Manchester City Lose The One Thing That Matters

A perverse pattern emerges when you examine the team in English soccer that has managed to generate the much-lauded ‘fear factor.’

Back in the 1980s, Anfield’s reputation was so lofty that Liverpool players could sense they’d get a victory in the tunnel.

“Teams would come to Anfield and be negative,” explained ex-Reds defender defender Mark Lawrenson.

“We would smell it. We would think to ourselves that it was not even going to be a contest.”

Suddenly, without warning, in the early 90s, that sense of inevitability disappeared. Liverpool fell from regular title challengers to a side that blew hot and cold.

Having won seven of the previous decade’s ten titles, it would take the club 30 years to be crowned English champions again.

Ironically, while Anfield was losing its fear factor a short distance away in North West England, bitter rivals Manchester United were putting together a string of leaguechampionship wins that gave their players a similar feeling of invincibility.

“When I was playing for Manchester United, you thought you had teams beaten in the tunnel,” former striker Mark Hughes said of the era he wore the Red Devils shirt.

However, that feeling vanished just as had been the case with Liverpool.

“It’s not the case [teams are beaten pre-game] now,” Hughes added in 2014 when United’s home record became abysmal in the absence of legendary coach Sir Alex Ferguson.

The gods of soccer wanted to punish any side that stood at the summit because as soon as United fell, Manchester City’s English stadium was where the teams seemed to melt in the tunnel.

And so this season, opponents’ fear of facing the Citizens appears to be fading after a similarly dominant spell.

Journalists Tim Spiers and Jay Harris articulated the City’s sudden decline well on a recent edition of the popular podcast The Totally Football Show.

“Just simply looking at that starting 11 for Man City, and I know they had people like Phil Foden, Bernardo Silva, Kevin De Bruyne and Jack Grealish on the bench, but it’s not amazing when you look at it,” said Harris.

“City used to possess a bit of a fear factor about them but that went long ago this season.”

Or as Spiers rather more concisely put it: “It’s like when Sir Alex Ferguson left Manchester United and it was like, ‘Oh, they weren’t that great after all.’”

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has admitted that the fear factor opponents had when visiting his home stadium has evaporated. As a result, teams are taking a more aggressive approach.

“Everyone came to the Etihad and stayed back,” he said last month.

“Now everyone comes here, doesn’t matter, man to man. They just jump to Ederson, Stefan [Ortega], so then you have to adapt. And after that do it better with the ball. Otherwise you will be happy not qualifying for the Champions League.”

In Guardiola’s opinion, the outlook is so bleak that he’s simply looking to survive this campaign to reboot next time.

“Next season, we will be­ back,” he said bullishly.

“Really now, it is a question to survive, to qualify, to fight for the title if it is possible, otherwise to accept the reality is completely different from the last eight or nine years.”

It’s undoubted that injuries have played a role in derailing Manchester City’s season. The club has had key members of the team sidelined, including Rodri, the team’s most important player for the past three seasons.

But you have to wonder how much of a role the fear played in their success. In the four back-to-back title-winning campaigns that preceded this season’s collapse, rivals often complained about a feeling of inevitability that each year City would just click into gear at some point and steamroller the league.

The same atmosphere ran through Anfield’s halls in the 1980s and Old Trafford in the 1990s. The belief in both the team at the summit and their opponent that the established side would find a way.

Once that dissipates, it is very hard to get back. You only have to look to the other side of Manchester, where the sense of inevitability associated with United finding a way to win a game, often in added time, has become a historical trait. Whenever there’s an odd modern example, it provides a cruel reminder of the way things used to be.

Great talents have trodden the Old Trafford turf, from Cristiano Ronaldo to Paul Pogba, steeped in Sir Alex Ferguson-era winning machine culture. Yet, none have been able to recapture that brilliance.

The difference for City is that their legendary coach has not yet departed, and there will be hope that, in Mark Twain’s famous words, rumors of their demise are greatly exaggerated.

At the moment, it looks like they’ve lost the one thing that matters most: the feeling that they are going to win.