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For its part, the City management showed its commitment to Guardiola’s project by extending his contract until 2023 last week, and so there are good reasons for the club to believe in him.
Guardiola is behind two of the three seasons in which City have scored the most points in Premier League history, as well as six titles in his first four seasons as the team’s manager.
But Saturday’s 2-0 loss to Tottenham Hotspur, which left the Citizens eight points off the top of the table, reinforced the difficulties that began with the start of last season.
Guardiola’s men are 13th in the league standings, with one game less. But the comeback with just 12 points from the first eight games of the season is the lowest since the 2008/2009 season, just months after the UAE acquired the club and began pumping millions into it.
City now have a negative goal difference, after scoring just 10 league goals, their lowest rate at this stage of the season since 2006/07, when they finished 14th with Stuart Pierce and failed to score a goal at home. after New Years.
Guardiola acknowledged it, saying: «The truth is that we are fighting to score goals this season. Ten goals in eight games is not enough ”.
Guardiola’s great disaster has always been with City, in the UEFA Champions League, as not even in four seasons could he repeat the team’s best career by reaching the semi-finals of the competition under the leadership of Chilean Manuel Pellegrini in 2015/2016 .
But this season, a European looks good for City, who managed to beat Porto, Marseille and Olympiacos, Greece, scoring three goals in each game, reinforcing their grip on the second group.
Thus, beating Olympiacos in the first leg on Wednesday will ensure qualification for the round of 16 for the eighth consecutive season in the Champions League.
The direction of the City Council, for its part, showed its commitment to Guardiola’s project, extending his contract until 2023
But the Citizens haven’t shown much that they have learned from their mistakes that have repeatedly cost them disqualification in the knockout stages of the Champions League simply by facing a high-profile opponent.
The loss to Tottenham was almost an exact replica of José Mourinho’s 2-0 men’s victory, when the two teams met before that for the last time in February.
During the two games at Tottenham Hotspur, the visiting team had 41 goal attempts without scoring, while Tottenham made four of their five shots at the opponent’s goal.
French teams Lyon and Monaco, Tottenham and Liverpool, were able to crack the City code in the Champions League through in-depth defense and quick counterattacks.
However, Guardiola remains confident that City will soon start scoring goals at their usual pace.
“In two seasons, we scored more than 100 goals,” he said. 80 or 90 percent of the players are the same, especially in attack ”.
But the big questions remain isolated from the ball, as the intense pressure to recover the ball from City, which accumulated 198 points in the Premier League in the two seasons between 2017 and 2019, is over.
Without this, manipulating the team seems easy even with a group of expensive international players.
The blue half of Manchester paid to strengthen their defense some 352 million dollars, to incorporate the Portuguese defenders Joao Cancelo, Robin Diach, the French Emeric LaPorte and Kyle Walker, in addition to the Brazilian goalkeeper Ederson. But that didn’t stop them from falling to the cunning of Harry Kane and the speed of South Koreans Son Heung-min and Dutchman Stephen Birkhven.
But Guardiola stayed relatively far from his previous methods with Barcelona and Bayern Munich, feeling that his harsh demands had exhausted even the best teams.
With the signing of his contract extension, he will spend several seasons in Manchester, as well as his seasons in Barcelona and Munich together.
Unusually for one of the best soccer coaches in the world, Guardiola finds himself in an unknown place as he must rebuild a great second team at the club itself, but the first signs were not promising.
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