The reporter reported coldly Manchester City's iterative acceleration of "panic buying" in the winter window has made people question Guardiola like never before. Especially after the 1-5 defeat to Arsenal, Guardiola, who completed the contract renewal not long ago, was rarely rumored by the British media to be out of class. Of course, this is obviously nonsense for Manchester City's hierarchy, which has been branded too deeply, and regardless of the lack of suitable replacements in the coaching market, even if Manchester City is in deep crisis, the responsibility should not be borne by Pep Guardiola alone.

While Pep Guardiola doesn't have to fall victim to Ten Hag's poor results, that doesn't mean he doesn't need to change as Manchester City's squad iterates. In fact, Guardiola's own changes are one of the important cores of Manchester City's iteration.

In Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City, Pep Guardiola's consistent "system before player" football thinking, with the continuous evolution of the Premier League and world football tactical system, it is time to abandon the old and bring forth the new.

After all, Manchester City's ageing squad and extensive injuries have proven this season: if Pep Guardiola's system football lacks the pivot players who run the team, the whole team will fall into a full-blown crisis of offensive and defensive stagnation. Manchester City in the Abu Dhabi era is experiencing a fourth metabolism, but this time it is different from the past: the team's tactical top-level design needs to be richer and more diverse, and the criteria for selecting players also need to be adjusted, from system adaptation priority to individual function priority, at least individual function can be an effective B plan to turn the situation around in the case of system football failure. Otherwise, even if Manchester City completes the second iteration of the Guardiola era, it will only be a young version of the previous ball-possession system football, and it still does not solve the problems that have always existed before but have never been fundamentally solved.

It's not that I don't want to change, but I always sway

In fact, since Haaland joined Manchester City in the summer of 2022, this iteration of the Blue Moon Army has been launched. At the beginning of this year, Manchester City signed a record 10-year contract, deeply binding Haaland's career to the Blue Moon Army. This also means that Manchester City's iteration has been determined to have Haaland as the core, and future staffing and tactical deployment will revolve around Haaland. However, two and a half years later, people still can't see that Pep Guardiola's system and tactics can activate the full potential of the Norwegian striker, giving Manchester City an advantage that other giants can't match.

With the exception of Haaland's arrival in the 2022/23 season, it has always been difficult to find the best balance between Pep Guardiola's system and Haaland's individual ability. Pep Guardiola has not tried to change, at the end of last year the team really did not see any hope of continuing to bounce back in the passing system, Guardiola suddenly switched to English rushing against Everton, which once made Manchester City fans quite expectant. It's a pity that the good times didn't last long, the melon-style transmission and control system has been deeply rooted in his bone marrow, and the hasty changes can only exert the power of the three-board axe. Encountering Grand Paris and Arsenal, Manchester City was forced to return to its original form by high positions.

Long balls worked against Everton and Chelsea, but once they encountered Guardiola's return to the old thinking of the pass-and-control system, the opponent was handy again. After all, Pep Guardiola's passing and control system has been almost unchanged in the past few years, the system is larger than the players, and once the core players are lost, the failure of the operation is easy to cause tragedy. It is true that Pep Guardiola has been trying to change the tactical details at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City, but there is no essential change in the transmission and control system itself, and these so-called changes are all the same.

Pep Guardiola's system and tactics need to be adapted to the players, rather than being able to design tactics according to the characteristics of the players like other managers. Whether his tactics are the traditional 433, 343, 4231, or the no-striker tactics or the centre-forward tactics that have been developed around Haaland in recent years, it is ultimately inseparable from the original passing and the adaptable players who must integrate and execute this tactic.

On the surface, Guardiola's system football is not only the pursuit of possession, but also the high pressing necessary in the fierce confrontation and fast pace of the Premier League, as well as the timely forward assists of the full-backs, and even Gundogan's back insertion has become a highlight. But these are holistic and positional sense as the foundation, players can only perform specific tactical tasks at the time and position they are familiar with, and at the same time, such a small range of cooperation is inseparable from the central bearing like Rodri to drive the operation, once the central bearing fails, the system will be paralyzed, bringing about a disconnect between attack and defense, back to the old road of ineffective passing.

