The season had ended by the time manager Gareth Taylor signed a contract extension with Manchester City.
A one-year deal was agreed in June last year, a surprising decision given Taylor had just led City to fourth, their lowest Women’s Super League (WSL) finish since they came fifth in their debut season in 2014. With his original three-year deal expiring, it would have been a logical point to part ways.
Ten months on, the decision to keep him looks fully justified.
City are top of the WSL after 19 of their 22 league fixtures, three points clear of its serial winners Chelsea, albeit having played a game more, and a first title since 2016 is in their sights.
With Chelsea in Champions League semi-final action last weekend and this coming one, City can open up a six-point gap on Emma Hayes’ side if they win away against bottom side Bristol City on Sunday.
But with star striker and WSL 2023-24 top goalscorer Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw expected to miss the remaining three matches of their season with a foot injury, Taylor needs flex all of his managerial muscle to get them across the line.
Shaw has been a key difference-maker for City this season.
She has scored 21 goals in 18 appearances (eight more than anyone else in the league) and has started all but two of their 19 league games. She has already surpassed her final WSL goals total of 20 from the 2022-23 season, so it is tempting to think the team have found new ways to maximise her output. The reality, though, is that her underlying numbers suggest any differences are as likely to be about small moments of fortune rather than any significant tactical tweaks.
The same can be said for City as a team — there were some unlucky results last season, something that has not happened as often in this one.
Her non-penalty expected goals (xG) total has actually slightly declined from 0.76 per 90 minutes last season to 0.71 per 90. That is still the highest in the league among players with more than 750 minutes of football and nobody in the division is over-performing their xG by more.
When looking at City’s rolling xG, their fourth-placed finish last season looked worse than it was. The jump from narrowly missing out on a Champions League spot to leading the title race ought to be a big one but City’s underlying numbers are not those of a team who have made vast improvements over the past year.
City improved across the 2021-22 season and into 2022-23, even though they were badly disrupted departures in the summer between the two seasons.
England midfielder Georgia Stanway and Scotland midfielder Caroline Weir moved on when their contracts expired, to Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, while England full-back Lucy Bronze ended her second spell at the club by joining Barcelona. The biggest blow was the transfer of academy graduate Keira Walsh, who also went to Barcelona, for what was a world-record women’s football transfer fee of £350,000 ($436,000 at the current exchange rate).
That exodus did not imply the squad had much confidence in Taylor. His appointment in the summer of 2020 had been a surprise and there were questions about whether he had the right experience for the job, having been promoted from managing City’s under-18 boys’ team when Nick Cushing moved on.
However, City have always prioritised internal hires. Cushing had worked his way up through the academy, and departed the women’s team job to become the assistant — now head — coach at City Football Group’s Major League Soccer team, New York City FC.
For large portions of the 2022-23 WSL season, City had a better non-penalty xG difference than they have done for the majority of this year. Across all of that campaign, City had the highest non-penalty xG difference per 90 in the league at 1.40 — far ahead of Chelsea’s 1.18, Arsenal’s 1.14 and Manchester United’s 1.02. Their figure for the same metric this season is 1.17.
Even when considering City’s style, not a whole lot has changed. They are still by far the most patient team in the league when it comes to attacking, and while their ranking in terms of the intensity of their press (passes per defensive action, or PPDA for short) has dropped from second to fifth, the metric itself has remained pretty consistent.
The stability of the team has been crucial in helping City get the results their performances have deserved.
They signed only one player in the summer and, until a season-ending anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury in January, that player, Netherlands midfielder Jill Roord, looked to be the missing piece of their jigsaw. But she has been seamlessly replaced by Jess Park, who had played only 120 WSL minutes all season before Roord was sidelined. Since then, Park has started six of eight games and recorded four goals and four assists.
That shows how, once the City team is set, it stays that way. Taylor has made the fewest substitutions of any manager in the league — just 64 across the whole season — and six City players have started 16 or more of their 19 league matches. By contrast, Chelsea’s Hayes has made 81 substitutions in 18 games, and only two of her players have been in that many starting line-ups.
“The continuity of players has been really important,” City’s Australia international defender Alanna Kennedy told The Athletic. “We’ve had that shared experience in the past (of losing) and that’s something you don’t want to feel again.
“Our mentality has been a lot stronger this season, surrounding those cheap goals and missed opportunities. We just so badly want to have something to show for the performances we’ve put in over the past few years. Hopefully, this season is our time.”
Despite being on a record 13-game winning run dating back to the middle of November in the league, a tendency to have back-to-back losses still looms large — City were knocked out of the Continental League Cup and FA Cup in the space of four days last month by Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur.
“Now our mentality is just on trying to win the league,” says Spanish full-back Leila Ouahabi, who won five league titles and a Champions League at Barcelona before a 2022 move to City
“These last three games are very important. We are focused now 100 per cent for the next game, then for the next game, and then for the next game. This is the winners’ mentality.”
That mindset is what City, a club who have finished as WSL runners-up six times since 2015, have often lacked — the ruthless ability to pick up points and finish off games, regardless of the situation.
Last season, their average age was the third-youngest in the WSL (25.5 years old) and there has been evidence that the extra season’s experience for their players has helped. The gutsy display at Kingsmeadow in February, becoming the first team to beat Chelsea on their own ground since Brighton did it three years earlier springs to mind.
But that grit will be tested over these final three matches, as will Taylor’s adaptability as a manager.
The fairest charge that can be made against him is that while his plan A often looks very good, when his team face adversity, he cannot make the in-game adjustments to help them overcome it. Without Shaw’s goals, he now has three matches to show he can — including one at home against third-placed Arsenal on May 5.
If he were to secure this WSL title, any lingering doubts would be dismissed once and for all.
(Top photo: Matt McNulty – The FA via Getty Images)
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