After Champions League capitulation to Real Madrid, has Manchester City’s empire fallen?

Kylian Mbappé’s coups de grâce were straightforward and swift. But Manchester City’s fall has been messy and painful.

It seemed to culminate Wednesday at the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, with a 6-3 aggregate loss to Real Madrid. But City’s capitulation, and its earliest exit from the Champions League in more than a decade, was neither surprising nor sudden. It followed a near-calamitous league phase, amid a season that long ago careened off the rails.

The 2024-25 campaign has been the worst of Pep Guardiola’s record-breaking stint at City. Heck, it has been the worst of his career. And so, it has begged a provocative question: Is this the end? The fall of the empire? The expiration of the City machine?

Time will tell. There has been an understandable hesitance to pronounce the dynasty dead, for fear that Guardiola’s City could rise and dominate English football once again.

There are hints, though, that City might never return to the historic heights it hit as recently as last season.

And there is the looming case of 100-plus Premier League rule violations, which could yield a ruling any day now — and could decimate City once and for all.

Several of the many reasons for City’s collapse have been, to a degree, fluky. Rodri’s torn ACL in September turned a humming season on its head. Losing a Ballon d’Or winner at the base of midfield would leave any team weakened. It left City porous, without equilibrium, and searching for answers that simply never materialized.

Guardiola never found an appropriate adjustment. He had no like-for-like replacement readily available, and no tactical tweak up his sleeve to regain equilibrium.

So City reeled, and reeled, and never recovered.

It would be oversimplistic and inaccurate, though, to chalk up City’s collapse to the absence of one player. The question is whether Rodri’s injury has exposed lingering flaws, or simply been compounded by bad luck and other injuries.

On one hand, many of the players who propelled City to four straight Premier League titles are aging. Kevin De Bruyne is well past his prime. Bernardo Silva, Ilkay Gündogan, John Stones and others are the wrong side of 30. They were the ones whose younger legs, in previous years, played adjacent to Rodri and combined so well with him. Their apparent declines coincided with the disappearance of Rodri’s support.

But on the other hand, there are still young legs. The other problem is that Phil Foden’s, and Oscar Bobb’s, and others have also been hurting. City’s defense, once protected by Rodri, has been particularly unhealthy — just as it was left exposed.

There is still talent on Man City’s books — gobs of it. There is Foden and Erling Haaland, Bobb and Rico Lewis, Josko Gvardiol and Ruben Dias, Savinho and now Nico Gonzalez and Omar Marmoush. This, by many measures, is still the deepest squad in Europe. There is every chance that it returns to the top of the Premier League next season.

But there is also a chance that none of City’s new wave will ever compare to the four-straight-title winners. There is a chance Rodri is never the same, and a chance equilibrium is never restored.

Barring severe penalties for the financial breaches, City surely won’t be done contending for trophies. But there is a chance they’ll never again be imperious. Whether that equates to the fall of an empire is open to interpretation.