How Pep Guardiola Reinvented Man City To Win The Champions League
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00:00 Manchester City absolutely demolished by Munich 3-0 in the first leg of their
00:07 Champions League quarterfinal last night and while they still have a tough away
00:10 game in Germany to go, look a really good bet to go on and win the whole thing.
00:14 Hello there everybody Adam Cleary 442 for you here and it's Manchester City
00:19 Jim, just not as we know it. Right we've got a lot to get through with this one
00:23 because it did actually feel like quite a significant night in European football.
00:27 Pep Guardiola has been slowly evolving this Manchester City side into something
00:31 that's meaner and angrier and nastier and hornier and last night he threw the
00:36 switch on Bayern Munich and just...
00:39 It's alive!
00:40 But how have they evolved I hear you ask? Well here is an incredibly boring dry
00:44 stat for you which will underwhelm you at first but just take a second to sit
00:48 with it and remember it's Pep's Manchester City. They won 3-0 at home and
00:53 had less possession than the opposition.
00:57 So why did this team have less possession than this team? Well very
01:01 simple answer for you, they didn't want it and when I say didn't want it I don't
01:04 mean in the sense that old curmudgeons in the pub say didn't want it when
01:07 someone's pulled out of a 50/50 tackle. I mean they were quite content to let
01:10 Bayern have the ball because their plan was to go and hunt them down for it in
01:14 the best possible areas. Now just some really dry tactic stuff for you here before we
01:17 get into the caramelly nougaty centre of how Man City did the whole Lion vs
01:21 Gazelle thing on Bayern but this was nominally how they were supposed to have
01:25 set up. Now we've seen this season they actually like playing with this box
01:28 midfield where Rodger will just sort of move over there and John Stones will come
01:30 across from right back but one small change Guardiola made last night which
01:34 actually hinted at their entire game plan was thus. While John Stones was here
01:39 and the back three did shuffle across like this with the Kanji, Diaz and Ake
01:42 there, the way they were doing it was actually by having Stones start
01:45 centrally and a Kanji be the right back. Now that might seem like a very subtle
01:48 almost pointless change but you've got to think about the tiny little transition
01:51 they go through to get from back four to back three. What normally happens is that
01:55 Stones will come across into here and a Kanji will move into there but that does
01:58 leave you with a very brief window where this area of the pitch is kind of left a
02:02 bit exposed. Meaning that if City lose the ball while this is going on they can be
02:06 got at in this area of the field which has the knock-on effect of meaning
02:09 whoever's playing on the right-hand side of the attack has to be mindful of that
02:12 and can't overly commit going the other way. And that's why that's such a clever
02:15 change because when you actually swap those two players around it means that
02:18 Stones just trots in from the centre and it's actually down to the other central
02:21 player to move across meaning this area is never exposed. And the one area of the
02:26 pitch Manchester City wanted to target last night was right here. Alphonso Davies
02:30 is one of the most attacking full-backs in the world and they wanted Silva to
02:33 know that he was free to get into any space he might leave if he pushes up to
02:38 support Mane. And then likewise if that meant Bayern decided to have Davies look
02:41 after Silva took away one of their best attacking options. Now we will come back
02:44 to the specific 'Bernardo Silva is amazing and they gave him the keys to the
02:48 kingdom' stuff last night specifically but let's just look at how City were as a
02:51 team absolutely rampant. So the headline to all of this is that Manchester City
02:55 have spent this season moving away from having that controlled possession style
02:59 of play. What they want to do now is to force you back into areas of the pitch
03:02 where you don't really want to be passing the ball around and then dive on
03:06 you like a pack of jackals and release Haaland with a really good first-time
03:09 chance. What makes their press different to say how Liverpool were doing it a
03:12 couple of years ago, how Newcastle are doing it this year, is the role Erling Haaland
03:16 plays in this. City will try to go as aggressively man-for-man as they can in
03:20 this area to try and force either an error or a mistake or just something to
03:23 happen under pressure but Haaland doesn't do that. What Haaland does is he
03:27 watches this press take place and tries to find the space. The idea being that
03:31 they do then win the ball back they haven't got to go short or go backwards
03:34 with it they can immediately try and hit a dangerous area for Haaland to just...
03:38 and let's see if I can find to get one...
03:40 OOOH! How?!
03:42 There's a f*cking magnet on it!
