📊 This possession stat for Man City-Chelsea is a shock first | OneFootball

Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Chelsea may look pretty routine on paper, but the manner in which it was achieved was quite unusual for a Pep Guardiola side.

Statistics from Opta show that City enjoyed just 46.47% of possession during the game at the Etihad on Saturday.

That figure represents the lowest percentage of possession recorded by any Guardiola team in the 381 top-flight games he’s been in charge for.

Speaking after the game, Kevin De Bruyne looked on the stat as a positive.

“It’s not that easy, people expect us to have 70% of the possession, but these guys [Chelsea] have a lot of quality,” De Bruyne told Sky Sports.

“It shows the other side we have, that we can control the game while defending and that’s also good for us.”

Guardiola’s coaching philosophy from his days at Barcelona through Bayern Munich and now in Manchester has been centered around dominating the ball in order to control the tempo of the game.

Chelsea’s adventurous approach at the Etihad undoubtedly contributed to this unusual statistic, but could this be a sign of things to come?

City have massive league games coming up in December against Manchester United, Arsenal and Leicester.

How they fare in those games should give us a better idea if Pep is becoming more pragmatic in his attitude to possession, or if Saturday’s game was just an anomaly.