Five Things Learned: Manchester City 0-1 Brighton & Hove Albion (Premier League)

Five Things Learned: Manchester City 0-1 Brighton & Hove Albion (Premier League) City suffered revenge at the hands of Brighton and Hove Albion  on Saturday afternoon as the Seagulls balanced the head-to-head scale with the Blues after their midweek Carabao Cup exit at the Etihad Stadium. In a reverse of Wednesday night's fortunes, when Enzo Maresca's side were a shade lucky to take the game to penalties and get through in the shootout, the Blues dominated proceedings this time and will be left bemused at how they didn't score at least once. Brighton did admittedly start the stronger of the sides and got their reward just after the ten-minute mark, as Matheus Nunes' fluffed clearance allowed Maxim de Cuyper to square for Yasin Ayari to score in simple fashion. Even at half-time, Manchester City will have been ruing their missed chances, as an Iliman Ndiaye header wide from close range and Erling Haaland strike straight at Lewis Dunk while the goal gaped could have been enough to see them level. And if those chances were presentable, they were nothing to the second-half, when Ndiaye twice went close again - one of those openings a practically open goal - and Nunes almost atoned but could only shoot straight at the impassable Bart Verbruggen on his left foot. Perhaps even more infuriating for City fans were the numerous promising moves derailed by sloppy decision-making or end product, or indeed by refereeing decisions, as four large penalty shouts from the Etihad faithful for various alleged handballs fell on the deaf ears of Craig Pawson; whilst some of the appeals were more in hope than in expectation, a late incident involving Luka Vuskovic did look clear-cut. Here are five things we learned from Manchester City 's frustrating defeat to Brighton in the Premier League. 1. Midfield make-up under the microscope City's midfield is perhaps the area of the team under most discussion from supporters, with the general consensus being that the trio of Elliot Anderson, Enzo Fernandez and Rayan Cherki left the Blues too open in defeats to high-quality opposition in the form of Paris Saint-Germain and Aston Villa . Many have been keen to see Ayyoub Bouaddi feature in a double pivot with Anderson from the start of games, so when the teamsheet to face Brighton featured both those names as well as Fernandez, fans were keen to see the unit in action. But, in a Pep Guardiola-esque tactical twist, Maresca utilised Bouaddi in a more advanced role than expected, seeing the Moroccan press up even higher than Erling Haaland out of possession, and limiting the teenager's ability to make a difference to the build-up when his side had the ball. The experiment lasted less than an hour before Maresca withdrew Bouaddi in favour of Cherki and reverted to his usual engine room set-up; the City boss would be best-served jotting this one down as botched trial run, and continue looking for a more balanced midfield configuration for matches against opponents in an elite bracket, which Brighton are probably now part of. How to score when Erling Haaland isn't firing is far from a new quandary for Manchester City, but it's especially brought to bear on days like this, when the majority of the squandered chances didn't even fall the way of the Norwegian. Iliman Ndiaye has dazzled at times in his first few months in blue, but the Senegalese is still yet to score for the club and will be wondering how on earth that's still the case after this game, with at least two glaring openings missed by the 26-year-old. These back-to-back Premier League defeats to Brighton have also been like a nightmarish trip back in time to pre-2026 Jeremy Doku, with the Belgian's end product - which came on so much season, to the point fans were arguing that he looked like one of the finest wingers in the world after adding bite to his bark - deserting him at a crucial time for the Blues. Rayan Cherki has started the season in fine goalscoring form, and Phil Foden hit four in two games last week to announce his return to the scene; now it's time for Manchester City's wingers to find their goalscoring boots. 3. Playing with fire We warned in our Five Things Learned after the Carabao Cup triumph in midweek that Brighton had fired a warning shot to City, and that the Blues would need to be far more switched-on in the Premier League to avoid Albion's bounceback. This game perhaps didn't pan out in the manner expected as City largely controlled proceedings, penning the Seagulls into their own half and only having their own carelessness and profligacy to blame for their failure to score, but the fact is that Brighton started the first ten minutes strongly, got their reward as Nunes handed them a goal, and ended up winning because of it. They were able to lay those foundations in the game because, as we've seen all too often in the last few years, City simply aren't the same side anymore when building from the back, and all that the visitors had to do was apply some pressure to Ruben Dias or Abdukodir Khusanov, they'd play it back to Gianluigi Donnarumma, and most viewers of the Blues in the last season-and-a-bit will know what happens from there. The decline in City's press resistance came with Pep Guardiola still in situ, and the Catalan made all manner of tweaks to his system to put together a functional side with the ball and have them challenging at the top of the league. Maresca will need to do this, as well as deal with a potentially more glaring problem without the ball, to keep his team at the summit. Which brings us onto... 4. A pressing issue Gone are the days when only Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool could hold a candle to Manchester City's relentless efficiency out of possession. Guardiola's best teams were heralded as being almost as good without the ball as they were with it, forcing opponents further and further back until they simply had to go long, at which point you could take your pick of the likes of Rodri, Ilkay Gundogan and Bernardo Silva to be in the right place to seize on the second ball and start an attack. Brighton were defending a lead for much of the game in this match and therefore reverted to a fairly standard method of clearing the ball long and sitting deep; before that, though, and especially throughout the cup match in midweek, the ease they had in playing through City's press was telling. There were times in moments of struggle - most notably in the difficult first half of the 2020-21 season and at the nadir of the 2024-25 campaign - when Guardiola was able to swallow his pride, admit that his team were too easy to play through and stopped trying to force a high press all of the time. We're not yet there with Maresca's team, but it's worth considering. 5. One of those days... To dispel any sense of doom and gloom (yes, we're aware that it's Halloween), it's worth remembering that games like these have always happened to City in their time as a top side. Keen supporters during the Guardiola era will be able to reel off any number of games where they battered their opponents in terms of possession, territory and chances, but allowed a cheap goal at one end and been left tearing their hair out (sorry Pep!) by a goalkeeping performance like Verbruggen's at the other. City have had a few games of their own this season where they've squeaked through on the finest of margins, so it's possible that this match against Brighton, as well as last week's against Aston Villa, was football's way of saying: "You win some, you lose some."