ETIHAD STADIUM, MANCHESTER — Pep Guardiola has trudged into enough post-match press conferences during his career — more often in victory than this latest bitter defeat — knowing exactly what the story will be before he’s opened his mouth.
Tuesday night’s 3-2 defeat to Real Madrid that leaves Manchester City starting at elimination from the UEFA Champions League knockout playoff round was no exception. Again Guardiola’s team led a game and again they threw it away
“After 2-1, it happened. We resumed a little bit this season,” he said. “In many games, it happened.
“Against Feyenoord, Sporting, Brentford, Man United. In many games. At the end we give it away.
“At this level, it is so difficult. It is not the first time unfortunately, it has happened many times and that is why it is difficult.”
So why does this keep happening?
There are several elements to City’s drop-off this season but the sight of a winning machine that has lifted six of the past seven Premier League titles persistently failing to get over the line has been the most startling to observe.
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Which games have Man City lost from winning positions this season?
The Real Madrid game was the fifth time City have lost this season having been ahead in the match. That’s more times than in their past four seasons combined.
- Sporting CP 4-1 Manchester City (UEFA Champions League, November 5)
- Brighton 2-1 Manchester City (Premier League, November 9)
- Manchester City 1-2 Manchester United (Premier League, December 15)
- Paris Saint-Germain 4-2 Manchester City (UEFA Champions League, January 22)
- Manchester City 2-3 Real Madrid (UEFA, Champions League, February 11)
“Obviously the last five minutes or so when you’re winning 2-1, to give it away like that is frustrating and hard to take,” said City defender Nathan Ake.
“Especially because it’s happened a few times now this season and we haven’t learned from it yet so we have to do that as soon as possible.”
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Manchester City’s late collapses in 2024/25
The particular nature of these setbacks is that they have often occurred during the dying stages of matches.
City had been impenetrable until recently on their home ground. November’s 4-0 defeat to Tottenham was their first Premier League loss in east Manchester for almost two years. That amounted to 35 league matches and 52 in all competitions.
Although Madrid prevailed in a penalty shootout on this ground after a 1-1 draw last season, you have to go back to the 2018 group-stage meeting with Lyon for City’s previous home Champions League defeat.
And yet, an almost suffocating sense of trepidation gripped the home supporters from the moment their former youth teamer Brahim Diaz dispatched a rebound in the 86th minute following a couple of dreadful moments for City goalkeeper Ederson. As the list below shows, they’d seen this movie before.
- Brighton (A): 2-1 loss; 1-0 up in the 78th minute
- Feyenoord (H): 3-3 draw; 3-0 up in the 74th minute
- Man United (H) 2-1 defeat; 1-0 up in the 88th minute
- Brentford (A) 2-2 draw; 2-0 up in the 82nd minute
- Real Madrid (H) 3-2 defeat; 2-1 up in the 86th minute
“It’s difficult to be honest,” Ake said. “We’re trying to find the reason why.
“There are little details that in some games you can get away with, but in these kinds of games you won’t get away with because they’re a top team.”
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Why do Man City keep losing games late on?
As Ake and Guardiola said postmatch, it’s hard to identify a single factor.
In the list above, the Feyenoord, United and Madrid game can all be pinned squarely on awful individual errors from Josko Gvardiol (arguably City’s best player this season), Ederson, Matheus Nunes, Ederson (again), Mateo Kovacic and Rico Lewis.
They are the sort of errors for which you cannot legislate and it was hard not to sympathise with Guardiola, who pulled out a couple of shrewd tactical surprises on Tuesday night to get his team to within touching distance of the finishing line before they self-destructed.
But the frequency of these damaging errors from a team that habitually cranked out double-digit winning runs over recent years is bizarre, meaning there must be a few things to pick out of the surrounding context.
The first relates to the man who loomed large over last night’s game in the form of a very large banner.
City looked a shell of themselves on the odd occasions their imperious Ballon d’Or winner wasn’t available last season and, to an extent, that’s simply been extrapolated over the course of an entire season following his ACL injury.
— Dom Farrell (@DomFarrell1986) February 11, 2025
Rodri would single-handedly ensure City managed the closing stages of games better than they are doing, or perhaps even allow them to dominate so that the closing stages aren’t close.
“It’s the fourth time we’ve played in a row against Madrid here,” Guardiola said. “The previous three we were much, much better than them.”
