Manchester City Vs Everton 2024/2025 – Post-Match Tactical Analysis

Manchester City versus Everton should be a game that is decided before the game even starts.

Over the last few years, the home team has been the most dominant force in English — and maybe even European — football, winning multiple Premier League titles and a UEFA Champions League trophy.

But these last two months have been nothing but pain for Pep Guardiola and his superstars.

With only four points out of their last eight league games, a loss to Sporting Lisboa in the Champions League, and bottling a 3-0 lead against Feyenoord in the final 15 minutes of the game, Manchester City have had nothing going for them in these last couple of games.

On the other hand, Everton are not too hot right now, either.

While they are not as deep in the relegation battle as they were a couple of years ago, Sean Dyche and his men are still stuck in the bottom third of the table again this season.

Their biggest struggle is scoring goals.

While eight goals from set pieces is a very nice stat, scoring only 14 goals overall and six goals from open play in 16 games is just plain bad.

There is nothing positive to say about the Toffees attacking play.

Now, these two struggling teams face off on Boxing Day 2024 and want to end their dire streaks to gift their fans a nice three points for Christmas.

In this tactical analysis and post-match report, we will examine how the game played out, what both managers did with their teams, and the deciding factors.

Players & Formations Used

For Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, injuries have not been kind to them, and therefore, the team pretty much lined up itself based on the remaining troops.

Ortega Moreno started in goal with a backline consisting of Rico Lewis, Manuel Akanji, Nathan Aké and Josko Gvardiol in front of him.

Mateo Kovacic played as a holding midfielder, with Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden moving around and attacking midfielders in the half-spaces.

Savinho and Jeremy Doku played on the wings in attack to provide service for looking-for-form superstar striker Erling Haaland.

On paper, the teams formation was a 4-3-3, but even at its lowest, the team still possesses a very fluid, Guardiola-style approach to the game.

Rico Lewis pushed into midfield frequently, Kovacic dropped back into the backline often, and Savinho sometimes played as more of a wingback when they formed a back-three, so Manchester City did not have a real formation in this game.

Looking at Everton, Dyche has used a 4-3-3 formation all season, but given their defensive play, it was a 6-4-0 or 6-3-1 formation for most of the game.

Jordan Pickford started in goal, and Coleman, Tarkowski, Branthwaite, and Mykolenko started as Evertons back four.

Dyche uses three defensive midfielders: Doucouré, Gueye, and Mangala.

Doucouré is the most attacking of the three, while the other two play defensive roles.

In attack, Ndiaye and Harrison played on the wings to help out the lone striker, Calvert-Lewin, who tends to be a bit isolated in the games this season.

Another thing that needs to be noted is the bench for City.

While Ilkay Gündogan and Kevin de Bruyne sat on the bench, they were not fully healthy, and the other substitutes were all youth players, so there was not a lot of room for Pep Guardiolas subs in this game.

Man City Between Anger & Guilt

The game started off with a lot of pressure from the side of City

Pep Guardiolas formation had his men play with an attacking mindset and a fierce attacking press to put them ahead early on in the game and maybe gain some confidence after the last couple of weeks.

City triggered their press on the goalkeeper through Haaland, and although Pickford is not the greatest ball-playing goalkeeper in world football right now, they had some early success with that.

Another positive thing was their counter-press.

City could retain possession a lot through the first 25 minutes of the game and recovered the ball well after losses.

Still, Everton also had a lot of struggles out of their very defensive shape and could not find solutions in the passing game at all.

Overall, City looked as sharp as you would have expected them to look.

In possession, City were struggling a bit, however.

While the team could retain possession for extended periods of time with no troubles whatsoever and showed great ball security against the weak attempts of a midfield press that Everton tried to play, they could not progress the ball effectively at all.

They used two main variants in possession, which we will take a look at now.

The first way of building up their play was relatively simple, and it was a Guardiola classic, a heavy overload of one side of the pitch.

Here, seven City players are on the left side of the pitch, forming three triangles and, subsequently, diamonds.

The players always had multipl