The unrecognizable City of PEP: a deception 23-24 season, Rodri’s broken crusader and 30% losses

Real Madrid visits the Etihad in the first leg of the Champions League, fourth consecutive duel between the two, fifth in the last six seasons. In the eighth of 2020 and in the semifinals of 2023 the City passed. In the semi of 2022 and the quarterfinals of 2024 the one that passed from Ronda was Madrid. What happens in 2025 will definitely be known on Wednesday of next week, but it is an evidence that this tie has a very different context from the previous ones: «I thought that Guardiola was going to have it much worse and it is just the opposite. He has not sunk and has learned to survive, ”he reflects on ABC Martí Perarnau, the PEP trilogy writer.

11 losses in 37 games

The City has played this season 37 games with a balance of 19 wins, 7 draws and 11 losses. That is 30% of lost matches, almost three times more than what had happened to Guardiola between 2008 and 2024. Numbers that only give you options to win the Cup and the Champions League. The City fell into the second round of the Carling And it is fifteen points (with one more game) of Liverpool in the Premier. In fact, he is fifth, outside the Champions Posts: “When you are not used to losing in such a common way fear appears, collective grabing, individual errors …”, says Perarnau.

And how has the City arrived at this point? The analysis seems clear. The 2023-24 season ended the sixth premierfourth consecutive, unpublished milestone in England, a European Super Cup, a Club World Cup, a Community Shield and a elimination in Champions against Madrid, for many undeserved. It did not seem bad balance after having conquered the triplet in 22-23, but that did not mean that the team did not need a face washing. Pep confessed it a couple of weeks ago, when he said that the team, and himself, had aged, insinuating that they had fallen asleep when renewing the squad.

Therefore, and for the many casualties the team has suffered so far this season, 210 million have been spent in the winter market. Four incorporations, one of them only, The Barça and son of the mythical Fran son. He arrives to try to do what they have not been able to Kovacic or Gundagan: try to find something similar to Rodri, but it will not have it simple. The decline of the second Golden Ball in the history of our country is, without a doubt, the reason for the greatest weight of the fall of the City: «The scorer is Haaland, the charismatic is from Bruyne, but who brings together everything is Rodri. It is the structural player of the team. And his absence is not the absence of anyone, ”analyzes Perarnau.

Rodri broke the crusade at the City-Senal of September 22 of last year and if everything goes well, he could play again in May, but that is now far away: «It is true that the streak from October to December in which The City loses all its matches, and is only able to tie one, the four centrals are also injured and Of Bruynebut the crisis would not have been the same with Rodri in the field. Each factor does not add the same. Of all the injured, the most important was him, ”explains Martí.

Rodri is that midfielder profile that Pep has always had in its teams. A footballer who plays more with the brain than with his legs, who is just what Pep did in his player stage and where the essence of his style lies. He did it with Busquets at Barça, with Lahm, Xabi and Kimmich In Bayern and with Fernandinho in his first two years in the City: “Notice that in Barça and in that first stage in the City he had Yaya Touroé, but he chooses another type of footballer,” Pearnau recalls.

The paradoxical is that Guardiola, in the summer of 2018, threw himself for Rodri despite the fact that at that time he was a footballer who stood out for his physique, not by his head. But Pep He is convinced that inside him there was a pivot with more brain than legs. And he was not wrong. With the help of Lillo and Pablo Barquero, Rodri’s agent, the Madrid footballer learned to exploit a quality that in Atlético was hidden by a Simeone with another game idea: «In ‘GOD SAVE TO PEP‘I explain the trend surrounding a lot at the end of each part, when he is already tired of brain, precisely because of that obligation imposed by Pep and Lillo to play more with the brain than with his head. In those minutes is when he loses attention and starts running much more. When running much more, your performance worsens. That is why that PEP public message saying that Rodri should learn to run less ».

That process costs Rodri complicated sections, like the last two months of the 20-21 campaign, in which his mistakes cost defeats to the City, to the point that the final of the Champions League that season, which loses Pep against Chelsea (1-0), Rodri does not play a single minute. That today would be unthinkable: «Until March I had made a temporal one, but in April and May it suffers a mental fall and with it, the team. If he works, the City is not an orchestra, but when he did not work, or is not, which is what happens now, the team is a disaster, ”says Martí. They are the causes of the unrecognizable PEP City.