The warning signs at Manchester City that reveal a key reason for their woeful run – and what their leaders must prove now

Manchester City‘s leadership group of players beat a hasty retreat out of the Allianz Stadium. Light on their feet as always; these players have always been able to sidestep the opposition.

‘Love to, but I can’t,’ came the replies to reporters asking for a quick word to dissect the 2-0 defeat at Juventus, leaving them in a troubling position in the Champions League and doing nothing to quieten swirling noise of a crisis.

It’s derby week in Manchester. Pep Guardiola‘s side have lost seven of their last 10 matches and are throwing games away with alarming abandon. City’s supporters deserve to hear from senior players away from carefully curated social media platitudes.

In fact, none of the squad fronted up aside from doing contractual TV interviews. Not club captain Kyle Walker, and not any of the other ‘captains’ within the leadership group.

It was left to Guardiola to publicly defend them again and the Catalan’s adept at all that, saying he was pleased with the way City performed – in fairness, they weren’t bad for most of the night – and turned the focus on himself. These players are lucky to have him, really.

You do wonder where the leadership has gone over the course of the past six weeks. The grit and stubbornness that saw City churn out result after result towards the back end of last season, when the style was not scintillating, has been replaced by a rather docile and flimsy backbone.

They are deserving of scrutiny and a lack of cohesion radiates from how they carry themselves

It is not right for the less experienced heads like Rico Lewis to be shouldering the burden 

Heads drop when things go against them. Collective grim accepting shrugs. That has never been City under Guardiola.

That will be the annoying thing for the manager after Juventus: they had carried out his instructions fairly well until the first sign of trouble. The same can be said during disappointing results against Brighton and Feyenoord. This is clearly not a talent problem.

Kevin De Bruyne, Ruben Dias, Bernardo Silva and Ilkay Gundogan file under Walker in the captains’ group and this squad – so renowned for its fortitude – is now deserving of scrutiny of its core. 

Dias recently talked about how the down days, or months, will define City’s legacy earlier in the week and while he steadfastly believes that – Dias is a motivation junkie – it is debatable whether that is a view held by many others inside the dressing room.

The less experienced heads, in particular Rico Lewis, are shouldering the burden and that is simply the wrong way round. Gundogan actually started the huddled pre-match team talk while Walker was still spraying the Italian air with water, as is his ritual. That lack of cohesion radiates from them all at the moment.

Guardiola has rightly pointed towards injuries during this torturous run, while he wants a new central midfielder in January – be it Martin Zubimendi, Ederson or Bruno Guimaraes. Anybody will do at this point. Anybody with a pair of legs who move as quickly as Walker did when heading for that coach on Wednesday night.

Right back will surely be high on the agenda come the summer too with Walker heading into the final 12 months of his contract. Guardiola had appeared to be phasing out the England international towards the end of the Treble campaign – Walker was no longer an automatic pick and only featured for eight minutes of the Champions League final.

Bayern Munich came calling that summer, but City panicked about the amount of experience heading out the door and gave him a three-year contract – plus the armband for good measure.

Kyle Walker has been failing at the basics – his errors are not from technique but lacking desire

Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva are also part of the leadership group at the champions

Pep Guardiola and the City hierarchy have tough decisions to make over the futures of some of their senior stars 

So Guardiola had been preparing for matches without Walker in 2023 and now 2025 approaches with the 34-year-old proving a major defensive problem – a guilty party in both Crystal Palace goals at the weekend and the same again in Turin.

Ambling out to stop a cross for the first; jogging back and letting Weston McKennie have the freedom of Ederson’s box for the second. 

Those examples of the errors are not technical. It’s application, desire. Walker has been carrying a knock for a while but these are basic issues somebody with a BBC podcast called You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker ought not to be making.

In his latest, published on the day of the Juventus defeat, Walker tells us what Guardiola’s office smells like – the manager will be delighted – and rehashes an old story about pasta dreamt up by Riyad Mahrez.

He’s won two football matches since that podcast started up, three days before losing the FA Cup final to Manchester United. Maybe a refreshing new year name change is in order.