Slowly, and then all at once. This is how Manchester City collapse these days. Pep Guardiola once described his ultimate fever dream as a coach, the goal at the end of all this detail; which is essentially to have the ball for 90 minutes, creating his own frictionless Pep-world of total control. Well, that might just have to be parked for a bit. Probably best not to watch this one back for a while, either.
At the Parc des Princes City produced one of the strangest performances of Guardiola’s time. Everyone has an off day. Human error happens. What stood out in, a second half during which City went from 2-0 up to 4-2 down, was how lonely the players looked out there, a team utterly losing the sense of itself.
Mainly it all just came from nowhere, arriving as a kind of social contagion. For 15 minutes City simply fell apart, collapsed like a rain-soaked cardboard box, an entity that suddenly had no resistance, no fibre, no sense of collective will.
Teams are strange things. Even at this elite, hyper-prepped level they run on emotion and collective energy. And City have been the ultimate systems team, coached by a manager so brilliantly controlling that he will paint a chalk spot on the practice pitch and make Raheem Sterling stand in it, just to understand that loss of self.
And yet the human element will keep creeping in: 25 storeys up there are still ants in the carpet. This has been a feature of City’s recent run, a way of falling apart that feels like something more than missing parts, closer to an internal hysteria.
City conceded three goals in eight minutes against Sporting Lisbon. Two goals in five minutes against Brighton. Two in seven against Tottenham. Three in 15 against Feyenoord. Two in two against Manchester United. Two in eight against Brentford. And here it was two goals in four minutes against PSG, from 2-0 up and playing like a team that seemed to be running away into clean, clear air.
That season-defining run from autumn into winter was in itself an astonishing nosedive into the canyon, nine defeats in 12 games after losing one over 90 minutes since December 2023. There had been a sense of repairs on the hoof in recent weeks, of something settling, that aura beginning to sputter and flicker back into life like a wonky streetlight.
In Paris, however, that loose stitching always seemed to be lurking. The Parc des Princes had been soaked with endless pounding rain in the hours before kick‑off, one of those days where the existence of dry land really does seem to be an oversight, a doomed layer of mulch lodged briefly between the sky and the oceans.
City started cautiously. For long periods PSG pushed at a door that seemed ready to give. There were signs. This City side talks to itself during games these days, and not always in a nice way.
Guardiola had come to Paris in full outward-bound mode, striding his technical area in sodden black quilted gown and cable-knit beanie hat, like a burglar on a hiking holiday. He berated Bernardo Silva on the touchline for while. Moments later Matheus Nunes played a pass slightly in front of Kevin De Bruyne, who turned and threw his arms up in dismay. Is this good? Does it speak to a settled state?
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With the game goalless Jack Grealish came on at half-time and opened the scoring five minutes later. Erling Haaland made it 2-0. At which point, something just seemed to shift. Bradley Barcola made the first for Ousmane Dembélé, pirouetting away from Nunes with alarming ease, leaving him literally facing the wrong way, staring into the crowd.
Barcola then made it 2-2, turning in a rebound off the bar. And in that period City were an absence, parts of a team ranged quite near a game of football. There seemed no way of reversing this. Guardiola sent on five substitutes in 28 second‑half minutes, the last just as PSG scored their third. The fourth arrived at the death, prelude to wild celebrations.
Where do City go from here? What next for this mille‑feuille team? It would be tempting to look for some existential cause for this sudden attack of the collective yips. There are simpler elements in play. This is such a carefully structured team. Watching City without Rodri has been like watching some beautifully engineered high-spec luxury saloon going into chronic viral electrical failure because the rotating flange unit is very slightly under-lubricated, causing systemic referred corrosion of the coils, poltergeists in the glove box, mirrors that keep falling off.
This feels like something more. City will surely still move on into the next phase of this competition. You still wouldn’t bet against them winning it. Perhaps champion teams of this type can simply click back the other way, too. For now they have become a brittle, collapsible and endlessly watchable entity.
