Manchester City, 2015-16 edition, are weird. Not, perhaps, by the wider standards of this season's Premier League; when it comes to oddness, they've got nothing on Chelsea's incompetence or Leicester's exceptionalism. But they're weird all the same.

Over the festive period just gone — SB Nation Soccer hopes you had a lovely one — City played four games, winning two, drawing one, and losing the fourth. One of the wins, a 4-1 tonking of relegation strugglers Sunderland, was a perfunctory romp that need not detain us here. But the other, Saturday's 2-1 victory over Watford, was of a piece with the loss, 2-1 at Arsenal. In both games, City were kind of broken for 80 minutes, and were losing the game, only for Yaya Toure to score a brilliant goal and the team to suddenly snap into focus. They couldn't quite nick an equalizer against Arsenal, but Bacary Sagna and Sergio Aguero combined for a tasty winner against Watford.

That goal had a certain hint of a statement about it. It felt like the kind of goal that could, in the fullness of time, be a turning point, a 'this is when the title was won' moment. Winning badly is the sign of champions, as the cliche has it (though we should note that this same weekend, Arsenal were also unconvincing in victory). But the wider performances — defensively shaky, offensively stodgy, always capable of snapping into moments of excellence — were emblematic of City this season. A team that, though they are in the title race, has rarely looked like a title-winning team. A team that looks far short of the sum of its parts, that doesn't seem to hang together quite right. A team, in short, that is weird.

There might be some perfectly prosaic reasons for all this, of course. Aguero is playing on one leg and Wilfried Bony hasn't yet looked convincing either as a replacement or a partner. Yaya Toure retains his capacity for the sublime but now largely deals in moments, not performances. David Silva has been injured, and Kevin de Bruyne and Raheem Sterling have shown inconsistency that is entirely forgivable in, respectively, the newly-arrived and the very young. And as for that defense: if reputations increase while a player is missing, then Vincent Kompany is currently on course for sainthood.

While City's captain is injured, City's central defensive options amount to Martin Demichelis, who is starting to age beyond the point of utility, Nicolas Otamendi, who is still adjusting to the Premier League, and Eliaquim Mangala, who might just be the most nervous-looking footballer in the Premier League. Like his team, it's not that he's bad exactly; most of the time he looks like an entirely adequate footballer. But for one or two minutes in every 10, his eyes sing with the distant terror of a man who inflated his CV slightly further than is sensible, accidentally landed a job far beyond his actual qualifications, and absolutely has no idea what any of these buttons do. The big red one. Can I push it? Should I push it? I'll push it. Oh. Oh dear. We've lost to Stoke.

Enough firm blows to the spine is enough to send any team a bit wobbly. It's impossible not to wonder, however, if something else is distracting City as a club. With Pep Guardiola having announced that he's tired of winning Bundesligas with Bayern Munich, it has been widely assumed that he'll be pitching up at City come the end of the season. We can reasonably assume that however professional everybody's being, this assumption has made its way from the media to the players, to the staff, and to Manuel Pellegrini himself, not that he seems particularly flustered by it. Or, indeed, by anything. Except Alan Pardew. And you can't blame him for that.

When Alex Ferguson makes a statement of purported fact, you should always check under the sauce. But he knows a thing or two about managing a football club, and there has arguably never been anybody better at reading and managing the complex psychological forces at work within a dressing room. Here he is in his latest book, Leading, talking about his decision to retire as United manager in 2001/02:

I made matters worse by ... announcing that my intention prior to the start of the 2001-02 season, which made the players go to sleep. It was as if I'd put chloroform over their mouths. I knew when I had made the decision and announced it to the players that I had made a mistake.

Elsewhere he described the decision to pre-announce his intentions as an "absolute disaster". It's notable that Ferguson blames himself, rather than his players; he seems to be implying that in circumstances like this, in the knowledge that a manager will be leaving his position at the end of the season, the intensity can't help but slip away. It's not hard to imagine why: when you know the person telling you what to do won't be around for much longer, what they have to say naturally diminishes in importance.

Is something similar going on across Manchester? Perhaps. While City haven't quite slumped to chloroform levels of non-performance, they certainly look like a distracted team might be expected to look: inhibited, inconsistent, curiously incoherent. But set against that, we need to acknowledge that the circumstances aren't quite the same: Pellegrini's departure is still a possibility rather than a certainty and, as noted above, there's plenty of other, more quotidian reasons we might look to. There's also the fact that Pellegrini isn't as embedded in City as Ferguson was at United; his departure might be a change, but it's not going to shake the foundations of the project.

Most important, however, is that while they are weird, they're certainly not bad, at least not as far as results go. United, in 2001-02, slumped down to ninth in the table and crashed out of both domestic cups; City, while they've played appallingly in quite a few games and been on the end of three genuine hidings, go into 2016 in third place, a mere three points off the lead, and with the majority of their tricky away games already behind them. Of the nine road games left this season, only West Ham, Liverpool and Chelsea look particularly tricky. Leaders Arsenal, by contrast, have yet to visit West Ham, Mark Hughes' inconsistent-but-certainly-dangerous Stoke, both sides of Liverpool and both sides of Manchester. Oh, and White Hart Lane.

So, if Manchester City aren't by any means clear favorites, then they're certainly well in the hunt. And if they do manage to win the title, then to have done so in the shadow of a managerial change will, perhaps, make it even more notable an achievement. Winning a league is one thing; any fool can do that. But overcoming a problem that frustrated Alex Ferguson? That's something special.