Man City's shocking summer led to their downfall - this is all their own fault

The end of an era? Wednesday’s 3-1 defeat at the Bernabeu may have felt like it, but the writing had actually begun to appear on the wall earlier this season.

Pep Guardiola read it and realised that this Manchester City squad had reached its heights and was now on the downslope.

He tacitly acknowledged as much by spending over £170m on four young players in January as he begins construction of what he hopes will be his third great City team.

This evisceration and City’s earliest elimination from the Champions League since 2012-13 was just an illustration of the scale of the task, and a painful reminder that the rebuilding should probably have started a lot earlier.

A widespread belief before he signed a new contract that this would be Guardiola’s final season led to an ageing squad being kept together in the hope of one last hurrah.

Despite a 13-game unbeaten start to the campaign, that hope was revealed to be misplaced when the next 13 yielded a single victory and nine defeats.

City only qualified for the knockout stage on goal difference after finishing the revamped group stage 22nd out of 36 clubs, a point below Celtic.

Perhaps if they had somehow fluked a victory in Madrid, even on penalties, this group of players could have staggered on. But Kylian Mbappe’s hat-trick for a rampant Real Madrid ensured that reality prevailed.

City have lost to Madrid before, but here they were overrun. Los Blancos were ahead after four minutes, 3-0 up after 61, and were resting key players after that.

Going into the Bernabeu looking to overturn a 3-2 deficit – against a Madrid side that had prevailed 39 times out of 41 when leading from an away win in the first leg of a Champions League knockout tie – was always going to be a big ask for City, especially without injured Ballon d’Or winner Rodri.

But to do it without Erling Haaland and with Kevin De Bruyne also watching from the bench, and John Stones limping off after just five minutes, proved impossible.

Haaland, who had scored 27 goals in 34 Premier League and Champions League games before this week, was fit only for the bench after jarring his knee in the 4-0 win over Newcastle at the weekend.

He had reportedly told Guardiola that he was even having trouble negotiating stairs. And after that it was always an uphill struggle of a different sort.

Injuries have been a fact of life for many teams this season, especially in north London, but Tottenham Hotspur have attracted scant sympathy on that front, while Arsenal’s current striker crisis is seen as a failure of their transfer policy rather than bad luck.

City were revealed as having no backup plan for a Rodri injury, so few tears will have been shed among their rivals as the remains of the City squad watched Madrid zip the ball around them and through them.

City could not stem the white tide in midfield and made no impression on the home defence until the tie was long decided. A necessary transfusion of young blood into the Etihad in January at a cost of £172.2m included the arrivals of Nico Gonzalez (23), Abdukodir Khuzanov (20) and Omar Marmoush (26).

But while they had impressed against Newcastle – Marmoush scoring a hat-trick and Gonzalez doing a passable Rodri impersonation – it was boys against men in Madrid. It will take time.

Guardiola admitted afterwards that City had reached the end of a cycle. “A little bit, yes. We’ve already started to [replace players]. It is normal. Nothing lasts forever and in the group there are players that have marked an era.

“We cannot deny what this group of players have done, winning six Premier Leagues in seven years given what that competition is, in Europe always getting to the quarter-finals, semi-finals, final. It says a lot.

“This year we faced the best Madrid. In the previous ones, going through or not, we were very good. We have had a bad year in the competition. If you finish 22nd, it is because we haven’t been right. It has been our worst year.”

With the verdicts expected next month on City’s alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules, he will hope it does not get worse before it gets better.