Individual ability is more important than adaptation system

City's seemingly flustered iteration stems in large part from Pep Guardiola's insistence on finding fit-fit players rather than functional ones. The British media believe that Manchester City's predicament this season, in addition to Rodri's injury, is largely due to the sale of Alvarez, an excellent and functional player in the team's attacking end. With Alvarez's meteoric spell at Atletico, one can realise that the Argentine striker can still produce almost equally good goal stats under the completely different tactical frameworks of Pep Guardiola and Simeone. What proves is the outstanding ability of individual players to integrate into different tactical systems, and at the same time, it should also make Guardiola realize that compared with the system adaptation players who were obsessed with Si before, Manchester City should need more functional players who can break the system norms and rely on individual ability to solve problems.

From Barcelona to Manchester City, Guardiola has personally trained and cultivated players who are suitable for the system, the most typical of which are Busquets and Rodri. The two have the same tactical position, and they are also the pivot of Guardiola's passing and control system. Adaptable players are at the heart of Pep Guardiola's tactical philosophy, and he even wants his players to be as precise in every pass and movement as they have been countless times in training, and not to allow players to dispute tactics. In fact, every time Guardiola seeks new changes in tactics, he has actually seen signs of "developing" the player's function, but in the end he has to return to familiar with passing. Gundogan's forward insertion and the use of Foden, including Alvarez, have given City a certain amount of functionality. Unfortunately, such a functional effect, in Pep Guardiola's huge, complex and constantly adding new content, is only a flash in the pan but cannot become a standing B plan.

If Pep Guardiola wants to increase the diversity of the attack while increasing the stability of the defence, he will have to change his thinking and gradually shift the criteria for selecting players from the old system adaptation to the function first. In this regard, perhaps Guardiola can communicate with Ancelottido. Italian coaches have always been known for putting their players in better positions and making the best use of them, rather than using everything as a framework.

In this iteration, Guardiola has to change even more

Of course, Pep Guardiola is not a "classicist" who sticks to Tiki-Taka football as usual, on the contrary, his coaching career has been in constant pursuit of change. In other words, what he pursues is to enrich the content of the pass-and-control football system and make the football under the framework of the traditional system more diversified in attack. In addition to the much-talked-about No.4 hub, the pseudo-No.9 who covers the attacking end with his teammates, and the full-back who cuts inside to increase the number of midfielders, are all tactical innovations that Guardiola has made out of the blue.

According to incomplete statistics, Guardiola has used at least more than 30 different formations in his coaching career, including two iterations in three phases at Manchester City, and more than 20 tactical formations. But in the end, now Guardiola has his biggest test.

At the end of last year, Pep Guardiola promised to make more changes to the tactical formation and reinvigorate the team, but two months on, City's tactical changes came to a halt and eventually returned to various fine-tuning under the passing system. In the absence of a central axis of attack and defense, these fine-tuning have little effect on more tactically diverse opponents. Pep Guardiola will have to make bigger and more radical changes than he has done before in order for City to come out of the doldrums and adapt to the new era.

Passing football, with Rodri as the hub, has proven to be unable to withstand injuries. Even finding a rotation player with a similar style will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of Pep Guardiola's system. How to better combine the long pass that was forced to be used at the end of last year, and the offensive tactics that were more thorough in front of the mountain, may be the way out of the dilemma of his own passing and control system.

Of course, it is difficult for Guardiola to give up possession. However, the situation is stronger than the people, and if Manchester City wants to build a new dynasty around Haaland in the next 10 years, it will be difficult to achieve complete tactical diversification if the essence of possession remains unchanged in terms of technique and tactics.

Fortunately, Pep Guardiola has begun to try to add more and more direct attacking elements to his system of football. More use of space on the pitch rather than the ground, more use of the flanks rather than the flanks, more weakness in recovering counter-attacks, rather than high-pressure forward passing, perhaps the future of Manchester City will be different.

At the very least, Pep Guardiola needs to prepare a set of simple and direct but effective B plans for his team, which is diametrically opposed to pass-and-control football, so that Manchester City will no longer be confined to "carving" within the rules and regulations of the pass-and-control system.