Manchester City are a brilliant football team.
Since Pep Guardiola took charge in 2016 his side have collected more Premier League titles (six), points (736), wins (231) and goals (774) than any other team in the country.
They have conceded fewer goals (258) than any side that has spent all nine seasons in the top flight and played some exhilarating football along the way.
Yes there is a cloud cast by their ongoing legal case with the Premier League but add in two FA Cups, four Carabao Cups and a Champions League, and it paints a clear picture of Guardiola’s side as one of the greatest to grace the English game.
They are so good that they do not need spurious records to prove their greatness.
So, let’s be clear, Manchester City did not break a Manchester United record in Europe this week. Manchester City are not “unbeaten” in 26 Champions League games.
City lost in last season’s quarter-finals to Real Madrid. You can tell because Real progressed to the semi-finals (and ultimately won the trophy against Borussia Dortmund at Wembley) while City bowed out, free to focus on their relentless and successful pursuit of a fourth successive domestic title.
It is hard to think of a clearer definition of defeat than that — one team continues, the other exits.
The fact that City’s loss to Carlo Ancelotti’s team was sealed by a penalty shootout after an absorbing 4-4 draw on aggregate is irrelevant. A defeat is a defeat, no matter how it comes.
But IFAB — the law-makers of the world game — do not agree. In law 10.2, penalties are simply one of three “permitted procedures to determine the winning team”, along with away goals and extra-time. Which means a team that are beaten in a shootout after drawing when the final whistle sounds are still able to claim they have not ‘lost’.
It’s a strange state of affairs. While away goal ‘wins’ are a grey area according to the record books, nobody disputes that the team which emerges triumphant at the end of extra-time has won the game. So why not apply the same thought process to penalties?
We have come a long way since the pre-shootout days when drawn ties were sometimes settled by entirely arbitrary coin tosses. Penalty shootouts, which were introduced in the early 1970s, are far from that kind of “lottery” — the cliche that attached itself to them for so long — or just a convenient and relatively quick way of settling a game between two evenly-matched teams, as the IFAB law suggests.
They are supreme tests of nerve and skill, and the best teams practise them as assiduously as they do their tactical shape and set-piece routines.
“There’s more to it (than luck),” former Croatia goalkeeper Joey Didulica told Omnisport in 2018. “The mental game, you’ve got to be confident. A lot of it comes down to research as well.
”You’ve got to know who’s kicking the penalty, the way they’ve approached the penalties before, where they slow down, if they’re going to slow down, which corner.
“As much as people think it’s 50-50, amateurs say that. I think at the highest level, a good goalkeeper definitely can have a better chance than 50-50 in a shootout. Your best keeper normally can win it for you.”
There is now reams of analysis that help inform penalty shootout methodology. In 2022, the Barca Innovation Hub compiled data on how to increase chances of success, suggesting that taking the first penalty, celebrating successful kicks enthusiastically, delaying run-ups after the referee’s whistle and putting a team’s best penalty takers on the first and fifth kicks enhanced the possibility of winning.
None of that suggests penalties are a game of chance. On the contrary, while they might require different disciplines to the free-flowing action during a game, penalties still act as an ultimate stress-test for a player’s ability to think clearly and execute their skill under the most intense pressure. We’re not talking about settling a game by rock, paper, scissors, here.
They also feel part of, or an extension to, the game we have just witnessed in a way that other random deciding factors — like the coin toss — could never be. And generally speaking, the better team wins because they are also better at taking penalties.
That was perhaps more arguable in the City-Real game last season, when two superb sets of players went head to head and there was barely anything to choose between them. But there is no disputing that Real Madrid won that game, and City lost it.
That does not change the fact that Guardiola’s City are among the finest sides the English game has produced. But it does mean that their latest “record” is a false one.
They are a team for the ages with a glittering array of trophies and records. They can manage just fine without fake ones.
(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