Oscar Bobb, who was City’s standout player in preseason before suffering a broken leg, and Rodri were the only injury absentees against Madrid. However, Ake could only manage an hour after coming back from his third injury absence of the season. John Stones, outstanding in the Rodri role before Ake’s departure, has barely played and continues to nurse a foot problem.
Defensive lynchpin Ruben Dias is back from his third muscle injury this term and that trio’s absence has meant Manuel Akanji being overworked. The Switzerland international hurt his groin blocking a Vinicius Junior cross and was replaced at halftime. Jack Grealish, starting his first non-FA Cup game since Christmas, played well for half an hour before being forced out of the action.
The problem has not just been injuries, it has been players playing to cover for injured teammates without being at optimal fitness levels themselves. A key ingredient to City’s rumbling title runs has been how Guardiola prepares his teams to peak in the final months of the season.
This time around, plans on the training ground have been decimated to make this calibration impossible. At the end of last year, Guardiola claimed his staff had calculated that players had spent a combined 100 fewer days on the training ground from the start of the season until November than they had during the treble-winning campaign of 2022/23.
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It would be understandable for confidence to be affected when players are unable to play safe in the knowledge that preparation has left nothing to chance, especially when such rigour has underpinned City’s success. This doesn’t just manifest itself in headline-grabbing errors.
Once again on Tuesday night, Guardiola criticised City for attacking too quickly. Now, on the one hand, why wouldn’t you? You have Erling Haaland on goalscoring form and Phil Foden and Savinho buzzing around behind him. If City are less confident in their traditional “one thousand, million passes” approach, then short-circuiting it to go straight to the big man feels like a decent workaround.
But when such attacks break down, it invites the running power and technical quality of Eduardo Camavinga, Jude Bellingham, Rodrygo, Vinicius and Kylian Mbappe to ask questions that a team at a low ebb might wish to avoid answering.
Injuries and peak fitness are part of the reason for this, but Guardiola deserves less sympathy when we examine a midfield he has allowed to grow old together.
Without Rodri, Kevin De Bruyne and Ilkay Gundogan are still lovely players. But they are 33 and 34, with serious injuries in their past and look every week of their years. De Bruyne looked a shadow of his former self last night, while Gundogan coming on with City 2-0 up at Brentford, all square in Paris and 2-1 up against Madrid isn’t a great argument for him being used from the bench to shore games up, even if he’s rarely been at the scene of the crime.
The same can’t be said for Kovacic after his error to gift Madrid the win last night, having similarly imploded as City went under at PSG, showed why he has spent his career as a high-class backup rather than a main man. Kovacic’s failure to adequately deal with Rodri’s absence is part of the reason City signed Nico Gonzalez from Porto on deadline day.
The former Barcelona midfielder was an unused substitute against Madrid as Kovacic replaced Ake. The painful denouement should make Guardiola reassess that particular part of the pecking order, not to mention the fact that City’s performance fell away badly after career midfielder Kovacic took over the holding role from the imperious but makeshift Stones.
Then there is Bernardo Silva, Pep’s teacher’s pet who has scored four times across previous battles with Madrid. Like Kovacic, he is 30 but looks to be running on empty, robbed of his trademark tenacity.
Like Akanji in defence, Silva remained fit throughout what Dias referred to as City’s “death sequence” this week. That led to him playing an awful lot of football, although an added factor is Guardiola’s complete refusal to trust Matheus Nunes and youngsters James McAtee or Nico O’Reilly in central midfield roles.
According to Opta, Silva recovered possession an average of 2.98 times per 90 minutes this season. That’s down from 3.55 in 2023/24, which was the only time since 2017/18 the figure had been below four. He made 5.34 recoveries per 90 in the treble season and 5.22 in his banner 2018/19 campaign when Silva helped inspire City to beat Jurgen Klopp’s relentless Liverpool to the title.
Those times feel like a fading memory as City face up to key home matches against Newcastle and Arne Slot’s Reds, interspersed with trips to Madrid and Tottenham. The FA Cup is realistically their only remaining prospect of silverware in a season they will have to gut out in the absence of quick fixes .
“I’ve been here for many years and we’ve been an extraordinary team, an incredible machine every three days,” Guardiola added.
“I said months ago, at the moment I’m not good enough to give composure to the team to manage these situations. It’s the truth. When you arrive at the end with this result, It’s tough.
“I think a lot of the players, I think about how long they suffer.”
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