TURIN, Italy — Manchester City are facing elimination and Pep Guardiola now looks as vulnerable and troubled as any other manager who has suffered a seventh defeat in 10 games. Both statements would have seemed unthinkable just a month ago, but after Tuesday’s 2-0 Champions League loss against Juventus, the old certainties no longer apply.
Second-half goals from Dusan Vlahovic and Weston McKennie put Juventus on course for a playoff spot and left City in 22nd position in the Champions League, a point clear of 25th place Paris Saint-Germain, currently below the cut-off point that will see teams drop out of the competition altogether. City face PSG in Paris in their next game and if they lose that, elimination from the Champions League will loom large.
But while that prospect would be a humiliation for a club of City’s stature and ambition — they were Champions League winners in 2023 — the biggest problem might just turn out to be Guardiola and whether we are witnessing the beginning of the end of his incredible eight-year reign in charge.
Is Guardiola’s position as City manager under threat after his team’s unprecedented slump? It is highly unlikely that the club’s hierarchy, who were in Turin led by chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, would be so knee-jerk as to think about dismissing the most successful manager in City’s history, a man who has delivered 18 trophies since 2016, but the faith and support of his bosses is not the issue.
With Guardiola cutting an unusually restrained figure on the touchline during this game in Turin — when he wasn’t slumped in his seat he stood with his hands in his pockets, barely delivering instructions to his players — the real question is how long he will be able to sustain himself in a role when nothing is working.
Guardiola has never been just another manager, one of those guys who has good days and bad days and ultimately runs out of solutions when the problems begin to mount. Yes, he has had bad results in charge of Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, but Guardiola has never been through the kind of crisis that all other managers endure. Until now.
The gilded career that has been a tale of almost unbroken success since he won the Treble with Barcelona in his first season in 2008-09 has placed the 53-year-old above the trials and tribulations of his contemporaries, but now that he is having to deal with them himself. Guardiola is failing for the first time in his career.
In Turin, he watched his team struggle to overcome a Juventus side that had gone into this game with just one win from their last six games and he did virtually nothing about it. He watched Kevin De Bruyne (33) and Ilkay Gündogan (34) run out of steam in midfield and left them toiling until waiting until the 87th minute to make his first change by introducing Matheus Nunes in favour of Jack Grealish.
Erling Haaland, City’s goal machine, once again failed to contribute anything in a game when he doesn’t score — he managed just 18 touches all night. But again, Guardiola was unable to make the crucial tweak in his selection or system to make the difference.
When asked after the game whether he was now questioning himself, Guardiola conceded he was, but with an air of defiance rather than hinting at a lack of self-confidence.
“Of course I question myself and I have my thoughts,” Guardiola said. “I’m stable in good moments and bad moments. I try to find a way to do it.”
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When pushed on whether he was now experiencing the toughest challenge of his career, Guardiola insisted it was not.
“My biggest challenge is to get results to continue to work in the first seasons [at Barcelona],” Guardiola said. “It’s life, it happens. Sometimes you have a bad period, but I’m going to insist until we’re there.”
When Guardiola signed a two-year contract extension last month, he said that he had begun to view this season as his last at City.
“I was thinking a lot,” he said. “There were some moments, I have to be honest, I thought this should be the last one. But at the same time, when the situation comes and the problems we had in the last month, I felt now is not the time to leave, I would let the club down and I had the feeling I had to do it.
“Don’t ask me the reason why. Maybe the four defeats were the reason why and I felt I cannot leave.”
Those four defeats on the spin have now become seven defeats in 10 — one win in the same period — so the situation has become much worse. City have had no bounce on the back of Guardiola’s new deal and they are now, along with their Champions League struggles, eight points behind Premier League.
And with City due to participate in the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States next summer, their season still has another seven months to run and Guardiola and his players already look to be out of energy and ideas.
They have become a team of old men, with none of the vibrancy and attacking verve of Guardiola’s great teams, and the manager himself is literally scratching his head for answers.
What we’re left with is the scenario that City might be relegated from the Champions League and Guardiola’s new contract may end up being worth less than the paper it is written on.
Unthinkable? Not anymore.
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