Bernardo Silva admits Manchester City are out of the Premier League title race and they "have not been close" to the standards of previous seasons.

The attacking midfielder sat down with Sky Sports to discuss the season so far and was not afraid to open up about his underperforming side.

"We are very motivated to start well this year knowing that 2024 was very good for us but at the end very bad for us," he said.

"We accept that and understand that. We just need to get much better at everything. There's not just one thing we need to get better at and it's in the small details.

"We have not even been close to our standards compared to the last seven or eight years."

Last Sunday's win over Leicester was City's second in their last 14 games in all competitions. But Silva is a serial winner, lifting league championships in seven of his last eight seasons at Monaco and then City.

So this run of form is not only personally alarming - it clearly hurts the 30-year old too.

"It's the first time in my career I've been through something like this," he admitted. "In the last eight or nine years, I've won seven or eight leagues. I've lost just once. Even when I didn't win, I never lost this amount of games, never in my career.

"Even when I was an academy player, losing two games was too much for me. I don't know, in 13 we've only won two… 14 even.

"It's ridiculous. If you said this to me at the beginning of the season I would have laughed because I would never have believed it."

City have had a relentless few years, regularly going deep in all competitions as well as timing their form perfectly to finish the season as the best team in the country.

Silva insists, though, the physical and mental toll of their schedule should not be used as an excuse for their unexpected results.

"We played the same amount of games or similar amount of games in other seasons," he claimed. "Of course, when you play every three days for five, six, seven years, for some players that will have a cost.

"The amount of things that happened to us in terms of injuries, in terms of underperforming… it's not just one thing. It's not just the injuries. It's lots of things together but the things we can control we can do better.

"We were just not good enough at this point of the season."

City have chased down large deficits before in the Premier League but even Silva admits this season is different.

The club is 14 points behind Liverpool and have played a game more, which means they can no longer consider themselves contenders.

"Right now it's about accepting the reality. I'm not looking at Liverpool, I'm sixth or seventh in the league," he says.

"I cannot be looking at Liverpool or Arsenal or whatever. I'm looking right now at the next game to win three points so if I'm seventh, I'm looking at sixth and what it takes to be fifth, to be fourth, third.

"Ten games from the end of the season you can start looking at the table and do a little maths to see where you can go.

"Right now it's not impossible as there are no impossibles in football. But right now Man City's completely out of the title race.

"There's no question about that, it's too late for us. People will always say, 'you don't win the league until January but you can lose it'. The reality is, we've lost it."

The Portugal international is clearly disappointed but is also optimistic about City's chances in the other competitions, especially the Champions League and the revamped Club World Cup in the summer.

But his first objective is giving fans something to cheer in City's next game at home to West Ham this weekend.

"It's very important to win again. We won the last game against Leicester, we should have won against Everton. Slowly we're starting to, even if we're not near our level, we're starting to come back a little bit.

"We need three points but we also need to give a win to our fans. They've been with us in this tough period and the last games at home, we gave them nothing. So we want that."

Follow Man City vs West Ham live on Sky Sports' digital platforms via the live blog from 1.30pm on Saturday; kick-off at 3pm. Watch free match highlights from 5.15pm.