Pellegrini has been given targets at City and is falling short

By David Conn/The Guardian

It does not need a seat on the sofa with the Sheikh in his palace watching City unravel on TV to understand what he and the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, will make of it. They have a track record since 2008 which charts their approach to episodes of failure. It points to a practice of not instantly reacting but recognising problems and expecting them to be addressed. If they are not, and the team fall short of the goals the manager has been targeted to achieve, they do not hesitate to fire a manager – and they line a replacement up, if possible.

It is far too early as yet for them to be considering replacing Pellegrini, given his success last season, and with City still able to qualify for the knockout stage if they achieve the seriously daunting task of beating Bayern Munich at home and Roma away.

Vincent Kompany reacted to the CSKA ignominy with some fighting talk while cautioning that City have to “put down milestones every year” and cannot be expected to win the Champions League after decades – before the money arrived – when they did not even qualify.

“I still believe in my team, and still back everyone at this club 100% to turn it around,” the City captain said, before articulating what the executives in Abu Dhabi will be thinking. “Personality will have to show in the next games, otherwise we will have to wait another year, and no one at this club wants that.”

Pellegrini will be expected to respond with improvement, and this means the possibility has hoved into view for the first time that if there is none, he could be gone before too long.

Bayern, embodying the football institution to which Mansour’s City project aspires, will arrive in Manchester on 25 November already qualified, with four wins from four games. It has been achieved by Pep Guardiola, the coach whom City’s former Barcelona chief executive, Ferran Soriano, and the director of football, Txiki Begiristain, worked with when they minted Barça’s glory years. City coveted and courted Guardiola for the job when they were firing Roberto Mancini, and they turned to Pellegrini, who has a lesser football pedigree, only when Guardiola opted for Munich.

Pellegrini surpassed expectations last year, winning the Premier League and League Cup and reaching the knockout stages of the Champions League, and now the huge Etihad academy has opened to try to bolster the first team. This season’s underlying problems, glaringly revealed in the CSKA defeat, are that the players he was sanctioned to spend £53mn buying in the summer, principally the £12mn Fernando and £32mn Eliaquim Mangala, have not fitted in as improvements to the championship-winning squad. There was also the overall spectacle of a team performing, in their play and in Yaya Touré’s and Fernando’s negligent reactions which drew their red cards, well below the level the players consider to be rightfully theirs.

The club’s owners will want Pellegrini to respond by fixing these major issues and in doing so, mend the details: the porous defence and strangely disconnected midfield. They will not overreact; they established they were not knee-jerk hirers and firers when they stuck with Mark Hughes, the manager they inherited, and gave him the enormous first wave of cash to spend before losing patience with him after 18 months.

When they did so, in December 2009, much of English football scoffed at City’s corporate portrayal of the decision to sack a manager, making an official statement after allowing Hughes to manage the team to a 4-3 victory over Sunderland, saying his performance was “not in line with the targets set” at the beginning of that season. They learnt from that messy experience to avoid sacking a manager during the course of a season.

When Mancini was let go after the FA Cup final defeat to Wigan Athletic at a drizzly Wembley in May 2013, despite a year earlier having won City’s first league title since 1968, City stated again that the Italian had failed to meet his targets.

There was not as much mockery then, as the might of Mansour’s money and Mubarak’s corporate planning had amassed a squad of world-class power from which Mancini was failing to get the best.

There was widespread indignation among City fans at the lack of sentiment for the winning Italian, but when the clear-eyed Pellegrini led his team to another Premier League title in May few were shouting for Mancini, and the Chilean was proclaimed on a famous banner as the fans’ ‘charming man’.

Yet if he starts to fall short of what is expected of him this season, City fans will be less shocked at a lack of leeway allowed for what he achieved in his first season, the first non-European to manage a team to the English title. He has his targets too, for this season, to progress towards where Abu Dhabi has demanded its money must take City: to more Premier League championships and the serious stages of the Champions League; to spearhead a football brand and global empire which now includes sky blue City clubs in New York and Melbourne, in which Mansour has invested.

Mubarak and Soriano have made it clear the progress expected of Pellegrini this season is to take his team beyond the round of 16, where they were last year in Europe, so at least to the quarter-final.

Despite the Uefa sanctions for the losses Mansour bankrolled – losses of €45mn were allowed under the financial fair play rules but City exceeded those – Pellegrini was still sanctioned to make his major signings in the summer. It will be regarded as a serious issue that Mangala and Fernando have not improved the team.

Mansour has not spent £1bn of his family oil fortune to watch the Premier League club he bought trudge out of European competition, and if it happens it will be considered a failure.

It may not come to making a change; there are few credible alternatives, and anyway Guardiola may not consider swapping Munich for Manchester. City’s executives hope Pellegrini will turn it around, but Guardiola is always there, the one they would have liked to have.