This preview was written by Neel Shelat, who you can find on Bluesky here and Twitter here.

Neel’s work has been featured at The Blizzard, Analytics FC, and Forbes, among others. Neel currently appears regularly on The Transfer Flow Podcast, as well as the Get Football Tactics Podcast. Neel has written for The Transfer Flow several times, most recently on the Club World Cup.

After an extremely disappointing 2024/25 campaign by their standards, Manchester City will be raring to get going in 2025/26 and return to challenging for titles. Their disappointing results and performances last term forced them to accelerate their squad rebuild this year, with a big splurge in January followed up by further moves in the summer. It’s not just players that have come and gone, though, as this was Hugo Viana’s first window as City’s sporting director following the departure of Txiki Begiristain. There have also been some notable changes in the coaching staff, with the experienced Juanma Lillo among the departures and ex-Liverpool assistant coach Pep Lijnders brought in as his replacement.

We should certainly expect a pretty different-looking Manchester City team from what we have gotten used to in recent years, but the big question is: how much better will that make them? 

Not nearly as good as they would have liked to be.

Having been billed as title favourites going into the season, Manchester City finished a distant third after finding themselves battling for a Champions League spot for the most part. They did get off to a great start (though fixture difficulty also played a part), but you can almost pinpoint the moment Rodri suffered a season-ending injury in their xG conceded trendline.

City managed to keep the results going against weaker opponents for a brief period, but started nosediving after a customary loss to Tottenham Hotspur in the League Cup. They went on a five-game losing streak for the first time since 2007 thereafter, which was extended to six defeats in seven matches without a win. Between the end of October and Boxing Day, they would endure an unthinkable run across all competitions of just one win, two draws and nine losses!

Evidently, their issues ran deeper than just the absence of one defensive midfielder. Their squad’s average age had crept up well past 27, causing them to be physically outmatched by younger and more energetic sides at times. They almost totally lost their ability to control games, conceded a lot of chances in transitions both after turnovers and failed attempts at pressing (more on that later), and also looked rather clueless in attack at times after the turn of the year, particularly when Erling Haaland was unavailable.

Ultimately, Manchester City were a bit worse at pretty much everything compared to their previous seasons, so their final table position was no worse than what they deserved.

Those underlying numbers should be a real cause for concern. In many cases, a consistent title-winning/challenging team can slip away for a season due to some freak xG underperformance, but that absolutely was not the case for Manchester City last season. They were no better than the third-best team in the league by any metric, and there was a pretty sizeable gap between them and the top two.

We only really know a couple of things about Pep Guardiola for certain. Number one is that he is a control freak and wants to see his team dictate proceedings for pretty much every second of the ninety minutes plus stoppage time. As a result, he absolutely despises fast transitions against his side and has lost all his hair trying to eradicate them from matches he’s involved in. The other thing is that he is never afraid to switch things up, be it in some big games or certainly between seasons.

Generally at City, Guardiola’s season-to-season tactical changes have been aimed at staying ahead of the game, whether that is through first inverting full-backs and later fielding a defensive line solely composed of centre-backs, or first pestering opposition blocks with false nines before dropping one of the world’s very best line-leading strikers on them. This time around, though, things are different. Instead of posing new problems for opponents to solve, City find themselves in a position where they have glaring issues of their own that need to be addressed before anything else.

Guardiola was often the one dictating the direction of the Premier League’s tactical meta, but he suffered a huge loss to the chaosball-enjoyers last season as almost every team started leaning heavily into fast transitions in one way or another. Teams across the board enjoyed varying degrees of success by simply having a solid and disciplined defensive block in addition to the ability to hurt opponents with direct attacking. City’s efforts to swim against the tide without their best controller certainly did not help their cause, so even they had to give in to some extent.

