FA Cup Victory A Rebuild Catalyst For Man City, Not A Season Savior

For Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, a year they hope will be quickly forgotten comes full circle at Wembley on Saturday.

It was in north London 12 months ago, in a 2-1 defeat to Manchester United in the FA Cup final, that Guardiola saw the first small signs of potential trouble ahead. At the time, he put the surprise result down to his own tactical mistakes; since then, though, what looked like an isolated incident has grown into City’s worst season for nearly a decade.

Guardiola and his players will return to Wembley to face Crystal Palace in another FA Cup final (stream LIVE on Saturday, 11:20 a.m. ET, ESPN+). And just as the defeat to United triggered a steep decline, there’s hope that lifting the trophy can ignite a climb back to the top of English and European soccer.

“We haven’t been there fighting in the Premier League or the Champions League, and that’s not good enough for a club like City,” Erling Haaland said in an interview with ESPN. “We have to finish strong in the Premier League and win the FA Cup. Then we have to start focusing on next season straight away.”

Guardiola has been clear that beating Palace won’t save their season — the bar has been set too high for that — but maybe it can provide some momentum ahead of the 2025-26 campaign and the fight to wrestle the Premier League title back from Liverpool.

Guardiola has, in part, changed his mind about what went wrong against United a year ago. Immediately afterward, he blamed the shock defeat to Erik ten Hag’s struggling team on a poor game plan. He still thinks he made mistakes — particularly his instructions about where to attack United — but he has also come to think, for the first time in City’s reign, that maybe the focus wasn’t quite there.

Asked to reflect on it months later, he suggested everyone was “hungover” following the celebrations to mark a record fourth successive Premier League title. He wasn’t being literal, of course, but having rewatched the game, there was a sense that his players had been too passive in the first half.

With the noise around United and Ten Hag’s future, it was almost like City believed they only had to turn up to win. The second half was better, but by then, they were already 2-0 down, and it was too late.

Guardiola faced plenty of questions about his players’ motivation after winning the treble in 2023, though they were answered emphatically by winning the title again the following season.

The sense that, perhaps, the desire was slipping away caught Guardiola by surprise. He has been keen not to talk about it too much this season, instead offering up other reasons, such as damaging injuries and his own failings, though it has been raised by more than one player.

“We haven’t had fully the hunger inside of us,” Haaland said. “I haven’t been good enough. I haven’t helped the team enough. In the end, we haven’t been good enough.”

This sentiment followed on from something Ilkay Gündogan told ESPN last month.

“I feel like in a lot of games from our side maybe we gave sometimes a bit too much importance to tactics and didn’t really pay attention much on behavior; behaviors of ourselves,” the German midfielder said.

“Having that determination, that desire, aggressivity. Like simple things that are part of the game, but maybe sometimes you just think too much about positioning yourself or whatever. You might forget the other things that are kind of normal, or that should be normal at least.”

For City, it has been part of a perfect storm. As much as everything fell into place during title wins in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, various factors have contributed to the downturn in results.

Big injuries to key players like Rodri have had an obvious effect. Besides the Ballon d’Or-winning Spanish midfielder, a whole team of players — Ederson, John Stones, Nathan Aké, Rúben Dias, Manuel Akanji, Kevin De Bruyne, Jack Grealish, Oscar Bobb, Jérémy Doku and Haaland — have missed at least nine games each. In Rodri’s case, it has been seven months.

Guardiola has admitted he overestimated the ability of aging stars such as Kyle Walker, Bernardo Silva, Gündogan, Ederson and De Bruyne to maintain their performance levels.

Julián Álvarez, a willing runner who averaged a goal every three games, went to Atletico Madrid and wasn’t replaced. Phil Foden, the reigning PFA Premier League player of the year, returned from the Euros tired and still hasn’t regained his rhythm. His start against Southampton on Saturday was his first for more than a month, though he could be back to the bench against Palace.

“If you see the numbers of many players who have been here for four, five, six years, in terms of goals and assists, this year [the drop has been] incredible,” Guardiola said. “It’s all of them. Not one. One would be easy, but it’s all of them. That’s why we are struggling to create and win games.”

Guardiola has hinted he now believes he stuck with his tried and trusted players for too long. Youngsters such as Nico O’Reilly and James McAtee have been given more responsibility in recent weeks, and it has coincided with better performances.

A change to Guardiola’s tactical plan has helped. A midfield box with two deep-lying midfielders, and two inside forwards with split strikers ahead of them, has given City more control in games. It’s something they’ve lacked since Rodri’s season-ending injury in September.

There has also been a return of the fight and desire that characterized the best City teams. Gündogan told ESPN in April that he has noticed a change in mentality since a hard-fought win over Bournemouth at the Vitality Stadium in the FA Cup at the end of March. They haven’t lost since.

“The way we behave there away at their place, especially after also conceding the first one, I think it was just unbelievable,” said Gündogan.

“People tend, especially in our society and also in football society right now, they tend to credit more a beautiful goal, a beautiful assist or beautiful actions by a single player. They don’t credit anymore so much working for the team, having the right mentality and to be there, fighting for each other, staying close to each other and doing everything together.

“So sometimes you maybe drift tend to drift apart a bit from these things. But honestly, I have to say that since the international break now in March, since we came back together, I see an improvement also in that area.”

Despite an unbeaten run of 10 games, Guardiola will be wary of a Palace side that earned a 2-2 draw at Selhurst Park in December and was 2-0 up at the Etihad Stadium in April before losing 5-2. Oliver Glasner’s team was terrific in their FA Cup semifinal against Aston Villa, and in the past month, Palace have drawn with Arsenal and Nottingham Forest and beaten Tottenham Hotspur. Eberechi Eze, who has been heavily scouted by City in the past, has scored eight goals in his past 11 games for club and country.

Glasner, Eze and Palace will head to Wembley confident they can inflict another damaging defeat on a City team that has had to deal with plenty this season. For Guardiola and his players, there’s the opportunity to take another step on the road to recovery.

Espn.co.uk