03:44 An example here from the opening couple of minutes, City have pushed right the way up to try and
03:47 pressure Bayern, they've broken through the first line but the ball runs loose
03:50 after that. It breaks loose, they win it back, they get it to De Bruyne and instead
03:53 of him cutting back infield and trying to move the play on the other side of
03:56 the pitch he immediately looks for Haaland who's making a run off the
03:59 defender. Again here they've used six players to pen Bayern into their left-back
04:03 area, they successfully turn the ball over and instead of just recycling the
04:06 play their first thought is instinctively to try and get an
04:09 opportunity for Haaland. Now as you've no doubt guessed Manchester City have had
04:12 to develop this new style of play because they've got Haaland now, when
04:15 you've got a player who's capable of getting so many goals it makes sense to
04:18 try and play a system that suits him. The thing is paradoxically Erling Haaland is
04:21 not what made this system too much for Bayern to handle, Erling Haaland is not
04:25 what won Manchester City this game. What made it work and what got them three
04:29 goals was this man, Bernardo Silva. A man who idiots will tell you was just the
04:35 other guy in great City teams he might now well be the most important player in
04:40 this new system and I mean he certainly was last night so let me just show you
04:43 the data real quick. Now despite this new system Manchester City still like to be
04:46 flexible, they still like to rotate, they still like to poke, to prod and find all these gaps. So if I just
04:50 show you the heat maps for all four of these attacking players you'll understand
04:54 how tactically crucial Silva was. So this really quickly is Jack Grealish, yes he's
04:58 mostly on the left but he comes into the centre a lot, he's tracked by, he moves all over
05:01 the place, he tries to find space wherever he can. This is Gundogan, he gets all over
05:05 the place, he's left, he's right, he's forward, he's back, he's central, you've seen that kind of
05:08 thing before. This is De Bruyne who despite what you might expect actually
05:11 likes to get out to both the flanks, he roams from his position all the time. And
05:14 this is Bernardo Silva. Have you ever seen a player in a game at this level do
05:20 so much of their work in the opposition's penalty area? And the thing is these
05:24 contributions aren't just little passes here and there, I'm gonna overlay the number of
05:28 tackles he made across the game. That's the reason he's so key to this system
05:32 because he's so aggressive when the ball is in these areas and he's so good as
05:35 well at winning it back. And just really quickly he is responsible for all three
05:39 of those goals either directly or indirectly. Even the first one was just a
05:42 30-yard screamer from Rodri, it comes about because Silva is occupying this
05:45 area of the pitch, they are not comfortable letting him be 1v1 so the
05:49 central midfielder comes over to cover leaving that area free. Now yes okay if
05:53 you're Thomas Tuchel and somebody taps you on the shoulder and says are you
05:55 absolutely sure you want him to move over into that area because it might
05:59 leave Rodri free to get a 30-yarder on his weaker foot away you probably say
06:03 yeah that's fine Silva's the danger I'm okay with that. But that's the thing isn't it
06:06 my friends, sometimes football's just gonna happen and in that exact situation
06:11 football just happens because they're worried about Silva. The second goal which
06:15 obviously he scores comes about because they've identified that space behind
06:18 Davies and at the point of the turnover there's only a few yards between them
06:21 and you would argue Davies is much a quicker player and yet by the time that
06:24 ball comes into the box he has left him for dust. And the third goal which is
06:28 just an incredible cross, an incredible header, an incredible finish comes about
06:32 because you guessed it Silva's got the ball in that area of the pitch and they
06:36 are terrified of him giving away a corner. Now okay yes it is only the first
06:40 leg and it is only the quarterfinal and I'm sure Bayern will give him a hell of a
06:43 game in the return fixture but this looked to me to be the Manchester City
06:47 team, the first Manchester City team that really does look equipped to go and win
06:52 the Champions League. And yeah alright that is because it's Erling Haaland who
06:55 scored 40 billion gold this year but it's also because they found a tactical
06:59 system that supports his directness with an overall level of just impetus, with
07:03 aggression, with... but I mean I don't know are they gonna win the Champions League?
07:08 Can they win the Champions League? Do you even want them to win the Champions League?
07:11 Let me know in the comments below and oh sorry what was that? Oh you kind of
07:15 enjoyed this video? Well thank you very much for saying. Please do hit the
07:17 subscribe button because we make them all the time. In the meantime though thank
07:20 you so much for watching I've been Adam Cleary, really excited for them to lose
07:24 the second leg 4-0 and me to look really stupid and I'll see you soon. Goodbye!