Dead Manager Walking: No way back for Manuel Pellegrini

After Monday night’s fragile capitulation to Crystal Palace, he is toast, his Manchester City career a smouldering ruin. If you want to know how low the manager’s stock is right now, compare his record with that of David Moyes, the unlamented ex boss down the road. In 2014, from the turn of the year until the point he was relieved of his duties at Old Trafford, Moyes presided over 16 Manchester United games, winning seven, losing seven and drawing two.

Since January 1st 2015, until now Pellegrini has played the same number of games, losing seven, drawing three and winning just six. Delivering a worse record than David Moyes: it is not exactly what you would define as a position of strength.

Sure, there are two significant distinctions between the Chilean and the Scot. While Moyes’s record prior to the New Year was not something likely to cushion any fall, up until Christmas Pellegrini secured a sufficient number of points to remain in contention. Thanks to that early form, he is still likely to steer his team to the Champions League next season.

And while both men were in charge of a shambolic title defence, at least it was Pellegrini who in the first place delivered the championship that he is trying to retain. Moyes merely squandered somebody else’s legacy.

Indeed, the very fact that he won the Premier League last season suggests that Pellegrini, unlike Moyes, is not the wrong man in the wrong job. He has succeeded admirably in the same set of circumstances before. He knows what it takes to win with City.

So what exactly has gone wrong this time? Watching City at Selhurst it was hard to reconcile them with the side who had started this season with such a gallop.

Weary, woeful and in the case of their most significant player, showing every sign of wanting to be anywhere other than in in a City shirt, they were a miserable shadow. No-one could have anticipated that a team of such stature would be crumbling so abjectly to the likes of Palace and Burnley.

It is abject. And Pellegrini has to take some of the responsibility for that.

No team goes out on to the field as flat as City are at the moment if they are being properly schooled and motivated.

The banner hoisted by the Holmesdale Road Fanatics at Monday’s game was very apt. “You’ve got the money, we’ve got the soul” it read. Clearly City appear currently an operation without a soul, without a heart, without much it has to be said in the way of guts. The manager cannot escape from culpability on that.

Yet to remove him and bring in a flavour of the month replacement like Diego Simone or Jurgen Klopp (whose stock has begun to rise once more as he has steered his Borussia Dortmund side away from relegation ignominy) is not going to address some of the fundamental issues at the club. Merely dropping the pilot will not necessarily put the operation back on course.

The structure at City means the manager is responsible solely for the first team. Although Pellegrini will have had input, it is the extensive technical department who are liable for a shambolic recruitment policy that has failed to bring in suitable replacements for an ageing squad.

Sure, the Financial Fair Play restrictions have not helped. But City’s bosses have still sanctioned over £100 million on a bunch of players who have simply never threatened to challenge for a first team place. Comparison with their principal rivals in England and across Europe does not make pretty reading for City’s back room operation.

If clubs were obliged to field a team entirely of under-25s, Tottenham’s would be virtually that which plays in the Premier League, filled with players of growing experience like Eric Lamela and Christian Eriksen, not to mention young guns like Harry Kane, Danny Rose and Eric Dier.

As for City’s? It would be stocked with unknowns, completely bereft of vital experience. The conveyor belt at a club now boasting the finest youth production facilities in the game is lamentably seized up.

And while he might have taken the opportunity of FFP restrictions to promote and school junior players, it is not Pellegrini's fault if none are of suitable quality. In the system they boast of at the Etihad, he can only work with what he is given. For the richest club in the game to be so short of those of potential is not something an immediate change of figurehead will address.

What an immediate change of figurehead might address, however, is the mood in the first team dressing room. Players like Vincent Kompany, David Silva and Yaya Toure look shadows of what they were. These are wonderful talents that have not disappeared overnight. But they have been dulled. What the reason for that is, probably not even Pellegrini can diagnose. In truth if he could, he would do something about it.

Confidence is the most elusive and vital component in team building. City looks a side bereft of that quality. Unfortunately for Pellegrini on Sunday he is scheduled to face an outfit currently mainlining the stuff, playing the most fluent and effective football in a couple of seasons, a team with all its parts approaching maximum output.

At last, after stuttering and stumbling for so long, Manchester United are once again playing like they should. The reason? They are exuding self-belief. Confidence has returned.

United haven’t won a derby at Old Trafford since Wayne Rooney’s overhead kick stole the points in 2012. They will certainly believe they can redress that record. Kompany, City’s captain, did his best to sound upbeat this week, insisting now is the perfect time to play the crosstown rivals, that not being expected to win will inspire his side.

He is right there, it could be the perfect time to play United, to recharge City’s race to retain the title they won so emphatically last May. Provided they win the game.

Defeat and their season is over, reduced from a chase for glory to a scrabble to keep off Liverpool for the fourth Champions League spot. Though you get the feeling that whatever happens in the big one, it will be the last derby in which Pellegrini takes charge.