On Wednesday night, Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini made a surprising decision – he dropped captain Vincent Kompany to the bench for the home game against Leicester.

Widely regarded as the best central defender in the Premier League, Kompany has been in sluggish form since his return from injury last month and this has come to a head with the Manchester City manager taking the decision to drop his captain along with Samir Nasri, Edin Dzeko and Pablo Zabaleta.

Pellegrini told the media after the 2-0 win that he dropped Kompany, along with Nasri, Dzeko and Zabaleta, in order to ‘refresh’ his squad ‘mentally and physically’.

Some pundits have seen this as a bad move, questioning the decision to keep Kompany on the bench rather than keeping him out of the match day squad altogether. They say that dropping him completely would have allowed the management staff to claim that Kompany was rested rather than dropped, or some other white lie made up to protect the player. 

The truth simply seems to be that Pellegrini wanted the world to know that Kompany was dropped. In fact, Pellegrini wanted Kompany to know that he was dropped.

That may sound harsh, but let’s remember that there is a difference between dropping a player in anger at a poor performance or some other misdemeanor, and dropping a player to give him either a rest or a kick up the arse. Or both.

In the case of Kompany it seems to be both. And here, Pellegrini has previous. 

Last season Joe Hart was having a torrid time between the Manchester City sticks when Pellegrini took the decision to drop the England number one. A lot was made of the decision to pick Costel Pantilimon instead of Hart, with many saying that Hart had paid the price for poor performances. Much like Kompany now.

But if you look at Pellegrini’s explanations for both decisions, he seems to have been taking them in the best interests for both player and team. Hart was given both an extended rest and hard proof that he was replaceable, not automatic number one.

Pellegrini said that Hart was having ‘a bad moment’ in his career and that ‘he [would] improve with a bit of a rest’. And so it proved as Hart put in some stellar performances as City hunted down Liverpool and won their 2nd Premier League title. It was just as psychological as it was physical.

This time, Kompany was dropped ‘to refresh the team’. This looks a little less like a decision taken with Kompany’s best interests at heart. But here’s the situation: Kompany, when fit, plays every single week without much of a rest, even captaining Belgium to a World Cup quarter final. At his best he is undroppable for City, and on his day one of the best defenders in the world but he has been playing without a rest since the start of last season. Since his return from a hamstring injury, Kompany has looked off the pace. He has looked slow on the turn and not very agile, and given his lack of rest this isn’t hugely surprising. 

But there is, just as with Hart, a psychological as well as a physical element to Pellegrini’s decision to rest Kompany.

City have been hit hard by Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, but have still managed to win everything domestically, and after winning the Premier League last season, it is always tough to gear up mentally to retain a title. Just look at how City crumbled in 2012/13 when Manchester United ran away with the title and Roberto Mancini was shown the door.

This time around they are probably even better equipped to defend their crown: they have the same core of players, but have added better, more solid stars like Fernando and Eliaquim Mangala.

But FFP has constrained them. I don’t mean that it has stopped them from buying players for extortionate sums (although it probably has) but that it has forced City to try to tie the stars they already have to huge 5-year contracts with tasty incentive-based bonuses. 

Psychologically, this must have an effect. Footballers are only human, and seeing a 5-year stretch in front of you with all the money you’ve been dreaming of now a reality, they surely run the risk of going stale and enduring a drop in performance levels. In many ways it’s the logical outcome. When you give such long contracts to such a large number of players, they’ll stagnate and form will start to drop.

This is also the logic behind the bonus structure of course, but it’s worrying from a City point of view that Pellegrini would need to rest Nasri and Dzeko too – two players who were given new long-term contracts along with Kompany in the summer.

And so the best thing to do from a management point of view is to show these players that they are not undroppable, that even though they have been rewarded with long and lucrative contracts, they are not now set to play for the club no matter what.

Pellegrini’s tactic has worked before, and if City are to have the motivation to track down Chelsea this year and to be up for the fight again in years to come, the tactic needs to work now too.

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