Honestly, we were intending to deceive you, we were going to tell you about two different teams; One of them has a set of supernatural statistics, and the other is his stats befitting a team in the middle of the table. These two teams are actually one team; Manchester City Guardiola.
Of course, this was before we realized that the title would expose our trick before you read a single letter, so we decided to be honest with you from the beginning. Manchester City suffers from schizophrenia. In fact, we have never seen a team combining these extreme contradictions with the coach himself.
Before we start we will give you a general idea of what we are about to discuss; Are you watching the Premiership? Certainly you see it, otherwise you will not be here, so you know how Liverpool have swept the Premier League in length and width this season, to the point that it was on the verge of shattering all City numbers from the past two seasons if its players were no longer at a declining level and less motivated after stopping.
Well, you have to prepare now because what we are going to tell you will seem unbelievable; According to the statistics of expected goals referred to as "xG", which measures the quality of each team's shots and then the percentage of goals converted according to their difficulty, Manchester City Guardiola, who lost more matches compared to Wolves and Manchester United, and less than Arsenal by one match, is the team The same has the highest percentage of goals expected in the Premier League table, the second lowest percentage of goals expected against him (the first is not Liverpool), and the highest goal difference expected. (1)
In fact, the word "higher" does not accurately describe what happened. According to "StatsBomb", one of the largest statistics companies in the world, which works with a number of the largest European clubs, the average "logical" goal difference for Manchester City is 1.52 goals per match. This is nearly twice what Liverpool, the current league champion, achieves (0.79 goals per match), who are crowned with an 18-point difference, expected to increase in the last round.
Logically, too, Manchester City should have scored 20 goals more than Liverpool and not just 15 as it happened, and the surprise is that he should have received 7 goals less than him as well! As far as we know, no team that achieved these averages ever lost the league by this point difference. (1)
Please note that there is a margin of error in every statistic. Some algorithms that calculate these stats are lenient with players and some do the opposite, so analysts tend to look for very clear repetitive patterns in which differences exceed the usual margin of error, and in that case we are talking about a weak difference. Goals are not just a slight increase that can be returned for any potential margin of error. (2)
If it is possible to name a single goal that Pep Guardiola seeks in every match, regardless of the opponent and whatever the competition or circumstances, it is the scoring in the first quarter of an hour. All the tactics, studies, training and philosophy you hear aim at serving this part; Exporting shock to the opponent from the beginning and killing his ambitions early, then comes the role of Guardiola's broad history of inflicting heavy defeats on his rivals to weigh on the psyche and mentality of the opponent, and push him to think 1,000 times before risking the rise to City in his regions.
All of this is done primarily with the aim of equalizing the tactical cuff, because Guardiola no longer seeks an impulsive attack in every match as much as he has become compelled due to his opponents' continuous retreat in front of him at least in the early stages, and this retreat gives them the opportunity to launch dangerous counterattacks after every broken pass or a stray shot or opportunity Unexploited, and what Guardiola is trying to achieve is simply forcing them to open their lines in the hope of compensation, that is, while people think that the impulse of the permanent man in the beginnings is his goal only for attack, he is in fact trying to protect his team in the remainder of the match, and to reduce the time space in which he is forced to risk And the rise in full to the last third. If you follow the Premier League, you probably know all of that. (3)
This may lead you to rethink one of the very popular theories about the man, which says that he does not care about defense as much as he is concerned with the attack, and regardless of that training at this level is not guided by principles and ideas with this superficiality, the truth proves that the saying is far from the truth. Guardiola's first 7 seasons in Barcelona and Bayern, his team was the strongest defense in the domestic championship, and with Bayern and City the same pattern was repeated; Guardiola accepted the fewest goals in the club's history in the league, setting a record, and then breaking that record by receiving fewer.
In fact, this prompts you to rethink all the impressions that the media and the fans usually confirm about the best coaches in the game. These are not false impressions in general, but at the same time they give us an inaccurate picture of this or that coach, an image in which one of his advantages overwhelms the rest, and with time people do not see others as a simplification and simplification, quite unlike the truth.
The problem with what Guardiola does to his opponents is that he is very effective, he succeeds in 95% of cases, and with every new match his players go to the field knowing exactly what they will do, what weakness they will focus on, in what way, how the opponent will react, and how they will exploit His reaction. Briefly; They know everything that needs to be done to score the sacred first goal.
This exceptional activity tempts his players to rely on him more than any other coach they have worked with, and it, at the same time, satisfies his ego and his obsession with controlling all the details, which is something any coach would really dream of; To possess a group of skilled and obedient players at the same time, simply because these two qualities are strongly contradictory, creativity is the opposite of obedience, and skill is always looking for freedom, and before that moment we imagined that the coach who would combine the two characteristics in his players would not come, and if he did he would win everything Everywhere and under any conditions.
the problem? This reliability is sometimes counterproductive; When you strip your players of the ability to improvise and turn them into a group of helpless children in the face of any new developments or exceptional circumstances, then what happened this season will happen.
If Man City fail to beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, Liverpool will be crowned Premier League champions for the first time. 🏆 pic.twitter.com/SCU262Rhfh
- Squawka Football (@Squawka) June 24, 2020
There is no doubt that Guardiola's team has the luxury of staying away from competition for one season, but that this is a very healthy phenomenon after two seasons in which he collected 198 points out of 228 available points (almost 87%), which is something that no coach has preceded him in any league, in what is called the media With "Hang Over", in an analogy to City’s current state of trying to wake up from drunkenness.