Particularly following the arrival of Omar Marmoush in the summer, City regularly utilised direct attacks from the back to deal damage. The pinpoint long-range passing of Ederson coupled with Marmoush and Haaland’s countermovements provided a much-needed reliable goal-scoring avenue, albeit only against teams that started off in a higher block. More disciplined deep blocks remained a challenge, though they later tried different setups including ones with split front-twos and fluid central compositions (particularly in the absence of Haaland) to come up with solutions. They often ended up relying on some game-changing moments of individual brilliance from Marmoush or occasionally Jérémy Doku, but consistently giving them the platform to make a telling contribution could well be the solution.

We cannot read too much into Manchester City’s work at the Club World Cup since they only played one European opponent and were without some key players, but we once again saw some different setups and yet more central fluidity at times. So, going into the new season, it will be very interesting to see how City look to get the better of different defensive setups, and how much direct attacking Guardiola permits.

Manchester City continued their rebuild with a few noteworthy signings and a couple of major departures this summer.

Players out: CM Kevin De Bruyne, RB Kyle Walker

City’s first big decision was announced a couple of months before the transfer window, when Kevin De Bruyne announced he would leave in the summer at the end of his contract. Though he did show glimpses of quality thereafter, he also looked pretty washed for long stretches of the season. He has not had the cleanest bill of health in recent years either, so all things considered, it made sense to let him go.

City have also lost their captain from the start of last season as Kyle Walker has moved to Burnley. His performances certainly declined significantly last term, leading to a mid-season loan move to Milan. That was pretty much that for his Manchester City career, so this was another no-brainer.

But the biggest loss will surely be third-choice goalkeeper Scott Carson. They cannot replace him.

Players in: AM Rayan Cherki, CM Tijjani Reijnders, LB Rayan Aït-Nouri, GK James Trafford, GK Marcus Bettinelli, CM Sverre Nypan

The best deal of the summer for City irrefutably has to be their signing of Rayan Cherki for £34 million. Their ability to pull it off was largely down to Lyon’s financial issues, but it is increasingly looking like a bit of a heist in a window where players that aren’t as good are going for twice that amount.

The Frenchman will play a big part in replacing De Bruyne’s creativity, though it won’t be in an entirely like-for-like manner. He doesn’t have the pace and power to dominate in transition, but in a side that has a couple of other players who fit that bill, his greater intricacy against low blocks should be a good trade-off.

A less great deal for our money’s worth is the roughly £50m they’ve committed for Tijjani Reijnders. I don’t think he’s a bad player, but adding another midfielder who doesn’t do a lot of defensive work on top of Cherki will surely demand a lot of the defensive midfielder (more on that soon).

Rayan Aït-Nouri at left back was an interesting move as it pretty much confirms Guardiola’s preference to return to conventional full-backs who run up and down the flank. The Algerian international is Premier League proven and above-average enough at everything except progressive passing (which he won’t be required for), so I don’t mind this transfer at all.

Throughout the window, City were expected to sign a similar right back as well, but have yet to make any concrete advances as Newcastle are expectedly keen to keep Tino Livramento. Now, reports are emerging that they might just make do with the options in their squad.

Elsewhere, they have paid over £30m to bring James Trafford back from Burnley. The 22-year-old keeper already is an exceptional shot-stopper, so I guess they think they can improve his ball-playing enough to prepare him as Ederson’s successor? For the shorter term, they also tossed some pocket change to Chelsea to bring in Marcus Bettinelli as the Carson replacement.

And lastly, I have to mention Sverre Nypan, the Norwegian teenage talent who finally chose City after mulling over offers from various top Premier League clubs. He’s definitely one for the future, but a very exciting prospect from what I’ve seen over the last couple of years. He is currently on the squad, but expected to go out on loan.

A quick summary:

Haaland, Marmoush and quite possibly Rayan Cherki should dominate the highlights with their brilliance in attack, but the key player in this Manchester City side undoubtedly is Rodri. There are very few players in the world right now who can do a half-decent job of replacing him, and there certainly aren’t any in Manchester City’s squad.

