Don't forget the Guardiola's magic. Guardiola usually starts the season with normal or bad results and he lets the other teams to take more points while time after time he starts having a much better performance and he will take back his place in the first place of the Premier League. That's still too soon to say Guardiola is not a good coach for Manchester City anymore because we have already seen much better results from this coach in the past seasons.
However, I was not expecting to see Guardiola and his players lose the game to Brighton with a 2-1 result, and maybe Manchester City's defenses were worse than normal.
Pep Guardiola can never be seen as one if the worse coach even if he lost straight 7 games he can't be seen as a bad coach. The Citizens lost 4 games in a row and we all know the cause of that. City are having a very bad time in the game with some of their key players out due to injury and instead of having them recover we get to see some going to join the other ones. For Pep Guardiola to say they have lost the race for the title only means two things, 1: it is either the whole injury situation has gone beyond his reach or 2: maybe Pep is playing a mind game on the other competitors.
Right from the beginning Manchester City haven't had a solid defense and if you check the defense line they have the same mentality of going forward and getting goals then tracking back at times becomes the problem and Pep has been using his defense to cause trouble for opposition.