We have been here before—more than once. Manchester City started the 2015-16 season with five straight wins in the Premier League. In 2016-17, as Pep Guardiola’s tenure began, they won six in a row to start and 10 in all competitions. This season, they have won four out of five in the league and have notched another victory in the Champions League. Their past three matches: three wins, 15 goals for, and zero against. It’s electric stuff; their early form has reinforced their status as preseason title favorites. Even their 1-1 draw against Everton was superficially impressive, as they spent about half the game a man down after Kyle Walker’s sending off and still managed to have the better of the game’s chances.

In both previous seasons, though, a promising start has proved to be a false dawn. Manuel Pellegrini’s final season saw the wheels come off as the team proceeded to win just 14 of their remaining 33 league games en route to a disappointing fourth-place finish, while the autumn of Guardiola’s first year was blighted by a succession of hard-to-fathom results, particularly at home. Often, the team failed to exploit dominant performances; after last September, they won just half of their remaining 16 league games at the Etihad Stadium, going 8-1-7.

However, this season already looks different.

On October 2, 2016, City traveled to White Hart Lane to face Tottenham and lost 2-0 to end the league win streak. It was the only league game of the whole season in which they were out-shot, and even still, the margins were pretty tight. Tottenham’s two first-half goals were the difference, but one was an own goal, while Spurs goalkeeper Hugo Lloris had to make a string of saves to secure his clean sheet.

Just under a year later, the team has drastically changed. Four out of the 11 starters who played that day have since departed the club, while keeper Claudio Bravo is now clearly a backup. Only six players started both this game and last weekend’s 6-0 demolition against Watford; four new arrivals plus Kevin De Bruyne completed Saturday’s starting 11.

The average age of the now-replaced players who joined Sergio Agüero, David Silva, Fernandinho, John Stones, Raheem Sterling, and Nicolás Otamendi on the pitch back in October 2016 was 31 years old. Of the four replacements who weren’t on the roster last fall—Kyle Walker, Benjamin Mendy, Gabriel Jesus, or Ederson—none are older than 27, and they average out at 24. City’s difficulty in sustaining a challenge in either of the past two seasons can be attributed at least in part to obvious squad weaknesses, particularly at fullback. They may have waited a year or two too long to retool in key positions, but both last winter and this past summer they finally made themselves younger and visibly better.

That’s what should scare the rest of the league: City might not even need to be a better team this season to win the title. Expected goals measured them as the strongest team in the league during 2016-17, but a combination of misfortune, the vagaries of variance, and Chelsea’s and Tottenham’s ability to eke out the absolute maximum return from their performances meant that Guardiola’s side managed to secure only third place. The core of the team remains robust, especially in attack. The directness of De Bruyne and intricacy of Silva make them two very different but indisputably elite attacking midfielders, while Agüero has been among the top three strikers in the league ever since his arrival in 2011.

However, the current supporting cast looks much better than the ones that propped up the De Bruyne–Silva-Agüero trio over the past two seasons.

Guardiola appears to have moved on from his desire to play just one striker, and this season he’s found a way to get Jesus and Agüero into his starting lineup. So far, it’s working, with the pair responsible for 11 of the team’s 20 goals. Agüero has also assisted two of Jesus’s four Premier League goals, and few are still wondering whether Guardiola prefers one over the other. With 12 goals already in his short City career, the 20-year-old Brazilian’s transfer fee of £27 million looks like a bargain.

Gabriel Jesus vs Watford (A) - Movement and intelligence is unbelievably mature for a 20 year old pic.twitter.com/H0yHSrDbqr — ▫ (@PositiespeI) September 17, 2017

Another benefit of incorporating two strikers is that it has also enabled a renewed focus on an aspect that has a more typical “English” feel to it: crossing.

The most striking aspect of Mendy’s play for Monaco last season was his ability to repeatedly fire dangerous balls in from the left flank, and the early signs suggest that City are also keen to encourage him to do so. His ability to get deep into the left side of the final third and attack the ball with pace is unique within the squad. The other side of the pitch has a slightly different dynamic: While Walker has quickly slotted into the starting lineup and frequently found himself high up the pitch to support play, for the most part he has deferred crossing duties to De Bruyne. This makes sense, as one of Walker’s weaknesses over time has been his lackluster final ball. City can still kill a team with the precision short passing of David Silva, De Bruyne, or Raheem Sterling, but if that plan fails, they now have the brute force of crosses from both flanks as a significant part of the armory.

If that weren’t enough, this team also has plenty of pace and plenty of depth. The speedy Leroy Sané and Sterling may have only three starts between them this season, but both can terrify tired defenses. Beyond this, Bernardo Silva can fill in across a variety of attacking midfield positions, and the center can be bolstered by Ilkay Gündogan. They have thus far had small roles but offer top-quality rotation options as the season progresses. During his time at Barcelona and more so at Bayern Munich, Guardiola had so many attacking options that he could rotate around key players without affecting the strength of the team. It has taken the manager three transfer windows to get there, but City’s squad is now similarly balanced and deep.

Defense was a problem for Guardiola in year one, and showing improvement there could be the key to maximizing their potential this season. The issues didn’t concern the volume of chances they allowed, but rather their inability to keep the ball out of the net whenever they did allow a shot. So far in 2017-18, they’ve conceded only twice—one of which was a once-in-a-lifetime Charlie Daniels wondergoal.

Whether Guardiola has used either three center backs or two—and he’s cycled between both—Fernandinho has been the ever-present central midfielder, while the addition of youth, speed, and quality at fullback means that the center backs are better protected than this time last year. It remains to be seen whether Guardiola will settle on a fixed defensive formation long term, and based on the three-center-back setup he used against Liverpool, it seems like he might play things more conservatively against his closest rivals. Then, in games that City are expected to dominate, he’ll pull out a center back, as he did at Bournemouth, Feyenoord, and Watford. For Guardiola, the second half of 2016-17 was more generally tactically conservative than what came before. He gave up trying to turn Gaël Clichy into an inverted fullback and prioritized building a team that was hard to beat. Just two league defeats in 2017—and only one (against eventual champions Chelsea) after the humiliating 4-0 loss at Everton in January—clearly pointed the way to the manager’s thinking.

During the opening weeks of the Premier League season, Manchester City have used 18 players. Ten of them have been signed during Guardiola’s time at the club, and three more—Sterling, De Bruyne, and Otamendi—arrived the year before. It is now very much his team. At times during 2016-17, particularly in defense, it felt like Guardiola was trying to fit square pegs into round holes. This season already looks far more logical, with players returned to orthodox positions and his once-complicated tactics becoming something that outsiders could begin to understand. The league remains competitive, additionally so with the reemergence of city rivals Manchester United, who have the same record and goal differential through the first five games. Winning it all will not be easy, but Guardiola finally has the right pieces to build his jigsaw, and he knows how to fit them together.