Mateo Kovačić was put in his place for the most part last term, but he was often exposed defensively and in deep build-up phases. January signing Nico González was billed as a “mini-Rodri” by none other than Guardiola, but I wasn’t having it. Six months later, I can safely tell Pep to hold that L.

City have not made any summer signings to bring in a like-for-like Rodri back-up, so they will very much need to wrap the Spanish midfielder in cotton wool and hope that his return restores a good chunk of their composure and control.

I do not believe Manchester City will fully fix their press this season, and that could well hurt them. 

Let me begin explaining by outlining the issue itself. Manchester City did look to press high a fair bit last season, but they simply were not very good at it. They had the third-most “pressed sequences” (an Opta metric that basically measures volumes of high pressing sequences) in the league but were below average for PPDA behind the likes of Brentford, Wolverhampton Wanderers and – believe it or not – Manchester United.

Tactically, the root of the issue was pretty simple. City mostly had an out-of-possession front two of players who did not like to press much and were not very good at it (for varying reasons) in Haaland and, say, Kevin De Bruyne. As a result, Guardiola asked them to block passing lanes into the opposition’s midfielders and got his wingers to step up and lead the press with out-to-in runs, ultimately looking to attack the ball with a pincer movement from two sides or, more often, squeeze the opposition into a corner.

The trouble was that the winger’s movements left the opposition’s wide defender(s) free, so a chipped ball or a quick bounce pass could find them in space. To prevent them from having enough time to pick their head up and play forward, Manchester City’s ball-side full-back would jump up to cover the space vacated by the winger. This, in turn, left a lot of open space down the wing, which opponents could still exploit through well-timed quick passing or good old long balls. This is basically how they conceded in the FA Cup final, among many other matches.

In some cases, City have shockingly lacked coordination in their trigger movements and jumps, including on certain occasions in the Club World Cup. But even if we assume they can entirely fix that issue during pre-season training, that will only stop them from getting cut open with ground passing. The issue of long balls to the big man up top could yet prevail, and there is no simple solution to that. With one full-back dragged out, City will often find themselves defending 3v3s or 4v4s if they fail to win the second ball, and that is when they are in trouble. If they had elite individual defenders à la William Saliba or Virgil van Dijk, they might yet back themselves to deal with such situations, but they do not quite have anyone of that calibre. Rodri’s return may stabilise their base to a good extent and help them pick up many of those second balls, but I’m not sure if it will be enough.

In previous seasons, City either had a pressing striker in Gabriel Jesus or someone like Bernardo Silva stepping up to pester the opposition’s central build-up and lead the press. The expected front two of Haaland and Cherki will have neither, so I really do wonder what they will do. They can’t simply not press either because 1) Guardiola HATES letting the opponent have the ball and 2) they are not used to defending in a deeper block for long stretches (like Arsenal are), so it is a real predicament. Maybe the solution is to get Lijnders shouting about intensity from the sidelines every two minutes?

We will obviously see a lot of rotation from Manchester City as they will surely have another 50+ game season at the very least, so their squad depth will prove handy. As a result, we might not see their very best XI a lot, but here’s what I think it looks like:

I reckon the two spots on the right wing are the most up for grabs. I’m going for Savinho up front for his dribbling, while Doku can be used as a serious weapon off the bench. At the back, Matheus Nunes would be the pick for a fully conventional full-back role, while Abdukodir Khusanov would be one to stay back and form a back three in possession, which I like better as it provides more stability and also frees Joško Gvardiol up a bit more to progress the ball.

Now, is this the best XI in the Premier League? And more pertinently, do City have the best squad in the league? I’m tempted to say no and put them behind Liverpool and Arsenal again, mainly due to the aforementioned out-of-possession questions and continued reliance on Rodri. It definitely looks better than last season, though, so we should finally get that three-way title race we have long been waiting for.

Prediction: 3rd