Manchester City is not playing as badly as it seems, but emotion surpasses data | city ​​of manchester

Jürgen Klopp knew no facts before arriving at Liverpool, but his first meeting with Ian Graham, the physicist credited with helping recruit the title-winning team, couldn't have gone better. Graham, Liverpool's research director, decided to show you how the expected goals (xG) metric works. He came through Borussia Dortmund's calamitous 2014-15 season, where Klopp's team had fallen from second behind Pep Guardiola's Bayern Munich the previous season to second-to-last at Christmas. “Echter Schrott“was the opinion of the tabloid imagewhich translates to “absolute garbage.”

But Graham had a different interpretation, even before Klopp arrived. His data told him that Dortmund was still the second best team in the league. And when Klopp signed his contract with Liverpool, Graham guided him through Dortmund's eight worst games of the season, showing how unlucky they were.

Klopp became increasingly animated in the presentation. 'Did you see that game? We destroy them! It was incredible that we hadn't scored!' Graham hadn't watched a single minute. I just knew what the data said. “I knew it!” Klopp said. “Well, you didn't know,” Graham thought. At least not for sure. Klopp's football instinct told him one thing, but the results, the headlines and the media noise told him he was finished.

That's why Guardiola might need a call from his former star right now when he faces Manchester United in Sunday's derby. As city ​​of manchesterDortmund had an injury crisis and sold key players with their struggling replacements, all of which exacerbated the bad luck, making their decline seemingly inexplicable. “Result bias is evident,” Graham said. “What actually happens is vivid and it goes against human nature to consider what could have happened. “What Jürgen did in 2014-15 was roll three dice and (repeatedly) got three ones instead of three sixes.”

And because fluke results still affect football more than most team sports (which makes it attractive), sometimes there is no meta-narrative for a run of form. The story is told 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. Nobody knows more about data analysis than Brighton's Tony Bloom and last week word spread out of Sussex that his data still puts City at the top of the Premier League for expected goals – essentially a measure of how many good chances you have created. matches some open source xG data which also has the top of the city.

However, your eyes do not deceive you either. Bernardo Silva, Kevin De Bruyne and İlkay Gündogan do not look at all like the athletes they were and a midfield composed of those three, and without Rodri, injured for a long time, will leave huge gaps, as seen against Juventus on Wednesday night. Similarly, Kyle Walker went from being the best and fastest right-back in the world to a hapless defender in a matter of months. Even a small percentage decrease in each player has a compound effect, greater than the sum of those individual percentages. Then the elixir of confidence runs out: even Ederson looks like an unstable and unreliable goalkeeper and Erling Haaland begins to waste chances.

“It's a mental problem. We miss the right moment, we lose a ball or we lose a duel and you can see that we immediately fall, we lose the rhythm,” Gündoğan said after Wednesday's 2-0 defeat, City's seventh in 10 games. “They (opponents) are able to escape and don't even need to do much. It has such a big effect on us right now. Doing simple things as best as possible, fast, clean and smooth, that's how you regain trust. But at the crucial moment, we are always doing things wrong.”

So what's going on? Essentially, City are worse than before, but it is not as bad as it seems. It's just that emotion trumps data and is wreaking havoc on both team confidence and media analysis. “People love narrative,” Graham said.

“If City buy a top midfielder, they will be there or close to it (in the title race) at the end of the season,” said a sporting director at a rival club. City initially had their eyes on Torino's Samuele Ricci long-term when Rodri suffered a knee ligament injury. Friday's financial results, which reveal revenue of £715m and profit of £73.8m, increase the likelihood that they will spend big on a more established player to make an immediate impact, such as Liverpool target Martín Zubimendi, the man who replaced Rodri at half-time in the game. the victory in the Euro 24 final over England.

For a team that had just won the treble and then four Premier Leagues in a row, City's trade has been curious over the past two years. From a position of strength, they might have been expected to move on, but it seems Guardiola has remained too loyal to the winners who should have been left behind.

Instead, it was the next generation of players who seemed to incur Guardiola's ire. “The decision to sell Cole Palmer was based on a certain degree of arrogance,” the rival athletic director said. “The players win the games, not the coaches, even if they are the best in the world.”

Theories abound: some say that Palmer's off-field strutting didn't suit Guardiola (recall Zlatan Ibrahimovic's claim that Guardiola likes his players to be obedient schoolboys); others, on the contrary, say that the coach decided to sell Palmer after he expressed uncertainty about taking De Bruyne's boots, immediately after being named man of the match in the Super Cup against Sevilla in August 2023.

Two weeks later he was sold to Chelsea, ironically just as De Buryne suffered the injury that could have cleared his way into the starting XI. Either way, Guardiola didn't like him, but his 17 goals this season surpass Haaland's 13 goals and one assist.

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

“I think stopping would be good for me,” Guardiola said in an interview this week with a celebrity chef, in which he admitted he had had enough of the strain of managing the club. Guardiola made it clear that he was talking about the long term and that he intends to honor the two-year contract he signed last month.

And in another interview with former Italian striker Luca Toni, he also said that he sleeps poorly, has trouble digesting food and sometimes loses his mind. 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 to Liverpool, perhaps the break would be good for him.