The Crisis at Manchester City in Context

Let's remember some teams

If you don’t follow Premier League soccer, it might sound pretty silly to call Manchester City’s current predicament a crisis. They have lost five matches in the last six weeks, but this is still a team in fourth place in England and safely within the promotion places in the Champions League.

Now, the underlying statistics suggest that their recent struggles are not a fluke. While City are averaging on the season about 0.5 more expected goals per match created than conceded, the balance has recently gone negative. These numbers include both Premier and Champions League matches.

Of course, a few matches with an aggregate negative expected goals difference and a passel of dropped points do not usually constitute a crisis. But Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has set quite an incredible standard for himself. His teams have won six of the last seven Premier League titles. Before that he won three Bundesliga titles in a row with Bayern Munich and three out of four La Liga titles in his last four years at Barcelona. Further, these teams have consistently had the best underlying numbers in the league to back up their table position.

Pep Guardiola and His Remarkable xG Difference

The one title in the last seven that City did not win, they still had better expected goals difference than Liverpool. His side also failed to take home a Premier League title in Guardiola’s first season, 2016-17, but even from third place they still won the Expected Goals Title with a plus-45 xGD.

As Chris Glover of the PL Fantasy newsletter has documented, this run in the last few months stands out as the worst of Guardiola’s time at City. Because I have data going back a few more seasons, I wanted to expand the sample to see if there were any comparable points.