When Pep Guardiola walked out to the piercing, plodding guitars of Oasis’ “Morning Glory” on a purpose-built stage in front of the Etihad Stadium in the summer of 2016, few Manchester City fans could have imagined the ride that was ahead of them. Least of all, how long they would be on it. The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich manager had found himself burnt out at both of his previous stops, four seasons at the former, three the latter. Most expected City to get a similar tenure from the best coach in the world.Instead Guardiola departed a decade later from a club he had radically altered. With Abu Dhabi’s backing, City would always have been there or thereabouts but with the best manager in the world they were a winning machine. Six Premier League titles (including England’s first ever back to back to back to back), eight more domestic cups and a Champions League. This has been the era of City.Now it is up to Enzo Maresca to ensure that his new club remain in the present perfect, that this club do not do what so many other English giants do when they lose their transformative coach. The challenge for the Italian is clear. Do not be the next David Moyes or Unai Emery. Even if you do not over-index the Community Shield, that looks like being a challenging mission.Why you should root for themFor the last decade, the reason you would pick City as your team was very obvious and you would do yourself no favors claiming otherwise. Yes, yes, you were around when Paul Dickov was dragging them out of the third tier. Of course it’s an aesthetic thing; you were just entranced by Kevin De Bruyne. I’m sure you fell into City through your love of Oasis. You were in it for the trophies, admit it.
And maybe that logic will stick post-Guardiola. City are still the richest team in the land. They still have probably the best player in the league in Erling Haaland, whose World Cup antics are sure to attract a few to the Etihad cause. And of course what they will find is a broader fanbase who saw enough lows before the recent highs to have developed a winningly self-deprecating edge.Is this team good?It is unquestionable that even last season’s fairly uninspiring (by their own standards) iteration of City were still a very, very good team. At their peak, they were arguably among the best in Europe. They had, however, developed into a markedly different iteration of Guardiola football. Easing up on the control, they embraced a more up-down style of game, living by the maxim that if their games became shootouts, they had the quickdraw king in Haaland. For much of the season it worked but a wobble in the form of their No. 9 around the new year proved critical in retrospect.Of course, what we do not know about City is just how profound the impact of Guardiola is. It must surely be one of the most outsized of any elite coach but many analysts, insiders and experts will tell you that only the very best move the needle and even then perhaps only by a dozen or so points. Maresca, who spent two years at City first as head of the development squad and then as an assistant to the first team, has achieved his club’s aims at both Leicester City and Chelsea and winning the Club World Cup with the latter is a feather in his cap. We just do not know if he can do what his predecessor did several times over in his career, spotting a new wrinkle for his team that would soon establish a new tactical meta across the game.
What has changed?It might be that Maresca has to spend much of his early months trying to puzzle out how to do something different with City. So much of this column has been given over to discussing the departure of Guardiola that the many other key figures following him out of the door have gone unremarked on. Bernardo Silva played more games for his now former coach than anyone else across all three of Guardiola’s roles. He is now a Real Madrid player. John Stones ranks high on that list too but injuries plagued him in later years and he was allowed to walk for nothing, signing for Inter earlier in the summer. Nathan Ake and Manuel Akanji might not rank as highly for games played but they knew what a winning City organization looks like. All four are now in their 30s. They did not have much left to give. Still, that is a lot of experience to walk out the door at a time when Maresca and his staff must refamiliarize themselves with their surroundings.And then of course there is Rodri. The $88.5 million Barcelona agreed to pay is extremely hard to turn down for a 30-year-old with one year left on his contract who had only just begun to show the Ballon d’Or-winning peak that eluded him after a major knee injury in September 2024. Those are terms that are even harder to turn down when you have secured the services of the player best placed to eventually take on such a pivotal role, the outstanding Elliot Anderson. Selling Rodri is a deal City should do.
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It is just hard to believe that City won’t take a short-term results hit from not having Rodri. In an ideal world, he would have been on hand to ease both Anderson and 18-year-old Ayyoub Bouaddi, for whom talks are well underway with Lille, through their first season at the Etihad.
The evidence of the last six Premier League seasons is that City are a far inferior team without Rodri. Since the start of 2020-21, 150 games with Rodri delivered 108 wins, 29 draws and 13 defeats, an average of 2.35 points per game. Over 38 games, that’s an 89-point performance. Their 78 games without Rodri have delivered six more defeats and a points per game rate of just below two. Run that over the course of a whole season, and you get a side that probably do not achieve much more than Champions League qualification.
On the evidence of their first game under Maresca, one in which Rodri was not on hand to knit things together, that is what City look like. Now it is the Community Shield, and the off-color performances of Haaland, Anderson and Doku, among others, could reflect nothing more than a post-World Cup slump. There will surely be strengthening of a squad that at the time of writing has added only Anderson, 17-year-old winger Jeremy Monga and backup goalkeeper Geronimo Rulli. More money will be spent on a squad that is tracking at three-quarters of a billion invested since their wobble before the start of 2025. No matter how much they invest, though, they will not be able to buy the experience of those heading out of the door.
Expectations for 2026-27
If all that seems unduly dour, it is worth noting that City are probably still Arsenal’s closest challengers at the top of the table. As such, they might only need one team to have a year spoiled by injuries, bad form or anything else you care to imagine and they might be champions. For all that has been lost, Maresca can still roll out elite talent such as Haaland, Anderson, Josko Gvardiol, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Doku.
It is hard to see the swift and dramatic slip away from title race relevance that hit Manchester United post-Sir Alex Ferguson. There is too much talent there. Then again, plenty believed the Premier League trophies would keep coming to Old Trafford in the summer of 2013. This feels like a major pivot point.
