The Rodri Conundrum and four more reasons why Man City won’t win the Premier League

We’ve already come up with five compelling and sensible and convincing reasons why Arsenal won’t win the league, and are thus now compelled to do likewise for Manchester City and eventually also Liverpool.

We’ve gone City first having decided to attack these in reverse table order as things currently stand. We actually had a go at coming up with five reasons why City might not win the title way back in August. One of those reasons was ‘Erling Haaland might get injured’ (happened, didn’t matter) and another one was ‘Spurs might win it instead’ (lol) so, you know, wish us luck.

Those Arsenal reasons are here, by the way.

1) What if Rodri suffers a misfortune?
We’ve discovered this season that Manchester City are better with Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne but can cope perfectly adequately without them. The same is not true of Rodri.

He’s obviously a wonderful player but it’s still staggering to see just how stark the difference is when you remove this one specific world-class operator from a squad that contains – and also copes perfectly well without – so many others.

We’ve all seen the stat about how Rodri hasn’t lost a City game for a year or some such thing, but it’s not that City never lose when he’s there; more importantly it’s that they nearly always do when he isn’t. He’s missed three Premier League games this season, and they are the three games City have lost at Wolves, Arsenal and Aston Villa. He also missed the Carabao defeat to Newcastle. He also missed 5-0 and 6-2 FA Cup wins over Huddersfield and Luton, but don’t worry about that now.

The facts are these. Manchester City’s Premier League points per game with Rodri in the side this season is 2.58 and their points per game without him is 0.00. What if he gets injured? He’s probably safe from another yellow-card suspension now, with a mere seven to his name and the amnesty point approaching, but what if he gets another red card? What then? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

READ: Rodri is in the Premier League XI of the season so far

2) The double-treble
City’s rivals both have their own additional distractions in what is likely to become for all three a distinctly fixture-dense run-in, but City’s extra burdens are the greatest. Arsenal have no FA Cup to worry about; Liverpool have Europa rather than Champions League.

That can bring its own hassle with Thursday-Sunday scheduling and potentially having to play catch-up most weekends, but it does also offer the likelihood of more opportunity for rest and rotation without harming hopes of progression too much. The lower level here also offers Liverpool theoretically greater scope for putting a tie to bed in the first leg and allowing a few key men to sit with their trotters up in the second.

City have it tougher, and also the added noise about the fact they’re not only attempting to win a double-treble, but also that nobody is particularly impressed by this and just kind of expects them to do something so monumentally absurd.

3) The sheer, vast immovable and unliftable weight of history
How long has English league football been around? We’ll tell you how long: f***ing ages. They even had it for a good 100 years before football was invented in 1992! Can you imagine that! We can’t! Don’t know how it would even work!

Anyway, point is, in all those decades upon decades upon decades, no English team has ever won four league titles on the spin. Liverpool never did it at the height of their 80s dominance. Fergie’s Man United could manage no more than a couple of threes.

Not even Huddersfield Town in the 30s could quite make it to four, which tells us that it’s actually therefore pretty much close to impossible. Having foolishly won each of the last three Premier League titles, City have therefore made it quite literally impossible for themselves to win it this year. That’s just maths.

4) Away days
It’s very likely the margin for error available to all three title contenders sit somewhere close to zero. They are all much better than anyone else in the league and are currently in the midst of quite emphatically showing it. Their combined record since the turn of the year reads 21 wins, one draw and one defeat from 23 games. And that one defeat was Liverpool at Arsenal.

With margins so fine and gulf to the rest so great, City’s trip to Anfield becomes a concern. It sounds like hyperbole, and that’s because it is, a bit, but if they lose there it really is a long road back given how rarely they can hope to expect anyone else to slip up on current form.

If Liverpool and Arsenal sustain their current levels, City might get played at their own relentless, point-guzzling game.

Having said that City probably don’t need to worry too much about games against the inadequate 17, it would also be remiss not to note that one of their other remaining away games is at Tottenham. Now they may or may not have broken the curse with a scrappy 1-0 FA Cup win against a Spurs team that for some reason really didn’t look like they could be bothered but for now their record at WHL2.0 in the Premier League still, absurdly reads P4 W0 D0 L4 GF0 GA6

5) Going behind an awful lot, relatively speaking
Only Liverpool have won more points from losing positions than City this season. Now for Liverpool, that’s fine. They’re a chaotic team, they’re mentality monsters, they live for drama. It’s what they do.

Chaotic brilliance is Liverpool’s stock in trade. But it isn’t City’s. Or at least, not usually. They’re supposed to be more machine-like than this. They’re not supposed to draw 4-4 with Chelsea or even more stupidly 3-3 with Tottenham. They even managed to go behind while toying with a Manchester United side firmly back in the doldrums.

They’ve gone behind in 12 separate Premier League games this season. That’s the same as Liverpool and Villa. Now like we say, that’s fine for Liverpool because they are chaos merchants. City shouldn’t have to be clawing games back as often as they have this season. It is not their way.

Now 12 deficits is still, by normal standards, extremely good. Everyone else bar Liverpool, Villa and one other team in the league has been behind in at least 14 games. But the clue lies in the identity of that other team and their own number. It’s – pretty obviously – Arsenal, who have only trailed in eight games all season.

At the moment, City are having to keep pace with their rivals on their rivals’ terms. Arsenal are doing it their own way, Liverpool are doing it their own way, but City don’t quite look like a peak City side doing as they please.

For comparison, last season City finished as low as 14th in the table for points won from losing positions, with less than half than the 21 they’ve already snaffled this season, primarily because they only went behind in nine games.