ETIHAD STADIUM, MANCHESTER – On the occasion of his 100th Champions League match as Manchester City manager, it was fitting that Pep Guardiola dropped a bizarre teamsheet.
There's a particular hall of infamy for this sort of thing that City supporters can pull effortlessly from the memory banks. How about benching Sergio Aguero at Camp Nou in 2016 (0-4), or playing midfield diamond for the first time that season in a 2018 quarterfinal at Anfield (0-3 within half an hour).
Most will point to the confused 1-0 final defeat to Chelsea in Porto in 2021, when Guardiola sent out a team with no discernible holding midfield, as the nadir. But real ones know that picking a 3-5-2 to guard against an unremarkable Lyon team's threat on the break, only to concede three on the break to lose in the 2020 quarterfinals, was as bad as it ever got.
The other side of this is that when Guardiola tries something unusual and it works, as he does frequently, no one bats an eyelid. Take the double false-nine gambit that baffled Real Madrid to set up the Lyon debacle, or John Stones shuttling from centre-back to attacking midfield positions in the 2023 final win over Inter Milan.
Anyway, when Guardiola handed in his selection for Wednesday night's defeat to Bayer Leverkusen, there were eyebrows raised but no galaxy-braining. The explanation was much more mundane.
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Why did Pep Guardiola make 10 changes for Man City vs. Bayer Leverkusen?
"I wanted [to make] 11 [changes], but I don't have the player to do 11," Guardiola told TNT Sport before the game.
"When you have a squad with 22 players and just play 11, 11, 11, you don't have 22, you have 11. We have to do it together, a lot of games and we need fresh legs, everybody involved, and I love to let the players [play].
"That's why they're Man City players, they're really good all of them – I decided this line-up."
This was confirmation that Guardiola had basically picked his Carabao Cup team. By the time Patril Schick made it 2-0 early in the second half, it was clear the 2023/24 Bundesliga winners were a bit better than the Huddersfield Town and Swansea City sides City have swept aside in England's secondary cup competition this season.
Guardiola has picked unchanged teams for City's past three Premier League games. That's unusual in itself – ask any FPL manager. But City are still a team in transition after their 2024/25 season collapsed in on itself around this time last year and forced the club into two very busy transfer windows.
As a result, Guardiola is still trying to groove things, such as the on-field relationship between dual creators Phil Foden and Rayan and how to get the level of control he craves in a team playing a little more directly to harness Erling Haaland's prolific tendencies.
He's decided that repetition is the best way towards this. Guardiola tends not to go to a regular, trusted XI until the season run-in, when the body of work compiled by his players over the previous nine months leaves no room for doubt. When City were churning to title after title, he'd generally change two or three each game for the weekend-midweek slog of mid-season.
Guardiola also keeps mentioning "vibes" in his press conferences and how important it is to maintain a positive collective outlook, which feels pointed in the context of how things fell apart last time around, when the team were perilously brittle and captain Kyle Walker decided to head of to AC Milan on loan in January.
However, it's not great for morale when an unfamiliar team who've heard all about how reliant City are on Haaland for goals don't create a serviceable chance and make it back-to-back defeats after Saturday's frustrating reverse at Newcastle. The vibes didn't feel fantastic for Rico Lewis, Oscar Bobb and Rayan Ait-Nouri, either, when they were hooked after a dismal opening 45 minutes. City looked more threatening by the time Haaland, Foden and Jeremy Doku were all working in tandem, but by that stage the game had gone.
Guardiola tells us in most Champions League press conferences how much he adores the competition. The fact that he was willing to send out a scratch side says plenty about the lack of jeopardy in this expanded format. City already have 10 points and two wins from their final three games against Real Madrid, Bodo/Glimt and Galatasaray should be enough to see them through in the top eight. Still, defeat at the Santiago Bernabeu on December 10 might make tonight's decisions look even more foolish.
2 - Manchester City have lost two of their last four home matches in the UEFA Champions League (W2), as many defeats as in their previous 37 (W30 D5). This was also their first home group stage loss in 24 games in the competition since September 2018 vs Lyon. Slump. Pic.twitter.com/uC3GcccltE
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) November 25, 2025
"Yeah, too many changes," Guardiola said in his post-match news conference. "In long seasons, everybody has to be involved, but maybe it was too much, seeing the result. They played not to make mistakes, instead of playing to do what we had to do. When you are thinking not to punish the [opponent], you are not free, you are not relaxed. Not just with the ball, without the ball. We were close but not aggressive enough.
"If you play quite often, you feel more comfortable and somebody [who doesn't play often] thinks they don't want to do something wrong for the team, but in that moment, you have to be free and make that mistake. Break the lines, make a movement, go close and do what you have to do. Mistakes are mistakes, but there are actions to be close and we are not there many times."
He'd never admit this, but Guardiola made a calculation that two Premier League games in the space of four days against 18th-place Leeds United and 15th-place Fulham were more important and had less margin for error than a supposedly showpiece night against the team third in the Bundesliga. Arsenal are seven points up the road and something had to give, although the listless performance of City's understudies showed the depth of quality probably isn't there for a title charge.
Guardiola has had many better Champions League nights in his City century and a few far more painful. But perhaps never any quite as strange.