Pep Guardiola lost back-to-back Premier League matches for only the third time as Manchester City went down 1-0 to Arsenal on Sunday.
It has happened only six times in all competitions for City under Guardiola and here, the PA news agency looks at the Spaniard’s overall managerial record.
Gabriel Martinelli’s winner for Arsenal followed Hwang Hee-chan’s for Wolves versus City last weekend.
It was the first time City had taken no points from a pair of league games since losing to Crystal Palace and Leicester across Christmas 2018.
Luka Milivojevic’s penalty proved decisive for Palace before Kevin De Bruyne cut the final margin to 3-2, and Leicester then overcame Bernardo Silva’s Boxing Day opener to win 2-1 through Marc Albrighton and Ricardo Pereira.
The Foxes were also the team to inflict City’s second successive loss in December 2016, Jamie Vardy with a hat-trick as Claudio Ranieri’s side won 4-2. Sergio Aguero and Fernandinho were suspended after late red cards as City lost their previous game 3-1 to Chelsea.
Before this weekend, City were out on their own in terms of time without back-to-back Premier League defeats.
Ten teams had suffered that fate this season – Burnley, Sheffield United and Bournemouth most recently, plus West Ham, Brentford, Luton, Manchester United, Wolves, Newcastle and Everton.
Eight more of the 20 current top-flight sides – Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Aston Villa, Fulham, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Crystal Palace – lost back-to-back games earlier in 2023.
The one other exception, Brighton, last did so in October of last year – almost four years more recently than City, whose run since Boxing Day 2018 stood at 178 games.
City host Brighton in their next match after the international break.
Albion will be the team looking to inflict a first hat-trick of Premier League defeats on Guardiola, whose team are alone in losing no more than two in a row since his arrival in 2016.
Arsenal and Spurs are closest with their longest run being three defeats. Fulham had the longest losing run overall, nine games, with eight for Sheffield United and Palace.
Guardiola has twice lost three in a row across all competitions with City, first in April 2018 when a 3-2 league defeat to a Paul Pogba-inspired Manchester United was sandwiched between losses in both legs of the Champions League quarter-final against Liverpool.
The other sequence spanned three competitions and two seasons – the 2021 Champions League final versus Chelsea followed by the Community Shield against Leicester and the 2021-22 Premier League opener at Tottenham.
The recent Wolves loss came on the back of a Carabao Cup exit against Newcastle, while the December 2018 Premier League defeats were uninterrupted by any other competition.
The other pairs came in early 2020, to Manchester United in the League Cup and Tottenham in the league, and January of this year when Southampton knocked them out of the Carabao Cup – and denied them a shot at a quadruple – before the Red Devils beat them in the league.
