Same old Man City? No, Arsenal are facing a very different animal | OneFootball

There’s something quite interesting going on with Manchester City.

This is a Premier League that is more direct, more man-to-man, more physical, more rough-and-tumble than it’s been since the 1990s.

At the same time, this is a Manchester City that is trying to find its identity again after a season where everything fell apart and went wrong in 2024/25. It’s perhaps easy to think that City remain the same City as before their crisis of confidence 12 months ago, but in this Brave New World of long throws and one-v-one duels all over the pitch, City are fighting with themselves to work out how it all looks.

For Pep Guardiola, the principles haven’t changed: “Still I believe, one good action [from] the keeper [to] the central defender, you create a chance,” he told reporters recently. “I will fight until my last day as a manager for that concept. Even now it’s man marking. Even now it’s more direct. Even now it’s more transitions. But a good pass makes a good pass.”

That’s all well and good…but there’s an interesting problem with that theory at City this season. The squad that the club has invested so heavily in and the revamp that’s taken place over the last 12-18 months has indicated there’s, at least in a small sense, a change in the direction of travel.

If you want a team that plays through the thirds under pressure, then you don’t buy players that excel when bursting into space and carrying the ball. If you want a good pass from the goalkeeper to a centre-back to begin the attack – where the pass is “in the right tempo, in the right moment, to the right foot”, as Guardiola says – you don’t buy a goalkeeper that struggles with the build-up.

This isn’t to say that those players that have arrived in more recent times aren’t of City’s quality. While it’s clear Gianluigi Donnarumma, for instance, often puts his defenders under pressure with a short pass or a pass to the wrong place, he alone has won City points in the closing stages of games at crucial moments – notably with huge saves from Alexis Mac Allister in a 2-1 win at Liverpool and from Harvey Barnes in a 2-1 win over Newcastle. His shot-stopping is exemplary.

On the other side of the coin, look at City’s offensive options. For a team that would much rather reject the counter-attack in favour of settled possession, which forces their opponent to drop into their defensive third, players like Antoine Semenyo, Jeremy Doku, Savinho and, to an extent, Tijjani Reijnders and (even though he’s been injured all season) Mateo Kovacic seem to offer the opposite.

All of them are good at picking up possession and bursting forward into space – better than they are at recycling the ball and getting their team camped in the opposing half. Even Nico Gonzalez, the holding midfield cover for Rodri, is a fan of a bit of ball-carrying risk-taking action, too.

Nico Gonzalez ball-carrying grades thanks to Gradient.

But let’s take a quick pause here to look at how the ‘old’ City won games, especially in an end-of-season title race. Neutrals would often accuse the team of being “boring” and that was no accident. City, by design, preferred nothing more than a relatively uneventful match, and the neutral wants an end-to-end, no-guts-no-glory punch ’em up.

Did you ever wonder why City would seemingly so often reject the counter-attack when an opportunity presented itself? It was because it was risky. Yes, they might be able to use the space to exploit their opponent’s disorganisation, but if City got it wrong and gave away possession, they would be equally as exposed and the opponent would have players left over in attacking positions that could cause a problem to a City not set in their defensive shape.

Instead, City would pause and allow their opponent to drop back into a low block in their own defensive third. That might make them harder to break down, but it seriously reduced the risk of the opponent scoring. If they won the ball back from that position, they had to get it to the other end of the pitch with none of their players forward and through City’s set-up.

The result was a near 90-minute battering, where teams couldn’t get out of their own penalty area for large spells and it felt like a relentless onslaught of probing passes and excellence in tight-spaces from City. And, in the end, a 2-0, 3-0, 4-0… whatever… win.

Fast-forward to 2026. Why, then, have City built a squad of players who look to be so much better in transition than they are at keeping the ball in tight spaces, especially if Guardiola has no intention of building a team that moves away from his ideology? To have bought one, maybe two, of that type of player could be an accident. To have continually done it must be by design.

It could be argued that Guardiola saw this change in the Premier League coming and the club was looking to stay ahead of the curve. The ball-carriers started to arrive in the aftermath of the treble in 2023, after all.

“You have two games at the moment,” Pep Lijnders, Guardiola’s assistant coach, said recently when deputising for the manager at a pre-match press conference. “You have one that’s played in the opposition half, where teams are deep and compact. Then you have a game where teams play man-to-man high press. Before I felt a lot of teams went immediately deep, and now it’s much more a combination of one game on one side of the pitch and a completely different game on the other side of the pitch.”

In a nutshell, in this rough-and-tumble version of the Premier League, fewer teams will automatically drop into their low block when they lose possession against City. Take the recent victory over Newcastle as an example – there is a complete paradox of emotions from first half to second because of the pattern of the game.

