There were times earlier this season, as Bournemouth amassed a thrilling collection of victories against the likes of Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle, when people were wondering if Andoni Iraola might be showing a possible way forward for the game in the post-Guardiola era.
Now Iraola’s side are winless in six since mid-February. They’ve hit the familiar spring slump of all sides who spend the autumn and winter pressing like maniacs.
Iraola blamed exhaustion for Bournemouth’s second-half collapse in the FA Cup quarter-final against Manchester City: “First half we played very well, second half we couldn’t keep the same intensity ... we were not as aggressive, we were passive ... we were not able to play at the same level.”
He could have been talking about their season.
Manchester City’s 2024-25 season is a textbook study in burnout
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Part of the reason why Pep Guardiola’s game model is all about controlling the ball is so his team doesn’t have to use as much energy chasing it. Yet even for him, energy and enthusiasm is fundamental, as he reiterated after beating Bournemouth.
“All my career people say, how good they play, how good they play – no. How much they run. How much they run, how much they fight – and this season for many many games that didn’t happen.”
City’s 2024-25 season is a textbook study in burnout. They had looked tired and sluggish during the first half against Bournemouth, but this can no longer surprise anybody. It was the club’s first game in two weeks, but look what their starting XI were doing in the meantime.
Erling Haaland played for Norway in Moldova and then flew on to Hungary to play Israel. Kevin De Bruyne was in Stuttgart to play for Belgium against Ukraine in a Nations League playoff and also played the second leg in Genk.
Bernardo Silva went to Copenhagen and played five minutes off the bench for Portugal against Denmark, then played 120 minutes as Portugal won the second leg 5-2 after extra time in Lisbon. His Portugal team-mate Ruben Dias played all 210 minutes of the same fixtures. Mateo Kovacic played a combined 171 minutes for Croatia against France, first in Zagreb and then in Paris. His compatriot Josko Gvardiol played 194 minutes in the same games, including some of the extra time period in Paris.
Phil Foden at least didn’t have to travel much, playing in two home games for England against Albania and Latvia, but he lost his starting place for the second game and became the focus of media criticism because the dullness of the games meant the pundits had hardly anything else to talk about.
The longest journeys were those undertaken by Abdukodir Khusanov, who played 90 minutes for Uzbekistan against the Kyrgyz Republic in Tashkent and then another 90 minutes against Iran in Tehran, although the goalscoring substitute Omar Marmoush ran him close, with 89 minutes for Egypt against Ethiopia in Casablanca and another 89 in Cairo against Sierra Leone.
There were three City starters who got to take some time off: Ederson had to withdraw from the Brazil squad due to injury, Ilkay Gundogan has retired from the German national team and Matheus Nunes was spared an international call-up for Portugal due to his mediocre performances for City.
The problem isn’t even so much the physical action of the football itself, it’s the perpetual incoherent succession of flights, cities, hotels, stadiums, opponents that start to blend into one another. The relentless grind of the schedule saps mental enthusiasm as much as it drains physical energy.
As Barcelona’s Frenkie de Jong observed earlier this season: “What I also notice in myself is that the anticipation disappears. When I was young, you looked forward to a European match or international match for days. Now you only have to turn on the TV and there is a match somewhere. They are commercially milking football. I just think it’s a shame.”
If a lot of City players look like they’re going through the motions, it’s because they are.
In a normal season City could at least see the finish line from here: nine more league matches, maybe two more in the Cup, and at last the prospect of some time away from football: few teams in the history of football have needed a break more.
Instead they will be going to America with Guardiola for at least three weeks, maybe stretching to six.
As befits a competition that exists purely as a device to enable Saudi Arabia to pump money into Gianni Infantino’s Fifa, the prize money at the 2025 Club World Cup is big. The European clubs will get between $12 million and $38 million just for turning up (the bigger clubs, of course, will get more according to where they rank in Fifa’s patented formula based on “sporting and commercial criteria”).
Beyond that point it’s $2 million per win in the group stage ($1 million per draw), then $7.5 million for reaching the round of 16, $13.1 million for getting to the quarters, $21 million for the semis, $30 million for the final and $40 million for winning it.
City could therefore make almost $150 million by winning this competition – but how much will it cost them to fund the 17-man injury list they risk ending up with by Christmas? As for time to bed in the new players who will arrive as part of their overdue squad rebuild, forget it.
The last time City’s preseason was disrupted by a summer club tournament was when they participated in the Covid-delayed Champions League playoffs in August 2020. In the new season that began just afterwards they took 12 points from their first eight league matches.
Depending on what happens with the long-awaited judgment in the Premier League’s case against them, City might have bigger problems by this August, but the football schedule alone already feels daunting enough.
