes.
City might have thought, however, that they had gotten away with it when they came through their dire League Phase campaign by beating Club Brugge and finishing 22nd out of 36, sneaking into the play-offs. Sure, they had to face Real Madrid, the undisputed kings of the competition, but they had knocked them out of Europe twice before and thrashed them 4-0 at the Etihad less than two years ago.
City led a charmed life for much of Tuesday's first leg. Their fans rubbed Rodri's Ballon d'Or win in the face of Vinicius Jr before kick-off, then breathed a sigh of relief both when the Brazilian was flagged offside when he would have otherwise have won a penalty and when his shot deflected off Manuel Akanji and onto the crossbar. They jeered in delight when Kylian Mbappe missed a gilt-edged chance at the end of the first half. They celebrated every block and tackle like it was a goal. And when Haaland sent Thibaut Courtois the wrong way to restore their lead in the 80th minute, City supporters thought they were heading to the Spanish capital next week with a lovely one-goal cushion.
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But those very same tendencies they had demonstrated throughout the League Phase came back to haunt them on Tuesday. Ederson, who was culpable for the defeats in Paris and Turin, as well as the disastrous draw with Feyenoord, was one of City's top performers against Madrid until he gave Ruben Dias a hospital pass from a goal kick and subsequently pushed Vinicius' central shot straight to the feet of Brahim Diaz, gifting the Spaniards their second equaliser.
Rico Lewis, meanwhile, suffered an untimely lapse of concentration and lost the ball to Vinicius, the last person he wanted to give it to, leading to Jude Bellingham's winner. City had seen this movie before, especially against Madrid, who knocked them out in the semi-finals in 2022 with two injury-time goals from Rodrygo. But if that late surrender in the Bernabeu felt like a one-off, what happened on Tuesday at the Etihad Stadium felt a lot more like deja-vu. Guardiola struggled to explain what had happened to his team. Or rather, what keeps on happening.
"We were not able to manage the situation," he said. "After 2-1, it happened what has happened many times this season – against Feyenoord, Sporting, Brentford, United. At the end we gave it away. At that level it is so difficult. It is not the first time, it has happened many times, and that is why it is difficult. We talk about that [how to stop it] but that is hard. We have to know that mistakes in some areas when we are there are difficult to manage. It has happened many times."
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Guardiola insisted that it was not about individuals. Ederson has certainly been a common denominator in many of City's awful results this season, but the coach admitted that his team were suffering from a collective malaise, including himself in that assessment.
"It belongs to all of us, not the players. I don’t have a problem to accept that it doesn’t work like it did in the past, it’s not a problem but [it’s about] all of us," he said. "For me, it would be easy to blame a specific player, but that is ridiculous and doesn’t work. Me the first – and the players as well. They want it – how they run, how they do it – but the truth is that we are not stable enough in those moments. Today is not an exception, it happened many times."
The fact that Guardiola kept repeating the words "many times" illustrated how there is a sense of Groundhog Day about City in the last three months.