In the first half v Newcastle, City were far more settled. They dominated possession and forced Newcastle to drop into their low block, despite Eddie Howe’s attempts to get his players to press higher up and gain more territory. As a result, City weren’t overly creative (but they did score twice) and it felt like Newcastle weren’t particularly threatening (but they did get in behind several times themselves).

The second half was the complete opposite. It was City who couldn’t keep possession and were forced into playing in transition, with the game becoming much more end-to-end and feeling very out of control for a Guardiola side. Yet in that second half, City were far more creative and should have finished the game off several times, while Newcastle created next to nothing until the aforementioned Barnes effort in stoppage time.

It’s almost like City have the players to thrive in an end-to-end match decided by key moments, but Guardiola would prefer games where City are in stable possession instead. Surely the plan can’t have been to buy lots of players that are good in the duels and good at counter-attacking and then teach them how to do all of the control stuff?

Maybe that isn’t as daft as it sounds.

“I know Pep and I know that his ideas don’t change much,” captain Bernardo Silva said to the press after the Champions League win over Galatasaray in January. “With different players on the pitch, you play in a different way and you have to use the quality of your players. But the concepts of Pep Guardiola will never change.”

What, then, does a Manchester City that is striving for control in games look like when it’s built from a squad of players that enjoy a more direct performance? Weirdly, maybe it’s not that different to what Manchester City looked like when teams were happier to drop into a low-block when they lost possession?

Take Saturday’s game against Leeds. After a rocky opening half-hour, where the build-up was (in the kindest possible way) ‘loose’, City forced their opposition to drop like in the good old days. For 30 minutes, City couldn’t get out – but then they gained territory, took the lead, and (somehow) the ball-carrying, risk-taking, good-in-transition players found 40 second-half minutes of stable possession.

For the final five minutes plus stoppage time, City were then able to dig in, heading and kicking it away when the moment called for it. That’s a new feature of Guardiola’s team, too. In the past, games would most likely be seen out with passing and possession, but now it’s just as likely to be an all-hands-to-the-pump defend-the-box situation.

“Pep [Guardiola] is about organised attacks, constantly wanting to suffocate the opposition,” Lijnders said. “It’s more about what teams do to us to counter that. Do we want to attack quickly when the pitch is open? Yes. Do we want to play a lot of passes when the pitch is closed? Yes, of course, because you need to disorganise [the opponent].”

In that case, if the opposition won’t immediately drop into a low-block when they lose possession and City can’t force them to do it either, perhaps this is where we see a more hybrid system from Guardiola? Perhaps City’s number one goal is to suffocate, keep possession, and continue to operate in the small spaces to unlock a deep defence, like against Leeds. But when that defence isn’t so deep and isn’t willing to go deep, they need the threat that they could have someone carry the ball through the lines or that someone could play it over the top for Erling Haaland, like against Newcastle.

As a result, you also get games where City aren’t in control and they rely on Donnarumma making a big save, Ruben Dias making a last-gasp block, or Haaland himself back in his own box heading away corners in the 97th minute. If control can’t be gained, then City have to stand up in the big moments – and you could argue that with the goalkeeper and main striker, plus the additions of Semenyo and Marc Guehi, that’s also what City have added to the squad.

This is perhaps most visible in City’s current problem in dealing with second halves of games. Leeds is the outlier of 2026, where the second-half performance was stable and solid. Before that, for whatever reason – whether opponents are more adventurous after half time, whether City are just technically not at the same level as they were in the past – there has been a dip in performance after the interval.

For all of Guardiola’s insistence that Donnarumma is good at the build-up, the pattern seems to be that City aren’t able to pass through the pressure and the ball ends up at the goalkeeper’s feet… where he sometimes puts a centre-back in trouble or hits a hopeful one towards Haaland, forcing a duel (and subsequent second ball) for City to have to win. That’s a million miles away from, as Guardiola might say, “putting the ball in the fridge” and making nothing happen for 45 minutes.

People expect that this version of City will just go on one of their end-of-season winning runs to pile the pressure on Arsenal in the title race, but that might not be possible with where the team is at the moment and with what English football looks like in 2026. “Many things are going to happen,” Guardiola told reporters after the win over Newcastle when asked about keeping the pressure on the league leaders. “I don’t know about Arsenal, but I have the feeling we are not going to win all the games.”

This is what makes this title race really interesting. Everything has changed and Guardiola is trying to both adapt and perfect his style for the new version of the Premier League while, at the same time, hammering his ideology into a group of new players who have little-to-no experience of a title run-in and who perhaps aren’t as naturally suited to his methods as their predecessors were.

What does Manchester City look like in the Premier League in 2026? While the principles might be the same, maybe it’s not like anything we’ve seen before.