But all this does not explain the psychological fragility that has become a characteristic of Guardiola's team, because although the team has maintained a wonderful defensive record over the past four years compared to its opponents, it is back to the 2017-2018 season that you discover that City have accepted a fifth of their goals in 10 minutes against Liverpool during the 4-3 match. The famous one, and in another 17 minutes against Manchester United in another match that ended with three goals for two goals, and in the following season a similar pattern was repeated, as City accepted half of the total season’s goals in just one month! (4)
In his analysis of the matter, Daniel Story, one of the most important analysts of "Four Four Two", says that the story is not related to the number of goals that City Guardiola accepts each season, nor even the number of expected goals that tilt in his favor, but rather about the difference between City and Liverpool's reaction when receiving the first goal. Instead of registering it.
For example, this season, Liverpool scored 1.8 points / game overdue, while Manchester City scored less than half that number in the last 12 games that saw them accept the first goal. (4)
Manchester City won the last 13 games in which he advanced in the score, during which he scored 42 goals and accepted only 3, while he won only 3 of the last 13 matches that have seen him late in the score, and the matter does not stop at this point, but City Guardiola tends to enter the cycle of The mistakes were made as soon as he accepted the first goal, for example, but not limited to, City accepted a second goal within just 10 minutes of accepting the first goal against Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham, Norwich and Wolves this season; Schizophrenia in its clearest form. (5)
If you have not noticed, the previous paragraph may answer one of the most important and famous questions regarding Guardiola since his departure from Catalonia; Why does Guardiola not win the Champions League? The answer lies in several important reasons, but one of the most important reasons is the failure of his players to adapt to the situation when things do not go according to the plan laid before the match, and their tendency to accept more goals as soon as their state of mind shakes.
Following their defeat to Southampton, Man City are now closer to the bottom half of the table (22 pts) than they are to the top of the table (23 pts).
Ralph Hassenhuttl showing Pep Guardiola the gap between them and Liverpool. 🙃 pic.twitter.com/vXuuYK8Oqg
- Squawka Football (@Squawka) July 5, 2020
Shock, it seems, is a double-edged sword, and the problem here is not with Guardiola himself, although his changes sometimes contribute to the deterioration of the condition of his team, but the main problem lies in the players' dealing with the changes, the truth is that Manchester City continues to create dangerous opportunities even after accepting the first goal, but He often fails to invest, his players' self-confidence is often shaken, especially in front of the goal, and they often waste penalty kicks. We haven't heard of another coach who was knocked out of the Champions League on 3 different occasions his best shooter missed an important penalty kick; Messi in 2012, Muller in 2016, and Aguero in 2019.
We have to admit something to you here; If all of the above was limited to a few exceptional incidents here and there, we would not have paid attention to it, but the fact is that the repetition of these characteristics with the teams of Guardiola and Manchester City in particular leads us to doubt.
Is the problem in Guardiola himself? The most effective team on goal could win the league even if it did not create the most chances. This is possible in a season every few seasons, but is it possible that the matter will be repeated twice in 4 seasons for the same coach with the same team? Sorry, we forgot to tell you that Guardiola's team was the most wasted of chances to score in 2016-2017 as well, and we forgot to also tell you that Claudio Bravo, who was one of the 3 best goalkeepers in the world prior to joining City, had the second worst record in 2016-2017 from Where to counteract the payments of dangerous liabilities.
This recurring digital pattern is bound to make statistical analysts mad, perhaps so the answer lies outside the field of statistics and its analytical space, simply because the repeated digital pattern must express a recurring psychological and mental pattern, especially if it is of this degree of strangeness.
The ideal soccer team is nothing more than a mirage, perhaps we need to remind you of that after what Guardiola did in England during the last two seasons, and maybe Guardiola succeeded in reaching this mirage at the local level, perhaps everyone felt after the past two seasons that City Pep has become invincible, And this is exactly what has caused it to decline in such a horrific way during the current season.
Liverpool's 4-0 defeat to Man City is the joint-heaviest defeat by an already-crowned Premier League champion in the competition's history.
A VAR decision away from breaking the record. 🥴 pic.twitter.com/r9H4pz1hyk
- Squawka Football (@Squawka) July 2, 2020
If we were to summarize Pep's last years in football, it could be likened to the near-death experience (NDE), which is reported by people whose body functions completely stopped working, died clinically, and then came back to life to tell people what they went through. Guardiola approached perfection in some way, bringing what he wanted from the players, and somehow he made them better than they were, and reached with them record levels of control and sweeping, then suddenly discovered that what he seeks does not come for free, but rather that its cost is very exorbitant, and it may backfire Sometimes, at extremely silly moments, it is often the price of losing an entire championship, not just a match.
Of course, Guardiola will not return to tell the rest of the coaches about the illusion of perfection that he sought and did not reach. Rather, he will continue on the same approach often because he no longer has another option, and this will mean that we will see many moments of genius, and fewer moments of extremely strong letdown as a counter-reaction, moments A breakdown in the team's mentality, psyche and personality, because it seems that Guardiola, while searching for his new character after the Barcelona experience, did not find a solution except to erase the personality of his players.
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