Pep Guardiola’s champions are struggling and both Liverpool and Arsenal look fallible in a season of change
Pep Guardiola's Manchester City are unlikely to ever again be as dominant as they used to be. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Imagestitle race this season. It may be a modern phenomenon that the side top of the table have lost only one of 26 games, and that the side in second have lost two, but after the years of champions habitually racking up 90 points and more, the general fallibility has been refreshing.
Slot appears unconcerned, pointing out that titles are rarely won without blips here and there. Which is true. It’s only recently that the financial stratification of football has made relentless excellence possible. Traditionally, almost all champions have had their off days, the games that just have to be plodded through and endured, the points salvaged from a scrap. Drawing tricky away games never used to be a problem.
It is possible Guardiola’s gifts themselves are waning. In a profession in which few manage a decade at the highest level, he is in his 16th season of perpetual evolution, trying to stay ahead of rivals who are constantly analysing his work, replicating or forging counter-strategies. Certainly in neither of the games against Madrid was there any sense of a viable plan to combat the axis of Vinícius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé.
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